“(Re)presenting Muslim Bodies of Performance” at ASTR Annual Conference

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Section Description

This working group foregrounds theatre and performance in Islamic countries and cultures, and representations of Muslim bodies on stage. Orientalist ‘othering’ into an age of paranoid nationalism has often rendered entire bodies of performance in Muslim worlds ‘absent’ in scholarship (Bell), or created a monstrous Muslim body of surveillance in the theatres of everyday life. Perhaps more than ever, Muslim bodies on stage (and off) have to negotiate an existence in a particularly hostile public sphere. These bodies resort to several negotiation strategies, such as strategic essentialism (Spivak), strategic anti-essentialism (Lipsitz), and disidentification (Muñoz), among many. This working session is an attempt to provide a counter public sphere in which all incarnations of these negotiation strategies are recognized and valued. This year, we are interested in interrogating the multiple ways in which theatre and performances from Muslim worlds, and theatre and performances about Muslim worlds, stage ‘otherness.’ We intend to probe the ways in which a Muslim ‘ordinary’ body becomes ‘extraordinary’ in performance through processes of (mis)identification, disidentification, (re)imagination, orientalization, or abjection. We particularly welcome provocations, interjections, and interventions that investigate representations of intersectionality of Muslim-hood and other racial, gender and sexual minoritarian categories.

Our definition of the Muslim world incorporates, but is not limited to: Sunni cultures of and beyond the Middle East; Shi’a countries such as Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain (including Shi’a minorities in predominantly Sunni countries); Ibadis of Oman, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and East Africa; and other often overlooked populations of the Islamic world, such as Muslim China; as well as hyphenated bodies of minorities on stage.

The working group is committed to interrogating the multiple ways Muslim bodies are (re)presented on stage, in everyday life, and in the archive. In what ways do performances of Muslim Worlds (re)present, perform, and (re)imagine ‘otherness’ on stage? We intend to define ‘other’ in the broadest way possible. Examples might include (but are not limited to) staging the white body as ‘other’ (invader, colonizer, or simply objects of desire), performances of political protest, performances of piety to the dictatorial regimes, performances of piety, trans* performances in the minoritarian sphere of Pakistan’s Sufi shrines, and subversive representations in times of US turmoil, such as Fawzia Mirza’s embodiment of Ayesha Ali Trump, Donald Trump’s illegitimate Muslim daughter. We invite scholarship that reimagines what Muslim performance entails. Papers may address various aspects of Muslim performance through such areas as:

• the archival body
• borders and surveillance
• diaspora and hyphenated bodies
• performances that intersect with religion, spirituality and notions of the sacred
• transnational networks
• grass roots activism and/or protest
• ethnography
• cross-culturalism/ inter-culturalism/ trans-culturalism
• cross-faith dialogue
• Orientalism

Section Organizers

Claire Pamment, The College of William and Mary
Hesam Sharifian, Tufts University