Performing Ethnicity Performing Gender

Performance and performativity are important terms for a theorization of gender and race/ethnicity as constitutive of identity. This collection reflects the ubiquity, diversity, and (historical) locatedness of ethnicity and gender by presenting contributions by an array of international scholars who focus on the representation of these crucial categories of identity across various media, including literature, film, documentary, and (music) video performance. The first section, "Political Agency," stresses instances where the performance of ethnicity/gender ultimately aims at a liberating effect leading to more autonomy. The second section, "Diasporic Belonging," explores the different kinds of negotiations of ethnic performances in multi-ethnic contexts. The third part, "Performances of Ethnicity and Gender" scrutinizes instances of the combined performance of ethnicity and gender in novels, films, and musical performances. The last section "Cross-Ethnic Traffic" contains a number of contributions that are concerned with attempts at crossing over from "one ethnicity into another" by way of performance.

This innovative volume compels readers to re-think the notions of performance, performing, and (non)performativity in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Given these multi-faceted ways of thinking about “performance” and its complicated manifestations throughout the pandemic, this volume is organised into umbrella topics that focus on three of the most important aspects of identity for cultural and intercultural studies in this historical moment: language; race/gender/sexuality; and the digital world. In critically re-thinking the meaning of “performance” in the era of COVID-19, contributors first explore how language is differently staged in the context of the global pandemic, compelling us to normalise an entirely new verbal lexicon. Second, they survey the pandemic’s disturbing impact on socio-political identities rooted in race, class, gender, and sexuality. Third, contributors examine how the digital milieu compels us to reorient the inside/outside binary with respect to multilingual subjects, those living with disability, those delivering staged performances, and even corresponding audiences. Together, these diverse voices constitute a powerful chorus that rigorously excavates the hidden impacts of the global pandemic on how we have changed the ways in which we perform identity throughout a viral crisis. This volume is thus a timely asset for all readers interested in identity studies, performance studies, digital and technology studies, language studies, global studies, and COVID-19 studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

This volume explores ways in which the literary trope of the palimpsest can be applied to ethnic and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. Based on contemporary theories of the palimpsest, the innovative chapters reveal hidden histories and uncover relationships across disciplines and seemingly unconnected texts. The contributors focus on diverse forms of the palimpsest: the incarceration of Native Americans in military forts and their response to the elimination of their cultures; mnemonic novels that rework the politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic; the urban palimpsests of Rio de Janeiro, Marseille, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles that reveal layers of humanity with disparities in origin, class, religion, and chronology; and the palimpsestic configurations of mythologies and religions that resist strict cultural distinctions and argue against cultural relativism.

Headscarves in schools. Ethnic gang rapists. Domestic violence in Indigenous communities. Polygamy. Sharia law. It seems that in public debates around the world, concerns about marginalised communities often revolve around issues of gender and women’s rights. Yet all too often, discussions about complex matters are reduced to simplistic debates such as “hijab: to ban or not to ban?” or “Muslim women: oppressed or liberated?”. This collection provides a space for in-depth analyses on the politics of gender, race and religion. As well as critical reflections on images and experiences of Muslim women, chapters also explore the relationships between gender, violence and protection, and offer innovative possibilities for intellectual and practical understandings at the intersection of gender, race and religion. Essential reading for scholars and students of gender and women’s studies, cultural studies, racial and ethnic studies, religious studies and an educated public interested in understanding the challenges and possibilities of tackling both racism and the oppression of women.

In this interdisciplinary study, Mónika Fodor explores how intergenerational memory narratives embedded in the speaker’s own stories impact ethnic subjectivity construction. Working with thematically selected life experiences from interviews conducted with second- and late-generation European Americans, Fodor demonstrates how the storytellers position themselves in a range of social, cultural, and political discourses to claim or disclaim ethnicity as part of their subjectivity. Tying narrative content, structural, and performance analysis to the sociological and sociolinguistic concepts of "symbolic capital" and "investment," Fodor unpacks the changing levels of identifying with one’s ancestral ethnic heritage and its potential to carry meaning for late-generation descendants. In doing so, she reveals the shared features of identification among individuals through narrative meaning-making, which may be the basis of real or imagined, heterolocal discourse community formation and sustained ethnic subjectivity. The narrative analysis demonstrates how the cohesive force among members of the community is the shared knowledge of story frames and the personalized retelling of these. Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives draws on inherited, often moving, personal experiences that offers new insights into the so far largely unexplored terrain of the narrative structure of intergenerationally transferred memory retellings, that will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, migration and identity studies.

This book explores the experiences of ethnic performers' in a small Chinese city. Introducing the concept of ‘intimacy as a lens’, the author examines intimate negotiations involving emotions, sense of self and relationships as a way of understanding wider social inequalities.

The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction argues that utopian science fiction written by European women has, since the seventeenth century, played an important role in exploring the racial and gender possibilities of the outer limits of the humanist imagination. This book focuses on six works of science fiction from the UK, France, Spain, and Italy: Jennifer Marie Brissett’s Elysium; Nicoletta Vallorani’s Sulla Sabbia di Sur and Il Cuore Finto di DR; Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe series; Elia Barcelo’s Consecuencias Naturales; and Historias del Crazy Bar, a collection of stories by Lola Robles and Maria Concepcion Regueiro. It sets these in conversation with key gender and critical race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam. It asserts that a key concern for feminism, anti- racism, and science fiction now is to seek inventive ways of returning to the question of the human in the context of increasing racial and gender divisions. Offering unique access to contemporary and historical women writers who have mobilised the utopian imagination to rethink the human, this book is of use to those conducting research in Gender Studies, Philosophy, History, and Literature.

Brings together texts in critical theory and shows how these texts can be used in the analysis of performance. Themed sections include decoding the sign; the politics of performance; the politics of gender and sexual identity; performing ethnicity; the performing body; the space of performance; audience and spectatorship; and the borders of performance--From publisher description.