The Racial Reckoning in Art & Performance at Yale
Since July 2020, when the New York Times reported that the George Floyd protests could grow into the “largest movement in U.S. history,” many have begun to describe our current period as being one of “racial reckoning.” The widespread usage of the phrase, which sometimes belies a long history of struggle, does however suggest the potential for a shift in the way that history is lived today.
This project brings to bear the theories and methods of performance studies to address these and related questions. It is premised on the belief that studying the live arts and performance theory is crucial for grappling with the structural changes underway across a broad and transnational range of culture industries. This is the case not in spite but because of growing digital media saturation, which does not obviate but underscores the importance of the humanistic study of liveness and presence.
This project embarks from the language of public discourse, even as it seeks to question the assumptions embedded in that language, using the tools of critical analysis. The word “reckoning,” for instance, directs our attention towards practices of counting and calculation. It thus brings together, at least potentially, longstanding calls for reparations with emergent technologies of computation. Where do the arts fit within such a reckoning, with its emphasis on quantification? How might the history of race in performance be reconsidered in its light of such quantified approaches? Conversely, how might the still cresting rightwing backlash against historical ‘revisionism’ be understood through the lens of performance?
Through scholarship, dialogue, creative research (sometimes referred to as practice-based research) and institutional critique (sometimes referred to as social practice), this project brings together scholars and artists to focus on the following questions:
- Why a racial reckoning now, in the wake of a global pandemic, and amidst escalating climate catastrophe, socio-political authoritarianism, and war?
- Where in this reckoning is indigeneity as it overlaps and diverges from race?
- How has black social practice evolved since the 1980s? What new movement histories might be uncovered in the wake of the feminist, trans, and queer leadership in Black Lives Matter, and the centrality of artists and creatives in this movement?
- Conversely, how have the culture industries sought to coopt social movements through branding, sponsorship, and market segmentation?
- Is it possible to question in any way the dominant frameworks of reparation, repatriation, reckoning, and so forth, all of which imply restoring or making whole? What other epistemologies and ontologies of relationality could be opened by artist-led social and ecological engagement, that are less dependent upon a rhetoric of return?