April 1: Hopefully Devoted, or the Feminist Lyre

Hopefully Devoted, or the Feminist Lyre

a lecture by P.A. Skantze
Tuesday, April 1
6:30 to 8 pm
P.A. Skantze, Performance Practices, University of Roehampton, and CSGS Global Visiting Scholar
This lecture, born of P.A. Skantze’s project The Flaneur at Her Devotions, makes use of a new methodology Skantze has been experimenting with: lyric theory, questions of gender, wandering, longing, and devotion as “temporal insurgency,” to use Fred Moten’s term. Who is allowed to take their time? Can we be an ethical thorn in the side of the businessification of learning if we insist on being inconvenient, digressing, getting lost? What does attending to the accidental auditory — what might, in a bad pun, be thought of as the practice of flanearing — produce against the visual grain of the flat screens, mini and grand, constantly jostling the present aside? As with all Skantze’s work, in this talk she is interested in the breath of “something like a universal,” as deployed by those of us too often assumed to be hindered by the specific: the specifics of gender, of race, of sexual orientation. Is it feminist to sing theory? Is it queer to write in meter? Let’s find out.
Department of Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, Room 612
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Performance Studies.