CFP:  Precarity in Performance in the Early Global South

If New Orleans and the greater Atlantic world have been characterized by recurrent states of emergency and endemic oppression and hardship, it has also produced profound cultural invention and innovation, particularly in its wide array of performance cultures.  “Precarity,” as this panel imagines it, invokes the vulnerability of living at sea level in an age of rising sea levels, but we also use the term to invoke the resourceful responses that shore up the region’s carefully constructed and balanced lives.

This panel is invites new scholarship on the theatre and drama, popular performance, music, dance, and of course public festivities and rituals that define New Orleans, the US Gulf Coast, and the greater Caribbean.  As part of the ASA’s Early Americas Caucus lineup, we aim to support work that explores the historically long, geographically broad, and culturally diverse early Americas.  Following the official theme of the 2022 ASA meeting, “The Roof is on Fire,” we encourage scholars to consider different forms of precarity, both as lived and as represented, and how they provoke, create, shape, and sometimes foreclose diverse acts.

Please submit your 250-word abstract as well as a brief professional biography (3-4 sentences) to Peter Reed, University of Mississippi, Department of English, at preed@olemiss.edu by January 20, 2022.