CFP Performing Wilderness Volume

 <DEADLINE EXTENDED>

The wilderness appears to be a place devoid of theatre. As perhaps the most social of artistic forms, theatre and performance seem to sit in opposition to the solitude of wilderness, natural areas supposedly untouched by human activity. That is, wilderness and the performing arts are often thought as part of separate spheres, opposites even, situated firmly on either side of the imaginary divides between “nature” and “culture.” 

However, designated wilderness areas necessarily perform a form of nature that is actively protected and managed. There is a certain dramaturgy to wilderness in the ways it is preserved and through our interactions with it. The concept of wilderness is further entangled with settler colonial notions of “civilization.” That is, wilderness sometimes means “empty” and untouched, even as it has been applied to spaces with people whose own designations for land follow different paths. Just as these representations of the status of land and water are clearly created and curated, there are also many representations of wilderness on theatrical stages and in the wilderness itself. We are interested in proposals for chapters for an edited volume that offer examples of wilderness performance and theatricality and trouble neat divisions between the social and the wild.

We are interested in developing an interdisciplinary account of the ways that we engage with chronologies, temporalities, and epochs of borders, water usage, preservation, resource extraction, and competing modes of land designation through various performative forms including legislative acts, treaties, and traditional ways of stewarding place. While thoughtfully entering into these new territories, we hope to therefore also interrogate scholarship’s own Romantic tendency toward the conquest of new “untouched” spaces and ideas. The volume thus aims to forge new maps and methodologies for conscientious movement and inhabitation, keeping the factors of human and environmental imbrication in mind and page as we proceed. 

This book considers how wilderness is called to perform and how we perform in, for, and even as the wilderness. We are interested in proposals that might build out any of the following sections:

• Wilderness Methodologies—New or innovative methodologies and ways of studying performance in and through wilderness.

• Wilderness Theories—Theoretical and even speculative work at the intersection of wilderness and performance.

• Wilderness Histories—Historiographical interventions into wilderness performance. 

• Wilderness on Stage—Representations of the wilderness onstage and issues related to staging wilderness in and through theatre.

• Wilderness as Stage—Theatrical and other performance forms created in and closely adjacent to wilderness areas.

• Wilderness with Art—Considerations of the ways that art and wilderness are and have been mutually constitutive through examples in representative and performance art.

We especially welcome contributions which engage substantively with indigenous theories and experiences; colonial, decolonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial theorizations and histories of “wilderness”; ecological and environmental considerations and approaches; borders, boundaries, and their performance; governmental, legislative, and activist modes of designating and maintaining wilderness; preservation and reperformance. We also welcome proposals for alternative formats beyond the scholarly essay: short provocations, annotated archival materials, interviews, and so on. We anticipate a collaborative development process for the volume including manuscript workshops in order to strengthen contribution breadth and depth as well as improve cohesion of the collection. 

To be considered for inclusion in the volume, please submit a title, abstract (~250 words), and a short bio (~200 words), along with contact information using the following form by 31 July 2025: https://forms.gle/QYv5S47Cb8dv2c1DA

We are happy to field inquiries related to the volume—please email both editors in any correspondence: Michelle Liu Carriger (carriger@ucla.edu) and Eero Laine (eero.email@gmail.com).