The Chorus: Blackness, Visitation, and the Poetics of Enclosure (ACLA '27)
updated:
Saturday, July 4, 2026 - 5:02pm
Andrew Santana Kaplan, University of Denver / Joy Priest, University of Pittsburgh
deadline for submissions:
Monday, September 21, 2026
This virtual seminar takes its inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s citation of the Greek etymology of the word chorus: “to dance within an enclosure.” For Hartman, the chorus also furnishes a paradigm for thinking—to play on Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion—Black (non)being singular plural. In Wayward Lives, Hartman suggests that any of the minor figures can stand in for the others, not as a claim of homogeneity, but rather as a contention that their singularity can be read as paradigmatic of waywardness—in its queer heterogeneity—in general. The chorus of black femme and queer youth is thus at once a singular plurality and a plural singularity as they make beautifully riotous lives within the enclosure of social death.