Performance as/in American Studies

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

How can the promiscuity and capaciousness of performance be a method for this moment in American Studies? And how can the porousness of performance allow us to think about the simultaneity of foreclosure/extinction and blossoming/renewal? How does both the theory and praxis of performance continue to push the field of American Studies to think with specificity about the fragility of historical analysis as a project? This roundtable will take up the call to challenge the systems of late stage American empire that continue to ensnare minoritized subjects through an analytical lens of performance. Each author (Danielle Bainbridge, Rhaisa Williams, and Jade Power-Sotomayor) will discuss their forthcoming books in the “Performance and American Cultures” series at NYU Press (eds. Robin Bernstein, Stephanie Batiste, and Brian Herrera) as a jumping off point for further conversation about the role that performance plays in creating and ultimately undoing those systems caught in empire’s demise. As we witness what seems like an acceleration in the process of un/re-making of the project of “America,” how does performance as praxis and optic continue to route and crystallize instances of becoming that reconfigure this node of land, bodies and histories? Urgent political questions regarding the obfuscation and misrepresentation of truth (in many cases historical fact), alongside the emergence of technologies that would outsource labors of all sorts (creative, physical, affective) find similar traction within frameworks that study the performed and the performative. The doings of performance, whether through collective organizing, world-building, speculative conjuring or simply gathering in shared time and place as co-witnesses, continue to act as a refractory buffer to the raging heat of the empire’s demise. Each author will discuss intersections between their work including: how performance methodologies negotiate the temporal discontinuities of the archive, the relationship between labor and performance, and how performance is mobilized to protest or question forms of liberal subjecthood and citizenship that often undergird appeals for “rights.”

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• All that Black Maternal Grief Manifests - Rhaisa Williams, Princeton University

• ¡Habla! Embodied Code-Switching and Listening to Our Dances - Jade Power Sotomayor, University of California-San Diego

• Future Perfect Performance Practices on the 19th-century Stage - Danielle Bainbridge, Northwestern University

Chair

• Danielle Bainbridge, Northwestern University

Comment

• Julius B Fleming, Washington University in St Louis

Biographical Information

Jade Power-Sotomayor Bio:
Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Her forthcoming monograph from NYU Press ¡Habla!:Speaking Bodies Dancing Our América theorizes the concept of "embodied code-switching" across distinct social dance spaces, examining how relationships between dancing and sounding indexes counter-histories rooted in Latinidad’s blackness that continue to challenge the violent afterlives of the colonial encounter. She has published in Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, TDR, Theatre Journal, The Oxford Handbook of Theatre and Dance, Latino Studies Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, and Performance Matters. Her articles “Moving Borders and Dancing in Place: Son jarocho’s Speaking Bodies at the Fandango Fronterizo,” “Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs,” and “Un Llanto Colectivo: A PerformaProtesta” have each been recognized with awards from the Dance Studies Association (DSA), American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS), as well as ASA’s Sound Studies Caucus. She is also a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego-based group Bomba Liberté. She is currently developing a bomba-based work for young Boricua women in Oakland inspired by Taína cacique and poet Anacaona.

Rhaisa Williams Bio:
Rhaisa Kameela Williams is Assistant Professor of Theater in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Williams’ research uses mixed-archive methods—spanning across literature, family history, archives, and public policy—to focus on the intersections of blackness, motherhood, affect, and disquieting modes of freedom. Her manuscript, Mama, Don’t You Weep: Black Motherhood, Performance, and the Costs of Grief (under contract with NYU Press), traces the intimate relationship between grief and black motherhood from the civil rights movement to the present. Offering discontinuous readings of grief, the book asserts that Black women, no matter their personal relationship to offspring or othermothering, have specifically mobilized grief inherent to Black motherhood as a tactic to perform, remake, and critique forms of citizenship. In 2020, she co-edited a special journal issue with Stacie McCormick on Toni Morrison’s influence on performance studies and adaptation, published through College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies. Williams earned her Ph.D and M.A. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, and Ford foundations. She has published or forthcoming book chapters in Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (eds. Zoraida Lopez-Diago and Lesly Canossi), Literature in Context: Toni Morrison (ed. Stephanie Li), and Thinking from Black (eds. Dionne Brand, Tina Campt, and Christina Sharpe). Williams’ peer-reviewed articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Theatre Journal, College Literature, Transforming Anthropology, Callaloo, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly.


Danielle Bainbridge bio:
Danielle Bainbridge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University and author of Currencies of Cruelty: Slavery, Freak Shows, and the Performance Archive (forthcoming NYU Press 2025) and Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays (forthcoming Jaded Ibis Press 2025.) From 2017-2020 she was the co-creator, researcher, writer, and host of the PBS Digital Studios web series "The Origin of Everything" which focused on highlighting unusual and under-told history and streams on YouTube and Facebook. Her memoir Dandelion was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Kore Press memoir award, the 2023 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, and the 2024 creative nonfiction prize from Autumn House Press. Dandelion won the inaugural 2024 Uplift Voices Nonfiction Prize from Jaded Ibis Press (judged by Myriam Gurba). Her first play "Curio" premiered at the University of Pennsylvania in April 2018 and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2018. She co-hosted two 2021 Daytime Emmy Nominated web series: PBS Self-Evident and YouTube Originals “Booktube.” Her essay “The Future Perfect, Autopsy, and Enfreakment on the 19th Century Stage” published in TDR, received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Her essay “Staging Aural Fugitivity Through Nineteenth-Century Freak Show Archives” received an Honorable Mention for 2023 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. From 2021-2022 she served as a host, writer, and consulting producer on PBS “Historian’s Take.” Historian’s Take received nominations for the 2023 NAACP Image Awards and 2023 Daytime Emmy Awards. In the 2022-2023 academic year she was a faculty fellow at Northwestern’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. She is completing her first short documentary based on her 2018 piece “Curio” with $55,000 in grant support from Northwestern’s Office of the Provost and an artist residency from Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle, Washington.