Repetition and Embodiment: Performative Reading in Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula

Abstract

This article argues that Kathy Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula enacts a mode of performative reading that imagines a place for literature within the world of performance art. Tracking Acker’s biographical relationships to performance art during the 1960s and 1970s, it shows how the novel engages performance artists’ conceptual concerns to conceive of reading as both a repetitive and embodied process. Acker’s interest in performance is in fact an underexplored aspect of her work that, read alongside existing criticism on Acker’s novels, provides an alternative genealogy for both Acker’s own writing as well as for her place in the trajectory of performance theory. Placing this biographical and textual reading within the larger framework of performance studies and performance theory, this essay contends that Acker is a neglected antecedent to current moments in the study of performance, anticipating the contemporary academic interest in both performance and archival theory.

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