JDTC CFP: Affect Performance Politics

[Erin Hurley, Prof.]

Call For Proposals

"Affect, Performance, Politics"

A SPECIAL SECTION

IN THE SPRING 2012 ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF DRAMATIC THEORY AND CRITICISM

(Deadline: December 15, 2010)

Erin Hurley and Sara Warner, Guest Editors

For this special section of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism,
we invite proposals for essays exploring the intersection of affect with
theatre and performance (studies).

Theatre and performance have often been conceptualized (or damned) as
engines of feeling.  In the case of Addison and Steele, Joanne Baillie, or
Victor Turner, theatrical emotion is mobilized for pedagogical or
rhetorical ends, to instruct in right-feeling or to communicate cultural
values. Zeami, Artaud, and Josette Féral, despite their obvious
differences, value affect for its potential to renew performance
aesthetics, whereas Jill Dolan, José Esteban Muñoz and Friedrich Schiller
turn to affect to solidify-even occasion-sometimes unexpected political
and social alliances. Indeed, feeling-here intended to gesture toward a
range of affective response from sensation to emotion-runs like a red
thread through the history of theatrical production and dramatic theory-
east and west, north and south. Of late, and consonant with what has been
called "the affective turn" in the Humanities and social sciences,
scholars have renewed theatre and performance's historical attention to
questions of sentiment, feeling, and mood with work on racialized affect
in/as performance, utopian performatives, and theatre's affective labour.
We hope that this special section of The Journal of Dramatic Theory and
Criticism will foreground performance's intellectual genealogy of affect
in ways that specify 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.

Potential topics include but are by no means limited to:

- Where and how might we locate aesthetic and intellectual genealogies of
the affective turn in (relation to) theatre and performance studies? What
of the histories of feminist performance and criticism, for instance, or
of theatre phenomenology?

- How do theatre and performance give rise to hegemonic and counter-
hegemonic "structures of feelings"?

- 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 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 in and through performance?

- 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 theatre, continue to suffer rather than thrive?

- What can studies of specific affects, such as compassion, pity, or
terror, tell us about postmodern feelings?

Please direct proposals and queries to both Guest Editors: Erin Hurley
(erin.hurley at mcgill.ca) and Sara Warner (slw42 at cornell.edu).

Proposals of approximately 500 words plus a short CV should be submitted
as attached files in either MS Word or .RTF format. Please include your
name, mailing address, e-mail, and phone number in the cover message.
Proposals must be received by December 15, 2010 to receive full
consideration.

Authors whose proposals are selected by the guest editors will have until
June 1, 2011 to submit their full essays of 20-25 manuscript pages,
exclusive of notes.  These too should be sent to both guest editors.
--
Erin Hurley
Associate Professor of Drama and Theatre
Department of English
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West
Montréal (Qc) H3A2T6