Abstract: In this dissertation I use several forms of contemporary performance---theater and drama, living history, public parades, processions and protests---to show how performance dramatizes, engages, reflects, and refracts the ongoing consequences of the fundamental process of circum-Atlantic colonization. In the early seventeenth century---at the height of British colonial expansion and the slave trade---the plantation colonies of Ulster (Northern Ireland), Virginia and the Caribbean were a part of the same colonial conversation. Indeed the first plantations in Ireland became the testing ground for those in the New World. Although in the twentieth century, Ireland, the Caribbean, and Southern U.S. have been---more often than not---figured as anomalous, a-historical, or exceptional in the study of Atlantic culture more broadly, they were also the plantation regions responsible for the ostensible 'success' of New World modernity. While relationships between these seemingly disparate regions are not widely discussed, concealed parallels reemerge in mid-Twentieth century performance practices. Performance has begun to supply one of the most compelling critical vocabularies for understanding regional affiliations and New World cultures. From Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic to Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead we begin to see the burgeoning development of the ways performance allows us to grasp the provocative and complex ways in which bodies, material culture, and the law interacts. I begin my dissertation by discussing the performative intersection of these areas, and charting a brief history of this triangulated regional inter-culture. In chapter two I argue that one of the most compelling conversations regarding the legacy of Ireland's shared geo-political and cultural history with the Caribbean materializes in theatrical and dramatic performance. I consider three plays, J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World, Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies, and Stewart Parker's Kingdom Come!: A Caribbean-Irish Musical. In chapter three, I turn to an examination of Carnival in Trinidad and Civil War reenactments in the Southern U.S. in the 1960s in order to answer the question: What is the relationship between the image of the Caribbean as an a-historical paradise (which is inadvertently resuscitated in mid-twentieth century Carnival performances) and the plantation romance (which is part and parcel of commemorating the centennial of the Civil War in Southern battle reenactments in the 1960s)? I finish this triangular examination in chapter four by returning to Ireland by way of the Southern U.S. Here, I examine political protests on the street, and political theater on the stage to consider circum-Atlantic connections that have been silenced in the grand narratives of the Civil Rights era in the U.S. and in Northern Ireland.