Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2012 Performing nostalgia: body, memory, and the aesthetics of past-home Jade C. Huell Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Huell, Jade C., "Performing nostalgia: body, memory, and the aesthetics of past-home" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 391. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/391 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. PERFORMING NOSTALGIA: BODY, MEMORY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF PAST­HOME A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Communication Studies by Jade C. Huell B.A., Columbia College, Columbia South Carolina, 2006 M.A., University of South Carolina, 2008 December 2012 Acknowledgements First, I thank my family for their continued support and for going above and beyond to make sure I had the opportunity to pursue all of my educational endeavors. For this, I am eternally grateful and forever in debt. Although I will never be able to repay you for all you have given me, please consider the following. Dad, you are hereby forgiven for tossing “Ping,” my grease‐stained construction paper duck, in the garbage when I was a child. And Mom, you were right—However unconsciously, I do tend to leave cabinets open. To my grandmothers, I draw my strength (and good genes) from you. To my Jordan, I love you always. I extend my heartfelt thank you to each one of my friends and colleagues whose company, help, and knowledge have been invaluable. Dr. Joe Rhodes, I forgive you for the hideous blue paint in our first office. Dr. Danielle Dick McGeough, thank you so much for our long talks, for your encouragement every step of the way, and for your great friendship. Crissy Stafford, we can always say we wrote “sistertations” together. Emily Graves, Annemarie Galeucia, and Mikeala Durrant, you guys are the best study buddies in the universe and I have loved my time with each of you. To everyone who was involved in my shows and/or in my independent study course, thank you, thank you, and thank you. Those memories will last forever. Additionally, I would like to thank all the graduate students who have touched my life since moving to Baton Rouge. You know who you are and you know I look forward to embarking on our careers together. Thank you for working with me in class, in shows, and in life. I extend my appreciation to the great minds that have guided me along the way with their knowledge, patience, and belief in my abilities. To Dr. Trish Suchy, Dr. John Fletcher, ii Dr. Femi Euba, Dr. Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, Dr. Stephanie Houston Grey, Dr. Nathan Crick, Dr. Loretta Pecchioni, Dr. Rachel Hall, Dr. Michael Bowman, Dr. Brian Rusted, Dr. Lisa Flanagan, Dr. Danielle Vignes, Dr. Sharon Weltman, Dr. Mindy Fenske, Dr. Jason Munsell, Dr. Helen Tate, Dr. Tamara Burk, Sara Nalley, Kyle Love, all the brilliant folk from the Black Feminist Performance Institute, and others, I express my gratitude. Each of you has touched my world and this dissertation in some wonderful way. I have benefitted greatly from the quality and diversity of your approaches to research, performance, and pedagogy. I owe a big thank you to each member of my dissertation committee. Your thoughts, provocations, and critique continue to influence my thinking about this project. I especially thank Dr. Ruth Laurion Bowman, my dissertation advisor, for her love, respect, and unwavering confidence in me throughout my doctoral studies. I am sorry I burned your okra. But I am not sorry I had the opportunity to be one of your advisees. Guiding me knowingly and skillfully, encouraging me to be my best, you have been a lifeline, an inspiration, and a friend. I believe that I can do more, that I am more, because of my relationship with you. This dissertation would not be possible without you, and I look forward to our future collaborations. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………...ii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….....v Chapter One. Tracing the Body of Nostalgia: Nostalgia, Performance, and Performing Nostalgia………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter Two. The Nostalgic Body: Practices of African American Genealogical Memory…………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………22 Chapter Three. My Nervous Body: Performing Nostalgia at Elmina Slave Castle……………...70 Chapter Four. Staging Nostalgia: Time and Space in Copious Notes: A Nostalgia Tale……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………107 Chapter Five. Notes Toward Performing Critical Nostalgia: A Return Home………………….175 Epilogue………..……………………………………………………………………………………………………………200 Works Cited…………………..………..…………………………………………………………………………………..206 Vita…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….212 iv Abstract Since its etymological beginnings, the meanings and usages of nostalgia have shifted markedly. In the shifting, nostalgia’s associations with the body and with the concept of home has diminished. This study of African American nostalgia for Africa uses genealogical inquiry, personal and autoethnographic narrative, and performance theories and practices to reinvigorate the relations between body, memory, aesthetics, past, and home. Attending to operations of time and space, I theorize the aforementioned relations in order to build a theory of critical nostalgia. Following Debbora Battaglia, I argue and illustrate that nostalgia is an act realized in performance, and I develop my theory of critical nostalgia investigating three primary sites of memory: two African American genealogy websites, Elmina Castle, a slave castle located on Ghana’s West coast, and my own staged theatre production Copious Notes: A Nostalgia Tale. Informed by Michel Foucault’s method of critical genealogy and Joseph Roach’s genealogies of performance, I offer critical nostalgia as a method of scholarly inquiry, as an active practice of personal and cultural memory, as a tool for representing memories of past‐homes, and as a compositional aesthetic. In the study, I interrogate the history of nostalgia and its use for scholars as a critical category. Theorizing the positionality of the corporeal black body within nostalgic appeals of home, homeland and community, I attend to the relations between origin, roots, and identity. Further, I explore the performative possibilities of nostalgia in relation to affective bodily experience and in relation to narratives of trauma. Finally, I illustrate the utility of critical nostalgia for creating aesthetic performances sensitive to time and space, and I synthesize the major tenants of critical nostalgia for use in performance praxis. v Chapter One Tracing the Body of Nostalgia: Nostalgia, Performance, and Performing Nostalgia In 1688, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia,” combining the Greek nostos, meaning to return home, and algos, for pain or longing, to refer to a familiar pathology we might call homesickness today. Since its debut in medical terminology, nostalgia has enjoyed a rich career as a descriptive and critical category in the social sciences and in the humanities. In “The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the ‘Critique of Nostalgia,’” Nauman Naqvi traces the development of nostalgia through history in order to “induce or heighten anxiety about the use of the word as a critical category” (Naqvi 7).1 According to Naqvi, nostalgia emerged as a medical term in the seventeenth century to describe the malady of desperately homesick “peasant‐soldiers.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nostalgia became associated with criminology, describing motivation for a variety of criminal activity, such as arson and assault. By the 1930s and 1940s, nostalgia was known as a psychological disorder, a mental condition that most commonly affected university students (Naqvi 7‐8). Further, somewhere along the line, nostalgia transformed from use as a diagnostic tool, applied to individuals displaying specific behaviors, to an indistinct critique “target[ing] the valorization and manipulation of the past” (Naqvi 5). This change marks two shifts crucial to my study. The first shift is the movement away from the corporeal body as an indication of nostalgic tendencies toward an emphasis on psychology. The second shift is that from diagnostic tool to social critique, turning nostalgia into a largely theoretical and subjective concept. Nostalgia transforms from being subject‐centered to 1 For other current reviews of nostalgia, see Susannah Radstone, The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory; and Jenelle Wilson, Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. 1 being centered on the subjective evaluation of a text or other expression, attitude or style. Nowadays, nostalgia is used often in the colloquial as a style of dealing with or writing about the past, at best in terms of romanticism or escapism and at worst in an effort to censor the past.2 By the end of his study, Naqvi concludes that the term