Call for Submissions: Text and Performance Quarterly, 2019–2021

Craig Gingrich-Philbrook (Editor)

Southern Illinois University

During my editorship, Text and Performance Quarterly will continue to pursue traditional and experimental essays that meet the “Aims and scope” statement published on the journal's Taylor & Francis website:

Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) is a peer-reviewed publication of the National Communication Association. TPQ publishes original scholarship that explores and advances the study of performance as a social, critical, communicative practice; as a theoretical lens; as a critical method; as a technology of representation and expression; and as a hermeneutic. Scholarship in TPQ addresses performance and the performative from a wide range of perspectives and methodologies, and it investigates sites of performance from the classical stage to popular culture to the practices of everyday life.

In addition to standard monographs, TPQ also publishes papers that examine and analyze performance in other scholarly modes, including experimental critical essays, photo essays, interviews, and performance texts/scripts.

TPQ also features a “Performance Space” section that documents performances and situates and critiques them in relation to performance studies theory and praxis.

As I consider TPQ's history and place in the portfolio of journals sponsored by The National Communication Association, I am also particularly (but by no means exclusively) interested in projects that attend to one or more of the following broad questions:

How can communication theory, applied to performance, enhance “intradisciplinary” conversation among specialties within communication studies; demonstrate the place performance studies has within a robust communication curriculum; and help clarify, for interdisciplinary audiences, the distinct contributions a communication-studies approach makes to global performance studies?

How have performance studies practitioners applied, critiqued, and elaborated various “turns” (posthuman, affective, material, ecological, sonic/sound studies, decolonial, etc.) that have animated the humanities in the last several years? Similarly, how do practitioners continue to use and refine (relatively) more established forms of criticism (semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, etc.), challenging the notion that they are irrelevant or have completed their projects?

Dwight Conquergood argued that performance studies “picks up where the theatre department stops: the study of nondramatic texts and nonelite performance practices” (29). In what ways do fiction and poetry continue to serve as sites for performance activity? How do non-elite performance communities (standing poetry and comedy “open mic” groups, emerging performance companies, drag/club culture events, festivals of various kinds, etc.) compose their own texts and use performance to make, negotiate, and share meaning with audiences? How do new and social media facilitate that labor?

For some time, performance studies advocates have held that performance is a mode of inquiry, but often operationalize this by using conspicuous performance for audiences to report their findings. There is nothing wrong with that, whatsoever, but what does performance as practice look like and contribute when pursued without the intention of ever producing “a show” for on and off campus communities? What are the best practices of performance inquiry that is not (immediately, or otherwise) preliminary to production?

Performance studies is a paradigm, Ronald J. Pelias and James VanOosting argued. It consists of more than propositions and methodological procedures; it also has unique pedagogical commitments and practices. How do we teach performance studies and, in so doing, prepare students for a life in which performance may not be their career, in a traditional sense, but nonetheless continues to enrich their lives by challenging their perspectives and encouraging their participation in sustainable communities?

In an era of widely noted and deepening divisiveness, how does performance studies assist those impacted by forms of domination based on their difference, identity, location relative to borders, access to resources, and other arbitrary bases for discrimination? How can performance do more than ameliorate these symptoms, providing the images and communicative resources to transform the conditions that perpetuate them?

In addition to essays and scripts pursuing variations on these (and other) questions, I invite substantive interviews with relevant practitioners in and beyond the academy, as well as proposals for an occasional forum of 3–5 scholars addressing an enduring or emerging question about practice, performance aesthetics, performance figures or movements, etc.

“The Performance Space” will continue, under the editorship of Amber Johnson and Jake Simmons. “The Year in Books” will also continue, under the editorship of Travis Brisini and Robert Gutierrez-Perez.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.