ATDS International Report, August 2010

ATDS International Report
August 2010

Submitted by Barbara Ozieblo, International Secretary

The ATDS International Committee was created a year ago, and members have communicated chiefly by e-mail, although a few of us coincided at a conference in Toulouse in early June, which enabled us to meet and discuss the issues involved. A report of that meeting was sent to all the members of the committee and to the President of the ATDS and is attached at the end of this report.

To summarize the work of this year:
We identified two areas on which committee members, with the support of the ATDS, need to work:
a. action that will encourage and stimulate work on American theater and drama outside the USA.
b. action that will encourage and stimulate collaborative projects between USA and non-USA scholars on American theater and drama.
The members of the committee feel strongly that both these actions require some sort of financial support.


THE SITUATION OUTSIDE THE USA AS REGARDS RESEARCH ON AMERICAN THEATER AND DRAMA:
Although there are national societies of American Studies in virtually every country, these very rarely have specific work groups devoted to the theater. It seems that Japan and China are exceptions. The Chinese American Drama Society, a part of the China Association of Studies of American Literature, held a conference in Shuzou in 2006, and one in Wuhan in 2009; the Japanese American Studies Society has a research group working on American theater. Initial contact with these societies seemed promising, but we would need to offer a program of specific activities in order to maintain contact. We have asked all the societies that we contacted to keep the ATDS informed of their activities and the society e.mail address of some has already been added to the ATDS listserve as a way of keeping their members informed.

The names and addresses of all European American Studies societies are listed on the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) web: www.eaas.eu/national.htm
The EAAS organizes a conference every two years but has no institutionally supported panels and no space specifically devoted to the theater. The next conference will be held in Izmir, Turkey in 2012 and the CFP should appear shortly on the web. The topic of the conference is “The Health of the Nation” and the dates are: March 30–April 2, 2012.
We strongly urge ATDS members to propose panels on theater; in order to have any chance of acceptance, these should be coordinated by two scholars from different countries.

As far as we have been able to ascertain, the only conferences held regularly in Europe that are devoted specifically to American theater and drama are those held in Spain (the conferences organized by Profs. Marc Maufort and Johan Callens of Brussels have always been devoted to a specific topic/author, like the conference on the Wooster Group). Prof. Ilka Saal, one of the members of the committee, suggested that the ATDS, which participated in the 2009 conference held in Cádiz, be more actively involved in the 2012 conference which will take place in Seville. I have consulted with the organizer of the conference, Prof. Ramón Espejo, and he will be more than happy to work closely with the ATDS. The Spanish conferences serve as a meeting point for European scholars of American drama, and we plan to use the 2012 conference as an occasion to organize future activities, and to strengthen the existing network and promote further outreach.


Other suggestions made by members of the International Committee:
a. promotion of exchanges of scholars between the USA and other countries such as those offered by the experts program. Internationalizing the experts program would raise financial problems for most scholars.
b. students working on dissertations on American theater in Europe frequently encounter problems in finding supervisors, examiners, texts and research material (not everything is on Amazon or Wikipedia!). Perhaps the ATDS graduate students could organize a system of support for their colleagues. Advice, help, support has always, to my knowledge, been readily forthcoming from colleagues in the USA, but always on a personal level. Institutionalizing such contact would make the ATDS more visible.
c. European scholars of American theater and drama should organize to present panels at local, national and international conferences in Europe and elsewhere, specifically the EAAS and the IFTR/FIRT, and the IASA conferences. EAAS, as already explained, does not support specific institutional or topical workshops, but IFTR/FIRT does (there are working groups on Arabic theatre, feminist theatre, Asian theatre . . . ). Prof. Johan Callens has volunteered to establish contact with the organizers of the forthcoming IASA conference in Brazil.
d. FUNDING: obtaining funds from a European organization seems doomed to failure as the EU is interested in developing links between European countries and not in the USA. What possibilities might exist of obtaining funding for joint projects from the Mellon Foundation, for example?
e. Find ways of encouraging more speakers from other parts of the world to participate in ATDS panels at conferences in the USA. One possibility would be to have an ATDS sponsored panel at ATHE on teaching/performance of American plays outside the USA.
f. Find ways of promoting participation of USA members of ATDS in panels on American theater at conferences outside the USA.





OF INTEREST TO ATDS MEMBERS:

Recent conferences:

IFTR 2010 World Congress: Cultures of Modernity
Munich, 26 - 31 July 2010
For conference information, contact: http://www.iftr2010.theaterwissenschaft.uni-muenchen.de/index.html

Indian Society for Theatre Research, 6th Annual Conference. "Indian Theatre - Criticism and Writings: National and International Perspective" (Sardar Patel University, Gujarat, 6-9 January 2010). For additional information, email spu.istr@gmail.com

Forthcoming conferences:
ATDS members who want to participate in conferences in Europe should check out the webs of European American Studies Associations. These are not specifically on American theater/drama, but may include panels/papers on theater. The EAAS web gives detailed information of all the European associations, and, of course, hosts its own conference every two years, the 2010 conference was held in Dublin. The 2012 conference will be held in Izmir (see above). For more information go to http://www.eaas.eu

For information on European national societies of American Studies go to http://www.eaas.eu/national.htm


IASA conference
Fifth World Congress of the International American Studies Association to be held in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, JULY 27th through 29th, 2011 THEME: “AMERICAN CONFIGURATIONS”
For more information go to http://www.iasaweb.org/


SAAS conference (Spanish Association for American Studies)
The Backyard of the USA Mansion: Critical readings of poverty and wealth in the United States
Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) April 14-16, 2011

Panel CFP:” Land/Scapes on the USA Stage: Theatrical Interventions in theLand of Opportunity”
Chair: Noelia Hernando Real. La Salle College-Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

From its very foundation, landscape has been ideologically used in the creation of the USA national identity. As E. L. Magoon put it in his essay “Scenery and Mind”: ‘The diversified landscapes of our country exert no light influence in creating our character as individuals, and in conforming our destiny as a nation.” But while the mythology that the USA was the land of the cornucopia where there was place for everybody and where the common dream of prosperity founded on notions of liberty, equality and free enterprise was transmitted, contesting elements of the myth had to be used and repressed. Native Americans were exterminated or put into reservations, African Americans were enslaved, and immigrants who did not fit into the WASP cosmology were simply left out on the margins of this mythological landscape. In her 1920 play Inheritors, Susan Glaspell already realized that “They’re people from the other side of the world who came here believing in us, drawn from the far side of world by things we say about ourselves. Well, I’m going to pretend – just for fun – that the things we say about ourselves are true” (139). As a living experience, theater provides the audience with the unavoidable confrontation with the landscape of the stage. This panel focuses on the works of American playwrights who explore the possibilities of landscape to discuss questions of poverty and wealth. The overall objective is to discuss the American stage as the site where the American Dream scenario of material and spiritual wealth is re-negotiated, questioned and re-written. This panel welcomes papers which address the following issues:
• How do playwrights explore the relationship between landscape and individual or national destiny regarding poverty and wealth?
• How are the mythological landscapes of the American Dream re-worked?
• How is the stage space used to escape from the land of poverty and /or how does the stage represent the USA as a land of opportunity?
• What are the theatrical relations between migration and American landscapes in the works of USA playwrights?
• What voices are suppressed from the American landscape?

Send abstracts (400-600 words) before 29th Oct 2010 to noelia.hernando@uam.es
More information: http://www.saasweb.org





ATDS International Committee Meeting
Toulouse, 11 June 2001

Members of the International Committee of ATDS who were at the conference “Identités Americaines” in Toulouse (10-11 June 2010) met to discuss what more can be done to strengthen links between the ATDS and scholars of American theater and drama in other parts of the world. Present were Emeline Jouve, Barbara Ozieblo and Ilka Saal; Noelia Hernando-Real, ATDS member from Madrid, who was at the conference, was asked to join us.

We had offered two panels (not specifically ATDS panels) on American drama, “Contemporary American Women Dramatists Explore American Identities” (Noelia Hernando-Real, Miriam Lopez-Rodriguez, Barbara Ozieblo and Inmaculada Pineda-Hernandez) and “American Drama, American Identity” (Matthew Roudane, Emeline Jouve, Taïna Tuhkunen and Ilka Saal), which, although excellent(!) were not well attended – in our experience, this is normal at conferences not specifically on drama. Although Chris Bigsby gave a keynote talk, this was not on the theater.

At the meeting, a brief discussion of what has been done so far by this committee made it clear that in spite of numerous efforts to reach out to organizations outside the USA, the results have not been positive. All the organizations contacted showed cursory interest in being included in the ATDS listserve, but little more. Our conclusion is that American drama is not very popular in Europe (the geographical area we are most familiar with) and that not many scholars devote their research to drama; on the other hand, ATDS members in the USA interested in establishing links with scholars in other parts of the world are confronted with logistical/financial problems as, of course, are all scholars. We feel that some means of stimulating interaction with scholars should be found, particularly at this point in time, when all universities are suffering cutbacks in funding. Any initiative requires resources, and these are not easy to obtain. We believe that a specific international fund/award to scholars wishing to present a paper on drama at international conferences would greatly help establish international contacts.

The venues for American studies scholars in Europe are the national American Studies Associations, and the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) which acts as an “umbrella” society. The members of EAAS are the national societies. EASS holds a conference every two years, in a different European country, and occasionally includes a panel on American theater/drama. There is no organization such as ATHE, ASTRA or ATDS in Europe which focus exclusively on American drama. The only conferences specifically devoted to American drama have been held at the University of Malaga (2000 and 2004) and the University of Cadiz (2009); there is a conference planned at the University of Seville for 2012. We feel that one of our goals should be to obtain a visible space for American drama at the EAAS conference; however, given the structural organization of EAAS, this would have to be done through the national societies.

All present at the meeting felt that the first step should be to form a working group of European scholars of American drama that would lobby their national societies to create space for panels on American drama at their national conferences, and then, lobby through the national societies, for space at the EAAS conference. However, as EAAS panels/workshops are not divided into specific fields/genres of study, I am not sure that much could be achieved through such a course of action.

Ilka Saal suggested that we use the upcoming conference in Seville as a meeting place to create a work group of European drama researchers; at the previous conferences, there have always been scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, as well as from the USA. If the ATDS agrees to actively support the conference, this would indeed be an ideal place to establish the network we feel is essential, and that could lead to the creation of a European American Theatre and Drama Society which could then interact with the ATDS. Possible ATDS support for this conference could be in the form of financing one or two senior members of ATDS who would offer keynote talks, as also travel stipends for younger ATDS members who wish to present a paper at the conference. Both the senior and the younger members of ATDS would have the opportunity to meet with European scholars and so establish further links.