Paper proposals are being sought for a panel titled "Missing Pieces:Theatre, Performance and Circulation in the Americas" at the American Comparative Literature Association conference to be held in Puebla, Mexico from April 19-22, 2007.

All paper proposals (max. 250 words) must be submitted through the conference website at http://acla2007.complit.ucla.edu/. Please specify Missing Pieces for the seminar. Feel free to contact Sarah J. Townsend at sjt239@nyu.edu with questions.

Proposals are due Nov. 1, 2006.

Missing Pieces: Theatre, Performance, & Circulation in the Americas

Both theoretical and historical accounts of theatre and performance frequently privilege the here-and-now (or the then-and-there) aspect of live performance. While this perspective is valid, it often neglects to address an important question: how do theatre and performance enter into
circulation? This seminar proposes to examine the relationship between performance and circulation in the Americas in ways that challenge the tendency to view performative culture as an unmediated expression of local
or national imaginaries. This might include addressing some of the following questions:

In what sense can embodied, performative practices transmit and construct historical knowledge? Are there ways of understanding the relationship between history and theatre that do not simply rely on notions of symbolic representation? How might the question of genre figure into this?

How have theatre and performance been involved in generating forms of identification such as race and class that are not exclusively defined by geography? How have they factored into the regional, continental, and global traffic of bodies, knowledge, and capital?

How do performance genres interact with print culture and mass media? To what extent have these other cultural spheres been defined in relation to or against performance, and vice versa? What role have theatre and performance played in undermining and/or erecting divides between "high"
and "low"?

Proposals can be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. We especially welcome papers that deal with understudied genres and time periods such as teatro obrero or working-class theatre, blackface theatre, colonial and nineteenth-century performance, teatro de revista or revue
theatre, melodrama, indigenous performance, closet dramas, historical tragedies, and Latin American performance art.