Professor Joshua Chambers-Letson on race and sexuality in Yoko Ono's grief diaries - CoDE seminar
Channel: CoDE - Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity
Date: 2022-05-20

Recording of Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) webinar on Thursday 21 April 2022. https://www.ethnicity.ac.uk/

Title: 'Shatter and Scream: Yoko Ono Grief Diaries'

Speaker: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University

Summary: Publicly hated and mocked in terms dripping with revanchist sexism and anti-Asian animus, Yoko Ono has none-the-less laid an indelible impress on a host of fields including conceptual and performance art, sculpture, rock, punk, and popular culture. This talk offers a meditation on the queer and Japanese American dynamics of grief in Ono’s practice, in which grief and destruction are experiences that never pass, nor conclude, offering instead a practice of living-with grief, living-with the shattering, and living-on-and-through the scream.