Unworlding, NYC

Claudia Rankine in conversation with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah

Wed, Oct 14 at 7:30pm
BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her genre-defying works. In Triage, her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, Rankine collides the lyric with narrative, memoir, image, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet, presented with full-color visuals. Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their histories and their shared but separate understanding of our current political landscape. The book—which Rankine will discuss with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah at the BAM Fisher—is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss.

Claudia Rankine is the author of eight books, including her American trilogy—Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric—as well as three plays and numerous video collaborations. Among her many accolades, she is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, Forward Prize, LA Times Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and MacArthur foundations, United States Artists, DAAD, The American Academy in Rome, The American Academy in Berlin, and the National Endowment of the Arts. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII).

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist and cultural critic whose longform profiles of subjects such as Kendrick Lamar, Missy Elliott, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Toni Morrison have been widely acclaimed. Her profile of white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the National Magazine Award for Best Feature Writing in 2018. Her profiles of Dave Chappelle and Missy Elliott were National Magazine Award finalists in 2013 and 2018, respectively, and her essay “The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin” was selected for The Best American Essays in 2017.

Jack Halberstam in conversation with Avgi Saketopoulou

Wed, Oct 27 at 7:30pm
BAM Fisher (Fishman Space)

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time. In a conversation with Avgi Saketopoulou, Halberstam will discuss this revolutionary way of seeing bodies and built environment, which unites radical politics and trans aesthetics.

Jack Halberstam is David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and the author of seven books, including Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance, The Queer Art of Failure, and Female Masculinity. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow, he is the winner of the Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship and was recently the subject of the film So We Moved by Adam Pendleton.

Originally from Cyprus and from Greece, Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou is a clinical psychologist and a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. She is currently completing her new book manuscript, The Offer of Sadism: Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetics of Political Resistance in the Anti-Reparative Turn.