If you would like a copy of any of these publications, please email me.
Books
Sovereign Acts (2017) is the first book to chronicle a near-century of performance practices whereby different groups inhabiting Panama and the Panama Canal Zone – including West Indian labor migrants, US citizens called ‘Zonians,’ and Panamanian nationalists – performed diverse claims to the sovereignty of the contested Canal Zone. Employing archival and ethnographic research, the book investigates the scenography of sovereignty and the limits of the law.
*Winner: Best Book of the Year, Caribbean Studies Association
*Winner, Best Book of the Year, Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
*Honorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award, American Society for Theatre Research.
You can listen to an interview about the book on the New Books Network.
The Cultural Cold War and the Global South (2021) examines the nuanced negotiations of artists and cultural producers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean during the global Cold War. In this contest for supremacy, the governments of the United States and Soviet Union competed to fund and support various kinds of artistic and cultural practices that served, in different ways, as propaganda and cultural diplomacy. Yet non-aligned artists and activists still used these funds and events – such as film festivals and writers’ conferences – to advance agendas that were autonomous from the superpowers’ binaristic worldviews. Funding art, as it turns out, is not the best way to deliver concrete, measurable outcomes.
Bodies on the Front Lines: Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean (University of Michigan Press, 2024). This volume, co-edited with Brenda Werth, examines the paradoxical nature of gender and sexual rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, as high rates of gender violence converge with some of the most progressive legislation in the world. The volume is the first to highlight strategic uses of performance practices by impactful transnational movements like Ni Una Menos (Not One Less) and the ‘Green Tide’ advocating safe and legal abortion. The volume covers a broad and comprehensive range of sites in the Americas, with original essays by more than twenty contributors.
*Honorable Mention, Edited Works Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). https://www.athe.org/page/editedworksawardees
Special Journal Issue
Co-Editor (with Colleen Kim Daniher), “Race and Performance in the US-Canada Borderlands,” Theatre Research in Canada: 41.1. (June 2020). The articles contained in this peer-reviewed special journal issue examine the production, circulation, and reception of racialized performance practices across the US-Canada border from the nineteenth century to the present.
Book Chapters
“Between Empire and Dictatorship: The Decolonial Dreams of Raúl Leis,” in Theatre After Empire, Ed. Harvey Young and Megan Geigner. Routledge, 2021.
“Parabolic Moves: Time, Narrative, and Difference in New Circus.” Race and Performance after Repetition, ed. Soyica Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
“Theatre and Drama in the Hot Zones of the Cold War: Selected Case Studies.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature, ed. Andrew Hammond. Palgrave, 2020.
“Sidelong Glances: Black Divas in Transit, 1945-1960.” Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, ed. Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz (NY: Routledge, 2018).
“Mises-en-scène of Militarization: Decommissioning US Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone.” Performance in a Militarized Culture, ed. Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan (NY: Routledge, 2018).
Articles in Refereed Journals
- “On Performance, Liminality, and Normativity,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 39.1 (Fall 2024): 45-72.
- “A Mobile Social Realm: Labour, Sovereignty, and Subjecthood in Disabled Theater,” Theatre Research in Canada 37, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 164-200.
- “Troubling Multiculturalisms: Staging Trans/National Identities in Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes’s El gallo.” Theatre Survey 55, no. 3 (September 2014): 343-361.
- “Sounding Sovereignty: Performance and Politics in the 1999 Panama Canal Handover.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 21, no. 4 (August 2014): 337-353.
- “Race and Politics in Concert: Paul Robeson and William Warfield in Panama, 1947-1953,” Global South 6, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 107-129.
- “The Michael Jackson Memorial Procession: Carving a Sonic Path through Stratified Spaces,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 1 (March 2011): 85-93.
- “Toward a Pedagogy of Redress: Staging West Indian Panamanian History in De/From Barbados a/to Panamá.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 4, no. 3 (November 2009): 293-317.
Katherine A. Zien 