CFP: The End(s) of Empire: Place, Politics, Performance
Irish Society for Theatre Research Conference 2025
Institute of Art, Design + Technology (IADT), Dún Laoghaire
6-7 June
This conference examines the intersections of place, politics and performance as they relate to the histories, legacies, and persistence of structures associated with colonial empires as well as neocolonial practices. For this interdisciplinary event, we invite proposals for 20-minute presentations on (or of) performance, visual, material, audiovisual and/or digital cultures as they relate to the conference theme, exploring such questions as: What are, or have been, the roles of creative and performing arts in negotiating the end(s) of empire or their continuation? How can creative practice, as well as research for and about such practice, illuminate our understanding of place and politics as they relate to empire? In what ways have place-based identities been performed in the context, or against the backdrop, of empire? How might we approach performing and creative arts within and beyond Ireland through a decolonial lens? What decolonial strategies have been employed or envisioned by artists and cultural organizations, and to what end? What roles do performing and creative arts play in perpetuating or exposing embedded structures that sustain racial, class and related privileges? How has performance, in its broadest sense from everyday life to the theatre stage, reflected or challenged historical or contemporary conceptions of empire?
The conference title is a deliberate pun on what might be called the decolonial end of history, the mirage or sleight of hand in the last century called ‘the end of empire’. It also connects with the motives and goals of new forms of imperialism ranging from neocolonialism, to globalization, to cultural imperialism.
We welcome a range of international perspectives on the themes of this conference, which will be hosted by Dún Laoaghire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. The locale of Dún Laoghaire (which was called Kingstown from 1821 to 1920), like others throughout the island of Ireland, is marked like a palimpsest by remnants of its contested and imperial past, now overlaid with signifiers of current global markets and new forms of empire and imperialism. As such, the location itself will echo questions pertinent to how the ghosts of history continue to haunt the present.
The ‘ends’ or motives of empire often coincide with and/or abide in ‘official’ performances of decolonization. Ireland’s recently concluded Decade of Centenaries, for example, offered a programme of state-sponsored events mostly commemorating landmarks in Ireland’s postcolonial processes from 1912 to 1923 including the struggle for independence, the civil war, and the foundation of the Irish Free State, which partitioned the island. Not only were Decade of Centenaries events met with protests concerning the perspectives and collective traumas they excluded or occluded, but they played out against a backdrop of a worsening Irish housing crisis, the ramifications of Brexit particularly for the border separating six of Ireland’s northern counties from the rest of the island, an international rise in right-wing populism, a global pandemic, a resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests internationally including the toppling of colonial monuments, ongoing or resurging international conflicts, and continuing global environmental and refugee crises.
Responding to a 2021 report published by the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, Sara Ahmed argues that the ‘dominant happy view of empire is enforced through citizenship, […] to become a citizen is to learn that positive view and to be required to repeat it. […] Gone the violence; the dispossession of people from land, from language, from culture, the dispossession of people from people’ (‘Melancholic Migrants’). This quote could be extrapolated from national citizenship to a sense of belonging under neoliberalism as a global geopolitical power structure that often perpetuates the hierarchies of colonial empires. As Quinn Slobodian argues in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018), rather than reducing the power of those in charge, neoliberalism has mostly served to redeploy such power at a global level.
How might we situate theatre, performance and the creative arts within such complex current and historical contexts as those outlined above? How are empires and their end(s) negotiated across forms? Responses might include, for example, explorations of: scripts and dramaturgy; the verbal, visual, and material languages of art, film and performance; adaptation, translation, and transmediality; site-responsivity and site-specificity; social and community engaged arts; and/or arts practices foregrounding diverse identities and bodies.
Please email abstracts of max 300 words, with a brief biographical note of 150 words, to both conference co-organizers: Dr Siobhán O’Gorman (siobhan.ogorman@iadt.ie) and Dr Kevin Wallace (kevin.wallace@iadt.ie) by Monday, 13th January 2025.