Please forward: Call for Submissions for Performing Arts Resources - A Tyranny of Documents

[Luella Massey]

Please forward to your lists:

Call for Submissions for an upcoming volume of /Performing Arts Resources/

To: archivists and historians of theatre, drama, performance studies, 
music, dance, and cinema 

Re:  Call for Submissions for a Volume of /Performing Arts 
Resources/ dedicated to Brooks McNamara to be titled "A Tyranny of 
Documents:  The Performance Historian as Film Noir Detective"

For a forthcoming volume of /Performing Arts Resources/, we are looking 
for submissions focusing on your experience with a 'tyrannical' document 
from the archive--a document that would not allow you to draw an 
otherwise apparent conclusion, that flew in the face of the evidence, or 
that carried embedded in it some aspect of the event that was 
incomprehensible, no matter how much additional research was brought to 
bear on it. 

Proposals should examine one document--and one only--that has been 
particularly troublesome to the researcher.  The emphasis should be on 
the work of the historian or archivist as detective in the archive, and 
on the difficult balance sought between respect for documentary 
evidence, the need to generate significance from it, and the 
natural-but-dangerous tendency to smooth out the rough edges of 
evidence.  Joint submissions by librarians/archivists and researchers 
discussing their relationship will also be considered.

If the historian is a detective, the model is sometimes less Hercule 
Poirot than a film noir gumshoe, who can’t quite realize the 
implications of the mystery, but who can’t stop following the clues.

This volume of /Performing Arts Resources/ will be dedicated to Brooks 
McNamara, /in memoriam/ -- former President of the Theatre Library 
Association, Founding Director of the Shubert Archive, Professor of 
Performance Studies at NYU, a pioneer in the serious study of popular 
performance in North America, and a much admired teacher and 
mentor.  Brooks was a gumshoe of the first order. 

Those interested in contributing to this volume should send a 200 word 
proposal to Stephen Johnson, Director, Graduate Centre for Study of 
Drama, University of Toronto, by email attachment 
at stephen.johnson at utoronto.ca <mailto:stephen.johnson at utoronto.ca> . 

Deadline:  15 June 2010 for proposals; if accepted, 30 Sept 2010 for 
final copy. 

Length of final submissions will be 3,000 words (10 pages), allowing for 
a greater number of briefer entries into this volume.  We hope to 
publish images of documents wherever possible, and will assist in rights 
and permissions research. 

/Performing Arts Resources/ is published by the Theatre Library 
Association  http://www.tla-online.org/

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