Notes: Course Repeatable for Credit. Let Their Eyes Adjust to Us: Poetry, Performance, and Print in the Shadows: During lighting set up for a performance in September 2019, the dancer Okwui Okpokwasili declared that there should be no spotlight on her and said, “I love performing in the dark. Let their eyes adjust to us.” Okpokwasili, a Black performer whose work draws attention to what oftens appears invisible, used her gesture to cast the spotlight on the spectator, and so shifted the demands of the performance: she would not be performing for the viewer to passively absorb; rather, viewers would need to shift their expectations to experience her work. The agency in her proposal moves from subject to object, and it becomes the task of the viewers to rearrange themselves; to shift their focus, their understanding, their gaze. Her performative stance layers new levels of intrigue into thinking about the possibilities of what might be lost or hidden in the darkness of an archive, a magazine, an anthology, a dance. Reading and thinking through these tensions, this course asks how we might re-imagine ways of reading writers, performers, and translators who might sometimes be considered “lost” in literary history. We will re-vision the image of poets and performers in the shadows: how do we see their work, how was it seen when it was made, and how do these writers see themselves and their work in the world? Considering varieties of “absence” and the “invisible” from archives, performance, print, and translation, the course will consider questions of scale and of motion; we will ask who wants to be seen or read, and by whom. We will consider possible advantages to witnessing from the margins, and how there might be power in staying hidden. Who is watching, who is listening, who is reading, and in what ways is the spectator, reader, or listener responsible for lost legacies and traces? We will ask what might be gained by remaining in the shadows, and what might be lost in the vanishing. What does it mean to see and be seen, and how do notions of secrecy, invisibility, witnessing, and hiding inform the work we read and watch today? How do these notions inform us?