Joshua Chambers-Letson
Biographic Data
| ID | 767325 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joshua Chambers-Letson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joshua |
| FAMILY NAME | Chambers-Letson |
| SIGNATURE | CHAMBERS-LETSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Melanie Klein's Racial Objects
This article offers an account of the racial objects that appear in the work of Melanie Klein, especially in her influential theory of reparation. It traces the racial and colonial unconscious of Klein's theory of reparation to suggest that, when read against its own racial symptoms, Klein's work offers a portrait of the psychic dynamics through which whiteness is shored up within the operations of reparation. As an effect, white selfhood and sub…
As It Turns Out, What Was Being Staged Was
Camille Billops and James Hatch’s documentary The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks is an allegorical descent through the hell of US American racism, making use of Dante Alighieri’s classic poem from the Italian Renaissance Inferno as its narrative blueprint. This essay brings a performance studies perspective to bear on a reading of the film to argue that, by centering performance and theatricality in their interrogation of race and racism within…
Syllabus for Race, Performance, and Media Studies
A reflection on the serious work and pressing exigencies of interdisciplinary teaching at the intersection of media studies, performance studies, and race and ethnic studies, this syllabus is both a portrait of pandemic pedagogy and a reflection of the work of friendship and mutual struggle
Keywords Symposium
2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Alt…
Integration and reparation are never complete-nor is the work of creativity
A meditation on Dorinne Kondo's Worldmaking, this essay attends to the work of reparative creativity in Kondo's text. Revisiting Melanie Klein's theory of reparation alongside Kondo's rich discourse on racialization, repair, and creativity, the essay follows Kondo to insist upon a framing of reparation that attends to both its creative and destructive psychic, political, and social effects
Divas on the Dance Floor
Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is a rich new offering to the library of queer nightlife, as it meditates on the textures, fissures, and fragments of gay South Asian nightlife cultures caught within the transnational flows of global and racial capital. Kareem Khubchandani is the party's host, but not the kind of host who will shame you for wearing the wrong outfit, having the wrong body, too thick an accent, too dark a skin tone, too femm…
After the Party
Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking. After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzal…
Epilogue
Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End
Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance
Eiko’s Entanglements
Searching for Danh Vō’s Mother
The Sense of Brown
The Queer of Color’s Mother
A turn to the work of four artists: Danh Vō, Ryan Rivera, Martin Wong, and Audre Lorde, this meditation on the relationship between reproductive labor and performance’s mode of reproduction attempts to describe the complex ways in which women of color and their queer children mobilize performance to sustain queer of color life, both before and after death
The Racial Mundane
Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday is a carefully constructed study of the relationship between the performance of everyday life and the making and unmaking of racial reality in and across the Asian American body. Defining “the racial mundane” as “habitual, quotidian behaviors that come to exemplify the possibility and the limits of crossing racial boundaries” (177), Kim explores a host of regist…
Homegrown Terror
At the intersection of Asian American studies, performance studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this article issues a study of the work of performance artist Wafaa Bilal. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein and, in particular, Klein’s theory of projective identification, Homegrown Terror issues a theory of projective identification’s role in the process of racialization, and, in particular, the production of the racialized…
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
Performance's mode of reproduction I
This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of con…
Mare Liberum
Bringing a performance studies perspective to bear on the emergent area of oceanic studies, this essay theorizes the oceanic imaginary and its particular resonance for Asian American performance. It offers a study of the mare liberum , or free sea: an insovereign zone that belongs to no one because it is common to all. Organized around a reading of musician Karen O’s performances, the essay identifies the emancipatory kernel at the heart of her p…
Shipwrecked Sovereignty
In 2007, a private corporation specializing in deep-sea salvage retrieved a treasure-laden shipwreck in international waters southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The wreck was that of a Spanish warship that sunk during the Napoleonic wars. Following the discovery, a legal dispute arose in U.S. federal courts, between the corporate salvors, the Kingdom of Spain, and other litigants. At issue in the legal proceedings was the status of the shipwreck …
Compensatory Hypertrophy, or All about My Mother
Thinking with the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Pedro Almodóvar’s film All about My Mother, this essay traces a series of transplants, organs, and acts of compensation that occur within all three in order to explore the question of how to address a loss that is unthinkable and incommunicable. The essay theorizes the transplant as an event that reveals the conjunctive relationship between life and death, fostering a practice of s…
A Race So Different
Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher EducationTaking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday …
“No, I Can't Forget”: Performance and Memory in Dengue Fever's Cambodian America
The Politics of Failure
Janelle Reinelt explores playwright Howard Brenton's return to Britain's national stages after almost a decade's absence, discussing recent productions that address the fraught relationship between religious belief and human conduct. Joshua Chambers-Letson contemplates the queer politics of failure in regard to Nao Bustamante's Hero, which challenges the value of “normality” via the possibility of a communal being-in-failure for queers, people of…
Reparative Feminisms, Repairing Feminism-Reparation, Postcolonial Violence, and Feminism
During the summer of 2005, as with every summer in New York City, a person couldn’t enter a bar or dance club without hearing a predetermined set of summer hits. This past summer, the host was comp
Performance's mode of reproduction I
This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of con…
Reparative Feminisms, Repairing Feminism-Reparation, Postcolonial Violence, and Feminism
During the summer of 2005, as with every summer in New York City, a person couldn’t enter a bar or dance club without hearing a predetermined set of summer hits. This past summer, the host was comp
Shipwrecked Sovereignty
In 2007, a private corporation specializing in deep-sea salvage retrieved a treasure-laden shipwreck in international waters southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The wreck was that of a Spanish warship that sunk during the Napoleonic wars. Following the discovery, a legal dispute arose in U.S. federal courts, between the corporate salvors, the Kingdom of Spain, and other litigants. At issue in the legal proceedings was the status of the shipwreck …
Reparative Feminisms, Repairing Feminism-Reparation, Postcolonial Violence, and Feminism
During the summer of 2005, as with every summer in New York City, a person couldn’t enter a bar or dance club without hearing a predetermined set of summer hits. This past summer, the host was comp
The Politics of Failure
Janelle Reinelt explores playwright Howard Brenton's return to Britain's national stages after almost a decade's absence, discussing recent productions that address the fraught relationship between religious belief and human conduct. Joshua Chambers-Letson contemplates the queer politics of failure in regard to Nao Bustamante's Hero, which challenges the value of “normality” via the possibility of a communal being-in-failure for queers, people of…
“No, I Can't Forget”: Performance and Memory in Dengue Fever's Cambodian America
A Race So Different
Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher EducationTaking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday …
Compensatory Hypertrophy, or All about My Mother
Thinking with the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Pedro Almodóvar’s film All about My Mother, this essay traces a series of transplants, organs, and acts of compensation that occur within all three in order to explore the question of how to address a loss that is unthinkable and incommunicable. The essay theorizes the transplant as an event that reveals the conjunctive relationship between life and death, fostering a practice of s…
Mare Liberum
Bringing a performance studies perspective to bear on the emergent area of oceanic studies, this essay theorizes the oceanic imaginary and its particular resonance for Asian American performance. It offers a study of the mare liberum , or free sea: an insovereign zone that belongs to no one because it is common to all. Organized around a reading of musician Karen O’s performances, the essay identifies the emancipatory kernel at the heart of her p…
Shipwrecked Sovereignty
In 2007, a private corporation specializing in deep-sea salvage retrieved a treasure-laden shipwreck in international waters southwest of the Iberian Peninsula. The wreck was that of a Spanish warship that sunk during the Napoleonic wars. Following the discovery, a legal dispute arose in U.S. federal courts, between the corporate salvors, the Kingdom of Spain, and other litigants. At issue in the legal proceedings was the status of the shipwreck …
Homegrown Terror
At the intersection of Asian American studies, performance studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this article issues a study of the work of performance artist Wafaa Bilal. Drawing on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Melanie Klein and, in particular, Klein’s theory of projective identification, Homegrown Terror issues a theory of projective identification’s role in the process of racialization, and, in particular, the production of the racialized…
A Constellation of Imagined Theatres
In ten one-page hypothetical scores, playlets, and closet dramas, a collection of theorists and artists of the contemporary stage present “imagined theatres” interrogating what is possible and impossible at the intersections of performance and technology. A one-page gloss faces each imagined theatre, expanding on its promise in critical, historical, or personal terms. The dialogues among these texts explore how performances theorize, and how theo…
Performance's mode of reproduction I
This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of con…
The Racial Mundane
Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday is a carefully constructed study of the relationship between the performance of everyday life and the making and unmaking of racial reality in and across the Asian American body. Defining “the racial mundane” as “habitual, quotidian behaviors that come to exemplify the possibility and the limits of crossing racial boundaries” (177), Kim explores a host of regist…
The Queer of Color’s Mother
A turn to the work of four artists: Danh Vō, Ryan Rivera, Martin Wong, and Audre Lorde, this meditation on the relationship between reproductive labor and performance’s mode of reproduction attempts to describe the complex ways in which women of color and their queer children mobilize performance to sustain queer of color life, both before and after death
After the Party
Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking. After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzal…
Epilogue
Tseng Kwong Chi and the Party’s End
Nina Simone and the Work of Minoritarian Performance
Eiko’s Entanglements
Searching for Danh Vō’s Mother
The Sense of Brown
Keywords Symposium
2020 Keywords Symposium Jennifer C. Nash (bio), Samantha Pinto (bio), Marisol LeBrón (bio), Monica L. Miller (bio), Ann Cvetkovich (bio), Julie Livingston (bio), Psyche Williams-Forson (bio), Ruha Benjamin (bio), Christina Hanhardt (bio), Harris Solomon (bio), Neelima Navuluri (bio), Charles W. Hargett (bio), Peter S. Kussin (bio), Noémi Tousignant (bio), Joshua Chambers-Letson (bio), Tiana Reid (bio), Miriam Posner (bio), Racquel Gates, Sari Alt…
Integration and reparation are never complete-nor is the work of creativity
A meditation on Dorinne Kondo's Worldmaking, this essay attends to the work of reparative creativity in Kondo's text. Revisiting Melanie Klein's theory of reparation alongside Kondo's rich discourse on racialization, repair, and creativity, the essay follows Kondo to insist upon a framing of reparation that attends to both its creative and destructive psychic, political, and social effects
Divas on the Dance Floor
Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is a rich new offering to the library of queer nightlife, as it meditates on the textures, fissures, and fragments of gay South Asian nightlife cultures caught within the transnational flows of global and racial capital. Kareem Khubchandani is the party's host, but not the kind of host who will shame you for wearing the wrong outfit, having the wrong body, too thick an accent, too dark a skin tone, too femm…
Syllabus for Race, Performance, and Media Studies
A reflection on the serious work and pressing exigencies of interdisciplinary teaching at the intersection of media studies, performance studies, and race and ethnic studies, this syllabus is both a portrait of pandemic pedagogy and a reflection of the work of friendship and mutual struggle
As It Turns Out, What Was Being Staged Was
Camille Billops and James Hatch’s documentary The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks is an allegorical descent through the hell of US American racism, making use of Dante Alighieri’s classic poem from the Italian Renaissance Inferno as its narrative blueprint. This essay brings a performance studies perspective to bear on a reading of the film to argue that, by centering performance and theatricality in their interrogation of race and racism within…
Melanie Klein's Racial Objects
This article offers an account of the racial objects that appear in the work of Melanie Klein, especially in her influential theory of reparation. It traces the racial and colonial unconscious of Klein's theory of reparation to suggest that, when read against its own racial symptoms, Klein's work offers a portrait of the psychic dynamics through which whiteness is shored up within the operations of reparation. As an effect, white selfhood and sub…
Sociology (13 works) · Art (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (8 works) · History (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works)