Schneider
!: “Clearly concatenations of primitivism and attendant racisms attach, in turn, to attempts to acknowledge performance as an appropriate means of remaining, of remembering” (102). Schneider’s belief that it is primitivism and racism that coincide with performance as a method to preserve history was poignant. To think racism contributes to this thought process seems unpopular, but makes sense as a medium through which people have sought to realize performance as a powerful preservation tool.
?: “…are we limiting ourselves to an understanding of performance predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?” (100). A follow up to this question: are we attributing more significance to performance as a means to defy cultural habituation? Performance can be archived, despite its disappearance, in the same way that songs and spoken word are archived. How is this different?
Birns
!: The section that discusses the Charley Patton documentation regarding Emmett Till and the woman he was killed for looking at connects to my section’s discussion about the white members of the community affected by the lynchings. It is often hard to empathize or consider that effects of such horrific acts on a not-directly affected group. Likewise, it is hard to try to humanize the woman for whom Emmett Till was murdered because of. It is an interesting concept.
?: “In Tree, he conjures a performative idiom literate in many languages, musical and gestural, Western and non-Western” (18). What is a “performative idiom”?
