This article tracks my intellectual journey in trying to understand the role played by craft specializations before the colonial era in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), which is the area where I come from. I do this by a comparative look at how craft specializations happened in other parts of the African continent, an approach prompted by the absence of older written or documentary sources on KwaZulu-Natal, prior to the advent of European colonialism. A key finding of the research is that the cultural and ritual repertoires of craft specialists reveal conceptual domains of expertise that are derived from intra-African regional dynamics. This contrasts with the colonial belief that implied that notions of expertise were as a result of European or Asian human contacts. In looking at craft guilds, I am interested in how ritual, technological skill and the mastery of certain musical/creative acts played a part in the formation of regional blocs in ancient Africa. Such a historical understanding may be crucial to our present-day understanding of emergent processes of regionalization and identity formation.
Keyword: performance
Review of Breathing Aesthetics by Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Duke University Press)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s Breathing Aesthetics draws our attention to how respiration as a cultural analytic maps the uneven distribution of risk in our contemporary moment. Intervening at the intersection of queer theory and the environmental humanities, Tremblay deciphers an archive of cultural texts that range from CAConrad’s ritualized poetry to Ana Mendieta’s elemental performance art and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In so doing, they reveal an understanding of how breath registers precarity across race, gender, and disability, while also serving as a mechanism for healing and care. This discerning analysis, combined with a focus on the exchange between body and milieu, makes a case for respiration as a distinctly ecological and embodied relation. Ultimately, Breathing Aesthetics provides crucial insight into how aesthetic expressions of respiratory variations evidence a tension between morbidity and vitality within bodies whose ability to breathe is most endangered.
Let’s Relax!
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People’s Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
Let’s Relax!
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People’s Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
Review of Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism by Jeffrey T. Nealon (University of Minnesota Press)
Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism crafts a history of performativity within contemporary theoretical thought. Through the structure of a genealogy, Nealon examines the nascence of performativity and its intersection with biopolitics and neoliberalism to predict not only the future of the performative, but also to imagine new avenues of criticism within the humanities.
Review of The Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment by Jillian Hernandez (Duke University Press)
The Aesthetics of Excess by Jillian Hernandez is a dazzling and provocative book that deploys the aesthetic as a category to grasp with great care the lives and representations of Black and Latina women whose performance of gender exceeds the white middle class norms of feminine comportment.
Review of Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War by Jennifer Ponce de León (Duke University Press)
In Another Aesthetics is Possible, Jennifer Ponce de León looks at recent aesthetic practices in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States that shift the commonsense of history, space, and violence in order to usher in an anticapitalist and anticolonial world. With an expansive archive and a method that combines interviews, journalism, and close formal readings of art–activist practices, Ponce de León demonstrates the importance of aesthetics—and of aesthetic criticism—for making another world possible.
Enacting Law: The Dramaturgy of the Courtroom on the Contemporary Stage
Although historical research into twentieth-century theatrical tribunals is widespread, the recurring theme of justice in contemporary performance practices remains largely unexplored. However, an increasing number of twenty-first-century artists have begun relying on structures of the court. By creating theatrical tribunals, these artists try to create a space for an alternative jurisdiction. However, a clear typology of this tribunal genre in the contemporary performing arts is still lacking. This article therefore aims to characterize theatrical tribunals. In the first section, I describe the setting of the courtroom as a theatrical place in which law gets enacted or performed. Following several scholars that already stated the important spectacular aspects of the legal system, I discuss the dramaturgy of the courtroom as a specific dramatic place with its own scenography, script, and dramatis personae. Next, by analyzing the dramaturgy of the courtroom, I distinguish two categories within the tribunal genre: (1) re-enactments of preeminent lawsuits that heavily rely on twentieth-century documentary practices and (2) performative pre-enactments of futuristic trials that have not yet been held or cannot be held because of systemic shortcomings. Finally I examine how contemporary theatrical tribunals could contribute to the enlargement of public knowledge on historical and contemporary examples of injustice, and whether they could obtain effective changes in our societies.
On Remembering Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969: An Assembled Interview
This assembled interview centers both Elaine Mokhtefi and Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969 (PANAF), a festival which she organized and attended as a part of the Algerian Ministry of Information, noting it as an exemplary instance of the power of performance at the nexus of political ideology, activist history, and the subsequent nostalgia for that era of liberation. It is equally an attempt to overcome a distant relationship to each, reflecting on the potential of oral histories to open up new pathways through the past. This history—of entangled international relations negotiated under the guise of a festive performance, a complicated trajectory of global politics which culminated in a remarkable event of celebration and solidarity—remains understudied, a footnote to more “political” concerns of Third World agendas, decolonial reorderings, and capitalist critiques. Yet through Mokhtefi’s testimony, interwoven with searching tendrils of archival detail, we can see that this festival was not a superficial exaltation in extravagance, but a pivotal moment in foreign affairs. More importantly, through her personal history, we can trace the central role that women played in these politics, if often unacknowledged. Edited in 2020, it also counters the pejorative label of non-essential labor applied to most cultural activities during the contemporary pandemic response to COVID-19.
Introduction: US Gun Culture and the Performance of Racial Sovereignty
This introduction examines gun culture in the United States and argues that it is a product of the longstanding practices of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and misogyny that have shaped life in the United States. Invoking an anthropological definition of culture, it argues that gun violence is a central facet of US political and social life and that performances of gun use and ownership, particularly when enacted by white men, embody a kind of “racial sovereignty,” or a violent limitation of the practical applicability of citizenship to those who promulgate whiteness, maleness, and violence as primary markers of full belonging in the civic community.
Good [Black] Guys With Guns: Performance and the Anti-Black Logic of US Gun Culture
This article examines the police shooting of twenty-one-year-old E.J. Bradford at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Alabama on November 22, 2018. After a brief investigation, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office absolved the officer who shot Bradford of any wrongdoing. Through a close reading of the Alabama AG’s report and a performance analysis of Bradford’s actions that night, this article argues that Bradford behaved exactly as he was trained to as a concealed carry permit holder and former enlistee in the Army. Bradford was the epitome of the NRA’s vaunted “good guy with a gun” who intervenes in a violent situation to save others’ lives. However, within the context of the United States’s gun culture, which envisions “good” gun owners as white and encourages police to rehearse responses that perpetuate anti-Black racism, Bradford was always going to be seen by police as suspect.
Aestheticizing the City Through Storytelling and Walking: Dublin’s 1916 Rebellion Walking Tour
The main concern of this article is situated in the theatrical experience of the 1916 rebellion walking tour as a broader mode of aestheticizing performance, focusing on the ways it traces the process of the tour to ask what the appeal is for international tourists in experiencing often tragic historical events through the use of performative strategies, namely, acts of walking and storytelling. By employing Walter Benjamin’s notion of storytelling and Michel de Certeau’s approach to the walking, this article intends to explore how the 1916 walking tour as a cultural practice rearranges and recreates the Dublin landscape, and how these new meanings are constituted aesthetically beyond their entertainment value. Furthermore, by placing this tour as performative genre, this article investigates how this historic event is embodied by the guide, perceived and transformed by tour groups, thereby creating tourists’ kinesthetic empathy during the tour, by way of the guide’s storytelling with their walking. In doing so, this article will offer a broader context of staging this historical memory that commemorates past events by way of physical engagement with this tour.
#eatthatwall
#eatthatwall is an in-progress performance-installation, presented first at Rhizome DC (a DIY experimental art space in Takoma Park, Washington, DC) on April 23, 2017. The project invited gallery participants to assist in the construction and eating of an edible wall made with approximately 1,200 mini cooked rice bricks set with refried bean mortar. The wall served as an imaginary, fabulist structure to separate a currently un-bordered area between Laredo in Texas and Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas, Mexico, or anywhere else this hypothetical border might arbitrarily fit. The performance score following the introduction to the project is a document of the process of making: from initial concepts, to the invitation to build/mimic, to a contemplation of how we digest the events and emotions leading to the wall, and to its eventual end.
Rage Grief Comfort &
Documentation and analysis by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson of a project by the arts collective Spatula&Barcode: In December 2016 a major city building in Madison, Wisconsin was closed for renovation, and enterprising curators installed a massive temporary art exhibition, titled Municipal. As the community was in the midst of processing the presidential election results, we created Rage Grief Comfort & with the explicit aim of moving participants through and past their immediate emotions.
Every Little Thing He Does: Entrepreneurship and Appropriation in the Magic Mike Series
This essay analyses the theatricalized performance of stripping in the popular films Magic Mike (2013; dir. Steven Soderbergh) and its sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015; dir. Gregory Jacobs). Following a critical dance studies approach that attends to the intersection of body and gesture with socio-political, historical, and economic structures, I suggest theatricalized sexual labour in these films reveals the racial exclusions from the ideology of entrepreneurship. Considering the appropriation of black aesthetics in Magic Mike XXL’s performances of striptease, the film seeks to evaporate the spectre of race, that is, the way the white fantasy of the entrepreneurial subject is supported by the appropriation of racialized and especially black labour.