After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

A new manifesto for performance studies that celebrates queer of color worldmaking

After the Party: Performance and Queer of Color Life tells the stories of minoritarian activists and artists who who mobilize performance both aesthetically and in everyday life. Through the exemplary work of artists Jorge Cortiñas, Nina Simone, Danh Vo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, Joshua Chambers-Letson explores how their performance produces freedom and sustains life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation.

With additional appearances by Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, Yayoi Kusama, Muna Tseng, and Nona Faustine, After the Party considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz, and alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black feminist theory, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letsonmaps a portrait of performance’s capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a being together in difference.

In considering this type of performance a rehearsal for emancipation, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise and fall of historical communism, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and Black Lives Matter to consider this worldmaking practice born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and care, Joshua Chambers-Letson argues that it is through minoritarian performance that we keep our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive an increasingly precarious present.