Online Issue Launch: Decolonisation and Performance Studies - 8th December, 2023
Online Issue Launch: Decolonisation and Performance Studies
Special Issue of Global Performance Studies Journal
8th December, 2023 – 18:00-20:00 GMT
Join us for the online launch of the latest Special Double Issue of Global Performance Studies (GPS) journal, Vol. 5 No. 1-2 (2022), “Decolonisation and Performance Studies”, published in the summer of 2023.
Issue Editor: Nesreen N. Hussein
Co-Editors: Kevin Brown, Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt
This special issue is a gesture towards an engagement with decolonisation and performance studies that considers a future for the field that challenges hegemonic configurations of power and epistemic privilege that place particular narratives, methodologies, and epistemologies at the “centre.” No matter how contested, the question of “decolonisation” here is an invocation of a different future with a promise of repair; it is a self-reflexive iterative process that is necessary, difficult, and generative. The twelve articles featured in the issue demonstrate a firm commitment to centring marginalised, under- or misrepresented-represented narratives, histories, and epistemologies, which is critical to transforming knowledge production in performance studies and other fields. The contributions stem from, or engage with, cultural, historical, and geo-political contexts that span five continents or that simultaneously cross multiple ones between: North, Central and South America; South, Southeast and Western Asia; North and East Africa; Europe, and Australia. Coalitional authorship occupies half of the collection, continuing GPS’s trajectory in experimenting with modes of coalitional publishing, and amplifying the politics expressed therein, in relation to urgent debates in the field.
At a time when abstract understandings of decolonisation are being disrupted before our eyes in the face of ongoing genocidal colonial violence in Gaza; when we are bearing witness to the material destruction of peoples, homes, and lands, this event comes as an opportunity to gather in grief and in conversation, and extend the impetus underlying the issue to imagine and create equitable futures and cultures of practice. The issue acknowledges that decolonisation is closely tied to upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples around the world, including Palestine. Its Editorial states that “debates on decolonisation must go hand in hand with debates on Palestine and indigeneity”, which is a commitment that must be epitomised today as an ethical and moral imperative when re-imagining conditions of knowledge formation that can begin to undo the consequences of systematic erasure.
Confirmed participants:
Khalid Amine (Abdelmalek Essaadi University)
Tania Cañas (Arts Gen)
Cecilia Fiel (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Dominika Laster (University of New Mexico)
Bryan Levina Viray (University of the Philippines Diliman) and Shanny Rann (Simon Fraser University)
Anika Marschall (Utrecht University) and Ann-Christine Simke (University of the West of Scotland)
Alessandra Montagner and Beth Lopes (University of São Paulo)
Marlon Jiménez Oviedo (Brown University)
Brahma Prakash (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Hui N. Wilcox (Macalester College)
The full issue can be accessed here: https://gps.psi-web.org/
To register for the event and receive the Zoom credentials, please fill in this short form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSffVIrOv8O8jwzBttH5AaeGcC9t5OzVWZYNV4pxOB3I4C3elA/viewform
The special issue was generously supported by Middlesex University’s Faculty Research Fund.
GPS: Global Performance Studies is a peer-reviewed, Open Access academic journal. We provide a platform for scholars and artists engaged in a broad range of performance studies, including contemporary performance practices; theory, politics, social and cultural contexts of and as performance; performance and visual arts and media; and practices of resilience and care for everyday life. We emphasize a global perspective on these themes and practices, and aim to support under-represented narratives and epistemologies that trouble and contest the discipline of performance studies.
