Fractured Identity and Agency and the Plays of Adrienne Kennedy

Boucher, Georgie

doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400302

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

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“…De-essentialization involves de-emphasizing political, social, or religious aspects of a movement and opening central practices to new constructions and representations that broaden their appeal (Boucher, 2006; Bekerman, Zembylas, and McGlynn, 2009; Yi and Silver, 2015). In other words, de-essentialization deracinates key practices from the very movement that infuses them with an essence.…”

Section: Syncretization Of Countercultural Movements and Marketsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

Munir

Ansari

Brown

2021

Administrative Science Quarterly

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Movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos. But this process can be particularly challenging for movements that are explicitly opposed to using a market mechanism as a means of scaling up. Our analysis of yoga between 1975 and 2016 reveals how a countercultural movement fundamentally opposed to a capitalist market economy but seeking to grow can paradoxically become syncretic with or infiltrated by concepts and beliefs that are core to the market system but incompatible with the movement’s original ethos. We show how, before such a movement can be commodified, it must be de-essentialized, a process that requires stripping away key aspects of its history, context, and religious commitments and transforming collective goals into individual ones. This process involves not only external entrepreneurs looking to mine the movement but also movement leaders seeking wider enrollment of resource-rich actors to scale the movement up. We show how codes borrowed from parallel movements and templates borrowed from markets can be instrumental in driving such a movement’s transformation. Through this extreme case of the yoga movement, we advance understandings of how movements can become syncretic with values and practices they fundamentally oppose.

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Section: Syncretization Of Countercultural Movements and Marketsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

Munir

Ansari

Brown

2021

Administrative Science Quarterly

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Emancipated Spectatorship in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays

Spencer¹

2012

Modern Drama

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This article takes up recent theories of French political theorist Jacques Rancière to reassess the radical nature of Adrienne Kennedy's address to both viewing and reading audiences of her work. According to Rancière, the political promise of art rests in both its unpredictable effects on an always active spectator and its ability to reorder the sensible world, the partitioning of which determines and polices what can and cannot be said, seen, heard, and understood. I argue that Kennedy's radical contribution is located not only in her racially charged subject matter and technical innovations but in the model of spectatorship she presents to her audiences and invites them to take up – a model that breaks down boundaries between watching and acting (reading and writing) in ways that hold liberating promise for her characters, and by extension, the audience as well. Kennedy's audience address is one that does not, in Rancière's words, “anticipate its effects” but rather invites consideration and complicity from a community of equally “emancipated spectators” made all the more aware of their own identity positions in the reception of her work.

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The Violence of Duality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro

Hogan

2018

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

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Adrienne Kennedy’s psychodrama Funnyhouse of a Negro personifies in her protagonist, Sarah, the internalized racism and mental deterioration that a binary paradigm foments. Kennedy also develops the schizoid consciousness of Sarah to accentuate Sarah’s hybridized and traumatized identity as an African American woman. Kennedy’s play was controversial during the Black Arts Movement, as she refrained from endorsing black nationalist groups like Black Power, constructing instead a nightmare world in which race is the singular element in defining self-worth. In her dramatized indictment of both white supremacy and identity politics, American culture’s pathologized fascination with pigmentation drives the protagonist to solipsistic isolation, and ultimately, to suicide. Kennedy, through the disturbed cast of Sarah’s mind, portrays a world in which race obsession triumphs over any sense of basic humanity. The play urges the audience to accept the absurdity of a dichotomized vision of the world, to recognize the spectral nature of reality, and to transcend the devastation imposed by polarizing rhetoric.

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Fractured Identity and Agency and the Plays of Adrienne Kennedy

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market

Emancipated Spectatorship in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays

The Violence of Duality in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro

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