Resistant Strains: In Dialogue with Drift Net’s Embodied Methodologies

An Invitation to Collaborative Conversation with Chris Campanioni

Facilitated by Elæ Moss Benedetto (e.mossbenedetto@pratt.edu)

Drift Net begins by foregrounding, in the image and action of unassimilable drift, the convergence of practice and theory—“to engage in a methodological project,” Chris Campanioni writes, “is not just a tactic of resistance by scholars of color but a way for us to seek revision in the language and discourse associated with the minoritized subject. This methodology, in other words, is part and parcel of the theory it sets out to develop and apply.” In much the same way as the genre of the scholarly monograph is exercised in Drift Net as both a notebook and a network, in pursuit of an interpretive mode of reading—to read event and encounter as one would read the text—to reassess literature and art with lived experiences, this public event encourages an opportunity to get underneath both scholarly research and literature and art through interaction and exchange, opening up the latent processes and alternative pathways of drift beyond the text proper. Building and drawing in part on media produced from Campanioni’s collaborative generative workshop with Pratt students from Moss Benedetto’s Body as Borderland seminar earlier in the day, this evening will function as a mirror to Drift Net ’s plurality, taken as prompt and process: in parts anti-lecture, conversation, and lab, with audience members invited to contribute their own observations, annotations, and personal asides in the enlarged margins, returning theory once again to the body.

Signed copies of recent releases will be available to purchase courtesy of Lever Press and the author.