scholarship

MOVING PERFORMANCES: DIVAS, ICONICITY, AND REMEMBERING THE MODERN STAGE
Rutgers University Press, 2016

Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. 

Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife.

As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements. 

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora, edited with Mae G. Henderson and Gene Melton II. Rutgers University Press, 2024.

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

ARTICLES
“Zine Pedagogies: Students as Critical Makers,” Radical Teacher, no. 125 (Spring 2023): 20-32.

“‘We Want Humanity to Advance Further’: An Interview with Dr. Anwah Nagia, Al Kaaf Human Rights Centre and Palestine Museum, Cape Town, South Africa,” with Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, National Political Science Review 20, no. 1 (2019): 174-182.

“Mortgaged Minds: Faculty-in-Debt and Redlining Higher Education,” Radical Teacher, Winter 2017: 32-44.

“Lesbians Bait the Military: The L[ast] Word on ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’?” Feminist Media Studies 14.3 (July 2014). Available online: Taylor and Francis

“The New Negro Flâneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” African American Review 42.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2008).

“‘The Importance of Objective Analysis’ on Gays in the Military: A Response to Elaine Donnelly’s Constructing the Co-Ed Military,” (with Nathaniel Frank, Aaron Belkin, and Gary Gates), Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 15.2 (2008): 419-448.

“‘Of La Baker, I am a Disciple’: The Diva Politics of Reception,” Camera Obscura 65 (2007): 72-101. Reprinted in: Eds. Mae G. Henderson and Charlene B. Regester. The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist. McFarland Press, 2017: 48-66.

“Visualize Academic Labor in the 1990s: Inventing an Activist Archive in Santa Barbara,” Feminist Studies 31.3 (Fall 2005): 557-569.

“‘Take Black or White’: Libby Holman’s Sound,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 9.2.18 (1998): 95-117.

Book Review
“Going Public: The Gendered Rhetorics of Suffrage, Nation, War, and Empire in the Making of Queer Citizens (1890-1928),” Review of Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain by Deborah Cohler, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, 15.1-5 (2011): 258-263.