Indigeneous Americas / ASTR seminar

[Ann Haugo]

Indigenous Americas:
Performance Research in Local and Transnational Contexts

As Joseph Roach notes in Cities of the Dead, the conscious exclusion of 
American Indian performance was among the founding principles of 
American theatre history scholarship.  The continued marginalization of 
indigenous theatre studies may not be a direct result, but the 
discipline’s repeated efforts to maintain or reconstruct its boundaries 
have not yet resulted in indigenous performance coming much closer to 
the center of American theatre scholarship.

Indigenous performance scholarship throughout the Americas has begun to 
grow over the last decade, but its place in our discipline continues to 
be located in undercurrents of popularly construed categories:  Latin 
American theatre, for the theatres of Mexico, Middle America, and South 
America, whose scholarship often muddies the complex relationships of 
indigeneity and European colonial identity; “American” minority 
theatres, for the theatres of the United States, whose scholarship 
includes reference to Native American theatre as one example of 
minority issues in the theatre, with little examination of lingering 
colonial legacies; post-colonial theatres, for the theatres of Canada, 
whose scholarship examines First Nations theatre as another facet of 
Canada’s own colonial relationship with the British Empire.

Current scholarship examines indigenous performance in its local 
contexts as “American” (U.S.), “Canadian,” “Mexican,” and so forth, 
although indigenous performance itself consciously refers to and 
circumnavigates these national borders.  The scholarship is further 
fractured by a rather binary approach to objects of study: First, an 
anthropological approach, following the line of scholarship established 
by Linda Walsh Jenkins’s dissertation and anthropological studies of 
Mexican and South American performance culture; or, second, a study of 
contemporary, more formalized theatre: plays, theatre companies, or 
social/political commentaries raised by performance work. 

The seminar provides a forum to foster scholarship on indigenous 
performance of the Americas, to find transnational connections and 
methodological overlap.  There is currently no institutional “home” for 
scholarship on indigenous theatre in the Americas: no journal, no 
conference or focus group of a larger organization, no professional 
organization.  An ASTR seminar thus provides a much-needed 
catalyst. The goal of the seminar is not to reach a consensus about the 
nature and breadth of indigenous theatre in the Americas, but to 
reflect on its layers, complexities, overlaps, and discontinuities.

For more information about this year's conference, see 
<http://www.astr.org>.

Please submit proposals via email or post by May 31, 2006:

Ann Haugo
  Assistant Professor
  School of Theatre
  Campus Box 5700
  Illinois State University
  Normal, IL 61790
  (309) 438-3955
ahaugo at ilstu.edu


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