* This email is sent via the PSi-Extra mail-list. 'Reply' will send your response to that list *
-----------------------------------------------------------
Performance Research Journal
Call for Proposals - Vol. 29, No. 7: On Ghosts
(Dec 2024)
Proposal Deadline: 19 February 2024
Issue Editors: Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine and Kristof van Baarle
In an age of durational and perpetual crises, where corpses – human and more-than-human – pile around us, the boundaries are thin between ghosts and those they might haunt. This issue of Performance Research revisits ghosts from the perspective of capitalist ruins, corpses of extinct animals and poisoned habitats, phantom narratives and uncertain trajectories, virtual and digital selves, expiring planets and lost celestial bodies, as well as the various veins of more-than-human philosophy. Performance studies is uniquely situated to consider deeply what might just be a ghostly age, being a way of working and thinking that encompasses the span of individual bodies and broader social patterns. In such an era, even the mundane performance of daily life is haunted by the existential threats of human-made disasters pressing into and overwhelming climates and communities, cultures and futures.
In this issue, we aim to provide a far-reaching overview of ghosts through an analysis of the ways in which their (non-)representations manifest, politically and aesthetically, in theatres and performances. From early on in theatre history, theatres have been considered vehicles that often transform into sites of spectral representation. As Joseph Roach (1996), Marvin Carlson (2001), Alice Rayner (2006), Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (2014) and Jessica Nakamura (2022), among others, have argued, theatres have almost always been haunted by spectral encounters. In contrast to this and similar prior scholarship on ghosts, which mainly focused on modernist techniques that made the ghosts on stage visible, this issue interprets ghosts as dramaturgical concepts in performance and society by shedding analytic light on the invisible/imperceptible rather than the visible/perceptible. As Maaike Bleeker argues, ‘theatre … presents the object par excellence for an analysis of visuality as a phenomenon that takes place within the relationship between the one seeing and what is seen’ (2008: 2). This echoes the Greek etymological meaning of the term theatron, which denotes a place to see. However, ghosts are inherently invisible and are thus equipped with an effective agency that haunts people’s minds. What are the defects and deceits of ocularcentrism in a world inundated with invisible catastrophes, phantom narratives and noisy corpses? How can we deal with the digital ghosts that saturate, seize and astigmatize our site?
Rather than focusing on Derridean hauntology and the historical discourses of vanishing, we invite contributors to revisit ghosts and ghosting from the expanded scope of more-than-human performance and amidst the troubled age of the Anthropocene to consider who or what is haunting, and who is being haunted, especially by going beyond the ghosts of ‘grievable’ humans (Butler 2004: 38). Ghostly invisibility comes into play when considering catastrophes beyond the human-scale perspective. The radioactive fallouts, greenhouse gas emissions, retreating glaciers, Gulf Stream deceleration, multi-species extinctions, atmospheric aerosol pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion and release of novel chemicals are all ‘invisible’ catastrophes until the moment they culminate to do unmissable harm to a particular group of humans (Bould 2021: 4).
Through a colonial habit of mind, which subjugated, silenced and ignored the suffering of those less-than-humans, we are now ghosting also the ‘vibrant matters’ that are full of life and agency on this planet (Bennett 2018: xvi). The act of ghosting others, which follows the line of white patriarchal colonial episteme, needs to be reconsidered, redressed and rectified. If we continue to rely merely on the given logic of human-centric presence, legibility and visibility, the many precarious humans living on this planet who are increasingly penetrated by invisible, incalculable and inconceivable ghostly matters, including those digital phantoms that haunt the Internet space, may become victims of ‘affective politics of fear’ that stealthily shape and distort our collective psyche (Ahmed 2014: 64). In this sense, it is necessary to reassess and reanalyze where the theatre exists when considering the ghostly performances of more-than-human age. If the ghostly performers are invisible yet annoyingly pervasive, then, where does the theatron, the place to see, exist?
‘On Ghosts’ seeks to expand the scope of existing academic enquiry on ghosts, spectres and mourning. By referring to previous scholarships on ghostly agency, ghostly identities, digital ghosts, mourning practices, dialogue with the dead and haunted performances, the issue aims to deliver renewed arguments on ghosts and necropolitics that go beyond the realm of humans and their anthropomorphic divinities, fears and sadnesses.
We welcome single-authored essays, co-authored contributions, artistic interventions, short provocations, critical reports and other materials interrogating the topic of ghosts. Topics may include but are not limited to:
• Ghostly performances and haunted narratives
• Posthumous dramaturgies
• Mourning practices and performances
• Digital ghosts and their affect
• Ghosts, monsters and spirits as protagonists
• Ghosts and paranormal events
• More-than-human ghosts in/of the Anthropocene
• Mortal beings and Buddhist impermanence
• Rights of the dead and the unborn
• Theatrical practices of haunting and remembrance
• Making visible the invisible
• Women, minorities, disenfranchised, queers as invisible agents
• Erased histories and haunted sites
• The uncanny, the dread, the uncertain beings
• Practices of conjuration, incantation and exorcise
• Afterlife, bardo and imaginations
• Archaeological sites and haunted spaces
• Necropolitics and performance
• Micropolitics of ghosting behaviours
• Ancestral politics and burials
• Ghosts as a political device
• Ghosts and optical effects in theatres
• Dialogues with the dead after catastrophes
• Rituals and rites with and for the dead
• Survivors, victims and the walking dead
• Ghosts of the future
• Postcolonial voices and ghosts
• Ecology and ghosts
• Ghosts of capitalism
• Spiritual practices and reincarnations
• Phantom limbs and body parts
• Technologies and spectral entities
• Postvisual performances and spectral beings
Selected References:
Allison, Anne (2023) Being Dead Otherwise, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Bleeker, Maaike (2008) Visuality in Theatre: The locus of looking, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The powers of mourning and violence, London and New York, NY: Verso.
Carlson, Marvin (2001) The Haunted Stage: Theatre as memory machine, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Cools, Guy (2021) Performing Mourning, Amsterdam: Valiz.
Del Pilar Blanco, Maria and Peeren, Esther (2013) The Spectralities Reader: Ghost and haunting in contemporary culture theory, London and New York, NY: Bloomsbury.
Despret, Vinciane (2021) Our Grateful Dead, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Durham, Scott (1998) Phantom Communities: The simulacrum and the limits of postmodernism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gordon, Avery (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the sociological imaginations, Minneapolis, MN and London: Minnesota University Press.
Han, Byung-Chul (2017) In the Swarm: Digital prospects, trans. Erk Butler, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kimbles, Samuel (2014) Phantom Narratives: The unseen contributions of culture to psyche, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Linguis, Alphonso (1994) The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Luckhurst, Mary and Morin, Emilie, eds (2014) Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, performance and modernity, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Peeren, Esther (2014) The Spectral Metaphor: Living ghosts and the agency of invisibility, London and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rayner, Alice (2006) Ghosts: Death’s double and the phenomena of theatre, Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Sconce, Jeffrey (2000) Haunted Media: Electronic presence from telegraphy to television, Durham, NC. Duke University Press.
Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Bubandt, N., eds (2017) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Weinstein, J. and Colebrook, C., eds (2017) Posthumous Life. Theorizing beyond the posthuman, New York, NY: Columbia University 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: [log in to unmask]
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editor:
Email: Kyoko Iwaki ([log in to unmask]), Eero Laine ([log in to unmask]),
Felipe Cervera ([log in to unmask]) or Kristof van Baarle ([log in to unmask])
Schedule:
Proposals: Outcomes February 2024
First drafts: June 2024
Final drafts: September 2024
Publication: December 2024
General Guidelines for Submissions:
• Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – 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 [log in to unmask]
• 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 to be published in Performance Research.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
For all subscription configurations (suspensions / leaving the list / digest
functions etc), use the following link:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=psi-extra&A=1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
