The Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen | Lecture One

Tickets are free and will be available starting one week before the lecture through the Harvard Box Office.

Centering on the FBI files of legendary African American singer and political activist Paul Robeson, Steve McQueen’s video work End Credits (2012-2022) features a continuous projection of digitally scanned files from the thousands of declassified, though highly redacted, documents kept on Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson. Beginning in 1941, this relentless scrutiny continued throughout Robeson’s life, all but ending his career as a performer. The video is accompanied by audio of performers reading from the files, but the narration is out-of-sync with what is projected onscreen. The discrepancy between sight and sound generates a continuous disconnect that points to the absurdity of this politically and racially motivated surveillance.

Four performers will read sections from Robeson’s FBI files while visuals from End Credits are screened behind them. The one-hour performance will be followed by a conversation and Q&A with McQueen and Donna De Salvo, Senior Adjunct Curator, Dia Art Foundation, who curated a presentation of the work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, moderated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

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