01 Nov 2012

PSi19 at Stanford: 'Now Then: Performance and Temporality'

Call for Papers

'Now then' as an adverbial form opens time as a modality of manner, not a thing: not a series of points, nor a line, nor even a circle. The adverbial contradiction nowthen, both nonsensical and functional, points to that aspect of performance which vanishes, but also persists, accumulates, anticipates, truncates, forecloses, syncopates, pauses, hurries, retards, accelerates, stops, starts, repeats … in time.

This conference seeks to bring forward the complexity of temporality in performance by inviting submissions that address this theme in its many variations. Further, performance studies has the potential to establish a unique take on the politics of time. Instead of alleviating social and economic injustices and inequalities, new technologies and new economies have aggressively pushed them from spatial to temporal dimensions of labor. Free time is not leisure time; we invite you to explore this and other paradoxes of neoliberalism. Also, the question of temporality is inseparable from question of history. This conference invites papers and presentations that examine performance studies' contributions to existing methodologies in historiography. 'Now Then' also invites presentations on our discipline's institutional history. The first Performance Studies conference held at NYU in 1995, 'The Future of the Field,' inherently positioned the field as a forward-looking discipline. Now, in the future, we hope to create an opportunity for focused and rigorous reflection on the paradoxical notion of the past anterior that can be seen as the paradigmatic situation of performance.