Into the Deluge

Into the Deluge was a semester-long series of events at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts that considered bodies of water as archives of memory, sites of history, and forms of knowledge. What would it mean to organize notions of self and society not around land, territory, and nation, but around the oceanic, the fluvial, the aquatic? Through lectures, artist talks, discussions, and an exhibition, we turn to water as an urgent mode of critical inquiry and artistic practice. The program drew on scholar Paul Gilroy’s notion of “offshore humanism” as we looked to oceans, rivers, and seas in an effort to rethink political subjectivity during our time of racial reckoning and climate emergency. View upcoming Into the Deluge events.