TY - JOUR
T1 - Counterpublic Goods in Interesting Times
T2 - Transitional Subjectivities Onstage at Highways Performance Space, 1989-1993
AU - Hamera, Judith
N1 - Funding Information:
The Border Brujo was a transitional subject who refused pluralist “culti-multuralism” and the market-ready diversity that was coming next. He was not alone. Dan Kwong's Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder premiered at Highways as part of the series including Border Brujo. As the title suggests, baseball is central to the piece: both Kwong's personal passion and a metaphor for America's “other” national pastime: racist exclusion. The Samurai Centerfielder's costume, like the Brujo's altar, signals parodic pastiche: “armor” made of carpet padding over a baseball jersey and pants, crowned by a bike helmet festooned with cardboard crescent horns and a baseball at its center. His tone is sometimes earnest, sometimes pedagogical, supported by slides, his own recorded voice-overs, movement—aggressive, athletic, and goofy—and hip-hop beats.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Authors, 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.
PY - 2022/1/1
Y1 - 2022/1/1
N2 - A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists' demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming recession; and an escalating housing crisis fueled by accelerating income inequality: welcome to Los Angeles between 1989 and 1993. In this period, AIDS became the leading cause of death for US men ages 25-44; ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)/LA called public health infrastructure to account and successfully fought for an AIDS ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. A widely circulated video of Los Angeles Police Department officers viciously beating Black motorist Rodney King, and their subsequent acquittal of criminal charges by a suburban jury, ignited five days of antiracist rebellion. The rising number of unhoused people in Los Angeles was becoming difficult to ignore, though not for the city's, state's, or federal government's lack of trying. Multiculturalism became a widely embraced - if sometimes cynically deployed - aesthetic and programming imperative.
AB - A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists' demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming recession; and an escalating housing crisis fueled by accelerating income inequality: welcome to Los Angeles between 1989 and 1993. In this period, AIDS became the leading cause of death for US men ages 25-44; ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power)/LA called public health infrastructure to account and successfully fought for an AIDS ward at Los Angeles County Hospital. A widely circulated video of Los Angeles Police Department officers viciously beating Black motorist Rodney King, and their subsequent acquittal of criminal charges by a suburban jury, ignited five days of antiracist rebellion. The rising number of unhoused people in Los Angeles was becoming difficult to ignore, though not for the city's, state's, or federal government's lack of trying. Multiculturalism became a widely embraced - if sometimes cynically deployed - aesthetic and programming imperative.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85121626449&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85121626449&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0040557421000582
DO - 10.1017/S0040557421000582
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85121626449
SN - 0040-5574
VL - 63
SP - 90
EP - 114
JO - Theatre Survey
JF - Theatre Survey
IS - 1
ER -