Cultural Studies Association (CSA) Black and Race Studies CFP

*Black and Race Studies Working Group CFP*

*“Performance between Violence and Structure”*

2019 Cultural Studies Association Annual Conference on “Performance,
Politics, Power”

Tulane University | New Orleans, LA | May 30th to June 1st, 2019





The turn to performance in race and cultural studies has generated incisive
and urgent work on the performativity of racial identity, the radical
imagination of fugitive practice, and the history of minoritarian
aesthetics. Two dimensions that have routinely been uncoupled from the
study of performance are “structure” and “violence.” The concepts of
structure and violence are frequently collapsed into each other to become
flip sides of the same *anti-political power*; implicitly and explicitly,
performance is reciprocally positioned as antithetical to both as an
embodied enactment of *political counter-power*. The result has been a
field that truncates three terms into a binary, and in a manner that writes
out alternative lines of inquiry into the paradoxes of racial subjection
that conceive the relation between structure, performance, and violence in
a *topological* relation: imbricated in each other, double-bound, knotted,
and so on.



In line with the general theme, “Performance, Politics, Power,” the Black
and Race Studies Working Group invites submissions of panels or individual
papers for at least two sponsored panels at the CSA Annual Conference that
think performance on a continuum *with*, as an underside *of*, or as
mediated *through* structure and/or violence. We are particularly
interested in “proposals that question the limits of performance as a
framework for enacting politics.” These papers may address, but are not
limited to, the following fields and thematic loci:



●      Performance and power in trans* theory

●      Structural theory and its afterlives

●      The ontology of affect

●      Afropessimism and critical black theory

●      Black feminist poetics

●      Theories of gender performativity and repetition

●      “Structures (don’t) march in the streets”

●      Discipline, punishment, accumulation, and performance

●      Black marxism and cultural studies

●      Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary violence



Please submit a brief abstract (300 words or less) through the CSA
submission system by its official deadline, currently: *Monday, December 3,
2018* (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=csa2019). Applicants need
*not* be a member of the CSA to submit. Submissions can either be an
individual paper or pre-constituted panel. *Please indicate that you are
applying through the Black and Race Studies Working Group*.





Questions? Contact the Co-Chairs of the Black and Race Studies Working
Group, Christopher Chamberlin ([email protected]) and Patrice D.
Douglass ([email protected]).

-- 
*Christopher Chamberlin, Ph.D.*
President's Postdoctoral Fellow
English Department
University of California, Berkeley

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