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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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Saturday, September 21 • 10:45am - 12:00pm
Sounding Failure: Against Convergence as a Utopian Ideal

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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.

Speakers
avatar for Sara Deniz Akant

Sara Deniz Akant

SARA DENIZ AKANT is a poet, educator, and performer. She is the author of three books -- most recently, Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), which was listed as a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and a Massachusetts Poetry Must Read -- as well as Babette... Read More →
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Ashna Ali

Ashna Ali is a writer, researcher, and educator. Their poetry has appeared in several journals including HeART Online, Bone Bouquet, femmescapes, and Nat. Brut. They research postcolonial diasporic feminisms and is a professor of English at Bard High School Early College Manhatta... Read More →
DA

Daisy Atterbury

Daisy Atterbury is a writer based in New York and New Mexico. She is co-director of NM Poetics, founded in 2010. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Jacket2 and Post45. She teaches creative nonfiction classes at Queens College. She’s currently working on a collection... Read More →


Saturday September 21, 2019 10:45am - 12:00pm PDT
UW2-021 Dance Studio