Racial Performance and the Politics of Hemispheric Inclusion

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel engages the role of performance in the constitution of national imaginaries across the hemisphere. It considers the racial, sexual and gendered scripts that underwrite the politics of inclusion in the U.S. and the Caribbean and assesses the ways performances rub up against or disidentify with such scripts. Operating at the cross-section of an array of performance practice including impersonation, popular dance, as well as contemporary revisions of folkloric dance, these papers draw from and contribute to cross-disciplinary conversations about the politics of black representation and embodiment in Literature, Anthropology, Performance Studies and Dance Studies. The authors collectively demonstrate that the legibility of scripted behaviors are not contained by national boundaries, and that ideologies of racial justice in the Hemisphere are transmitted, illuminated, and contested through gendered bodily practice.

Sub Track

• Film, Performance, and Culture

Session Organizer

• Danielle M Roper, University of Chicago

Chair

• Maya J Berry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Discussant

• Jill M Lane, New York University

Individual Presentations

• Collective Rehearsals of Rebellious Gender in “updating” Havana - Maya J Berry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Haitian Revolutionary Movement Politics - Dasha A Chapman

• Blackface in Miami: Impersonation and Racial Inclusion - Danielle M Roper, University of Chicago