Migrations in American Drama and Theater”

Université de Lorraine (Nancy, France)

4 – 6 June 2018

Abstracts due 15 September 2017 

Working in partnership with the American Theater and Drama Society (ATDS) and the Spanish universities of Cádiz, Sevilla, and Madrid Autónoma, the research group I.D.E.A. (“Théories et pratiques de l’interdisciplinarité dans les études anglophones”) and the Université de Lorraine are announcing a call for papers for the conference “Migrations in American Drama and Theater” to be held in Nancy, France, from 4 to 6 June 2018.

This 5^th International Conference on American Drama and Theater will be dedicated to the study of migrations, understood in a broad sense. The four previous conferences were held in Málaga, 2000; Málaga, 2004; Cádiz, 2009; and Sevilla, 2012; topics included violence, plays and players, politics, and the romance of the theater.

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• John Patrick Shanley, American playwright, screenwriter, and theater and film director. His play Doubt: A Parable won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play. He won the 1988 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his film Moonstruck.
• John Guare, American playwright, best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, Landscape of the Body, and A Free Man of Color, which was nominated for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of a Tony Award, as well as several Drama Desk, Obie, and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards.
• Lee Breuer, American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, film maker, poet and lyricist. Founding co-artistic director of Mabou Mines Theater Company, Breuer directed the celebrated 2011 production of Un tramway nommé Désir (A Streetcar Named Desire), the first foreign play produced at the illustrious Comédie Française in Paris.
• Maude Mitchell, American actress and producer, who specializes in fresh interpretations of classics and development of new plays, and worked alongside Breuer in Un tramway nommé Désir as dramaturg. Best known for her performance as Nora in Mabou Mines’ critically acclaimed production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which toured internationally for 8 years and earned her an Obie Award as Best Actress.
• Dr. Annette Saddik, professor and scholar of American drama and theater, City University of New York. She has published numerous articles and four books on American drama: Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer (2015); The Traveling Companion and Other Plays (2008); Contemporary American Drama (2007); and The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams’ Later Plays (1999). Dr. Saddik lectures regularly at Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, and serves as a judge for the Lucille Lortel Theater Awards in New York.
• Dr. Sue Abbotson, British born professor and scholar of American drama and theater. Former President of the Arthur Miller Society, Abbotson currently serves on their board and is Performance Editor for the Arthur Miller Journal. She has authored countless articles and chapters on a wide range of other American playwrights, and is also a creative writer herself. Among her many books are Critical Companion to Arthur Miller (2007) and Thematic Guide to Modern Drama (2003). Forthcoming is the long-awaited Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1950s (Methuen, 2016).

The impulse to cross geographical barriers and transgress boundaries, of whatever kind, traverses the history of mankind. Such processes often turn out traumatic and painful, however ultimately beneficial or rewarding. Motivations may be economic, political, or just sentimental. But fleeing the (literal or figurative) homeland (or, in today’s parlance, one’s comfort zone) in search of safety, a livelihood, happiness, novelty, change, self-realization or prosperity is bound, in most cases, to exert psychological pressure and involve a price. For the scholar, such processes whereby human communities or individuals are confronted by the new and the alien, often by the other in oneself, are fascinating to study and probe. Cross-hybridization between cultures and values has often resulted in new ways of looking at and making sense of reality. The friction and strife such processes bring with them are similarly pertinent areas of scholarly interest and inquiry.

Few countries have been more dependent upon migrations, understood in a broad sense, than the US. Not only is a great part of its population descended from migrants (all of it if we understand migrations in a wider sense, as native peoples have had to migrate not only geographically but culturally from ancient practices to largely alien notions of progress and modernity), but the country has been predicated upon geographical and social mobility, in itself a kind of migration. Debates on the advantages, if any, of migrations, as well as the alleged danger of disenfranchisement for the receiving population, the advisability of “contamination” by foreign values, or competition from abroad, are common. Obviously, there has never been a time in the history of the country where some kind of wall has not been deemed advisable, and not only the kind endorsed by the protagonists of The Fantasticks, a musical which became an icon of American theatrical culture precisely on account of its adamant refusal to the oft-suggested migration to Broadway.

Migration here is understood as a trope that implies change, translation, re-situation or re-location, adaptation, transferral, as well as the embracement of the new. When playwrights explore new themes, new theatrical styles or new dramatic voices, they become migrants, often encountering resistance and feeling unwelcome, which they brave in search of artistic fulfilment, new audiences, or merely profit. Without stylistic migrations, there would have been no evolution in the dramatic art: no Eugene O’Neill, no Susan Glaspell, no Thornton Wilder, no Living Theater, no Sam Shepard, no Broadway musicals. Even migrations across media (from film to stage or stage to film, from novel to play or play to musical) or from one country to another (European influences on American playwrights, the impact of US drama and theater abroad) are areas of research especially encouraged.

Other possible areas for research and reflection include (but are not limited to):

• Theatrical migrations understood both literally and figuratively. Real migrations and migrations as a trope.
• Stylistic migrations and cross-hybridization between formats.
• Transnational studies of American drama.
• Foreign playwrights in America and hyphenated American playwrights. Multiculturalism as migration.
• US drama abroad and foreign drama in the US. The migration of cultures on stage.
• World realities on the US stage. America on the world’s stage.
• Mainstream playwrights migrating to the fringe. Fringe playwrights reaching the mainstream. Crossings between theatrical milieus.
• Broadway migrating from Broadway. The emergence of Off and Off-Off Broadway and the regional theater movement.
• Bodies, trauma, gender, and identity. Migrations from one’s sense of self and the corporeality of migrations.
• Intertextuality, transmedia, and intercultural exchanges.
• Migrating texts.

To submit either a paper, a roundtable discussion, or an already organized panel, please send abstracts of 300 words and a brief CV to Dr. Josefa Fernandez Martin (jfmartin@us.es) by 15 September 2017.

19-20 October 2017

International Conference organized by IMAGER (EA3958)

At Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC)

Contemporary societies are the theatre of linguistic and cultural blending. While this is not a new phenomenon, it is accelerating, amplifying and complexifying in novel ways due to geographical and online mobility. Boundaries between the real and the virtual are becoming ever more permeable as technology and innovation reach new heights in speed and sophistication. In this context the circulation of people, the diffusion of political, scientific and cultural information, as well as the blending now characteristic of an increasingly globalized world, all work in a way that radically impacts how we perceive others and how we apprehend ideas, share our thoughts or make decisions. Progress in the human sciences, notably biology and cognitive neuroscience, redefine our relations with others and with our environment. The paradox of such a profusion of multilinguistic and multicultural exchange lies in the constraints it entails in terms of increased difficulty in interpersonal communication and growing socio-political confusion, which both tend to elude traditional actors and indicators.

The question is how this reconfiguration of contemporary societies can be conceived and analysed through the prism of the languages, which both unite and separate us. Through adaptive logic, contemporary societies are torn between two antagonistic quests: i) one either one pursues simplistic, often binary responses, which are often expressed through identity closure in areas such as the choice of dominant languages in school to facilitate integration of individuals to the dominant culture, the dwindling of languages used in social media, the predominant diffusion of research publications in English, the multiplication of Newspeak jargons, which fundamentally dis-acknowledge the processes we seek to clarify, ii) or one accepts to address the challenge of complexity. But how? Incited to move continuously in and out of diverse cultural spaces, has it become necessary to adopt several perspectives at once and to know several languages at varying levels of proficiency, which requires great mental plasticity and can undermine the need for a stable identity in a world where individuals are called upon to navigate among multiple identities (Lahire) or liquid identities (Bauman)?

For want of inter-individual solutions, mediation necessarily comes into play. Forged from the Latin verb mediare, traditionally designating the intervention of a third party to reconcile two other parties, the notion of mediation is henceforth called upon to link up fuzzy, multidimensional realms. Is mediation suited to conciliate current schools of thought that seem to oppose, on the one hand, a universalistic approach that implies the existence of an abstract space of translinguistic communication and, on the other hand, “differentialist” approaches that insist upon the super-diversity of linguistic  expressions?

We propose to question the notion of mediation in both plural and transdisciplinary configurations from the perspective of languages that are, implicitly and explicitly, at the heart of the blending phenomena they endeavour to clarify. Woven within cultures and contexts, language and languages are themselves complex systems that reflect various ways of perceiving and embodying our relations to the real. While a scientific consensus exists around the intrinsic wealth of each and every language, neither the postcolonial hierarchy of the statuses of various languages nor challenges to this paradigm are self-evident. The means for inter-comprehension in a globalizing and transcultural world must take into account blending phenomena as they emerge, for such phenomena are objects of critical inquiry for both researchers and actors.

This conference intends to spur analyses of multilingual and/or multicultural situations through their mediations, as they are expressed in concrete forms (in classrooms, in journalistic discourse, in political, economic or educative spheres, etc.), or represented in virtual situations (in literature, publicity, visual arts, etc.).

• How do translators, pedagogues, researchers, decision-makers, make choices when confronted with real-life challenges, when relating with others to interact or transmit, among individuals and groups and across borders, ideas, values, representations and regulations?

• What are the emerging paradigms which transcend the limits of triangular mediation?

• What are the transdisciplinary solutions required by the need to think and act along the instable local-global continuum?

We envisage this problematical theme along the following axes, non-exclusively, welcoming in particular inter- and trans-disciplinary contributions:

1. How does translation evolve faced with these new challenges? How does it position itself between the dream of a uniform and transparent global space of communication and the growth of linguistic singularities and idiosyncrasies? What is the place of translation between the project of universal meta-language and the “superdiversity” of contemporary linguistic practices?

2. Concerning literature, theatre and poetry, we invite research, for instance, in the hybridation of internal forms of text, possibly the encounter of several languages within a singular work. We also question authors, mediators of their own works who, by translating themselves, spawn palimpsest universes.

3. Literary mediation is another field of transcultural blending in language, one of inventing new spaces: blogs, interactive writing in several languages, new forms of literary festivals which encourage more direct exchange among authors and readers the world over, exchanges among authors developing collective translinguistic projects. How should emerging semiotic forms occupy this space? How do they facilitate the development of hybrid cultures? In the age of Amazon, of on-line publication, of integrated translators, are these new forms of literary mediation gate-keepers of knowledge enrichment or do they engender massified systems of shattered or impoverished knowledge?

4. In the field of linguistics, phenomena of blending question the very concept of transmission and intersubjective regulation. For Antoine Culioli, for example, every utterance implies a “minimum of regulation without which exchange cannot exist, i.e. the access of one subject to another” (A. Culioli [1998] 1999: 137). The implication is that one cannot accept the idea according to which speakers have at their disposal “ready-made” or “ready-to-use” referents, in other words “what is referred to”.

Our focus is thus upon the referential values that suppose modes of utterances including constant adjustments. How are these adjustments applied in multilinguistic situations, for example,  interpretation or translation? What kinds of adjustments intervene within reformulations that occur at every moment during discourse? In relation to these questions, we welcome research based on empirical data dealing with precise linguistic markers (lexical, syntactic, prosodic), present in various languages.

5. In civilization and the social sciences, interactions and comparison among institutions, actors, territories and temporalities have never been so complex as in the era of globalization. While resulting in a certain standardization, globalization is especially the theater of growing differentiations, tensions and blending that result in growing local cultural and multi-scale specificities in evolution. For the social sciences “translation” of terms and concepts, even “functional equivalents” are often neither operational, nor an end in themselves. This is the case, for instance, of conceptual forms of mediation, which allow for the establishment of international statistics with the aim of comparing national situations or answering comparative interrogations, formulating recommendations for public practices or policies. How do actors answer these challenges to reach reliable results?

6. Concerning language didactics and education, the diversity of languages in class raises questions about mass education in some dominant languages. From pre-school to university, research attempts to formulate new models that include mediations among languages and cultures of the learners. How can language teaching heighten joint understanding and acting in communion through mutual respect and in a plurilinguistic and pluricultural perspective? To meet this unprecedented challenge, some researchers explore corporal and emotional mediation through artistic practices (theater, dance) and an aesthetic and “performative” approach to languages (Aden, Lapaire, Schewe, Soulaine). Others mobilize the notion of language mediation from an interactionist (Delamotte-Legrand) or  sociolinguistic perspective through notions such as translanguaging (Garcia), translangager (Aden), code-meshing (Canagarajah) or taking into account linguistic landscapes and superdiversity (Blommaert) in an ethnographic approach to linguistic diversity.

Calendar

Deadline for submitting contribution proposals: 15 March 2017

Response from Scientific Committee: 15 April 2017

Proposals may be written in English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. They must include a title and a 700 word maximum résumé, including bibliography. They must be accompanied by the surname/s, name/s, and scientific affiliation/s of the author/s.

Submissions must be send, in word format, indication in the mail object “Mediation Conference” to the three following addresses:

joelle.aden@u-pec.fr ; teresa.keane-greimas@u-pec.fr ; donna.kesselman@u-pec.fr

Roosevelt Institute for American Studies

Middelburg, The Netherlands

30 November – 1 December 2017

Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin Roosevelt are three of the most inspiring and dynamic political leaders in 20th century US history. Theodore and Franklin both redefined the presidency and political leadership, each in their unique way. Eleanor, the first modern First Lady, as a widow became a prominent media personality and advocate of political causes such as human rights and the anti-nuclear movement. Each of the three Roosevelts had a specific impact, influence, and legacy, shaping the foreign and domestic policy of the United States, and the relations between the US and the world, through the twentieth century and beyond.

The Rooseveltian Century is a new concept for contemporary history. The nearest equivalent is the idea of the Wilsonian Century, based on the worldview of President Woodrow Wilson and how he conceived of US power being used to shape world politics through WWI (‘making the world safe for democracy’). In contrast, the Rooseveltian Century examines the three Roosevelts as a ‘collective agent’ who, through both domestic and foreign policies, changed our understanding of the responsibilities of government and the global role of the United States. This mean that the Rooseveltian Century, as a historical frame, makes use of the three Roosevelts to view, critically consider and explore key themes in US history and international relations, without necessarily stating that the three acted in unison or that they expressed the same views or policies.

This conference builds on the experimental MOOC, ‘The Rooseveltian Century’, produced by Giles Scott-Smith and Dario Fazzi in 2016. The event, the first to be held at the newly-founded Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, has two main purposes. Firstly, it will uniquely combine research on each of the three principal Roosevelts within an overarching historical investigation into their influence and legacies. Secondly, it will frame the debate around the central themes, motifs and images that can be represented by the term Rooseveltian Century, identifying the longer-lasting meaning and importance of this frame in current-day (international) politics.

Paper proposals on the following topics are welcome:

1) Domestic and International Public Policy – which fields were initiated, shaped, or heavily influenced by the Roosevelts;

2) ‘Rooseveltian Transfer’ – how public policy initiatives were taken up by and shared between the Roosevelts and their supporters;

3) Who Influences Who – the roots of Rooseveltian idealism and realism;

4) Public Memory – how the Roosevelts both shaped their own public legacies and have been used by advocates (and adversaries) to represent distinct identities and causes in the public realm;

5) Partisan Politics – how the Roosevelts influenced socio-political and party-based activism;

6) Style and Media – how the Roosevelts responded to and used a changing media environment for their personal and political purposes;

7) Institutions and Alliances – how did the Roosevelts transform US foreign relations and the US role in the world;

8) Principles and Values – how did the Roosevelts broaden conceptions and understanding of such ideals as democracy, freedom, and equality?

Special Guests:

Frank Costigliola (University of Connecticut)

Michael Cullinane (Northumbria University)

Mario Del Pero (SciencesPo)

Sylvia Ellis (University of Roehampton)

Petra Goedde (Temple University)

Justin Hart (Texas Tech University)

Lisa McGirr (Harvard University)

Kiran Patel (University of Maastricht)

Please send a 250-word proposal, together with a CV, to rooseveltiancentury@gmail.com.

The deadline for paper proposals is 31 March 2017.

Draft papers of 5000 words will be required no later than 1 November 2017, in time for circulation to all participants prior to the conference.

For all enquiries please contact Giles Scott-Smith by email: g.scott-smith@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Spring 2018 Issue

Guest Editor: Eva Darias-Beautell

In her Levinasian discussion of the functioning of ethical obligations in the face of global and local forms of precarity, Judith Butler links the production of vulnerability with a situation of “up againstness” or “unwilled adjacency,” of one’s involvement in a relation of proximity that has not been chosen (134). Vulnerability in those cases arises from the realization that “one’s life is also the life of others”, and that “the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us” (141). Itself the site of production of various forms of violence and vulnerability, this adjacency also triggers the affective and creative engagements necessary for action (134).

These seem crucial issues in Canada, where contemporary debates over citizenship and social justice often take place within complex transnational, transcultural, and (post)colonial contexts as well as beside the historical experiences of settlement and migration, with their contested forms of national or cultural belonging. Additionally, Canada’s humanitarian tradition, itself marked by convoluted narratives, is increasingly challenged by new conditions of global violence, environmental threats, social and political unrest. Canadian literatures do not merely reflect on these conditions but engage with them, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of what could be thought of as a reconnection between the text and the world. How does cultural production articulate and propose strategies of resistance to the massive production of vulnerability? Are the examples of resilience offered by Canadian literature, film, performance and visual arts able to reactivate ethical responsibility and political activism?

This special issue invites contributors to offer a critical examination of Canadian cultural production with an emphasis on the discursive modes that deconstruct the hegemonic structures that produce vulnerability. We also wish to invite research articles that interpret the present condition of (un)willed adjacency in its real and metaphoric possibilities as a site of production of violence and vulnerability, but also (potentially) of lucid creativity, exposing, soliciting, seducing “in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us.”

Possible areas of interest include (but are not limited to): urban poverty, the medicalized body, indigenous activism, colonial violence, migration and war narratives, ecological vulnerability, the posthuman seduction, emotional precarity, sexuality and (trans)narrative desire, gender and agency, technological liquidity, queer creativities, precarious labour, (non)narratives of resistance, narrative ethics and the post-truth moment. Comparatist and interdisciplinary approaches are most welcome.

All submissions to Canada & Beyond must be original, unpublished work. Articles, between 6,000 and 7500 words in length, including endnotes and works cited, should follow current MLA bibliographic format.

Submissions should be uploaded to Canada & Beyond’s online submissions system (OJS) by the deadline of June the 1st, 2017. They will be peer-reviewed for the Spring 2018 issue.

Work Cited: Butler, Judith. 2012. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26.2: 134-151.