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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
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.
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Jenna Lyons
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Hodges Persley
Due: February 3, 2015
Module 1 Blog
While reading Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States, Antonio Gramsci’s name appeared frequently and alongside several of his most prolific cultural theories. Omi and Winant used Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony to push forth the argument that an ever-dominant, ruling white class has achieved and maintained racial hegemony over a subordinate class of color. They write, “. . . after World War II a system of racial hegemony was substituted for the earlier system of racial domination” (15). By explaining how racial politics of the United States have shifted from a focus on physical domination and exclusion to the containment and rearticulation of postwar civil rights movements to the contemporary moment of buzzwords, colorblindness, and neoliberalism, their argument and subsequent observations successfully prove that the people of the United States are ensnared in the hegemonic power structure of the white ruling class.
Omi and Winant’s argument that racial politics in the United States function as racial hegemony restructures how the state and the white ruling class perform whiteness. In previous centuries, explicit and violent racism was tolerated and promoted by the state, but after the black civil rights movements, the state and the white ruling class were pressured to bring about a change in racial politics and performance. However, there was not as much change as there was hegemonic negotiation; there were efforts to appease and create consent to the racial hegemony already in practice, not a revolutionized racial state. The correlation between whiteness and the ruling class remained, but what had to be reconfigured was how to enact racist policies, commit racist actions, and guard the hegemonic structure, without being called “Racist!” Gramsci’s idea of hegemony operates on many levels of American society, and most notably, as Omi and Winant argue, in racial politics.