The French department invites you to a lunchtime talk by Dr. Jaime Shearn Coan, titled “Trying to Hear Assotto Saint’s New Love Song, Thirty Years Later"
Details:
Date: April 10th
Time: 12:30pm
Location: Academic Building, 4190
Assotto Saint (1957-1994), poet, publisher, editor, cultural activist, staged his multidisciplinary theater work New Love Song in New York City in 1989, bringing together a group of Black gay men on stage to represent disparate and shared experiences of Black and gay life in the midst of the mounting AIDS epidemic. Offering stories, dancing, rituals, and chants derived from African-diasporic religious practices and belief systems, Saint and his cast, some of whom were practitioners or culturally connected to these spiritual traditions, shifted the stigma of being marked as Haitian, Black, gay, and HIV positive, and demonstrated the strength to be found at that intersection instead. New Love Song functioned for its audience and performers alike as a space for collective grieving and healing around the bodily threats of HIV/AIDS, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. In this talk, I will describe my process of seeking out witnesses who could serve as bridges to the performances of New Love Song. In light of limited audiovisual documentation, I have sought to answer the following questions: How might we hear, how might we take into our bodies and feel, the vibrations that passed through the bodies in that theater? How might we be moved to face contemporary struggles by the ancestors that sustained Saint, and the ancestor that Saint has become?
Jaime Shearn Coan is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ), affiliated with the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Rutgers-New Brunswick. His research attends to corporeal archives—in particular, to the circulation of embodied knowledge related to race, nation, gender, sexuality, and seropositivity. From 2020–22, Shearn Coan was the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at ONE Archives Foundation in Los Angeles. Shearn Coan received his PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). His dissertation, “Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation,” was supported by a CUNY Dissertation Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NYPL). Jaime Shearn Coan’s writing has appeared in publications including ASAP Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, Critical Correspondence, The Brooklyn Rail, Movement Research Performance Journal, Gulf Coast, On Curating, and Women & Performance. He is the co-editor with Ishmael Houston Jones and Will Rawls, of Lost and Found: Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now (Danspace Project 2016) and, with Tara Aisha Willis, of Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2020). His poetry chapbook, Turn it Over, was published in 2015 by Argos Books. He is currently at work on a monograph on the performance works of Assotto Saint, and recently authored the introduction to Sacred Spells: Collected Works of Assotto Saint (Nightboat Books 2023). He is also co-author with Tara Aisha Willis and taisha paggett of In the Horizontal Plane: taisha paggett Performance Works, forthcoming from Soberscove Press in 2025.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ) and Rutgers’ Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies.