AMST 262
Race-Making and the Politics of Performance Fall 2024
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity

What is the relationship between contemporary understandings of race, American national identity, and performance? From the Sons of Liberty “playing Indian” during the Boston Tea Party to spectacles of racialized violence into the freakshow exhibition of “primitive, exotic Others” and the emergence of modern theater and film in the 19th and 20th century, performance has played a central role in shaping and disseminating ideas of race and racism in the American popular imaginary. This course will examine how the overlapping histories of settler colonialism, slavery, immigrant exclusion, and imperialism have been variously framed, justified, and contested through performance (in both an artistic and everyday sense). A central contention of this class is that race is constantly “made” (and remade) through performance, which we will explore through a historical survey of theater, film, popular culture, anthropological documents, and law. We will take a comparative ethnic studies approach that tracks the interconnections between Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latina/o racial formations across public spectacle and theatrical/cinematic representation. We will also tend to the ways in which minoritized folks have used performance as a powerful tool to rethink identity, subjectivity, and community.