Perhaps we need a new tragic poetry, a new tragic art. Perhaps the age of bourgeois drama—the art form of posthistory—is over. Perhaps Elfriede Jelinek is the poet for this new age, asking why people follow a “master” whose only ideology is hollow triumphalism.

This performance text is Elfriede Jelinek’s instant response on the day of the announcement of Trump’s second election victory. It was conceived during his campaign as a coda to her response to Trump’s fi rst victory, titled On the Royal Road–The Burgher King, also translated by Gitta Honegger and published in 2020 by Seagull Books.

How can we listen to those whose traditional lands are being destroyed to support our “green energy” consumption? Nigamon/Tunai (2024) is a collaborative sonic performance about trans-Indigenous solidarities amid rare earth metal extraction that interweaves diverse forms of sound to engage forms of listening to ecological crisis.

As “blackface” has become a catchall for a range of practices in contemporary global popular culture, use of the term has entrenched an implicit assumption that blackface is distinctive to the United States. To grasp the manifest globality of blackface, however, it is necessary to consider the many histories and forms blackface has taken across disparate geographies as well as its role in shaping racialized mappings of the world.

Tracing the intranational and transnational itineraries of the Georgia Minstrels and Charles B. Hicks recuperates forgotten histories of Black minstrelsy. Doing so offers several correctives to the historiography of these figures by demonstrating the significant role that these artists played in shaping Black minstrelsy as a vital space for Black performance.

Cuban-born A.M. Hernandez traveled to the United States in the late 1840s and performed in various US blackface minstrel troupes from the 1850s through the 1870s. His movements across Cuban and US borders show how his participation in blackface minstrelsy reflected global logics of race and antiblackness, pushing existing studies of blackface to consider subjects whose lives exist transnationally.

Examining the “heathen Chinee” craze prompted by Bret Harte’s poem and its transnationalization uncovers what happened to the minstrel form and the violence of slavery that the figure evokes. As the “heathen Chinee” figure became racialized as distinctly “Oriental,” it obscured the antiblackness of the minstrel form.

What could Dave Carson, a US American minstrel in British India, have in common with Ardhendu Sekhar Mustafi, pioneer of Bengali public theatre? Or with Hindi cinema superstar, Amitabh Bachchan? These seemingly unrelated actors are yoked together across time and space by their distinct Indianized interpretations of the urban dandy, each of which shares an unexpected ancestry with blackface characters like Long-Tail Blue and Zip Coon.

Over the past decade, several prominent ballet companies have come under fire for perpetuating racist stereotypes. With blackface, the discourse has focused on the United States and minstrelsy. Ballet’s far older alliance with European colonialism, however, entangles Orientalism and racism, Africa and Asia-Pacific, in the figure of the “blackamoor.”

Blackface performed by South Korean women entertainers reveals a precarious, gendered economic condition for these actors and singers whose appearance does not conform to K-pop and K-drama beauty standards. Their use of blackface often represents an attempt to garner attention as a valuable resource, even if negative, within the contemporary attention economy.

The blackface photographic series Negro utópico (2001) by the Afro-Colombian artist Liliana Angulo underscores the role of racial impersonation in the enunciation of a black geography amid Colombia’s turn toward multiculturalism. Negro utópico is embroiled in an act of Black place-making as part of Viaje sin Mapa, the first art exhibit focused on blackness in Colombian art.

Four authors engage global histories to explicate contemporary genealogies of blackface and racial impersonation: Chinua Thelwell, Kellen Hoxworth, Bethany Hughes, and Danielle Roper.