“DIFFERENCE, DIASPORA, AND THE NATION: THE POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF MINORITARIAN PERFORMANCE IN 20th AND 21st CENTURY ITALY”
7-8 February 2025
A two-day hybrid conference organized by the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics, Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, University of Milan, Italy
Italy has long been home to rich and varied performance cultures. The live and digital performances created by its minoritarian cultural producers have served as a vibrant site for the negotiations of the politics of belonging, offering alternative personal and historical narratives regarding the self and the nation and developing new visions of the future. Often overshadowed by Italy’s powerful mainstream theatre, opera, film, and performance art scenes, these aesthetically innovative and politically significant performance worlds have failed to receive the level of scholarly attention they deserve. This conference addresses this gap by placing particular emphasis on performance’s capacity to intervene in politics—not only in the name of liberatory or progressive goals but across the political spectrum.
The conference will consider research papers addressing the role of theatre, dance, music, performance art, spoken word, and video art in building or challenging communities and fostering critical understandings of self, community, and nation at the margins in Italy. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
- Staging the Nation
- Intersectional Perspectives on the Performance of Social Identities
- Performances of Gender and Sexuality
- Diasporic Performance: Memory, Heritage, and Cultural Transmission
- Performing Citizenship
- Community Building Through Performance
- Minoritarian Utopianism in Performance
We encourage innovative theoretical frameworks and methodologies for studying these phenomena, and welcome comparative studies and transnational perspectives.
The online day of the conference will be held on February 7 using Microsoft Teams. The in-person day will be held on February 8 at the University of Milan’s main campus Via Festa del Perdono 7, Ca’ Granda, Room 109. The conference will be conducted in English.
Submission Guidelines:
We welcome proposals from scholars in all relevant disciplines—including but not limited to theatre and performance studies, dance, music, art history, visual and media studies, cultural and diaspora studies, anthropology, sociology and political science—and at all stages of their career.
Abstracts of between 200 and 250 words, along with a brief bio of no more than 100 words should be submitted to daniel.dilliplane@unimi.it by January 1, 2025. Please include “Difference, Diaspora, and the Nation” in the subject line of your email. Proposals should be written in English. Please also indicate whether you intend to participate online or in-person. Each participant will have 20 minutes for their presentation. Notification of acceptance will be sent by January 10, 2024.
The conference committee is planning to publish a special issue in a leading journal comprised of selected papers from the conference.
There is no fee for participation. The conference is supported by the Cariplo Foundation as part of the project “Negotiating Abjection: Performance and Politics among Turkey’s Diasporas in Lombardy,” Grant no. 2022-3538, PI Dr. Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay.
Please contact Dr. Christina Banalopoulou at christina.banalopoulou@unimi.it with any questions.