CFP: The "Global City" in the shadow of the Arab Spring

[Kim Solga]

Dear all,

Please see the CFP below. Any questions, please email me at ksolga at uwo.ca.

Very best,
Kim

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CFP: The "Global City" in the shadow of the Arab Spring

PERFORMANCE AND THE GLOBAL CITY (ed. D.J. Hopkins and Kim Solga), the follow-up volume to 2009's critically acclaimed PERFORMANCE AND THE CITY, will be published by Palgrave in Spring 2013. Featuring essays by Loren Kruger, Susan Bennett, Haiping Yan, Jean Graham-Jones, Paul Rae and Simon Jones, Eng-Beng Lim, Jisha Menon, Silvija Jestrovic, Nicholas Whybrow, Ana Martinez, Jason Bush, and Kim Solga with Jennifer H. Capraru, PERFORMANCE AND THE GLOBAL CITY will seek to investigate how the now-ubiquitous notions of the "creative city" and the "global city" collide, malignantly as well as productively, with the labour of live art workers, arts managers, community art-makers, and artist-academics in a wide variety of urban spaces around the world. What work is the rhetoric of the "global city" doing, right now, on urban populations in different "glocal" zones, and how might theatre and other forms of live art enable, jam, challenge, or reframe this work to the benefit - or perhaps not - of those populations? Working at the intersection of urban studies, performance studies, and globalization studies, PERFORMANCE AND THE GLOBAL CITY will question when, how, and to whose benefit performance labour meets the "global" city today.

To complete the volume, we are currently seeking writing that addresses some of the above in relation to a city or cities in North Africa and/or the Middle East. We are especially keen on work that explores the urban dimensions of the "Arab Spring": to what extent are the democratic uprisings we have seen since spring 2011 urban phenomena? What aspects of the democratic resistance were explicitly or implicitly theatrical? And how might the lens of performance productively interrogate these events? Where and how do these uprisings meet - and where and how do they diverge from - the neoliberal rhetoric of the "global" creative city? What emerges, for cities like Tripoli, Cairo, or Damascus, in the wake of the Arab Spring (and, in some cases, in the wake of ongoing or renewed violence)? Might these centres of revolt become sites of a fresh resistance to global, neoliberal urbanism? Or, alternately, will the latter ultimately prove helpful to the democratic shifts the 2011 and 2012 protestors sought?

Papers may be academic or performative in style, and artists/artist-academics are especially welcome to get in touch. Queries, with 250-word abstract, should be sent ASAP, and no later than Friday, March 23, 2012, to DJ Hopkins <dhopkins at mail.sdsu.edu> and Kim Solga <ksolga at uwo.ca>. Please bear in mind that, owing to tight press timelines, complete paper(s) will be due within three months.

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