This academic symposium coincides with the exhibition The Other: Race, Ethnicity, and Puppetry, curated by Dr. More recently, a “fluorescence” of African-American artists have turned to puppets, masks, crankies, and other performing objects to resist objectification of the black body, counter the grotesque ways that African-Americans have been portrayed, take back their own identities, complexify dominant narratives, and address sensitive issues through humor (Bland et al. In his solo street show, Puns and Doedie–Puppets against Apartheid (1981-1986), South African puppeteer Gary Friedman satirized the racist Apartheid regime and raised awareness of the social attitudes that underpinned it. Masks and puppets representing Vietnamese women made repeat appearances in Bread and Puppet Theater’s anti-war political spectacles in the 1960s and 1970s, providing human form to the abstractions of collateral damage. Practitioners have also bravely challenged systemic racism. Beyond such racist imagery, puppetry and allied forms frequently reflects a particular society’s unstated, subtle, and yet systemic and pervasive racism and bias, which is often not even recognized or acknowledged by the practitioners engaging in it (Populoh 2019). Turkish karagöz is replete with caricatures of the diverse population of cosmopolitan Istanbul, with offensive portraits of haggling Jews, stupid Arabs, and others. America’s most popular living puppeteer, ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, is famed for his demeaning José Jalapeño and Achmed the Dead Terrorist figures and other characters who spout racist remarks. The road to the Holocaust was paved by anti-Semitic puppets, showing, for example, Jews transforming to pigs, inculcating into German children an image of the racist insult Judensau (Blumenthal 2005: 94). The transformative capacities of performing objects-which allow any practitioner to enact anything or anybody-grant them unique capacities to realize exotic fantasies inscribe and reinforce racial stereotypes and ethnic misrepresentations but also to transcend received categories and struggle against modes of oppression such as colonialism, often through parody. Such dramatizations of alterity routinely involve caricature and exaggeration. Online symposium, April 9-10, 2021 Organized by Matthew Isaac Cohen, Jungmin Song, and John Bell Sponsored by the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry and the Puppets Arts Program of the University of Connecticut In societies around the globe, puppets and other performing objects such as masks and cantastorias are used to represent and stage the Other - various ethnicities and races considered different from the dominant group.
0 kommentar(er)
