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Performance, Race, Violence and the Body

This is the course page for the class "Performance, Race, Violence and the Body" at University of Texas at Austin. This course examines the complex relationship between performance, the body politic, violence, race and gender. We engage with a survey of texts that interrogate this relationship from the colonial/conquest/slavery period through today. The focus, while global, is the Americas. Using the ethnographic and theoretical lens of performance, performativity and enactment, we examine the multivalent layers of violent repression at work within multiple societies at various temporal moments. Within this framework, we critically reflect on how violence, in its alternate forms, impacts identity formation by inscribing race, gender and sexuality onto the body at multiple social and culture junctures. 

One of the primary objectives of the course is to theoretically engage with the relationship between the body, identity, and state, structural and symbolic violence. Addressing the politics of representation as a principle theme, we interrogate how theories of performance make power somatically legible, and how the relationship between performance and the body have everything to do with social order and repression. 
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  • Christen Anne Smith
  • Publications
  • Interviews
  • Afro-Paradise
  • Silence Transformation Collective
  • Courses
    • Violence Trauma Memory >
      • VTM Blog
    • Performance, Race, Violence, Body >
      • PERFRVB Blog
    • Black Women, Struggle and the Transnational State >
      • BWSTS Blog
  • Contact
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