(Apologies for x-posting. Please share widely.) For more information
please refer to website:
http://legacy.lclark.edu/~tepo/Conference/theme.htm
Ten Year Anniversary of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational
History of the Americas 2013
Embodied Politics: Race, Sexuality and Performance
The racialized erotics of subjectivity, state formation, and bodies
politic have been fascinating topics of inquiry to the Tepoztlán
Institute for its first nine meetings. This year for the tenth
anniversary of this gathering we turn our attention fully to these
questions. Racialized and sexualized bodies participate in discursive
practices across social, political, economic, and cultural fields in
varied and distinct ways. Scholars at Tepo and elsewhere have explored
these intersections of the body and politics via such concepts as
biopolitics, “theories in the flesh,” racial formations and
racialization as well as the intersectionality of race, sexuality and
gender. This year’s topic calls participants to attend to the
productive intersections of embodied practices, welcoming critical race
studies, gender and queer theory, and performance studies approaches,
among others.
This topic pushes us to reflect upon the location of our annual
meetings, a timely task as the Institute completes its first decade.
Tepoztlán itself is a performative site, a privileged location from
which to contemplate the embodied process of knowledge production,
political contestation, and subject formation. Since Robert Redfield
immortalized Tepoztlán as an isolated folk village in his classic 1932
ethnography, the town has captured the attention of academics,
bohemians, tourists, corporate developers, and even scholars attending
our own Instituto…. The national and international spotlights may
objectify the community as a laboratory of modernity for academic
researchers, an indigenista and new-age fetish site for tourists, and a
speculative territory for venture capitalists. Yet local folklore,
festivals, and protests—embodied performances—index a cultural cycle of
resistance, accommodation and adaptation rooted in a process of
contingent hybridity that has negotiated external influences, realigned
internal relations, and preserved and revitalized collective memory.
With Tepoztlán as location, it is vital to be curious about the
relationship between textual academic archives and local embodied
rituals.
We invite participants to consider these processes across the Americas,
wondering at such questions as: How has race been a central category
in the articulation of colonial, national, postcolonial and
postnational body politics? How have Indigenismo, mestizaje,
Afro-Latinidad, as well as the legacies of slavery, colonialism and
indentured labor conceived corporeal politics through race? How have
gender and sexuality been a part of the rearticulation of the nation
and other forms of imagined communities beyond the notion of the
“horizontal brotherhood?” We welcome feminist and queer scholarship
that questions hetero and homonormative definitions of masculinity and
femininity, as well as official modes of sexual regulation, and we
particularly embrace performance studies innovations in theorizing
identity through the notion of a repertoire of embodied practices.
Performance studies’ attention to embodied practices opens up the
possibility for us to think through the sort of discourses constituted
with and through the body in different political and cultural terrains
as well as in different historical periods. The pedagogical
perspective on this “scene” would address the administration of such
carnal knowledge inside and outside the classroom. The flourishing
political cabaret scene in Mexico City, so near and key to Tepoztlán,
mixes embodied practices (theater, song, and dance) with satire and
parody to launch powerful challenges to social, economic, and political
systems.
Taking these multivalent sites of bodily performance of race and sex in
the Americas as starting point, we call for participants for the
Instituto 2013 to examine the politics of the body and/or the body in
politics, widely understood, pursuing some of the following topics from
varied disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives:
· ethno-racial erotics
· queering the nation/queering mestizaje
· colonial and postcolonial desires
· carnal knowledges
· cultural and local definitions of gender
· gender, sexuality and postcolonialism
· racialized sexualities
· performing race and gender in the Americas
· performance of the historic and cultural discourses about
Tepoztlán (or other pueblos)
· embodied ritual vs. archival text
· the staging and performing of ethnicity, gender, sexuality as
invented tradition
· hybrid cultural formations of race and sex in the Americas
· the relationship between history/historical studies and
performance and performance studies
· historical, cultural and social stagings of race and sexuality
· performativity of race vs. sexual performativity
· racialized erotics
· deployment of body types/classified bodies
· practices of body modification and the maintenance of artificial
bodies
· racial and sexual fetishisms
· histories of racialized sexualities
· histories of sexualized racial formations (casta paintings,
archival terms for race and sexuality)
· coloniality of race, gender and sexuality
· formation and/or evolution of genealogies of racial formations
across the Americas
· new subjects of “race” in the context of gender/sexual
performance
· comparative studies of racial/sexual formation across Brazil,
the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas
· heteroracial/ homoracial erotics
· biopolítica/biopolitics
· pedagogies of cabaret
The Tepoztlán Institute 2013 will take place July 24-31 in Tepoztlán,
Morelos, Mexico. More information at homepage.
Interested scholars and students from across the Americas please fill
out the application here.
by December 1, 2012.
--
Emanuela Bianchi
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