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82-623: His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies . His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity , was published by NYU Press in 2009. Muñoz was Professor in, and former Chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University 's Tisch School of

164-464: A performance and aesthetics lens, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning queer futures that stem from minoritarian subject experiences. The study of queer sociability has expanded beyond the fields of Performance Studies , Queer Theory , and Gender and Women's Studies and has been used by various scholars to address issues of Black Diaspora Studies , Caribbean Studies , and musicology , and has also led to

246-743: A B.A. in Comparative Literature. In 1994, he completed his doctorate from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University , where he studied under the tutelage of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick . He wrote about artists, performers, and cultural figures including Vaginal Davis , Nao Bustamante , Carmelita Tropicana , Isaac Julien , Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas , Kevin Aviance , James Schuyler , Richard Fung , Basquiat , Pedro Zamora , and Andy Warhol . His work

328-515: A BA in drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Richmond University , London also offers a BA in Performance and Theatre Arts. The University of Plymouth has offered a BA in Theatre & Performance since the early 1990s; its postgraduate research programme (ResM and MPhil/PhD) specialises in performance studies. The University of Warwick also offers a BA in Theatre and Performance Studies, in addition to leading Postgraduate programmes. More recently,

410-665: A Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award (2018). He has served on numerous editorial boards including American Quarterly , Callaloo , Social Text , and Discourse . He has served on advisory boards for Issues in Critical Investigation at Vanderbilt University , the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine, and was on the board of directors of

492-562: A MA program in performance studies, which focus on redefining methodologies of cultural studies and research on the basis of the nuances of performance studies. It is formulating the first Practice based PhD in the country and working extensively in the realm of Practice-as-Research. On the similar lines, the Centre for Performance Research and Cultural Studies in South Asia (CPRACSIS), Kerala have organized series of workshops and seminars over

574-423: A branch of performance ethnography that centered the political nature of the practice and advocated for methodological dialogism from the point of encounter to the practices of research reporting. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has contributed an interest in tourist productions and ethnographic showmanship to the field, Judd Case has adapted performance to the study of media and religion, Diana Taylor has brought

656-489: A degree in economics . His interest in sociopolitical discourse, the work of Noam Chomsky , civic outreach, and political activism led him away from his studies. At the end of his first year, Moten was required to take a year leave. During this time, he worked as a janitor at the Nevada Test Site , wrote poetry, and discovered the works of T. S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad , among many others. His return to Harvard

738-420: A devoted research project conducted at the University of Bristol between 2001 and 2006, offers a number of inspiring articles and portraits of such research projects and was key for a breakthrough of using creative thinking within this subject field. Performance studies has been charged as an emerging discipline. As an academic field it is difficult to pin down; which could be the nature of the field itself or it

820-468: A focus on practice lead to research methodologies and theories beyond theatre or literature in relation to or in service of understanding performance. For more information on the different origins and disciplinary traditions of performance studies see Shannon Jackson's book Professing Performance and the introductory chapter in Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer's Teaching Performance Studies . In

902-499: A hemispheric perspective on Latin American performance and theorized the relationship between the archive and the performance repertoire, while Corinne Kratz developed a mode of performance analysis that emphasizes the role of multimedia communication in performance. Laurie Frederik argues for the importance of ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base in anthropological perspective. An alternative origin narrative stresses

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984-443: A marriage ceremony. For any of these performative utterances to be felicitous, per Austin, they must be true, appropriate and conventional according to those with the proper authority: a priest, a judge, or the scholar, for instance. Austin accounts for the infelicitous by noting that "there will always occur difficult or marginal cases where nothing in the previous history of a conventional procedure will decide conclusively whether such

1066-478: A master and ph.d. degree in "performance design", focusing on subjects such as theatrical performances, live music, festivals, and urban performances. In Germany University of Hamburg offers a master program in performance studies at the centre for performance studies run by Gabriele Klein . The Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Bremen offers a certificate in performance studies focussing on

1148-485: A minority (e.g. queer people of color ), negotiate identity in a majoritarian world that punishes and attempts to erase the existence of those who do not fit the normative subject (i.e. heterosexual , cisgender , white , middle class , male ). Muñoz notes how queer people of color, as a result of the effects of colonialism , have been placed outside dominant racial and sexual ideology, namely white normativity and heteronormativity . In his own words, "disidentification

1230-412: A procedure is or is not correctly applied to such a case". The possibility of failure in performatives (utterances made with language and the body) is taken up by Butler and is understood as the "political promise of the performative". Her argument is that because the performative needs to maintain conventional power, convention itself has to be reiterated, and in this reiteration it can be expropriated by

1312-438: A queer futurity. Muñoz develops an argument for queerness as horizon, hope, and futurity. According to Fred Moten , "Jose's queerness is a utopian project whose temporal dimensionality is manifest not only as projection into the future but also as projection of a certain futurity into and onto the present and the past." Muñoz theorizes chusmeria or chusma, as a form of behavior that is in excess of normative comportment. Chusmeria

1394-610: A road map or toolkit to point us in the direction of the gap, wound, or hole of displacement as a necessary condition for interpretation to take place." After his death, a special issue of the journal Boundary 2 , themed "The Beauty of José Esteban Muñoz", was published. The journal featured pieces from various scholars influenced by Muñoz including Juana María Rodríguez , Fred Moten , Daphne Brooks , Elizabeth Freeman , Jack Halberstam , and Ann Cvetkovich . The issue covered themes related to Muñoz's contribution to various academic fields such as queer of color critique, affect studies, and

1476-430: A survival strategy. Through disidentification, the disidentifying subject is able to rework the cultural codes of the mainstream to read themselves into the mainstream, a simultaneous insertion and subversion. By the mode of disidentification, queer subjects are directed towards the future. Through the use of shame and "misrecognition through failed interpellation , queer collectivity neither assimilates nor strictly opposes

1558-666: Is cultural performance , which includes events that occur in everyday life, in which a culture's values are displayed for their perpetuation: rituals such as parades, religious ceremonies, community festivals, controversial storytelling, and performances of social and professional roles, and individual performances of race, gender, sexuality and class are all considered a form of cultural performance. The oldest roots of performance studies are in elocution , sometimes referred to as declamation . This early approach to public speech delivery focused on verbal diction, physical gestures, stance, tone, and even dress. A revival of its practices during

1640-416: Is gay rights , same-sex marriage , and gays in the military , are trapped within the limiting normative time and present. Following Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Hope , Muñoz is interested in the socially symbolic dimension of certain aesthetic processes that promote political idealism . Muñoz re-articulates queerness as something "not yet here." Queerness "is that thing that lets us feel that this world

1722-754: Is "a form of behavior that refuses bourgeois comportment and suggests Latinos should not be too black, too poor, or too sexual, among other characteristics that exceed normativity." Queer theorist Deborah Vargas uses chusmeria to inform her theory of lo sucio , "the dirty, nasty, and filthy" of society. In the Muñozian sense, "lo sucio" persistently lingers as the "yet to be". Muñoz began to theorize on brown affect in his piece "Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect" in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) . In this article, Muñoz wanted to focus on ethnicity, affect, and performance in order to question

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1804-761: Is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside ; he previously taught at Duke University , and the University of Iowa . His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney , In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition , and The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018). He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges , The Feel Trio , B Jenkins , and Hughson's Tavern . In 2020, Moten

1886-407: Is a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth." Reflecting on his old neighborhood, Moten recalled: "I grew up around people who were weird. No one's blackness was compromised by their weirdness, and by

1968-502: Is a collective mapping of self and others. The turn from identity to affect resulted in Muñoz's conceptualization of the "Brown Commons" as the key point in which race is experienced as a feeling, as an affective specificity. Licia Fiol-Matta describes Jose's "Cubanity" as a "disidentity, a feeling brown, part of a brown undercommons and as an artistic manifestation of the sense of brown." With Latinidad as an affective difference, "José gave us

2050-411: Is a cornerstone in the field for staging narrative texts, though it remains controversial in its assertions about the place of narrative details in chamber productions. Breen is also regarded by many as a founding theorist for the discipline, along with advocate Louise Rosenblatt. More recently, performance theorist and novelist Barbara Browning has suggested that narrative fiction itself—and particularly

2132-412: Is a literary and queer cultural theory that combines elements of utopianism , historicism , speech act theory , and political idealism in order to critique the present and current dilemmas faced by queer people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the death drive in queer theory . Queer futurity or "queer sociability" addresses themes and concerns of minoritarian subjects through

2214-404: Is about managing and negotiating historical trauma and systemic violence." The disidentificatory subject does not assimilate (identify) nor reject (counter identify) dominant ideology. Rather, the disidentificatory subject employs a third strategy, and, "tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against, a cultural form." Aside from being a process of identification, disidentification is also

2296-593: Is an interdisciplinary academic field that teaches the development of performance skills and uses performance as a lens and a tool to study the world. The term performance is broad, and can include artistic and aesthetic performances like concerts, theatrical events, and performance art ; sporting events; social, political and religious events like rituals, ceremonies, proclamations and public decisions; certain kinds of language use; and those components of identity which require someone to do, rather than just be, something. Performance studies draws from theories and methods of

2378-824: Is indebted to the work of Chicana feminists : Gloria Anzaldúa , Cherríe Moraga , Chela Sandoval , and Norma Alarcón , members of the Frankfurt School of critical thinkers such as Ernst Bloch , Theodor Adorno , and Walter Benjamin , and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger . Muñoz died in New York City in December 2013. At the time of his death, Muñoz was working on what would have been his third book, The Sense of Brown: Ethnicity, Affect and Performance, to be published by Duke University Press . In addition to his two single authored books, Muñoz co-edited

2460-608: Is influenced by Muñoz's Sense of Brown and Counterpublics. For Muñoz, spics are epithets linked to questions of affect and excess affect. Ibarra's performances of "la Virgensota Jota" and "La tortillera" are ways to re-inhabit toxic languages for the purpose of remapping the social or what Muñoz described as disidentificatory performances. Muñoz has seminal influence on many American scholars and artists, among them Robert McRuer, Roderick Ferguson , Daphne Brooks , Nadia Ellis, Juana María Rodríguez , Deborah Paredez , and Ann Cvetkovich . Performance studies Performance studies

2542-561: Is not enough." Muñoz reconceptualizes queerness from identity politics and brings it into the field of aesthetics . For Muñoz, queer aesthetics, such as the visual artwork of Vaginal Davis , offers a blueprint to map future social relations. Queerness in Muñoz's conceptualization, is a rejection of "straight time", the "here and now" and an insistence of the "then and there." Muñoz proposes the concept of "disidentificatory performances," as acts of transgression and creation, by which racial and sexual minorities, or minoritarian subjects articulate

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2624-521: Is still too young to tell. In either case, many academics have been critical of its instability. There are, however, numerous degree-granting programs that train researchers being offered by universities. Some have referred to it as an "inter discipline" or a "post discipline." Scholars in today's field of performance studies may trace their roots to a number of other fields such as elocution, interpretation, theatre, anthropology, and speech communication. According to Diana Taylor , "what they have in common

2706-546: Is the idea of educated hope, "which is both critical affect and methodology." Jack Halberstam in the book In a Queer Time & Place, discusses the role of drag king culture as a form of counterpublics that validate and produce "minoritarian public spheres" at the same time they challenge white heteronormativity. Examples of counterpublics includes visual performances like Xandra Ibarra "La Chica Boom" spictacles, Vaginal Davis , and Cuban activist and The Real World: San Francisco cast-member Pedro Zamora . Queer futurity

2788-572: Is their shared object of study: performance—in the broadest possible sense—as a process, praxis, and episteme, a mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world." Richard Schechner states that performance studies examine performances in two categories, the first being artistic performance , marked and understood as art. This includes solo-performance, performance art, performance of literature, theatrical storytelling, plays, and performance poetry. Artistic performance considers performance as an art form. The second category

2870-411: Is wary of Brecht's theory, as it doesn't seem to consider the work of artists of color and also ignores the use of humor as a didactic and political project. Muñoz argues that the work of queer artists of color is political and will remain political as long as the logic of dominant ideology exists. In Disidentifications, drawing from Nancy Fraser's notion of "counterpublics," which she states "contest

2952-650: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York . As of September 2018, Moten is professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he teaches courses in Black studies, poetics, music and critical race theory. One of his most well-known works is a series of essays he published with Stefano Harney in a book called The Undercommons . Throughout these works he criticizes academia's drive to professionalize

3034-677: The Deep South to seek new prospects in the northern and western parts of the country. His parents were originally from Louisiana and Arkansas , and after resettling in Las Vegas, his father found employment at the Las Vegas Convention Center (and later worked for Pan American Airlines ), and his mother worked as a grade school teacher. Moten enrolled in Harvard University in 1980 hoping to pursue

3116-558: The Guildford School of Acting has offered a BA in Theatre and Performance. Part of the conservatoire, the course focused on investigating performance practically, with strong emphasis on the idea of Practice as Research . The programme was led by Dr Laura Cull, founder of the now multinational Centre for Performance Philosophy ; a new strand of performance studies which attempts to develop the relationship between philosophy and performance. In Denmark Roskilde University offers

3198-800: The HIV/AIDS crisis forged new relationships of temporality . The exhibit, which ran from June 5 to June 24 at La Mama Galleria, featured works from Nao Bustamante , Carmelita Tropicana , Benjamin Fredrickson, and more. Muñoz's disidentification theory has also influenced other thinkers in the field. In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer, draws on Muñoz's theory of disidentification to articulate and imagine "collective disidentifications" made possible when putting queer and crip theory in conversation. Diana Taylor , Ann Cvetkovich , Roderick Ferguson , and Jack Halberstam have cited and applied Muñoz to their own work. Muñoz

3280-652: The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill , and Washington University in St. Louis . Texas A&M University 's Department of Performance Studies is unique in including both Music and Theatre degree programs. In the United Kingdom Aberystwyth University offers a degree scheme in performance studies with highly acclaimed performance artists such as Mike Pearson, Heike Roms and Jill Greenhalgh. The University of Roehampton in London offers

3362-448: The 1996 issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. The idea that performance is ephemeral is essential to the field of performance studies . In this essay, Muñoz claims that ephemera does not disappear. Ephemera in the Muñozian sense, is a modality of "anti-rigor" and "anti-evidence" that reformulates understandings of materiality . Building on Raymond Williams ' concept of "structures of feeling", Muñoz claims that

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3444-926: The Arts . Muñoz was the recipient of the Duke Endowment Fellowship (1989) and the Penn State University Fellowship (1997). He was also affiliated with the Modern Language Association , American Studies Association , and the College Art Association . Muñoz was born in Havana , Cuba, in 1967, shortly before relocating with his parents to the Cuban exile enclave of Hialeah, Florida, the same year. He received his undergraduate education at Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 where he received

3526-653: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The photograph depicts a nude African American girl, posed as Venus. Saidiya Hartman discusses the photograph as well, in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheava l. In May 2024, Moten gave a keynote lecture at an academic conference: "Jews and Black Theory: Conceptualizing Otherness in the Twenty-First Century," held at Harvard University. "Black studies

3608-485: The U.S. national affect and highlight the affective struggles that keep minoritarian subjects from accessing normative identity politics. Muñoz's undertaking was to move beyond notions of ethnicity as "what people are" and instead understand it as a performative "what people do." Muñoz describes how race and ethnicity are to be understood as "affective" differences. Affective differences are the "ways in which different historically coherent groups 'feel' differently and navigate

3690-589: The United States, the interdisciplinary and multi-focus field has spread to Columbia , Brown , UCLA , UCI , UC Berkeley , and elsewhere. Undergraduate and graduate programs are offered at The University of Texas at Austin , UCLA 's Culture and Performance Program , UC Davis , UC Irvine , Kennesaw State University , Louisiana State University , Southern Illinois University Carbondale , California State University, Northridge , San Jose State University , University of San Diego , University of Maryland ,

3772-612: The West; schools and departments of elocution and oratory cropped up across England and the United States throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most significant of these to performance studies today is the Northwestern University School of Oratory, established in 1894 by Robert McLean Cumnock to teach speech education on the principles of elocution. The School of Oratory housed their Department of Interpretation which focused on literature and on

3854-495: The art collective, My Barbarian , was selected to participate in "Alternate Endings", a video program put on by Visual AIDS, for the 25th anniversary of Day With(out) Art . Begun in 1989, the annual event is meant to commemorate the AIDS crisis and give artists a platform to display work that reflects and responds to the history of HIV/AIDS. Titled, "Counterpublicity", the video performance is based on Muñoz's essay on Pedro Zamora . In

3936-416: The art of interpretation as a means of understanding literature and bringing it to life through oral reading. In 1984, the Department of Interpretation was named the Department of Performance Studies to incorporate a broader definition of texts. On the literature front, Wallace Bacon (1914–2001) was considered by many to be someone who pioneered performance theory. Bacon taught performance of literature as

4018-467: The award was Janet Mock in 2015. In the Spring of 2016, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University inaugurated the distinguished José Esteban Muñoz Memorial Lecture; speakers have included Fred Moten , José Quiroga, and Judith Butler . Muñoz challenges and questions contemporary mainstream gay and lesbian politics. He argues that present gay and lesbian politics, whose political goal

4100-630: The books Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) with Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (1997) with Celeste Fraser Delgado. Along with Ann Pellegrini , José Muñoz was the founding series editor for NYU Press 's influential Sexual Cultures book series which premiered in 1998. Grounded in women of color feminism, the series specializes in titles "that offer alternative mappings of queer life in which questions of race, class, gender, temporality, religion, and region are as central as sexuality" and

4182-627: The combination of academic and artistic research within performance projects. In Poland, Jagiellonian University in Kraków offers a master program in performance studies at the Faculty of Polish Language and Literature. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru University offers MPhil and PhD program in theatre & performance studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics. Since 2012, School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University Delhi , started

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4264-505: The development of speech-act theory by philosophers J. L. Austin and Judith Butler , literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick , and also Shoshana Felman . The theory proposed by Austin in How To Do Things With Words states that "to say something is to do something , or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something". the most illustrative example being "I do", as part of

4346-609: The discrete art forms of Dance, Music and Drama in performing arts. In Brazil, the Universidade Federal de Goiás , started an interdisciplinary program (masters) in cultural performances in 2012, the first in a Latin country. The goal of this program is to analyse "rituals, games, performances, drama, dance" from a cross-cultural point of view. Fred Moten Fred Moten (born 1962) is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory , black studies , and performance studies . Moten

4428-455: The dominant regime," but works on strategies that result in queer counterpublics. His theory of disidentification is foundational to understandings of queer of color performance art and has proved indispensable across a wide variety of disciplines. Muñoz's argument is in conversation with Stefan Brecht 's theory of "queer theater." Brecht argues that queer theater inevitably turns into humor and passive repetition, ultimately, falling apart. Muñoz

4510-769: The eighteenth century, also known as The Elocution Movement , contributed to the emergence of Elocution as an academic discipline in its own right. One of the major figures of the Elocution Movement was actor and scholar Thomas Sheridan . Sheridan's lectures on elocution, collected in Lectures on Elocution (1762) and his Lectures on Reading (1775), provided directions for marking and reading aloud passages from literature. Another actor, John Walker, published his two-volume Elements of Elocution in 1781, which provided detailed instruction on voice control, gestures, pronunciation, and emphasis. The elocution movement took hold in

4592-545: The embodied performance, the three artists recreate scenes from The Real World: San Francisco in an exaggerated manner, critically examining the politics of reality television . Lyrics for the piece were adapted from Muñoz's theory of counterpublic spheres. In a panel, My Barbarian said, "the video is a remembrance within a remembrance: to Pedro Zamora and to José Esteban Muñoz." The video premiered at Outfest in Los Angeles. Xandra Ibarra , La Chica Boom's use of "spics"

4674-418: The ephemeral, "traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things," is distinctly material, though not always solid. Framing the performative as both an intellectual and discursive event, he begins by defining queerness as a possibility, a modality, of the social and the relational, a sense of self-knowing. He argues that queerness is passed on surreptitiously due to the fact that the trace of queerness often leaves

4756-410: The exclusionary norms of the 'official' bourgeois public sphere, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative forms of speech," Muñoz defines his own invocation of counterpublics as "communities and relational chains of resistance that contest the dominant public sphere." Counterpublics have the capacity of world-making through a series of cultural performances that disidentify with

4838-667: The explosion and morphing of the field of affect theory as a result of Jose's work. Deborah Paredez describes Muñoz as key to the practice of a critical and ethical attentiveness to a wide range of performances by Latina/o artists and for helping scholars listen to the melody of what is like to feel brown. In 2014, Muñoz's concept of ephemera as evidence was the theme for a Visual AIDS exhibit, curated by Joshua Lubin-Levy and Ricardo Montez. The exhibit took its name from Muñoz's 1996 essay, Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts . Featuring visual art , performance art , and pedagogical projects, Ephemera as Evidence explores how

4920-402: The field of queer of color critique . In Cruising Utopia , José Muñoz develops a critical methodology of hope to question the present and open up the future. He draws on Ernst Bloch's Marxist inspired analysis of hope, temporality , and utopia , and looks at "inspirational moments from the past in order to (re)imagine the future." In the book, Muñoz revisits a series of queer art works from

5002-578: The fields of feminism, psychoanalysis , critical race theory and queer theory . Theorists like Peggy Phelan , José Esteban Muñoz , E. Patrick Johnson , Rebecca Schneider, and André Lepecki have been equally influential in both performance studies and these related fields. Performance studies incorporates theories of drama , dance , art , anthropology , folkloristics , philosophy , cultural studies , psychology , sociology , comparative literature , communication studies , and increasingly, music performance. The first academic department with

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5084-402: The infelicitous utterance (the misfire) is also taken up by Shoshana Felman when she states "Infelicity, or failure, is not for Austin an accident of the performative, it is inherent in it, essential to it. In other words ... Austin conceives of failure not as external but as internal to the promise, as what actually constitutes it." Performance studies has also had a strong relationship to

5166-403: The last few years to engage scholars, artists and practitioners in conversation informed by performance studies. In Australia, the University of Sydney , Victoria University and Queensland University of Technology offer degrees majoring in performance studies, honours, masters and PhD. Performance studies in some countries is also an A-level (AS and A2) course consisting of the integration of

5248-452: The material world on a different emotional register." In the piece "Feeling Brown", Muñoz discussed the notion of racial performativity as a form of political doing based on the recognition of the effects of race. Thus, "feeling brown" is a modality of recognizing the affective particularities coded to specific historical subjects, like the term Latina . He emphasized that Brown feelings "are not individualized affective particularity" but rather

5330-451: The name "Performance Studies" started at NYU in 1980. Shortly after in 1984 Northwestern University renamed its long-standing Department of Interpretation as the "Department of Performance Studies;" finally reflect their broadened definition of text and performance. Generally the differences between the NYU and Northwestern models cite different disciplinary concerns, however, in both instances

5412-411: The new ways to conceptualized concepts such as Latina/o identity, queer ephemera, and temporality . After Muñoz's death, various art, literary, and academic institutions, artists, and periodicals, commemorated his legacy and contributions through a series of online and journal based obituaries and memorial lectures and annual events. In the special edition of Boundary 2 , Ann Cvetkovich credits Muñoz for

5494-408: The normative scripts of whiteness , heternormativity , and misogyny . Counterpublics disrupt social scripts and create through their work an opening of possibility for other visions of the world that map different, utopian social relations. Muñoz suggests that such work is vital for queer people of color subjects survival and possibilities for another world. At the center of counterpublic performances

5576-545: The novel—demands the performative participation of the reader. On the theatrical and anthropological front, this origin is often regarded as the research collaborations of director Richard Schechner and anthropologist Victor Turner . This origin narrative emphasizes a definition of performance as being "between theatre and anthropology" and often stresses the importance of intercultural performances as an alternative to either traditional proscenium theatre or traditional anthropological fieldwork. Dwight Conquergood developed

5658-421: The ontology of performance lies in its disappearance. Muñoz parts from this view as it is confined to a narrow view of time. He suggests live performance exists ephemerally then without completely disappearing after it vanishes. Muñoz's theory of disidentification builds on Michel Pêcheux 's understanding of disidentification and subject formation by examining how minoritarian subjects whose identities render them

5740-480: The past to envision the political potentiality within them. He draws on the queer work of Frank O'Hara , Andy Warhol , Fred Herko , LeRoi Jones , Ray Johnson , Jill Johnston , Jack Smith , James Schulyer , Elizabeth Bishop and Samuel Delany's and Eileen Myles queer memoirs of the 60s and 70s. Muñoz develops a hermeneutics of "trace and residue to read the mattering of these works, their influence and world-making capacity." This world-making capacity allows for

5822-573: The performing arts, anthropology, sociology, literary theory, culture studies, communication, and others. Performance studies tends to concentrate on a mix of research methods. The application of practice-led or practice-based research methods has become a widespread phenomenon not just in the anglophone world. As such research projects integrate established methods like literature research and oral history with performance practice, i.e. artistic auto-ethnographic approaches and verbatim theatre. The documentation of Practice-as-Research in Performance (PARIP),

5904-610: The queer subject vulnerable for attack. Muñoz's definition of ephemera is influenced by Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic "as part of the exchange of ephemera that connects and makes concert a community." As a result, Muñoz states, queerness has not been able to exist as "visible evidence" rather it has had to exist in fleeting moments. Thus, queer performances stand as evidence of queer possibilities and queer worldmaking. Muñoz understands Marlon Riggs ' documentary films Tongues Untied and Black Is, Black Ain't as examples of an ephemeral witnessing of Black queer identity. In 2013, Muñoz

5986-473: The student, logistical capitalism, debt–credit hierarchies, and state-based institutions. He offers a theory of hapticality and to stay in debt to one another as a means of understanding one's own relationship to the world and to others. The essay, "Catalogue Number 308 (The Black Apparatus Is a Little Girl)", in Black and Blur discusses photograph number 308 in Thomas Eakins ' photographic collection at

6068-444: The truth about cultural hegemony . Muñoz critiques Lee Edelman 's book "No Future" and the concept of queer death drive that results in Muñoz theorization of queer futurity or queer sociality. Queer futurity thus "illuminates a landscape of possibility for minoritarian subjects through the aesthetic-strategies for surviving and imagining utopian modes of being in the world." Muñoz first introduced his concept of ephemera as evidence in

6150-417: The ultimate act of humility. In his defining statement of performance theory, "Our center is in the interaction between readers and texts which enriches, extends, clarifies, and (yes) alters the interior and even the exterior lives of students [and performers and audiences] through the power of texts" ( Literature in Performance , Vol 5 No 1, 1984; p. 84). In addition, Robert Breen's text Chamber Theatre

6232-499: The unauthorized usage and thus create new futures. She cites Rosa Parks as an example: When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, she had no prior right to do so guaranteed by any…conventions of the South. And yet, in laying claim to the right for which she had no prior authorization, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy. The question of

6314-694: Was a collaborator on the exhibit, An Unhappy Archive at Les Complices in Zurich . The goal of the exhibit was to question the normative definition of happiness through the use of texts, posters, books, and drawings. The title of the project is a reference to Sara Ahmed 's concept of the "unhappy archive." According to Ahmed, the unhappy archive is a collective project rooted in feminist -queer and anti-racist politics. Other collaborators include Ann Cvetkovich , Karin Michalski, Sabian Baumann, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick . Muñoz departs from Peggy Phelan 's argument that

6396-515: Was also influential to the field of Queer of Color Critique. In the book Aberrations in Black , Roderick Ferguson employs Muñoz's disidentification theory to reveal how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology . Moreover, disidentification theory has been used by an array of scholars to apply a queer of color critique to various themes such as identity politics , temporality , homonationalism , and diaspora and native studies. In 2014,

6478-744: Was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society . Moten's work The Feel Trio (2014), named after Cecil Taylor 's trio with William Parker and Tony Oxley , was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize , and was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award . He also received

6560-612: Was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for "[c]reating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life." Fred Moten was born in Las Vegas in 1962 and was raised Catholic in the segregated black neighborhood on the western end of the city. His parents were among the black families that made up the Great Migration , the period in US history when many black families moved from

6642-668: Was foundational to the establishment of queer of color critique. Muñoz also worked on the initial Crossing Borders Conference in 1996, which focused on Latin America and Latino queer sexualities. [1] He was a Board Member of CUNY 's CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and editor of the Journal Social Text and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory . Shortly after his death, CLAGS instituted an award in his honor, given to LGBTQ activists who integrate Queer Studies into their work. The inaugural recipient of

6724-620: Was more successful and led to developing his understanding of prose and finding more inspiration for his own work. It was also during this time that he met his collaborator-to-be Stefano Harney . After graduating, Moten went on to pursue his PhD at University of California, Berkeley . Moten makes considerable intellectual contributions to the discourses of black studies, poetry and poetics, critical race theory and contemporary American literature. He has been profiled by Harvard Magazine , The New Yorker , The Brooklyn Rail , and LitHub.com about his life and work in scholarship. In 2016, he

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