CFP: [Ethnic] Atlantic Performances: Race and Forgetting ACLA 2009 seminar

full name / name of organization: 
Andrea Opitz
contact email: 

American Comparative Literature Association
March 26-29, 2009
Harvard University

Seminar: "Atlantic Performances: Race and Forgetting"
Co-chairs: Ryan Burt and Andrea Opitz

**Submission deadline: November 1, 2008**

This seminar considers the relationship between cultural performance and processes of historical
production in the modern and contemporary Transatlantic. What role have street performance
and theater played in anti-colonial/imperial struggles? How do local performances recast our
understanding of both racial formation and minority cultural practices?

We invite submissions that engage a wide range of topics such as (but not limited to):
• street theatre
• traveling shows
• the circus (as imperial spectacle?)
• the reception of performances and how the dominant imperial ideologies (in light of a failing
European imperial enterprise?) shape such reception
• performance and passing
• nation and performance
• indigeneity and sovereignty

Ideally the seminar will push us to consider how we frame these discussions and how terms like
“the global,” “diaspora,” “transatlantic,“ “memory,” “circumatlantic,” “history” shape, enable, or
hinder our conversations. In this sense we are interested in papers on specific performance
histories, literary and cultural productions, as well as on larger critical conversations around how
we currently approach questions of racial formation in and across the Atlantic.

Submissions: All paper proposals must be submitted via the ACLA website by Nov 1, 2008:
http://www.acla.org/submit/.

Depending on the size of this seminar we may meet on all three days of the conference or only
on the first two. Check out the ACLA website for more information on the unique format of ACLA
seminars.

Questions about the seminar: contact Andrea Opitz (aopitz_at_stonehill.edu) or Ryan Burt
(rburt_at_u.washington.edu).

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Received on Sat Oct 04 2008 - 11:04:16 EDT