This dissertation is an ethnography that investigates how Chicago-based artists and organizations use hip-hop performance as a tool for grassroots education and communal dissent. By exploring these local artistic approaches, this research reveals the salience of hip-hop performance in cultivating social movements, embodied politics, and choreographic repertoires that respond to...
Land and Water: Performing Ecologies of Statelessness in the Aftermath of the Vietnam/American War focuses on land and water as epistemological and ontological grammars to examine cultural productions of Vietnamese refugee narratives. Specifically, I analyze how Vietnamese/American oral history narrators, filmmakers, visual artists, and performance artists narrate refugee subjectivity in...
This dissertation examines how filmic, literary, and popular musical performances of black female sexualities in the post- civil rights era both reveal and frustrate state-sanctioned infringements on black freedom. “The Paradox of Black Freedom: Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary Performance, 1965-2000” elucidates a powerful paradox wherein the US state enacts...
This dissertation analyzes theater performances that use narratives of U.S. military veterans in the post 9/11 era in order to cross the military-civilian divide. Engaging theories of performance, embodiment, and affect, this project investigates the depiction of military bodies onstage, the public perception of military identities, and the lived experience...
The dissertation aims to explore the intersection between the artistic performance of blackness in contemporary Italian theater and the country's social stigmatization of black immigrants as a problem or national emergency. I argue that Italians live in a state of "historic forgetfulness" since they have not been able to absorb...
This dissertation is a comparative study of gezaixi (Taiwanese opera) in China and Taiwan. It foregrounds the different, at times conflicting, performance styles and aesthetics of gezaixi on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, which is primarily the result of a long closure (1949-1987) imposed by the two regimes, and...
This dissertation examines the ways in which performance forms articulate with urban identities in the context of transnational economic and cultural exchange. In this multisited historical ethnography, I explore the links between late 19th-century Ottoman and contemporary Turkish public spheres fractured by morality battles and political transformation. Both periods are...
In this dissertation, I examine a near-century old popular theatre genre in Ghana known as the concert party to explore how contemporary political and economic circumstances shape its relationship to the spider-man trickster of Ghanaian (specifically Akan) folklore. Since the early 18th century various writers have attempted to define Ananse's...
Initiation is a performative model that dictates the participation of individuals in the various traditions of Western occultism, locating that individual within a nexus of practices and discourses that facilitate the transmission of occult teachings to that individual. While the act of initiation may be represented by a single performed...
This dissertation combines critical ethnography, critical performance and historical analysis to examine three Trinidadian dance companies - Malick Folk Performing Company, Shiv Shakti Dance Company, and Noble Douglas Dance Company Inc. - asking how each choreographs Trinidadian discourses of race/ethnicity, class and national belonging through its own uniquely crafted embodied...
This dissertation articulates the practice of clown theater by a Chicago-based company called 500 Clown in order to provoke further investigation and definition of this hybrid theatrical form, which, though increasingly popular as a practice, has yet to be theorized or historicized. This study addresses clown theater's relationships with other...
My study examines three participatory learning environments in which computer-based tools and improvisational training techniques comprise innovative approaches to teaching performance studies to undergraduate students. For my analysis, I have selected to focus on two classes and one production project. I contend that performance, an interdisciplinary and collaborative art form,...
This dissertation project explores the relationship between the architectures of black masculinity in America and a specific performance of discreet sexual identity. Through critical ethnographic and discursive exploration, I look closely at a group of black men who describe themselves as being on the "down low" (DL). These men, who...
This dissertation deploys an interdisciplinary methodology, extending what is conventionally understood as discourse to include performance. It brings together the fields of performance studies, discourse analysis and theatre studies to document, contextualize, and analyze the events after the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992. It examines gang youth who turned to...
A number of new satiric forms -- or emergent genres -- have exploded in popularity almost simultaneously in recent years, all markedly political, all incorporating the real into the mimetic in striking ways, and all straddling the line between satire and serious political dialogue. This dissertation focuses on three of...
This study examines contemporary theatrical, filmic, and pictorial representations of Heinrich von Kleist's 1807 novella, "The Marquise of O--." It particularly focuses on the development of a solo music theatre production by a team of German/American, independent theatre artists, of which I was one, in the auditorium of the German...
Circling the Cosmograms marks the first full-length study of second-generation feminist and/or queer art and performance in the Haitian Dyaspora (Haitian Kreyòl spelling) following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Through archival research, visual and performance art analysis, and in-depth interviews, I document the ways feminist and/or queer Haitian-American...