Performance of Literature: Race, Space, and Black California

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This performance studies class focuses on the relationship between notions of racial performance, literary analysis, and performance of literature. Students analyze literature, history, and race, first, through reading and writing and, second, through a critical production of literature as theater. Exploring characteristics of performance in black literature and identity, this class asks how literature, and African-American literary offerings in particular, can be differently understood if staged. Students fully engage African American writing about Black California as literature and, in making specific interpretations, project an analysis through their own embodiment of text and their own staging of its atmosphere and meaning.