The pop show: racial performance and transformation in global arts industries

Global cultural and arts industries, with their multiple centers and overlapping circuits of creativity and capital, operate on the constant and necessary movement of bodies. These bodies belong to visual artists, dancers, songwriters, designers and models, all of whom are forced to contend with the varying systems of racialization and racialized value that their bodies become subject to in the process of global mobility. Arts industries send bodies into motion across global scapes, emphasizing the portability of artists and their aesthetics. For artists to manage that movement through the cultural and sociopolitical circuits of the globe, they must stage their own bodies and their works according to wildly varied conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality, transforming constantly, making and re-making the edges of their identity performances. ❧ This dissertation considers these performances of race using the grammars of racial performativity to explore the conditions under which race is staged, exhibited, and trafficked in global cultural and arts industries. Case studies from the fashion, visual art, and dance industries serve as lenses for examining the possibilities and limitations of racial performance in the creative circuits of globalization. How does racial performance both help and limit the transformation and mobility – symbolic and literal – of the racialized body? How are particular racial performances a tactical resource in global movement? How do industry’s global economies script racial performance and how do artists navigate those scripts through strategic racialization? ❧ Mapping the discourses of racial performance onto the selected case studies, I propose a new optic for understanding the ways in which racial performance can correspond to the geo-political demands of global movement. That optic is pop-up performance, a concept that helps us confront how artists strategically play with the permutations of the racialized body, calibrating performances of race according to varying economies and their attendant systems of racialization. Examining the artistic practices of designers, visual artists, and choreographers through this optic enables us to understand the racial feeling and value articulated through their bodies and their aesthetics as inseparable from site-specific political economies of race.