124267 AR Cultural/Media Studies 1/2 (AR) (2019W)

This class engages in the critical analysis of performance cultures as popular cultures in the United States, from the 18th century to the present day. We will begin by asking ourselves what it is that makes cultural practices popular, and we will discuss the challenges of studying and archiving performances, as they represent embodied practices of dis/appearance. Taking cues from scholarship on the aesthetic, cultural, social, anthropological, economic, and technological dimensions of performance and popular culture, we will discuss parameters such as the body, co-presence, physical movement, skill, affect, spectatorship, liveness, site-specificity, repeatability, textuality, and the archive. We will ask how close attention to these parameters can facilitate an understanding of the cultural work of popular performance practices, and well as of their political implications.

By way of example, we will look at a select number of popular U.S. American performance practices, past and present, and ask how these practices are entangled in political struggles concerning race, gender, sexuality, class, or the nation; how these practices negotiate the particular histories and localities of their enactment; what kinds of publics these practices invoke; and finally, how these practices circulate and how they have been archived—if at all.