&Now 2019 Conference

Our panel will deploy and present a range of at once resonant and contextually divergent aesthetic practices for radicalizing inheritance. The panelists work through text, performance, installation, memory experiments, political demonstration, and private everyday rite to communicate through the charged palimpsests of ancestral corridors, historical materials (voices, objects, memory, citizenship, routes of flight), and the violence of muted and instrumentalized collective narratives. In excess of the often empty and naturalized spectacle of challenging the present to be haunted by its history, we are specifically attempting to participate rather in more vulnerable practices required by ongoing catastrophe, whereby the present haunts itself.

YANARA FRIEDLAND will reflect on her book-in-progress, Book of the Sleepless, and its composition in somnambular spaces to think through circular hauntings, remnants, lost memories, and traces of the dead that accumulate in cities and bodies.

TOM HAVIV will discuss tools for activating political imagination for Palestine/Israel, the poetics of post-nation and binationalism, and the power of Mizrahi poetics (futurism and pessimism) in the 21st century. He will focus on the relationship his book, A Flag of No Nation, has to its multimodal outcomes and engagements, from performance work to political and community organizing to oral history and the archive.

KRISTINA LEE PODESVA will read a text on the arrangement that was her father—a traumatized veteran—and her relationship to it/him through an archaeology of artifacts (photo albums, papers, and correspondence) to ask what heavy matters are in life that evaporate with death, and then, what is left?

ROBERT YERACHMIEL SNIDERMAN will frame and moderate, starting from his performance work on walking aesthetics and ethnocide.

JANE WONG will read and perform acts of radical altar-making from her forthcoming manuscript, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, honoring her family's experience with hunger and growing up in a Chinese American restaurant.