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27 October 2020 / Events

Online Lecture: The Fatal Drop

image: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon. Photo by Joe Mazza

This lecture will be given via Zoom Webinar. Please book on this page and we will email you full details of how to access this new and exciting (and necessary!) way of participating in our lectures.

 

The Fatal Drop: Body, Race and Gender in Boucicault’s The Octoroon and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon.

Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. This melodrama proved immensely popular, with performances in the USA and Britain. Set in antebellum Louisiana with exotic events such as a slave auction, its depiction of race focuses on Zoe, the tragic mulatta tainted by black blood.

In 2017, African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon received its European premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre. Here, Jacobs-Jenkins queries the racial binary of black or white through audacious casting and dialogue which challenge the concept of the tragic “racialised body.”

Speaker’s biography:

Dr. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas is a scholar-practitioner, connecting theatre-making and performance theories.  Her research interests include representations of race, gender and culture in the post-Empire diaspora.  As a director and scenographer, her work explores the interface between text and scenographic practices. She is a contributor to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance, Alternatives Within the Mainstream: British Black and British Asian Theatre, Reconstructing Hybridity, ‘Black’ British Aesthetics Today and Design and the Postmodern Stage.

Dr. Kaneko-Lucas created the BA Acting and World Theatre at Regent’s University,  She is currently Academic Leader of Performance Preparation Academy and Annual Events Coordinator for the Society for Theatre Research.

If you have any questions, please contact us via events@str.org.uk

Date

27 October 2020

Time

19:30