Hosted by the Humanities Center and graduate fellow, Victoria LaFave. Respondents include Bridget Keown (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) & Ariel Nereson (Theatre and Dance, SUNY Buffalo). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

Americana is a kinetic term – simultaneously representing anything related to the United States, a blended folk music genre, an aesthetic, and a national identity. While comprised of nebulous parts, Americana has come to represent a singular, heteronormative vision of national history and identity. This presentation interrogates how Americana iconography was developed on university campuses in the early twentieth century, though in unexpected ways. Utilizing the archival residue of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cap and Gown Club Records and the Records of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard University, this presentation positions these organizations as case studies for how Americana was constructed - and maintained - through queer performance practices.

Formed in 1745, Hasty Pudding produced all-male, student-written parody musicals with sponsorship from influential alumni, which inspired Pitt’s own spin-off, the Cap and Gown Club, established in 1908. Amid scrapbooks, programs, and musical scores are the echoes of students who chronicled issues on campus, popular culture, and rising concerns around emerging World Wars through comedy and song. The 1938 productions in Cambridge and Pittsburgh were filled with historical actors behaving queerly; cross-dressing student performers in high-kicking chorus lines would defeat Mussolini and Hitler on stage before these same young men would join the war effort in 1941. Hasty Pudding’s “So Proudly We Hail” and Cap and Gown’s “Pickets Please” offer a unique insight into the dynamic relationship between queer performance history and national affect that questions what it means to feel “American.”

Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two weeks prior and up to the event.