W&M Featured Events
[PAST EVENT] GSWS Faculty Colloquia: R. Benedito Ferrão
Location
Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 314100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
- Free food
In Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2007), playwright-performer Mojisola Adebayo employs the real-life story of Ellen Craft (1824-1900), an African American woman who escaped slavery by disguising herself as a white man. Moj’s travels across continents coincide with the character’s evolving gender identity, both evoking Craft’s own trans-continental and trans-gender forays.
By traveling across oceans and continents, Moj sutures these diverse locations as a Black person reversing and remembering histories of displacement. Despite its historical underpinnings, the play does not simply function in the realm of the known, its use of fictional contexts borrowing from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Melville’s Moby Dick. These intertexts, and especially the symbolic references to coral formation and a whale, recall an ecological as well as a colonial past while also speculating about the future of Antarctica.
The play’s use of queerness offers a rethinking of personhood as it is delimited by national belonging; it queries the possibility of looking to the care of land as a transformative extension of self-making and as a practice of active decoloniality.
Sponsored by: Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies