ASTR CFP: Culture, Citizenship, and Mass Spectacle

[Keren Zaiontz]

American Society for Theater Research 2012 Working Group Session CFP:
Culture, Citizenship, and Mass Spectacle

Convened by Kimberly Jannarone, University of California, Santa Cruz, (kmj at ucsc.edu 
) and
Keren Zaiontz, Roehampton University (keren.zaiontz at roehampton.ac.uk)

This seminar addresses how mass spectacle mobilises citizens to  
express modes of cultural belonging. We seek papers that will  
contribute to a critical dialogue on the role of large-scale events in  
the formation of citizenship. From the official gathering of North  
Korean citizens openly weeping for the death of Kim Jong-il to the  
unofficial gathering of illegal citizens to sing the American national  
anthem in Spanish, citizenship relies on the appeals and  
contradictions of theatrical display.  Theatricality's ability to  
transform subjects into citizens is a globalized practice claimed by  
both the state and the stateless.  Both can turn to mass choreography,  
song, speeches, and orchestrated visual display to give shape and  
power to their political ideologies.  Artists have long been integral  
to the infrastructure of public spectacle.  The utopian possibilities  
they promote make them key to how citizenship is enacted through the  
immediacy of mass bodies.

We invite essays that analyze the co-creative roles of artists and  
citizens in the formation of festivals, world’s fairs, revolutionary  
spectacles, mass choreographies, Olympic ceremonies, Occupy movements,  
and other mass forms crossing performance genres and political lines.  
Essays might consider the following questions:

·  What role do communities play in creating or resisting patriotic  
definitions of the nation sponsored by the state?
·  How might artists and activists stage “counter-nationalist modes of  
belonging” (Butler) through public art events, and how might those  
modes travel across ideological lines?
·  Can state- and corporate-sponsored events make room for spaces of  
critical dialogue and civil dissent?  Or does such sponsorship create  
its own political charge?
·  How does the relationship between the audience and the performer  
define itself when there are thousands of participants, and when does  
the sheer number of orchestrated or gathered bodies mandate its own  
rules for that relationship?

Papers are welcome addressing any era and place of performance history.

Session Format

This session will take the form of a focused three-hour seminar.  
Participants will be expected to read and discuss their papers with  
selected other members of the group in advance of the November  
session.  In addition to paper contributions, we will read selections  
from theorists and fiction writers concerned with the protocols of  
national performance. We will discuss how these disparate readings  
inform our thinking on mass spectacle.  Authors will begin the seminar  
by outlining and investigating points of intersection in their work.   
The papers will be distributed not only among the seminar authors but  
also, ideally, made available for interested ASTR members in order to  
enable the highest degree of conversation possible once the seminar  
convenes in Nashville.

Please send 250-300 word abstracts and a brief bio to the organizers  
NO LATER than MAY 31, 2012 at kmj at ucsc.edu and keren.zaiontz at roehampton.ac.uk
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