17 th Debrupa Bal Memorial International Students’ Seminar

2-3 December 2025

Organized by the students of
Department of Comparative Literature
Jadavpur University

CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECTATORIAL-ITY: RECEPTION/ REGENERATION/ REPRODUCTION

The formation of culture in the South Asian context is predicated on the ‘ways of looking’ into the
practices of orality and performative traditions which form subjectivities vitalised by the experience
of cultural/artistic production. Creation within such networks of performance and transmission
relies on regenerative flows that mould, align, and modify the continual emergence of culture in
perpetuity. This seminar would like to engage with questions of spectatoriality, embodiment,
aesthetic transmission, and cultural regeneration in South Asian performance traditions and
their contemporary resonance from interdisciplinary perspectives. The seminar will foreground
processes that hinge upon aesthetic moorings that define the politics of articulation, representation,
and embodiment.

Exegesis of textual and performance cultures asserts a certain nature of concretisation of the artistic
output from various epochs. Ancient and classical Sanskrit aesthetic codes, definitive to the critical
understanding of performance history, bear a categorical impulse that envisions the body as a site
for both the making and unmaking of art’s experiential purpose. Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra presents the
act of viewing as an actualisation of emotion on a spectatorial plane, foregrounding an affective
subjectivity for the audience. This subjectivity, albeit textually codified, asserts an intimacy of
emotional association by situating the performer’s ability to evoke the Bhavas (affective states) that
generate corresponding Rasas for the audience/spectator/listener. Bharata’s text codifies the
emotional framework of human experience into the nine rasas - the performative ideal grounded in
the body’s capacity for transmission and reception. The theoretical apparatus of Rasas presents the
experiential with a regenerative virtue that flows from the body of the performer, the artist to that of
the listener or, the audience grounded upon a phenomenological unity of the performance space.
The utility of art thus operates through hegemonic cultural transmission and alternative receptions
that define the boundaries and horizons of imagination within the performative realm. The ideal
audience—the sahṛdaya darśaka—emerges as one capable of an idealised generative response derived
from the actualised emotional unification of performance and perception. Aesthetics as a
methodological intervention thus becomes essentially interrelational, existing through affective
regeneration where the body remembers through a sensorial paraphernalia that animates the
repertoire of a living tradition. In this sense, the pedagogic imperatives of performance and ritual expression engender differing conditionings of emotional responses —bodily, ideological, and moral—shaping the diverse modalities of reception.

The seminar will further focus on the contemporary theoretical turn to affect in discussions of
performance, performativity, and spectatorial subjectivity. This turn has revitalised aesthetic
discourse, particularly around questions of presence and liveness in performance events. The value
of affect theories to contemporary performance lies in its capacity to comprehend the dispositif —
the network of relations, technologies, and discursive mechanisms that structure performative
experience— of performativity in digital cultures and the visceral economies of simulated or
mediatized experience in the human–technology assemblage. Moving beyond the self as constituted
through representation, affect articulates a more immediate, corporeal engagement—matter within
us responding and resonating with the matter around us. In this sense, affect may be understood as a
form of transhuman aesthetics.

Building on the emerging mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, the seminar seeks to
engage the interplay among embodiment, image, and the dynamics of mimetic affect in generating
perspectival discourses on new digital pathologies in general, and virtual simulations in particular. In
the realm of the virtual, art work is not only an object, but a space, a zone, or what Alain Badiou
calls an "event site" where one might encounter affect in ways that render other plans of reality
perceptible and accessible. As beings situated in the world, we are caught in spatio-temporal sensory
registers. The switching of these registers through the intervention of prosthetic technologies marks
the juncture at which new media converges with art, and where the aesthetic function of media takes
a deterritorializing turn. What does it mean to be a viewer-subject at the interface of interactivity and
immersion? Spectatorial practices and processes of meaning-making - triggered by hyperreal
simulations to mimetic reenactment - demand historicization within a more critical and wider
conception of interpretative action, of the embodied status of on-screen bodies, and of the dialectics
of seeing and being seen. This shift opens the possibilities of counter-hegemonic practices to emerge
in discourse at the interface of the material and the digital. The performance of protest not only
questions and subverts established ideas of where and how politics is enacted, but also constitutes a
rupture of within the existing political order through the enactment of its aesthetics -both
performative and communicative. The key question, then, concerns what the interaction between
online and offline spaces means for democratic expression, political voice, visibility, and new forms
of solidarity, serving as visual mediations for dialogue and dissent. At this juncture, it becomes
imperative to deconstruct the category of modernity by confronting the prevailing abstracted view
of screen cultures with the contingencies of their archival histories. In this view, cinema is
inextricably linked to urban life and new technologies that promote a visual culture continually
recasting the nature of memory, experience, and desire. Visual cultures have also profoundly
affected the human sensorium, reconfiguring subjectivity and contributing to the formation of
cinematic and televisual spectatorship. The impact of cinematic encounter operates through the
‘beyond’ of subjectivity , exploring how the body becomes imbricated in the process of performing.
The advent of contemporary digital and interactive media replaces contemplation with participation,
representation with simulation, fundamentally reconfiguring the aesthetics of perception itself.
Walter Benjamin observed how art’s classical “aura” — its unique presence, ritual authority, and
historical authenticity - is eroded by mechanical reproduction, detaching the work from its context
and enabling mass distribution. In this context, criticism can no longer simply demand “truer”
representation. Instead, the question shifts from “How well do new media and digital cultures
represent reality?” to “What coherent realities, behavioral codes, and representational logics do
simulations and algorithms produce and organize?” How does the shift from image and narrative to
procedurality transform beauty, affect, and ethics—when meaning is produced through the ways
operations loop, restrict, or surprise the user?

Simulation thus marks a decisive break from the older aesthetic orders of mimesis and narrative,
establishing an epistemology of interaction, where meaning arises through the iterative processes of
construction, feedback, and modification. Video games, for example, simulate the act of acquisition
rather than depicting it—the player’s management of systems becomes the aesthetic form itself.
Aristotle argued that since imitation (mimesis) is a fundamental human tendency, art must stem from
it due to its capacity to articulate lived experience. Mimetic orientations continue to manifest in
simulations, photographic, and cinematic imaging, albeit in shifting forms within the cultural
functioning of digitality. However, contemporary games and social media often abandon these fixed
dramatic arcs: in open or multiplayer worlds, performance becomes improvisational, shaped by
participant’s interactions rather than an author’s design. The digital stage exceeds it— raising a
central question: when performance itself becomes the artwork, what remains of narrative, plot, or
catharsis?

The seminar would welcome critical explorations that address the intersections of embodiment,
digitality, performance, and affect, as well as innovative approaches to spectatorial subjectivity in
both traditional and new media contexts. The seminar invites abstracts that engage with, but are not
limited to, the following sub-themes:

● Sanskrit Aesthetics, Embodiment and Spectatorial Subjectivity
● Natyashastra and 21st century performance
● Natyashastra and Modern Visual Cultures
● Language of Emotions in the Natyashastra
● Aesthetics of Sensation
● Politics of Performance beyond the Fourth Wall
● Embodiment in the Performance of Protest
● Counter-hegemonic Aesthetic Imaginaries
● Encountering the Screen as a site of Affect
● Cultural Politics of Regenerative Spectatorship
● The User, the Player and the Spectator
● Literary Analysis and Media Ecologies
● Recontextualising Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory
● Authorship, Ethics and New Media
● Digital Rituals and Performative Spaces
● Immersive Technologies and the Politics of Presence
● Orality and Performance in Hybrid Media Environments
● Spectatorial Agency and Interactive Narratives
● Memory, Archive, and the Mediatization of Tradition
● Visual Culture and Urban Performances in South Asia
● Soundscapes, Voice, and Embodiment in Performance
● Ethnographic Approaches to Performance and Spectatorship
● The Role of Gesture and Movement in Digital Performance
● The Body as Medium in Virtual and Augmented Realities

The title, and a brief abstract of not more than 300-350 words with a short bio note (50 words)must
be sent in .doc/.pdf format to dbmssju@gmail.com by 16 November, 2025. While sending
abstracts, the file name and subject line of the email should be in the given format:
‘Abstract_DBMISS2025_Name of the presenter/(s)’. Abstracts must be either in English or
Bangla. Please use Unicode for writing in Bangla. Acceptance will be intimated by 20 November,
2025. Online panels will only be available for overseas presenters. Both individual and collaborative
papers are welcome. Outstation participants would have to arrange their own travel and
accommodation arrangements.

For any further queries, please write to Team DBMISS at dbmssju@gmail.com