Abstract
Close/Bye is a play devised in collaboration with students in Stephanie Batiste’s class Performance of Literature: Black California. This chapter describes the critical hurdles students tackled in prioritizing a theme of intimacy and betrayal in a play that addressed structural crises in Black life and offered paeans to the dead. The class put identification and empathy into practice through performance theory and embodiment. The process identified closeness and distance, love and betrayal as means to layer self-knowledge, intimate relationships, social injustice, and state violence in performance. Inspired by Black writing and performance workshops, the students moved swiftly from the personal to the structural as a confrontation with the impacts of state violence and oppression in honor of citizens recently slain by U.S. police.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
These guests constituted a lecture series called “Social Justice and Performance.” The student performance was the final offering in the series.
- 2.
Black Lives Matter is a political, social, and media activist organization developed in response to police killings of Black citizens. See blacklivesmatter.com
References
Batiste, S. (2015). Close/Bye, a play. BLST Review: A Journal of Undergraduate Research. Eds. Shana Redmond and Jeffrey Stewart, Department of Black Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Issue 3, Fall. http://blst-review.squarespace.com/
Butler, O. E. (1995). Bloodchild and other stories. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Elam, H. J., & Krasner, D. (2001). African-American performance and theater history: A critical reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gottschild, B. D. (1996). Digging the Africanist presence in American performance: Dance and other contexts. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Harrison, P. C. (2002). Form and transformation: Immanence of soul in the performance modes of black church and black music. In P. C. Harrison, V. L. Walker, & G. Edwards (Eds.), Black theatre: Ritual performance in the African diaspora (pp. 316–331). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Hill, C. P. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge.
Johnson, D. (2001). Break any woman down: Stories. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Johnson, E. P. (2003). Appropriating blackness: Performance and the politics of authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nanda, A. (2011). Black California: A literary anthology. Berkeley, CA: Heyday.
Parks, S. L. (2005, December 4). New black math. Theater Journal, 57(4), 576–583.
Smith, L., Adams, J., Smith, R. G., Lee, S., …, Wisconsin Public Television. (2002). A Huey P. Newton story. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, Distributor.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Batiste, S.L. (2018). Close/Bye: Staging [State] Intimacy and Betrayal in ‘Performance of Literature’. In: Perlow, O., Wheeler, D., Bethea, S., Scott, B. (eds) Black Women's Liberatory Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65789-9_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65789-9_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-65788-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-65789-9
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)