Files
Abstract
American (post) both explores and demonstrates a social justice application for Roland Barthess process of traversal from work to text. By dispersing authorship, highlighting a multiplicity of perspectives, and cultivating critical thinking among a diverse audience of participants, this creative-scholarly project enacts a performance of theory, which points to and begins to cultivate unrealized democratic potential within the Americas and for literary/artistic practice. Informed and shaped by interdisciplinary foci and anchors, this vein of research and cultural production disrupts binary oppositions such as black/white, male/female, rich/poor, artist/audience, and us/them and contributes answers to the question, How and when can art empower people and catalyze social change? In doing so, it posits an aesthetics of social justice and an expression of democracy predicated on conscious collision and collusion.An interdisciplinary creative-critical manuscript comprises the dissertation. This manuscript explores and performs the projects theoretical underpinnings; the socio-historical context that delineates the methodological field in which manifesting a theory of text becomes significant; the methodology through which manifesting a theory of text becomes possible; and preliminary speculation about applications for a theory of text beyond American (post). The project, writ large, invites ongoing community participation through a web presence and additional trials of the theory in gallery and non-gallery installations of the 2D and 3D translation-objects, performances, and workshops.