Performance Studies in/as American Studies

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In the past 30 years, American Studies has taken a “performance turn.” Scholars and activists have turned to popular performance and performance theory to understand and challenge American imperialism, carcerality, slavery, electoral politics, race, gender, and much more. Our roundtable thinks critically about this development. We are six senior scholars (including two scholar-performers) whose interdisciplinary training in the late twentieth century launched work and careers that have been rooted in American Studies while traversing Performance/Theatre Studies, Sound/Music Studies, Media Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies, and African American Studies. In our roundtable, we—Stephanie Batiste, Robin Bernstein, Jayna Brown, Brian Herrera, Koritha Mitchell (chair), and Tavia Nyong’o—will assess the ever-evolving utility of “performance” as a scholarly rubric, method, or mode in the contemporary moment. Performance studies offers American studies a visitation of liveness, embodiment, and multiplicity; sensitivity to the vicissitudes of events, acts of spectatorship, and memory; and unexpected fields of evidence in not only paper and celluloid but also in material culture, lines of activity, gesture, and affect.

For this no-paper roundtable, each participant will share 5 minutes of reflection concerning an aspect of their interdisciplinary research. Topics may include form, method, archive, argument, theory, etc. We will then discuss questions from the Chair, each other, and the audience. Questions we might address include:

How has performance theory enabled you to think about American empire (Batiste), carcerality (Bernstein), speculative fiction and ecology (Brown), Latiné/x studies (Herrera), and Black studies (Mitchell and Nyong’o)? What would have been lost from your analyses if you had not thought through performance?

Gender and sexuality are fundamental to all the roundtable speakers’ work. What does performance studies have to offer the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality?

How has performance activated your approaches to archive?

Live performance exists in a permanent present, yet it lingers indefinitely. How does this paradox, which is foundational to performance studies, inform your work in American Studies? How does it enable us to engage the conference theme, "Late-Stage American Empire?"

For Batiste and Herrera: how has your practice of performance—as actors, playwrights, and directors—affected your work as scholars of American Studies? For Bernstein and Mitchell: do you have performance practices that inform your scholarship? For Nyong’o: how does the intersection of performance and American Studies factor into your curatorial and editorial work at the Park Avenue Armory (US), Boffo (US) , and Between Bridges (DE)?

What are you reading right now at the intersection of American Studies and performance studies? What kind of work excites you? How would you like to see American Studies and performance studies engage each other in the future?

Chair and Participant: Koritha Mitchell (Boston University)
Participants:
Stephanie Batiste (University of California—Santa Barbara)
Robin Bernstein (Harvard University)
Jayna Brown (Brown University)
Brian Hererra (Princeton University)
Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University)

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Koritha Mitchell, Boston University

Panelists

• Stephanie L Batiste, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Robin Bernstein, Harvard University

• Jayna A Brown, Brown University

• Brian Eugenio Herrera, Princeton University

Biographical Information

Stephanie Leigh Batiste is a Professor of Black Studies and English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she is also Affiliate Professor in the Departments of Theater and Dance and Comparative Literature. Dr. Batiste served as the Acting Chair of the UCSB Black Studies Department from 2011-2012, was a Co-PI on the Consortium for Black Studies programming and research grant from 2015-2018, and currently serves as the Director of the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. She is co-editor of the NYU Press Book Series Performance and American Cultures. Dr. Batiste’s research areas include Race and Racism, Performance Studies, African American Literature and Culture, American Studies, Cultural Studies, and U.S. History. Her interdisciplinary work has appeared in Text & Performance Quarterly, The Black Scholar, The New Centennial Review, International Journal of Screen Dance, The Journal of Haitian Studies as well as multiple collections and anthologies. Dr. Batiste’s first book, Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression Era African American Performance (Duke University Press, 2011) won the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize and honorable mention for the Association for Theater in Higher Education Book Award. Currently, Professor Batiste is finishing her latest book project tentatively titled SpacesBetween: Black Performances of Violence and Death in Millennial Los Angeles. This research focuses on the ways performances generate and theorize feeling and community belonging in millennial Los Angeles’ Black performance cultures. Addressing in-community artistry around loss and grief, Metaphysics of Resurrection reveals embedded structures of transformation in the confrontations with violence forged through performance. Dr. Batiste is a poet, performer, and playwright. Her poems have been published in The Current and Foundry. Her solo show Stacks of Obits and plays Blue Gold & Butterflies, and Young Love Found & Lost: 6 poems in a circle have been performed nationally and internationally. Notably, she received a LA Creation Residency at the Bootleg Theater for Blue Gold & Butterflies.

Robin Bernstein is a cultural historian who focuses on race in the United States since the nineteenth century. Currently Chair of the Program in American Studies at Harvard University, she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She co-edits the book series Performance and American Cultures for New York University Press. She wrote her most recent book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (University of Chicago Press, 2024), with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (NYU Press), won five awards and was runner-up for the ASA’s John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Her recent article, "'You Do It!': Going-to-Bed Books and the Scripts of Children's Literature," co-won the William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article in PMLA.

Jayna Brown is Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. She is the author of two books, both published by Duke University Press: Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008) and Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021). She has also published numerous essays in publications including Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Women and Performance. Brown has also been a contributing journalist for NPR’s music programming. Her areas of research and specialization include speculative fictions, music, queer studies, black feminism, black diasporan intellectual history, and our changing media landscape. Her current work is located at the intersections of speculative fiction, ecology, and black expressive cultures.

Brian Eugenio Herrera is, by turns, a writer, teacher and scholar - presently based in New Jersey, but forever rooted in New Mexico. Brian's work, whether academic or artistic, examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through U.S. popular performance. His book Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Michigan, 2015) was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and received an Honorable Mention for the John W. Frick Book Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. With Stephanie Batiste and Robin Bernstein, Brian serves as co-editor of “Performances and American Cultures” series at NYU Press. Also a performer, Brian's autobiographical storywork performances (including I Was the Voice of Democracy and TouchTones) have been presented in venues large and small across the United States, as well as Beirut and Abu Dhabi. Brian is a longstanding contributor to the Fornés Institute, a project invested in preserving and amplifying the legacy of María Irene Fornés. He has also worked closely with ArtEquity, an organization committed to creating and sustaining a culture of equity and inclusion through the arts; with Theatrical Intimacy Education, a group researching, developing, and teaching best practices for staging theatrical intimacy; and with The Sol Project, an initiative dedicated to producing the work of Latinx playwrights in New York City and beyond. Brian is presently at work on several scholarly book projects: Casting: A Brief History, a historical study of the material practices of casting in US popular performance; Starring Miss Virginia Calhoun, a narrative portrait of a deservedly obscure early 20th century actress/writer/producer; and Fornés in Context, an anthology co-edited with Anne García Romero that documents the life, work and legacy of playwright María Irene Fornés (Cambridge, 2025). He also publishes the #TheatreClique Newsletter. Brian Eugenio Herrera is Associate Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where he is also a core faculty member in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and a faculty affiliate with the Programs in American Studies, Music Theater and Latino Studies.

Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, violence throughout U.S. history and contemporary culture, and Black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly, and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” identifies similarities between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. Her second monograph, From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture, appeared in 2020, was named a best book of the year by Ms. magazine and Black Perspectives, and became a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in 2021. Mitchell is also editor of a scholarly edition of Frances E. W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy and of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman.