ABSTRACT

This book examines necropolitics and performance art, with a particular focus on the black body and the African diaspora.

In this book, Myron M. Beasley situates artists as cultural workers and theorists who illuminate the political linkages between their own and others’ specific locales. The focus is an interrogation of the political systems that dictate and determine the value of lives (and decide which lives matter) through a lens of performance and art. Beasley highlights how the performances of rupture, which are of artistic, and historical significance, reveal both strategies of survival and promises of possibility. Artists and curators examined include Jelili Atiku, Giscard Bouchotte, Nona Faustine, Vanessa German, Simone Leigh, Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Ebony G. Patterson, and Dianne Smith.

The volume is an ideal research and reference book for students and scholars of Contemporary Art, African Studies, and Performance Theory.

chapter 1|11 pages

Performance, Death, Politics

chapter 2|13 pages

Haiti Is Open for Dreaming/Haiti Is Open for Business

Curating Périféeriques against Precarity

chapter 3|12 pages

9 of 219/A Carnival of Caskets

chapter 4|12 pages

Public Mourning/Performance as Life

chapter 5|12 pages

Geographies of Death Wearing White Shoes

chapter 6|8 pages

On Rituals of Death

chapter 8|9 pages

The Anti-Museum

chapter |4 pages

Afterword