THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form ���InterPlay��� utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes ���social change.��� I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that���even in these endeavors���they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain.

Faithful Genres: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting

���Faithful Genres��� examines how African Americans adapted the genres of the black church during the civil rights movement. Civil rights mass meetings, as the movement���s so-called ���energy machine��� and ���heartbeat,��� serve as the project���s central site of inquiry for these meetings were themselves adaptations of the genre of the black church service. The mass meetings served as the space to draw people into the movement, encourage people toward further activism, and testify to anyone watching that the African American community was working toward desegregation, voting rights, and racial equality. In Martin Luther King, Jr.���s words, ���Through these meetings we were able to generate the power and depth which finally galvanized the entire Negro community.��� In these weekly or sometimes even nightly meetings, participants inhabited the familiar genres of the black church, song, prayer, and testimony. As they did, they remade these genres to respond directly to white supremacy and to enact the changes they sought to create. While scholars have studied the speeches men and women such as King, Ralph Abernathy, and Fannie Lou Hamer delivered at meetings (Wilson; Selby; Holmes; Brooks), scholars have yet to examine how civil rights mass meetings functioned through a range of genres and rhetors. My study addresses this absence and invigorates this discussion to demonstrate how the other meeting genres beyond the speech���song, prayer, and testimony���functioned to create energy, sustenance, and motivation for activists. Examining these collectively enacted genres, I show how rhetors adapted song, prayer, and testimony toward strategic interventions. I also examine how activists took these same genres up outside the meetings to circulate them in broader contexts for new audiences. By recovering and defining the mass meeting as a flexible repertoire of genres and then examining the redeployment of meeting genres outside the meeting, ���Faithful Genres��� contributes to histories of civil rights and African American rhetorics, genre studies, and histories of religious rhetorics.

Between Nation and State: Albanian Associations from Ottoman Origins to a Communist Party, 1880 - 1945

This dissertation addresses the broader antecedents of the Communist Party of Albania (CPA) as one of a number of associations whose experience was central to Albanian political history. This long experience dates back to the informal national associations formed in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century. The dissertation examines the role of these associations which, pursuing language rights and political representation through imperial state reforms, set a pattern that struggled to connect nation and state, rather than asserting the territorial demands for a nation-state familiar across the region. Starting out in the Ottoman Empire, but then maturing in the Albanian diaspora in Romania, Bulgaria, Egypt and the United States, this dissertation shows politically significant processes of longer-term adaptation that created informal associations as institutional structures able to channel collective action. It then traces the reframing of these patterns through their destruction in the Balkan Wars and the First World War to the emergence of communist associations in the interwar period and beyond. This dissertation is a sustained study that traces long-term Ottoman imperial political legacies in the Albanian successor state. The story of the associations, based on hitherto unexamined archival documents, shows that the Albanians possessed a far greater capacity for political mobilization that previously acknowledged by historians. Moreover, the dissertation successfully challenges the conventional wisdom that portrays the Albanians as irreparably divided along sectarian and regional faultlines. It finds that Albanian national activism was civic in character rather than ethnic as elsewhere in the Balkans. The Albanians fought to remain within a multinational framework because this afforded them political security, social advancement and potential economic growth. In the late Ottoman period, this political objective was manifested in the acceptance of the supranational imperial order whereas during the Second World War, in the aspiration to become members of the Comintern internationalist movement. Another important find, is the newly-discovered evidence concerning the founding of the CPA and its wartime conduct as an organization created and led by the Albanians themselves, albeit with Yugoslav ideological assistance under the transnational umbrella of the Comintern.