Transient Performance

A photograph of Scherezade Garcia’s In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise, from the series Theories of Freedom, (2011) adorns the cover of our special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. The material artwork is a sculpture that uses more than thirty swim rings (also called inner tubes or lifesavers) of different sizes and in various hues of blue: either solid or with prints. Suspended in the air or against a wall, these objects are bound to one another with plastic ties; many of them have airport luggage tags that read “JFK.” The assemblage of flotation devices arranged on a vertical axis functions as an object to be seen and one through which a spectator might gaze because of the transparency of some of the materials as well as the doughnut quality of each inflatable. Garcia queries what and how we perceive through these relatively quotidian items used for leisure and/or safety. The airport tags further prompt viewers to link these questions to travel: who and what can move and with what risk? How long might a plastic or rubber tube keep one afloat? The suggested passage of both space and time conveyed by Garcia’s work as well as the potentially rapid shifts from security to precarity connoted by the lifering inform our scholarly project.

Transient Performance resulted from six years of work with a diverse body of scholars whose research interrogates the polyvalent significations of the word “transient”. Although not everyone with whom we worked appears in the culminating publication, we are appreciative of and indebted to the productive and insightful conversations throughout our journey. The Transient Performance Working Group began with the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) conference in Minneapolis on the theme “Trans-”. This first iteration required participation in a reading group that largely focused on queer of color critique, performance studies, and black feminist theory. As we developed our ideas, it became clear that any investigation into transient performance must contend with histories of racialized forced movement in a global framework. Consequently, our call for papers for the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting in Utrecht reflected this focus. Here we began to solidify the body of scholars that would bring Transient Performance to life. Sam C. Tenorio, Lynn Mie Itagaki, and Jennifer M. Gully joined the group, which already included Gwyneth Jane Shanks from the initial conference. The presentations and resulting conversations urged the group to delve into materiality — exploring the effects of (forced) transience on bodies and bodies that enact transience. Our meeting at the 2017 ASTR Conference “Extra/ordinary Bodies” in Atlanta took up this call, interrogating the contingent performances of extraordinary bodies that transgress boundaries in their refusal either to stay in place or in plain sight. Stefanie A. Jones and Áine Josephine Tyrrell joined the project at this stage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the foray into marronage as well as the group’s continued invocation of queer of color critique prompted us to consider questions of futurity and led us to critical refugee studies. In 2018, we convened our final working session as the Transient Performance Group at the ACLA annual meeting in Los Angeles. In addition to the conference session, the working group included a reading and writing retreat made possible by a grant from the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. During the writing retreat, we spent a significant amount of time thinking through how frameworks from critical refugee studies impact our understandings of transient performance and our own readings of our case studies. We also discussed key terms including refugee, migrant, civilian, and transience as well as how contributors’ work spoke (or didn’t) to each other. These conversations significantly shaped the production of Transient Performance, a collection of essays that proposes transient performance as a new analytic that can contend with the intersections of black and refugee peoples, fugitivity, performance, geography, and transnational movement. We think comparatively across disparate national boundaries as well as formal structures of representation. The volume of scholarship seems particularly salient in an era of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement that concerns itself with the dispossession and precarity of black life on the African continent as well as in the diaspora.