Topics/Histories
THEA-UT 801-001 ~ 4 Credits
Tuesdays 9:30-12:15
Professor Sebastián Calderón Bentin
ssc7@nyu.edu
This course will explore the way governments draw from ritual, theater, and performance to legitimate and perpetuate their political authority. From monarchies to bourgeois democracies, across different geographical locations and historical periods, we will trace instances of states using theatricality and performance to naturalize authority, enact power, and manage populations. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with critical texts by Ernst Kantorowicz, Clifford Geertz, Louis Marin, Quentin Skinner, Wendy Brown, Antonio Gramsci, and Achille Mbembe, among others, we will trace how governments are not merely decorated but constituted through performance: ceremonies, rituals, and spectacles, both live and mediatized. Topics include political rites, the body politic, the King/President’s body, the fiction of the state, ideological state apparatuses, the colonial state, and governmentality, among others. The course will also look at artists who have used theater and film to problematize and question the state as a performative institution including works by William Shakespeare, Ant Farm, Harun Farocki, Aaron Landsman & Mallory Catlett, and Sierra Pettengill & Pacho Velez, among many others.