Oct
23
1:30 PM13:30

2026 American Studies Association Roundtable - Erotics of Improvisation: Experimental Performance at its Own Edge

2026 American Studies Association Roundtable - Erotics of Improvisation: Experimental Performance at its Own Edge

This roundtable gathers scholars across Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Latine Studies, and performance-based practices to converse with improvisation as a resistant and erotic practice. We engage improvisation as a shared analytic and method, asking how it materializes refusals of heteropatriarchal discipline while opening alternative relationalities and temporalities. Bringing into dialogue Black/Brown feminist, punk, and queer experimentations, the roundtable explores improvisation as both an aesthetic strategy and a practice of everyday survival. Together, we ask: What becomes possible at improvisational thresholds? How do performers and cultural workers move against discipline and toward less bounded, more enduring forms of refusals? What does it mean to inhabit improvisation as a method, rather than an object of study? We draw on varied engagements with performance, sound, embodiment, and critical theory to generate a collaborative discussion. Topics will include dissonance and refusal, experiments with loss and non-repair, and the entanglements of race, pleasure, and value. By placing these approaches in conversation, the roundtable foregrounds improvisation as a site of ongoing, collective theorization.

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Nov
6
10:30 AM10:30

2026 National Women's Studies Association Workshop - Being Wild: Abandoning the Master’s Tools and Coming Home to Ourselves

2026 National Women's Studies Association Workshop - Being Wild: Abandoning the Master’s Tools and Coming Home to Ourselves

Our era demands disembodiment and a subdued consciousness. How might we more wildly inhabit ourselves, our bodies? Fatima Ife, in Maroon Choreography, writes, "I refuse the choreographed apparatuses of coloniality, its methodologies, its origin stories, its naming rituals, and its movements." This interactive session includes individual and group singing, movement, and guided creative writing. Co-conveners will play guitar/sing songs (tributes to Tina Turner, Sinead O’Conner, and Hiba Abu Nada) and move with our wild feminist ancestors – bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Academia demands that we leave our bodies at the door, abandoning our radicality and wild ways of being. We’re told that our bodies impede knowledge production, and we’re rewarded when we forget them, tightly control them, or order them—futher deadening our spirits and creativity. Academic classrooms echo patriarchal needs for the tamed bodyminds, further erasing feminist wildness. We hope that participants will leave wilder than they came. Come and recover your wildness! 

This session offers a gathering space for wild feminist imaginings. We move towards a wildness that’s unknowable, and thus able to sustain unfathomable, sensuous, and liberatory forms of living. Together we’ll shepherd each other towards (re)activating our collective wildness. We’ll facilitate a discussion about the ways in which we’re tamed by patriarchal structures in the classroom, and how that taming dulls us–making it impossible for us to think, let alone dream and build together, wildly. Undergirding this is the notion that women/femme/female wildness is dangerous and disruptive. This session's objective is to give space to things we feel we can't say out loud, out of fear of being too wild or too out-of-place. We root in theoretical frameworks of Black Feminisims, Erotics, Feminst poetics, and abolitionist pedagogy. 


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Dec
4
to Dec 11

Workshop @ LitArts RI - Haunting Returns: The Poetry of Pastness

A LitArts RI Writing Workshop

Unearth what haunts you in this workshop geared towards helping you return to your authentic, experimental, poetic inner voice. How are we tied to the past—to history, time, and space? What is haunting, and how might it embody ideas of erasure, absence, suspension, and refusal? What’s made you into a ghost of your former self? Together we’ll consider what to do with the liminal, unruly, and spectral inheritances—the parts of the story, of us—that don’t fit neatly in time and space.

This workshop will center poetry, while also exploring creative non-fiction and theory. Using texts, short movement exercises, and writing prompts, we’ll begin to tease out the past that preoccupies and possesses our writing. Texts from writers such as Lucile Cliffton, Eve Tuck, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Fahima Ife, and Dionne Brand allow us to examine how history, haunting, and loss are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism, while writing exercises and peer-to-peer feedback will orient us towards a rich reframing of what it means to be alive, and to return to oneself.

Open to writers of all levels. This is a 2-week workshop, with a 2-hour session each week. Please prepare for approximately 1-2 hours of work between sessions which might include completing a few short readings and generating 2-3 pages of rough, drafted writing.

This 2-week workshop meets on Thursdays from 6-8pm at LitArts RI on the following dates:

Thurs, Dec 4

Thurs, Dec 11


About Your Teaching Artist

NAIMAH ZULMADELLE PÉTIGNY (she/her) is a Black feminist scholar, dancer, poet, and

abolitionist educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Naimah writes toward expansive, experimental notions of Blackness as she centers questions of gender, pastness, loss, and erotics. Her current book project considers how we might be lovingly adorned by loss, instead of anchored by it. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal, Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, and Cultural Studies.


Community Access Lottery

LitArts RI offers a lottery for free admission to those who could not otherwise afford to attend. The lottery closes 2 weeks before each workshop, at which time entrants will be notified if they are a recipient of one of the free seats.

To enter the lottery, press the red "Get tickets" button at the top right of your screen, then scroll down to add a "Community Access Lottery Ticket" to your cart and check out.


Safe and Brave Space Policy

Writing workshops can be vulnerable spaces. As a literary arts organization, LitArts RI is committed to providing a safe, brave, inclusive and accessible space to all participants, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, citizenship status, age, size, abilities, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Be sensitive, be supportive, be respectful and engage with care. Discriminatory, hateful, and threatening content will not be tolerated; we ask that you bring any concerns to our attention immediately.


Accessibility

LitArts RI is wheelchair accessible. The organization is actively committed to cultivating a community that values and reflects diversity, equity and inclusivity and to providing programming that is accessible to all attendees. Please let us know about any accommodations we can make to allow you to participate fully in this event.


Health Safety Guidelines

If you have tested positive for Covid-19 within a few days of attending an event at LitArts RI, please contact Staff so we can let others know of possible exposure. We ask that you wait 14 days or until testing negative to return to the Center.



This activity is made possible in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by a Project Fund grant from Providence Art, Culture and Tourism.

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Dec
3
4:00 PM16:00

Rhode Island School of Design - Fall 2025 Humanities Forum "The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life.”

The third event in the 2025–26 Humanities Forum features Naimah Petigny, Assistant Professor in the Department of Literary Arts and Studies.


Petigny's talk, "The Hold is Also an Embrace: Tracing Haunting Erotics in Black Life," contends with historical traces, afterlives, and latent erotics, exploring Black aliveness as it is seeded within contemporary art and performance. She details how haunting emerges as a supple orientation—a structure of relation—toward death, pastness, abjection, and embodied knowledge. Returning to and re-reading Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic, Petigny follows Lorde's assertion that a "fed-up-ness" with suffering must sustain erotic power. The talk seeks after playful, unexpected, ephemeral, and suspended experiments with suffering, abjection, and loss in art and performance—experiments marked by an infidelity to the projects of re-dress and a refusal to anchor Blackness in abjection. Ultimately, it develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology and offers holding/embrace as a matrix and orientation toward pastness, embodiment, and the creative excavation of the erotic from the abject.

Colleagues are cordially invited to join us for the third event of the academic year on Wednesday, December 3, 2025, from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at 20 Washington Place, Auditorium 143 on the first floor.

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