Visiting speaker from The University of Boston, Louis Chude-Sokei, will address racial identity and cultural appropriation using the work of Edouard Glissant, a black author from Martinique who wrote the play Monsieur Toussaint, subject of Louis Henderson’s gallery installation. The play tells the tragic story of the charismatic leader of the Haitian revolution – the only successful slave revolt in history – leading to independence. Captured by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, he was spirited away to France where he died a year later from malnutrition and pneumonia, locked away in a remote French castle.
This is followed by a screening of a new film from Turner-Prize nominated The Otolith Group, exploring the work of Julius Eastman, the largely unknown queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor. Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group are both attending, to answer any audience questions afterwards.
PART 1 / 13.10 – 14.10 (60 mins)
Presentation by Louis Chude-Sokei
Blackness and Becoming: Edouard Glissant’s Retour
Visiting from The University of Boston, Louis Chude-Sokei will address the significance of Glissant and the long standing tension in his thinking between racial identity and transformation, between cultural identification and cultural mixture, between racial presence and cultural appropriation.
BREAK / 14.10 – 14.20 (10 mins)
PART 2 / 14.20 – 15.35 (75 mins)
Film / The Third Part of the Third Measure + Q&A (15)
Dir. The Otolith Group / GB 2017 / 43 mins
From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of 50, Julius Eastman, the queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and conductor wrote and performed compositions whose ecstatic militant minimalism initiated a black radical aesthetic that revolutionized the East Coast new music scene of the 1970s and 1980s. No recordings of Eastman’s compositions were released during his lifetime.
We will be joined by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group for a Q&A following the screening.