Initiating Acts : the Role of Rupture in the Formation of North American Cultural Identities
Description:... Abstract: This project is an examination and a recasting of historical events as performances and the residue of those events in contemporary popular cultures. The historical events I am exploring can be divided into three sections. The first section explores Africans' participation in the circum-Atlantic Slave Trade as actors instead of unwitting victims, as well as the happenings aboard slave ships during the Middle Passage and subsequently the auction block and slave pens. The second section examines plantation life in the Antebellum South from the vantage point of a person performing the role of a mistress, maid, slave and master through a close reading of selected diary entries, passages from autobiographies, journal publications and selected private journal entries, respectively. The historical is then linked to the contemporary in the last section of this project by "citing" the parallels, residue, and mutations of the roles from the plantation household to Hip-Hop culture ...
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