H42.2122-001 Lec 4 Credits
Instructor(s): Kay Turner
Topics in Performance Studies: Dead Performers: Ghosts, Phantoms, Spectres, Spirits, and the Undead
Kay Turner
H42.2122-001 (Albert # 75915)
Monday-Thursday 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm, 4 points
Classroom 613
Ghosts are dead performers. Ghost performers narrate the realm between the living and the dead, belief and disbelief, and in
Derrida's sense, between ontology and hauntology. Ghosts occupy "between" spaces and they are also very much of the inbetween.
They are unsettled, symptomatic. They point to something missing, a feeling unresolved, a relationship terminated
but not ended. What requires a story most? A ghost. Why??
In attempting to answer this question, our course aims at critical, theoretical thinking and writing concerning the nature and
meaning of ghosts, ghosting, ghost performances and performativities, and ghosts as performers. We work in a range of genres
including theater, narrative, photography, and religious ritual. We begin with Hamlet and end with him too, but much
transpires in between as we read, among others, Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim:Kinship Between Life and Death; Alice
Rayner's Ghosts: Death, the Theater and Its Double; Judith Richardson's Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in
the Hudson Valley; Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International; Derrida's The Work of Mourning; Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and
Their Meaning; Patricia Sawin's “Negotiating Gender and Power in Ghost Stories;” Terry Castle's Apparitional Lesbian;
Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters; Christopher Peterson's Kindred Specters; Fred Moten's "Black Mo'nin;" and Jose Munoz's
"Ephemera as Evidence," as well as his “Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van DerZee,
Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston.”
Not surprising, New York is a city of ghosts and this affords us opportunities for field trips to sites such as Ground Zero, The
African Burial Ground, and the very haunted Washington Square Park. No previous experience with ghosts is necessary, just a
willingness to submit to the full range of hauntological challenges and possibilities summarized in that oft-repeated
performative, “Remember me.”
Two short papers, daily completion of assigned readings, co-teaching, and class participation required.
Kay Turner has taught courses in the NYU Performance Studies Department including "Deciphering Gender," on women's performances in
traditional culture and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," on the meanings and interpretation of ephemeral performances of gender and sexuality.
She holds a Ph.D. in folklore and anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization are in women’s performed
folklore (especially in the arenas of oral narrative, folk religion, and material culture) and feminist and lesbian/gay/queer interpretations of folklore
and popular culture. Kay’s dissertation concerned Mexican-American women’s home altars interpreted from a feminist perspective. She completed
an expanded version of her dissertation called Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (NY: Thames and Hudson, 1999).
Kay is considered an authority on women’s devotional arts and practices and has lectured and written widely on this subject in both academic and
popular contexts. In 1999, she also published Baby Precious Always Shines (St. Martin’s Press), an edited selection of love notes between Gertrude
Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Currently, she is working on a long essay concerning ephemerality and September 11th and a new book Transgressive
Tales: Rethinking the Grimms' Fairy Tales from Feminist and Queer Perspectives. Based at the Brooklyn Arts Council, Kay also work as the
folklorist for the Borough of Brooklyn, researching and presenting the diverse folk arts and artists of Brooklyn. Recently, she curated "Local Eyes:
Folk Photography in Brooklyn" and engaged in a project for the Smithsonian Institution concerning the folklore and traditions of Wall Street. Kay
produced and directed fieldwork for a major festival celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Williamsburg Bridge.
