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Disturb the Hive
- Douglas A. Jones, Jr.
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- Journal:
- Theatre Survey / Volume 57 / Issue 3 / September 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 August 2016, pp. 400-402
- Print publication:
- September 2016
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“Where do we find ourselves?” We ask some permutation of this question in response to life events, as Ralph Waldo Emerson does to open his haunting essay on the death of his young son, the magisterial “Experience” (1844). Commemorations also compel us to make such accountings, to break from the requisite, often monotonous routines of everyday life to assess our evolutions. The sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the American Society for Theatre Research offers such an occasion, and this forum's invitation to imagine and, perhaps, sway the direction of the organization's discursive and institutional practices over the next decade or more requires, first of all, estimating where we, as scholars of theatre and performance culture, find ourselves. Although these inspections would certainly reveal actions and innovations worthy of commemoration, the more important task is to lay bare and come to grips with those assumptions, ruts, and shibboleths in our respective fields of inquiry that have become so ingrained that they have achieved a kind of sacrosanctity. We must contest and, in many cases, abandon these conceptual and analytical habits: such efforts, though to the detriment of ideology, will be to the good of the discipline and the enrichment of our individual scholarly sensibilities.
1 - Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre
- Edited by Harvey Young, Northwestern University, Illinois
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre
- Published online:
- 05 December 2012
- Print publication:
- 25 October 2012, pp 15-33
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Summary
On the evening of June 28, 1849, Frederick Douglass attended a performance by Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders, one of the few all-black minstrel troupes before the Civil War. In spite of his “disgust” at minstrelsy’s racist grotesqueries, Douglass decided to go to the theatre because of his “love of music” and “curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race,” as he put it in his review that ran in his newspaper, The North Star, the following day. Midway through the review, Douglass turned from his assessment of the Serenaders’ act to reflect on the political potential of black performance in general. He writes: “It is something gained, when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” In other words, if African Americans controlled the means of production – even if they appropriated the form of blackface minstrelsy, which by the late 1840s was virulently anti-black – their aesthetic and cultural efforts could help redress racial inequality. Much to Douglass’s dismay, however, Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders simply “exaggerate[d] the exaggerations of our enemies” and “cater[ed] to the lower elements of the baser sort.”
In his brief review, Douglass articulated a profound degree of ambivalence regarding the use of performance in the work of black uplift. His ambivalence was born of the decidedly fraught relation that enslaved Africans and their descendants have had with cultural performance since the time of their earliest arrivals in the early seventeenth century. Simply put, Douglass perceived how dominant performance practices entrenched sociopolitical norms such as slavery and white supremacy, but he also recognized how slaves and free people of color used performance to fashion modes of protest and pleasure.
Contributors
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- By Aakash Agarwala, Linda S. Aglio, Rae M. Allain, Paul D. Allen, Houman Amirfarzan, Yasodananda Kumar Areti, Amit Asopa, Edwin G. Avery, Patricia R. Bachiller, Angela M. Bader, Rana Badr, Sibinka Bajic, David J. Baker, Sheila R. Barnett, Rena Beckerly, Lorenzo Berra, Walter Bethune, Sascha S. Beutler, Tarun Bhalla, Edward A. Bittner, Jonathan D. Bloom, Alina V. Bodas, Lina M. Bolanos-Diaz, Ruma R. Bose, Jan Boublik, John P. Broadnax, Jason C. Brookman, Meredith R. Brooks, Roland Brusseau, Ethan O. Bryson, Linda A. Bulich, Kenji Butterfield, William R. Camann, Denise M. Chan, Theresa S. Chang, Jonathan E. Charnin, Mark Chrostowski, Fred Cobey, Adam B. Collins, Mercedes A. Concepcion, Christopher W. Connor, Bronwyn Cooper, Jeffrey B. Cooper, Martha Cordoba-Amorocho, Stephen B. Corn, Darin J. Correll, Gregory J. Crosby, Lisa J. Crossley, Deborah J. Culley, Tomas Cvrk, Michael N. D'Ambra, Michael Decker, Daniel F. Dedrick, Mark Dershwitz, Francis X. Dillon, Pradeep Dinakar, Alimorad G. Djalali, D. John Doyle, Lambertus Drop, Ian F. Dunn, Theodore E. Dushane, Sunil Eappen, Thomas Edrich, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, Jason M. Erlich, Lucinda L. Everett, Elliott S. Farber, Khaldoun Faris, Eddy M. Feliz, Massimo Ferrigno, Richard S. Field, Michael G. Fitzsimons, Hugh L. Flanagan Jr., Vladimir Formanek, Amanda A. Fox, John A. Fox, Gyorgy Frendl, Tanja S. Frey, Samuel M. Galvagno Jr., Edward R. Garcia, Jonathan D. Gates, Cosmin Gauran, Brian J. Gelfand, Simon Gelman, Alexander C. Gerhart, Peter Gerner, Omid Ghalambor, Christopher J. Gilligan, Christian D. Gonzalez, Noah E. Gordon, William B. Gormley, Thomas J. Graetz, Wendy L. Gross, Amit Gupta, James P. Hardy, Seetharaman Hariharan, Miriam Harnett, Philip M. Hartigan, Joaquim M. Havens, Bishr Haydar, Stephen O. Heard, James L. Helstrom, David L. Hepner, McCallum R. Hoyt, Robert N. Jamison, Karinne Jervis, Stephanie B. Jones, Swaminathan Karthik, Richard M. Kaufman, Shubjeet Kaur, Lee A. Kearse Jr., John C. Keel, Scott D. Kelley, Albert H. Kim, Amy L. Kim, Grace Y. Kim, Robert J. Klickovich, Robert M. Knapp, Bhavani S. Kodali, Rahul Koka, Alina Lazar, Laura H. Leduc, Stanley Leeson, Lisa R. Leffert, Scott A. LeGrand, Patricio Leyton, J. Lance Lichtor, John Lin, Alvaro A. Macias, Karan Madan, Sohail K. Mahboobi, Devi Mahendran, Christine Mai, Sayeed Malek, S. Rao Mallampati, Thomas J. Mancuso, Ramon Martin, Matthew C. Martinez, J. A. Jeevendra Martyn, Kai Matthes, Tommaso Mauri, Mary Ellen McCann, Shannon S. McKenna, Dennis J. McNicholl, Abdel-Kader Mehio, Thor C. Milland, Tonya L. K. Miller, John D. Mitchell, K. Annette Mizuguchi, Naila Moghul, David R. Moss, Ross J. Musumeci, Naveen Nathan, Ju-Mei Ng, Liem C. Nguyen, Ervant Nishanian, Martina Nowak, Ala Nozari, Michael Nurok, Arti Ori, Rafael A. Ortega, Amy J. Ortman, David Oxman, Arvind Palanisamy, Carlo Pancaro, Lisbeth Lopez Pappas, Benjamin Parish, Samuel Park, Deborah S. Pederson, Beverly K. Philip, James H. Philip, Silvia Pivi, Stephen D. Pratt, Douglas E. Raines, Stephen L. Ratcliff, James P. Rathmell, J. Taylor Reed, Elizabeth M. Rickerson, Selwyn O. Rogers Jr., Thomas M. Romanelli, William H. Rosenblatt, Carl E. Rosow, Edgar L. Ross, J. Victor Ryckman, Mônica M. Sá Rêgo, Nicholas Sadovnikoff, Warren S. Sandberg, Annette Y. Schure, B. Scott Segal, Navil F. Sethna, Swapneel K. Shah, Shaheen F. Shaikh, Fred E. Shapiro, Torin D. Shear, Prem S. Shekar, Stanton K. Shernan, Naomi Shimizu, Douglas C. Shook, Kamal K. Sikka, Pankaj K. Sikka, David A. Silver, Jeffrey H. Silverstein, Emily A. Singer, Ken Solt, Spiro G. Spanakis, Wolfgang Steudel, Matthias Stopfkuchen-Evans, Michael P. Storey, Gary R. Strichartz, Balachundhar Subramaniam, Wariya Sukhupragarn, John Summers, Shine Sun, Eswar Sundar, Sugantha Sundar, Neelakantan Sunder, Faraz Syed, Usha B. Tedrow, Nelson L. Thaemert, George P. Topulos, Lawrence C. Tsen, Richard D. Urman, Charles A. Vacanti, Francis X. Vacanti, Joshua C. Vacanti, Assia Valovska, Ivan T. Valovski, Mary Ann Vann, Susan Vassallo, Anasuya Vasudevan, Kamen V. Vlassakov, Gian Paolo Volpato, Essi M. Vulli, J. Matthias Walz, Jingping Wang, James F. Watkins, Maxwell Weinmann, Sharon L. Wetherall, Mallory Williams, Sarah H. Wiser, Zhiling Xiong, Warren M. Zapol, Jie Zhou
- Edited by Charles Vacanti, Scott Segal, Pankaj Sikka, Richard Urman
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- Book:
- Essential Clinical Anesthesia
- Published online:
- 05 January 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2011, pp xv-xxviii
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