An Act of Terrorism: Performative (His)trocities and the Eradication of The Black Body

Diana Taylor asserts that the discipline of performance studies allows scholars to rethink what constitutes an event as performance. Taylor contends that ethnicity, race, and issues of social justice are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere. To understand these events as performance suggests that performance also functions as an epistemology: embodied practices that are bound up with other cultural practice and offer us a way of knowing. I will attempt to examine the tragic events of Trayvon Martin’s death on February 26, 2012, within the scope of performance studies as a way of further illustrating how performativity is intrinsically tied to cultural practices. These practices are habitually rehearsed daily in the public sphere. In some cases, cultural performances can produce violent and atrocious outcomes.