April 8, 2016

Lyman Hall, Becker Library

Curating the Costume: Pauline Johnson’s Racial Ambiguity Act

Colleen Kim Daniher, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, held a graduate colloquium talk in TAPS.

From 1892 to 1910, Mohawk poet and performer Pauline Johnson toured Canada, the U.S., and England with her two-part recital act. Offering dramatic readings of original poems in two costumes – buckskin leather and Victorian evening dress – Johnson thrilled audiences with her ability to appear “pure Indian” one moment and “at least almost white” the next, as one 1897 reviewer put it. This talk focused on the assemblage and component parts of Johnson’s buckskin costume to argue for a critical reading of the frequently-maligned “Indian maiden” garb invested not in authenticity rubrics but in performative effects. Drawing from original archival research, Dr. Daniher suggested that approaching Johnson as a curator of her own (inauthentic) costume significantly reframes existing accounts of Johnson’s agency, artistry, and activism in an era of aggressive and transnational Native-assimilation legislation.

Colleen Kim Daniher is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and an M.A. in Theatre Studies from the University of Guelph. She is currently completing her book manuscript, Racial Volume: Surface, Objection, and the Racial Ambiguity Act, which links strategic performances of racial ambiguity to gendered racial surveillance projects across a long twentieth-century archive of intermedial performance.