LATS 455 Performance and the Law (Same as Theatre 404) (Not offered 2005-2006; to be offered 2006-2007)*
This is an interdisciplinary seminar that combines Performance Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Latino/a Studies, Media Analysis, History and Queer Theory in order to examine the Law's discursive and performative apparatus via spectacle, theatricality and simulacra. Based on readings from Hibbitts, Patricia Williams, Foucault, Auslander, Butler, Moten, Baudrillard, Turner & Schechner, and Roach, the course will deal with the performative elements of the Law in the practices of visual authority, zero tolerance,-prohibition legislation, and dataveillance. We will engage with questions of social drama in relation to Law and action-looking, for example, at Law and entertainment in mass media and popular trials, the televisual performance of the Rodney King case, and the criminalization of Puerto Rican masculinity and the Puerto Rican flag in Seinfeld and Law and Order. We will, moreover, address the criminalization of sexuality, style, and noise. In this last vein, we will analyze the racialized prohibition of jazz performance and its musical instruments, the image of the artist as criminal on the US/Mexican border, and the construction of the criminal subject in performance cultures of the African Diaspora in the Americas-such as carnival, hip hop culture, and rumba. Format: seminar. Requirements: class participation and two presentations, two short essays (5-7 pages), a research proposal (2-3 pages), and a research project (15-20 pages). No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 10 (expected: 5-8).