&Now 2019 Conference

How do we use sound and performance -- both as creative forms and experimental sites -- in order to produce or rewrite the myths that have been constructed around gender and empire? In what ways do we “fail” -- to emerge, to communicate, to perform -- and why might failure be useful as a practice of (non)convergence? If we think of failure as modulated for particular bodies, and convergence as an imperial myth or a utopian ideal, then how might we forge new intimacies across our own embodied practices? In what ways can the performance of new sites of failure constitute bodily, structural, or sonic (non)convergence as an encounter with empire?

As a group of interdisciplinary writers and artists, we propose a creative presentation followed by a collaborative conversation around the poetics and politics of failure within the specific context of our sound and performance practices.

By using mannequins, costumes, and voice modulation, Sara Deniz Akant explores the damning myths of nation, gender, and language as a site for both failure and creative production, asking how the multiplying body can be used to escape its neoliberal constructions and disrupt its own intersecting lines of power. Ashna Ali explores transgenerational relationships between women and dynamics of postcolonial internalizations/ conflicts of imperial pressure on the brown femme body through experimental performance poetry. Daisy Atterbury considers U.S. settler colonial dynamics, soundscapes and the built environment, engaging audiences through film, installation and performance as well as print media as she considers how we (dis)locate ourselves.