The Department of American Culture and Literature welcomes you to a talk by Jonathan Karp titled “Staging Repair: Performance, Aftermath, and the East St. Louis Massacre.”
When: 4 February, 2026; 16:30
Where: H-232
GE 250/251: 15 Points
Abstract:
This talk will detail competing visions of racial justice at a pivotal moment in African American history: the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917. That summer, vicious labor struggles in East St. Louis, Illinois, catalyzed racist fears of Black migration into an extended campaign of violence that appeared as a crisis of the American project. The massacre presented overlapping challenges of narrative and justice: what forms could represent the extraordinary collective violence and point towards repair? To address this question, the figures in this talk turned to performance. I argue that figures including U.S. congressmen and Josephine Baker used performance to mediate the exceptional and the everyday and establish limits on what could count as violence and who might be held responsible.
Bio:
Jonathan Karp is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Collaborative Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He received his PhD in American Studies from Harvard University.