CALL FOR PAPERS/ECOCRITICISM AND INDIGENOUS PERFORMANCE

[Marc Maufort]

Proposal and Call for Papers:

 

Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Performance

 

To be edited by Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes and Prof. Dr. Marc Maufort

 

“Dramaturgies,” P.I.E.-Peter Lang (Brussels)

 

 

Ever since the mid-1990s, ecocriticism—or “the study of the relationship
between literature and the physical environment,” in Cheryll Glotfelty’s
famous definition—has become an increasingly popular methodological paradigm
for literary studies. In Native American and First Nations Studies, however,
the coordinates for a fruitful critical investment in environmentalist
issues are still being mapped. Common stereotypes, such as the wilderness
topos, the “ecological Indian,” or the keeper of a planetary spirituality,
have proven tenacious and difficult to overcome. Joni Adamson additionally
reminds us that ecocritics often overlook the “connections between social
injustices and environmental degradation” (20) and accordingly pleads for
both “a more inclusive environmentalism and a more multicultural
ecocriticism” (xix). Similarly, Donelle Dreese examines the particular
connection between landscape and configurations of the self in contemporary
Native American poetry and prose; and in their study on Postcolonial
Ecocriticism (2010), Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin call attention to
further forms of ecological imperialism (such as biocolonization or
environmental racism). Representations of nature and patterns of political
power, in short, are inseparably intertwined. For the field of indigenous
theater and drama, however (a genre that has itself been widely overlooked),
these questions have not yet been systematically addressed.

 

This volume seeks to explore the relationship between indigenous drama and
the “environment” in the widest sense—as place, land, nature, wilderness,
social space, “thirdspace” (in both Soja’s or Bhabha’s senses), and
“alterNative” space. Our notion of ecocriticism is not limited to
environmentalism as a form of creative advocacy, but it acknowledges, in its
basic assumption, Robert M. Nelson’s insight that “cultural identities, like
individual identities, emerge not from class struggle but rather from the
land” (7). We therefore invite more general perspectives on performative
representations of place, space, and nature. We are particularly interested
in the ways that plays and performances envision space (and especially the
relationships between humans and spaces), but also in the concrete
engagements with the space of the stage. From the highly experimental
approach to uranium mining in Marie Clements’s Burning Vision to the ritual
preparation of a dancing circle in James Luna’s Emendatio, from the
planetary, cosmopolitan vision of Tomson Highway’s Rose to the metaphorical
landscapes of Diane Glancy’s plays, and from Jack Davis’s and Wesley Enoch’s
dramatizations of Australian Aboriginal Dreamings to Hone Kouka’s and Briar
Grace-Smith’s celebrations of the spiritual bond between Maori people and
the land, the spectrum of “staging nature” is as wide as it is powerful. The
corpus of the volume would deal primarily with Indigenous works from North
America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Fiji,
Hawaii), thus offering a broad comparative perspective on the multiple
variants of Indigenous writing for the stage. 

We invite contributions of roughly 6,000 words (prepared according to the
latest version of the MLA stylesheet), to be submitted by December 1, 2012.
Questions/topics to be addressed include, but are not limited, to the
following: 

 

*	the multiple and transversal interconnections between identity,
place, and space 
*	the particular use of the land and landscapes as defining factors of
identity
*	the significance of spaces and places for particular indigenous
dramaturgies 
*	land and landscape as active “characters” or crucial elements in the
development of dramatic plot rather than passive decorum
*	the intersections between local and global, tribal and transnational
trajectories in indigenous theater and drama
*	the conceptualization of new methodologies through ecocritical
perspectives and, in turn, the potential of indigenous (re)writings and
(re)stagings of place for an expansion of ecocriticism as practice
*	studies of how individual playwrights address ecocritical issues. 
*	Comparative studies of how playwrights from different world regions
address these concerns.

 


 


Interested contributors are invited to send us an abstract of 250 words and
a brief biographical sketch by March 1, 2012: 

daewes at uni-mainz.de

mmaufort at ulb.ac.be

Please do not hesitate to contact the editors, should you have any further
questions regarding possible topics.

 

 

Marc Maufort

Professor of English

Modern Languages and Literatures CP 175

Université Libre de Bruxelles

Av. F.D. Roosevelt, 50

1050 BRUSSELS

BELGIUM

 

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