Liquor Store Theatre

“For [Maya] Stovall, how we know is the operative question. Through such a simple act, dancing on the sidewalk before these business establishments, she sparks so much one-on-one engagement that has led to long-term dialogues. It is through her performances that she is able to bring into relief what affects the lives of her community: the economic, racial, historic, political, social forces that shape the area's inhabitants and the built environment that surrounds them.” - Christopher Y. Lew, from the foreword

“Maya Stovall's wildly ambitious, experimental, poetic, and multimodal ethnographic engagement reimagines what the ethnographic encounter entails and demands while asking us to reconsider the very nature of scholarly research in urban America.” - John L. Jackson Jr., Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

“An important contribution to the conversation on performance ethnography and the ethics of representing racialized bodies in urban space, Liquor Store Theatre is a singular type of immersion across ethnography, historiography, geography, and art.” - Aimee Meredith Cox, author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

"The interest many will find here is the unexpectedness and complexity of the lives she reveals. Residents share memories and discuss neighborhood changes, talk about their experiences with family and work, housing, shopping, education, transportation, and their understanding of the forces that have shaped their lives. These are individuals, not subjects, and Stovall offers the particularities that good storytelling requires. Once we are able to see them as individuals, the residents of McDougall-Hunt are hard to ignore." - Andrea Kirsh, Artblog

"Stovall is an anthropologist by training, and this becomes abundantly clear in the first few pages of Liquor Store Theatre, which is meticulously researched and scintillatingly told. . . . The publication of Liquor Store Theatre therefore becomes a space to unpack the true depth of the project, as well as a site for exploring Stovall’s larger research methodology." - Alice Bucknell, Pin-Up Magazine