"I know how it is when nobody sees you": oral-history performance methods for staging trauma. Issue 2 (2nd April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yeboah, Nikki Owusu
• Is Part Of: Text and performance quarterly. Volume 40:Issue 2(2020)
• Page Start: 131
• Page End: 151
• Publication Date: 2020-04-02
• Subjects: Oral-history performance -- trauma studies -- performance ethnography -- police violence -- verbatim theatre; Oral communication -- Periodicals; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 302.224205
• DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2020.1788133
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1046-2937

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this essay, I argue that, in a society oversaturated with images and narratives of racial trauma, creating theatre for social change requires more than staging minoritarian bodies with the aim of making their trauma visible. Contemporary oral-history performance practitioners must face the challenge of how to make the hypervisible meaningful. Drawing on my own production The (M)others, an oral-history performance adapted from the narratives of Bay-Area women who have lost family members to police violence, I present a methodology that works to disrupt the ways contemporary audiences are invited to passively consume, rather than actively intervene in, acts of racial trauma.