Perf. Stud Grad Student Spotlight: SHANTE T. SMALLS
I first met Shante Smalls in my senior year of college in 2003 while we were both enrolled in a graduate course on black diaspora performance. Neither one of us really "belonged" to performance studies at the time----I was an undergrad majoring in English and she was an M.A. student at the Gallatin School.*
Fast forward three years: Shante's a 2nd year PhD diva in NYU's department of Performance Studies where she has just started working on a dissertation on the politics of women in underground and queer hip hop. Like me, she's taking qualifying exams in a month under the tutelage of performance studies faculty Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong'o and Karen Shimakawa. Her other academic interests include pyschoanalysis, black popular music and culture, and ethnic/queer studies. She's a graduate of Smith College where she received her bachelor's degrees in English and Theatre.
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Outside of academia, she's well known as "Shante Paradigm", a founding member of the queer hip hop group BQE, one of the stars of the documentary film PICK Up the MIC and co-founder and curator of Peace Out East, New York City's annual queer hip hop festival (www.peaceouteast.com).
*Frank: "Shante, what is performance studies for you? How would you define the field for a general audience?"
Shante: "Performance Studies is an opportunity to examine performance, particularly music-related performance, through a critical and psycho-social lens. I'm invited to reflect on the sonic's work as both an imprint of specific geographical, identitarian, and temporal groupings and a cut into/through those various boundaries. Performance Studies takes seriously popular cultural work as a potential source of illuminating and radical means to subject formation. It's also just plain exciting and fun to study, think about and learn more about music, recording, the music industry, audiences, overground, underground and subcultures. "
Frank: "Right, and for you Performance Studies has a special relationship to the study of black popular music---ok, of course. What made you come to this field specifically? I remember that you were also admitted to major doctoral programs in English ---why Performance Studies over an English Ph.D.?"
Shante: "I think English was a conservative fall-back for me. I majored in English and Theatre as an undergraduate and am very invested in literature and literary theory, however, the main reason I pursued a Master's and then a Doctorate, was due to my years as a performer and wanting to have something more compelling and in-depth to say about music worlds. I don't regret leaving the false security of a "known" field. My training in Performance Studies and my own desire and interests have led me down more fruitful roads then I could have imagined. "
You can find Shante via her blog at shanteparadigm.blogspot.com
Category: What is Performance Studies?
The "what is performance studies?" series is intended as an online resource for scholars, popular audiences, and newcomers to the field.
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