Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone
ISBN-10
0813584248
ISBN-13
9780813584249
Category
History
Pages
272
Language
English
Published
2017-09-08
Publisher
Rutgers University Press
Author
Katherine A. Zien

Description

Sovereign Acts explores how artists, activists, and audiences performed and interpreted sovereignty struggles in the Panama Canal Zone, from the Canal Zone’s inception in 1903 to its dissolution in 1999. In popular entertainments and patriotic pageants, opera concerts and national theatre, white U.S. citizens, West Indian laborers, and Panamanian artists and activists used performance as a way to assert their right to the Canal Zone and challenge the Zone’s sovereignty, laying claim to the Zone’s physical space and imagined terrain. By demonstrating the place of performance in the U.S. Empire’s legal landscape, Katherine A. Zien transforms our understanding of U.S. imperialism and its aftermath in the Panama Canal Zone and the larger U.S.-Caribbean world.

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