Saturday, October 31th 2:45 – 4:15

Session Room: Loft 2

1) Ilana Szobel, Brandeis University
Choreographing the Disabled Body: Performing Political Change

From its inception, the Zionist movement has created a conceptual connection between the revival of the nation and the well-being and prosperity of its people. Much has been written about the juxtaposition of nation-building and the body in a Zionist context, as well as about the gendered aspect of this “muscular Judaism.” Yet most of the critical discourse about Israeli society ignores the idealization of the abled body.

Israeli negation of the disabled body, and especially women’s disabled bodies, is made even more noticeable in the absence of visible bodily difference and disability in Israeli culture, especially in Israeli performance. It is in this social and cultural space that current dancers with disabilities create. The presence of their (culturally unwelcomed disabled) body, therefore, interrupts the socio-cultural processes of molding the faultless Zionist body.

By focusing on the work of the renowned Jewish-Israeli dancer and performance artist Tamar Borer (b. 1965, in 1990 was involved in a car accident that left her paralyzed in both legs), this talk examines the implications of disability and embodiment in Israeli society. The talk looks into ways in which disability is not a condition to overcome or to adjust to, but rather a lacuna of, or a starting point for, radical social change. The talk explores the ways in which disabled dance in Israel creates political resistance, and how disabled experiences come to act out political agency. Hence, it raises questions such as: In what ways do the visual markers of “limited” mobility, such as walkers, wheelchairs, or canes, affect sociopolitical concepts such as control, agency, and authority? What does it mean to address the political arena from the position of the disabled occupier? And how can the non-Apollonian frame challenge common perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

2) Dhruba J. Neupane, University of Waterloo
Remapping Canada in Waren Cariou's Lake of the Prairies

This paper places Waren Cariou’s memoir Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging at the intersection of place, narrative, affect and memory. The ideas of nomadic, lost and found, forgotten and hidden identities, and identities as discursive constructs rather than pre-givens are central to Lake. An active and “performative” re-membering features prominently in the memoir to suggest a nonpresociality of identities, as opposed, for example, to more demanding national, regional, and ethnocultural identities that Bhabha would call the “pedagogic.” Nothing is autopoetic or sui generis in the preformative we are directed to in the memoir.

In the memoir our attention is drifted away from the pedagogical repetition (Bhabha) and the museological, official version of history, characterized by Cariou’s school trip to a museum. Cariou’s archaeological intervention comes in the form of his digging (e.g., the section titled Unearth), and this “ORIENTATION” (a chapter) to alternative history and chronotopia become evident when he deluded his father into believing he and his friend unearthed an arrowhead from a ranch. This act also implies both the act of recovery and the reminder that writing cultural memory and exploring self-representation is a rather, if necessary, complex work.

The chapters “ONCE UPON a TOWN”,  “Born in Forget”, and the mystery and myths about Meadow Lake reassert the idea of chronotope (Bakhtin, Foucault) and heterotopia (the placial margins), as opposed to history, temporality, and progressive narratives. The memoir overall foregrounds the affective, the experienced, the lived. This makes sense because Cariou’s is neither a nationalistic nor a regional nor an ethnocentric take of place and memory. Unlike the particular, reactionary, and nostalgic versions of a nation and a people, Lake demands a more complex digging.

3) Gabrielle Moser, OCAD
Developing agents: artistic approaches to performing and undoing citizenship in Canada

Citizenship—as a status, claim, legal category, tool of governmentality, and ideal—seems to lie just beyond our peripheral vision, coming in and out of view as an object of study in disciplines as diverse as education, geography, legal studies, history, postcolonial studies, and, more recently, the histories of art and visual culture. Despite extensive attempts at defining citizenship, what remains untheorized is how citizenship is visually represented. By focusing on the work of three Canadian-based contemporary artists, this paper asks whether we can develop the image of citizenship more clearly by looking for evidence of how it is represented in photographic archives from the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, I focus on the ways in which contemporary artists use historical materials to make non- and would-be citizens visible to the public. Examining three recent projects by Canadian artists—filmmaker Ali Kazimi’s Fair Play (2014), a three-dimensional video installation that reenacts the infamous Komagata Maru incident of 1914, when more than 300 Indian immigrants were denied entry into Canada, despite claiming their rights as imperial citizens; Hajra Waheed’s Sea Change (2012–ongoing), a sprawling “visual novel” that traces the disappearance of nine characters immigrating from India to Canada; and Deanna Bowen’s Invisible Empires (2013), a multimedia installation that contrasts the history of the Klu Klux Klan in Canada with official immigration policies—this paper posits that contemporary artworks operate as framing devices for presenting difficult histories to the public, and asks how artists harness the affective dimensions of the archive to question how citizenship is understood across generations of viewers. Of interest is the work artists do as researchers in existing archives, looking for claims to citizenship that state officials and researchers did not at first “see.”