Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Arts and Humanities

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Performance

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale Apr 2021

Stranger Compass Of The Stage: Difference And Desire In Early Modern City Comedy, Catherine Tisdale

Doctoral Dissertations

In periods of social and political upheaval like ours, it is more important than ever to interrogate constructions of identity and difference and to understand the histories of alterity that separate us from one another. Stranger Compass of the Stage: Difference and Desire in Early Modern City Drama reimagines the cultural and social effect of alien, foreign, and stranger characters on the early modern stage and re-envisions how these characters contribute to, alter, and imaginatively build new epistemologies for understanding difference in early modern London. Resisting the field’s current critical inclination toward English identity formation, this project works intersectionally to …


Brooklyn Bedroom: An Ethnodrama On Female Sexuality, Third World Feminism And Performance Ethnography, Ayshia Stephenson Jul 2018

Brooklyn Bedroom: An Ethnodrama On Female Sexuality, Third World Feminism And Performance Ethnography, Ayshia Stephenson

Doctoral Dissertations

Brooklyn Bedroom is a performance that interrogates societal perceptions of race and sexuality. I have utilized the writing of the performance as my method; the performance is an act of Third World feminist resistance and liberation. Storytelling is the type of research preferred by many black female playwrights. A type of qualitative inquiry, ethnodramatic work forms a bridge between individual stories and social issues affecting society with the goal of socio-political change. The source of reality for this ethnodrama is the Rose family, their history was a catalyst for the writing of Brooklyn Bedroom. I have explored their stories to …


Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley Jul 2016

Summoning The Body That Acts, Brendan M. Mccauley

Masters Theses

Seven series of artworks; painted, drawn and performed. These works are presented as affective incorporation exercises, that test modes of aesthetic communication in response to varying political contingencies. The constitutive processes used to develop the work also function as a methodology for my own political radicalization. As an artist I am wagering how to talk, as an activist I am preparing to act. The artworks discussed occur at the crossroads of these desires as enactions of futurity within the subjunctive mood.


Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti Aug 2014

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …


Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar Jan 2011

Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural …


Geo-Graphies: Performing City Space And Economic Possibility And The Storyteller Of Cairo, Miriam C. Maynard-Ford Jan 2011

Geo-Graphies: Performing City Space And Economic Possibility And The Storyteller Of Cairo, Miriam C. Maynard-Ford

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Albert Cossery, known as the ‘story teller of Cairo’, weaves tales of the marginalized living in a city of the global South whose geographies have been impacted by colonial and neocolonial legacy. Cairo’s city and economic spaces have often been theorized as determined and dominated by the forces of neoliberalism, an approach that obscures the experience of residents who contest and evade these forces daily. For example, in “Les Couleurs de l’infamie”, the main character is a robin-hood archetype that revels in observing the resourcefulness of the city’s residents. ‘Alternative’ occupations and spatial uses abound: an unemployed philosopher teaches secretly …