Theater and Crisis: Myth, Memory, and Racial Reckoning in America, 1964-2020 (2024)

Just days after the George Zimmerman verdict, the Truth N Trauma (TNT) Theatre Ensemble, comprised entirely of African American actors, performed the devised piece The Only Way Out is the Way Through. Wearing a hoodie and holding a package of Skittles, the ensemble’s only male actor delivered a monologue that spoke eloquently about the threats that young black men face. By briefly embodying the figure Trayvon Martin, this performance interrogated the perceived dangers of black masculinity in order to reveal that the deadly violence levied against black men is not an aberration, but rather is the norm. This article seeks to locate the death of Trayvon Martin historically, tracking similarities in the murders and trials of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till. It then focuses on the monologue, interrogating its themes, its creation, and its effect in performance in order to discuss the multiple narratives surrounding black masculinity that emerge through it, narratives which speak truth to the dominant discourse that normalizes the murder of black boys. Finally, it demonstrates how theatre is an arena in which such divisive issues can be explored, deconstructed, and transformed into a vehicle for social change.

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as "hyperincarceration." It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as "the New Jim Crow" for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the "subtext of ongoing Black captivity" is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Advances in Applied Antrhropology, 2020

Political Protest Graffiti is an increasingly visible form of rhetoric that provides a democratizing space to enable its disenfranchised peoples to articulate their own narratives. As a form of visual activism, the George Floyd Protest Graffiti acts to historically document the tragic sentiment of the collective protest demonstration and testify to political and racial struggles in America. In this essay, I examine the George Floyd Protest Graffiti as a discursive site to analyze how emotions come into play in its production. With a rhetorical power to communicate ideas and influence public debate, I contend that the Floyd cultural graffiti production functions as a system of socio-cultural negotiations and a political call to arms to collapse structural racism in America.

TDR/The Drama Review, 2003

Theatre Research International, 2018

This book examines a series of contemporary plays where writers put theatre itself on stage. The texts examined variously dramatize how theatre falls short in response to the demands of violence, expose its implication in structures of violence—including racism and gender-based violence—and illustrate how it might effectively resist violence through reconfiguring representation. Case studies, which include Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present and Fairview, Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The Author, provide a range of practice-based perspectives on the question of whether theatre is capable of accounting for and expressing the complexities of structural and interpersonal violence as both lived in the body and borne out in society. The book will appeal to scholars and artists working in the areas of violence, theatre and ethics, witnessing, memory and trauma, spectatorship and contemporary dramaturgy, as well as to those interested in both the doubts and dreams we have about the role of theatre in the twenty-first century.Introduction: Staging the Role of Theatre, Performative Violence and Self-Reflexive Dramaturgy: A Study of Guillermo Calderón’s Kiss and Other Works “Touching Something Real”: The Critique of Historical and Theatrical Methodology in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present… The Ethics of Imagining Others: The Limits of “Performative Witness” in Michael Redhill’s Goodness and Erik Ehn’s ThistleStaging Rage: A Feminist Perspective on Theatrical Self-Reflexivity in Ella Hickson’s The Writer and Tim Crouch’s The AuthorMetatheatrical Dramaturgies of Reception: Mirroring the Audience in Ontroerend Goed’s Audience and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s FairviewConclusion

Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America , 2023

This is the introduction to my book, __Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in 'Postracial' America __ published by U Press of Mississippi, 2023Reading fictional narratives through political ones, I argue that during theeight years of Obama’s presidency, 2008–2016, and beyond, a variety of mediaplatforms, including film, television, news, and social media, turned whitenessinto a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace.These outlets propagated a narrative of whiteness under attack and did so inthe context and under the guise of progressive “postracial” film and television,including the most prominent postracial ruse of all—Obama’s presidency.

ojsprdap.vm.ku.edu

TDR/The Drama Review, 2004

Post-George Floydian Discourse: An opinion article On the BLM movement , 2020

“I can’t breathe!”, being George Floyd’s last words, will certainly chronicle the re-birth of American outcry for a true abolishment of “systemic racism” in American history. Since George’s tragic death, fifty states have witnessed anti-racist protests, without taking precautions of social distancing, allowing Covid-19 walk unseen amongst protesters. In my opinion, the prospect of the American experience , a melting pot society where different ethnicities “fit in” a social tapestry, is now being tested, and a universalized humanistic approach to law enforcement and police intervention is going to be integrated globally. If these measures are not implemented, history will repeat itself again. This is a discourse reading of the repercussions of the Floyd Event in the USA.

Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2020

TDR: The Drama Review, 2004

The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, 2019

In this article the authors make an argument for a critical race media literacy that is attuned to the ways in which popular media are used to adhere media consumers to a taken for granted US national identity. Using the concept of “black narrative commodities”, the article suggests that black pain and/or black visibility become filters through which black lives are brought into a nationalist framing. The article uses three popular media commodities to illustrate how how pain and visibility mask a nationalist agenda, including: (1) the videotaped killing of Eric Garner, (2) the book The New Jim Crow and the film 13th: An Original Netflix Documentary, and (3) the movie Black Panther. The authors suggest that critical media literacy absent a cogent and principled interrogation of the interplay between race, class, and the nation-State is incomplete.

Wake Forest University, 2020

Representation Matters is an utterance that is often evoked to uncover the ways globalized anti-blackness constructs forms of exclusion within media and culture. The phrase acts as a kind of perceptible measure for the assumed racial progress of civil society, as the presence of black bodies in powerful positions attempts to serve as verification that the horrors of slavery and genocide are simply the unfortunate effects of past mistakes rather than an enduring legacy of gratuitous violence. My thesis plans on analyzing how the visibility of racialized and gendered bodies, especially those made visible for entertainment, are intertwined within the ontometaphysically violent process of obliterating the Other, particularly the black nonbeing. My analysis hopes to unveil representation as a fraudulent measure for progress and examine representation as an epistemological tool that employs rhetorical arguments designed to fortify the anti-black logic that maintains civil society.My thesis will focus on how black representation within American popular culture is implicated within the politics of the archive, a collection of historical records, iconography, and documents which provides an assumed public memory and intimate insight on the inner workings of a place, institution, or group of people within an event. In addition, I reflect on critical fabulation as an in(ter)vention of the archive and representation. The practice of reimagining the black social life challenges the Western Canon of the archive which relegates the genealogy of black feminist epistemology into zones of death. My thesis will compare these narratives to demonstrate the ontological violence of the archive then use the process of critical fabulation to explain the radical potential of telling stories of black life in events of social death.

Journal for the History of Rhetoric, 2020

Television and New Media, 2020

During the uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, black hip-hop artist Killer Mike appeared on television to ask that people remain nonviolent and in their homes. Similar events took place years earlier. James Brown performed a live concert on WGBH to keep Boston peaceful following Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, both The Cosby Show and The Arsenio Hall Show were used to similar ends. These examples demonstrate the ways in which television has activated black identity to quell certain forms of civil rights protest and implicate televisual discourses of liveness, domesticity, and public service.