Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic ─ Haptic Allegories

Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic advances an innovative and compelling approach to writing comparative studies of performance in trans-national, intercultural relation to one another. Its chosen subject in this case is the cultural and political intersection of African and Irish diasporic peoples and movements.

Gough approaches her subject via five key 'flashpoints' in black/green relations, moving from the mid-19th century to the early 21st. In turn, each of these are related to mediums of performance that were prevalent at the time, such as abolitionist oratory and melodrama, photography and tableaux, architecture and folk drama, television and political demonstrations, and visual art and dramaturgy.

By examining the unlikely kinship between social actors such as Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory and Zora Neale Hurston, and Bernadette Devlin and Alice Childress, along with a host of old and new theatrical "characters", this book explores how a trans-medial investigation of gender, community, and performance allows for a revision of historiography in Atlantic Studies, while the study itself revises and reimagines key concepts central to performance studies.