WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2021-2022       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Advanced Topics in Performance Studies: Imagining Anticolonial Performance Practices

THEA 316
Fall 2021 not offered
Course Cluster and Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate, Queer Studies, Sustainability and Environmental Justice

What is the relationship between decolonization and performance? How might we think of performance as a critical and creative resource for the anti-normalization of settler logics and practices, including the private ownership of land and extraction of natural resources for profit? In this course we will approach these questions through the lens of performance studies (an interdisciplinary field focused on the live event and in conversation with anthropology, theater studies, linguistics, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory). Grounded in Indigenous studies, this class will use "performance" as both a practice and a lens. We will explore questions including: "What do land, sovereignty, sustainability, and subsistence-based practices have to do with performance?" "What is the colonial history of dominant performance cultures?" "Can, or should, we separate performance from the political in our understanding of theater and performance as merely an aesthetic practice?" With a specific attention to Native North American epistemologies and practices, we will study contemporary Indigenous art and theories in order to imagine performance's potential ability to work toward the disobedience and anti-normalization of settler colonial logics and laws. Student projects will take the shape of semester-long critical research papers. We will read theoretical works by Patrick Wolfe, Sandra Ruiz, Eve Tuck, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Jolene Rickard, Jodi Byrd, and Stephanie Nohelani Teves and engage artistic works by Nicholas Galanin, Jeffery Gibson, James Luna, Vick Quezada, Emily Johnson, AKU MATU, Muriel Miguel, S.J. Norman, Joseph Pierce, and many others.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA THEA
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode:
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (CSCT)(STS)

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459