Literature Program, LAIS Program, American and Indigenous Studies Program, and Ethnomusicology Present
Immersing Miami
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
RKC 103
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Alexandra T. Vazquez, Associate Professor,
Department of Performance Studies, New York University
This talk involves a willful submerging into the performance ecologies of Miami, Florida. The city, too often made mere fulcrum for many a geopolitical before and after, holds rich and established resources for creative practices. Far beyond a cultural wasteland or cold war terminus, Miami's artists have long made things from vast distances, inside precarious currents, outside of their families. “Immersing Miami” is and isn’t about the city; it is an exercise on how to write through the intimacies of the local and out towards parallel gatherings. The talk specifically works with the 1998 “Speed Split” series by the Cuban born, Miami-based artist Consuelo Castañeda (b. 1958) as an opportunity to transpose an artist’s visual mode into a musical response to displacement and dispossession. Castañeda extends a call to listen on the insides of the alienating narratives that drown Miami and in doing so enables us to hear robust aesthetic histories everywhere else.Department of Performance Studies, New York University
Alexandra T. Vazquez was born in Miami, Florida. She is Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Vazquez’s work has been featured in the journals American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and in the edited volumes Reggaeton and Pop When the World Falls Apart.
For more information, call 845-752-2405, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: RKC 103