the young people's professor

One of the easiest ways of answering the question “what is performance studies?” is by looking at actual dissertations that have come out of the field. Yesterday Dr. Jeffrey McCune, a graduate of Northwestern’s program, discussed performance studies’ relationship to Ethnic Studies disciplines such as African Diaspora Studies.

Following McCune’s cue, today’s performance studies alumni spotlight is on Beth Sarah Wright, a recent graduate out of the NYU camp. Beth received her B.A. in Sociology from Princeton University in 1995 and MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. She completed her PhD in Performance Studies in 2004 under the direction of Barbara Browning. Beth’s dissertation, based on several years of fieldwork in Jamaica, is a great example of an anthropologically informed study which is situated within an African diaspora/performance studies context. She is currently a professor at Spelman College where she direcs the African Diaspora Studies program.

Beth's dissertation “Emancipative Bodies: Woman, Trauma, and a Corporeal Theory of Healing in Jamaican Dancehall Culture” is the first ethnographic study of women in dancehall culture.

The dissertation critically examines how dance and the performance of the female body in contemporary Jamaican dancehall culture represents an emancipative process specifically addressing the effects of historical, insidious and personal forms of trauma. It addresses how these extremely explicit dances actually negotiate and endeavor to "heal" the contemporary effects of political and economic disenfranchisement, personal traumas, as well as persistent traumatic consequences of slavery. Dancehall's various dimensions collectively serve as effective tools in identity formation and social and economic empowerment for a historically alienated sector of society.

Chapter One gives a brief history of this popular cultural phenomenon. It raises a central paradox, that of women celebrating their bodies to lyrics that scream violence about their bodies. It contextualises the dancehall space as having a history of resistive practices. Chapter Two introduces the concept of trauma, defining trauma on three levels, personal insidious and historical. It also describes how trauma informs what these bodies know or their corporeal epistemology. Chapter Three explores how trauma is addressed and how healing occurs through the unique dance forms of dancehall culture. The concept of emancipation is clarified in this chapter and is primarily achieved through the de-colonization of the body. Chapter Four is a compilation of interviews of women who participate in dancehall. Through their narratives they give tangible examples and situations of emancipative experiences as a result of the dancehall. Their experiences also bleed into their everyday lives outside the immediate context of the dancehall space. And finally, the dissertation analyses the vagina as a passageway of memory and healing as depicted in a series of dancehall docu-videos. The international distribution of these videos raises questions about whether these videos perpetuate stereotypical images of black women's bodies as hypersexual or whether dancehall culture is unique in its healing capacities to Jamaican women.

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.

Posted by the young people's professor on 3/26/2007 at 9:33:00 PM | Permalink