-by Aylwyn Walsh

In Jason Allen-Paisant’s welcoming address he puts forward the provocations that underpin the call for papers: How memories are shaped by and reflect on capitalist modernity?

The starting point of cultural memory – performance as intervention becomes a means of filtering experiences. He proposes that we consider the particularities of performance to expose the ironies of racism and representation. He suggests moving beyond a sense of despair, to consider the place of ‘the future’ – making the provocation that we can use memory towards the future.

This reminds me of José Esteban Muñoz, who writes of feeling brown, and what this might offer for critical engagement with thinking. His work promotes thinking about the aesthetic as a place of knowing minoritarian becoming – i.e.: moving past merely relying identity politics and through critical race studies to think through performance and performativity (Munoz, 2006).

Jason’s provocations of the triangle of memory, performance, futures serves to launch us into the three days of exploration.

Muñoz, J.E. (2006) Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position. Signs, 31(3): pp.675 – 688.