MLA – Performing Slavery’s Preinventions

The MLA Drama and Performance Forum invites abstracts for a sponsored session titled “Performing Slavery’s Preinventions.”

In the long afterlife of the transatlantic slave trade, drama and performance have offered vital engagements with the material and psychic persistence of slavery’s structures of racial violence. But in what ways was the ground laid in earlier periods for the world-historical emergence of the Atlantic slave trade and the convulsive effects of racial modernity? “Performing Slavery’s Preinventions” invites papers that consider how ancient, medieval, and early modern performance imagine conditions and practices that would later inform and structure the modern era of racial slavery and the racialization of laboring bodies. How was the concept of slavery engaged with or contested in performance practices prior to modernity? What types of continuities and discontinuities can we identify in such theatrical representations and performance practices?

Please send a 250-word abstract and brief cv to Lisa Freeman (lfreeman@uic.edu) and Shane Vogel (shvogel@indiana.edu) by March 11, 2019.