Artist Office Hours with Faustin Linyekula, interviewed by Lili Chopra
Read the program for In Search of Dinozord.
See Faustin Linyekula answer questions from students in our Artist Office Hours series.
Once you’re done reading — or whenever you’ve got something to say! — join the discussion.
Postcolonial African Performance
These texts set the stage for Faustin Linyekula’s imagination of a post-apocalyptic Congo, in the wake of violence — both specific wars, and in relation to its colonial past.
NYU professor Awam Amkpa is part of the post-show conversation with Faustin Linyekula at NYU Skirball on Sept. 22, 2017: his Theatre and Postcolonial Desires (2003) is a crucial text in articulating the complex legacies of colonialism in contemporary performance.
Christopher B. Balme takes on language, ritual, and embodiment in Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama (1999).
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1999) gives context for the historical events Linyekula is in conversation with.
Goran Sergej Pristas, “Faustin Linyekula: The Right to Opacity” in Not Just a Mirror: Looking for the Political Theatre of Today (2015) offers a review and contemplation of the political work of Linyekula’s oeuvre.
Jean Rahier (ed.) collects a range of essays on diasporic African performance in Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities (1999)
Joseph R. Roach’s Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996) takes on colonial- and post-colonial intercultural contact, via Mardi Gras rituals as well as histories of indigenous Americans traveling to Britain in the 1800s.
Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (2012) is another history of the Congo, and the events that shape the experiences of these performers.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo, playwright and former NYU professor, grapples with the politics of speaking English — relevant to Linyekula’s use of French — in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986).
Memory, Trauma, and Performance
These texts take questions of haunting, memory, and loss more broadly, in relation to Faustin Linyekula’s meditation on these subjects as he revisits an earlier work of his own with In Search of Dinozord. These works will also resonate with Justin Vivian Bond, Parable of the Sower, and Until our Hearts Stop, so you can come back to these throughout the season.
Linyekula’s art is in conversation with so many works in which performance is a “memory machine,” as Marvin A. Carlson calls it in The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (2001)
David Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.) have collected a luminous array of thinkers in Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), in which the ethical imperatives of mourning are articulated with particularly poignant urgency in relation to queer and feminized subjects of color in the wake of the AIDS crisis.
If you read nothing else on this list: read the first 2.5 pages of Avery Gordon’s haunting and lyrical Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008). Go now, and return to it often.
Ranjanna Khana, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003)
José Esteban Muñoz is one of the great teachers of loss, and his “Ephemera as Evidence” [pdf] from Women & Performance (2008) is no exception.
Susan Sontag pursues the ethics and efficacy of witnessing in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), a crucial text for audiences.
Another NYU professor, Diana Taylor, offers a lens for viewing Linyekula’s work in her classic text, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003).