CFP: ACLA 2013 The Politics of Theatre/The Theatre of Politics

[Lawrence Switzky]

Call for Seminar Participants:
The Politics of Theater/The Theater of Politics

Seminar Organizer(s):

•Martin Harries (University of California, Irvine)
*Lawrence Switzky* (University of Toronto)

*ACLA Conference 2013* Victoria College in the University of Toronto (American 
Comparative Literature Association)

4-7 April 2013, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Political theory has long drawn on the model of the theater: as a site of the formation 
of a polis; as the dystopian other of genuine political community; as a model for 
training for sociality itself.  From Plato to Rousseau to Nietzsche and beyond, the 
theater has been a site where identity and the political encounter, contest, and shape 
each other.  Meanwhile, the theater has also staged problems of politics – not least, a 
politics specific to the theater, specific to theatrical embodiment, specific to the 
encounter of spectacle and audience and to the collaboration of actors, directors, 
playwrights, and producers.  What is the politics of theater?  What is the theater of 
politics? What is the relationship between them?

This panel invites papers reading specific political theorists through theater (and vice 
versa) as well as readings of political processes and problems through theories of 
theater, drama, and performance.  How do assumptions about, or complications of, problems 
of theatricality underwrite political theory?  What vocabularies do theories of drama 
provide for the analysis of political events?  What political theories, for instance, 
underwrite the globalizing conceptions of the theatrum mundi?  How does the theater 
localize diffuse or abstract political practices?

SEMINAR KEYWORDS: Theater, drama, political theory, performance, embodiment, community, 
politics, stage

We invite proposals from scholars of theatre and performance, political science, 
philosophy, literature, and related fields. Please submit a brief abstract (no more than 
250 words) to http://www.acla.org/acla2013/propose-a-paper-or-seminar/ by no later than 
November 15, 2012 at midnight. Please contact lawrence.switzky at utoronto.ca with any 
questions.