Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist movement and the embodied archive

Catalog description

Drawing inspiration from Harge’s multiform fable project FLY | DROWN and Audre Lorde’s conception of biomythography, students will trace their interiority to realize and imagine how personal histories, ancestral inheritance, and metaphysics live/move through the body. We will translate and transform stories of the flesh into a series of compositional modalities–which may include text, movement, performance, sound, and installation–to create lexicons that honor subjectivity as form. Informed by surrender, refusal, imagination, and self-sovereignty; we will situate our embodied archives as vessels for fable writing, create and correct myths through movement, and expand our relationship to memory, time, space, and illegibility. Throughout the course, we will turn to Black feminist literary and performance works employing fable, myth, and ancestral legacies including but not limited to: Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Aretha Franklin’s gospel music, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Chameleon, and a close reading of Harge’s FLY | DROWN. The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.