“Embodying Race, Performing Citizenship” investigates racial and ethnic impersonationsin American popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I
focus my analyses on first-generation Irish, Chinese, and Jewish Eastern European artists and
their American-born children during a time when the United States had absorbed the highest
number of...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance...
Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I...