Drama 582

Minoritarian Performance

In his 2008 monograph Cruising Utopia, performance and queer of color theorist José Esteban  Muñoz positions the term minoritarian “to index citizen-subjects who, due to antagonism within the social such as race, class, and sex, are debated within the majoritarian public sphere” (56). He writes that minoritarian performance is “both antinormative and critical of the state”; it also “transports us across symbolic space, inserting us in a coterminous time when we witness new formations within the present and the future” (56). 

This course surveys and interrogates minoritarian performance – that is artistic performances such as performance art, social practice works, dance, and theater that are in dialogue with the minoritarian public sphere.. Students will read critical theory and other texts attentive to minoritarian performance; attend and write about performance events centering minoritized artists (such as Black, Indigenous, Asian Diasporic, Latinx, Queer, Differently-Abled and/or Feminist artists); and make performance as theory, research, pedagogy and creative practice. 

A central course question is: How does theoretical, archival, and embodied engagement with minoritarian performance animate conversations among fields of Performance Studies, Ethnic Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre History, Art History, Critical Theory, Geography, and Public Policy? The course positions conversations between theorists and artists across topics including disidentifications, the burden of liveness, stillness, the afterlives of slavery, Afro-presentism, Afro-futurism, the the sonic, sensorium, grain of the voice, racial capitalism, Black feminism, intersectionality, refusal, racial care, disability justice, the neutral body, decoloniality, Brown sociality, queer of color critique, radical women of color, quietness, dreaming, utopian performatives, and trans, indigenous, and minoritarian futures. 

Link to syllabus.