AFTER EFFECTS: TRAUMA, MEMORY, PERFORMATIVITY
Symposium
Friday, November 29
School of English, Media and Performing Arts
UNSW
http://aftereffects-symposium.blogspot.com/
After Effects investigates the role of performance and performativity within contemporary trauma culture. In the field of memory and trauma studies there is now a substantial discourse on how to represent absence and violence and how to respond to these representations. Theories of performance and performativity supplement this discussion by foregrounding models of witnessing, embodiment and rehearsal to examine why and how artists represent memory and trauma and what these representations do in the world. For some, performance provides a social space in which to act out as well as work through personal memory and trauma. For others, performance facilitates processes of surrogacy and substitution: it is a place to create prosthetic memories and to produce proxy witnesses. We invite scholars to think through these issues across a wide range of performative, cinematic, visual, literary or architectural media.
As a symposium-masterclass, After Effects seeks to assemble both leading and emerging thinkers in trauma and memory studies for a day of discussion and debate. Panellists will be asked to present 10 minute versions of pre-submitted papers, to aid a workshop and dialogue process. We invite contributors to consider the performative effects of:
- national apologies;
- post-colonial and post-post-colonial perspectives;
- ceremonies of reparation and public memorials;
- documentary, verbatim, and testimonial aesthetics;
- ‘trauma porn’ and the memory rituals of popular culture;
- false memory, false witness, postmemory and perjury;
- fictocritical writing practices and prosthetic voices;
- witnessing in/as/through performance;
- states and sites of re-enactment;
- mediatised witnessing and global performance;
- archival remains, hidden histories;
- new modes of perception and spectatorship;
- posttraumatic modes of narration, narratives of terror;
- human rights theatre, communities of memory;
- narratives of trauma in the Global South;
- affective engagements;
- the contaminated logics of the postmodern and posttraumatic;
- the parallel fortunes of performance studies and trauma studies.
KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS WILL BE GIVEN BY:
* Dr Helena Grehan (Murdoch University, WA)
* Associate Professor Paula Hamilton (University of Technology Sydney)
PERFORMANCE PARADIGM
Participants are also encouraged to submit article proposals for the forthcoming issue of Performance Paradigm (No 5) 'After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory' http://www.performanceparadigm.net/call-for-papers/
PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS OF 250 WORDS BY EMAIL TO:
Bryoni Trezise b.trezise@unsw.edu.au
Caroline Wake cwake@hotmail.com
School of English, Media and Performing Arts,
University of New South Wales,
Sydney NSW 2052
DEADLINES
Symposium 28 November (University of New South Wales, Robert Webster Building)
Abstracts due 15 September
Papers due 15 November
REGISTRATION
There is no registration fee for this event.
See http://aftereffects-symposium.blogspot.com/
