News
★ Guggenheim Fellowship ★
Chasin held a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2020, in support of the research and writing of UnMan
Fragments, Lists & Lacunae
Performed at New York Live Arts February 13 - 15, 2020
Directed by Zishan Ugurlu
Featuring Judith Butler
Reviews for Fragments, Lists & Lacunae
"Fragments, Lists & Lacunae... takes its audience back to school.... [T]he lecture-performance has given me a reading list that’ll be with me for a few weeks...The text belongs to scholar-professor-playwright Alexandra Chasin, who has spliced together her own fearsomely clever lectures..."
-Helen Shaw, Vulture @ New York Magazine
"... in a series of punchy, truncated lectures, the professor hips her undergrads to the idea that “absences are more than merely meaningful; rather, they are the material that governs that which is present...Intellectually, “Fragments, Lists & Lacunae” is a treat…"
-Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
"Through a series of examples and exercises, [the professor] pries apart the holes in History and asks her students to confront the abyss. Yet the true star of the play is the academic interpretation."
-Noa Weiss, CultureBot
Writing On It All ran on Governors Island, in New York Harbor, from 2013 to 2017, hosting sessions in which artists, writers, and interested members of the public experimented with writing on the interior of an out-of-use house.
Books
Assassin of Youth: A Kaleidoscopic History of Harry J. Anslinger's War on Drugs
Assassin of Youth speculates on the origins of the war on drugs by focusing on Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930-62). Lots of pictures, poetic license, and lyrical language twist up a riotous history of drug prohibition.
An art vandal makes a passionate plea to a judge: you, the reader. Maybe history is the real culprit. In the app, randomly placed images evoke 1961, the year of the narrator's birth. Get the app here.
In this collection of linguistically acrobatic fictions, Alexandra Chasin employs forms as diverse as cryptograms and sentence diagrams to reveal the relation between verbal and visual effects. Love, loss, longing, war, and innovation of fictional form.
Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market
What is the relationship between the gay and lesbian niche market and the social movement that fights for the civil rights of gay men and lesbians?