The Fall 2018 WHAP! lecture series includes a diverse lineup of writers, academics and performers. | Image: CalArts
CalArts’ Aesthetics and Politics Program launches its Fall 2018 WHAP (West Hollywood Aesthetics and Politics) series tonight, Friday, Oct. 5, with a lecture by black feminist performance artist and writer Gabrielle Civil. The Detroit, MI-born artist has created and performed more than four dozen original solo and collaborative works around the world.
Her performance memoir, Swallow the Fish, was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms Press in 2017, and her upcoming book, Experiments in Joy, engages race, performance, and collaboration in essays, scores, critical dialogues and performance texts. Civil joined the faculty of the School of Critical Studies this semester, teaching both MFA Creative Writing and BFA Critical Studies.
All WHAP! lectures begin at 7:30 p.m. and take place off-campus at the West Hollywood Public Library.
Forthcoming WHAP lectures include:
Oct. 12: Ronak Kapadia, “Scaling Empire: Security, Sensation, and the Queer Life of the Forever War”
Ronak Kapadia is an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His upcoming book, expected in 2019, is Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke UP, 2019), and examines the “visionary, world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the context of ongoing US war and empire in the Greater Middle East.”
Oct. 26: Kara Keeling, “I Feel Love”: Race, Gender, Technē, and the (Im)Proper Sonic Habitus
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). A second monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, will be published in the spring of 2019 by New York University Press.
Nov. 16: Aimee Bahng, “Toward a Transpacific Undercommons”
An assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College, Aimee Bahng is the author of Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke UP, 2018), which examines “narrations of futurity across various platforms—from speculative fiction by writers of color to the financial speculations of the 1%.” Her teaching and research interests reside at the intersection of transnational Asian/American cultural studies and feminist-queer science and technology studies.
Nov. 30: Lisa Nakamura, “Automating Racial Empathy: Virtual Reality and the Undercommons”
Lisa Nakamura is the Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and coordinator of its Digital Studies Institute. She is a leading scholar on the examination of race in digital media.
Event Details
WHAP Lecture Series
Community Room
West Hollywood Public Library
625 N. San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood
Oct. 5: Gabrielle Civil
Oct. 12: Ronak Kapadia
Oct. 26: Kara Keeling
Nov 16: Aimee Bahng
Nov. 30: Lisa Nakamura