Reading
Alexandra Egan & Kendra Sullivan
As a poet, musician, sound-artist, and scholar, my work interrogates how cultural sites of injury transfer and mistranslate across different aesthetic mediums, embedding themselves in the architectures of national memory and sonic hauntings of the West. In this workshop, we will engage in a transhistorical, transmedia study of Saidiya Hartman’s Crow Jane—a fugitive figure who moves between the blues, and Black poetics (which is also still the blues), further explore Crow Jane through Amiri Baraka’s poem of the same title, and listen to the blues standard Crow Jane as recorded by Joe Williams. Through this tenuous movement across textual, sonic, and historical frequencies, we will ask: What does it mean to revise? To look again, again, again—hurt as (re)vision? What kinds of relationships emerge between revision, nationalism, performance, and Black feminist poetics? How does revision mark, distort, or refuse? This workshop takes up revision not just as a textual process but as a site of performance, (mis)translation, and contested meaning. How might our engagements move us towards what Denise Ferreira da Silva articulates as a Black Feminist Poethics?
Together, we will write/create in response/(with) select text, attempting to develop our own counter-insurgent grammars—poetic, micro, and theoretical formulations that emerge from refusal, revision, and aesthetic disobedience. Participants will leave with new writing generated from prompts that push our own respective artistic practices.This virtual workshop is open to writers, musicians, artists, and anyone invested in the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and the (re)construction of refusal in art that can also question the conditions of its emergence.
