Group Presentations

Please comment on your preferred 2-3 group presentation readings by Tuesday January 12th at 4pm. I will assign the readings based on the order in which you post your preferences. All readings are linked to in full - feel free to peruse them before you comment.

• Tues Jan 19th - Performing Oral History: Storytelling and Pedagogy (Stucky)
• This essay addresses the potential of oral history performance to explore human communication across cultures. The study describes a class project in collecting and performing oral history interviews. By engaging students as field researchers to gather oral texts, and through the use of performance as a mode of historical, cultural, and interpersonal inquiry, students meet their interview subjects in a dialogic encounter designed to enhance their understanding of another's personal experience.
• Thurs Jan 21st - Beyond the Text: Toward a Performative Cultural Politics (Conquergood)
• Conquergood's teaching and research interests are in performance ethnography, cultural studies, and field research methods. Conquergood is particularly interested in how refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized groups cope with forces of displacement and domination through identity-strengthening performance practices.
• Tues Jan 26th - Critical Poetic Response (Alexander)
• This article focuses on what Alexander calls the Critical Poetic Response (CPR), in which the critical response of the instructor is presented in a poetic and artistic frame. This method offers critique, while reflecting the specific skills and performative nature of a given assignment. What follows is an initial articulation of this emerging method that seeks to foreground performative acuity as the tender of pedagogical negotiation. In order to explicate this method, Alexander elaborates the notion of a poetic pedagogy, following it with his process for creating the CPR. Next, he addresses larger questions about this method. Finally, in an appendix, he presents two examples of CPRs from a performance studies class.
• Tues Feb 2nd - Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities: Interview with Judith Butler (Reddy & Butler)
• In this interview, Reddy engages Judith Butler, described by Reddy as "one of the most challenging, influential and refreshing thinkers of our time." One of the topics covered is how Butler's work on performativity theory applies to the African context. The authors invite the reader to consider Butler's thinking in relation to how men and women may continue to engage theory and analysis from an activist perspective.
• Thurs Feb 4th - From the African American Oral Tradition to Slam Poetry: Rhetoric and Stylistics (Stoudamire)
• Applies the concept of a "speech community" -- "any group which shares both linguistic resources and rules for interaction and interpretation" (Coulthard, 1977, p. 32) -- to the Black American community and traces the rhetorical patterns throughout various textual forms such as oral history, phonetics, folklore and slam poetry. Black America, Black English, Black Dialect, Black Idiom, Ebonics, or as Geneva Smitherman refers to it, “the language of soul” (Talkin and Testifyin 1) is defined as “a language mixture, adapted to the conditions of slavery and discrimination, a combination of language and style interwoven with and inextricable from Afro-American culture”.
• Tues Feb 9th - To Witness Mimesis (Wake)
• This paper examines an Australian “verbatim play” about asylum seekers, Through the Wire, in order to consider the relationship between realism and witnessing in the theatre. It argues that verbatim or testimonial theatre is better understood as a form of realism than as a form of documentary theatre, as is usually the case. Current scholarship in both theatre and trauma studies criticizes realist approaches principally on ethical grounds, without necessarily accounting for a play’s political effects. Through an analysis of Through the Wire’s production and reception, Wake suggests that, while testimonial theatre may be ethically problematic, it can also be politically efficacious, precisely because of its realist aesthetics.
• Thurs Feb 11th - Performativity, Parody, Politics (Lloyd)
• The aim of this article is to examine both the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and examples of how Butler's writings have been appropriated by certain other writers. Lloyd explores three areas in particular: the relation between performance and performativity in the work of Butler and her `adherents'; the developmental changes in Butler's argument between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; and the question of the effectiveness of the politics of parody.
• Tues Feb 16th - Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school (Charles)
• In this article, Charles draws on Judith Butler's notion of performativity to investigate the role of digital technologies in processes of gendered subjectification (or ‘girling’) in elite girls' education. Elite girls' schooling is a site where the potential of digital technologies in mediating student‐led constructions and explorations of ‘femininity’ sits alongside school‐produced digital media in the form of promotional texts, in which young femininity is regulated by discourses of ‘girl power’. While such schools are well equipped with digital resources that might be utilized towards students' interrogation of how ‘femininity’ is understood, thus politicizing the girling process, school‐produced digital media inscribe a more prescriptive picture of ‘who’ an elite schoolgirl can ‘be’.
• Thurs Feb 18th - So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (Nielsen)
• When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photography and other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than “prove” it. In a project that aims for “forgiveness, redemption, and healing,” Roger Guenveur Smith's first explicitly autobiographical work in documentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965 baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal “clashed” with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and other media recordings throughout the performance fix Smith's meditations about the game, and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age “memoir” that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and out of remembrance's affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentary and other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermedia cuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burning instruments for and bearers of memory.
• Tues Mar 1 - Performance Constellations: Memory and Event in Digitally Enabled Protests in the Americas (Fuentes)
• This essay analyzes the development of the relationship between performance and digital media within protest movements in the Americas. Fuentes tracks digital media's role in constituting what she calls “performance constellations.” Performance constellations complicate previous definitions of performance as acts of transfer in order to account for hybrid, networked, and decentered protest performances. Focusing on 1990s hacktivism within the Zapatista rebellion and on social media practices during the 2011 Chilean student protests, Fuentes demonstrate that by dis-locating bodies and events, performance constellations constitute important reworkings of time and space outside of neoliberal management.

Date	Material	Presenters
1/21/16	Performing Oral History: Storytelling and Pedagogy (Stucky)	Natalie & Susannah
	--	--
1/26/16	Critical Poetic Response (Alexander)	Nikki & Grace
2/2/16	Troubling Genders, Subverting Identities: Interview with Judith Butler (Reddy & Butler)	Amanda & Paige
2/4/16	From the African American Oral Tradition to Slam Poetry: Rhetoric and Stylistics (Stoudamire)	Rachel and Shewit
2/9/16	To Witness Mimesis (Wake)	Rosie & Montana
2/11/16	Performativity, Parody, Politics (Lloyd)	Taylor and Lily
2/16/16	Digital media and ‘girling’ at an elite girls' school (Charles)	Meryl and Samantha
2/18/16	So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary Solo Performance in Juan and John (Nielsen)	Blaise & Kaylie