21st Annual Conference of The Space Between Society: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945

Time: May 30-June 1, 2019
Venue: South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD
Proposals by: December 1, 2018

What is the role of staging in The Space Between? What does it look like, where does it occur, and how does it function?

Staging is an essential part of how we conceptualize history, literature, culture, and art. The concept of staging naturally invokes performance and invites us to examine this period’s performing arts: its theatre, dance, and music, its art and artists, celebrities and entrepreneurs, its practices and innovations. Staging expands the realm of performance to include more diverse arts, media, and productions, such as fashion, literature, performance art, and interior design. Technical innovations extended modes of performance to radio, cinema, television, staging the voice and the body in new and provocative ways to different and diverse audiences.

However, staging extends beyond the arts into other realms of society. We can observe how staging operates within consumer culture, from the department store to the popular periodical, and we can track the growth of industries that relied on mass production. The term embraces other registers of performance and enables us to consider the performativity of language and gender, warfare and nationhood, politics and protest. Staging shapes the way we remember the present and the past, both as individuals and as a society.

The organizers welcome paper proposals that engage with the various forms and meanings of staging in the 1914-1945 period, across disciplines and media, on research and/or pedagogy. Possible topics also include:

• Staging production (economy, labor, Britain’s General Strike, the assembly line)
• Staging alternatives (cabaret, avant-garde, Dada)
• Staging exhibitions (visual arts, art history, museums, collections, world fairs, colonial expositions)
• Staging the future (International Expo of Art and Technology in Modern Life, the talkies)
• Staging design (Ideal Home Show, Omega workshops, the runway)
• Staging travel (travel writing, refugees, evacuees, soldiers)
• Staging intersections (migration, transnationalism)
• Staging a coup (fascism, communism, radical suffrage)
• Staging disaster (the Holocaust, the influenza pandemic, war)
• Staging the nation (representations, developing histories, colonialism, politics)
• Staging a comeback (spectacle, hoax, extravaganza)
• Staging the academy (periodization, pedagogy)
• Staging authorship (publication, periodicals, staged readings, celebrity authors)
• Behind the Scenes (makeup, lighting, costume, sound design)
• Unusual staging (puppets, magic, circus)
• Offstage and waiting in the wings

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to nicole.flynn@sdstate.edu by December 1, 2018. Submissions should include the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information.

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