Let’s Pulse: Creating/Living/Infiltrating Fugitive Spaces

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

American colonization and execution of empire has distinct sounds, cadences (rhythms of sounds), frequencies, and performances. Subsequently, defenses and counterattacks upon foundations and structures of empire have their own sonic-praxes and strategies of performative fortifications. With Audio Intersectionality, Shawn Trenell O’Neal identifies communications of race, gender, and sexuality within processes of sound, music, and performance that are activated through audio confrontations and trans audio passaging; these practices in turn could interrogate and restructure oppressive systems into useful spatial and temporal social, cultural, and political requirements and demands. Bomba music of Puerto Rico, in example, is a syncretism, an amalgamation of enslaved, colonized, and colonizer populations creating the essence of Puerto Rican soundscapes. Bomba became a secretive, fugitive, communication disseminating codes, protests, and shoutouts. Likewise, sampling within African American Hip Hop, is a communicative action remixing voices and rhythms often buried and silenced in history. Within this session, as a collective of scholars we purposefully expand, poke, trouble, and play with form to offer a roundtable, performative session, a performed roundtable. Drawing from our unique interdisciplinary and personal commitments and ethical predispositions, this roundtable is imbued by five different theoretical projects, encountering each other in the form of a pulse, a sonic-praxis. While Amalia Scott grounds their scholarly, poetic, and healing work through the fugitivity of the human body, a space that is already a free and hybrid ecology, generating more freedom always, Page Regan invites dialogue and praxis into his emerging framework Trans Radical Love (2024) to advance a pedagogy of heartbreak. Lau Malaver (2023) examines our relationship with time and space as various performance fortifications unfold in these sitios (geographical and philosophical locations) through their episteme of Recovecos (Spanish for nooks, twists, and turns). Additionally, dena harry saleh, as a decolonial Palestinian scholar, seeks to find and uncover the ways in which trans and queer Palestinians necessarily combat annihilation. They do this by singing, dancing, writing, and speaking themselves into existence with others, a process they call Palestinian fictive kin creation. We ask, how do we as perpetually embattled people summon and project secretive, fugitive codes, protests, and shoutouts energies? As an offering, we say “Let’s Pulse!” Beyond biology, pulse can be the result of a singular sound, rhythm, or word, as well as ensuing from a collaborative thought, exercise, or spontaneous movement of sound. Since a pulse can be an audible or inaudible audio repetition, Shawn argues that in the context of race, gender, or sexuality for instance, those heard or internal rhythmic sensations can be embodied as cyclical-emotional charges constructively or destructively effecting our “Blackness” or “queerness” or “non-normativity.” Every time we hear that sound or feel that emotion we are reengaging a conversation within ourselves. Our pulse in this sense is a communication of our overlapping and intersecting histories/herstories and identities. The pulse starts as a singular function that expands to include our communities and collective memories. The pulse ignites our need to engage and reengage with our ancestors and our present people.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Lau Malaver, St. Olaf College

Panelists

• Shawn T ONeal, CU, Boulder

• Page V Regan, Colorado College

• Amalia C Scott, Loyola University New Orleans

Comment

• dena h saleh, University of Colorado, Boulder

Biographical Information

Lau Malaver (St. Olaf College), malaver@stolaf.edu
Lau Malaver [they/them] is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnic, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at St. Olaf College. Malaver's research project, Recovecos: Race, Time, and the Performance of Trans Embodiment, investigates 21st century trans and queer cultural productions in the Américas through the theoretical framework they term Recovecos (Spanish for nooks, hidden turns, twists) which is the relationship of space and time. Malaver is on the Editorial Board of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and has published in ASAP/J: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal, Chiricu Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Ecumenica: Journal of Performance and Religion, among others. Malaver has received recognition for their performance work at the Denver Art Museum, through a creative residency with B2 Center for Art, Media, and Performance, and as a working group facilitator with the New York University Institute of Performance and Politics. Lau is also a fiction writer.

Page Valentine Regan (Colorado College) pregan@coloradocollege.edu. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Page Valentine Regan’s (he/him) research and pedagogy is grounded in his experiences facilitating, teaching, learning, and cultivating contexts for critical consciousness and youth socio-political development. Inspired by lineages of scholars, movement builders, and transcestors, he wonders what it means to continue to act, choose, dream, think and become otherwise? Especially from within the structures (such as schooling) painted with promises of justice and antiracism? In his research, he weaves theoretical traditions such as trans of color criticism; Black feminist love politics; and theories in the flesh in order to explore and continue to posit all the ways in which trans of color life offers, or perhaps demands, a radical and emergent loving praxis. Such praxis invites active and ongoing consideration into the stories written, recycled and defended about desire, knowledge, agency, and power within various educational settings (including church basements, street corners, couches and clubs). Page reflects upon these sites as sacred grounds for self-determination, relational possibility, and reimagining civic engagement.

Amalia Scott Jančič (acscott@my.loyno.edu) is a counselor-in-training, a practicing Astrologer, a scholar of life, and a poet. Amalia is completing a Master in the Science of Clinical Mental Health at Loyola University in New Orleans and approaches their work with clients through relational-cultural and somatic lenses. Amalia is dedicated to integrating embodiment in the formation of relationships and practices so that cultures, traditions, and ultimately the fabric of our belonging can grow from the ever-evolving ecology of our embodiment. Black queer feminist, decolonial, anti-capitalist, and disability justice frameworks inform all Amalia’s creations and participations. A multiracial trans person, child of immigrants and diaspora, Amalia inherits and weaves together the threads of many identities: Jamaica’s AfroCaribbean blackness, the whiteness of Jamaica’s colonizers, the whiteness of Slovenian immigrants’ recent deracination in the U.S, and mental illness among all of them. In their survival, Amalia’s work has become a means by which to dismantle our boundedness to colonized identity categories, opening up spaces in which we may collectively explore something in a beyond that is already here.

Shawn Trenell O’Neal- CU Boulder
Shawn Trenell O’Neal (he, him, his), shawn.oneal@colorado.edu earned the distinction of being awarded the first dissertation completion fellowship from the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) at CU Boulder (2022-2023), where he is now an executive committee member. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, in addition to being a renowned DJ and audio producer. Dr. O'Neal is also a founding member and faculty fellow in Lyripeutics Storytelling: Remixing Our Reality Through Hip Hop Education. His research includes African American studies, Africana studies, musicology, ethnomusicology, queer and trans of color critique, and women of color feminisms. Dr. O'Neal developed an interdisciplinary and intersectional theoretical concept called Audio Intersectionality, upon which he based his dissertation. Audio Intersectionality are interdisciplinary herstories and histories, active responses, self-narratives, self-defenses, traumas, and celebrations, regarding race, gender, and sexuality communicated through sound, music, and performance. The dissertation title is "Audio Intersectionality: Self-Identification Within the Processes of Interdisciplinary Explorations in Sound, Music, and Performance." Dr. O’Neal’s work appears in Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism (2020).

dena harry saleh - CU Boulder, dena.saleh@colorado.edu. dena is a nonbinary trans Palestinian artist-scholar of the diaspora. They are a PhD student in the Critical Ethnic Studies department at CU Boulder, and their research seeks to situate the refugee-as-settler toward a liberation ethic partially through generating new cosmologies influenced by Islam and the material reality of the current age. They are an organizer, parent, musician, writer, and lover of the never-ending project of liberation. They presented and performed at the 2024 ASA Conference in Baltimore with their Liberation Love Troupe. Their writing, “The Intersection of Disability and Genocide” was published by Alice Wong on her blog “Disability Visability Project,” and they lead numerous speaking engagements around Denver where they currently settle.