Kellen’s presentation explores the intersections of African immigration, race, and family in Jocelyn Bioh’s Broadway play Jaja’s African Hair Braiding. Bioh’s work dramatizes the lives of African immigrant women in the US, highlighting the complex negotiations of kinship between Black Americans and African migrants. Kellen uses this play to critique prevailing performance theories, particularly Joseph Roach’s concept of performance genealogies, which traditionally rely on Afrocentric understandings of cultural survivals. Kellen argues that Roach’s genealogical method risks reinforcing a naturalized notion of race and inheritance that fails to account for the ruptures and silences inherent in diasporic identities. By focusing on the play’s depiction of the fractal and sometimes fractious relationships within the African American and African immigrant communities, Kellen calls for new methodologies in performance studies that can account for both the continuities and disruptions that shape racialized kinship. This paper challenges scholars to rethink the ways in which family resemblances and dissemblances are articulated in the context of diasporic and postcolonial subjects.
Waleska’s paper brings us to the dynamic intersection of Afro-Venezuelan cultural memory and queer kinship through the lens of electronic music. Analyzing the first-ever Boiler Room event in Caracas, hosted at the LGBTQ+ Revo Disco Club in March 2024, Waleska focuses on Venezuelan audiovisual artist MPeach. Using electronic music as a sonic strategy, MPeach creates a space where dissonant intimacies unfold amidst the rhythms of Afro-Venezuelan traditions. Drawing from a mix of tambor de Caraballeda rhythms and underground club genres like amapiano and techno, the performance becomes a site where diasporic belonging, queer utopian ideals, and collective memory converge. Waleska argues that this DJ set not only preserves Afro-Venezuelan sonic aesthetics but also challenges heteropatriarchal structures by offering a radical form of kinship through sound. This paper speaks to the ways in which music and performance can act as both a vehicle for resistance and a method for preserving marginalized cultural histories, proposing that queer kinship can emerge through sonic reimaginings of family and heritage.
Ariel’s contribution moves to the realm of care work and queer kinship in the context of the Filipinx-Canadian diaspora. Examining Lani Montreal’s play My Grandmother and I, Ariel investigates the performance of intergenerational queer kinship between a queer grandson and his grandmother. Set against the backdrop of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the transnational Filipinx migrant experience in Canada, the play provides a meditation on the complexities of kinship beyond heteronormative family. Ariel reads the play through the lens of queer carework, especially the ways in which queer Filipinx youth, often excluded from traditional understandings of care, carve out their own spaces for emotional and spiritual connection. Montreal’s use of magical realism and Filipino folklore transforms the relationship between grandson and Lola into a site of reimagined care, allowing for a reconceptualization of kinship within the Filipinx nuclear family. By focusing on the emotional labor embedded in queer Filipino caregiving, Ariel challenges dominant narratives of family that center biological or heteronormative structures, instead proposing that queerness, care, and kinship can coexist in ways that transcend familial expectations.
Together, the three papers highlight how performance serves as a crucial space for renegotiating the terms of kinship, memory, and belonging. From the Afro-Venezuelan rhythms that carve out queer cultural spaces in the diasporic landscape, to the theatrical dissection of African American and African immigrant relations, to the reimagined practices of queer care within Filipinx family, these papers push against conventional notions of family resemblance. They reveal how theatre and performance can be a powerful tool for rethinking the structures that define kinship, encouraging us to consider the complexities, contradictions, and liberatory potentials that lie in reimagining family beyond the boundaries of tradition.
Each session participant will speak for roughly 18 minutes, leaving us 20 minutes for discussion. These participants bring diverse perspectives, drawn from distinct fields, geographies, and academic ranks, with identities that include LGBTQ+, first-generation, Latinx, and more.