[Discussion] CFP: Performing Reparation (11/15/05; journal issue)

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

From: "Diaz, Robert" <RDiaz1@gc.cuny.edu>

CALL FOR PAPERS
(please circulate widely)

Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory
PERFORMING REPARATION: PRACTICE, METHODOLOGY, AND PROCESS

Co-Editors:
Joshue Chambers-Letson        Robert G. Diaz
Performance Studies           English
New York University           The CUNY Graduate Center

Reparation as a concept is laden with multivalent cultural significance. If the
most basic definition of reparation is an act that mends, repairs, and restores
a loss, rupture, or break, what other complex ways has reparation been defined
and enacted, particularly by feminists, queers, and people of color? Melanie
Klein, for example, defines the act of making reparation as a psychic process of
making good injuries =97 both real and in phantasy  for which we remain
unconsciously guilty and in pain towards a sustained seeking of pleasure. What
would an act of reparation look like and what would such an act be capable of
doing? Which is to say, what are the performative effects of reparation? What is
the performance value of reparation? Assuming that reparation has often been a
method for surviving and living against elision, for asserting a presence
deserving of recognition, or for coping with insurmountable losses, what are the
other potentials for reparation?

Our first concern in this issue is to perform an in-depth inquiry into the
many ways that reparation is defined as an individual and collective process.
For example, in relation to the traumas of geopolitical violence, 'reparations'
as a political and economic concept has been linked to the emergent demands by
marginalized and/or subjugated groups for acknowledgement and redress of abuses.
An example of this paradigm might be the activist labor of Korean and Filipino
'comfort women' forced into sex slavery during the occupation of Japan during
World War II. In turn, for the individual subject, how might reparation manifest
itself as a personal and everyday process of reintegrating a fragmented self
into a not-necessarily unified 'whole' or totality (both socially and
internally)? Second, we consider the ways in which reparation has been
manifested in the work and practices of various groups and individuals including
artists, activists, and intellectuals. By this, we might consider the
performance work and publications of a group like the Guerilla Girls, a
collective that has sought to restore the place of unacknowledged women artists
to the 'canon'of art history. Our third primary concern is to consider the
utility of reparative acts and readings of reparation to changing the conditions
of possibility in our critical acts. This is to say, what are the protocols that
critical theory has come to abide by, and how the reparation as critical
methodology take us down new critical avenues: politically, artistically and
intellectually? What means might various approaches to and enactments of
reparation serve?  How and when is reparation productive?

This issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory addresses the
above concerns about the performativity and utility of reparation (as a
practice, methodology, and process). We invite papers concerned with reparative
performances and acts as well as papers that provide reparative approaches to
critical inquiry, especially in relation to the work of feminists, people of
color, and queers. What are the potentials for reparation and what might some of
the limits be? Can reparation be employed (or co-opted) as a means of insincere
alleviation, substitution, or displacement? How have groups and individuals
engaged in reparative acts and processes? How do different and sometimes
contradictory notions of reparation work in relation to each other? How do
theoretical conceptualizations of reparation function relational to practical or
material uses of the concept? We encourage contributions from a range of
disciplinary approaches, including but not limited to performance studies,
literature, American studies, psychoanalysis, economy, law, art history,
cultural studies, women=92s studies, as well as other activist or artistic
approaches to, or representations of, reparation.

Possible Topics could include: Melanie Klein and the theory of reparation,
feminism and psychoanalysis, anti-oedipal psychoanalysis, economic/political
reparations (including the Japanese-American internment of WWII, slavery,
Comfort Women, the Holocaust, etc.), reparative feminist performance, health
and economic policy, the law, reparative criticism, queer theory.
Specific artists, performance artists, figures and writers whose work could be
read as reparative or necessarily in need of a reparative approach could include
but are not limited to: the Guerilla Girls, Le Tigre, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Oprah, Eve Sedgwick, Joan Riviere,
Sandra Day O'Connor, Kara Walker, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane.


Essays should be approximately 5000-6000 words in length and should adhere to
the Chicago Manual of Style. Please send completed essays as MSWord attachment
to both of the editors at jcl310@nyu.edu and rdiaz1@gc.cuny.edu by November 15,
2005. Expressions of interest prior to the deadline are encouraged.





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