Past Faculty Fellows – Center for World Performance Studies

“Orientalism and White Supremacy: Race, Gaze Training, and Middle Eastern Studies”

The project begins with the simple observation that early modernity and the Enlightenment found the racialized figure of the Muslim (aka, the Moor) critical for producing white supremacist discourse and practice. In the Reformation, for example, the “Sons of Noah” theory subordinated Semites (meaning both Jews and Muslims) and Hamites (Africans) relative to white Japhetites; an estimated 30% of enslaved Africans in the New World were Muslim; the first enslaved African revolt in the Americas had Wolof Muslim leadership, which prompted the 16th-century Spanish Crown to prohibit their importation from that ethnic group; Queen Elizabeth I deported legions of London-based Moors in 1596, and shortly thereafter, Shakespeare’s Othello the Moor (1603) and The Tempest (1610) framed the characters of Othello and Caliban (the monstrous Arab) as the quintessential flies in the white ointment of a new world order; Linnaeus’s taxonomy of race (1767) painted the “Sooty Moor” as ungoverned and ungovernable; and Immanuel Kant described the Moor as spreading “an evil smell.” Like the Jew and the African, the figure of the Muslim was indispensable to white self-definition. Yet, despite this history, critical race studies from W. E. B Du Bois to Nell Irving Painter have overlooked the phenomenon. Simultaneously, in Middle East studies, scholars like Edward Said have studied orientalist discourses against the Muslim but have overlooked the concept of race and the process of racialization. The goal of this project is to place the two fields in conversation and to create a synergy of comparative insights about how white supremacy operates. This project conceives of white supremacy in the spirit of Du Bois as a global phenomenon with multiple sites of application—the plantation, the eugenic university, the gas chambers, the race sciences, the colony, and the ethnological exhibit.

“War Dance”

Professor Chanchani will travel to Cambodia to study the position of dance in the region in the medieval period. Specifically, by melding clues preserved in the art historical record with surviving epigraphic evidence, Chanchani will explore his working hypothesis: that certain medieval dances concurrently recounted classical myths about cycles of cosmic dissolution and regeneration and masked struggles to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use coercive violence as the Angkorian state as extended its authority across the vast Khmer Empire. Through his fieldwork and archival research he plans to publish an article and use this research to inform his upcoming special exhibition at UMMA.

Professor Gould will partner with former CWPS Graduate Fellow and Zimbabwean artist Masimba Hwati to focus on how climate change and man made intervention has affected the Tonga people who live on or near the Zambezi river. This work will use the story of the Zambezi river itself and how it has been altered by the dam. It will also consider the story of Nyami Nyami, known as the Zambezi River God or Zambezi snake spirit as inspiration while putting this in context with the broader impact and complexity associated with the Anthropocene. The two will collaborate while in Berlin, Germany at Tanz Tangente, a gallery space and dance company that Gould has collaborated with for the past 15 years.

This project comprises of archival work as part of Professor Hannaford’s research into African American music theorists. Specifically, Hannaford will spend time at the Institute of Jazz Studies (Newark, New Jersey) and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center (New York City) examining the archives of Andrew Hill, Sonny Rollins, and Mary Lou Williams.Most people’s encounter with music theory is dominated by white male composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. The vast majority of music theory textbooks are archetypal in this regard. The theories that shape these books and most music theory classrooms were developed in the Western art music tradition and by white men such as Heinrich Schenker, Hugo Riemann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Milton Babbitt. Whiteness thus operates largely unmarked in music theory on the levels of epistemology and representation.This narrowness is also evident in music theory’s academic spheres. At the level of both the classroom and academic society, music theory is white and male. These statistics are extremely problematic because representation is an important part of welcoming a more diverse range of students and scholars into the field. The issue here is not that there has never been Black music theorists, but that they have been excluded from the field and erased from its history. Following recent calls to work toward greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in music studies by scholars such as Philip Ewell (2020; 2021), Ellie Hisama (2000; 2018; 2021), and Loren Kajikawa (2019; 2021), Hannaford reexamines and redresses who counts as a music theorist.

Professor Hughes is working on a collaborative research project titled “Performing Indigenous Networks.” It seeks to understand Indigenous networks of cultural production as active processes and interconnected sets of relationships and resources that influence the possibilities and practices of Indigenous artists. It is motivated by the question, “How do Indigenous creatives produce work while navigating the constraints of existing networks of production and forge new networks in the process?” The collaborative project is comprised of scholars, archivists, and Indigenous creatives who will come together in August 2022. Hosted by the Clements Library we will spend time interacting with archival objects that captured Indigenous performances in early 20th century Michigan, hold a public facing panel on the relationship of Indigenous creatives to institutions and networks of production, and dedicate time for Indigenous theatre artists to develop new work as a pilot/lab space for the project’s central questions.

INDELIBLE is a new multimedia solo performance that Professor Hughes is writing and will appear, under the direction of acclaimed theatre artist and designer Dan Hurlin. This work draws upon art history, psychological theories of trauma formation, feminist theory, court documents, and autobiography to examine how the current discourse in American culture on sexual violence places a great emphasis on the importance of victims’ narratives while neglecting to ask larger questions about the prevalence of such misconduct despite decades of feminist organizing.

Professor Jackson will continue work on his book, “Spectacular Dominion: Slavery, Performance, and the Boundaries of Personhood in Premodern Japan”, which explores the relationship between slavery and performance in premodern Japan by analyzing the intersection between embodiment, economy, and sovereignty. Jackson focuses on three historical moments over six chapters. First, on the early Muromachi period (1336–1573), when Noh plays about slavery emerged. Next, the late-sixteenth century, when slave trade by Jesuit missionaries occurred between Europe, Africa, Asia, and “The New World.” Finally, the book considers Commodore Perry’s mid-nineteenth century mission to Japan, when blackface minstrel shows by “Ethiopian Players” abetted U.S. gunboat diplomacy in Asia. In each of these contexts, the relationships between social status, spatial practices, gender, and racial formations become vital analytical concerns, particularly as they shaped how various forms of religious discipline or colonial subjection took hold. Spectacular Dominion ventures new lines of inquiry into how personhood was defined and contested in premodern Japan, tracing shifting responses to the central question: How is personhood performed – both literally and metaphorically – when one’s humanity is persistently threatened? The project engages questions significant to Performance Studies and Black Studies, drawing insights from critical race and queer theory.

Professor Nkanga will explore the many facets of multidisciplinary performances currently taking place in Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Considering the history of Kinshasa, once known as Kinshasa-la-Belle, or Kinshasa-the-Beautiful to now Kinshasa-la-Poubelle, or Kinshasa-the-Trashy, Nkanga will observe the following: the language of the trash and its implication in the artistic creation of masks and performances; the techniques used by the performers to put together these masks and costumes; the contradiction of the symbolism of trash and SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes) known for their high fashion in the same neighborhood of Matonge and in Kinshasa; issues of individual and collective memories along with the daily experience of being Congolese and Kinois (a resident of Kinshasa); and the role played by Congolese traditional and the Rumba Music, along with dances in the performances.

Professor Sarath will present performances in South Africa of his composition, His Day is Done. The piece sets to music Maya Angelou’s poem of the same title, which she wrote to commemorate the life of Nelson Mandela. Written for symphony orchestra, choir and jazz soloists, the work will involve 150 musicians, and – reflecting the length of Angelou’s poem – comprises five movements and is close to 40 minutes in duration. This work provides as musical example of a core principle of Sarath’s vision for the future of music studies, where the best of conventional practice coexists and coevolves with an expanded creative and cultural palette, with black music as a powerful galvanizing force. The performances are part of an ongoing initiative launched by Sarath with his collaborators called South Africa/America Music Exchange (SAME).

Professor Thurman’s next project, entitled “Our Lives Can Be Made Beautiful,” takes a broad view at the politics of race and classical music in the twentieth century. The title – “Our Lives Can Be Made Beautiful” – is taken from the African American soprano and activist Aida Overton Walker’s 1905 essay encouraging Black musicians to perform art music in spite of white criticisms of their talent. Inspired by Walker’s essay, Thurman’s book explores both the history of systemic racism that has historically functioned to keep Black people out of classical music and also the discursive and musical practices that Black musicians developed to perform it anyway. Ultimately, her next project addresses the urgent contemporary question that Black people ask – “Is this music for us?” – by placing that question in a historical context.

“Musical Expressions and Traditions in the Borderlands: Collaborative Field Research at Aflao-Ghana”

Based on ethnomusicological field research methods and in collaboration with Kofi Kudonu, a member of faculty at the University of Ghana, the project investigates the impact of ambience and soundscape in a major border town on drumming, song, and dance repertoire of Yeve religious rites. The suite of dances (and accompanying drumming and songs) selected for the project are Misago, Adzrowo, Sakpate, Tsorhue, Yekpe, Brekete, and Dah. At the end of the project, we shall jointly publish two journal articles, one in the US and the second in Ghana.

Performing an Archipelago: Contemporary Performance Arts in Puerto Rico is a book-length multimedia project that focuses on contemporary alternative, black, queer, and women’s performance in Puerto Rico. Prof. La Fountain-Stokes will document how a select number of artists re-envision, transform, and challenge Puerto Rican culture and society under U.S.colonialism; how they address violence, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia; and how these performers negotiate the local situation of precarity caused by the longstanding (post-2008) financial crisis, given the added impact of natural disasters such as Hurricane María in 2017 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

Professor Lam will conduct interviews with Japanese kunqu practitioners, and examine documents in theatre archives. He will conduct a month-long research project in Japan, and will interview Tamasaburo and Japanese kunqu promoters, scholars, and fans. Professor Lam will also visit archives of Japanese theatres which have presented kunqu shows. The data collected will be used in a monograph on kunqu as a Chinese and global opera, which will historically and musicologically examine kunqu performance and reception in Japan, Taiwan, UK and the US. The chapters will probe and compare national phenomena with current and international theories, such as music as a social practice (Christopher Small), as cultural pragmatics (Jeffery Alexander), as tactical interactions (Michel de Certeau), and as diplomatic soft power (Joseph S. Nye).

As an ethnographer of theatrical performance, Professor Lemon has been following a group of acting and directing students who passed through the Russian State Theatrical Academy in Moscow. She has published descriptions of their social and cultural worlds, but none of that writing conveys how we felt inside this “space capsule,” or “aquarium,” as some called the Academy. This was performance boot camp, barely time to sleep or money to eat. Former students – now working in Moscow’s theaters and film companies – are collaborating with me to edit a film titled Tremors: Stanislavsky Rests. Drawing from 30 hours of video and audio material recorded from 2002-2005, they not only document students’ nervous struggles as they survive one of the world’s most rigorous theatrical academies, but also trace how small stages channel global conflicts. Seemingly cut off from traumatic historical events, students’ waking hours were all the same infused by them. Do we give up life to live in art?

Professor Mendeloff will collaborate with Kenyan playwright Rogers (Aroji) Otieno, whom she met at a workshop at La Mama Umbria’s Director’s Symposium in Italy, on environmental staging of a play about Nobel prize winning eco-activist Wangari Maathai. The play “Wangari’s Prayer” tackles the subject of deforestation, pollution and climate change in East Africa, through the telling of the story of Africa’s first female Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement.

“Activating Local Partnerships to Decolonize Carillons in Southern Africa”

Twentieth-century war memorial carillons were lauded as democratic “voices” of their cities. Yet the first of these instruments, the Cape Town City Hall carillon in South Africa, has never sounded the voices of Black musicians. For the LSA Dutch Studies theme semester “Decolonizing the Netherlands,” Professor Ng is commissioning Xhosa composer Dr. Bongani Ndodana-Breen to write the first carillon piece by a Black South African, with local partners identifying a second commissionee. She will conduct fieldwork and performance research at the African carillons in Cape Town and Réunion to explore how marginalized listeners might build a sense of ownership over formerly oppressive soundmarks. In the fall, the commissions will be premiered by Professor Ng at U-M and by Alexios Vicatos in Cape Town.

Collaborative Research Trip to Opera Centers in Cape Town, South Africa

Modern Postural Yoga in an Expanded Field

Queer Spiritual Contact

South African Exchange

Paris/Beijing: The Sino-French Axis in Eighteenth-Century Music

The Outdoor Dramas of Kermit Hunter, Appalachian Identity, and Ethnicity