Epistemic violence continues to cast long shadows over intellectual and artistic aspirations of equal global exchange. The con ference will seek ways to enable this exchange without falling into the trap(s) of hegemonic homogenisation, which is no less insidious than colonisation itself.
Date: 27.-29.11.2021
Time: 6:30pm - 8pm
Event Title: Performing Tangier Festival (17th Edition): I. Theatres of the Global South – Decolonial Visions
Event Type: Konferenz
Category: BMBF
Organisor: ICPS - International Centre for Performance Studies, Tangier - in Kooperation mit: IRC 'Interweaving Performance Cultures' - Free University, Berlin; University of New England, Tangier; Faculty of Humanties - Abdelmalek Essadi University, Tetouan
Location: TANGIER & TETOUAN, MOROCCO // plus Live-Stream & Zoom-Webinar (links will be provided via the website on the day of the event)
This conference is an invitation to plunge into the poetics and politics of resistance against domineering, exclusionist and, at times, Eurocentric paradigms, theatrical and otherwise, whose very existence hinges on dismissing and discarding as irrelevant any alternative trials to graft newer elements onto a body said to be in full swing.
United through their shared histories/ (her)stories of struggle and strife as well as their common manifest destiny, theatre practitioners hailing from the Global South are now - very much in the manner of Caliban- appropriating and transforming the tools of soft/velvet power to strike back/write back/perform back to the canon, the civilised and civilising centre, from within and without in an attempt at reconfiguring the power dynamics maintaining the privileged few the upper hand.
Whilst heavy-handed colonial occupation may be said to be a thing of the past, epistemic violence still casts its shadow over intellectual and artistic endeavours across both sides of the fence as a result of what Foucault labels as the positional superiority of the Eurocentric subject as the only one fit and apt to churn out knowledge as pitted against the abject objects of knowledge in a perpetuation of the Hegelian dialectic of master vs slave, which precludes any room whatsoever for becomingness.
In the very condition of their performances lies a dissonance, a schism, a conflict whose resolution, if it so happens, could lead to an espousal and a reconciliation and/or perhaps a (con)fusion of the past, which is not yet over, with the present, a chapter in progress, the traditional and the post-modern, the local and the global. Theirs is a quest, not for roots, but for routes the global sphere can tread toge ther in peace and harmony without altogether falling into the trap(pings) of hegemonic homogenisation, which is no less insidious than colonisation itself. As long as coloniality continues to lurk where its former twin colonialism was, the Global South will be in no position to (re)cede before the Global North and has to form intersectional collectivities to stand in the face of creeping capitalism and its (b)latent paraphernalia of power.
Only after the abyss pulling the world asunder is bridged can an equitable interweaving take over the now existing monologue wherein the few dictate and the rest obeys in conformity with the Foucauldian maxim of knowledge and control which stipulates that more subjugation requires more information.
The return of the wretched of the earth, the downtrodden subalterns, in new attire to the stage is sure to steal the show from its runners by demythologising historicism from below. Having been muted, stifled and smothered, the downtrodden subal terities, can proffer alternatives, which find expression in the ecology of knowledges celebrating diversity in their accommodation of the oppressed wherever they be irrespective of their gender, geography, class, ethnicity, colour and so on and so forth.
