Racializing Performances in Colonial Time-Spaces

Abstract

Abstract Starting from the premise that colonialism begat the racial systems that continue to undergird hierarchies of power and privilege, the chapter argues that colonial time-spaces (chronotopes) remain productive of racial orders. Even in ostensibly postcolonial contexts, colonial-era racial logics have long half-lives and often continue to circulate through performances that represent or re-enact colonial time-spaces. The chapter traces the semiotic workings of racial performances, from mundane everyday interactions to staged spectacles (and back), in order to examine how they selectively highlight or erase the genealogies connecting past and present and performatively enact configurations of racializing signs that can mark physical bodies, social types, locations, voices, dispositions, and practices, usually in overdetermined, if not necessarily consistent ways. The chapter draws upon critical theory and ethnographies of performance in the Americas to discuss the case of Cuban bozal, a figuration of “untamed” African presence in contemporary Cuban religious and folklore performances.

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