CALL FOR PROPOSALS: After Assembly: the hum, the shutter, the earthworm

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

After Assembly: the hum, the shutter, the earthworm

Editorial assembly: Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, Tia-Monique Uzor, Nesreen Hussein, Marilena Zaroulia, Diana Damian Martin and Louise Owen.

This forthcoming issue of Global Performance Studies departs from, and moves beyond, the Performance Studies international (PSi) #29 conference in London, UK, themed ‘Assemble!’. 

Thinking from the multiple entanglements, temporalities, methodologies, gatherings and intersections in and beyond the conference, for communities that gathered and those that did not, After Assembly invites considerations of what happens after assembly. The ‘after’ is not a linear representation for the special issue; it is a mode of accounting for the multiple temporalities already present in assemblies, and a methodology for tending to that which is less audible and legible, but nevertheless present already and in myriad ways. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay articulates, timelines are an imperial technology that operates like shutters, consisting of ‘milestones in the form of wars, conquests, revolutions, constitutions, laws, establishments, institutions, foundations, and inventions’ (2016: 176); we deploy ‘after’ as an unruly temporality - as a means to open up thinking in theatre and performances that takes up assemblies in multitudes of conjectures, and that consider what lies underneath, in the zones between, in that which requires different attunement. 

We begin by offering a few brief texts capturing what  emerged in our conversations during and after the ‘Assemble!’ gathering. These texts work as snapshots, sketches, brief scenes, frames gathering and departing from the PSi #29 conference. They are reflections, provocations or to borrow the words of Sandra Ruiz and Hypatia Vourloumis, they are vignettes, ‘offering an opening for the minor voice to resound in otherwise form [...]  miniature images or portraits which fade into the mise-en-scene, vignettes reject the solidity of a frame’ (2021: p8/9). These offerings are invitations to open up elements that gather in assembly (seen and unseen; heard, overheard and silenced; spatial and temporal and so on). We offer these as an open invitation to expand this gathering of frames, scenes, stories, vignettes, sketches, snapshots and provocations after assembly. 

The Hum. In certain environments - in a busy street, on a bus, aboard a boat crossing the sea- choral sounds of uncertainty resonate. The hum operates at a frequency that eludes both capture and silencing, persisting even after the audible sound has dissipated. By emphasising the aftermath of sound through the hum, we engage with embodied vibrations that function as covert strategies, accumulating beneath the surface. It is the hum that signifies both the beginning and the end of the world. What other tactics are necessary to prioritise sensorial ways of listening and communicating? 

Shutter, Earthworm. There is an echo in the chamber; eavesdropping on the sides; it is a late evening and I am watching earthworms eat up colonial ships to make way for new passages; it is early morning and I have written several lines of text over one another; it is the middle of the day and I wonder if there are any passageways less seen in this ghostly library. What is felt, audible, resonant in the aftermath, in the moments after, in the divergent temporalities that are felt in and beyond the assembly? What slips between the cracks? What has come to pass in and as the assemblies unfolded, and what occurs after their dispersal? What is rendered audible when attentions are re-oriented? What discrepancies, resistances and emergent forms take shape in the corridors, traces, leftovers, landscapes?  What smuggled narratives and microcosms form in and beyond assemblies? What loopholes and alternative circulations emerge? 

Imperial Hauntings. Haunted by the genocidal violence, settler colonialism and ongoing Nakba in Gaza unfolding as we assemble in an international conference in the heart of a former empire. Witnessing forms of peaceful assembly in solidarity with Palestine violently silenced and dispersed. Called to reflect on how and why do we assemble, build, co-create, in situations of immense urgency, grief, and despair? Do we need to reconsider the praxis of assembly when in the midst of planetary destruction and the material and systematic undoing of peoples and lands by brutal colonial powers? How, in this moment in time, do we gather in institutional spaces haunted by lingering imperialist and colonial logics; the very logics that persist in performance studies, and continue to shape the lived experiences of minoritarian bodies and voices, those present and absent, navigating, enduring, and disrupting those imperialist structures? Can we reclaim dis-assembly and dispersal as subversive modes of resistance and refusal?

Callings.  What remains of assembly?
What of the arms that are raised in the sky, demanding to be counted?
What of those ‘willful parts; hands which are not handy’?
What of assemblies that conjure a ‘call to arms’, ‘fleshy limbs […] being called’, arms as ‘wilful agents, they create by reaching’ (Ahmed: 194)?
What is called upon and what remains of the calling of assembly?
What of the assembly’s parts and callings re-turn and how?

haunting on the margins
they weep in an inside space slipping
where no sound is uttered
dead quiet

they die {killing a part of themselves} so
they might live forever
fugitive

(Ife 2021, pg. 22)

the weeping that has no sound. the dying that makes way for living. releasing, surrendering to a state of perpetual invisibility. what remains at the margins? what is conjured in the earth and in our bodies after such temporal collectivity?

the unseen, unheard, unknown, never felt. what haunts the edges of assembly? what might attuning to haunting lead to? how might a mode of wake work enable us to imagine otherwise on borders (Sharpe,2016, pg.18)?

imagining otherwise for understanding
imagining otherwise for grieving
imagining otherwise for advocating
imagining otherwise for celebrating 
imagining otherwise for gathering beyond assembly.

Submission procedure:

We welcome single-authored, multi-authored or collaborative submissions, curated (assembled) roundtables, papers or creative-critical interventions, video and audio-essays. 

We welcome contributions in the languages of the editorial assembly: Arabic, English, French, Greek, Spanish, Patois, Romanian. 

Colleagues are invited to submit an abstract, concept, or framing document (up to 400 words) on or before 18th October 2024. The abstract should clearly explain the intention, mission and exploration of the proposed piece. 

We welcome full-length articles (8,000 words) or shorter pieces. Please specify the format, choice of presentation, and proposed length of your submission in your proposal. 

Any digital media content should be carefully curated and associated with a proposal of a scholarly and/or creative project, and the purpose and use of digital media elements be clearly defined in the proposal, including obtaining rights and permissions to publish.

Please do not send media files with any initial proposal. Examples of media may be solicited as needed. 

Submission of a proposal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

To submit, please fill in this form: https://forms.gle/rVs7k84dKJ9C4z6a6 
For any queries, please email vignettesbeyondassembly@psi-web.org 

Timeline

Proposals due: 18 October 2024
Proposal outcome: 18 November 2024
First drafts for peer review:  24 March 2025 
Feedback:  5 May 2025
Second drafts for accepted submissions: 28 July 2025
Publication: November 2025

References

Ahmed, S. (2014) Wilful Subjects. Duke University Press
Azoulay, A. (2019) Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso
ife, fahima (2021) Maroon Choreography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)
Sharpe, C. (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Vourloumis, H. and Ruiz, S. (2016) Formless Formations: Vignettes for the end of the world (Minor Compositions)