Staging Repair: Performance, Aftermath, and the East St. Louis Massacre

Title: Staging Repair: Performance, Aftermath, and the East St. Louis Massacre

By Jonathan Karp (Vanderbilt University, Collaborative Humanities)

Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Time: 1630-1800

Room: H-232

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.

About the speaker: Jonathan Karp is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Collaborative Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He received his PhD in American Studies from Harvard University

Organized by the Department of American Culture and Literature