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.
