Patrick Anderson, T Banks

press release: Join visiting scholar, activist and writer Patrick Anderson and local poet and community activist T Banks for a reading about disease, disability, and survival.

Patrick Anderson's Autobiography of a Disease documents, in experimental form, the experience of extended life-threatening illness in contemporary U.S. hospitals and clinics. The book blends the genres of storytelling, historiography, ethnography, and memoir. Unlike most medical memoirs, told from the perspective of the human patient, Autobiography of a Disease is told from the perspective of a bacterial cluster. This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers—from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for—and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context. The narrative is based primarily on the author’s sudden and catastrophic collapse into a coma and long hospitalization thirteen years ago; but it has also been crafted from twelve years of research on the history of microbiology, literary representations of illness and medical treatment, cultural analysis of MRSA in the popular press, and extended autoethnographic work on medicalization.

T Banks's newest chapbook, "Left," focuses on survival, healing and liberation and continues exploring the world of body and the medical industry from a Black, Queer, Trans, and Disabled perspective.

About our readers:

Patrick Anderson works at the interstices of performance studies and cultural studies, focusing in particular on the constitutive role of violence, mortality, and pain in the production and experience of political subjectivity. Anderson has worked as a director and actor in theater and film; as an anthropologist in Sri Lanka, Chicago, and New Mexico; and as an activist and organizer for anti-war groups in Sri Lanka, for the Berkeley Free Clinic in California, and for HIV/AIDS groups in various locations in the United States. He is Associate Professor in the departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Duke UP, 2010), Autobiography of a Disease (Routledge, 2017; winner of the ICQI Book Award and finalist for the Many Voices Prize), and Empathy’s Others (forthcoming); the co-editor, with Jisha Menon, of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave, 2009); and the author, interviewer, or co-author of numerous essays and book chapters in journals and anthologies. Anderson serves on the editorial boards of Women and Performance and Cultural Studies, and is the co-editor, with Nicholas Ridout, of the “Performance Works” book series at Northwestern University Press.

T Banks is a community organizer, a mental wellness advocate, poet and playwright. After graduating with a degree in English Creative writing, Banks has successfully used his art through plays and poetry to address Racism, Transphobia, and Abelism. As a Black Trans, Queer person with a disability, T believes the movement for Black Lives must be intersectional and deeply connected to the struggle to end Patriarchy, specifically as it manifests as violence against Black Trans folks. His work addresses the need for the Black liberation movement to be accessible to those with mental wellness challenges and / or physical disabilities as well fights for the ability of these populations to regain their autonomy in a capitalistic society.