UC Santa Barbara

Rarely spoken in the same breath, the loaded terms of trauma and utopia serve as provocations to rethink how shared histories of struggle call new collectives into being. This dissertation examines the generative tension between trauma and utopia in Black and Latin@ queer performance texts from the 1960s to the present. In so doing, it offers a theoretical model I term “traumatic utopia,” or the use of historical traumas as the raw material for generating concrete utopias in creative and activist spaces. By focusing on what Josefina Báez calls “that very concrete utopia,” I look to how participatory performance practices do not model a utopian future but actually create the space in which transformation becomes possible. My use of utopia, then, is not unbounded or existential but about discrete settings—in the theatre, in the cultural studies classroom, in the performance workshop structure—that collaboratively enable other visions of collective sociality and healing.

Traumatic utopias exist in creative spaces as a site for social transformation through the power of art to expose the root of suffering, not a spectacle of sufferers, to provoke rather than pacify audiences into enacting visions of liberation in their own lives—in ways often illegible to the demands of mainstream representation or state recognition. In the so-called post-Civil Rights era social actors often locate trauma in a static past, and reduce utopia to a fantasy informed by naïve investments in change. This dissertation intervenes in cultural and critical discourses of trauma by arguing that remembering and mourning are not incompatible with healing, hope, and transformation. Through interdisciplinary analysis of a rich performance archive, my project shifts conversations about trauma in queer and critical race theory away from a politics of (spectacularized) hopelessness and toward the everyday transformation of social realities constituted in struggle. While never losing sight of the institutional, I pay close attention to the way power operates and circulates between bodies at the level of the quotidian. This project thus bridges the divide between analyses that emphasize the institutional at the expense of the individual and those that romanticize agency at the risk of neglecting the devastating effects of power. That is to say, the critique of institutional trauma and the imagination of liberatory possibilities both provide vital optics for art and activism.

Building on Black and Chicana feminist queer traditions of self-definition in the face of trauma, each chapter centralizes social life and spirituality against the grain of a ubiquitous politics of hopelessness—from plays that address Emmett Till’s sonic legacy and #BlackLivesMatter, explored in Chapter 1; to Black feminist revolutionary theatre, explored in Chapters 2 and 3; to digital activism and tactical poetry along the Mexico/U.S. border, explored in Chapter 4. In addition, an epilogue reflects on the Afro Latin@ utopian imagination. The Black/Latin@ queer performance literature I close read attends equally to the very real violences and daily lived traumas of imperialism, colonialism, sexism, and racism, and the need for imagining other ways to be in the world. I define performance literature broadly as texts that exist on the page and stage (plays, ensemble pieces, choreopoems and other works that combine dance, gesture, music, and spoken word)—materializing in and between situated bodies. A genre by definition meant to be read aloud and to transform (in) provisional communities, I take seriously the work of performance literature in shaping and transforming reading publics, particularly when classroom and other communal spaces negotiate texts collectively.

My reading of performance (as) literature centers the critical methodologies of literary and cultural studies more than theatre studies per se. Pedagogy also informs this approach: I have taught all of the texts assembled here so my readings reflect, sometimes explicitly, how classrooms can operate like theatre spaces. In examining performance texts that generate new social modalities, I remain attentive to each work’s reception history and cultural context to assess the stakes of its political juncture. This constellation of works rethinks the discursive limits of trauma alongside abolitionist politics and utopian poetics of social upheaval.

Amidst dystopian realities, Black and Latin@ performance literature contends with the structural traumas of global racial capital to forge queer networks of creative solidarity that imagine and inhabit a livable social world. Against the colonialist imposition of borders, nations, binaries, walls, and cages, utopian visions activate the abolitionist demands of cultural producers who seek the dissolution of oppressive institutions. In the face of state violence exist possibilities for speaking truth to power, for mobilizing around social issues, and for creating spaces to grieve personal and shared traumas. Performance literature can be a rich site for all three of these aims: the creation of alternative forms of knowledge production, grassroots coalitional work, and community healing. In exploring performance’s unique possibilities for social transformation, this project demonstrates that understanding trauma as institutional, not exceptional, unearths cultural silences around its experience, as well as creates a more inclusive and urgent space for its articulation.