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Event Details:
TAPS, CCSRE and Native American Studies (NAS) host University of Michigan's Bethany Hughes for a Professional Development Series, including a Lecture and Departmental Workshop. RSVP for the Lecture is requested
ABOUT THE LECTURE | Across the 19th century, American theatre artists and audiences turned to the "Indian" to tell stories of drama, tragedy, comedy, and history. From these diverse but popular plays, a recognizable and racialized figure developed, the Stage Indian. This talk tracks the material elements used to create "Indian" characters to explore how theatrical techniques and dramatic repertoires worked with and through settler colonial logics, resulting in a recognizable and racialized figure. The Stage Indian is more than feathers and face paint, however. It is an embodied figure whose legibility as an "Indian" is co-constructed with its audience. Tracing instantiations of the "Stage Indian" across the 19th century reveals the saturation, flexibility, and persistence of redface as a tool of U.S. control over Indigenous nations and peoples.
Reception with refreshments to follow | Must be logged in via an @stanford.edu account to RSVP
ABOUT THE SPEAKER | Bethany Hughes (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is an Assistant Professor of American Culture and a core faculty member in the Native American Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on Native American representation in theatrical performance and contemporary Indigenous theatre and performance. She teaches classes on Native American Studies, American Performance, Race and Musical Theatre, Indigenous Performance, and Critical University Studies. Her writing appears in Theatre Journal, American Periodicals, Mobilities, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics. Her first book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, which explores the aesthetic, racial, and political stakes of Native American representation in U.S. theatre history, was published in 2024 by NYU Press. She is currently writing an introductory-level book on Theatre and Indigeneity.