Race and Performance Symposium

Join the IHGC Race and Performance Lab and the Black & Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute for this symposium. More details to come!

Contact Prof Fiona Ngô for information: qmd3pw@virginia.edu

Presenters:

Lisa Cacho

Kasey Jernigan

"Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigenous Health"
In this talk, Kasey Jernigan introduces Commod Bods, an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of how Indigenous bodies carry the histories of settler colonialism through food, health, and everyday life. Centering Choctaw communities in Oklahoma, the book examines the long afterlives of U.S. commodity food assistance programs and how they have reshaped relationships to land, kinship, and the body.
Rather than treating health disparities as individual or behavioral problems, Commod Bods reframes them as embodied inheritances of colonial disruption. Government-issued foods become more than nutritional interventions; they are material traces of dispossession that reorganize taste, metabolism, and memory across generations. Through intimate ethnographic storytelling, Jernigan shows how these foods are taken up, reworked, and at times refused, becoming part of what she calls embodied heritage, a living archive of survival, adaptation, and constraint.
The book moves between personal narrative, community histories, and critical theory to ask: What does it mean to inherit a body shaped by colonial food systems? How do people make life, identity, and care within those conditions? And how might we rethink health, not as a return to an imagined past, but as a practice grounded in relationality, land, and ongoing Indigenous presence?
Bringing together medical anthropology, Indigenous studies, and critical food studies, this talk offers a powerful reorientation of how we understand food, health, and the body in settler colonial contexts.
Kasey Jernigan is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Virginia and a scholar of Indigenous foodways, community health, and environmental humanities. Her work bridges medical anthropology, American Studies, and Indigenous studies to examine how food, land, memory, and structural violence shape Indigenous and rural wellbeing. She is the co-Director of the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute, where she leads collaborative, community-rooted research initiatives, including public humanities and digital storytelling projects, and she serves as Director of UVA’s Native American and Indigenous Studies minor. A citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Jernigan is deeply committed to ethical partnership, public scholarship, and culturally grounded approaches to food and health research.

Jodi Byrd

"Indigenomicon: Indigenous Relationality in the Grind of the Shitty Future"
Settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies are often assumed to be the same intellectual project. In Indigenomicon, Jodi A. Byrd examines the differences between the two fields by bringing video game studies and Indigenous studies into conversation with Black studies, queer studies, and Indigenous feminist critique. Byrd theorizes “the image of the law of the Indigenous” as structuring dispossession in games including Assassin’s Creed, Animal Crossing, BioShock Infinite, and Demon Souls. They demonstrate how games and play might reveal histories of slavery, genocide, and theft of Indigenous lands even as their structures obscure Indigenous spatial and embodied practices that prioritize relationships with land, water, plants, and spirits. With ground and relationality defined as key concepts, Byrd centers Indigenous visions of dystopias to reveal how game spaces encode settler structures of governance even as the design of games might yet provide vital modes of resistance to Indigenous erasure.
Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and professor of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Their first book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) won the 2013 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. Byrd co-edited the collection Colonial Racial Capitalismwith Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, and Brian Jefferson published by Duke in 2022 and also co-edits the Northwestern University Press’ Critical Insurgencies series with Michelle Wright. Their book, Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession, was just released by Duke University Press early November 2025. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, they were a professor in Literatures in English at Cornell University. They also helped build the American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2006–2015, and served as Acting Director of AIS during the 2013–2014 academic year. They have held an appointment in Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and they received their PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 2002.

Josh Chambers-Letson

"One More Try, or, Teacher, There Are Things that I Don’t Want to Learn"
The loss of a teacher, or mother, or friend, or anyone you love isn’t something you can or really should move on from. There is no escaping loss or grief, since losing is a constitutive part of living and loving. This talk stages a return to the scene of a classroom some time ago as a return to the braided questions of melancholia and the weighty inheritance of queer of color loss. Drawn from a larger project on unfinished grief, it weaves together performance theory, queer theory, Asian American studies, and Black studies to consider the fraught, always incomplete, and risky work of loving, losing, grieving, and living on as a practice and process of living together and living with loss.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is the Chair of Performance Studies and Professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.JCL is the author of Unfinished Grief: Queer Love and Loss (forthcoming from NYU Press in June of 2026) as well as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America; co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Mok.

James McMaster

"Racial Care in the Asian American Case"
In this talk—working across Asian American studies, performance studies, crip queer of color critique—James McMaster explores what he calls “racial care," which includes everything we do to sustain racialized subjects through whatever suffering may converge on their particular location within a white supremacist, anti-Black, and settler colonial capitalist United States. How might Asian Americans forge an ethics and politics of care in a racially unjust world? How have artists and activists already begun to answer this question?
James McMaster is Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at The George Washington University. He is a cultural theorist whose work focuses on the social reproduction of minoritarian life. His first book, Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival, was published by Duke University Press in 2025. His other scholarly work has appeared in American Quarterly, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and elsewhere.