Queering and Transing the Visual: Sensing the World Beyond Late-stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Kung Li Sun’s alternate history of the early United States, Begin the World Over, reminds us that revolution requires all of our senses. Taste, when protagonist James Hemings, a formerly-enslaved Paris-educated cook, prepares sumptuous meals for the movement that nourish their efforts. Hearing, when Mvskoke and Seminole singers weave their musical traditions together in a rousing scene that moves the revolutionaries toward their goal. Touch, when the wet, sticky swamps that surround maroon communities protect those housed within. Smell, when the scent of gunpowder before its successful seizure from white bureaucrats energizes those who have joined the struggle. Sight, when the vision of a pirate ship disguised as a slave ship, to achieve entry unnoticed in the port, offers assurance.

With Los Angeles on fire at precisely the moment Octavia Butler predicted in Parable of the Sower (1993), the utility of artistic/creative practice for crystallizing visions of the future is clearer than ever. Literature is a formidable tool of visuality, giving readers rich descriptions to push against the ways in which our imaginations are imprisoned/limited. Likewise, queer of color aesthetics, exuberant style, and fashion–madison moore shows and theorizes in Fabulous: the Rise of the Beautiful and Eccentric (2018)–are sites of resistance and reimagining for queer and trans people of color. Yet the visual modalities constructed in these works queerly reconstitute ways of seeing as embodied and relational practices. Far from the god-trick of the imperial eye, the visual is thus contoured and accompanied by other senses, like hot pangs of empathy and collective dance floor fervor, in ways that craft–rather than extract–more pleasurable, vibrant, and reciprocal relations.

This roundtable discussion unites scholars, organizers, and artists whose work clarifies how each sense is fundamental to revolutionary struggle against late-stage American empire. We ask:
-How might we sense the world in ways that resist and move beyond late-stage American Empire?
-How might we mobilize our and attune our senses in ways that move us closer to liberation?
-What are the revolutionary tools that each of the five senses offer us?
-How do various cultural forms (film, literature, music, art) help us remember these revolutionary potentials, and imagine liberation?
-What multisensory movement offerings exist within and beyond the fuzzy boundaries of American empire?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Amber Hickey, University of Tennessee - Chattanooga

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College

Panelists

• madison moore, Brown University

• AB Brown, University of Virginia-Main Campus

• micha cardenas, University of California Santa Cruz

• Amer Kanngieser

Biographical Information

Roundtable Participants:

madison moore is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. madison is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the five alarm fire of everyday life. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. madison has performed internationally at a broad range of art institutions and nightclubs, including The Kitchen, BASEMENT (NY), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, SFMOMA, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Somerset House Studios London, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and beyond. In 2022, madison held a nightlife residency at The Kitchen in New York in concert with the artist Sadie Barnette’s installation The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an ode to the first Black owned gay bar in San Francisco. In February 2023, he guest co-edited a special issue of the arts journal e-flux on BLACK RAVE with McKenzie Wark. Currently, he is currently working on a multimedia film/ book project, NIGHT FEVER, focused on queer nightlife as a method of living.

AB Brown (they/them) is a performance artist and scholar. Their creative and scholarly research practice explores aesthetics of statelessness that carve out critical and coalitional practices of unbelonging across gender, ability, geography and history. They use performance to attune audiences to the potential of affect, aesthetics, embodiment, and materiality to disrupt nationalist, settler colonial, racist, ableist, and transphobic politics that undergird concepts such as citizenship, subjectivity, the body, and history. They received their PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently assistant professor of contemporary performance at Colby College. Their writing can be found in The Journal of African Cultural Studies, Women and Performance, Text and Performance Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail as well as the anthologies Queer Nightlife and Queer and Trans Migrations. They are a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader through the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson Foundation) and a recipient of the Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund.

micha cárdenas, PhD, is an artist and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press (2022), proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Poetic Operations was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association. cárdenas’s co-authored books The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) and Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs (2010) were published by Atropos Press. She is a first generation Colombian American.

Her solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries and biennials including the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, Arnolfini Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Centro Cultural del Bosque in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural de Tijuana, the Zero1 Biennial and the California Biennial. cárdenas is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0.

Amer Kanngieser is a political geographer, sound artist and educator. Their practice engages listening and attunement to approach how people collectively determine conditions of liberation and care in the face of ecocide and environmental change. Amer is a co-founder of artistic project Oceanic Refractions and collaborates with Oceania-based decolonial storytellers, artists and grassroots activists. Their writing has appeared in diverse publications including South Atlantic Quarterly, WIRES Climate Change, The Contemporary Pacific and Critical Legal Thinking. Their work has been exhibited at museums, festivals and galleries worldwide, among them La Biennale di Venezia, Transmediale x CTM, Arts Centre Melbourne, the Natural History Museum London, Coventry Biennale, and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Their radio works have been commissioned by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ABC Radio, BBC, and Deutschlandradio. Amer runs workshops and masterclasses on listening, ethics and anti-colonialism, bioacoustics and climate crisis, audio storytelling, radio production (software and hardware), consensus decision making and social organising and sound ethnography. They have facilitated these for Sonic Acts Festival, Live Art Development Agency, The Centre for Deep Listening, and Fiji National Gallery, amongst many others. Amer holds a Visiting Professorship in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London. https://amkanngieser.com/



Co-Chairs:

Amber Hickey (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at The University of Tennessee – Chattanooga. They hold a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California – Santa Cruz. Their research and teaching span the fields of visual studies, environmental humanities, and critical Indigenous studies. Their writing has appeared in the Journal of Transnational American Studies Special Issue on Molecular Intimacies of Empire, Violence & Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present (Northwestern University Press), the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas. Their work is forthcoming in Energized: 101 Words for a New Politics of Energy (West Virginia University Press), Seahorses: Trans and Nonbinary Pregnancy (PM Press), as well as in a special issue of TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies on “Queer Nightlife.” Hickey’s first piece of creative nonfiction, “Waves will always be louder than bombs,” was published in early 2024 as part of Ocean Space’s “Journeys” series. They are currently developing a new work of creative nonfiction on sensing bodies of water in the southeastern United States. Their current book, Visualities of Radical Care: Decolonial Art and Activism Beyond the Necrocene (under contract with University of Minnesota Press) is an interdisciplinary examination of the aesthetics of radical care, as well as a call to mobilize radical care in practices of looking.

During their time at Colby College, they were cofounder (with Laura Sachiko Fugikawa) of the American Studies Program’s Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative. They are on the Advisory Committee for Colby College’s Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities and an Advisory Board member for UTC’s Environmental Studies Program. They are also Field Editor of Indigenous Art for caa.reviews.


Ashton Wesner (she/her) is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College, where she also co-chairs the Environmental Humanities faculty seminar and is an organizing member of the Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative. She received her PhD in Environment & Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work intersects the fields of queer feminist STS, political ecology, critical environmental history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her recent publications can be found in The American Naturalist, on the
history of coloniality, data, and power in the natural sciences, and Women’s Studies, on the gendered slippages in studies on jumping spider mating behavior and the possibilities for queer modes of attention to disrupt heteropatriarchy in the scientific study of animals.