Cosponsored by the LGBT Center and the Department of Africana Studies at Penn
Listen to a podcast interview with E. Patrick Johnson on What's Left of Queer Theory Now?
This event is free and open to the public.
In this lecture Prof. Johnson will share excerpts from his current creative nonfiction research on black southern women who love women to demonstrate how he employed performative and creative writing as a feminist method for conducting oral histories. Johnson will also point to how creative nonfiction provided him a space to allegorize cross-gender ethnographic and oral history praxis and the tensions that arise therein.
E. Patrick Johnson is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, Carlos Montezuma Professor of African American Studies and Performance Studies, Northwestern University. He has published widely in the areas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the founder and director of the Black Arts Initiative at Northwestern. He is also a Project& artist, a nonprofit arts organization engaged in art for social change and impact. Johnson is a prolific performer and scholar, and an inspiring teacher, whose research and artistry has greatly impacted African American studies, performance studies, and sexuality studies.
He is the author of two award-winning books, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History. He is the editor of Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis by Dwight Conquergood (Michigan UP, 2013) and co-editor (with Mae G. Henderson) of Black Queer Studies—A Critical Anthology and (with Ramon Rivera-Servera) of solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays and Blacktino Queer Performance (Duke UP, forthcoming). He is currently at work on the companion text to Sweet Tea, entitled, Honeypot: Southern Black Women Who Love Women and an edited collection of new writings in black queer studies tentatively titled, No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies.