Insurgent Spaces: Performing Revolt in Public
Insurgent Spaces: Performing Revolt in Public
Proposed Panel for the American Studies Association Annual Meeting
(Baltimore, November 12-15, 2020):
Everyday life is shaped by how people engage with the spaces they inhabit: the institutions of which they are a part, the national sites of memory that carve out certain histories for remembrance while occluding others, and the public spaces that are open to some but closed to others as a result of their race, ability, gender, or class. Performance offers one way to uncover and challenge the relations of domination embodied by these spatial encounters. Public performances of revolt can reveal how state and private actors manipulate space in order to exert social control; they can also offer creative ways to resist that control, asserting the right to live free from systemic violence. This proposed panel will examine how people perform in public spaces in order to challenge relations of dominance, imagine new futurities, reconceptualize “public” engagement, and express communal resilience to the logics of dehumanization.
Proposals submitted to this interdisciplinary panel might consider: marches and mass demonstrations; “occupy”-style protests; movements to repatriate Indigenous land; reclamations of sites of memory, the Movement for Black Lives and other anti-police brutality movements; performances of fugitivity; practices of sousveillance; or challenges to memorial sites and objects, such as Confederate statuary.
Submit proposals with a title, 250-word abstract and a short biographical statement to Lindsay Livingston (llivingston@bowdoin.edu) by January 21, 2020.