AFTERWORDS: assembly—Saidiya Hartman at Wesleyan

Saidiya Hartman ’83, Hon. ’19 will be in conversation with Kaneza Schaal ’06 moderated by Kiara Benn ’20 as they discuss Litany for Grieving Sisters.

Litany for Grieving Sisters is a new performance work, a ceremony for life at the end of the world based on Hartman’s text (originally published in the journal Representations, 2022). Reflecting on themes of kinship, maternal care, anti-Black violence, and collective grief, the work uses the voice through overlapping operatic, generative, and compositional traditions that look specifically to Indigenous vocal performance lineages between women. In this conversation, Hartman will be joined by director Schaal to discuss the evolution of the project as they work to translate between scholarship and writing, specifically Hartman’s use of critical fabulation, into a collective and embodied practice of movement, song, and storytelling.

This event is the start of AFTERWORDS: assembly, a series of public programs that asks: what happens after the encounter with the work of art? How does art have the capacity to not only bring people together but to produce new forms of knowledge and ways of knowing the world around us? If “to assemble” means both to come together and to make or construct, how are these definitions inextricable, such that assembly brings together something (perhaps a “we”) that didn’t exist before, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts?

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