April 2024 #RadDeathReads #RDR
‘Some of Us Did Not Die’: Art and Storytelling as Anti-Racist and Decolonial Death and Mourning Practices
Curated by Saharra L. Dixon
Grief can be hard to describe. Yet, bereavement policies indoctrinate us into the belief that grief is quantifiable, linear, and swift. Too often does the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy fundamentally oppose the sitting and the stillness that grief requires. Racism and colonization have ultimately robbed us of our own grief ritual. How can we get back to our grief? How can we allow our grief to transform us? Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Queer grief remind us that some of us have not died. Some of us are still here. These communities historically have used art and storytelling to grieve together, to heal together, and to be reborn again within a society that predicts and predetermines our death. Despite epistemological and structural violence, we are reminded that mourning is a practice that can enhance our ability to live life presently.
Over the next few weeks, four Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Queer women and femmes invite you to explore our temporalities through creative mourning ritual and practice. We will highlight how our unique artful practice transforms marginalized, racialized, and oppressed communities and moves grief to the public arena to be shared, interrogated, and engaged. Through theatre, storytelling, design & textiles, poetry, and multimedia, we feel the importance of creative processes as a means to remember and celebrate as we, the ones who did not die, protest colonization and racism, and heal through our mourning.
WEEK 1 // On Borrowed time…
WEEK 2 // Grief-Work, Wake-Work, and Ritual Theater
WEEK 3 // From GriefLove to DreamStorm: Creating Healthful Narratives with Dr. Shanaé Burch
WEEK 4 // Digital Storytelling: An Autoethnograhic Approach to Mourning and Activism
#RadDeathReads #RDR meets virtually through Zoom at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 5 PM GMT every Sunday for ~2 hours each day to discuss the selected material(s), host guest speakers, exchange ideas, and share related information in a private online space.
SESSIONS WILL NOT BE RECORDED! As Rad Death Reads is a discussion group, we don’t record the Zoom sessions out of respect for the participants and desire to facilitate an intimate and safe place for deep discussions.
Closed captioning will be available for all sessions. Please email info@radicaldeathstudies.com if additional accommodations are required.
**This book club is solely put together by CRDS members’ volunteer work without any sponsorship or reimbursement. The small fee is to cover our administrative costs and the huge amount of time and resources that go into this project. Please note, we are therefore unable to refund you if you are unable to attend or miss a meeting. Please consider supporting us in making a donation to CRDS so we can offer more projects like this in the future.