Season Butler, Wayward Temporalities – Fell on Black Days: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and the Erotics of Black Life and Death

I am currently preparing a research project grounded in the burgeoning fields of intersectional and critical race narratology using Lauren Berlant's notion of the ‘Situation Tragedy’ (from Cruel Optimism, 2011) – a genre grounded in the experience of irreparable fragility – as a key critical framework. To me, this is a compelling lens through which to expound on Anthropocene narratives grounded in present time precarity and the effects (and affects) of late capitalism. My interest in work wherein the anxieties of the neoliberal End Times is a central or governing presence focuses on areas creative praxis where the legacy of white settler colonialism feels fully reified and naturalised by climate change, hetero-patriarchal normativity and contingent (rather than stable or consensual) citizenship in literary fiction, visual art, performance and film.
For Wayward Temporalities, I would like to present some preliminary findings, establishing a starting point for my theorisation in the present of Black life – the now, the constantly renewing, ephemeral, elusive point zero. I will approach this through an examination of Séancers by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, in which I will be performing as ‘guest séancer’ when the work is presented in Brighton Festival this May. Kosoko describes the work as: ‘an auto-ethnographic performance work that collapses lyrical poetry, psychic movement forms and strategies of discursive performance to investigate concepts of loss, resurrection, and paranormal activity […] journey[ing] into the surreal and fantastical states of a Black imagination as it traverses the “fatal” axis of abstraction, illegibility, identity and gender complexity.’ Extending the ‘witnessing’ element of the guest séancer role, I will explore the implications of Kosoko’s work in the frame of Christina Sharpe’s and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s theorisations about race and (anti)futurity, as well as Bakhtin’s formulation of chronotope in the context of the racialised experience of the Anthropocene.
You can find a trailer of Séancers here: https://vimeo.com/231556423
For my presentation, I would like to be able to show video with sound.

Bio
Season Butler is a writer, artist, dramaturg and lecturer. She undertook the MA in
Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in 2007 and recently completed an PhD in Creative
Writing at Goldsmiths College. She was a recipient of the first Live Art UK Diverse Actions Leaderships Bursary (2017), and was shortlisted for the SI Leeds Prize for fiction by Black and Asian women in 2014. She is interested in intersectionality, the opportunities and traps of hindsight and hope, coming of age into unprecedented change and what it means to look forward to an increasingly wily future.