Back to MLA
After three years on the job market, I swore that I'd take some time off from the anxiety-fest that is MLA. Looks like that time off is only one year...
Up until now, I have gotten every conference paper abstract I've submitted to a conference accepted...except that is for anything I ever submitted to MLA. I once got a special session paper accepted, but then the session didn't make the cut.
This morning, after years of futility, I learned that my paper "The Inscrutable Terrorist and the Righteous Rioter: Violence, Dialogue and Representability in Oral History Performance," is accepted for the Literature and the Other Arts panel on "Performance: Riots, Uprisings, and Terrorism."
What's interesting (to me, at least) about this is that the paper will feature some discussion of Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, which I saw at Studio Theatre in DC last fall, and which I generally didn't like. I thought initially that the trip was something of a professional waste (although socially, a winner).
Anyway, after lots of conferences and a few articles, I felt like an MLA paper was one of the last things I wanted to check off the list (that and a book contract). So now it looks like I've got that monkey off my back . . .
After my shortish bloggy hiatus, I've got some less self-congratulatory stuff to post (like my ambivalence about having that last post linked through IHE, or some notes on the conference I attended last week), but those will have to wait until I'm done slogging through a stack of grading. But this was just the pick-me-up I needed to get me through that (since the girl scout cookies still haven't materialized . . .).
Comments
I really wanted to see Guantanamo when it was playing in DC, and I'll be curious to know why you didn't like it. Congrats on getting an MLA paper accepted. I felt the same way last year when I had a paper accepted.
Posted by: Chuck | March 1, 2006 11:36 AM
I think my whole problem with the play was that it seemed to betray the promise of oral history performance, which I see as both representing and provoking dialogue where none it is most needed. While it did represent the Administration's position, it did so in a cartoonish way (which is easy in these times), and so the play felt like a lecture, like a series of didactic monologues, instead of a genuine exchange of persepctives.
Part of this, I'm arguing, is that the nature of the discourse on terrorism is actively anti-dialogical: One the one hand, the violence of terrorism and the unknowability of the terrorists themselves precludes actual discussion (The play avoids this only by insisting that the subjects of the play are not terrorists but says nothing about those who are), while the official "We do not negotiate with terrorists" approach of governments re-affirms the impossibility of dialogue.
It's a new direction for me in some existing research on oral history performance, and I'm pretty excited about it.
Posted by: Cats & Dogma | March 1, 2006 12:38 PM
Congratulations on the accepted paper!
Posted by: CJ | March 1, 2006 1:49 PM
Interesting. You should check out the films "The War Within" and "Paradise Now" (I've reviewed both on my blog). I'd argue that both films seek to complicate that representation to some extent and do so in ways that are interesting. Both films are told from the point-of-view of (would-be) suicide bombers who find their missions complicated when tehy actually meet/face the people they wish to attack. I do think that both films are flawed but still well worth renting.
Posted by: Chuck | March 1, 2006 3:26 PM
your girl scout cookies must be the 2 dozen boxes still in our dining room. my daughter lost the list of people who ordered them...
congrats on the paper.
Posted by: timna | March 6, 2006 12:28 AM