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Home » News » Assistant Professor Kellen Hoxworth publishes essay in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Assistant Professor Kellen Hoxworth publishes essay in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Published September 2, 2021

Kellen Hoxworth, new faculty College of Fine Arts, School of Theatre

Assistant Professor Kellen Hoxworth of the School of Theatre published a new essay, “Performative Correctness; or, the Subject of Performance and Politics” in the Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism (vol. 35, no. 2). Hoxworth illuminates how “performative” (and related terms such as “virtue signaling” and “playing politics” that have skyrocketed in popular discourse in recent years) reanimate discourses of “political correctness” around politics and performance. His essay notes that “performative marks the politics of the accused as mere performance, bad theatre, and/or fake in contrast to putatively real politics” and as a result transmutes “political correctness… into performative correctness, wherein the only ‘true’ subjectivity is one impossibly devoid of performance.”

Kellen Hoxworth is Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. He has published in American Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Modern Drama, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Survey. His essay “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman” received the 2018 Errol Hill Award for outstanding research in African American theatre and performance studies. He is currently working on a monograph that traces the transnational circulations of blackface minstrelsy and related forms of racialized performance from the prerevolutionary circum-Atlantic world through the nineteenth-century Anglophone imperium, tentatively titled “Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance.” In the 2021-2022 school year at FSU, he will teach undergraduate courses in African and Caribbean Theatre & Performance, performance theory, research, and history. 

More information about Professor Hoxworth and his work can be found on his website.