Race and Performance After Repetition

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Dialogue Format

Abstract

Repetition repeats itself. Theories of repetition inform American Studies and theatre and performance studies across periods, methodologies, theoretical frameworks, and approaches to examining history and historical practices. From descriptions of repetition-with-a-difference and performative iteration to twice-behaved behavior and staged revivals, repetition has become an axiomatic starting point for understanding the complex temporality of theatre—sometimes at the expense of other ways of imagining performance in time and as time. Among other entities repetition might be (an ontological allegory, a rhetorical operation, a signifying chain, a rhythmic pulse, a well of influence, a technology of discipline, a comfort, a nightmare), it is a temporal mode that marks a series or sequence. It is the interplay between linear time—existing on a chronological line where things recur again after they have previously occurred—and cyclical time—since if tomorrow is a repetition of yesterday, then yesterday is already tomorrow and tomorrow yesterday. In toggling between line and cycle, repetition gives us seriality, division, memory, and difference. But there are other ways to contemplate and inhabit difference than via repetition.

Repetition is but one way that past/present/future can be configured in relation to each other, but it is not the only one. Our roundtable will explore what other temporal arrangements organize theatre and performance? How else does theatre and performance temporalize the relationships between identity and difference, between chronos and kairos, between the past and the present? Are there other ways of understanding difference, power, and resistance that are not necessarily shaped by repetition? What are the limits of repetition for comprehending the historicity and phenomenology of theatre? How do ecstatic temporalities alter the linear and cyclical patterns of repetition? How does performance interrupt repetition, rather than rely on it, for its effects? How have new media technologies changed how we think of repetition and performance? What other lexicons might we develop to understand the relationship of performance to time and history?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2020

Chair

• Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University

Panelists

• Nicholas Fesette, Emory University

• Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond

• Mario J. LaMothe, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Katherine Zien, McGill University

• Jasmine Johnson, University of Pennsylvania

• Catherine M. Young, Princeton University