BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:Playing in the Land of Milk and Honey: Race Performs on Southern Stages PRODID:-//Harvard events data//EN BEGIN:VEVENT UID:event_1521941_0 SUMMARY:Playing in the Land of Milk and Honey: Race Performs on Southern Stages DESCRIPTION:

Theater and Performance imageTHEATER AND PERFORMANCE

SPEAKER: Heather S. Nathans, Tufts University

My project raises the question of how race “performs” in the South. Performing race acknowledges race as a malleable construct – implying an identity that the performer can don or shed at will. Recently I have become intrigued by the way in which individuals or communities mobilize the idea of race to perform acts of inclusion or exclusion. In this context, race becomes a shorthand for power and it also performs a longing for permanence.

I am intrigued by the ways that Southern Jews used performance to experiment with and improvise their own claims to different racial identities. By reading a series of racial “scripts” – understood as play texts, public or theatrical events, letters, diaries, essays, songs, or images – I ask how their creators used them to inscribe performances of race and Jewishness as well as race as Jewishness. How did racial scripts perform resistance for Southern Jews? How did those scripts become improvisatory tools in shifting power dynamics in Southern U.S. culture? And how did racial scripts serve to interpret diverse American identities to each other?

About the Speaker

Heather S. Nathans is a professor in the Tufts University Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and is also the Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies. Her publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017).

Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans received the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research, as well as the American Theatre and Drama Society’s John W. Frick Book Award.

She has received numerous fellowships, including ones from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nathans is the Editor of the award-winning Studies in Theatre History and Culture series from the University of Iowa Press.

LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 024 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230921T210000Z DTEND:20230921T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR