[ecrea] special issue call for papers: reterritorializing digital performance from south to north

International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media


SPECIAL ISSUE CALL FOR PAPERS: RETERRITORIALIZING DIGITAL PERFORMANCE 
FROM SOUTH TO NORTH

Guest editors: Sonali Pahwa and William W. Lewis
Deadline for submission: 28th February 2019

Publication: 2019 in Volume 15, Issue 3

The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media is 
seeking contributions by 28th February 2019 for a special issue on
'Reterritorializing Digital Performance From South to North'.

Digitally mediated bodies have become key sites of performance in the
contemporary world, providing individuals space for working outside
politicized media and corporatized theaters. In what ways do digital
embodiments relate to territorial politics? While there prevails a 
utopian notion that digitalization of culture brings a flattening of 
hierarchies, digital media are often entangled in corporate and 
governmental politics.

They work in unequal ways based on geopolitics, economics, and social
structures. This special issue of IJPADM examines modalities of digital
and post-digital performance that cross between online platforms and
territories of embodiment. Putting in dialogue case studies from the 
South and North of the global economy, we ask how digital performance 
places and dis-places identity politics.

In both South and North, creative digital performances open up the
politics of normative space, and attempt to refigure the territories 
from which they launch. Digital performance from Asia, Africa, and Latin
America often emerges from political unfreedom, intersects with activist
efforts, and counters corporate production practices. Actors here 
assemble virtual territories within geographical space in order to 
perform posthuman agency (Barad 2003). They move between online and 
offline domains to territorialize critical embodiments and make 
political claims matter. In the Global North, media channels are 
perceived as more open, but are only democratic to the extent allowed by 
players controlling information platforms and pipelines. Gatekeepers 
such as Google and Facebook tip the scales of power by offering a 
pseudo-freedom, while minutely controlling the information they surveil, 
collect, and disseminate. Performing bodies in digital assemblages are 
outcomes of these societies of control, where algorithms generated via 
digital tracking fix territories and figure a limited range of human 
identities.

How can performance studies lenses help to explicate the performativity 
of genres enabled by digital technology? What practices do digital
performances contribute to cultural repertoires of embodiment? A key
question informing our dialogue between digital performance in the 
Global South and North is how to think of the differences between 
communication networks entangled with separate (though intertwined) 
politico- economic structures. How are respective social and economic 
relationships reassembled when culture becomes pervasively mediatized 
(Couldry and Hepp 2017)? We propose to reframe the concepts of North and 
South in terms of territorialization rather than territory, attending to 
the material relations of digital networks with geographically situated 
powers. We also examine how particular configurations of human and 
nonhuman actors (as in social media algorithms) shape the intervention 
of digital performance in political territories. Following conceptual 
frameworks of agential realism, new materialism, and critical 
posthumanism, we introduce politics of territorial difference into the 
analysis of distributed materiality in digital performance.

This special issue, guest edited by Sonali Pahwa and William W. Lewis,
considers how the materiality of digital networks affects the agency of
performance in varied territorial (political, economic, cultural) domains.

We ask: How does digital performance change the territories upon which 
and through which it acts? How do these territories ground the 
performance of agency in digital networks? Does digital creation and 
digital labor destabilize human agency in favor of technological agency? 
We invite contributions that examine the way territorial relations 
affect digitally informed performance; how digital performance 
reconfigures conceptions of labor and activism; how the digital 
reassembles human-nonhuman relations as it links embodiments across 
platforms; how digital circulation changes the affective or economic 
impact of performance; and how digitality can stage community between 
and within territories. Our volume seeks to contribute case studies of 
digital (or digitally-informed) performance complementing pioneering 
theatre and performance studies scholarship at the intersection of new 
materialism, communication studies, and post humanism.

Please submit your contribution, formatted according to the Routledge
journal style, through the journal's website
<https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rpdm20&page=instructions>.

For further enquiries, please contact the guest editors at
(pahwa007 /at/ umn.edu) <mailto:(pajwa007 /at/ umn.edu)> and (wwl12 /at/ txstate.edu)
<mailto:(wwl12 /at/ txstate.edu)>. Potential contributors are invited to send a
draft abstract for early feedback on suitability for the special issue.


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