About the Book
Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education
Winner, 2018 Errol Hill Award in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research
A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking.
After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, and Nona Faustine, After the Party considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance's capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference.
Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, Chambers-Letson argues that it is through minoritarian performance that we keep our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive an increasingly precarious present.
About the Author :
Joshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).
Review :
"After the Party is indeed a manifesto: transparent in its politics and elegant in its prose, it takes the temperature of contemporary politics and offers 'a tactical manual' for survival and transformation … After the Party is a love letter to performance, excavating its efficacy beyond commodification and toward sustenance. With gorgeous prose and unapologetic politics, the author offers this book as a gift … Chambers-Letson invites us to the party, to commit to the transformative and embodied labor of performance that might bestow 'more life.'" (Kareem Khubchandani, Global Performance Studies) "After the Party is a necessary and fearlessly original text, which pushes against the conventions of the academic monograph, suggesting something closer to a 'travel guide' or 'tactical manual.'" (This Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory) "The book is exactly what we need after a year and an uprising that brought increased attention to systemic racism and the unequal distribution of life and death. It is a "travel guide and…tactical manual" (5) that could be called prophetic—but only if you have not been paying attention. This is not an indictment, but a compliment to Chambers-Letson's work [...] Museum, memorial, and memento mori, After the Party challenges readers to imagine creative ways of living through this moment, and meaningful ways of honoring those we have lost, those we are losing, those we are going to lose." (The Black Scholar) "A luminous reflection on mourning, care, and being together. Through deft and intimate analyses, Chambers-Letson assembles a group of insurgents, minoritarian performers whose meditations on survival, death, and collectivity provide the basis for a new theory of communism. These performers show us snippets of space where the violences of neoliberalism, racism, and homophobia are met with howls, defiance, and a turn toward community. These are moments where life persists and this book brings you there." - Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism "Joshua Chambers-Letson invites us to the party in his beautifully written consideration of the collective functions of performance for more livable black and brown, queer and trans worlds. In a series of cogent readings of various forms of performance across the twentieth century, from Nina Simone to Tseng Kwong Chi, After the Party is a treatise and a handbook for queer and trans of color survival. A timely book and an urgent read!" - C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity "This is the ongoing process of survival and sustenance that propels Chambers-Letson's rich theorizations of minoritarian performance, which continuously labours towards 'More Life' in the ongoing work of getting free and bringing your loved ones with you while doing it, even if they have passed on." (Asian Diaspora Visual Cultures and the Americas) "Chambers-Letson takes up Muñoz's work and expands on this to focus on how to deal with the overwhelming death of queer and trans people of color." (Journal of American Culture)
