Culture in / as Performance (DRA2072)

30 credits

This module looks at the relationship between performance and culture. You will explore different approaches to understanding and defining culture, and look at issues of the representation of ethnicity, gender and national identity in different types of performances including theatre, popular culture, films, and museums. You will use theories from performance studies and cultural studies, including globalization, transnationalism, diaspora theory and postcolonialism to look at these performances in different cultural contexts, questioning how identity and culture reflects and/or resists definitions of the ‘norm’ or the ‘other’. You will also look at the way that nations and cultures perform themselves as a form of making and promoting national or local identity, and preserve or challenge this identity through the idea of ‘heritage’. You will conduct your own ethnographic cultural study of a performance, event or place as part of the module.