| Summary: | This paper is a study of The Wooster Group’s staging of identity-related tensions in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. Using Judith Butler’s theories on performativity as an analytical framework, this paper shows how Elizabeth LeCompte’s iconoclastic American company deconstructs O’Neill’s 1920 work to “trouble” the traditional configurations of both gender and race. By playing with the codes of representation, The Wooster Group sheds light on the artificiality of the conventional binary system opposing the masculine to the feminine and Whites to Blacks. As they subvert traditional signs and symbols, The Wooster Group creates an “aesthetic of resistance,” this paper argues, opening onto a reconfiguration of gender and race identities.
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