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Performing Hybridity May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, editors |
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A kaleidoscopic consideration of transnational culture and performance. Amid the modern-day complexities of migration and exile, immigration and repatriation, notions of stable national identity give way to ideas about cultural "hybridity." The authors represented in this volume use different forms of performative writing to question this process, to ask how the production of new political identities destabilizes ideas about gender, sexuality, and the nation in the public sphere. Hybridity as it is rendered in this volume acquires its power by rearticulating and inventing narratives of origin, place, displacement, arrival, culture, transit, and identity. Rather than creating new genres or styles that might seem to reflect a hybrid aesthetic, the contributors use familiar forms such as the theoretical essay, poem, photo essay, and case study. They examine historically specific cases in which the notion of hybridity recasts our ideas of identity and performance: the struggle for Aboriginal land rights in Australia, Bahian carnival, the creolization and pidginization of language in the Caribbean world, queer videos, and others. These works make links across historical, geographical, and linguistic lines and demonstrate the overarching concerns, claims, and hopes embedded in ideas of hybridity that impinge on everyday life. Languages and practices collide in these pages, erupt through the surface of the text, and stage their intranslatability, pointing the way to new possibilities for understanding hybridity. "Performing Hybridity brings together a collection of poems, essays, case studies and photographic works in the fields of performance studies and cultural studies that examine instances in which the notion of hybridity challenges ideas of identity and performance. Contributors such as Toby Miller, Fiona Foley, Shani Mootoo, Celeste Olalquiaga and Fred Moten provide a sampling of how artists are articulating new hybrid identities as a way of rethinking questions of identity, sexuality, social agency and national affiliation. Highlights of the book include Robert Stam's fashioning of the 'aesthetics of garbage' as they relate to Brazilian cinema as well as Jose Esteban Munoz's complex reading of Richard Fung's autoethnographic videos. Performing Hybridity establishes an important mise-en-scene for the shifting notions of hybridity and its implications for the production of knowledge." —Parachute Contributors: Meena Alexander, Awam Amkpa, Tony Birch, Barbara Browning, Manthia Diawara, Fiona Foley, Sikivu Hutchinson, Deborah A. Kapchan, Toby Miller, Shani Mootoo, Fred Moten, José Esteban Muñoz, Chon A. Noriega, Celeste Olalquiaga, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam. May Joseph is assistant professor of performance studies at New York University. Jennifer Natalya Fink is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute and adjunct professor of drama at New York University. 256 pages | 17 black-and-white photos | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1999 |
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$26.00 paper