Fall 2019 Courses

A. Pellegrini
PERF-GT 1000.001 (7565) – Mondays, 12:30pm to 3:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 612

Recitation Sections:
PERF-GT 1000.002 (7566) - Tuesdays, 1:00pm-2:30pm, Stern
PERF-GT 1000.003 (7567) - Tuesdays, 1:00pm-2:30pm, Holfeuer
PERF-GT 1000.004 (7567) - Tuesdays, 2:45pm-4:15pm, Carr

This course is designed to introduce students to the field of performance studies via examination of some of the foundational texts, tracing various genealogies of the field and considering its links to various disciplines/modes of inquiry (anthropology, theater studies, dance studies, gender studies, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, etc.).  What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it?  In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.

D. Taylor
PERF-GT 2406.001 (23902) – Mondays, 3:30pm to 6:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 612

This course explores the many ways in which politicians and state actors perform authority and truth, as well as they ways in which artists and activists use performance to make a social intervention.  We begin the course examining several theories about performance and politics (Brecht, Boal, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Rancière, Mouffe, Butler among others) and then focus on issues of agency, space, event, audience, gender, sexuality, and race both online and off in relation to major political events, movements, and contestations. In addition to examining political performances by politicians, we explore the work of major practitioners: the YES MEN, CADA, Reverend Billy, Anonymous, Zapatismo, and others. Video screenings and guest lectures will provide an additional dimension for the course. Students will post weekly reading responses and collaborate in the creation of a final, web-based project on some aspect (which we will decide as a group) of performance and politics.

F. Moten
PERF-GT 2616.001 (23903) – Tuesdays, 9:30am to 12:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 611

The development of performance studies methodologies based on interdisciplinary research paradigms (movement analysis, ethnomusicology, ethnography, history, oral history, orature, visual studies, ethnomethodology, among others) and the close reading and analysis of exemplary studies. Considers the conceptualization and design of research projects in the context of theoretical and ethical issues and in relation to particular research methods and writing strategies. Develops practical skills related to archival and library research; ethnographic approaches, including participant observation and interviewing; documentation and analysis of live performance; and analysis of documents of various kinds, including visual material. Readings address the history of ideas, practices, and images of objectivity, as well as of reflexive and interpretive approaches, relationships between science and art, and research perspectives arising from minoritarian and postcolonial experiences. Assignments include weekly readings, written responses to the readings, and exercises. Students are encouraged to bring projects to the course, especially ones that might develop into dissertations.

L. Harris
PERF-GT 2312.001 (7308) – Tuesdays, 12:30pm to 3:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 670

*Cross-listed with Art & Public Policy (Limited space)*

This course expands the methodological, theoretical, and discursive possibilities of situating culture and the arts in relation to the political, tracking this relationship in a transnational world. By privileging analytics from transnational feminism, critical race theory, disability discourse, and queer studies, this course specifically reimagines the issues of arts and politics in relation to questions of power and survival. However, rather than perpetuating a dominant discourse of art merely being resistant to the state, we aim to expand other narratives and analytics that seek to complicate not only the political, but also the aesthetic.

This course will first establish working definitions of aesthetic theory and practice and political discourse. While tracking shifts in visual art in relation to performance, social practice, and the intermedial, we will also find grounding in concepts from political economy like neoliberalism, biopolitics, and Marxism. By doing so, we will establish methodological approaches to how we analyze legal texts, policy documents, art objects, and moving bodies. From this theoretical and practical grounding in arts and politics, we then engage different legal, “material” sites – including but not limited to native sovereignty, immigration, citizenship/personhood, “War on Terror,” intellectual property, and labor. We will ask what analyses of culture and art reveal about such sites. In offering multiple texts, the goal is for us to track intellectual conversations that are occurring across disciplines and fields. In situating art in relation to theory and legal cases, we will examine and destabilize the disciplinary boundaries around what we take/privilege to be fact, truth, ephemera, and merely interesting. By looking at legal cases and theory, critical theory, and cultural production, our meetings will study what it means to critique the law from a “left/progressive” standpoint(s), seeking to challenge the liberal frames that inform many of our normative claims. What are the limits of both politics and art in describing and addressing bodily injury, pain, and power?  The artworks we will draw from come from the Global South, along with Europe and the US. Theorists include Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Saba Mahmood, Sue Schweik, Mel Chen, Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, Shannon Jackson, Giorgia Agamben, Jasbir Puar, Dean Spade, Hannah Arendt, and Mark Rifkin, amongst others.

B. Browning
PERF-GT 2804.001 (24499) – Tuesdays, 4:30pm to 7:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 613

This course will explore the notion of fetish in the three ways in which it is most typically invoked: to refer to an object with performative power, be it through magic, through commodification, or through sexual displacement. In an ethnographic context, the term fetish is often understood as a derogatory one, indicating a naïve belief in the animation of objects. But it was precisely the model of animated objects, which allowed for Marx and Freud to elaborate theories of the role of objects, which we often take for, granted. Rather than “applying” Marxist and psychoanalytic theory to objects often examined in an ethnographic context, we will go in the other direction, looking at the objects themselves as theoretical lenses through which to reconsider Marx and Freud, and the later theoretical extensions they generated. Specifically, we’ll look at minkisi, central African object poems, and their diasporic reformations (particularly “voodoo dolls”) in order to rearticulate, with as much specificity as we can, how it is that objects actually can, and do, make things happen.

Aside from close readings of objects, we’ll also be reading: Pietz, MacGaffey, Thompson, Hurston, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Freud, Lacan, Grosz, McCallum, Winnicott, Marx, Baudrillard, Taussig, Appadurai, Pels, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Nyong’o, and Mercer.

M. Jose Contreras
PERF-GT 2122.001 (23904) – Wednesdays, 9:30am to 12:15pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 612

This course will ask what it means to do research through art practice and will explore how to design and develop a project according to methodologies of art practice as research. In the current global landscape of academy, methodologies of performative research constitute an innovate way that has the potential to trigger radical challenges to the paradigms of knowledge-making in the academy. Art practice as Research problematizes the binary of theoretical and practical knowledge by bridging different kinds of knowledge upon a common research question. Following Borgdorff’s (2012) conceptualization, the course will critically debate and creatively explore what is the nature of the object in research in the arts, in what ways it differs from scholarly and scientific research, what research methods are appropriate to developing art-practice-as-research, and which are the best modes of disseminating the knowledges generated through art practice.  In coherence with the epistemology of art practice as research, this course aims to dislocate a strict distinction between theory and practice. We will use practical creativity as reflexive enquiry and learn to navigate in the in-between of action and discourse. Classes will propose diverse activities from seminar sessions devoted to discussing canonic texts of art practice as research in order to gain acquaintance with the epistemological and political framework of artistic research, to practical exercises to elicit embodied and creative reflections on the topics of the course and also studio work in small groups aimed to design and develop a brief art practice as research pilot project. 

P. Clough
PERF-GT 2100.001 (23905) – Wednesdays 12:30 - 3:15pm
4 points - 721 Broadway, Room 612

Act made its author, Fredric Jameson, one of the most publicly recognized Marxist cultural/literary critics of the time. In this course we will begin with Jameson’s text, to raise questions about its assumptions and conclusions and to evaluate the cultural turn in Marxist thought in terms of the present moment. Drawing on various psychoanalytic texts as well as contemporary texts of cultural criticism, we will ask about the function fulfilled by the concept of the unconscious in the question of the political and the concept of the political in the question of the unconscious.  Or to put it another way: What today is political unconscious and how does performance serve as an answer to this question?

J. Puar
PERF-GT 2218.001 (23908) – Wednesdays, 4:55pm to 7:55pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 613

This course will focus on Americanist approaches to scholarship, solidarity, and performance on Palestine. We will situate Palestine not as external to the US but rather an integral part of American settler colonialism and the functioning of US empire. We will read from the fields of settler colonial studies, native studies, Black studies, Middle East studies, postcolonial studies, and from the literatures on neoliberalism, humanitarian aid, biopolitics, and securitization. Readings include work from Noura Erakat, Andrew Ross, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Nick Estes, Alex Lubin,  Lisa Bhungalia, Helga Tawil-Souri, Decolonize This Place, Ali Abunimah, and others. 

This course will meet with Professor Lisa Duggan's seminar on the same topic in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. We will be inviting speakers to the class approximately every other week. 

A. Vazquez
PERF-GT 2603.001 (23909) – Thursdays, 10:15am to 1:00pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 613

From the sound systems that shake loose its joints, to the moving rehearsals that make its carnaval comparsas, the new world thrums with activity from populations in search of aesthetic forms. The “new world” suggests rupture and continuity; it offers a mode of enriching our understandings of coloniality (ancient and current) and challenges the containing and comparative approaches of area studies. This course brings key readings and recordings from across the Americas into vitalizing assembly for performance study. We will channel under the new world’s conquest narratives, play inside novels and other literary forms, take in its bass and treble, and seek out aesthetics developed for staying alive (even and especially in translation) to cultivate how we imagine practice, tradition, and resistance in conditions of annihilation. As the course lives in a capacious sense of latinidad and blackness, we will investigate the productive pressure that performance puts on ontologies of identity such as Latina/o/x, African American, and West Indian. 

A. Pellegrini
PERF-GT 2219.001 (7636) – Thursdays, 2:00pm to 4:45pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 613

*Limited enrollment: Permission of instructor required is required to enroll.*

This course is organized around two keywords—“religion” and “affect”—and will make use of a series of legal cases (beginning with Reynolds v. United States, the Mormon “polygamy” case of 1878) and the dense history around them as a way to focus many of our units.  Religious freedom is the first named freedom in the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution, but its meaning, extension, and limits remain unsettled.   What is the relationship between disestablishment and free exercise, the two named components of religious freedom, and how are they linked, conceptually and in practice, to multiple norms of embodied life (including the embodied life of affect)?  How to reconcile promises of religious freedom with the Christonormativity that is the baseline of U.S.law and public life?   Readings will be drawn from critical studies of religion and secularism, legal studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, research on the history of emotion as well as recent work in affect studies.  Although the class is primarily focused on the United States, over the course of the semester we will also consider how U.S. models of religious freedom travel globally.

A. Pellegrini
PERF-GT 2504.001 (7634) – Fridays, 12:00pm to 2:45pm
4 pts – 721 Broadway, Room 612

This seminar is concerned with conjunctural moments in the history of dance modernism across the twentieth century, the critical and historical contextualization of which can provide the dance and performance scholar with the tools to align philosophical and political questions on dance and choreography with the demands of practical criticism. Conceptual areas to be covered include: conjuncture, tradition, law, populism, sovereignty, articulation, labor, public sphere, archive, indigeneity, nationalism and writing. Historical topic areas to be covered include: neoclassicism, folkloric dance, doctrinaire modernism, politically radical modern dance, Haitian dance, sixties minimalism, and the culture wars.