"No Storm in the Weather: Domestic Bliss and the Performance of African American Identities"

Stephanie Batiste,is Assistant Professor, Literary & Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon and visiting RISCRE fellow. She is interested in relationships between representation, performance, identity, race, and power, not necessarily in that order. Batiste specializes in African American and 20th century American literature and culture and interrogates the ways in which cultural “texts” (literature, theater, performance, film, art, bodies) as imaginative systems are themselves performative of identity, cultural values, and human interactions. She uses theories of culture, race, imperialism, and post-coloniality to examine how expressions of identity produce and sustain power relationships and inform human economic, political, and social realities. Her work considers the influence of history on expressive culture and the ways expressive culture is, in turn, determined by and formative of social and cultural movements. Batiste recently finished her dissertation on imperial representations (such as primitivism and expansion) in Depression Era African American performance. She analyzes films and theatrical shows including A Pictorial View of Idlewild, Michigan (1924), The Exile (1927), Two Gun Man From Harlem (1938), The Voodoo Macbeth (1934), and The Swing Mikado (1938) for their expression of African American racial and national subjectivity. This work deals with international relationships between blacks and complicates African Americans' identity as Americans during a moment of financial and cultural instability.