The American Studies Association annual meeting theme “Creativity within Revolt” speaks to creative practitioners across disciplines. This panel seeks proposals from those in: visual arts, music, dance, poetics, interdisciplinary practice, and performance to present current artistic research from practices that intersect with the concept of a reparative turn.
In Reparative Reading, Paranoid Reading (2003) Sedgwick proposed that a critical reparative-based approach offers promising, productive, and undiscovered potential to create individual and social agency that produces a move toward an exit from identity-based bias by reaching for pleasure rather than avoiding shame while also assimilating the violence and trauma that permeates these systems (Sedgwick: 2003; and Best: 2016). A reparative turn offers a constructive action, a re-making-inventing of an empowered-self narrative, an undertaking of a kind of surgery on wounds inflicted by systemic oppression, producing a hopeful exit from othering’s shadows in the context of a creative imaginary engaged with the many possible new existence(s) repair might produce. Sedgwick’s paper is a call for queer and feminist scholars to consider reparative theory vs. paranoid approaches that currently dominate the fields of liberatory studies. This panel seeks to further Sedgwick’s proposal for investment in reparative theory by replacing the suggested reading framework with artistic practice. Specifically, this call seeks contributions foregrounding artistic practices that embody subversive imaginaries in revolt against hegemonic and social othering through a reparative turn towards agency and an exit from dynamics of bias.
The ASA conference theme “Creativity in Revolt” asks “What imaginative and practical possibilities are (simultaneously) opened when people move against seemingly immovable systems of violent domination? How might revolt itself be conceptualized as a creative and artistic form, catalyzing as it actively produces new ways of interacting with what Sylvia Wynter calls the “praxis of human being?”” (ASA open call)