Where state sovereignty as theology would have subjected groups accept their condition with its attending violence and suffering, the micro sovereignty I propose here – not merely as a futuristic idea, but more as a reflection on how subjected groups have dealt with subjection – invites us not to accept that violence and suffering, but to find creative ways out of it through the cracks of Empire.
This piece features a multimedia reflection on José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, which emphasizes the text’s radical approach to imagining solidarities and social relations beyond the normative paradigms of identity politics and its permutations. Through both textual poetics and sound design, Wadud and Lázaro Moreno riff off Muñoz’s own performance-based approach to storytelling and meaning-making, engaging Sense as an invitation to reconsider the aesthetic and philosophical terms of community-making, centering the power of counterintuitive methods.
“What can we do when apparently nothing can be done, and doing nothing is not an option?” Theologian Kyle Lambelet and performance theorist Diana Taylor discuss the challenge and possibilities of presence within systems that seem to allow no alternative.