Module 5- Race Remixed

This module worked to complicate whiteness by interrogating its assumed homogeneity. By interrogating relationships of ethnicity to whiteness and power, we were able to identify the ways in which social, cultural and racial relationships to whiteness unsettle and disrupt particular social, cultural and economic interests that are directly tied to the state. How do trajectories of whiteness get remixed over time and space? How are have particular sites of assumed whiteness been challenged by particular racial and ethnic groups shifting the assumed meanings and connotations of whiteness by "coloring" it through assertions and/ subversion of its constructs?

Module 4- Black+ White+ Atlantic Mash Up

Satirist and comedian Trevor Noah is an embodied representation of the exchanges that map the historic contours of violence, intellectual property and creativity that marks the "routes and roots" of the black Atlantic. A south African born Black male of Xhosian, German, Jewish decent, Noah was recently named the successor to Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show , a popular television show that offers national and international political critique of social inequality from a US perspective. Noah's personal mapping of modernity and his capacity to be read as simultaneously black and "other," American and South African, in multiple national contexts, is at the crux of this module's notion of the "mash-up." My definition of a mash-up here "extends the music metaphor to imply a blending and connecting of multiple cultural and national experiences into one transformative text that illuminates the histories of its multiple sources"(Hodges Persley 2015). Over the past few weeks we have explored the central importance of the black Atlantic in shaping and defining modernity. Paul Gilroy's landmark text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness explores the simultaneity of a black Atlantic culture whose complexity circulates through bodies and their cultural contributions to shape circuits of shared cultural exchange that have left an indelible mark on humanity. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness continues the work of Gilroy to challenge the persistence of a Hegelian master-slave dialectic by asking how the radicalized caste system of the US disproportionately targets a particular Black American population to discipline and punish their bodies and consciousness. For Alexander, such acts shoulder viewed as human rights violations and must be addressed and read within a global context of the black Atlantic and the transatlantic slave trade. As you write about this module consider how Gilroy's syncretic theory of the Black Atlantic speaks directly to the specificity of Alexander's argument about mass incarceration. In what ways do notions of colorblindness attempt to mask and flatten the histories of social inequities embedded in the circuits of exchange that both shape and delimit black subjectivity? How might the US model of mass incarceration become an international model of supression the resignifies humanity?

Module 3- Disrupting the Black-White Binary

During this Module we explored texts that challenged the black-white binary that shapes the American racial imaginary. How are scholars and artists interrogating shifting definitions of blackness and whiteness over time? What do we make of the multivalent and conflicting language used to describe race, its ascription to particular groups and its regulation by the state? How might cross-racial performance and transnational comparisons of racial formations foster social, cultural and political connections between and within communities that can enable new ways of thinking about race and ethnicity?

Module 2- Performing Raced and Gendered Bodies

This week, we finish our module on performing raced and gendered bodies. After reading Elam, Foucault and Butler think about the new tools you have to read the performance of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee and Yinka Shonibare. Consider how these performances interrogate, reinscribe and/or subvert the the intersecting and mutually constitutive boundaries of racial, gender and sexual identification in performance. What do the performances enable or foreclose to concepts of race and gender identification?

Module 1- Black and White Matters

Over the past few weeks we have read several texts that have given us some insight into the installation of the black-white binary as the guidepost for racial formation in the United States. After reading George Aiken's play Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cheryl Harris's "Whiteness as Property" and Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990's as texts that give you some insight into the racial trajectory mediated by the state and social relationships mediated by the law, what is your take and how do you understand these texts in relationship to some of the visual texts we have explored such as Kara Walker's Antebellum series or Douglas Kirk's Imitation of Life?

Welcome to Theories of Race and Performance (THR 914), a graduate course taught by Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley at The University of Kansas Department of Theatre. This is an inter-textual course that explores interdisciplinary scholarship on race and performance seeking to translate these theories into practical application in various visual, audio and performance texts in popular culture. The course is divided into modules aimed at gaining an understanding of the shifting meaning of race over time and its relationship to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nation and power. How do we perform our identities? How is race constructed and maintained through performance? To begin to answer these questions, we will examine the ways in which racial identities are created through performance.