THEA 270 - Race and Identity in American Theatre

The course explores the role American theatre has played in the construction, preservation, and interrogation of race and gender categories. Students analyze works that employ performance as a venue for political activism, for cultivation of intraethnic pride, and for explorations of social issues too sensitive to be addressed in other contexts. Drawing upon readings from the theatre and other humanities and social science disciplines, this course examines the ways dramatic texts help to foster intra- and cross-cultural understanding, and also how a familiarity with the politics of representation and various other concerns of identity-based cultural groups can inform performance practices. Students examine works from a variety of cultural traditions in an effort to understand how seemingly common institutions or value systems (family, gender, class dynamics) must always be viewed through specific historical and cultural lenses. This course provides students with a more nuanced understanding of what race is and how it functions in America, and how theatre has been implicated as both a tool of racism and a means by which to resist its effects

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): CRES 270
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).