Dozal, Mario Alonzo. "Playing the Savage: Professional Wrestling’s Portrayal of the Exotic Through James 'Kamala' Harris." Professional Wrestling Studies Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2020, pp. 41-55In the world of American professional wrestling, cultural performance has traditionally been used and reinforced for the sake of developing characters and stories that bring fans into the arena or into the mass audience of television and online viewers of wrestling shows. Historically, some of these cultural performances have constituted a xenophobic cultural space where people of color and foreigners are typically given the role of the villains, or “heels,” while white performers of domestic origin are typically given the roles of the heroes, or “faces.” These cultural performances enact racial, gender, and political ideologies that reproduce hegemonic relations of power. This study focuses on the career of African-American wrestler James Harris and the evolution of his cultural performance as “Kamala” to illustrate how ideologies of race and colonialism intersect to reproduce historical and evolving stereotypes in U.S. popular culture. Using content analysis, I examine a selection of performances that represented turning points in the career of Kamala, including the creation and introduction of the character to regional audiences in Memphis wrestling in 1982 and his introduction to national audiences with the World Wrestling Federation several years later. Additionally, Kamala is examined using Schudson’s five dimensions for determining the strength of a cultural object to gauge the extent to which Kamala can be viewed as a cultural object.Keywords: performance; colonialism; exotic; authenticity; culture