“I know how it is when nobody sees you”: oral-history performance methods for staging trauma
Publication Date
1-1-2020
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Text and Performance Quarterly
DOI
10.1080/10462937.2020.1788133
First Page
131
Last Page
151
Abstract
In this essay, I argue that, in a society oversaturated with images and narratives of racial trauma, creating theatre for social change requires more than staging minoritarian bodies with the aim of making their trauma visible. Contemporary oral-history performance practitioners must face the challenge of how to make the hypervisible meaningful. Drawing on my own production The (M)others, an oral-history performance adapted from the narratives of Bay-Area women who have lost family members to police violence, I present a methodology that works to disrupt the ways contemporary audiences are invited to passively consume, rather than actively intervene in, acts of racial trauma.
Keywords
Oral-history performance, performance ethnography, police violence, trauma studies, verbatim theatre
Department
Communication Studies
Recommended Citation
Nikki Owusu Yeboah. "“I know how it is when nobody sees you”: oral-history performance methods for staging trauma" Text and Performance Quarterly (2020): 131-151. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2020.1788133
