PERFORMING LEGACIES AND SUBVERSIONS OF WHITE SUPREMACY: CO-PERFORMANCE, COMMEMORATION, AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN THE POST- CIVIL WAR UNITED STATES

This dissertation employs critical ethnography to study performances that subvert and affirm white supremacy in the U.S.. I argue that American cultural identities are, in part, formed in collaboration with embodied and mediated co-performances. Furthermore, these co- performances affirm or subvert fantastical memory, Confederate Stewardship, and the Confederate gaze—which I contend are important tenets of white supremacy in America. Building upon the work of Mechtild Widrich, this dissertation analyzes performance documents, audiences, sites, and monuments as performative monuments (that is, mnemonic, and often commemorative, objects as speech-acts) that engender moments of racial reckoning by revising or renewing dominant, white supremacist narratives of the past. Performative monuments also invite their audiences to participate in the transmission or disruption of white supremacy through co-performance. As a performance ethnographer, I hold a firm commitment to justice and truth while exercising the vulnerability and compassion needed to subvert white supremacist heritage in America.