Publicly hated and mocked in terms dripping with revanchist sexism and anti-Asian animus, Yoko Ono has none-the-less laid an indelible impress on a host of fields including conceptual and performance art, sculpture, rock, punk, and popular culture. This talk offers a meditation on the queer and Japanese American dynamics of grief in Ono’s practice, in which grief and destruction are experiences that never pass, nor conclude, offering instead a practice of living-with grief, living-with the shattering, and living-on-and-through the scream.

Speaker bio:

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and, for the ’21-’22 academic year, a Presidential Fellow and Visiting Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University. Widely published in the areas of contemporary art and performance, critical race theory, and queer of color critique, JCL is author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018), A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (2013); co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok; and series co-editor of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series with Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini.