The Unwieldy Otherwise: Rethinking the Roots of Performance Studies in and through the Black Freedom Struggle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This project presents a syllabus that emerged out of an ongoing set of discussions between the two co-authors about how Black, Southern theatre and performance traditions—as well as embodied and transmitted genealogies of community engagement and activism—informed the intellectual, social, and political commitments that have suffused performance studies from its origins as an academic discipline. These discussions allowed us to generate a syllabus that provides the raw materials for an alternative and potentially radically destabilizing pedagogical approach to narrating the historical roots and development of performance studies over the past half-century. Specifically, we ask what shifts might occur in the performance studies classroom by narrating the field’s origins through the Free Southern Theatre, founded as a multiracial artistic ensemble in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964. Our syllabus incorporates the key strands woven into the Free Southern Theatre’s aesthetic and political interventions, including Africanist cultural forms (such as the story circle); influences from the artistic and theatrical avant-garde; and populist theatre projects that developed in tandem with the revolutionary energies of the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist struggles of the student movements of the 1960s. We ask how these largely hidden histories of resistance and dramaturgies of evasion reorient the way performance studies syllabi of the future tell the story of who and what matters, and in so doing materialize pedagogies of field formation that get frozen in place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".