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We look forward to seeing you this September at &Now: Points of Convergence!
Registration is now open. Please visit Ticketspice to reserve your pass and order boxed lunches.
Complete conference details, including travel, accessibility, and technology information, can be found at the conference website: andnowfestival.com.
General Inquiries: andnowfestival2019@gmail.com.
Registration questions: iasinfo@uw.edu.


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Friday, September 20 • 3:00pm - 4:15pm
Failure Biographies

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Blending reading, performance, and multimedia spectacle, this panel brings together four wide-ranging writer-artists to explore failure as a productive space.

The presented works resonate with what Jack Halberstam describes in The Queer Art of Failure as “the unregulated territories of failure”: an anti-capitalist and potentially revolutionary landscape. The incorporation of failure into artistic practice offers potential for “new rationales for knowledge production, different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, other modes of political engagement than those conjured by the liberal imagination.” To willfully inhabit “territories of failure,” in other words, offers potential for alternate, counter-hegemonic modes of production.

How, then, can we begin to map these territories? How might failure illuminate a path towards the future in a moment when we appear to have none?

In this panel, four writer-artists—each working across a variety of mediums and forms—will share poetry, prose, comics, and video that engage with failure as a positive and inherently political space of creation.
Speakers
avatar for Vidhu Aggarwal

Vidhu Aggarwal

Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of Literature, Rollins College
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media, drawing mythic schemas from popular culture, science, and ancient texts. Their poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized... Read More →
avatar for Johnny Damm

Johnny Damm

Johnny Damm is the author of The Science of Things Familiar (The Operating System), chosen by the Publishers Weekly Critics Poll as one of the best graphic novels of 2017, and chapbooks including Your Favorite Song (Essay Press). His comics, diagrams, visual poetry, and prose have... Read More →
avatar for Michael Tod Edgerton

Michael Tod Edgerton

Edgerton, San Jose State English Dept
Michael Tod Edgerton is a queer poet and author of the collection Vitreous Hide from Lavender Ink press (https://www.lavenderink.org/site/shop/vitreous-hide) . His poems have appeared previously as the winner of the Boston Review and Five Fingers Review contests, and in Coconut, Denver... Read More →

Friday September 20, 2019 3:00pm - 4:15pm PDT
UW2-021 Dance Studio
  Panel

Attendees (16)