CES 18th International Conference of Europeanists
June 20-22, 2011, Barcelona, Spain
SAE Panel Prosposal "Politics and Performance"
Call for Papers Jokes, satire, irony and literary tropes have long been
part of political speeches, cartoons, campaign slogans, and rhetoric. Yet
in the context of radical, nationalist, and xenophobic movements across
Europe, in addition to neoliberalization and widespread economic hardship,
the stakes of such "light" or seemingly playful political discourse have
become more highly charged, even urgent, and this genre of political
performance lies both within and beyond the electoral trail.
This panel investigates how political discourse is staged and consumed in
public arenas by diversely positioned European citizens. How do satire and
allusions, whose meanings are only legible and recognizable to some
groups, help consolidate political goals and collective identities? How do
they transgress local cultures and national borders and become a political
language understood transnationally? Who is excluded by these
simultaneously overt and covert political performances? Alternatively, how
do social actors align themselves politically in otherwise "non-political"
verbal arts, such as music, poetry, television, film, or theater? Why does
politics, a traditionally serious engagement, become an arena for laughter
and literary or artistic experimentation? What is the meaning of various
performative acts and how do they reshape neoliberal values, public spaces
and ethical codes? How do they constitute authority and power? How does
politics as a performative art form recreate European political landscape
and European citizenship?
Potential topics include:
-Political speeches and campaigns as a performative art -Verbal arts and
political discourse -The circulation of symbols and art in social
movements -Representations of the body in politics -Humor and politics
-Entertainment industry and politics -Ethics, politics, and performance
-Europeanization and political performance -Nation, the state, and
citizenship in performative arts -Intellectual activism, performance, and
politics -Late socialist, post-socialist, and neoliberal political
aesthetics
Please send paper proposals to Neringa KlumbytÄ— (klumbyn@muohio.edu) and
Noelle Molé (nmole@Princeton.EDU by October 1st. For more information
about the Council for European Studies Conference see
http://www.councilforeuropeanstudies.org/ .
