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Rebecca Schneider

Professor of Media and Culture at Brown University

Professor of Media and Culture at Brown University

Biography

Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Modern Media and Culture at Brown University. Formerly, she served as chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and she continues to contribute to dance and theatre studies. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (1997) and Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011) among other titles. She is presently completing a digital book titled Standing Still Moving: Arts of Gesture in Lateral Times.  

She has been a Mercator Fellow in Konfigurationen des Films at Goethe University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Drama at Queen Mary University of London among other affiliations. In 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a long-term project titled Shoaling in the Sea of History: Littoral Dance in the Afterlives of Slavery’s Capitalism. Her first efforts on this project recently appeared in Island Studies as “This Shoal Which is Not One: Island Studies, Performance Studies, and Africans Who Fly.”

 

Title and Abstract of Conference Paper

The Monument and the Quarry

Monuments hail passersby into relations often marked as "heritage." On what kinds of frequencies or through what gestural means can flesh-based performance respond to architecture or statuary that continually re-sediments a triumphalist, imperial, or colonizing history through stone-based imperial gestures in public space?  Can the often remarked “invisibility” of monuments, which become unseen parts of everyday landscapes, be contravened by amplifying what Michel deCerteau called the “oceanic rumble of everyday life”? Does the relationship of flesh to stone, and stone to flesh in our architectures of enactment -- the way we walk through a Triumphal arch, say, or the way we genuflect, or not, to a gesturing stone emperor -- hold open the potential for unsettling history toward its own otherwise futures? Are there other ways of listening to what stone might say? Or, what is the quarry to the monument, and what can the quarry re-call?