Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible (or) … a performative response to la paperson, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and Julietta Singh

ABSTRACT

Phantasms in the Halls: A Future University is Possible, is a mediated live performance presented synchronously on Zoom and in person. In this devised ensemble piece, the performers offer a performative response to recent scholarship on the settler colonial university and its significance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work weaves together theories of fugitivity, spectrality, and refusal to offer contextually situated critiques of labor practices under quarantine. The performance form works in collaboration with its critical content to offer an embodied, albeit mediated, look into what decolonizing academic labor can look like in a moment of global epistemic upheaval and collective survival.

KEYWORDS:

• decoloniality
• virtual performance
• institutional critique
• Zoom
• pandemic performance

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the I-4C Collective and the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University for their invitation to create this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 la paperson, A Third University Is Possible: Uncovering the Decolonizing Ghost in the Colonizing Machine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, U.K.: Minor Compositions, 2013); Julietta Singh, “Errands for the Wild,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 567–80; Eli Meyerhoff, “’This Quiet Revolution’: Alternative Modes of Study with the Experimental College at San Francisco State,” Cultural Politics 15, no. 3 (November 2019): 315.

2 la paperson, A Third University, 25.

3 Singh, “Errands,” 569.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, Arizona State University.