A salon-style reading and conversation concerning Writing and Performativity with poet, actor, and African American Studies professor Javon Johnson.
Javon Johnson’s research focuses on performance, blackness, African American literature, black pop culture, black feminist theory, black queer theory, masculinity studies, black sexualities, and ethnography. Johnson, a renowned spoken word poet, is a three-time national poetry slam champion and a four-time national finalist. He has appeared on HBO’s "Def Poetry Jam," BET’s "Lyric Café," TV One's "Verses & Flow," "The Steve Harvey Show," "The Arsenio Hall Show," "United Shades of America with Kamau Bell" on CNN. He also co-wrote a documentary titled "Crossover," which aired on Showtime in collaboration with the NBA and Nike. Johnson’s first book, Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (Rutgers University Press 2017), unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces and argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His second project, The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape (Northwestern University Press (2018) is a co-edited book that critically creatively explores Chiraq (a name that is an amalgamation of Chicago and Iraq as a way to call to the violence of certain parts of Chicago) as a space and as a term. Additionally, Johnson has published in Text & Performance Quarterly, Liminalities, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, The Root, Huffington Post, and others.