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After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life
A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking.
After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, 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 alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance’s capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference.
Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, 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.
After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, 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 alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance’s capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference.
Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, 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.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published August 7, 2018
7 people are currently reading
212 people want to read
About the author
Joshua Chambers-Letson
12 books3 followersJoshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 24, 2020
A homage to survival, mourning, and queer of color life
This book struck so many chords. The writing is stunning. I loved the many meanings of "After the Party," from the party of queer nightlife to the communist party to the Black Panther Party to the days of pre-AIDS urban life. Here's to how artists build a commons to celebrate and preserve the lives that society tries to destroy. Yes to more life.
This book struck so many chords. The writing is stunning. I loved the many meanings of "After the Party," from the party of queer nightlife to the communist party to the Black Panther Party to the days of pre-AIDS urban life. Here's to how artists build a commons to celebrate and preserve the lives that society tries to destroy. Yes to more life.
June 24, 2020
This book grabbed me from the very first moment - It came highly recommended, but I was still skeptical before I started. I don't often enjoy books, particularly non-fiction ones, that focus on artists with whom I'm not very familiar. Chambers-Letson, though, is a powerful writer who paints the most gorgeous of pictures - I felt like I could HEAR Nina during the opening chapter, I felt like my body was moving through gallery spaces in the later chapters.
This is a book you should take your time with - let each chapter be cherished and dissolve into your brain as you read. Ruminate, and let yourself be filled with longing, celebration, and sorrow, in memory of all of the ways liberation has been defined, practiced, and reached for. I closed this book in tears: the party must end, but it is all the better for that fact.
This is a book you should take your time with - let each chapter be cherished and dissolve into your brain as you read. Ruminate, and let yourself be filled with longing, celebration, and sorrow, in memory of all of the ways liberation has been defined, practiced, and reached for. I closed this book in tears: the party must end, but it is all the better for that fact.
June 23, 2019
An electrifying tour-de-force; this tender grief monument is not just about queer of color performance art—it is a work of art. I am still personally wrecked by the intimate second-person address of the preface and epilogue, which somehow finds the possibility of More Life even at scenes of loss.
See my interview with the author for Cultplastic: https://cultplastic.com/2019/01/05/we...
See my interview with the author for Cultplastic: https://cultplastic.com/2019/01/05/we...
March 16, 2022
May I present to you: The first assigned reading that made me cry!
As an academic read it chose a daring, out-there format and less dense style.
As a queer text, as a piece of mourning, as a love letter to one's teacher and mentor this was heartbreakingly beautiful.
As an academic read it chose a daring, out-there format and less dense style.
As a queer text, as a piece of mourning, as a love letter to one's teacher and mentor this was heartbreakingly beautiful.
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December 5, 2023heartbreaking, incredible.
March 20, 2025
genuinely one of the most incredible written works i've ever read. and i forgive for the communism-as-party analogy 😭🙏
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews