Children’s Books, Dolls, and the Performance of Race; or, The Possibility of Children’s Literature

Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

Staging Lesbian and Gay New York

Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

Rodney King, Shifting Modes of Vision, and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

Toward the Integration of Theatre History and Affect Studies: Shame and the Rude Mechs’s The Method Gun

As affect studies has become increasingly central to performance studies and many other fields, a question has emerged: How can one historicize affect? This essay forges one answer through analysis of The Method Gun, a 2008 avant-garde theatrical piece created by the Austin-based company the Rude Mechs. The Method Gun simultaneously archives actors’ historically specific feelings of shame, and reveals shame as a motor that powers much contemporary theatre. The Method Gun singles out method-based realism as a site of special intensity in the production of shame. Because method-based realism is historically and geographically located and because shame is increasingly central to affect studies (and especially queer affect studies), method acting presents an extraordinary opportunity to historicize affect. Modern theatre history, then, is vital to the transdisciplinary project of thinking historically about affect.African and African American Studie

Utopian Movements: Nikki Giovanni and the Convocation Following the Virginia Tech Massacre

A seemingly impossible, utopian moment occurred on April 16, 2007 at the convocation following the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, in which student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and faculty members. Nikki Giovanni, a luminary of the Black Arts Movement and a professor at Virginia Tech, read her stirring poem, “We Are Virginia Tech,” to the capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum. At the poem’s conclusion, the full house rose cheering and chanted, “Let’s Go, Hokies.” In this context, the familiar sports chant “took on new meaning,” as one local newspaper noted. The chant became a poem. And the audience members became poets, performing in alliance with a black feminist poet. This essay argues that this transformation became possible despite Giovanni’s racially marked and gender-queer performance because of Giovanni’s poetic invocation of unity in the context of the physical space of the sports arena. Giovanni’s poem invented a “we” that drew upon what Marvin Carlson would call the “haunted” aspects of the sports arena. Unlike the “we” constituted through past performances of athletic events, however, Giovanni’s “we” had no “they.” This subtle but crucial twist enabled Giovanni’s performance to harness the power of the athletic “we” (a “we” that is, like collegiate sports, always racially saturated) while steering it definitively away from the insularity, racism, and xenophobia that so palpably threatened to overwhelm a campus that had just sustained a mass shooting by a man of color. Most significantly of all, the setting of the sports arena invited the restoration of gestures—standing, chanting, clapping—by which the audience performed utopia. Nikki Giovanni’s performance, and the audience’s physical response, ultimately enables a new understanding of utopian performance—one based not on audiences feeling, but on audiences moving.African and African American Studie

Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race

Proceeding from Robyn Wiegman's call for a transition from questions of "why" to "how" with regard to formations of race, this article proposes a heuristic, the "scriptive thing," to analyze ways in which racial subjectivation emerges through everyday physical engagement with the material world. The term scriptive thing integrates performance studies and "thing theory" by highlighting the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. A knife, a camera, and a novel all invite—indeed, create occasions for—repetitions of acts, distinctive and meaningful motions of eyes, hands, shoulders, hips, feet. These things are citational in that they arrange and propel bodies in recognizable ways, through paths of evocative movement that have been traveled before. I use the term script as a theatrical professional might, to denote not a rigid dictation of performed action but, rather, a necessary openness to resistance, interpretation, and improvisation. A "scriptive thing," like a play script, broadly structures a performance while unleashing original, live variations. Like the police in Louis Althusser's famous scenario, scriptive things leap out within a field, address an individual, and demand to be reckoned with. By answering a hail, by entering the scripted scenario, the individual is interpellated into ideology and thus into subjecthood. I conduct close readings of scriptive things, including a photograph of a light-skinned woman posing in about 1930 with a caricature of a young African American man, a set of twentieth-century arcade photographs, a viciously racist 1898 alphabet book by E. W. Kemble, and a black doll called "Uncle Tom" that was whipped in the 1850s by a white girl who would grow up to write best-selling children's books. These readings show how interpellation occurs through confrontations in the material world, through dances between people and things.Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

Toys Are Good for Us: Why We Should Embrace the Historical Integration of Children’s Literature, Material Culture, and Play

This manifesto argues that the field of children’s literature has, for too long, downplayed the historical relationship among children’s literature, toys, and play. If we desist from erecting arbitrary boundaries among these modes of cultural production, we stand to gain three benefits: we will better understand how children’s literature actually functions in the everyday lives of children; we will mitigate the “top, down” understanding of children’s literature that underestimates children’s agency; and we will hinge our field to disciplines and interdisciplines that already care about material culture and play—and thus we will expand our influence and power across the university.African and African American Studie

Mount Pinatubo, Inflammatory Cytokines, and the Immunological Ecology of Aeta Hunter-Gatherers

Early growth cessation and reproduction are predicted to maximize fitness under conditions of high adult mortality, factors that could explain the pygmy phenotype of many rainforest hunter-gatherers. This life-history hypothesis is elegant but contentious in part because it lacks a clear biological mechanism. One mechanism stems from the field of human immunological ecology and the concept of inflammation memory across the life cycle and into subsequent generations. Maternal exposures to disease can infl uence immunological cues present in breast milk; because maternal provisioning via lactation occurs during critical periods of development, it is plausible that these cues can also mediate early growth cessation and small body size. Such epigenetic hypotheses are difficult to test, but the concept of developmental programming is attractive because it could explain how the stature of a population can change over time, in terms of both secular increases and rapid intergenerational decreases. Here we explore this concept by focusing on the Aeta, a population of former hunter-gatherers, and the Ilocano, a population of rice farmers. We predicted that Aeta mothers would produce breast milk with higher concentrations of four bioactive factors due to high infectious burdens. Further, we predicted that the concentrations of these factors would be highest in the cohort of women born in the early 1990s, when exposure to infectious disease was acute following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991. We analyzed levels of adiponectin, C-reactive protein, and epidermal growth factor in the milk of 24 Aeta and 31 Ilocano women and found no detectable differences, whereas levels of transforming growth factor-β2 were elevated among the Aeta, particularly as a function of maternal age. We found no difference between cohorts divided by the volcanic eruption (n = 43 born before, n = 12 born after). We discuss the implications of our findings for the terminal investment hypothesis and we suggest that the historical ecology of the Aeta is a promising model system for testing epigenetic hypotheses focused on the evolution of small body size

Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.

Other Research UnitAfrican and African American Studie

Growth and Morbidity of Gambian Infants are Influenced by Maternal Milk Oligosaccharides and Infant Gut Microbiota.

Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) play an important role in the health of an infant as substrate for beneficial gut bacteria. Little is known about the effects of HMO composition and its changes on the morbidity and growth outcomes of infants living in areas with high infection rates. Mother's HMO composition and infant gut microbiota from 33 Gambian mother/infant pairs at 4, 16, and 20 weeks postpartum were analyzed for relationships between HMOs, microbiota, and infant morbidity and growth. The data indicate that lacto-N-fucopentaose I was associated with decreased infant morbidity, and 3'-sialyllactose was found to be a good indicator of infant weight-for-age. Because HMOs, gut microbiota, and infant health are interrelated, the relationship between infant health and their microbiome were analyzed. While bifidobacteria were the dominant genus in the infant gut overall, Dialister and Prevotella were negatively correlated with morbidity, and Bacteroides was increased in infants with abnormal calprotectin. Mothers nursing in the wet season (July to October) produced significantly less oligosaccharides compared to those nursing in the dry season (November to June). These results suggest that specific types and structures of HMOs are sensitive to environmental conditions, protective of morbidity, predictive of growth, and correlated with specific microbiota