WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students.
“Political Play: Children as Vanguards of Cultural Resistance and Change”
by
Prof. Bryan Reynolds
Thursday, 5 July 2018, 10:30 - 11:30, Collegium Novum 316 A
Abstract:
As promises for the future, children occupy a crucial position in all human societies. However, because of this crucial position, the figure of the child, as paradigmatic trope of “child” or incarnation of “childhood,” poses an anxious contribution to theoretical discourses of subjectivity, and political subjectivity especially, as well as to their practical implementation into “civil” society. The child embodies aspects of alterity and is permitted de facto certain liberties based on assumptions about its developing social identity and the limits it presents with regard to sanctioned subjectivation. It also traces the potential for subjective growth, allowing on explicit or subterranean levels the capacity for transformative processes of subjectivation to occur. Contemporary cultural representations of childhood often reveal fissures in the logic and assumptive frameworks they reciprocally attempt to support. These frequently surface as spaces of threatening transgression; for instance, recent debates on children’s societal integration have tackled this problem with an array of appropriations, from bestselling books to thriving urban youth gang subcultures to the conscription of children into Congolese tribal conflict. Without assuming an ethical position on children’s roles within this spectrum, we can observe that the possibility of rupturing dominant social systems accompanies the child’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development. Yet, every socially-sanctioned adult subject has at some point experienced childhood. To function in society, then, one must have spent time at least rehearsing, typically with much play, society’s possible unraveling. In looking at several examples from my current research on highly-charged performative acts and attendant cultural production by both individuals and groups in the Middle East and Africa in periods of intense sociopolitical conflict, I want to argue that, rather than containing this notion as a closed-off space/time in which alterity is stripped and adult subjects are created, childhood’s condition as necessarily subversive -- a fugitive rehearsal within official culture -- is rich with alternative conceptions, fluctuations, and performances of subjectivity, and thus offers much potential for children as vanguards of cultural resistance and change.
Bryan Reynolds is Chancellor’s Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He has held visiting professorships at the University of London-Queen Mary, University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, University of Cologne, University College Utrecht, Goethe University-Frankfurt, and the University of California-San Diego; and he has taught at Deleuze Camp and The Grotowski Institute, among other academic and arts institutions. He is the Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright, whose plays have been produced in the United States and Europe. His books include Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics, and the Future of Affect (2017), Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2009), Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006), Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003), and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). And he is editor of Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories (2014) and coeditor of The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, Vols. 1 & 2 (2011; 2014), Critical Responses to Kiran Desai (2009), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005), and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). He is currently writing a book, Art at the Edge, with Mark LeVine, on the performance activism in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. And he is writing a book on extreme sports.
WA Friday Lunch Talks
