Minoritarian Performance:

This course surveys minoritarian aesthetics through performance practices such as performance art, theatre, dance and social practice. 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).   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, Afro-presentism, the the sonic, sensorium, grain of the voice, racial capitalism, Black feminism, intersectionality, inscrutability, minor archives and repertoires, refusal, abolition and carceral aesthetics, disability justice, the neutral body, decoloniality, Brown sociality, queer of color critique, radical women of color, quietness, dreaming, and trans, indigenous, and minoritarian futures.