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Dear Colleagues,

Please join us next Wednesday, 13 January, for Quorum, the research  
seminar series of the Department of Drama at Queen Mary, University of  
London.  For the first event of 2010, we're thrilled to host an  
extended seminar, with papers by two visiting scholars from North  
America: Dr. Ric Knowles (University of Guelph, Canada) and Dr. Tavia  
Nyong'o (New York University, USA).  Both papers draw from a rich pool  
of cultural sources to address a politics of difference and the  
discourse of civil equality.

15.00 ? 17.00
Dramaturgy Across Difference
Ric Knowles
University of Guelph, Canada

17.15 ? 19.00
The Gentrification of Freakishness, or, Invisible Landlordism of
Posthistoric Capitalism of Tabu
Tavia Nyong'o
New York University, Canada

Queen Mary University
Arts Building
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

Refreshments will be served.  All are very welcome.

Warmly,
Johanna Linsley

****
Dramaturgy Across Difference

Why is dramaturgy across difference so difficult? Focusing on Toronto,  
"the world's most muliticultural city," this paper probes the role of  
the dramturg working across cultural difference. Beginning with  
received dramaturgical wisdom and the problems of intercultural  
performance theory, it moves on to survey the practices of some of  
Toronto and Canada's most experienced dramaturgs to attempt to  
formulate appropriate intercultural dramaturgical practices for play  
development that employs non-western forms and belief systems. The  
paper concludes with a case study of the creation process in Toronto  
of Kuna/Rappahannock playwright Monique Mojica's new play, Chocolate  
Woman Dreams the Milky Way, in which dramaturgical principles are  
being developed based on the structural principles embedded in the  
textile and pictographic arts of the Kuna people of coastal Panama, a  
project on which Knowles is working as dramaturg.

Ric Knowles is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of  
Guelph, editor of Canadian Theatre Review, and past editor of Modern  
Drama. Among his books are The Theatre of Form and the Production of  
Meaning, Reading the Material Theatre, Theatre & Interculturalism  
(forthcoming from Palgrave), and, co-edited with Monique Mojica, the  
two volume anthology of First Nations drama, Staging Coyote's Dream.  
He is general editor of the book series, Critical Perspectives on  
Canadian Theatre in English, and has just won the Excellence in  
Editing Prize for sustained achievement from the Association for  
Theatre in Higher Education in the US.

****
The Gentrification of Freakishness, or, Invisible Landlordism of
Posthistoric Capitalism of Tabu

At a moment when civil equality has assumed political primacy, what
are we to make of those differences to which queer acts and lives
remain inextricably attached? Is social acceptance contingent upon a
worrisome process of queer gentrification? Or can freakishness ? as a
non-identitarian category of sex, creativity, and collectivity ?
resist its burial and memorialization by the invisible landlordism of
Tabu? Through a look at some work by Michel Foucault, Slavoj ?i?ek,
Jack Smith, Taylor Mac, Jennifer Miller, Samuel Delany, Filip
Noterdaeme, Bruce La Bruce, Todd Browning, Renate Lorenz and Pauline
Boudry, this talk will explore the cultural history of ?the freak? in
popular amusement, in cultural lore regarding the sexually,
genetically or genitally different, and in contemporary tactics to
reclaim the epithet for artistic and political purposes. The lecture
will argue that freaky theory and performance enable a queer parallax
view on the symbolic and material processes of gentrification.
Gentrification thereby comes to serve as a stand-in for the traumatic
Real of capitalism itself, a prop in the play of queer and freaky
theatricality.


Tavia Nyong'o is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New
York University. His research and teaching interests include black and
postcolonial studies, queer and affect studies, performance history,
and popular music studies. His first book, The Amalgamation Waltz, was
published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2009, and he is
working on two new projects, one on the intersections of punk and
queer and the other on black aesthetics in a "post-racial" era.

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