Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Mythologies are ambiguous sign systems intensified by music-theatrical forms. Historical colonialism and its cultural mentality, coloniality, deployed mythologies to support imperial ideologies. This dissertation project considers three objects, distinct in their histories and geographies: Reisado do Congo (Brazil), Jerico-Jim Crow (USA, Langston Hughes, 1962), and Siyaba (South Africa/Switzerland, Charlotte Hug, Forgotten Angle Theater Collaborative, and PJ Sabbagha, 2012-2015). By considering the music-theatrical text, a symbolic site where narrative forms engage sound, gesture, embodiment, space, and improvisation, a model emerges to examine the creation and reception of this music-theatrical text and its presence in the objects of study. Mythologies of coloniality are present in the contexts where these objects were created. Two sign systems are observed in these objects and their contexts: (1) coloniality, an ethnological construct present in how these objects were created, and (2) music-theatrical text, an aesthetic construct where sonic and dramatic elements produce imbricated narratives. This dissertation demonstrates how these objects perform as anti-coloniality texts via semiography and semiology. Analyzing these sign systems can provide a reflection on the conditions and limits of European literary culture; that the music-theatrical text can perform as a mode of inquiry in a post-colonial setting.
Author: Feitosa de Almeida, Guilherme
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214135811