[Candrama] CFP: On State Violence - Performance Research Journal

Mon Aug 19 14:13:05 EDT 2024

Sent on behalf of editors. Apologies for cross-posting.

Performance Research Journal

NEW CfP
Vol. 30, No. 3: On State Violence (September 2025)
Deadline: 9th September 2024

Read the CfP on our website at: bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions<http://bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions>

Edited by Lucy Freedman, Micaela G. Signorelli, Charlotte Young and Martin Young

State violence is not an aberration or an outlier: states are violent by their nature. Indeed, the classic Weberian definition of the state as the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, while by no means an adequate final word on the subject, is correct in identifying violence as constitutional to the state’s existence. The discipline of theatre and performance studies has engaged many topics related to state violence – prison drama projects, the performativity of military displays and the theatricality of protests, for example. However, despite the depth and richness of this scholarship, the actual role of the state as such is often overlooked, sidestepped and under-theorized. How the state’s involvement in questions of performance and theatricality relate to its broader aims, interests, constitution and reproduction is frequently neglected. This issue invites contributions that contextualize performance analysis within broader critical theories of the state, including but not limited to de-colonial, feminist, queer and Marxist critiques.

The categorical boundaries of ‘state violence’ are hard to delineate; therefore, for the purposes of this issue, we construe the term as broadly as possible, and invite submissions relating to law enforcement, the criminal justice system, the military, intelligence and surveillance programmes, censorship, border and citizenship regimes, racialization and the policing of gender by states, and punitive welfare systems. We take a similarly broad view of ‘performance’, and welcome work on theatre, live art, visual art, dance, drama, music and performance in everyday life.

State activity (and, in particular, state violence) is often easiest to make sense of when it is understood as the pursuit of some essential state functions – we would say, provisionally, the reproduction of itself and of the society it rules over through such strategies as the defence of territory, the promotion of economic activity and the maintenance of civil order. Every modern state has its own unique history and constitution and plays its own unique role as a competitor in the imperialist world order. And yet, even in starkly different national, regional and cultural contexts, where different forms of state can be clearly distinguished, such as between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ state, the capitalist and the socialist, or the colonial and the post-colonial, certain patterns emerge. The maintenance of state rule through the daily exercise of violence and the unsanctioned abuse of power are consistently observable. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) in the United States, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Nigeria, the Guidance Patrol morality police in Iran and the Ministry of Social Security in North Korea (officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) are all unique institutions with important specificities, but they all also share an irreducible core set of characteristics in common that make them police – there is a shared history and internal logic to policing the world over. This commonality is nowhere understood better than by the police themselves, as policing is increasingly globalized in terms of shared or borrowed techniques, training, technology and resources regardless of the context in which different forces operate.

Nor is state violence the exclusive purview of armed officers. While our primary concern is with the immediate activity of law enforcement and incarceration – police, prisons, courts, border enforcement – we recognize also Mark Neocleous’s conclusion that ‘the best way to understand police is as an activity rather than an institution, a function rather than an entity’ (2000: 5). That is, the project of policing cannot be reduced only to the work of police officers but suffuses every aspect of the exercise of state power, including even its supposedly benign or benevolent activities. This blurring of categorical boundaries is concretely played out when workers in schools and hospitals are required to actively participate in border enforcement and counter-terror surveillance (as under the UK’s racist ‘hostile environment’ policies and Prevent agenda: a surveillance and reporting scheme practised across UK institutions including schools since 2003, which has been widely held to reinforce Islamophobic racial profiling), or when putatively therapeutic interventions for psychiatric patients in healthcare settings take the form of involuntary restraint, detention and medication.

One of the challenges facing both performance and performance studies when it comes to engaging with state violence is that, as Paul Butler says, ‘Violence is not always an “event”, but rather a process or ongoing social condition embedded in our everyday lives’ (2022: 24). Because of the centrality of the state to the institutions and processes that order our lives, state violence is practically inseparable from structural violence, defined by Bandy X. Lee as ‘the avoidable limitations that society places on groups of people that constrain them from meeting their basic needs and achieving the quality of life that would otherwise be possible’, a form of violence that is ‘often subtle, invisible, and accepted as a matter of course’ (Lee 2019: 123–4). State violence also does not sit in tidy opposition to criminal violence. Cecilia Menjívar has observed how ‘individuals who commit common crimes mimic the state as it metes out punishments on enemies’ (2011: 37). And Martin Luther King Jr identified the ‘deplorable’ crimes committed by Black rioters in Detroit in 1967 as ‘derivative crimes … born of the greater crimes of the white society’ (2018 [1967]).

In one sense, this topic will always be timely – state violence is a perennial issue. In another sense, this issue is an active effort to capture an already fading moment. The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 precipitated a widely observed explosion of interest in anti-police, anti-carceral and abolitionist politics over the following years. Calls to reduce police funding, if not abolish police and prisons outright, and to explore non-punitive solutions to social harms achieved a previously unprecedented foothold in mainstream discussion – a scarcely predicted success of radical political interventions and the assertion of positive, affirmative and revolutionary visions. But that cultural moment is rapidly on the wane, supplanted by a reassertion of tough-on-crime, law-and-order political messaging and the aggressive expansion in multiple countries of law enforcement, border policing, and the criminal justice system. This issue provides a venue for the discipline of performance studies to retain and reflect on the critical insights of that moment, facilitating the long-term incorporation of the lessons of those successful activist interventions into discussions within the discipline, as well as providing a space for theorizations that work their way into praxis. We therefore invite contributors to draw from the long and heterodox international traditions of organizing, activism and scholarship that interrogate and challenge state violence, and from which the discipline of theatre and performance studies has much left to learn.

Proposals might address:

   Performance work depicting, interrogating and/or responding to state violence
   Performing state control and coercion
   Performing arts programmes within the carceral system
   Work produced by those made subject to state violence
   Complicity between the performing arts sector and the state
   Racialization and/as state violence
   State violence and gender
   State violence, sexuality and its regulation
   The colonial structure of state violence
   Activist- and/or community-led performance projects
   ‘Security theatre’ and other examples of the state’s performed or presentational activity
   Utilization of theatre and performance techniques within ‘crime prevention’ schemes
   Theatre in education and its relationship to the carceral state
   Academic scholarship and arts criticism’s relationship to state violence

References

Butler, Paul (2022) ‘The problem of state violence’, Daedalus 151(1): 22–37.

King Jr, Martin Luther (2018 [1967]) ‘The crisis in America’s cities’, The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-jr-the-crisis-in-americas-cities/552536/<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-jr-the-crisis-in-americas-cities/552536/>.

Lee, Bandy X. (2019) Violence; An interdisciplinary approach to causes, consequences, and cures, Oxford: Wiley.

Menjívar, Cecilia (2011) Enduring Violence: Ladina women's lives in Guatemala, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Neocleous, Mark (2000) The Fabrication of Social Order: A critical theory of police power, London: Pluto Press.

Format:

Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below, including a 100-word author bio, for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations, including artist pages and other contributions that use distinctive layouts and typographies.

Issue Contacts:

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info at performance-research.org<mailto:info at performance-research.org>

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors:

Email: l.freedman at qmul.ac.uk<mailto:l.freedman at qmul.ac.uk>

Schedule:

Proposals: Outcomes September 2024

First drafts: January 2025

Final drafts: May 2025

Publication: September 2025

General Guidelines for Submissions:

   Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org<http://www.performance-research.org/> – and familiarize yourself with the journal.
   Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs re artist pages.
   The text for proposals should not exceed one page, circa 500 words.
   A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text.
   Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.
   Proposals should be sent by email to info at performance-research.org<mailto:info at performance-research.org>
   Please include your surname in the file name of the document you send.
   Please include the issue title and number in the subject line of your email.
   Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
   If your proposal is accepted, you will be invited to submit an article in first draft by the deadline indicated above. On final acceptance of a completed article, you will be asked to sign an author agreement in order for your work

________________________
Alessandro Simari (he/him), PhD (QMUL)
Part-Time Professor // Department of Theatre & Department of English, University of Ottawa
Part-Time Faculty // Department of Theatre, Concordia University

Research in publication
*NEW* Chapter (forthcoming): “The Theatre Ticket and the Circuit of Capital” [with Shane Boyle] in Theatre Things: Material Theories and Histories, edited by Eero Laine and Andrew Friedman (2024)
*NEW* Article: Journal of Dramatic Theory & Criticism 36.1 (Fall 2021): Marxist Keywords for Performance: A Contribution to the Critique of Performance and Political Economy [open access; co-written with the Performance & Political Economy Research Collective]<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/841951?fbclid=IwAR2yKRmY9K6Oz6PW1xTgREKWYg8mnIjDURagZR4j-KQQo-xgcK380b78bBo#bio_wrap>
Special Issue: Shakespeare Bulletin 38.1 (Spring 2020): Special issue on “Labor in Contemporary Shakespeare Performance”<https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/44230> | Introduction<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/787385>
Article: Shakespeare Bulletin 38.1 (Spring 2020): <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/787389> “<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/787389>Volunteer Labor and Theatrical Community in Emma Rice's A Midsummer Night's Dream (2016)”<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/787389>
Article: Cahiers Élisabéthains 99.1 (2019): <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0184767819837720> “<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0184767819837720>Performing silence as political resistance: Audience interaction and spatial politics in Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III”<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0184767819837720>

Editorial in publication
*NEW* Book: Unframing Photography: Performing the Image to See Otherwise by Manuel Vason, edited by Alessandro Simari (LADA Books, 2022)<https://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/publishing/unframing-photography-performing-the-image-to-see-otherwise/>

l am available for editing, proofreading, and research consultancy. Please contact me for more information and rates.

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