course description for a course i prob won't teach

“Faking It: Mimics, Imposters, and Impersonators in US Popular Theater and Performance.” US performance culture is as old as the US itself; from the nation’s inception, explorations into ideas of selfhood, identity, and personhood dominate the American stage. In this course, students analyze the historical and conceptual breadth of fakeness as a profoundly American quandary. Among others, students look at pre- and post-colonial Native American stories about tricksters, Royall Tyler’s 1787 satire The Contrast on American Anglophilia, as well as the rise and fall and rise again of Instagram scammer/folk heroine Carolina Calloway. This course asks: what is the line between self-reflection and solipsism on the American stage and screen? What are the differences between your physical self and the self you create and perform online? How does the introduction of non-binary gender categories into the public sphere affect identity construction and relationships toward the self and other in everyday life and/as a performance culture? Do Alexa, Siri, or Google Home have a personality? In order to think through the ever-shifting constitutions of selfhood and identity in the US culture industry, students explore the aesthetics and ideologies behind historical and contemporary representations of impersonation, mimicry, and imposters. Concepts under particular scrutiny include: voice, race, gender, sexuality, technology, emotion, touch. By thinking about how people, characters, and, technologies present themselves through artifice, we can identify the constitutive elements of that presentation, and move closer to understanding what is at stake in being a person today.