Feeling Otherwise

Friday, October 9, 2015, 7pm

Organized by cheyanne turions

How does otherwise feel? And what does it mean to feel otherwise?

Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching experiences are wide-ranging: from Black Studies to Performance Theory and Sound Studies to Philosophy and Theology to Black Feminist and Queer theories. He recently completed his first book project, “Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility,” an investigation into black queer aesthetics and performance as modes of collective/social imaginings otherwise.

At Gallery TPW, Crawley will present Feeling Otherwise, a talk and participatory conversation that expands upon his multi-year project elaborating the concept of otherwise possibilities.

The otherwise, as Crawley conceptualizes it, engages the normative world as a deformational force. Mapping the ways that feeling otherwise is connected to the ongoing projects of settler colonialism and racialized capitalist logics, Crawley explores how feeling and being otherwise can function as a critical analytics. Departing from the Blackpentecostal faith he was raised with, Crawley investigates how the music, the sound and the feeling of Blackpentecostal lifeworlds make such otherwise possibilities perceptible to audiovisual experience. Yet, this is but one, and certainly not the only context where the otherwise can be registered. Such feelings, such otherwise possibilities, are plural, queer, black.

Feeling Otherwise will experiment with beginnings and endings, the fictive and the real, the sonic and the haptic, inviting a translation of the otherwise through artistic and curatorial methods in the participatory discussion to follow.