Reclaiming Time and Taking on "Go Forth"

Dr. Isaiah Wooden (Swathmore College): Reclaiming Time and Taking on "Go Forth"
Thursday, October 29, 2026 | 4:00 PM
TD West 2517

In 2010, three years after earning her MFA in photography from Syracuse University, the multidisciplinary visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier confronted a series of personal and communal losses. In addition to the death of her Grandma Ruby, a frequent collaborator and subject of her work, Frazier learned that the community hospital in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania was set to be closed and demolished. The decision represented yet another manifestation of the systemic neglect experienced by Black residents of postindustrial communities like Braddock whose access to essential resources had been steadily eroded. In response, Frazier decided to activate her body--at once to spotlight the significance of the hospital to Braddock’s Black community and to provide broader commentary on the conditions of social, economic, and environmental abandonment its shuttering reflected. This talk turns attention to the resulting project, "LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s," to explore the ways performance offered Frazier a vital medium through which to reclaim time by interrogating the ongoing effects of the decline of industrial activity in places like Braddock and to advance critiques of the narratives of progress that have sustained investments in a normative temporal order that fails to account for Black living and flourishing.

Dr. Isaiah Wooden is Associate Professor of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is author of Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2025), finalist for the 2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award. He is also co-editor of August Wilson in Context (Cambridge UP, 2025) and Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP, 2020). In addition, Wooden has contributed more than sixty articles, essays, and reviews on contemporary art, drama, and performance to scholarly and popular publications, including The Black Scholar, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, The Huffington Post, and PopMatters, among others. 

Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative, and Department of English. 

Photo: "LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s,” 2010. LaToya Ruby Frazier; courtesy LaToya Ruby Frazier / Gladstone Gallery