Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research

• Migration of people= “economically propelled and politically coerced.” (p 145)
• “ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS” = ECONOMIC REFUGEES
• cultural theory=post colonial theory
• local context! encompassing all intersections of our existence,

“historical, dynamic, often traumatic, movements of people, ideas, images, commodities, and capital.” (p 145)

• new cultural theory

“For whom is the border a friction-free zone of entitled access, a frontier of possibility.”

•        it is for THUGS= corporate elites, politicians, drug lords (politicians & corporate elites), NGO’s

“Who travels confidently across borders, and who gets questioned, detained, interrogated, and strip-searched at the border?”

• WHAT THE MAP CUTS UP, THE STORY CUTS ACROSS

• Knowing “how” & knowing “who”

We found ourselves asking neighbors, "el señor que es tio de ______, y está casado con _______" or "Yeah I know the owner on this spot but I'm not sure if they opened yet, I got their number though" and "I think I heard her say that she knew someone that did that, I'l hit her up and see."  Over & over again we were able to within our confines of our city to make this project bloom into what it did.  We were grounded both internally and externally to our very community.

• Organic intellectual, Gramsci’s definition of an “organic intellectual” describes a person that counteracts hegemony by identifying with a group and trying to organize a social power within this group.
• Community members themselves, street cred
• ACTIVE,  INTIMATE,  HANDS-ON,  PARTICIPATION
• *view from body: elitism
• *rooted in experience: orality, local contingencies

• what our families & community members know ends up resisting and putting into question the white supremacist status quo.  which is why academia and higher education or event education in general seen as a hierarchy. can’t be a money making institution if it was accessible. so make people “work for it”, make people believe in the system. make people doubt themselves, & their own knowledge.

“No systemic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro’s mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor.  The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore is easily solved.  When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.  You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder.  He will find his “proper place” and will stay in it.  You do not need to send him to the back door.  he will go without being told.  In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.  His education makes it necessary.” (p 7, Miseducation of the Negro, Woodson)

• Knowledges are then “legitimized” when they are recorded through a written record in the english language.

The [written] record is usually but a fragment of the expression (as the written word omits all telltale record of gesture and tonality; and not only Performance Studies 147 may our “literacy” keep us from missing the omissions, it may blunt us to the appreciation of tone and gesture, so that even when we witness the full expression, we note only those aspects of it that can be written down). ( [1950] 1969:185)

• Isn’t this what peoples keep saying about “so much getting lost” through email, text?  This should also be applicable when it comes to higher education, and what are we exactly perpetuating?