RESEARCH & WRITING

Situated Stages: The Geo-Racial Politics of Site-Specific Performance

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My current project reorients theories and practices of site-specificity around racial geographies, an emerging field that makes antiracist and decolonial politics and practices central to questions of space and place. Rather than reiterate site-specificity’s broad interest in space-making, my study turns to sited performance practices of the Global Majority to probe the stakes of, and alternatives to, space-taking. Through interdisciplinary engagement with Black feminist geographies and critical Indigenous studies, I move beyond current interest in discrete sites of performance – architectural, environmental, memorial, and virtual – to argue that site-specific performance enacts on a grander scale; it is a mode of situated knowledge dissemination capable of either reifying or refusing the white settler spatial imaginary. This shift positions site-specific performance squarely within contemporary struggles over the making and meaning of space, and it allows me to demonstrate alternate modes of aesthetic attunement capable of moving site-specific discourse more fully toward its geopoetic potential.