Global Performance Studies special double issue: Decolonisation and performance studies

This Double Special Issue is a gesture towards an engagement with decolonisation and performance studies that considers a future for the field that is challenging to hegemonic configurations of power and epistemic privilege that place particular narratives, methodologies, and epistemologies at the “centre.” The question of “decolonisation” here, no matter how contested, is an invocation of a different future, with a promise of repair; is a self-reflexive iterative process that is necessary, difficult, and generative. The twelve articles featured in the issue demonstrate firm commitment to centring marginalised, under- or mis-represented narratives, histories, and epistemologies, which is critical to transforming knowledge production in performance studies and other fields. The contributions stem from, or engage with, cultural, historical, and geo-political contexts that span five continents, or that simultaneously cross multiple ones. Coalitional authorship occupies half of the collection, continuing GPS’s trajectory in experimenting with modes of coalitional publishing, and amplifying the politics expressed therein, in relation to urgent debates in the field. This is GPS’s first trilingual issue (Arabic, English, and Spanish), and is also the first one published using the Open Journal Systems platform, extending the journal’s commitment to Open Access and Open Source alternatives to extractivist publishing economies.

Moreover, this project partly stems from an embodied, lived experience, occupied as an epistemic position, and a space of resistance.