<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: monospace; font-size: 13px; ">American Society for Theater Research 2012 Working Group Session CFP: <br>Culture, Citizenship, and Mass Spectacle<br><br>Convened by Kimberly Jannarone, University of California, Santa Cruz, (<a href="mailto:kmj@ucsc.edu">kmj@ucsc.edu</a>) and <br>Keren Zaiontz, Roehampton University (<a href="mailto:keren.zaiontz@roehampton.ac.uk">keren.zaiontz@roehampton.ac.uk</a>)<br><br>This seminar addresses how mass spectacle mobilises citizens to express modes of cultural belonging. We seek papers that will contribute to a critical dialogue on the role of large-scale events in the formation of citizenship. From the official gathering of North Korean citizens openly weeping for the death of Kim Jong-il to the unofficial gathering of illegal citizens to sing the American national anthem in Spanish, citizenship relies on the appeals and contradictions of theatrical display. Theatricality's ability to transform subjects into citizens is a globalized practice claimed by both the state and the stateless. Both can turn to mass choreography, song, speeches, and orchestrated visual display to give shape and power to their political ideologies. Artists have long been integral to the infrastructure of public spectacle. The utopian possibilities they promote make them key to how citizenship is enacted through the immediacy of mass bodies.<br><br>We invite essays that analyze the co-creative roles of artists and citizens in the formation of festivals, world’s fairs, revolutionary spectacles, mass choreographies, Olympic ceremonies, Occupy movements, and other mass forms crossing performance genres and political lines. Essays might consider the following questions:<br><br>· What role do communities play in creating or resisting patriotic definitions of the nation sponsored by the state? <br>· How might artists and activists stage “counter-nationalist modes of belonging” (Butler) through public art events, and how might those modes travel across ideological lines? <br>· Can state- and corporate-sponsored events make room for spaces of critical dialogue and civil dissent? Or does such sponsorship create its own political charge? <br>· How does the relationship between the audience and the performer define itself when there are thousands of participants, and when does the sheer number of orchestrated or gathered bodies mandate its own rules for that relationship?<br><br>Papers are welcome addressing any era and place of performance history. <br><br>Session Format <br><br>This session will take the form of a focused three-hour seminar. Participants will be expected to read and discuss their papers with selected other members of the group in advance of the November session. In addition to paper contributions, we will read selections from theorists and fiction writers concerned with the protocols of national performance. We will discuss how these disparate readings inform our thinking on mass spectacle. Authors will begin the seminar by outlining and investigating points of intersection in their work. The papers will be distributed not only among the seminar authors but also, ideally, made available for interested ASTR members in order to enable the highest degree of conversation possible once the seminar convenes in Nashville.<br><br>Please send 250-300 word abstracts and a brief bio to the organizers NO LATER than MAY 31, 2012 at <a href="mailto:kmj@ucsc.edu">kmj@ucsc.edu</a> and <a href="mailto:keren.zaiontz@roehampton.ac.uk">keren.zaiontz@roehampton.ac.uk</a></span></body></html>