Lily Kelting | FLAME University (original) (raw)

Papers by Lily Kelting

TDR: The Drama Review

Monster Truck’s performances reproduce power dynamics that are at once painful and hurtful. By st... more Monster Truck’s performances reproduce power dynamics that are at once painful and hurtful. By staging the representational process of dehumanizing black bodies, Monster Truck applies a different strategy than other Freie Szene groups: shining a bright light on dark discourse, selling the audience’s own willing consumption of neocolonial power relationships back to them as art.

Edna Lewis, 2018

Lily Kelting, a postdoctoral fellow associated with food research, explores Lewis’s legacy as bot... more Lily Kelting, a postdoctoral fellow associated with food research, explores Lewis’s legacy as both a cultural icon and cultural historian. She examines the significance behind Lewis’s image immortalized as a stamp, recalls her own journey into the archives of Lewis as she worked on her dissertation, and reflects on the sensual prose that marks Lewis’s writing as uniquely her own. Finally, Kelting remarks on the duality of the sadness of Lewis’s passing and the enduring sense that she is “decidedly not gone”.

Performance Research, 2019

The Southern Quarterly, 2016

Food, Culture & Society, 2016

Abstract Southern food in the last ten years has become more than a regional food—it functions as... more Abstract Southern food in the last ten years has become more than a regional food—it functions as lucrative brand and social movement. This article describes this transition using the methodology of performance studies, reading Southern food cookbooks as performative texts in order to trace the way that Southernness circulates both within the South and outside it. It then argues that this “new turn” in Southern cooking might be at the same time a nostalgic turn toward the past: a turn that underplays African-Americans’ labor’s role in creating and sustaining Southern food culture. How these erasures of the past butt up against New Southern food’s visions of the future is explored.

Performance Research

In this paper, I use the food-based performances of contemporary Korean-American, Berlin-based ar... more In this paper, I use the food-based performances of contemporary Korean-American, Berlin-based artist Kate-Hers Rhee to examine the knottiness of immigration and identity politics in contemporary Berlin. Rhee’s works offer taste (and smell) as a means of engaging otherness, using Korean food as a site of social exchange. I focus on Rhee’s 2011 project, Dr. Rhee’s Kimtschi Shop, a performance installation masquerading as a pop-up store within a Berlin bar. Rhee’s choice of kimchi as both material object and metaphor for the apprehension (even disgust) many feel about a changing Europe is apt: kimchi is pungent, rich with chilis, garlic and ginger. As such, its pervasive smell can become shorthand for images of contagion and uncleanliness surrounding immigration, as Martin Manalansan notes from his fieldwork in Queens, New York. The 60 jars of homemade kimchi weren’t for sale: visitors to the “store” had to produce something of equal value to kimchi in order to barter. And what exactly is the value of kimchi? According to UNESCO, kimjang, the making of kimchi, is part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.” And so participants swapped homemade German rye bread, a copy of Wagner’s Parsifal, and blue jeans, filling out a lengthy, bureaucratic form detailing their own cultural heritage and defending the cultural status of their objects. This confusing, alienating, potentially humiliating experience of formal registration echoes the experiences of “foreigners” (Außländer, a word still in common use) living in Berlin. Indeed, some Germans balked at the given form, especially at describing their race and ethnicity. On a level, this is understandable: on German forms, there is no “race or ethnicity” box. To do away with categories of racial difference, in postwar ideology, was to do away with racism. Thus, Rhee’s anecdotes of lived racism and performances alike demonstrate the necessity of creating new language about race in Berlin. As David Theo Goldberg writes, “The European experience is a case study in the frustrations, delininations, and injustices of political racelessness” (2006, 335). Nowhere is this more visible than in Berlin. This paper, then, situates Rhee’s work bringing kimchi to Germans as using taste—the taste of kimchi—to intervene in political discussions about a postracial Berlin, as Germany stands at the brink of major demographic change.

Author(s): Kelting, Lily | Abstract: This dissertation attempts to answer one very large question... more Author(s): Kelting, Lily | Abstract: This dissertation attempts to answer one very large question: in what political ways do the aesthetics of food function? Throughout this dissertation, I articulate moments in food culture when nostalgia (looking backwards to foods of the past) in fact becomes an idealized model for a utopian future. This conflation of looking backward (nostalgia) and looking forward (utopianism) demonstrates the ways in which time is multiple and multi-directional. In my current work, I address the relationship between nostalgia and utopian thinking in two case studies: the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes and cookbooks from the contemporary American South. In these two examples, nostalgia for food is entangled with utopian rhetoric, and moving back towards an agricultural, pre-democratic government is figured as a utopian turn. This nostalgia often operates as a revisionist history that erases slave labor and scarcity. However, what I call "the utopia...

Before I even knew the title, Cornerstone, I knew playwright David Jacobi and director Sarah Wans... more Before I even knew the title, Cornerstone, I knew playwright David Jacobi and director Sarah Wansley were setting a play in UC San Diego's Central Utilities Plant. The Central Utilities Plant is a co-generation plant, combining heat and power production for the university. What this means: cooling towers, fans to chill the heated water that returns from the university in pipes, large waterfalls that harness hydroelectric power, and turbines that send the chilled water throughout the campus to power cooling across campus. It's incredibly efficient and happens to be right next door to the La Jolla Playhouse. It's loud. I've never been inside.Setting a play in a power plant means that you are not only invited to encounter the space of the power plant itself, a set unlike any other. You are also invited to contemplate the power of the plant, and the electrical needs of the theatre more broadly-each of those 250,000 Watts lighting up a La Jolla Playhouse show was generate...

Contesting Nordicness

With Noma, our aim was to change food in Denmark….[ It was] ar hetorical instrument, just another... more With Noma, our aim was to change food in Denmark….[ It was] ar hetorical instrument, just another one in my toolkit … to redefine Nordic food."-Claus Meyer 2011:R ene Redzepi is as mall mani nabig tent.H ewears jeans, rubber wading boots laced over his knees, and aT-Shirt reading "MAD foodcamp." His moppy brown bangsa re pushed to the sideand he wears aflesh-colored, over-ear mic. Based on the huge,r esoundingr ound of applause, cheers, and shouts, one unfamiliar might think Redzepi is not ac hef, but ar ock star.2 011 marked ah igh point for Noma,R ene Redzepi'st wo-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark: Noma was named the best restaurant in the world for the second year running,a nd Redzepi found himself as much celebrity as chef. Founded in 2003 by gastronomic entrepreneur ClausMeyer,Noma is not just arestaurant. In 2008, Meyer and Redzepi added aresearch wingtothe restaurant,the Nordic Food Lab, wherec hefs and scientists tinker with culinary experiments that may end up on the menu. And in this first Mad symposium in 2011,R edzepi turned his culinary praxis into am arketable, shareable worldwide conversation about how we should eat. Noma is so media saturated that the origin story of the restaurant that Redzepi told at MAD foodcamp is alreadysomething like amythos in the contemporary food world. Redzepi grew up between Copenhagen and his father'sn ative Macedonia. In industrialized Copenhagen, "people ate fast food and microwave food. Idon'thaveany good food memories from my Danish childhood."¹ Writing about the New Nordic movement in their article "From Label to Practice: The Process of CreatingN ew Nordic Cuisine," Haldor Byrkjeflot,J esper Strandgaard Pedersen, and Silviya Svejenova assert that Nordic food was an "emptyl abel," which was transformed into ar obust set of culturalp racticesb yR edzepi, Meyer,M agnus Nilsson, and other gastro-entrepreneurs, chefs, high-level government supporters,s cientists, media disseminators,a nd foodies from around 2002 to the present.² New Nordic food is ac ulturalc onstruction, ac onfluence

Paragrana, 2016

, Mississippi: An Inside Story

Edna Lewis: At the Table with an American Original, 2018

Performance Research, 2018

European Stages, 2017

Berlin is feeling more and more like Avignon or Edinburgh. The Theatertreffen, the major theater ... more Berlin is feeling more and more like Avignon or Edinburgh. The Theatertreffen, the major theater festival for the German-speaking world, is structured around inviting the ten "most noteworthy" productions of the former year to Berlin, juried by ten critics. But these ten productions feel less and less like the backbone of the festival, which is over-crowded not only with the Stückemarkt playwriting program (since last year, the staged readings are also in competition for a full production in Karlsruhe) but also with productions from the Festspiele's own Immersion and Circus production series. This year, the team added another nebulously-curated element, Shifting Perspectives, consisting of a series of Goethe-Institut coproductions with African partners, a conference on democracy, and commissioned smaller or sitespecific works in and around the theater building itself-all on the second weekend of the fifteen-day festival. While the overall effect was overstimulating, the individual events were often thought-provoking or at least amusing. I arrived early enough for one mainstage performance to be ushered into a Shifting Perspectives one-to-one performance in the "Institute for Gastroacoustic Psychology" (one of the dressing rooms). I filled out a personality and lifestyle questionnaire and a "doctor" (actually artist Sebastian Hanusa) used these responses to create an audio portrait of my core personality and gut instincts based on a belly ultrasound. While it is more difficult than ever to get tickets to the ten juried productions, there are now so many auxiliary events that one finds them mostly empty.