CFP - ASTR working session

[Erin Hurley, Prof.]

Call for Papers due Friday, May 15, 2009

Emotional Cartographies: Affect, Performance, and Politics
Working Session


American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) 2009
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Condado Plaza Hotel and Casino

November 12-15, 2009

Affect shares with the ASTR 2009 theme, "Theater, Performance, and
DestiNation," a set of expectations related to discovery and encounter,
experiences from pilgrimage to consumption, and inquires into performance's
role in constituting cultural and (inter)national forms of belonging.  The
question of how performance solicits, organizes, and marshals affective
responses are of central concern to theatre studies, as treatises on emotion
from Aristotle and Bharata through Addison and Steele to Brecht and Boal
and, most recently from, Dolan, Muñoz, and Ridout make clear.  Critics have
queried how and at what level performance engages spectators' emotions, have
asked after the connection between form and feeling, and theorized the
relationship between sentiments and their display.  Moreover, feeling is a
question of daily professional significance for artists.  Some actors train
to conjure convincing emotions on stage, while others labour to alienate
feelings in themselves and others.  Describing a stage-wash as "warm" or
"cool" indicates not only the lighting's colour palate but also its
emotional resonance. 

Despite affectivity's centrality to performance,
however, it has not yet come fully into view as a research object in our
discipline.  Moreover, despite theatre being the affect machine par
excellence, it is noticeably absent from the emergent discourse of affect
studies in the Humanities.  This seminar strives to foreground performance's
intellectual genealogy of affect in a way that specifies theatre's relation
to and use of emotion and to put theatrical performance back into the wider
conversation on affect in order to enrich an already lively discussion.

We encourage proposals for 8-10 page papers that address the following
questions:

-    How has theatrical affect participated in building or destabilizing
collectives, communities, and nations? What are the best or most efficacious
strategies for mapping, tracking and/or marking affects and their
resonances?
-    How does theatrical affect travel, circulate and/or move? By what
various means does theatre produce, disseminate and transmit feeling,
emotion and affect?  Are there kinds of theatre/performance that seems
particularly affective, and why?
-    How do theater and performance give rise to hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic "structures of feelings"?  Is structure the correct word,
or have we moved beyond Raymond Williams and need to thing about other ways
these feelings may manifest and move ­ what about temporalities of feelings,
geographies of feelings, anti-structures of feelings, networks of feelings,
etc.?
-    What role has theater and performance studies played in the recent
"affective turn" and what does/might the "affective turn" offer these
fields? 
-    If affective labour, as Michael Hardt and others have noted, now
constitutes the pinnacle of labouring forms, why do some forms of affective
labour, namely theater, continue to suffer rather than thrive?
-    What can studies of specific affects, such as compassion, pity, or
terror, tell us about postmodern feelings?

Selected participants will submit papers (8-10 pages) on September 15 for
feedback by three or four other participants by October 15 via a wiki forum.
Our conference session will entail a structured discussion of broader
questions germane to the emergent discourse of theatre and affect.

For more information on ASTR and the 2009 conference, see:
http://www.astr.org/Conference/WorkingSessionsGuidelines/tabid/128/Default.a
spx

Please e-mail 500-word proposals and a short cv to both session conveners by
Friday, May 15:

Sara Warner, Cornell University, slw42 at cornell.edu
Erin Hurley, McGill University, erin.hurley at mcgill.ca


-- 
Erin Hurley
Assistant Professor of Drama and Theatre
Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montréal, Qc H3A 2T6
(514) 398-6573