"Troubles with Identities"  

TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation  
Call for Papers- 3.2 Fall 2024 Submission deadlines: for papers, April 5, 2024; for letters, May 31, 2024 

Amartya Sen, in his 2014 book Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny brings the notion of the “I” as a tissue of ephemeral and arbitrary subjectivities to mind when he describes how “the same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a vegetarian, a woman, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings out in space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English)".  

Sometimes having a definable identity can be dangerous. In his 1999 book Disidentifications. Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Munoz analyzed how minority actors repurpose and remix elements of dominant cultural streams “in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship”. Not being consistent in one’s public identity, to practice “disidentification”, thus can be a survival strategy for those who live beyond the pale of dominant conventionality. 

In the face of this one might well ask: “Who needs identity?” Stuart Hall’s introduction to a 1997 book on cultural identity opened with precisely this question. Surveying the transformations that the notion of 'identity' had undergone in modernist and postmodern thought since Rimbaud and Barthes, Hall emphasized the discursive and psychoanalytic processes of identification through which identity (understood now as a temporary point of attachment to a subject position) emerges primarily through difference (i.e. in relation to the Other).  

Over the last two decades, the phenomenon already called “identity politics” in Hall’s analysis, has also engulfed the cultural sphere in spectacular, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes troubling ways that oppose the post-modern deconstruction of the auctorial subject and do not accept the notion of an individual as a “tissue of inconsistent identities”. Rather they tend to assert that no person can be read without a community context. These countermodels seem to echo and extend the Zulu/Xhola concept of ubuntu.  “One aspect of ubuntu is that, at all times, the individual effectively represents the people from among whom he or she comes, and therefore tries to behave according to the highest standards and exhibit the virtues upheld by his or her society.”1   

Other than in African thinking, however, the community in question in recent public discourses is not necessarily that into which a person was born. Rather, this community may also be consciously constituted through self-identification or disidentification; through recognition by others who already belong to it; or, even sometimes (as in the concept of “race”) by human biology. The precise criterion for belonging may thus differ widely from community to community. 

This turn to communitarian identities becomes manifest in the policing of voices (who can speak about whom or what?), in examinations of cultural appropriation (who can use which cultural resource to create new art?), in demands for representational diversity on all levels as well as in the freezing in time of personal identity (what a person wrote or said at one point in their lives determines forever who they are). This renewed public relevance for aspects of community identity, experienced by many as welcome actions towards their emancipation, nevertheless can come with an unwelcome twist: it can create new types of “phobic public spheres” (Munoz) where conventional social norms are replaced by the enactment of newly introduced, theory-driven yet publicly incontestable moral norms. 

Workers in the cultural sphere are currently asked to field two major crosscurrents. On the one hand, the animated, debate-oriented public cultural sphere as it exists today is largely a heritage of European notions of individualized expression - often positioned precisely against or at the margins of prevailing majoritarian thinking. The very vitality of public cultural discourse relies on auctorial perspectives that are able and willing to think and speak about their perceptions of others and of the Other, even to imagine what it would be like to be an Other. It relies on a fundamental openness towards non-majoritarian expression in the public sphere: towards divergent empathies, towards misunderstandings – and towards involuntary as well as voluntary resonances beyond one’s own community identity. “Culture makes ways of living comparable that would otherwise be incomparable”, writes Dirk Baecker2. 

On the other hand, artists, cultural actors and their work are often subjected to vehement critical scrutiny over the legitimacy of their voice, over suspicions of cultural appropriation, over utterances and stances in their past. Having to find a viable artistic and curatorial strategy that can both positively acknowledge the relevance and salience of - but also yet creatively engage with - such criticism can be as vexing, daunting and intimidating as it can be transformative and liberating.  

For issue 3.2, TURBA seeks contributions that recount and critically analyze how curators and practitioners of the live arts try to navigate these crosscurrents, bridge these troubled waters, and engage with the issues and questions above in productive, creative, quirky, wistful, serious, partisan, revolutionary or elegant ways.  We are interested in the practices, strategies and creative responses of those who must reconcile lofty ideals with local conditions: with concrete persons, power structures, debates and beliefs, local politics, money and audiences. 

Most cultural expressions are “traditional” in the sense that they rely on transgenerational transmissions of practices and identities, and on their own relevance to certain geographically, sometimes even ethnically circumscribed audiences. In most contexts, there is a locally dominant practice, ethnicity and community. Should all such locally dominant cultural practices equally diversify, decolonize, disidentify? Or does this expectation only apply to globally dominant practices that are associated with “the West”?   

How do you as curators or thinkers reconcile demands for a diversity of persons of various (cultural) identities while operating within a clearly culturally specific and often locally dominant practice (e.g. bel canto opera, Kabuki, Bharata Natyam, symphony orchestra, Zaouli dance or Jingju)? How do you convolve an engagement with a diversity of cultural practices versus concerns about the appropriation or mis-representation of “other” cultural practices? How do you deal with reverse appropriation and disidentification – i.e. when “other” cultural expressions (“mis-“?)use or (“inexpertly”?) emulate dominant practices that you consider to be your own field of expertise? How do mixed and transgressive identities, migratory aesthetics, the wide diversity and internal hierarchies of cultural practices within each given community enter into your considerations – and your long-term cultural strategy?  

SUBMISSIONS POLICY 

TURBA invites submissions engaging with any tradition, genre, community, culture, artistic discipline and aesthetic world view in the live arts. The journal is particularly interested in featuring compelling, experimental, politically engaged, and transformative content that fosters critique and debate, expands knowledge, and provides socio-cultural and historical context for the evolving practices of live arts curation.  

TURBA is open to a wide range of genres and formats. Contributions may include academic papers, critical essays, historic and reprinted texts with commentary, dialogic exchanges and transcribed group conversations, manifestos, reviews of publications, analyses of curatorial paradigms and events, poetry, visual essays, graphic representations, and more. They may also interweave such styles and epistemologies. 

TURBA welcomes writers in any language to submit texts, including texts previously published in other languages. Such texts must be accompanied by the first draft of a translation into English. Should the text be selected for publication, we will, if necessary, work with the author(s) on a final English version.  

Academic papers will be blind peer reviewed on request, should be a maximum of 5,000 words accompanied by a 150-word abstract and 4-5 keywords. Please do not include your name in the article or the document’s metadata. Submit a 50-word biography on a separate page with accompanying image(s) proposed for the article.  

Submissions in all other writing genres may not exceed 3,000 words and should include a 50-word biography in the main document, with accompanying image(s).  

Letters can be written in a casual style. From 500-750 words, they might be short reflections, reports, explanations, critical observations on something that is happening or has just happened in the writer's local area, for instance a controversy, a new policy, a travelling show or a text that have made waves, the death (or birth) of an influential live arts protagonist, a miracle or a scandal, etc. The letters section has a later submission deadline of July 1, 2024.  

Texts should be submitted in a Microsoft Word document, 12-point Times New Roman font and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style (double-spaced, with endnotes, list of works cited and in-text citations). Style sheet available on request.  

Images must be submitted according to the Artwork guidelines on the Berghahn Journals Submissions page: www.berghahnjournals.com/submissions. 

Although the submission deadline for TURBA 3.2 is April 5 for first drafts, we encourage authors to propose initial ideas in the form short summaries at an earlier date to confirm that they fall within the theme of the issue. If accepted for publication, we will provide editorial support for further work on the papers.   

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TURBA appears twice a year in the spring and the fall, both in a limited print edition and as  

an e-publication. In addition to open calls, submissions are also accepted on a rolling basis. For more information, please visit: www.berghahnjournals.com/turba. Send your contributions, queries, and questions to managing editor Dena Davida at [log in to unmask] 

 

 

 

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