Olivia Landry (Lehigh University) on "Anger Now: Philosophy, Social Justice, and Theatre"

Drawing on her forthcoming monograph, Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Berlin, Olivia Landry’s lecture offers an account of anger as a form of knowing, of energizing, of empowering, and of caring. It makes its way through a history and philosophy of anger, which begins with Aristotle and leads all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement via Black feminist theory, with particular attention to the resonating voices of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed.

The lecture thus traces a simmering tale of anger that runs counter to stoic narratives of reticence and apatheia, which condemn anger as an impetus to hate and violence. Instead, anger is taken up here as an affirmative and critical tool in the project of social justice. Bookended by examples from contemporary German theatre, specifically, Sibylle Berg’s Nach uns das All – Das innere Team kennt keine Pause and Necati Öziri’s Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’, this approach to anger is further illuminated as the contemporary mood of political art and performance of resistance. 

Olivia Landry is Assistant Professor of German and Director of Film and Documentary Studies at Lehigh University. In addition to numerous articles in the fields of film, theater, gender, and performance studies, she is the author of Movement and Performance in Berlin School Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2019) and Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Berlin (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming 2021). 

The event is part of the German Studies: New Perspectives seminar series at the Mahindra Humanities Center.

Pre-registration is required. Register here.