CAAPP's Fall Black Study series "Close Reading the Emergency!" will run from Tuesday, October 11th through Friday, October 14th. The series will feature a mix of virtual and in-person events and features the following invited guests in conversation and collaboration: Hanif Abdurraqib, Kimberly Drew, Namwali Serpell, Ashon Crawley, Coco Fusco,  Dante Micheaux, D. S. Marriott, Diedrick Brackens, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Torkwase Dyson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

“Disaster requires acts of imagination…emergency can be, and almost always is, a moment of emergence.” —Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Yale Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

In Event 2 of our series, performance artist Coco Fusco will present and be in creative conversation with scholar and artist Ashon T. Crawley. Writer Fahima Ife will moderate a conversation and audience Q&A to follow.

Ashon Crawley is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Crawley works in the areas of black studies, queer theory, sound studies, theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies. His first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) investigates alternative modes of sociality present in the aesthetics practices of Black Pentecostalism. His second book, The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), explores the relationships between blackness, quantum mechanics, mysticism, and love. He is currently at work on two books about the Hammond B3 organ, the Black Church and sexuality.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008 and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications.

fahima ife (they/she, any or no pronoun) is an artist-scholar of black study based in Monterey Bay California and New Orleans. She considers 20th and 21st century experimental black aesthetics, ecological poetry and poetics, ambient field recordings, electronic music, performance art, pleasure, energetic healing, open intimacies, and land rematriation. fahima produces poems, lyrical essays, and hybrid/open-genre meditations. She is author of Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021) and other works in liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics & black studies, mercury firs, and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
fahima is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, contributing editor at Tilted House press in New Orleans, and director of the “fluid poetics studio” an artist collective and listening project of the Redwood Forest.
They are at work on an experimental multidisciplinary series, no way where we were was there (whose title is shared with poet Nathaniel Mackey), which includes the forthcoming poetry collection, Arrhythmia, and other stuff. (they/she, any or no pronoun) is an artist-scholar of black study based in Monterey Bay California and New Orleans. She considers 20th and 21st century experimental black aesthetics, ecological poetry and poetics, ambient field recordings, electronic music, performance art, pleasure, energetic healing, open intimacies, and land rematriation. fahima produces poems, lyrical essays, and hybrid/open-genre meditations. She is author of Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021) and other works in liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics & black studies, mercury firs, and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.