Week 3- Performing Raced and Gendered Bodies: Trans/national Subjectivity

As you explore the think through the links in the final module of our intensive course on theories of race and performance, think about the tools that Judith Butler, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley give us to discuss the dynamic quality of racial identifications and in/voluntary acts associated with notions of race and performance. Speak to the intersections between their theories of how subjects constitute themselves. How does race complicate the theories of Foucault and Butler? Please use this prompt to incite ideas, however, you do not have to directly respond to it. Write freely with these considerations in mind and use your own performance examples.

Week 2- Disrupting the Black-White Binary Module B

Discuss how the weeks performances in Imitation of Life, Tropic Thunder, and Kara Walker's art pieces can be read using Feagin and Elgin's systemic racism theory. Discuss the perspectives of the artists and the ways that their perspectives align themselves with and/or depart from the theoretical arguments offered. Please mention Omi and Winant's theory of social formation as an important point of departure for their analysis.

Week 1-Exploring the American Racial Imaginary, Module A

George Aiken's play adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toms' Cabin marks one of the first nationally acceptable forms of popular entertainment that simultaneously stole the dignity and experience of African Americans as it ventriloquized their quest for freedom and justice through blackface. The intention of Stowe's abolitionist text was lost in cross-racial translation as melodramatic performances mocked the suffering of black slaves and embossed indelible images of blacks as Uncle Toms, Topsies, Mammies, Tragic Mulattos, and Black Bucks into the American racial imaginary. The first module of the course attempts to charts the discursive and visual architecture of the black-white binary as a hierarchy of power and privilege. How do the readings and performance couplings in this module attempt to articulate critiques and resistances to the institutional and structural racism in the United States?