Perf & Social Theory:

(4 Credits)

We’ll think about the force of performance in some key works by W.E.B. Du Bois and we’ll also think about Du Bois as a performer, as a theorist of performance, and as a prophet of préformance, which is an underconcept or a noncept, that we’ll attempt to discover and/or invent in the class. Another way to put all this is that we’ll consider the relay between what Du Bois calls “the strange meaning of being black” and what emerges as a fundamental object and mode of study for him under the rubric of "the general strike."