Contemporary Arab American theater makers have to contend with unreliably supportive institutions and biased narratives that are conditioned by xenophobic, especially anti-Arab and Islamophobic, socio-political contexts within the United States. These conditions of production have been understudied in academia, where scholarship has predominantly focused on the discursive response of Arab American theater to post-9/11 hostilities, cultural alienation, stereotyping, and transnational politics. However, this project seeks to expand the field by exploring the production processes behind these responses and to illuminate how the conditions of the public sphere instill systemic challenges to Arab American theater practice. It combines ethnographic and archival research with literary and material analysis to study three examples of theater making: play development and publication; stage production; and festival organization. Case studies include the works and experiences of playwright Yussef El Guindi; the practices of Golden Thread Productions, the leading American theater company dedicated to Middle Eastern plays; and the grassroots organization and stand-up comedy interventions of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival. Through these cases, this project reveals the complex, tensile relationships between Arab American theater makers and their biased conditions of production. It shows how these relations manifest in and through practical challenges to theater making. I use these findings to posit and support the correlation dilemma theory, which argues that the interdependence of multiple actors and conditioning factors creates systemic issues that inhibit sustainable Arab American cultural production on its own terms. In the process of mapping out this theory onto the various case studies, this project also reveals the strategies and practices used by contemporary theater makers to build discursive and institutional networks that support the unrestricted development of Arab American art, identity, and publics. These combined findings help Arab American artists and similarly marginalized theater makers navigate their complex relations to the US public sphere and its theater industry.

This book examines the intersections of violence, memory, and material space and how it could contribute to a nuanced understanding of a material dimension of performance theory. Categorizing violence as performance offers insight into the dangerous repercussions of performances, as well as those that remain, reanimate themselves, and ‘scrutinize’ themselves in everyday life. My case studies, The Washington National Cathedral (Washington, DC), The National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, TN), and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre (Sandy Hook, CT) are cross-historical cases that offer poignant sites to investigate the repercussions of the performance and re-performance of violence in the United States, specifically at sites that have been deemed “national” vestiges of memory.A performance studies-based analysis of sites of violence and the material remains challenges the notions that “original” is equal to “authentic,” since violence has no legible beginning and/or end. Performances are layered, collapsed, and in these utterances codified social norms and mores are determined. Acts of violence affects how we construct our societies, as well as the way we carry on within them. I use the term “theatres of violence” when addressing these sites of violence to allude to the various dimensions these performances take: somatic, temporal, material, and sacred. The fourth dimension, or the sacred dimension of performance, is built in the gaps between the somatic, temporal and material. Sites of violence, particularly sites of collective trauma, are transformed into sacred spaces, and that sacrality dictates how bodies move, how time is collapsed and simultaneously extended, and how material is maintained and signified. Theatre, in this regard, refers to the dramaturgical framing of spaces in which violence is being considered. Additionally, “Theatres of Violence” refers to the role of theatre as a space of collective gathering and draws on the metaphysical processes in which theatre is used to debate culture within community through ritual. Memorialization is not a response to a violent act, but rather a contribution to its role in culture, and its archives. These theatres of violence are spaces where these various contributions are played out. Although official narratives are produced, these debates remain. By reading the in-betweenness of theaters of violence— the careful design of curated museums constructed on the footprint of trauma— scholars can understand how various hierarchies are established and reaffirmed in production of social norms and expectations of behavior within public spaces.

This paper examines the literary archetype of the mystic as understood and elaborated upon in religious literature at the twilight of the Spanish Golden Age. It then applies that archetype to the character of the Virgin Mary as she appears in Sor María de Agreda’s La mística ciudad de Dios.

The first task is to define the mystic archetype as understood in the literary and religious traditions of the period. To accomplish this, we principally examine the writings of Santa Teresa de Jesús with a specific emphasis on El castillo interior. She was, herself, a noted mystic and wrote extensively about the mystic experience. Her writings heavily influenced those who came after her, including Sor María de Agreda, which is why her writings are used to construct our theoretical framework. Through her writings, the evolution of the mystic, the gradual metamorphosis from earnest disciple to the heights of metaphysical rapture, is made clear. In the pattern laid down by Santa Teresa, each step along the mystic journey serves to prepare the mystic for that which follows. This theme of stepwise preparation is a critical underpinning to the concept of the mystic as understood by Santa Teresa and her contemporaries.

With this understanding in place, attention is then turned to the life of Sor María de Agreda and her own mystic experience. From a rigorously devout childhood and early exposure to mysticism in her own home, we witness her progression into a mature seeker of God’s divine influence. We examine the ways in which of her own lived experience either fulfills or defies the expectations of the mystic as laid down by tradition. We also analyze her exploration of the mystic archetype in some of her lesser-known writings. Her Escala espiritual, for example, is an instructional guide for those seeking mystic enlightenment.

Finally, our attention turns to La mística ciudad de Dios. While Sor María claims that the work is, itself, the result of an extended visionary experience, the character of the Virgin Mary as presented in the work is also an exemplar of the mystic archetype. While Mary receives grand visions while still within her mother’s womb, she nonetheless grows and evolves in her relationship with the divine in a manner resembling the traditional mystic progression.

Due to the lack of a working model, immersive events have grown through size and grandeur: Design and opulence being offered instead of curation and specificity. To expand in this way takes capital, and the more capital it takes to produce an event the higher the price of entry. Production cost can easily become overwhelming when the working definition of immersion is drowning the consumer in a property. The few academics who have worked toward systemizing immersion as a technique have done so through favoring of the body. Others have denied that there is any difference to traditional narrativization and privileged the mind. I take a more Spinozian approach, privileging neither but requiring them to work in tandem to assemble the narrative for themselves — in other words, a cognition’s approach. The emotive narrative is an exploration into how story is told in immersive events. By utilizing various theories on cognition, affect, memory, thing, kinesis, and media the way immersion can be accomplished becomes clear. Marrying these theories to the techniques that successfully engross the audience/participant in immersive events unfolds a system of storytelling with the emotive as its key operative. The formation of a narrative is experienced through the individual senses and requires the totality of the audiences’ mind and body. It is not a passive process but one that requires the whole person, their pervious experiences, and current stimulus. The audience members or as I term them, audience/participants, as they are fulfilling both roles simultaneously are not simply material embedded into the production or a body that the production acts upon. They are active in every element of the event through this process. Using this approach this dissertation explores a myriad of immersive events including theatre, dance, fine dining, and media activations. It also takes time to explore immersion during the time of the Covid 19 pandemic shutdowns and how that changed the immersive landscape. The goal of this dissertation, after all, is to examine how the emotive narrative is structured and put into use. These techniques are task-based movement and game, food as story, embodied advertising, and the emotive narrative at a distance (virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed media).

Staging the Sacred examines relationships between and among Native North American concepts of the sacred to consider four perches: multi-vocal salients of humor, ecological protection, intertwinings in sexuality and corporeality, and ministering to community needs. These topics and their relationship to the sacred in Native drama enact crucial and interconnected discourses. The presence of the sacred underscores what Hanay Geiogamah calls survivability to foreground drama as a form given in and of service to the community. The sacred in Native drama opens possibilities for corporeal sovereignty to be asserted, as in Trickster and Two-Spirit sexualities. The sacred in Native drama also undergirds multi-vocal humor as a form of cultural expression that acts as a salient to incise, infiltrate, and destabilize colonial extinction narratives. These discourses are prevalent within Native North American drama and thus assert themselves as indispensable touchstones for engaging with this dramatic tradition. Expounding on the role of the sacred in Native North American theater cultivates an alternative hermeneutic to map the surrogate didacticism of theater’s participatory hierarchies by drawing upon multiple Native American and Indigenous studies scholars, activists, and artists. Instead of treating Native drama as a secular dramatic tradition or in a ceremonial/traditional and secular/contemporary dichotomy, this project proposes a hermeneutic for reading and analyzing the variegated—nuanced—stagings of the sacred: defiant and ritualized. Such readings abrogate and chafe at representation in the static symbolic. Performance studies contribute the theoretical fundament for recognizing and engaging physical incarnations of “absence incarnate.” The action of gathering disparate pieces to form a living whole, “bone gathering,” animates this process. Staging the Sacred engages plays, performances, and essays (1972-2022) from well-known and emerging artist-scholars to illumine the multiple resonances and functions of the sacred in dramatic literature, theatrical stagings, and performative interventions. This archive includes canonical and lesser-known texts by such playwrights as Tomson Highway, Muriel Miguel, Diane Glancy, Drew Hayden Taylor, and a network of playwrights from the Native Voices new works festivals (2017-2021). This activist spectrum also includes performance interventions such as those emanating from the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement. These playwrights and practitioners embed their plays and performative interventions with ritual, ceremony, and didactic resonances that invoke the sacred as a force to strengthen community relationships, aid healing from the continuing traumas of genocide, and reclaim Native North American subjects as agents of history in the present. This approach challenges the colonizing role of the secularization of the arts, culture, and academy by illuminating how sacrality is not separate from Native identity and therefore factors prominently in literary, artistic, religious, feminist, historical, and social expressions of indigeneity.

This dissertation interrogates multiple tensions between group identity and personal identity in African American drama. Borrowing from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s and Paul Ricoeur’s theorizations about group identity and self-formation, I propose two conceptual tools of analysis based on an understanding of identity as interaction and drama as a refractive medium of experience: ipseity and aesthetic refraction. I develop these concepts by applying them to the analysis of six African American plays: Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind, Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, and June Jordan’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky. In each play, I problematize essentialist readings of group identity, disclosing the singularities of the characters’s interactions in relation to the structure of the works and the authors’s personal perspectives. My dissertation discloses how singular interactions can recast the image of a group, how interracial characters can be torn apart by different narratives of belonging, how history acts and is acted upon in relation to individuals, how interaction rather than inheritance determines belonging, how communities are dynamic processes in lieu of fixed products, and how a diverse social milieu provides different affective value to different groups without absolutely determining the agency of the individual. I argue that ipseity and aesthetic refraction allow for a methodology that problematizes essentialist perspectives over identity-formation based on group identity. I conclude with a discussion of possible applications for ipseity and aesthetic refraction beyond dramatic criticism.

This dissertation explores the concept of the body in fictional representations within the context of repression and forced migration in literature and visual arts. My analysis focuses on the aesthetic proposals of Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941), Daniel Moyano (Argentina, 1930 – Spain, 1992), and José Balmes (Spain, 1927 – Chile, 2016), banned in their home countries and forced into exile by military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. The study draws from contemporary discussions on nomadism, Borderlands theory, feminist critiques of modern understandings of the body—especially in the context of repression and violence—and Latin American visual arts and literary theory in relation to exile and memory. Drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s insightful understanding of the body as a porous borderland that dwells in liminality and intersectionality, I argue that the close interrelation and interdependence between embodiment and space become highly legible in the condition of physical displacement. This is why I examine the somatic and discursive constructions of migrant embodiment—particularly in the situation of forced displacement—in different characters in Peri Rossi’s poetry, Moyano’s fiction and Balmes’s art.

Bodies in Transit is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 is titled “The Body in Fluid Stages: Negotiating Exile in Descripción de un Naufragio, by Cristina Peri Rossi” (1975, Description of a Shipwreck). In this poetry collection, the free expression of eroticism and passion constitutes an irreverent and eloquent perspective on banishment (Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Sandoval, 2000). The characters relearn their corporeal language as part of both a migratory dynamic of traveling by ship, and a hybrid reality of living in between worlds. In Chapter 2, “Going into Exile: Rethinking the Body in Libro de Navíos y Borrascas by Daniel Moyano” (1983, The Book of Vessels and Tempests), I explore the journey into forced displacement (also sailing across the open ocean), the somatic experiences of the main characters and their exposure to sexual violence, forced disappearance, and prison (Arendt, 1963; Butler, Bodies, 1993; Scarry, 1985; R. Segato, Guerra, 2018). The various literary voices in this novel search for ways of coping with the complex experience of banishment; they find havens in memory (personal and collective), in art, and in the representation of non-official historical episodes. Finally, in the third chapter, “Mapping Memory and Trauma: Exile in José Balmes’s artwork,” I examine bodies that revisit trauma in the artist’s output relating to his recollections of his own journeys as a Spanish refugee in 1939 and as a Chilean exile in 1973 (Johnson, 2007; Lazzara, 2006; McCloskey, 2005; Nochlin, 1996; Richard, 2007; Taylor, 2007). In Balmes’s paintings, the human body performs a testimony and is represented as an important component of an alternative historical discourse.

A comparative look at these three experiences of migratory flows is important since the journey into exile has an effect on the literary and visual representations of these authors. Specifically, I analyze how the body is limited and violented by discourses deploying a modern concept of embodiment, and how, at the same time, going into exile presents opportunities for becoming aware of the embodied border-location. I am interested in the analysis of power structures and in their intersection with alternative cultural representations—literary works, visual and plastic artworks—that represent a “material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure” (Lowe 22). I explore a striking reiteration of topics in the outputs of the three creators, specifically related to the terms absence and presence, memory and violence, and body and trauma. These are recurrent concepts that acquire a particular nuance from the creators’ shared experience as exiled subjects.

Although much research has already been done into Southern Cone literary and artistic exile, my work looks at significant connections in multiple intersecting fields and responds to the contemporary complexities of migration. My study broadens the discussion about the connections between embodiment and dominant discourses on citizenship and exile in the Americas. It also expands our understanding of how the vibrant and diverse cultural production of Latin American spaces is constantly threatened by repressive discourses that persist, even after the end of dictatorship, naturalizing violence and silencing dissident writers and artists.

This dissertation is a study of theater networks between Mexico City and Quebec during the NAFTA years (1994-2018) and their role in regionalizing North America. It examines the regional imaginaries enacted through theater collaborations, considering both the material and imagined dimensions of these networks, exposing the role of theater and its translations in the politics of international and intercultural exchange. It explores the dis/connections between the political agendas that draft continental projects and the everyday practices enacted across these geographic and cultural spaces. Conceptually, the intercultural is theorized in the project as the reassembly of the networks that enable these intercultural performances, and not through principles of hybridity. In this process, translation is foregrounded in order to reveal the implications of paraphrasing and referencing meaning in another context, as well as the new configurations of knowledge and aesthetic languages produced by this contact.

The dissertation extends the hemispheric conceit of what the North is to Mexico and of Canada’s broader South, re-thinking the region from a perspective less centered on Anglophone meditations or on the discourses of official leadership. It begins with the theories of translation, regionalism and interculturalism that guide it, followed by a reassembly of theater networks between Mexico City and Quebec established primarily via the activation of latinité as an imaginative tool. The last two chapters are close readings of case studies representative of these networks: a co-production – La vida no vale nada/La vie ne vaut rien – created by a Mexican and a Quebecois company, and a Quebecois text – La divine illusion by Michel Marc Bouchard – in production in Mexico City. These last two chapters rely heavily on translation for their analysis, and test the limits of the intercultural in our understanding of global cultural production. The project thus expands its cultural analysis by introducing hypercultural as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the rhizomatic accumulation of shifting meaning and aesthetics beyond the premises of national or cultural essence. I argue that these theater networks – while enabled by political agendas and economic regulations – perform the superabundance of culture that results from contact in global times, and evidence the complex work of mis/translation that makes it possible for us to imagine and inhabit regions.