Guest Editor Timmia Hearn DeRoy, Editor Aaron C. Thomas

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet —whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” — Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1985)

Popular scholar and playwright John Feffer, building off the earlier work of Eric Hobsbawm, called the post-1992 period the “Age of Activism.” Activism here refers largely to the increased capacity of “common people” to influence global discourse through the rise of popular media and easier access to information. In these last three decades we have seen a proliferation of justice-centered movements, articulated, theorized on, and developed through frameworks such as Reproductive Justice, Environmental Justice, Racial Justice, and Disability Justice. These movements utilize powerful narratives that reverberate on every level of society and are key elements of Feffer’s “Age.” This journal special section calls for performance scholarship that examines the role of narrative in moving the proverbial needle toward Justice, specifically examining how theatre artists can and do generate Narrative Justice through our practices. Narrative Justice is a framework first developed by legal scholar Rafe McGregor and theorized by special section editor Timmia Hearn DeRoy into Narrative Justice Storytelling as a practical and theoretical methodology that can be used to explore how theatre, dance, and other performance creators facilitate social transformation in actualized ways. This special issue calls for in-depth analysis of directing, devising, choreographing, and other types of performance generation techniques, practices, and methodologies used with the purpose of creating Social Justice through performance. 

The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism seeks contributions to this special section that unpack, explore, and theorize on contemporary theatre and performance’s role in upholding, challenging, or reimagining structures of power. This issue seeks discussions that go beyond the model of “telling untold stories” and instead explore embodied archives, as theorized by Diana Taylor, for people and places, actively changing people’s lives and their self-perceptions, community-based self-empowerment through storytelling, reclaiming of self-histories and identities, visioning new and transformational currents and futures, and moving storytelling methods of the margins to the center of practice, praxis, and scholarship.

 Contributions might:

• Interrogate methods such as intimacy choreography, trauma informed methodologies, consent-based acting training, alternative theatre company structures like power sharing, collective ownership, and grass-roots development, looking at how these ways of making theatre do and do not generate justice;
• Examine ways in which mainstream theatre practices—from acting training to directorial methods to design standards—do and do not provide space for justice to occur;
• Explore audience involvement in theatre and performance events and the power and justice implications of these practices;
• Engage critically with practices that claim to center Social Justice, looking at how this work impacts the communities most affected;
• Examine practices by individuals and communities that are designed to heal self and community;
• Reflect on and rigorously interrogate the idea of for whom specific productions are done;
• Examine mainstream theatres’ desires to position themselves as doing Social Justice and who is benefitting from this movement;
• Reflect on historical theatre methodological developments as they pertain to contemporary theatre practice, from Theatre of Cruelty, to Theatre of the Oppressed, to the rise of Performance Studies itself in the context of ideas of appropriation, power, and justice;
• Theorize on theatrical power to contribute meaningfully to ongoing movements to decolonize.

Submissions should center storytelling methods utilized both now and historically by those whose dreams, lives, and ways of being have been and continue to be marginalized. This special section seeks articles that take part in chartering the freedom Audre Lorde spoke of in her 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not A Luxury.” Following the epigraph leading this call Lorde says: “Poetry coins the language to express and charter” what she calls the “revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.” This special section seeks to shine a light on all forms of storytelling practice, from case studies to underlying theories to historic movements, that have and continue to actively create more just narratives and contribute to self and community healing and empowerment. To freedom. 

 We invite critical essays of approximately 5,000 words as well as shorter pieces: manifestos, case studies, interviews, and reflections of between 750 and 1,500 words. For consideration, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words by December 15th, 2024. Completed articles will be due in late May 2025. The special section is slated for publication in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism in Fall 2025. Inquiries are welcome. All correspondence and proposals should be directed to Timmia Hearn DeRoy and Aaron C. Thomas at timmia@berkeley.edu and acthomas@fsu.edu.