Papers by Maya Stovall Dumas
Critical Correspondence, Movement Research Journal, 2023
This critical correspondence is primarily composed by Maya Stovall. Her thoughts, insights, and c... more This critical correspondence is primarily composed by Maya Stovall. Her thoughts, insights, and commentary are interwoven with her brother, Josef Cadwell's poems and reflections. It is a correspondence, but their timeline is asynchronous. Their communication is dictated by the prison system and the surveillance, bureaucracy, and neglect this system rewards. Despite and through each challenge these siblings find each other and call out for a different way of being together, a more cohesive movement, a creative future-not fiction-that requires all of us.-Londs and Nicole, CC Co-editors Screenshot of a blue-toned gmail inbox with categories along the left and featured in the center, an incoming email notification from JPay: You have received a message from your loved one Josef Cadwell.
TDR: The Drama Review (MIT Press), 2020
Transforming Anthropology, 2019
Liquor Store Theatre is a study of the struggle for the city in contemporary Detroit. An ethnogra... more Liquor Store Theatre is a study of the struggle for the city in contemporary Detroit. An ethnography completed over several years in an east side Detroit neighborhood called McDougall Hunt, the project exists in a variety of registers, working across contemporary art, performance, urban anthropology, critical geography, visual studies, film and new media, African American studies, and urban studies. The visual work of Liquor Store Theatre includes a four-volume, twenty-plus video episode meditation on city life included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial 2017. The works were produced as I staged and video-documented dance performances and conversations on city life in the streets and sidewalks surrounding liquor stores in the neighborhood where I also lived. In addition to the publicly known moving and still image works associated with the project, Liquor Store Theatre was a classical neighborhood ethnography. From the liquor store performances and conversations as points of departure, I orbited with my willing neighbors into their lives up and down our blocks. I ended up in their breakfast nooks, at their cocktail parties, in their backyards and public gardens, together on the sidewalks of Heidelberg Project, and at neighborhood meetings, hanging out and tracing daily living in the zone. Despite the racist/capitalist economic system and regionalist/post-industrial economic decline evident in Detroit broadly and in the zone, people found ways of making the city move. Over my fieldwork, I found that residents used the forces of art, labor, and movement to shape and interpret city life. Understanding McDougall Hunt required fresh thinking due to its seemingly bizarre contradictions—a gorgeous geography, near the river, with complex and intelligent long-time residents, artists galore, eight liquor stores in 0.39 of a square mile, and a median income of $13,000 USD at 2010 Census. I was searching for a new way of thinking about old questions of power and struggle for the city. In this search, I located an analytic I called the paradox of place. With paradox of place, I prioritized both the affect and desire of the day-to-day, and the abstract, philosophical possibilities of space, along with attention to the historical materialist, empirical realities that shaped political economy of space and place. From the quiet art and writing of neighbors, to alternative modes of labor keeping the block going, to movement of capital, people, water, and development, the project that started with a dancerly prompt landed squarely in the everyday; touching the affect and desire of the mundane, the paradox of place, and documenting visually and ethnographically the rich complexities in the present moment.
How might an anthropologist use dance to study cities? How about dance ethnography as method? The... more How might an anthropologist use dance to study cities? How about dance ethnography as method? The Liquor Store Theatre project (LST) is a series of choreographed dance performances and ethnographic conversations on the sidewalks and spaces in and around liquor stores on Detroit's east side. LST started in a moment where you feel tears begin to form: a solitarily emotional place of anguish, release, and sometimes joy. A moment of holding on and of letting go, where something indescribable but so incredibly recognizable is speeding to the surface, rushing at you full throttle, and all you can do is let go and let it happen, whatever it may be. It lands on the shale-and dust-coated sidewalks of the city, dancing to bizarre rhythms as it seeks to connect with people. LST sets forth choreography/ethnography as research method. It uses staged dance performances in the spaces of my neighborhood as the point where ethnographic conversations begin. In this way, creativity and improvisation are at the center of ethnographic encounters. Working in an east side neighborhood in Detroit, LST investigates the complexities of blackness in a small, unique zone of an American city in transition.
Transforming Anthropology, 2015
African Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with r... more African Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with respect to dance in particular. Through labor, art, cultural technology , and social life, African American aesthetics have breathed life into modern and contemporary American culture. The stress and fatigue of machines, labor, capitalism, and racism, imposed on bodies during the industrial revolution and in the postindustrial era have provided raw material for black artistic expressions during the mid–to-late twentieth century. Furthermore, this artistic expression, fueled by the angst of changing times generally and tensions facing African Americans in particular, has served as American catharsis through the creation of innovative cultural expressions. This article analyzes the dialectical relationships of industrialization, racism, and modern aesthetics, through the lens of the innovative African American social dance form, the Lindy Hop; and the virtuosic pop performances of Michael Jackson. The important contributions of theLindy Hop as a dance style and Michael Jackson as a performer have had a profound impact on the aesthetics of modernity in American social and popular concert dance. To better understand the relationship between industrialization and the African American shaping of aesthetics of modernity, this article analyzes black experiences and embodiment of industrial labor and the ways that African Americans drew from their particular experiences of industrial labor toward the creation of critical cultural technology.
Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process ... more Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process of business and investment descending upon the city. In spite of this narrative, Detroit today remains a city of intense poverty and inequality. Between 2009 and 2013, an estimated 39 percent of Detroit residents were living below the Federal Poverty Line. This figure renders Detroit as statistically the poorest city in the country. In addition to a mythical narrative of rapid-fire investment, popular media representations of Detroit are peppered with racialized references to white business investment. These references position whiteness as " saving " Detroit and center whiteness in the urban process. This racialized narrative is false and divisive in a city that is upwards of 83 percent African American. In this paper, we map the disparity between the racial politics of Detroit and the anti-black public discourse narrative currently surrounding the city. We demonstrate that the public discourse valorization of a profit-driven urban process results in an anti-black prioritization of whiteness in Detroit's post-bankruptcy redevelopment process. This narrative, if unchecked, will have serious consequences in the city's present and future. As such, we propose a re-centering of the blackness of the city and the racial politics of generations that have shaped current conditions , toward a more equitable recovery process.
Journal of the Anthropology of North America (JANA), 2016
Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process ... more Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process of business and investment descending upon the city. In spite of this narrative, Detroit today remains a city of intense poverty and inequality. Between 2009 and 2013, an estimated 39 percent of Detroit residents were living below the Federal Poverty Line. This figure renders Detroit as statistically the poorest city in the country. In addition to a mythical narrative of rapid-fire investment, popular media representations of Detroit are peppered with racialized references to white business investment. These references position whiteness as " saving " Detroit and center whiteness in the urban process. This racialized narrative is false and divisive in a city that is upwards of 83 percent African American. In this paper, we map the disparity between the racial politics of Detroit and the anti-black public discourse narrative currently surrounding the city. We demonstrate that the public discourse valorization of a profit-driven urban process results in an anti-black prioritization of whiteness in Detroit's post-bankruptcy redevelopment process. This narrative, if unchecked, will have serious consequences in the city's present and future. As such, we propose a re-centering of the blackness of the city and the racial politics of generations that have shaped current conditions , toward a more equitable recovery process.
Books by Maya Stovall Dumas
Duke University Press, 2020
For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017,... more For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017, a conceptual art and anthropology video project in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. Her conversations with her neighbors—which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit's history—bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve on its own.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/liquor-store-theatre
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Papers by Maya Stovall Dumas
Books by Maya Stovall Dumas
https://www.dukeupress.edu/liquor-store-theatre
https://www.dukeupress.edu/liquor-store-theatre