Dear All,
Please see below:
A CALLALOO CALL FOR PAPERS Misperformance
Staging Law and Justice in the African Diaspora
Callaloo invites papers for a special issue on “Misperformance: Staging Law
and Justice in the African Diaspora” guest edited by Jason Allen-Paisant
(University of Leeds, United Kingdom).
Project description:
Enlisting Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s (2014) concept of
“misperformance,” this
special issue of Callaloo wishes to consider forms of performance that
engage the legal apparatuses of colonialism as a site for critical thought
and intervention in the political present. We wish to harness the enabling
potential of the concept of “failing yet performing acts” for providing new
understandings of performative interventions that confront histories of
racial violence and imperial crimes despite disavowal, lack of official
recognition, and absence of memorialization.
The mis- in misperformance evokes two central and interrelated ideas. It
evokes the failures of colonial justice to close and redress the social
breaches left by colonial crimes. However, beyond the idea of failure, it
speaks to the critical creative forms of agency that arise from such
failure. It suggests notions of defiance, of a breaking of the rules, of
resistance—in sum, a refusal to comply, a misbehavior. Indeed,
misperformance points to an unwillingness to consider Empire’s crimes as
closed or archived. It speaks to an opening up and an opening out of
disavowed histories and of the modes of memory and remembering that such
moves engage in the current moment. This interplay and interrelation
between failure and its productive potentials can, we believe, animate a
series of questions around justice, imperialism, and performance in the
present.
Notable examples of current performative interventions in the field of
colonial law include The Trial of Governor Eyre (Jamaica), which uses law
and theater together to confront a colonial atrocity during the British
Empire; Action Zoo Humain, a project by Belgian theater maker Chokri Ben
Chikha that sets up mock truth commissions in several Belgian cities around
the colonial tradition of human zoos at the many world exhibitions and
fairs that Belgium has hosted; and A Trial of the Code Noir by German
public art exhibition association Documenta.
What new questions are such performances asking of colonialism for the
current time? What new understandings do they provide with respect to the
triangulation of trauma, memory, and performance? How are modes of
performance (ritual, theatrical, etc.) being enlisted within movements for
reparations for slavery and colonialism (e.g. in the US South, the
Caribbean, Britain, France)? Are there benefits, insights, or philosophical
understandings that accrue from the theatricalized performance of justice
and the law within histories of colonial violence?
This special issue invites poetry, visual art, essays, and critical
articles on misperformance and the law in the Black Atlantic. Submissions
that consider any or a series of the following points are welcomed, but
contributions may address other relevant points:
1.
Tragedy and the law
2.
Law and memory
3.
Law and the aesthetics of performance
4.
(Mis)performing the law
5.
Play-trials/ performance-trials
6.
Racism and justice
1.
Justice and time
2.
Justice and art
3.
Justice and memory
4.
Reparations and the performing arts
5.
Justice, imperialism, and the nation
6.
The work of Chokri Ben Chikha
Callaloo Submission Guidelines:
Manuscripts must be submitted online through the Callaloo manuscript
submission system by November 23, 2018. Please see the submission
guidelines here: http://callaloo.expressacademic.org/login.php. In order to
submit a manuscript, you must register with the online system. The
registration process will only take a few minutes. All manuscripts will
follow the usual review process for submissions, and the Callaloo editor
makes all final editorial decisions. Please note all manuscripts must
follow the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (3rd Edition)
and include in-text citations, a works cited, and endnotes for any
commentary.
Please direct questions or other correspondence to the Guest Editor for
this issue: Jason Allen-Paisant ([log in to unmask])
Guest Editor:
Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School
of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds (UK). He
holds a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) degree in Medieval and Modern
Languages from the University of Oxford, where he was a Commonwealth
Scholar, and an MPhil in French from the University of the West Indies. His
research focuses mainly on theater and performance and on poetics in the
Caribbean. He is the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial: Aimé
Césaire and Derek Walcott and is currently at work on a second monograph
that involves studies of contemporary Haitian theater. Dr. Allen-Paisant
has a number of published and forthcoming articles in scholarly
peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and *Callaloo*. He is a 2015 *Callaloo *poetry
fellow.
--
Jason Allen-Paisant, D.Phil (Oxon).
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
School of Languages, Cultures and Societies &
Centre for World Literatures
University of Leeds, LS2 9JT Leeds, UK
Co-organiser of conference: Memory and Performance in African-Atlantic
Futures, University of Leeds, 31 Aug - 2 Sept, 2018:
https://www.africanatlantic.net/
Recent publication: 'Reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze: *Carnival*,
or the novel as theatrical space', *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature*
, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989418767492
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