Please join us on Zoom for our final event of the Spring 2021 semester as we host Mlondi Zondi for a discussion of his work-in-progress, “Domestic Servitude and the Ruse of Care,” on Friday, April 16th, at 10:00 am CST. To confirm attendance and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please write to Mel Micir (mmicir@wustl.edu).

Abstract: There has been a drive in academic discourse and artistic venues towards recuperating the “heroic” status of the domestic servant. This exaltation is often in recognition of domestic servants’ tact and endurance in spaces not meant for their survival, as they admirably go through fire to provide for their families. This paper posits that this celebration reinstitutes Black domestic servants back to a position instantiated through coercion and force. As a reading of contemporary South African aesthetics, it elaborates upon opaque and non-spectacular ways in which Black women in particular are brutalized by, and forced to perpetually resist, anti-black terror within the domestic enclosure. Terms such as “care,” “mothering,” “domesticity” are all placed under critical scrutiny.

Bio: Currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University, Mlondolozi (Mlondi) Zondi is a scholar and interdisciplinary artist whose research focuses on contemporary Black performance and art history. Currently, Mlondi is working on a book project titled Unmournable Void, a study of critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. The manuscript approaches questions of matter, mourning, and ontological absence through an engagement with revolutionary Black thought, psychoanalytic theories, art history/visual studies, and dance/performance theory. Mlondi completed a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University (with certificates in Critical Theory, African Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies). The dissertation project received support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Prior to attending Northwestern, Mlondi received an M.F.A in Dance as a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Irvine; and a BA (Hons) cum laude in Cultural Studies and Performance Studies from the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. Mlondi’s work has been published in The Drama Review (TDR), ASAP Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Propter Nos.