Webster McDonald

Dr. Webster McDonald is an artist-scholar-educator who theorizes a "BlackQueer" Jamaican, post-colonial subjectivity to subvert normative cultural discourses like colonialism, anti-Blackness, and hegemonic masculinity. McDonald’s artistic and theory-infused work includes Critical Decolonial Monodrama Performance, Choreography, Directing, Devising Theatre, and Dance Dramaturgy. His book project, Archival Weight: Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Performance of Black and Queer Life in Jamaica, considers "archival weight" as a metaphor and a material reality: that is, the weight of history bearing down on the body, embedded in the state, and circulating through cultural formations. Archival Weight offers an interdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into how the past lives on/in the flesh and futures of Black queer subjects. The juridical, ontological, popular, and spiritual dimensions of archival weight are each given analysis: from colonial laws and national archives of sexuality and citizenship to the categories of human ontology, to the haunting presence of spirits and ancestors. The result is a project that not only theorizes "weight" as a key paradigm for understanding Black queer life in Jamaica, but also performs a kind of weight-lifting: imagining, through performance, how we carry, redistribute, or shed the burdens of history in an orientation toward freedom.

Dr. McDonald has presented scholarly works in the US, Iceland, Canada, Germany, 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 author of the essay "Scripts of Sexual Ethics: Tensions With/In the Performance of Jamaican Citizenship" (Caribbean Studies, Volume 51, 2023). He also has a book chapter, "Scripts of Maleness: Tensions Within Homosexual Performances in Jamaican National Identity," in Caribbean Men in the Arts: Demystifying Masculinities, edited by Keino Senior and Opal Palmer (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024).

Dr. McDonald previously joined Northwestern University's Slippage lab as the 2024-2025 Postdoctoral Affiliate supported by the Mellon Foundation grant, Race, Black Dance and Geographies of Freedom, where he is co-editing the anthology Black Social Dance: Embodied Geographies of Freedom and a Chapbook with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz.