Christofer Rodelo
Harvard University
Christofer A. Rodelo is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. He holds an MA in English from Harvard and a BA in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration from Yale University. His research interests include theater and performance studies, 19th century American literature and drama, Latinx and Afro-Latinx literary and cultural studies, critical race/gender/queer/feminist studies, archival thought, and aesthetics/visual culture. His dissertation is a critical study of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and Indigenous performance cultures in the long transnational 19th century.
Performing While Black and Brown: A Cultural History of Latinx and Afro-Latinx Performance Cultures, 1850-1915
Advisers: Robin Bernstein and Lorgia García Peña
My dissertation project is a cultural history of Latinx and Afro-Latinx performance cultures in the second half of the transnational American nineteenth century. I demonstrate how cultural producers of Latin American origin operating across the Americas negotiated expectations of their racial identities through aestheticized bodily performance. The nineteenth century is a foundational era for formations of race, gender, sexuality, and empire, yet remains an understudied area of Latinx Studies. Through performance history, my project underscores how critical discourses of the nineteenth century revolved around the spectacle of bodies from the Global South. Participating in the C19 2018 seminar on Dissonant Archives: The History and Writings of Nineteenth Century Afro-Latinas will propel my prospective dissertation project to new dimensions, unsettle the archival and theoretical dimensions of my work, and provide the opportunity to connect with both leaders and peer scholars in the field of Afro-Latinx Studies.
My interdisciplinary project uses close readings of literary, visual, and material objects to historically track the experiences of nineteenth-century Latinx and Afro-Latinx performers. These figures, which include novelists, freak show performers, playwrights, photographers, and dancers from across the Americas, articulate a racial sensibility built from the intersection of whiteness, blackness, and brownness. For instance, sideshow performers Maximo and Bartola, enslaved and brought to the United States from El Salvador to perform as indigenous “Aztec Children,” were staged with African American freak shows and wore afro-like coiffed hair. As my research demonstrates, this interplay of blackness and brownness led spectators—from everyday onlookers to scientists like Louis Agassiz— to debate the pair’s origins in relation to racial hierarchies spurred by imperial practices.
The racial indeterminacy of figures like Maximo and Bartola exemplifies a key tenet of my dissertation: how corporeal performances align with and disengage from normative formations of U.S. and Latin American blackness and brownness to construct transnational racial formations. More concretely, the theatrical bodies of performers like Maximo and Bartola highlight the troubling of racial categories, and by extension, discourses on slavery, racial science, and empire. Tracing these moments of racial indeterminacy in performances across the United States, Europe, and the Americas, I posit the unknowable body as central to comprehending social life in the nineteenth century. The dissertation uses a relational case-study method, showing how individual artists worked in a transnational performance circuit linked by their varied exhibitions of racial identity. My project is important in order to understand not only how black and brown bodies were racialized beyond the black/white binary in the nineteenth century, but also offers useful historical knowledge for a contemporary society where one’s racial identity is regularly decided on the basis of bodily presentation.
Recent scholarly works have combed the archives in an attempt to elucidate Latinx life in the 1800s, but mainly through literary-historical approaches (Coronado 2013, Ruiz 2014, Lazo and Alemán 2016). At the same time, performance studies, while innovative in its theoretically-rich and archivally-grounded exploration of the nineteenth century, largely focuses on the relationship between black and white performers in the United States (Hartman 1997, Moten 2003, Brooks 2006, Nyong’o 2009, Bernstein 2011, McMillan 2015). Extending these two fields, my broader project indexes the formation of a hemispheric Latinx and Afro-Latinx performance culture from the 1850s to the 1900s. Through attention to transnational performance cultures in the Americas, my dissertation expands understandings of nineteenth century racial formations within and beyond the black-white binary. Finally, it models a method of critical race studies scholarship rooted in historically-situated evidence and arguments, offering new interpretive paradigms for Latinx Studies, Performance Studies, and the broader cultural history of the transnational nineteenth century.
Dissonant Archives: The History and Writings of Nineteenth Century Afro-Latinas
