Writing & Performing the Self

What is a self? How might writing and performance
together help forge or express its possibilities?
Grounded in creative writing and drawing on
performance art, literature, art criticism,
cultural studies, and black feminist theory, this
class will open space for creative writers to
write and perform the self. Students will read
personal/ autobiographical / performance texts,
see live and archived performance, and keep
persona journals. Key course topics will include
embodiment, memory, autobiography, persona,
subjectivity, disclosure, tracery, gesture, and
action. We will also reckon with the self in
relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and
other vital sites of identity. Class readings,
exercises, assignments, and showings will help
students develop their writing/performing practice
over the course of the term. Together we will
activate writing as performance and vice versa in
the self/in the world.