Event Date
Dr. Erin Lam (UC President's and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSB)
Abstract: This paper theorizes “irreverence” as an affective alchemization of racial melancholia through and alongside the work of Johanna Hedva, a multi-modal L.A. based artist. Their 2020 poetry and essay collection, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, presents a decade of work haunted by cultural inheritances, patriarchy, and literal ghosts, exploring how to build new art upon oppressive foundations without consenting to the alienation of being othered. Hedva’s playful renegotiation of the term “genius” in the opening essay “Euripides is Not A Genius. I Am.” opens up a non-hierarchical way to dialogue with canonical texts from the Ancient Greek literary tradition, bypassing more typical attitudes of adulation or rejection. Their essay offers traces of their 2012-2015 Greek Cycle performances, troubling the idea of text as preservational record, meant to enable recreation of or interaction with the past, with a dynamic insistence on ephemerality, relationality, and embodiment.