CfP - "Vocal Embodiment and Remediation"

Type: Call for Papers
Date: September 23, 2016
Location: Netherlands
Subject Fields: Humanities, Literature, Music and Music History, Theatre & Performance History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies


In the past decades, the encompassing interaction between literature and media in live performance has paved the way for epistemologies centered on vocality, performativity, and embodiment. More recently, Jelena Novak’s notion of ‘Postopera’ (2015) raises questions about the role of the body in contemporary technoculture and the traditions technologies transmit and adapt: “the relationship between the body and the voice [in their digital remediation] is the locus for a redefinition both of opera itself and our understanding of it.” This panel will further explore redefinitions of the voice-body interrelation as staged in literature, music, and performances, both historical and contemporary. As with postopera, we will follow trajectories in musicology, gender studies, and media studies, in order to further understand the interface between (singing) bodies and voices. In addition to the postoperatic perspective, which returns to the body as one of the most compelling components – even one of the main texts – of today’s digital landscapes of voice, we will also consider how critical observations issued from posthumanism have repeatedly questioned the ties that bond the voice to the body.

This panel seeks to convene media and literary critics, musicologists, and composers, as well as other cultural theorists committed to further deconstructing voices and their materialities of embodiment. We welcome papers examining vocality’s technological mediation of bodies from a broad range of critical perspectives and in different media: from voice to embodiment studies, and from literature (both print and electronic) to (digital) opera and performance art. As our goal is to broaden the scope and the relevance of vocal embodiment for interdisciplinary study, we also welcome presentations that do not directly pertain to literary texts, but will nevertheless contribute to our understanding of these different areas of study.

To participate in this panel, please submit your abstract via the ACLA’s website before the deadline on Sept. 23, 2016. If you would like to discuss your paper with us before submitting an abstract, please feel free to contact us by email.

Contact Email: jrdaoust3@gmail.com