Diana Taylor in Conversation with María Lumbreras, with Moderator Heather Badamo

In ¡Presente! (2020), Professor Diana Taylor asks what it means to be physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. As much an act, a word, an attitude, a theoretical intervention, and a performance pedagogy, Taylor maps ¡presente! at work in scenarios ranging from conquest, through colonial enactments and resistance movements, to present moments of capitalist extractivism and forced migration in the Americas. ¡Presente!—present among, with, and to; a walking and talking with others; an ontological and epistemic reflection on presence and subjectivity as participatory and relational, founded on mutual recognition—requires rethinking and unlearning in ways that challenge colonial epistemologies. Showing how knowledge is not something to be harvested but a process of being, knowing, and acting with others, Taylor models a way for scholarship to be present in political struggles.

Dr. Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Performance (2012, English trans. 2016); The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003); Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War” (1997), and Theatre of Crisis (1991). She has also edited five volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights, and several digital books such as What is Performance Studies, Resistant Strategies (co-edited with Marcos Steuernagle) and Dancing with the Zapatistas (2016). The recipient of several major awards, including the Guggenheim, she has been invited to participate in discussions on the role of new technologies in the arts and humanities in important conferences and commissions in the Americas (i.e. ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure). Diana Taylor was founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2020. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 2021 History of Art & Architecture Discussion Series, Unlearning: Race, Space, Art, explores the entanglements of race, imperialism, spatial and artistic practices in the constitution of the “political”. We will host conversations with four authors on their books: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); Prathama Banerjee, Elements of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Duke, 2020); Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012); Diana Taylor, ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence (Duke, 2020).

Upcoming Schedule:

Mon Mar 15    Prathama Banerjee in conversation with Bhaskar Sarkar

7:30-9:00pm   Moderator: Swati Chattopadhyay

Click here to download the series flyer .