Performative Ethics: Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform

A conversation with Lilian (Lily) Mengesha, assistant professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, with affiliation in the Consortium on Race, Colonialism and Diaspora. Her research and teaching considers the use of theater and performance to address legacies of colonialism across various historical, political and geographic moments and places. She is currently working on a manuscript that theorizes the affective and place-based performance practices among Indigenous feminist performance artists in the North and Central America, particularly works that reimagine and address forms of violence against women from the US/Mexico border to downtown Vancouver, Canada. Importantly, her research illuminates how artists use their bodies as an active, lively agent for documenting legacies of dispossession.

This event is part of the yearlong lecture series Performative Ethics: Embodied Representation in the Commons.