Collaborators-in-Residence
In fall 2023, the Princeton Collaboratorium will host scholar Saidiya Hartman and director Charlotte Braithwhite, who will bring together a dynamic team of collaborators including artists Arthur Jafa, Okwui Okpokwasili and Imani Uzuri, musician Esperanza Spaulding, and actor André Holland to develop a performative interpretation of Hartman’s acclaimed essays, “The End of White Supremacy” and “A Litany for Grieving Sisters.”
Fall 2023
Saidiya Hartman is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured. She weaves findings from her meticulous historical research into narratives that retrieve from oblivion stories of nameless and sparsely documented historical actors, such as female captives on slave ships and the inhabitants of slums at the turn of the twentieth century.
Her first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), traces continuities between pre- and post-emancipation eras in the United States by demonstrating how even advocacy-oriented abolitionist rhetoric reproduced the violence and domination of the state of enslavement. She extends her analysis to the present day by challenging contemporary scholars to be wary of recirculating scenes of the violated Black body. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), combines elements of historiography and memoir in a meditation on her travels to Ghana in search of a deeper understanding of the experience of enslavement. With this work, Hartman defies the conventions of academic scholarship and employs a speculative method of writing history, which she terms “critical fabulation,” to interrogate the authority of historical archives as the singular source of credible information about the past. She revisits the primal scenes of the African diaspora—its coastal fortresses, dungeons, and hinterlands—and reimagines from multiple perspectives the case of an African girl who was murdered by a ship captain and singled out in a speech by the British abolitionist William Wilberforce in 1792. As a whole, the book dramatizes the challenge of rendering in narrative form such irreparable conditions of loss and dispossession and illuminates the ongoing consequences of these conditions in the present day.
Hartman’s most recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), is similarly inventive in its mode of presentation and immerses readers in the interior lives of young Black women who fled the South and moved to Northern cities in the early twentieth century. While drawing from sociological surveys, tenement photographs, reformatory case files, and other sources, she critiques the pathologizing portrayals these official documents present and recovers stories of resistance enacted by famous women (such as Ida B. Wells) and numerous anonymous others who looked outside the bounds of the law to find kinship, intimacy, and freedom. By addressing gaps and omissions in accounts of trans-Atlantic slavery and its aftermath, Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.
Charlotte Braithwaite‘s genre-defying work illuminates the realities and dreams of marginalized people; people whose stories have been silenced, disappeared, and ignored. Dealing with subject matter from the historical past to the distant future, her work brings to light issues of social justice, race, sex, power, and the complexities of the human condition. A director of classical texts, multimedia, site-specific, dance performances, operas, concerts, film, and installations— Brathwaite’s trans-disciplinary inquiry manifests in spectacles of color and music. Her works live in the deep time of aural/oral history and create an immersive experience for audience and performer alike which offers new perspectives in both form and content.
Brathwaite’s work art has been presented across the globe including: New York – The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Park Avenue Armory, The Shed, The Public Theater/Under the Radar Festival, the Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance (BAAD!), The Living Theater, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa E.T.C, The Highline, Jack Performance Space, Bushwick Starr, BRIC Arts Center, Harlem Stage, Central Park Summer Stage, the Studio Museum of Harlem, 651 Arts; Washington D.C. The Kennedy Center, D.C. Arts Commission 5×5 Projects; USA – The International Festival of Arts and Ideas (New Haven), FORM Festival (Arcosanti), Moss Arts Center (Virginia), MDLive Arts (Miami), Segerstrom Arts Center (Orange County), Wow Festival (San Diego), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati); International – Dakar Biennale (Senegal), Right About Now Festival (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Test! Festival (Zagreb, Croatia), Het Veem Theater (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), The Little Carib Theater (Port of Spain, Trinidad), Culture Station Seoul 284 Festival (Seoul, Korea), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, Germany), The Dakar Biennale as well as in Kolkata, India, and Accra, Ghana.
Brathwaite is the recipient of several awards and citations including a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Creative Capital award, a United States Artist Fellowship, multiple Map Fund Awards and the Princess Grace George C. Wolfe Award among others. She received her MFA at Yale School of Drama, a BA in Physical Theater at the Amsterdam School for the Arts (the Netherlands). A freelance director and educator, Brathwaite has taught at University of Fortaleza (Brazil), Barbados Community College (West Indies), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Amherst College, New York University and other institutions.
Okwui Okpokwasili is a writer, performer, and choreographer. In partnership with collaborator Peter Born, Okpokwasili creates multidisciplinary projects that are raw, intimate experiences. As a performer, Okpokwasili frequently collaborates with director and choreographer Ralph Lemon, including Come Home, Charley Patton (2006), for which she won a “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Performer; How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? (2010), a duet performed at the Museum of Modern Art as part of On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2011); and Scaffold Room (2014). Okpokwasili has appeared as an actor in many productions including Richard Maxwell’s Cowboys and Indians (1999), Richard Foreman’s Maria del Bosco (2001), Kristin Marting’s Sounding (2009), Joan Dark (2009), Young Jean Lee’s Lear (2010), Nora Chipaumire’s Miriam (2012), and Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2013). Film credits include The Interpreter (2005), The Hoax (2006), I Am Legend (2007), Knut Åsdam’s Abyss (2010), and Malorie’s Final Score (2013).
Okpokwasili’s pent up: a revenge dance (2008) premiered at Performance Space 122 and received a 2010 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production. An immersive installation version of the work was featured in the 2008 Prelude Festival. Her FCA-supported Bronx Gothic received a 2014 “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production and continues to tour nationally and internationally. An early iteration of FCA-supported Poor People’s TV Room was presented by the Lincoln Center in the David Rubinstein Atrium in 2014.
Andre Holland is an American actor widely known for his 2016 performance as Kevin in the Academy Award-winning film Moonlight. Throughout his career, Holland has acted in film, television, and theater productions. On television, he has starred as Dr. Algernon Edwards in the Cinemax series The Knick (2014–2015) and as Matt Miller in the FX series American Horror Story: Roanoke (2016). He portrayed politician and activist Andrew Young in the 2014 film Selma and sportswriter Wendell Smith in the 2013 film 42. On stage, he has starred in August Wilson’s play Jitney on Broadway in 2017. In 2020, he played a lead role on the Netflix musical drama series The Eddy, directed by Damien Chazelle.
Imani Uzuri is a vocalist, composer and cultural worker who has been called “a post modernist Bessie Smith” by The Village Voice. She composes and researches music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family. She has recently been praised in the New York Times for her “stirring” music and her “gorgeously chesty ruminations.” Uzuri creates concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions and sound installations in international venues/festivals including Lincoln Center Out of Doors, New York’s Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, Public Theater, Performa Biennial, France’s Festival Sons d’hiver, Met Breuer, London’s ICA, and MoMA. Uzuri has also collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines including musicians Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Vijay Iyer; visual artist Wangechi Mutu; conceptual artists Carrie Mae Weems, Sanford Biggers; choreographer Trajal Harrell; poet Sonia Sanchez and composer Robert Ashley.
Photo credit Robert Hamacher. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist and filmmaker. Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals. His artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Stedelijk, Luma Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work include presentations at Luma Arles, France; Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; OGR Torino, Italy; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.”
Photo credit: LaMont Hamilton
esperanza spalding (also known as irma nejando, or, i.e.) is a being who has grown to recognize love in the abstract and aspirational and is now fully dedicated to learning how she can serve and embody actualized love through honor for and receptivity to, fellow humans, teachers, and practitioners of various regenerative arts.
Bass, piano, composition, performance, voice and lyrics are tools and disciplines she is engaged in deeply to cultivate her own channel for transmitting care and beauty through vibration/sound/presence.
spalding has written an opera with Wayne Shorter, which premiered in fall 2021. She is currently developing a mockumentary in collaboration with brontë velez and San Francisco Symphony, researching liberation technologies in jazz and black dance, and continuing a lifelong collaboration with practitioners in various fields relating to music, healing and cognition to develop music with enhanced therapeutic potential. From 2017 – 2022, Harvard University hired her to co-create and learn with enrolled students, working on developing creative practices that serve the restoration of people and land.
Past Guest Collaborators
2023 Guest Collaborators
In 2023, the Princeton Collaboratorium for Radical Aesthetics launched a Collaborators-in-Residence program with a vibrant group of guests including writers Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand and their collaborators, artist Torkwase Dyson and poet Canisia Lubrin. During their residency they reflected on their individual and collaborative practices of ekphrastic writing and thinking, as well as the work of The Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project on their collaborative publication: Think/ing from Black: A Lexicon, a book that imagines a set of words, terms and practices from some of the manifold positions of Blackness that locate and animate Black life. Guests included:
- Dionne Brand
- Christina Sharpe
- Torkwase Dyson
- Canisia Lubrin
- Francoise Vergès
2022 Guest Collaborators
- Kahlil Joseph
- Bradford Young
- Onye Anyanwu
- Cameron Rowland
- Saidiya Hartman
