Webster McDonald

Webster is an artist-scholar and educator. He earned a B.F.A. in Theatre Arts from The Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts and an M.A. in Theatre Education: Theatre and Community from Emerson College. Currently, he is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at The University of Kansas, completing a dissertation entitled “Voyages into Colonial Spaces: Unsettling Western Culturality, Constructing Implicated Subjects, Inaugurating Contemporary Human Systems.” In this work, McDonald focuses on Michael Rothberg's writings about “multidirectional memory” and, more recently, “implicated subjects” to expand upon the work of scholars such as Pierre Nora. He offers a conceptual framework for studying public and transcultural remembrance.

McDonald theorizes a queer, Black Jamaican, post-colonial subjectivity to subvert normative cultural discourses like colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. He does this within his transrhizomatic theory, defined as a hybrid container for research that centers Afro-Caribbean thought in conversation with Western knowledge systems. This concept allows him to move within, between, and against the anti-Black design of space's political, social, and economic organization, as well as perceptions of blackness that emerged during violent colonial ruptures.

He joins the ranks of many radical post-colonial thinkers who call attention to humanism in its secular state to construct projects that seek to enact epistemological ruptures, especially in spaces where the culture of White Supremacy predominates. Webster teaches courses in Acting, Movement, Approaches to World Dance, Post-Colonial Theatre and Drama at the University of Kansas and, for three consecutive summers, offers Special Topics in Dance, Performance Studies, and Contemporary Arts as a visiting professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Webster has presented scholarly works in the US, Iceland, Canada, the UK, and parts of the Caribbean. He is a co-author of the anthology Dubbin Monodrama Anthology I: Black Masculinities in African Diaspora Theatre (2019) and has a book chapter, "Scripts of Maleness: Tensions Within Homosexual Performances in Jamaican National Identity," which is currently under peer review by Keino Senior and Opal Palmer(The University of the West Indies Press).