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CS92PROD
Destroying the Audience: Limits of Performance and Representation in the Theater of (Non) Being
FGSS 353
Fall 2024
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: THEA 353, AMST 354, ENGL 364

Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company, active between 2003 and 2016, is most known for a series of "racial-identity plays," written and directed by Lee, which adopt an experimental approach to the critique of racial politics, driven by the motto "destroy the audience." On the one hand, this course will explore literary and artistic works that express an ambivalent, if not antagonistic, relationship to the presence of an audience. On the other hand, this course will consider the role and function of the audience as a social category by considering how the concept of audience (broadly understood) contributes to cultural production about race and gender as a potentially active element in the creative process. Students can expect to read and/or view drama, visual art, performance, film, and self-writing (autobiography and memoir) which, explicitly or implicitly, address the presence of the audience as a way of tackling larger social and cultural problems related to race and ethnicity. The goal will be to foster an understanding of the politics of gender, sexuality, ability, language, and class that determine how these issues are conceptualized and articulated. This course will employ an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of primary and secondary texts, engaging audience studies, performance studies, ethnic studies, and disability studies, in addition to queer/trans of color, postcolonial, and legal theory, to historically contextualize and theoretically ground a cultural understanding of the relation between audience and racial performance.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS FGSS
Course Format: DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (THEA)
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on OCT-04-2024
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