ASTR Research Group on National Identity / National Culture

Research Group Call for Papers

ASTR National Identity / National Culture Research Group, 2005

“Theatre and National/Cultural Identity: Negotiating Globalization and the Transnational”

The National Identity / National Culture research group focuses on the interplay between culture and national identity as a way of investigating the political and social effects of theatre as both a legitimizing and a challenging art form. Building on successful meetings at the 2003 and 2004 ASTR Annual Conferences, the research group seeks to fulfill its mandate in providing research support to its membership, alternative methodologies for the study of national culture, and ongoing exploration of issues related to national identity.

In response to feedback and requests following last year’s meeting, this year’s gathering will have a more finely focused topic, allowing scholars of theatre and performance to bring diverse approaches and perspectives to bear on the complex issue of national/cultural identity within transnational systems (such as global commerce, religion, internet communities, etc.).

For the 2005 conference, the National Identity / National Culture Research Group invites scholars to submit proposals for a two-hour session of large and small group discussions, 7:30-9:30 PM, Saturday, November 12.

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“Theatre and National/Cultural Identity: Negotiating Globalization and the Transnational”

We understand the fatal diagnoses of Western cultural exhaustion and postmodern fragmentation. We understand the fatal diagnoses by postcolonial critics of appropriation and imbalances in power relations. We believe, however, that the cross-cultural or intercultural transactions of many theatre artists are, and have been, more complex and fluctuating than these discourses allow, suggesting a fluidity in cultural formation processes that ought to critique customary paradigms of static or fixed national/cultural identities. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai speaks of the “diasporic public spheres” of a postnational political order, whose engines are the mass media and the migrations of peoples (Modernity At Large).

The contemporary phenomenon of globalization, from networked capitalist economies to international theatre festivals, has transformed and continues to transform the traditional means by which national/cultural identities have been constituted and performed. During the past several decades, communication technologies have played major roles in accelerating this process. If globalization has meant a welcome wealth of intercultural contact, it has also sometimes tested the limits of the ways we conceive of community and perhaps human subjectivity itself. Whether lauded or vilified, globalization is a fact of contemporary life. As cultural anthropologist Néstor Garcia Canclini has observed, “Today all cultures are border cultures” (Consumers and Citizens, Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts).

Although the scale and rapidity of globalization is new, there are numerous examples of cross-cultural drama and performance from earlier historical moments that have required a negotiation with other transnational forces, systems, and discourses. Joe Roach has shown, for example, that early American drama and performance were already cross-cultural, while Marvin Carlson notes that the theatre has a nearly universal tradition of being macaronic, calling to mind theatre’s fundamental discursive hybridity (East of West, ed. Claire Sponsler and Xiamei Chen).

Participants should bring to the table instances of theatre practices on the borders, so to speak, addressing:

-- ideas and examples of performance and drama that complicate the discourse in our field about how theatre artists of different nations and cultures are negotiating this era of globalization; or,

-- means by which performance and drama have participated historically in the negotiation of cultural identity within transnational structures, discourses, and boundaries

Whether it be historical or contemporary, we are looking for work that critiques terms (such as periodization) in which historians have framed national/cultural drama and performance.

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Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to the co-conveners by 1 June, 2005. Participants will be expected to submit full papers of no more than 12 pages in the early fall, to initiate pre-conference e-mail discussion.

2005 co-conveners:

-- Natalya Baldyga (nbaldyga@yahoo.com)
-- Gary J. Williams (gajowills@aol.com)
-- Evan Darwin Winet (winet@macalester.edu)