Judith Hamera
Biographic Data
| ID | 3692994 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Judith Hamera |
| GIVEN NAMES | Judith |
| FAMILY NAME | Hamera |
| SIGNATURE | HAMERA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2721-9470 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 31 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Njoki McElroy’s Radical Oral Interpretation of Literature
In fall 1970, Njoki McElroy taught the first university-level “Interpretation of Black Drama” course in the United States, which she designed and offered as a graduate student earning her doctorate in the Department of Interpretation at Northwestern University (NU). Her course curricularized epistemic commitments and selections from the Black Arts Movement (BAM) repertoire, bringing its theoretico-aesthetic project and its plays to a unit that wa…
Text and performance quarterly
Counterpublic Goods in Interesting Times
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…
Syllabus as Crisis Autoethnography
This personal essay examines entanglements of contemporary crises and pedagogical routines using the syllabus as autoethnography. Syllabi are an intrinsically autoethnographic genre: combining personal and disciplinary ideals, scoring contributing voices via course materials, and operating within the realities of academic labor. The syllabus for 'Performance in Extraordinary Times' organizes reflections on the ways COVID-19, lethal U.S. anti-Blac…
Cautionary Contours
Joann Kealiinohomoku's Silhougraphs®, traces of the silhouettes of dancers, were her attempt to operationalize her cultural relativist commitments and create a new method of dance analysis. Silhougraphs illuminate underexamined scholarly presumptions, methods, and tools that both contributed to and paralleled the emergence of dance studies as a discipline. Silhougraphs are also a cautionary tale demonstrating the ways culturally sensitive researc…
Weighty Anti-Feminism, Weighty Contradictions
On August 14, 2017, Breitbart News, a right wing populist US-based website, published a story about Princeton University’s DAN 312: “Fat – The ‘F’ Word and the Public Body,” my interdisciplinary hu
Rehearsal Problems
Jazz choreographer Gus Giordano's award-winning dance The Rehearsal exemplifies the fraught liminality of white middlebrow dance during the 1970s and early '80s, and the ambivalent place of works like it in US concert dance histories of the period. Middlebrow dance is a problem for critics and historians, because it is neither virtuosic nor innovative nor oppositional. Yet it is also a rich area of cultural production with considerable potential …
Gus Giordano, The Rehearsal, and the Critical Utility of Forgotten Dance Triumphs
Gus Giordano, The Rehearsal, and the Critical Utility of Forgotten Dance Triumphs Judith Hamera (bio) If you took classes in jazz dance in the American Midwest from the mid-1960s through the new millennium, you almost certainly encountered the work of Gus Giordano whether you knew it or not. Maybe one of his LPs was the score for your barre or for crossing the floor. Maybe you used his syllabus and barre exercises. Maybe your teacher had a batter…
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business argues that Michael Jackson and Detroit, both as material entities with specific histories and as representations with uncanny persistence, have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the United States, and particularly about the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid-1980s and 2016. They teach us about the racialization and aesthetics of these changes, how they …
The Labors of Michael Jackson
Chapter 1 establishes Michael Jackson’s deindustriality, which is too frequently ignored in favor of white artists like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or Bruce Springsteen. Jackson is the exemplary transitional subject of the deindustrial; his popularity peaked as manufacturing sector contractions became increasingly visible as national problems. His racial assertiveness and virtuosic dancing marked his own extraordinary social mobility wh…
Leland H. Roloff (1927 – 2015)
Lee Roloff was Professor Emeritus of Interpretation and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He received his B.A. in Speech from San Diego State University, an M.A. in Speech from Northw...
Commemorating Lee Roloff
Leland (“Lee”) H. Roloff made a profound impact on his students, colleagues, and friends. Detailing that impact reveals the ways the labors of commemoration both succumb to and challenge the view of performance as that which disappears. This personal memorial essay uses accounts of Lee Roloff’s pedagogy, references to the Greek myths and formulations of indigenous peoples, American poetry, the Jungian practice of sandplay therapy, and Lee’s own s…
Dancing, Reaching
This reflective essay uses an instance of gestural solidarity forged during Petrichor, a senior thesis performance at Princeton University created by transgender artist Bree White, to probe both the "Keep Dancing Orlando" video made in response to the horror of June 12, 2016, and, more broadly, the specific mechanisms through which dance creates communities of shared labor across difference in troubled times. It posits the reach-the moment when o…
Domestic(-ated) Desires, Tanked City
Osman Khan’s performative sculpture Come Hell or High Water both evokes and disrupts images of Detroit’s crumbling residential infrastructure. In so doing, the piece focuses attention on the home as a site of Fordist desire for a secure middle-class life, and the Fordist bargain itself as an object of attachment
Acts of Activism
Not all performance is activist, but D. Soyini Madison compellingly demonstrates that activism is not fully thinkable or operational apart from performance. In Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Rad
How to Do Things with Performance (Again and Again …)
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJudith HameraJudith Hamera is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University
The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems …
Feeling with Fish
Animals are good to think with, as Aesop's fables and the Muppets attest. They are even better to feel with; consider Marley and Me; Knut, the Berlin zoo's star polar bear; and the late, lamented A
Dwight Conquergood and the Field of Performance Studies
The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies
Disruption, Continuity, and the Social Lives of Things
Contemporary Navajo artworks bind together communicative competence, history, and affect within the commodity situation. Exploring the dynamic character of the object and its social trajectories, the author demonstrates how Navajo art objects are not static entities, but invested and infused with infinite performative powers. The object “speaks”; it animates relations of exchange even as it is, itself, animated
Regions of Likeness
Relations between dance and language are complex. Yet dance is not pre- or a-discursive; technique—the grammar and vocabulary that make dance go—also organizes interpersonal conversations that support pedagogical and performance communities. Citational solidarity with nonacademic texts, particularly Jorie Graham's poetry, enlarges these conversations, making them available to audiences beyond technique's outsiders. This essay explores the theoret…
All the (Dis)Comforts of Home
This essay examines ballet as a vernacular landscape, a homeplace where solidarity and competition, surveillance, and self-fashioning come together for adolescent girls. First, the author argues that place itself is performatively produced. Next, specific examples of place in ballet are examined. The author then discusses a Southern California ballet studio as a generative home for a diverse group of young women who navigate the pressures of pare…
An Answerability of Memory
In the aftermath of the genocide wrought in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge, some Cambodians told themselves that dance was the reason for their survival. Hamera investigates the fraught relations between history, trauma, and truth. At stake is the survival of a family—and of a culture
I Dance to You
This essay engages Luce Irigaray's view of love as carnal and relational labor, and her ethics of that love, as they emerge in her book I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Of particular interest is the 'to' in her formulation 'I love to you'. This 'to', the author argues, is deployed by, or reverberates between, dancing, observing and writing bodies. It is a technology of corporeal intimacy, a protocol for reading and re-imag…
All the (Dis)Comforts of Home
This essay examines ballet as a vernacular landscape, a homeplace where solidarity and competition, surveillance, and self-fashioning come together for adolescent girls. First, the author argues that place itself is performatively produced. Next, specific examples of place in ballet are examined. The author then discusses a Southern California ballet studio as a generative home for a diverse group of young women who navigate the pressures of pare…
Text and performance quarterly
The ambivalent, knowing male body in the Pasadena dance theatre
Classical ballet training, in the context of a semi‐professional company, serves as an initiatory vehicle for its male participants. This study examines the negotiation of this initiatory vehicle by men in the Pasadena Dance Theatre (PDT), a highly acclaimed company in Pasadena, California. Examined are the ways in which the PDT men consolidate cohesive group subject positions; how difference is framed and policed; how masculine agency is bracket…
Weighty Anti-Feminism, Weighty Contradictions
On August 14, 2017, Breitbart News, a right wing populist US-based website, published a story about Princeton University’s DAN 312: “Fat – The ‘F’ Word and the Public Body,” my interdisciplinary hu
Dancing, Reaching
This reflective essay uses an instance of gestural solidarity forged during Petrichor, a senior thesis performance at Princeton University created by transgender artist Bree White, to probe both the "Keep Dancing Orlando" video made in response to the horror of June 12, 2016, and, more broadly, the specific mechanisms through which dance creates communities of shared labor across difference in troubled times. It posits the reach-the moment when o…
Silence that reflects
This is the first of what TPQ hopes will be an annual look at contemporary performance art practices, focusing on aesthetic considerations. The author has had extensive experience as a reviewer of such performances
A post‐jungian perspective on repetition and violence in the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch
A post‐jungian perspective on repetition and violence in the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch
On reading, writing, and speaking the politics of (self‐) re‐presentation
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL VOICES: RACE, GENDER, AND SELF‐PORTRAITURE. By Françoise Lionnet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989; pp. vii‐258. $29.95. WOMAN, NATIVE, OTHER: WRITING POSTCOLONIALITY AND FEMINISM. By Trinh T. Minh‐ha. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989; pp. 1–173. Paper $14.95
Silence that reflects
This is the first of what TPQ hopes will be an annual look at contemporary performance art practices, focusing on aesthetic considerations. The author has had extensive experience as a reviewer of such performances
Loner on wheels as Gaia
Judith Hamera continues her examination of contemporary practices in performance by looking at the “angry art” of the “grand mother of activist performance art.”
The ambivalent, knowing male body in the Pasadena dance theatre
Classical ballet training, in the context of a semi‐professional company, serves as an initiatory vehicle for its male participants. This study examines the negotiation of this initiatory vehicle by men in the Pasadena Dance Theatre (PDT), a highly acclaimed company in Pasadena, California. Examined are the ways in which the PDT men consolidate cohesive group subject positions; how difference is framed and policed; how masculine agency is bracket…
Twilight
Seasons
I Dance to You
This essay engages Luce Irigaray's view of love as carnal and relational labor, and her ethics of that love, as they emerge in her book I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. Of particular interest is the 'to' in her formulation 'I love to you'. This 'to', the author argues, is deployed by, or reverberates between, dancing, observing and writing bodies. It is a technology of corporeal intimacy, a protocol for reading and re-imag…
An Answerability of Memory
In the aftermath of the genocide wrought in the 1970s by the Khmer Rouge, some Cambodians told themselves that dance was the reason for their survival. Hamera investigates the fraught relations between history, trauma, and truth. At stake is the survival of a family—and of a culture
Regions of Likeness
Relations between dance and language are complex. Yet dance is not pre- or a-discursive; technique—the grammar and vocabulary that make dance go—also organizes interpersonal conversations that support pedagogical and performance communities. Citational solidarity with nonacademic texts, particularly Jorie Graham's poetry, enlarges these conversations, making them available to audiences beyond technique's outsiders. This essay explores the theoret…
All the (Dis)Comforts of Home
This essay examines ballet as a vernacular landscape, a homeplace where solidarity and competition, surveillance, and self-fashioning come together for adolescent girls. First, the author argues that place itself is performatively produced. Next, specific examples of place in ballet are examined. The author then discusses a Southern California ballet studio as a generative home for a diverse group of young women who navigate the pressures of pare…
The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies
Disruption, Continuity, and the Social Lives of Things
Contemporary Navajo artworks bind together communicative competence, history, and affect within the commodity situation. Exploring the dynamic character of the object and its social trajectories, the author demonstrates how Navajo art objects are not static entities, but invested and infused with infinite performative powers. The object “speaks”; it animates relations of exchange even as it is, itself, animated
Dwight Conquergood and the Field of Performance Studies
The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems …
Feeling with Fish
Animals are good to think with, as Aesop's fables and the Muppets attest. They are even better to feel with; consider Marley and Me; Knut, the Berlin zoo's star polar bear; and the late, lamented A
How to Do Things with Performance (Again and Again …)
Additional informationNotes on contributorsJudith HameraJudith Hamera is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University
Domestic(-ated) Desires, Tanked City
Osman Khan’s performative sculpture Come Hell or High Water both evokes and disrupts images of Detroit’s crumbling residential infrastructure. In so doing, the piece focuses attention on the home as a site of Fordist desire for a secure middle-class life, and the Fordist bargain itself as an object of attachment
Acts of Activism
Not all performance is activist, but D. Soyini Madison compellingly demonstrates that activism is not fully thinkable or operational apart from performance. In Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Rad
Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business argues that Michael Jackson and Detroit, both as material entities with specific histories and as representations with uncanny persistence, have something valuable to teach us about three decades of structural economic transition in the United States, and particularly about the changing nature of work and capitalism between the mid-1980s and 2016. They teach us about the racialization and aesthetics of these changes, how they …
The Labors of Michael Jackson
Chapter 1 establishes Michael Jackson’s deindustriality, which is too frequently ignored in favor of white artists like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever or Bruce Springsteen. Jackson is the exemplary transitional subject of the deindustrial; his popularity peaked as manufacturing sector contractions became increasingly visible as national problems. His racial assertiveness and virtuosic dancing marked his own extraordinary social mobility wh…
Leland H. Roloff (1927 – 2015)
Lee Roloff was Professor Emeritus of Interpretation and Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He received his B.A. in Speech from San Diego State University, an M.A. in Speech from Northw...
Commemorating Lee Roloff
Leland (“Lee”) H. Roloff made a profound impact on his students, colleagues, and friends. Detailing that impact reveals the ways the labors of commemoration both succumb to and challenge the view of performance as that which disappears. This personal memorial essay uses accounts of Lee Roloff’s pedagogy, references to the Greek myths and formulations of indigenous peoples, American poetry, the Jungian practice of sandplay therapy, and Lee’s own s…
Dancing, Reaching
This reflective essay uses an instance of gestural solidarity forged during Petrichor, a senior thesis performance at Princeton University created by transgender artist Bree White, to probe both the "Keep Dancing Orlando" video made in response to the horror of June 12, 2016, and, more broadly, the specific mechanisms through which dance creates communities of shared labor across difference in troubled times. It posits the reach-the moment when o…
Weighty Anti-Feminism, Weighty Contradictions
On August 14, 2017, Breitbart News, a right wing populist US-based website, published a story about Princeton University’s DAN 312: “Fat – The ‘F’ Word and the Public Body,” my interdisciplinary hu
Art (26 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Visual arts (14 works) · History (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (12 works) · Diversity and Impact of Dance (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works)