1st Edition
American Cultures as Transnational Performance Commons, Skills, Traces
This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance.
Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word.
This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies
Content
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
1. INTRODUCTION
Birgit Bauridl, Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal, Pia Wiegmink
COMMONS
2. The San Francisco Opera House as a Music Theater Commons: Performing Heart of a Soldier Ten Years After 9/11
Nassim Winnie Balestrini
3. Performing Il/legibility: Staging Miscegenation in in Oroonoko and Inkle and Yarico on the late Eighteenth-Century Stage
Theresa Saxon
4. Absence and Cracks in Erica Mott’s Technopera 3 Singers
Andrea Zittlau
5. Transatlantic Musical Performances for American Indian Sovereignty in Late Cold War Central Europe
György Tóth
INTERVENTION I
6. Border Movement: Transnational Performance in Practice
Marina Barsy Janer, Caro Ley, Denise Uyehara, Pia Wiegmink, Andrea Zittlau
SKILLS
7. Performance Labor and Transnational Capitalism in Annie Proulx’ Barkskins
Leopold Lippert
8. Fugitive Voices: Artfulness, Performance, and ‘The Other’ in Advertisements for African and African American Fugitives in the Early National United States
Shaun Wallace
INTERVENTION II
9. Radical Time Travel: An Interview with Denise Uyehara
Pia Wiegmink and Andrea Zittlau
TRACES
10. #god im so glad i got to go: The Monster Ball’s Transnational Performances and Digital Traces
Katrin Horn
11. Theater of War: Reconstructing (Trans)national Affiliation and Performance Residue in a Divided City
Juliane Braun
12. Tracing, Erasing, and Recovering Spring Path: An Eighteenth-Century ‘Site of Memory’ in Olaudah Equiano’s Jamaica
Linda Sturtz
Biography
Katrin Horn is an assistant professor of American studies and Anglophone literatures and cultures at the University of Bayreuth.
Leopold Lippert is an assistant professor at the English Department at the University of Münster.
Ilka Saal is a professor of American literature at the University of Erfurt.
Pia Wiegmink is an assistant professor in the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz.
