Introduction

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Corrigendum

Why a special issue of Performance Research ‘On Trans/Performance’? The prefix transmobilizes a series of concepts that (as will be seen in the contributions here) offer rich possibilities to the understanding of performativity or performance as process – linking, mediating and interrelating qualities in ongoing ways, connecting the trans(implying exceeding, moving towards, changing; going across, over or beyond) to the performative (saying as doing, or that which performs something while articulating it).

Throughout this introduction, I use the term ‘trans-’ rather than ‘trans’ for reasons explained by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore: transkeeps the term suspended in an implicit relationality, which is a key aspect of the prefix I hope to keep in action here (2008: 11).¹ As Mel Chin has noted, ‘transis not a linear space of mediation between two monolithic, autonomous poles … Rather, it is conceived of as more emergent than determinate, intervening with other categories in a richly elaborated space’. The ‘prefixial trans-’, Chin notes, opens up what Mira Hird has described as a ‘broader sense of movement across, through, and perhaps beyond traditional classifications’ (Chen 2012: 136, 137; Chen is citing Hird 2006: 37).

‘On Trans/Performance’ seeks to address concerns that relate to sites and spaces (including potentially fluid ones, or moving across borders) as well as to modes of embodiment and performativity. The issue seeks to present the work of a range of thinkers, creators and performers interested in developing the concept of transin relation to performance and performance studies in general, but also in relation to local geographies, whether the participants’ own or, as a site of inspiration and one that motivated this project in its earliest stages, MontréalQuébec-Canada (in tension with a broader continental understanding of Indigenous cultures, which cannot be contained by Western nationalisms).

This function of trans(its capacity to keep thought and creativity in motion in relation to performance) was the basis of TransMontréal, which I spearheaded and directed and co-organized from 2012 to 2015. TransMontréal was the Montréal contribution to Performance Studies International’s 2015 annual events gathered under the rubric Fluid States – Performances of Unknowing. Replacing the standard PSi annual conference (which generally had taken place in one Western/Northern Hemisphere city, usually anglophone), Fluid States was envisioned and, in 2015, enacted in a series of nodes around the world as ‘a yearlong, globally dispersed and cross-cultural event which resists the prerogatives, politics, and hierarchies of centralised and corporatized conferences’.² ‘On Trans/Performance’ takes its inspiration from these initiatives, working to open up what the frameworks of performance studies can do for thinking and making around live (or virtual) performance and what the notion of trans-can achieve for the understanding of how performance works (particularly in its sense of implying across or through, and thus its implicit relationality and state of ongoingness).

ON THE GENERAL CONCEPTS OF ‘ TRANS -’ AND ‘ PERFORMANCE ’

Transis a prefix designating a movement or connection across, through or beyond the quality it precedes. It also signals change. As such transis intimately linked to the claims for performativity or performance. Transconnects (a performer and an audience, the present soon to be past act and future histories) and opens the creative arts to embodiment, fluidity, duration, movement and change: transtemporality, transhistory, transgenealogy, transmigratory, transmogrification.

Transepitomizes the tension between the local and global in understanding how performance and performative identities work (it was this capacity of transthat successfully linked Trans-Montréal, with its local and global aspirations and its siting in a city formerly at the heart of North American colonization and trade, to the larger Fluid States project). In this context, transsignals geographical, conceptual, linguistic and migratory crossings through terms such as transnational, transidentification, translation, transmigration, transembodiment, even transspecies. Along these lines, the trans(or trans*, as is sometimes used in this context) is of course also frequently connected to transgender subjectivities and the discourses around transgender politics – transhere is a signal of misalignment or fluidity, depending on how one understands these identifications.

The transis itself fluid and multipurpose, a mode of performing complex relationships between one site, identification or mode of speaking/doing/being and another. Transmateriality, transactivism, even transspectatorship.

ON TRANS MONTRÉAL

Trans-Montréal began with a conversation in Palo Alto, California, in February of 2012 between myself and Marin Blažević, key mastermind behind the global events of Fluid States, PSi #21/2015. Upon hearing about the plan to challenge the tendency to establish a single annual conference in a major city in Western Europe or North America (even more narrowly dominated by the US and UK) by choreographing, rather, a series of approximately monthly events around the world, I was hooked. Having just moved to Montréal two years earlier, fascinated as I was by the extraordinary politics and culture of Québec (the only officially francophone part of North America), I made the argument to Blažević that Québec represented a marginalized culture within the dominant North American scene. As such, a contribution to the planned 2015 series of events by a group from Montréal could be extremely valuable in questioning how dominant cultures and discourses function – how a dominant culture (USA) or location (North America) can be disrupted by an aberrant locale that challenges its dominance; Montréal functions as a rupture in the linguistic and cultural hegemony of English and US-based anglophone culture in North America. Montréal is both in the centre of the continent, a privileged site of artistic and popular cultural production (from various arts movements, to a lively avant-garde film and dance scene, to Cirque du Soleil), and completely marginalized from US-based narratives about art and performance histories.

As well, being lodged in the middle of the St. Lawrence waterway – one of the key access points facilitating the colonization and establishment of trade routes across North America from the sixteenth century onwards – Montréal also exemplifies a site defined by its ‘fluid states’, a land mass important precisely for its location in the water and in the middle of a continent (more or less). Montréal – I argued – was a brilliant site both to complicate concepts of centre versus periphery, as well as to explore questions of translation: the city is polyglot, with a range of immigration cultures from the original French and English to Haitian, Iranian and North African, but French and English are the dominant languages and are spoken interchangeably or even in an everyday form of ‘Franglish’.

The original Trans-Montréal brainstorming and planning group I organized in 2012 in Montréal, consisting of local artists and scholars, latched onto the term transas a way of signalling our interest in exploring the ‘fluid states’ not only of historical life in the Montréal area (including the culture of the tribe most often called (by whites) ‘Mohawk’ and other Indigenous tribes thriving in the area long before the Europeans arrived) but also of contemporary exchanges across the visibly and aurally different cultures of twenty-first-century Québec. I would like to thank the original planning group, which morphed and shifted over the years between 2012 and 2015, consisting of the following brave souls: Tawny Andersen, Vincent Chevalier, Barbara Clausen, Arseli Dokumaçi, Jess Dorrance, Tagny Duff, Éve de Garie-Lamanque, K. G. Guttman, Michelle Lacombe, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Patrice Loubier, Johnny Forever (Nawracaj), Erin Silver, Victoria Stanton, Alanna Thain, Sylvie Tourangeau and Katie Zien. And from Regina, Kathleen Irwin and Jesse Archibald-Barber, colleagues who joined our discussions in 2013 and planned a parallel event Performing Turtle Island, which Skyped into our September 2015 Trans-Montréal symposium. And, finally, the expanded cohort who joined the core planning group from Trans-Montréal (Jones, Stanton, Thain, Tourangeau and Zien) for an exploratory version of the final event at the 2014 Hemispheric Institute Encuentro conference in Montréal, entitled Trans(and) Performance: Evelyne Bouchard, T. L. Cowan, Roy Gomez Cruz, Ariel Federow, Pancho López, Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, Stephanie Miller, Didier Morelli, Toni Pape, VK Preston, Jasmine Rault, Adair Rounthwaite and Coral Short.³ And finally, the additional contributors who joined us for the 17 and 18 September 2015 Trans-Montréal event at McGill University: 2Fik, 2boys.tv (Aaron Pollard and Stephen Lawson), Leslie Baker, Evelyne Bouchard, Diane Dubeau, Sarah Henzi, Erin Hurley, Heather Igloliorte, Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Kama La Mackerel, Jean-Marc Larrue, Nicole Panneton, Noémie Solomon and Jen Spiegel.

The planning events over three years (especially the Encuentro work group moment) were seriously fun and always performative and open ended. Everything that ultimately happened at Trans-Montréal (at McGill University) was less of a finalizing culmination than a transperformative efflorescence of some of the threads brought up in numerous earlier planning meetings – each of which had been choreographed and documented by a different subgroup. My favourite meeting, for example, was organized by the ever-creative ‘Transaction’ subgroup, consisting of Stanton, Tourangeau, Duff and Guttman (the former two, notably, constitute the performance collaborative TouVA and have work represented in this issue). They continually traversed the meeting with unexpected écarts – gaps or breaks – connecting these disruptions to the media descriptions of the contemporaneous student strikes going on across the city to protest tuition hikes. Most creatively, to instantiate (as they put it) the way in which ‘the operation of the performative is to insert a gap or a distance into the way “things are” in order to allow for more room to observe’, they set cameras around the room at strange angles, resulting in some very dynamic and non-centred documents of our discussions investigating the concept of performativity in relation to our own interventions into urban life.

Sylvia Tourangeau, Victoria Stanton, K. G. Guttman and Tagny Duff at a Trans-Montréal planning meeting, 8 May 2013, at Concordia University (picture taken showing Amelia Jones presenting, with footage from roving video projected on the wall behind her)

TouVA (Victoria Stanton, Sylvie Tourangeau) panel at the Trans-Montréal event, McGill University, 17 September 2016, showing an écart (one of their collaborators "breaking" or intervening in the presentation)

Fluidly linking this planning mentality to the final event, this amazing and lively mode of generating discussion and learning among ourselves – truly a transactional and transformational moment – linked up to TouVA’s contribution to the final 2015 event, wherein they invited additional collaborators (Bouchard, Dubeau, Lotbinière-Harwood and Panneton) to infiltrate the symposium with performative actions.

The generous interventions of TouVA epitomized throughout the project the way in which Trans-Montréal overall was about transas process, opening up our relationship to knowledge formation as performative – and as including actions, reactions, words, arguments and engagements. Never was a result achieved or ‘answer’ attained in any simple way: we never even posed a singular question. Rather, discussions included continually shifting questions, each of which provoked further ideas and nodes of examination, all relating to issues of fluidity and the transconcept of working across or through.

The Trans-Montréal event in 2015, suitably, thus consisted of a range of performative expressions: performances, panel discussions, a film screening, presentations and the Skype session with the ‘Turtle Island’ group noted above.⁴ The film screening of Québékoisie – Mélanie Carrier’s and Olivier Higgins’ brilliant 2013 film about the relationship between Indigenous and immigrant cultures in Québec – took place up the hill from the McGill campus in the Mont Royal Park, with the digital projector powered by Alanna Thain’s bicycledriven generator from her ‘Out of the Box’ project. Spectators took turns riding the bike and thus actively – performatively – powering our own screening, literally making the images appear through our own bodily labour.

Trans-Montréal marked a melancholic trailing away for me of a direct relationship to the city (although with never a final ending in sight!); in 2014 I moved from Montréal to a coastal city that is nonetheless far less ‘fluid’ in its geographical location (the beach is over there, but does not surround the city): Los Angeles. By the end of 2015, the event was over and I left my beloved Trans-Montréal colleagues to further explore themes of across, through and around in my absence. I am overjoyed to have a number of their contributions in this special issue, where I hope a suitably open sense of ‘trans/performance’ as a mobilizing concept is kept alive.

TRANS ING : THE ISSUE CONTENTS

After the Trans-Montréal event was over, then, the core organizing group hoped to provide some kind permanent commemoration of the thoughts, flows, actions while not purporting to document or fix in any final way our three+ year process: hence ‘On Trans/Performance’, this special issue of Performance Research. Borrowing a term from one of the contributors, Stefania Mylona, I see this issue as participating in a process of ‘trans-ing’, mobilizing thought around performances and performative actions that involve everything from classical Indian dance to seventeenth-century manuscripts to discourses about translation to chatterbots.

This special issue is thus theoretically and conceptually broad; however, contributors were encouraged to develop the notion of trans/ performance in relation to sharp and local themes, as well as potentially larger theoretical concerns. Hence, what results is (appropriately) a hybrid between the following: 1) contributions that expand upon discussions leading up to and presentations/performances produced at Trans-Montréal in September 2015, itself simply a moment within a larger network of activities taking place in Montréal between 2012 and 2015 – this includes contributions by Andersen, Bénichou, Preston, Proulx, Nawracaj, Stanton and Tourangeau (TouVA), Lawson and Pollard (2boyz.tv), and Despland-Lichtert; and 2) other contributions brought in through the call for papers that complement these creative expressions and in some cases move definitively in other directions – After Performance Working Group, Madeira, Brown and Pamatatau, Mello, Williams, Spiess and Strecker, Mylona, Timplalexi, Lewis and Sharma, Mitra, Engdahl, Olivier and Lauren, Fatehi, Dinco, Rectanus, Krpič, and Gotman. In itself, this hybrid movement constitutes another kind of transing, moving across and through and beyond live discussions to editorial engagements taking off on the transtheme.

I have organized the issue around a series of transconcepts, hoping not to build a traditional, coherent narrative but to suggest and provoke – to keep thoughts about transin motion, while allowing for resonances between and among projects to emerge. The issue as a whole performs a trans-ing function, not only to our understanding of the methods of doing and studying performance, but also to our comprehension of histories of modes of performance or performative activity. Each section interrelates with the others so in some senses the divisions might seem arbitrary, but they are also thought through and orchestrated to provoke and move us to new places.

For example, the first section – ‘Transhistories, Transtheories, Transnationalities’ – most directly addresses questions of history and method through a theoretical lens attending to how we can think the performative through transconcepts. It begins with a theoretical foray into the theory of the performative or the ‘performative turn’ by dancer and performance scholar Tawny Andersen, who uses the movement implied by the transto explore in depth the processual and relational nature of the performative, looking at its earliest formulations in the work of J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida. Kélina Gotman’s ‘Translatio’ also takes a deep look at transas a hugely productive theoretical concept, using it as an opening to understand knowledge as ‘translatio’ (which she terms ‘transfer or passage between fields and empires’). The transof performance, Gotman argues in a turn that might define this issue as a whole, is an ‘act of translation’ allowing for an understanding of a field of knowledge in a momentary and processual way – it is a temporary and mobile framework that enables rather than confirms or fixes knowledge about the world.

Following the Andersen and Gotman pieces are a series of essays that address specific cases of thinking across histories and theories through the movement of the trans-. Given what we learn from the fascinating case studies here – by Anne Bénichou (who examines an original 1948 dance by Françoise Sullivan, a star on the post-Second World War Québec dance scene, and its subsequent life through re-enactments and redoings across borders and times), Cláudia Madeira (who provides a ‘transgenealogy’ of Portuguese performance through an art historical lens, passing through the influential 1970s–1980s continental European debates about the transavantgarde), and Teena Brown and Richard Pamatatau (who examine transnational living and ritual practices among Tongans living in Auckland, New Zealand and Santa Ana, California (USA)) – we understand the interrelation between fluid histories of the performative and questions of locational belonging. The transhere functions fluidly to interconnect practices that are similar or reiterative but also different, allowing us to understand the complexity of how performative behaviours and practices come to mean across time and space – particularly when articulated by transmigratory communities such as the Tongan people in New Zealand and California.

The contribution by the After Performance Working Group, ‘On Transauthorship’, precisely explores the way in which working across borders complicates collective authorship. Can the transmove us beyond capitalist and imperialist and modernist concepts of authorship, in the grip of the individual ‘I’? This short piece theorizes – or, rather, enacts through a kind of performative writing – the possibilities in relation to an ‘ethos of critical care’, as the collective authors put it.

The second section – ‘Transembodiment, Transmateriality, Transdimensionality, Transspecies’ – addresses questions of moving across and through bodies, materialities, dimensions, even species. How can the concept of the transmobilize our thinking about the interrelatedness of these qualities and modes of being in the world? Here, we move from Alissa Mello’s fascinating take on transembodiment in puppetry, to Eleni Timplalexi’s study of transdimensionality through the chatterbot– human interface. Both of these essays make use of the capacity of transto allow us to think across bodies and performers – including those that are non-human and objectual (puppets) or virtual (chatterbots). Here, the importance of the term in highlighting the relationality of meaning and value across performatives, no matter the agent of expression, is key.

Stefania Mylona’s ‘Trans-ing’ is a fascinating exploration through personal, embodied experience of the potential to think everyday tasks (here, waiting table at a restaurant in Greece) in terms of trans/performance. While Mello and Timplalexi use transto explore the hinges between the human and the (strictly speaking) non-human, and Mylona puts it in motion in terms of a kind of habitual performativity of everyday tasks, Joshua Williams mobilizes transspecies as a conceptual tool to come to a greater understanding of modes of human/animal ‘drag’ in popular culture (the television show Empire) and performance art (the work of Coco Fusco and Kathryn Hunter).

If these essays traffic more in metaphors and a meta-level analysis, Klaus Spiess’ and Lucie Strecker’s essay here, which addresses their performative project The Hour of the Analyst Dog, actually enacts the material and biological relationships between animal/human but also between dead/undead. This work made use of biotech advances to reactivate the DNA of Sigmund Freud’s dog Jofi (which, weirdly, had been woven into a rug by Freud’s daughter Anna) – this ‘transgenetic’ materiality is explored for its potential to activate agency via the body heat of present participants in the performance (paralleling the very interrelational and intersubjective transference of psychoanalysis itself).

Following the section on transspecies and transembodiment is a large section of multiple projects addressing ‘Translation’ and ‘Transtemporality’. In effect, all experiencing of and writing about art, performance or history itself requires translation – perception and interpretation are translational, involving reading one kind of evidence or process into another in the experiencer’s present. The authors and artists who have work in this section explore the way in which the transnot only activates but also inhabits and drives our relationship to the past, to other cultures and among and between cultural modes of performance and being. Tara Fatehi Irani thus creates a portfolio of memorabilia from her family’s recent past in Iran and the UK, manipulating, collaging and writing over/across these materials to bring her family’s past into her/our diasporic and globalized present. This piece is a subtle commentary on the translations that occur transtemporally in order for us to inhabit our present spaces and times.

Other contributions in this section explicitly address deep histories relating to the contacts and conflicts requiring translation and transtemporal understandings linked to the history of colonialism. Lisa Lewis’ and Aparna Sharma’s chapter thus describes their theory/ practice project that aims at exploring the transactional nature of Welsh colonializing efforts in north-east India in the nineteenth century (coincidentally, very close to the site of my own Welsh-American great-grandfather’s colonialist stint as a missionary in Madurai, south-east India⁵). Meanwhile, Marie-Claude Olivier and Audrey Lauren, working from what we might call the hyper-translational context of Montréal, write about the TRANS TIME exhibition spearheaded by Olivier and two other collaborators in 2014 – here transis attached explicitly to gender/sexuality, and the Montréalbased artists whose work is featured in the essay (including Kama La Mackerel, who participated in Trans-Montréal) enact queer performativity to push the boundaries of time and space, intersectionally and relationally binding subjects through collective memory and individual agency.

In this section, Royona Mitra and V. K. Preston also deploy the mobilizing force of the transto write the deep histories of colonialist encounters. Mitra uses ‘rasa theory’ from classical Indian dance to rethink two projects from contemporary British dance culture, mobilizing the ancient concepts in a ‘translational’ gesture to radicalize not only our concept of contemporary diasporic dancers’ work in the UK, but also our understanding of how historical performance can be activated in the contemporary framework. Preston (who participated in Trans-Montréal) explores the necessity and the impossibility of translation in accessing pre-colonialist cultural languages in North America – noting that our only access to the Huron tribal language of Wendat is via seventeenth-century colonial transliterations and translations. In order to activate rather than narrow our access to these pre-colonial languages (often proclaimed dead by Euro-American linguists), Preston deploys techniques from performance studies to excavate the archive through the power of transcription – writing across languages and cultures to allow each to inform the other, rather than presuming that the colonizing language can fix and know the language of the conquered.

Other structures of linguistic and broadly cultural transfer and translation press on us in the computer-internet age. Christopher Engdahl thus explores the ‘transtemporality of online performance’, pointing out that no live performance or event occurs today without what Christopher Bedford has termed a ‘viral’ effect (contaminating through the translatory processes of the digital). What occurs live is always already participating in ‘transtemporal networks’, remediated and transformed. And Mikhel Proulx, who also participated in TransMontréal (as well as in a related class I taught on the topic of queer performance at McGill), contributes here an article on artists – including 2Fik, another Trans-Montréal participant – who play on and radically take apart the queer selfie format, performing transitional sexual bodies through photographic/digital means to transgress the ‘restrictive codes of digital cultures’, which tend to reformat selfhood into old-fashioned binaries.

The flow of ‘On Trans/Performance’ is then interrupted by an artists’ project – Bleed Through – devised by Susan Silton and including contributions by herself, and by opera singers/ artists Juliana Snapper and Sean Griffin – a literal, material intervention of printed material that is (in Silton’s words, from her initial proposal)

itself a space of performative possibility … embody[ing], both in process and in form, connectivity among and between three distinct (queer) voices … a translation and a transaction, a set of visual/textual/graphic responses … to the materiality and mutability of voice.

The insert makes use of transparency (of material) to overlay and intermingle ‘voices’: the piece, Silton has noted to me, ‘isn’t about transparency in any logical way, it IS transparency’.⁶ It connects back to the artist’s site-specific project A Sublime Madness in the Soul, performed in 2015 in the windows of her downtown Los Angeles studio to be viewed/ heard from the soon-to-be-dismantled Sixth Street Bridge (I was lucky enough to witness the performance live). In Sublime Madness, Snapper and Griffin sang a libretto Silton had culled from movies and texts, each phrase relating to the topic of greed in relation to capitalism. The piece was a direct commentary on the rapidly encroaching gentrification on the East side of downtown – Silton’s studio was about to be a casualty of these shifting flows (or tsunamis) of capital, and condominiums and office towers are moving in.

The final section of ‘On Trans/Performance’ – ‘Transidentification, Transpectator, Transactivism’ – includes projects that extend the exploration of transgender/transsexual identifications in visual and performance cultures through strategic focus on relational exchanges among artist/performer, location/ site, materiality/art/performance, and audience. Johnny Nawracaj – a core member of the TransMontréal group from the beginning – offers a short but profound rumination on the ways in which movement, process or ‘trans’ qualities destroy the ‘myth of stillness’ embedded in and securing colonial and imperial power. Mark Rectanus uses the motivating power of the transto explore new modes of activist art and performance – which he sees as engaging in ‘transactivism’. The ‘translocal’, borrowed from the work of Sven Lütticken, is another key term for Rectanus, bringing to bear the current tendency of transactivism to take place across boundaries and (citing Lütticken) ‘locally embedded but networked internationally’. These transterms indicate entirely new modes of activism that understand the complexities of contemporary societies, where the ‘local’ is always already mobile and constituted through diaspora and networks of shared experience.

Tomaž Krpič and 2boys.tv (Aaron Pollard and Stephen Lawson) carry this concern for understanding the complexities of the local versus ‘global’ (so often a veil, rather, for EuroAmerican concepts and structures of power) to radically different contexts. Krpič’s case study is that of Via Negativa, a ‘postdramatic’ theatre group from Slovenia that aims to explore and deconstruct the relationship between performer and audience – to produce what Krpič calls a ‘trans-spectator’. Tightrope, the peripatetic performance project of 2boys.tv (based in Montréal and present at the Trans-Montréal event), is a mobile structure Pollard and Lawson bring to different locales around the world – including Toronto, Montréal, São Paulo, Mexico City and Havana – to engage with themes of memory, loss and disappearance as these relate to what they term a ‘queer body politic’. The ultimate result of Tightrope’s strategy of opening local communities to a structure of performance guided by an attention to each culture’s relationship to loss and mourning is a series of ‘transformative encounters’.

This section also includes three contributions illustrating or describing key transperformative events. The artist portfolio of TouVA, or Victoria Stanton and Sylvie Tourangeau, as noted came out of the transitory and transactional activities they mobilized as key core members of the Trans-Montréal project. This four-page spread activates in the form of print media their lyrical, ongoing transformational and transactional impulse, deploying the performative body in social space – here an activity denoted through a meandering red line – to enliven others (who become participants) and raise consciousness of the micro-gestures through which we engage the world. This activity was transformational for the Trans-Montréal group, and they have captured that energy here.

Dino Dinco’s short piece describes a radical performance event he organized in 2015 in La Zona Centro, Mexicali, which bears an uneasy and transgressive relationship to documentation and archives. Like TouVA, Dinco is interested in weaving performers into the fabric of already performative engagements in urban spaces and seeing where such interventions lead. Dinco is resistant to conventional modes of documenting such events, hoping (in his words) to ‘transgress conventional modes of performance conception, transmission and translation’ – begging questions, again similarly to TouVA, about where the ‘performance art’ ends and everyday life begins.

Finally, Noémie Despland-Lichtert describes an important ‘urban lab’ project she activated with the Montréal-based performance collective Points de vue in 2014, wherein the group sought to interrogate the costs of urban gentrification in the city by examining particular weed growth at a waterfront development area to reveal the past industrial and even pre-industrial uses of the site. The range of weeds discovered testifies to Montréal’s key role as a node in a global network of trade that accelerated with early European colonialism – inhabited initially by Indigenous tribes and then by French fur trappers, founded as a city by the French in the seventeenth century and located at a key location within the Saint Lawrence River, Montréal was a premier site for the flows of people and goods (including seeds) that defined and sustained settlement in North America.

This understanding of Montréal as local and global (as translocal) brings us back into the PSi Fluid States project and the initial impetus for Trans-Montréal – not only to explore the Euro-American role of the city as a node in a fluid trade network, but also to acknowledge and honour the island’s original (or earlier) manifestation as an important site for Huron and other native tribes and animal and plant life. As Despland-Lichtert sums it up evocatively, the ‘local presence of this unique biodiversity attests to transnational migrations and the ephemeral nature of the transforming landscape’.

CODA

The plethora of transconcepts explored, expanded upon and mobilized by the essays and project in ‘On Trans/Performance’ justifies my initial conviction – in 2012 – that Montréal had something to offer Fluid States. While not all of the contributions here are about Montréal, or by or about creative people located in the city, Montréal could be said to be the perfect lived and living site of what trans puts in motion in the ‘fluid states of knowing and unknowing’ that the PSi organizers hoped to explore. It is a paradigm of Euro-American urbanism, shaped so deeply by the oppressions and violence of colonialism – but also by the translations, transmigration and transactions that make life in our increasingly globalized world so rich and yet (so often) conflicted. It epitomizes a translational culture: although the local tribal languages have long been subdued, they are rising again to mingle with the ‘Franglish’ that Montrealers speak so fluidly and so well. Translation is key not only to speaking in Montréal – it is crucial to modes of embodiment and social exchange.

Finally, Montréal has a past. It holds transhistories within its walls, roads and stones and passageways (and its weeded empty lots!), even as these are being changed again through gentrification. In this way, Montréal epitomizes most big cities in North America and Western Europe – where late capitalism threatens to erase history by making everything anew. While Fluid States, and Trans-Montréal, celebrated fluidity in a general sense, this kind of fluidity without borders we must guard against, and our historians and artists contributing here make clear why. Articulating ever-new modes of understanding the past – or transhistories (connected through the trans always to the present concerns and motivations) – is the only and best way to maintain our integrity as thinking and making people invested in the power of performance to transform.

Notes

1 Mel Chen discusses their use of terminology as well, see Chen (2012: 137).

2 See the Fluid States website, http://www. fluidstates.org/page. php?par=16&id=20, accessed 13 July 2015.

3 See http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/enc14-work-groups/item/2537-enc14-workgroups-trans, accessed 7 July 2016.

4 For my textual and photographic documentation of the event, see http://www.fluidstates.org/article.php?id=180 and http://www.fluidstates.org/article.php?id=181. On the Fluid States project as a whole, see http://www.fluidstates.org/. All accessed 7 July 2016.

5 My father’s four grandparents were all missionaries in Madurai, and my grandparents grew up together there. The grandfather mentioned here, John Peter Jones, was born in Wales and immigrated to the US as a teenager; the other three were US born.

6 Silton, email to the author, 15 July 2016.