Drama 587 – Seminar in Dramatic Theory

This seminar takes as its starting point Jean and John Comaroff’s provocative book Theory From The South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa.  The Comaroffs ask, “What if . . . in the present moment, it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?”  From this, we might ask: How are the operations of neoliberal global capitalism manifest in the realm of performance in disparate sites in the Global South? What new futures, presents and pasts are being imagined, rehearsed, enacted and performed there?  While history for so long treated the Global South as lagging behind in Enlightenment teleologies of progress, might we now be seeing a reversal in which the global south has become the vanguard? Readings will include recent works in theater and performance studies by scholars such as, Rustom Bharucha, Leo Cabranes-Grant, David Donkor, Megan Lewis, Diana Looser, Jisha Menon, Margaret Werry and others.