1st Edition

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic Haptic Allegories

By Kathleen Gough Copyright 2014
220 Pages
by Routledge

224 Pages
by Routledge

224 Pages
by Routledge

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in transnational, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements. Gough approaches her subject via five key "flashpoints" in... Read more

1. Introduction: Kinship, Performance and the Historical Real  2. Orientation: Slavery meets the Famine  3. The Image: Joan of Arc, Jim Crow, and the Irish Question  4. Between the Words: Syncopated Rhythm and Tender Mapping  5. Political Action: Kinship, Civil Rights, and Analog(ous) Troubles  6. What Fresh Ghost Is This?  Epilogue  Notes  Bibliography  Index

Biography

Kathleen M. Gough is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies and resident dramaturge in the Department of Theatre at the University of Vermont, USA.

Winner of the 2014 Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American theater

"Startlingly original [...] This invigorating critical and creative project is a challenge to scholars and artists to acknowledge and address the implications for ethical practice of gendered instabilities in archives, performance, and their multiplying interactions." 

- New Theatre Quarterly

"A novel addition to a field that demands novelty [...] Gough’ s insistence that we need to think differently about the actors of this history is necessarily coupled with a historical approach that can enable that type of reading. Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic is "a dramaturgy of the figure of woman in movement" that allows us to read "the figure of woman" as a social actor across time."

Theatre Survey

"Gough’s ambitious and evocative book offers new analytical engagements with the performance of gender, race, and identity among key Irish and African American figures from the 1850s through the present day [...] Serves as a reminder that archives, researchers, and history are in constant motion, and that awareness of changing relationships among them leads to new insights into past and present." 

Modern Drama  

"Gough’s sophisticated study relies on a range of theoretical ideas, reworking, for example, Richard Schechner’s "restoration of behavior" in order to rethink both the telos that Schechner implies, and his primary focus on the social actor, with Gough emphasizing instead that restoration of behavior "moves backward and forward in the archive."

- TDR: The Drama Review