NU Performance Studies

Figuring the Chola: Drag and the Re-Folklorization of an Andean Icon

October 14, 2026
4 pm CT

Krause Studio, Annie May Swift Hall
Northwestern University
1920 Campus Drive

The chola, an Indigenous woman of Quechua, Aymara or mixed descent, has been a central figure in the construction of Andean indigeneity in South America. This presentation examines drag performers who embody the chola across performance art, gay beauty pageantry, and popular media as these embodiments reveal both the fragility of colonized national borders and the importance of Indigenous women in thinking the Andes.

Enzo E. Vasquez Toral is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

See you Oct 8th at Slippage_NU !!!💜
Come and join us in the celebration of the publication of JCL Joshua Chambers-Letson‘s Unfinished Grief featuring reflections and a conversation with and between friends, colleagues, and critics.
Published by NYU Press, Unfinished Grief is a meditation on artists and theorists who ask what happens when we learn to linger, dwell, live, and work with q***r grief as an art of living on.

With bimbolamakes Avgi Saketopoulou Thomas and special guests🌟
Time: Thursday, Oct 8th, 6 PM CT.
Space: Slippage_NU Slippage Lab, Louis Hall
1877 Campus Drive

📍RSVP link in bio

Join us SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 2026,
for our late and beloved colleague,
Prof. Paul Edwards Memorial, from
12:30 to 3:30 PM @ KRAUSE STUDIO,
featuring an installation screening
of Prof. Edwards’ video essays
as well as selections from his library.

At 4 PM in LOUIS THEATER, a memorial will take place with remarks from colleagues, students, collaborators, and friends of Prof. Edwards.

Reception in the Southern Rehearsal Room to follow.

Deadline extended !!!!!
Don’t miss this amazing opportunity to think with these great scholars!

Northwestern’s Department of Performance Studies and Slippage Lab invites applications from graduate students and recent graduates on the theme of Black Q***r Aesthetics for our 2026 Performance Studies Summer Institute. Check out the flyer for more information!

Application Deadline May 17!! The Department of Performance Studies and Slippage Lab invite applications from graduate students and recent graduates on the theme of Black Q***r Aesthetics for our
2026 Performance Studies Summer Institute.

TODAY!
MONDAY May 4th, 12:30-1:50pm
Filling The Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic
A Talk with Rayya El Zein

Presented by
The Department of Performance Studies, co-sponsored by the MENA program
free & open to the public!

Zoom link in. Bio

Mark your calendars!!! This week .nu

SLIPPAGE Black Performance Theory 2026 lecture series continues with more exciting conversations!
THURSDAY, APRIL 30 @ 5:30 PM
Henry Castillo (Northwestern University) and Luis Alba (NYU)
FRIDAY, MAY 1 @ 12:30 PM
Thomas F. DeFrantz (Northwestern) and Kevin E. Quashie (Brown University)

For more information, check the flyer!!! See you All There !

Taking Sides with the Neutral International Conference
April 23-24, 2026
Northwestern University (Evanston)
Annie May Swift Auditorium
Participants:
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Ryan Dohoney
Matthieu Dupas
Scott Durham
David Halperin
Hélène Merlin-Kajman
Laurie Laufer
Augustin Leroy
Maïté Marciano
George-Henri Melenotte
Nasrin Qader
Gérald Sfez
Domietta Torlasco
Marie-Claire Vallois
Roland Barthes defined the Neutral as that which eludes the paradigm, that which “suspends meaning in favor of the sign.”
With the spread of French Theory across American campuses, the “thought of the Neutral” has continued to circulate and reinvent itself. In q***r theory, performance blurs the binary structure of gender. In Black theory, fugitivity escapes dominant categories through a fluidity of meaning.
Nearly fifty years after Barthes’s course at the Collège de France, in the wake of , when egalitarian gender civility is imagined, trigger warnings proliferate, and neutral or inclusive pronouns circulate widely, a desire for the Neutral has emerged. Through intellectual and aesthetic experiments, invited scholars across gender, sexuality, race, literature, psychoanalysis, language, cinema, music, and dance will help us attune to the Neutral and the novelty it brings.

The conference is a collaborative initiative between the Department of French and Italian and the French Interdisciplinary Group at Northwestern, as well as the Mouvement Transitions in partnership with Université Paris-VIII - Vincennes - Saint-Denis and Northwestern University. It is co-sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, SLIPPAGE, and others.
We hope that many of you will join us.

Join Performance Studies, MENA Studies, MSA, and MENA-SA next week for a lecture 🤓 and live dance lesson 💃 on Syrian 🇸🇾 dabka. Light refreshments ☕️🍰 will be served after. RSVP on ‘Cats on Campus.
Link: https://cglink.me/23r/r376218

THURSDAY, APRIL 23rd @ 3:30 pm

A talk by Christipher B. Patterson!!!

This talk reflects on acts of writing in times of grief, disillusionment, and emerging fascism.
Crowe Hall, 1132 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208.
Open to all students! Lunch served @ 11:30am -2:00 pm

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.