Faculty Publications

Disaster Narrative Emergent/Cies: Performing Loss, Identity And Resistance

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Cultural Performance, Disaster Narrative, Ethnodrama, Playback Theatre, Social Action

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Text and Performance Quarterly

Volume

32

Issue

1

First Page

20

Last Page

37

Abstract

The essay investigates narratives of disaster experiences as performed in over five hundred oral histories, diaries, interviews, letters, and other sources drawn from US-related disasters over one hundred years time. Based on analysis of the stories, the study establishes disaster narratives as a specific type of cultural performance with characteristic aesthetic strategies and performative intents; articulates their reflexive and emergent qualities to be restoring/creating identity and social critique; and shows how ethnodramas of disaster narratives, particularly Playback Theatre, radically re-contextualize disaster narratives by opening them to new viewpoints and speakers, fostering dialogue, debate, and social action. © 2012 National Communication Association.

Department

Department of Communication Studies

Original Publication Date

1-1-2012

DOI of published version

10.1080/10462937.2011.622782

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