Fabienne
Kanor in Transgression: Documenting, Performing, Writing, and Filming the
Insufferable. A Multivolume Anthology. This
multivolume anthology project centers on Fabienne Kanor’s performance,
literary, filmic and journalistic works through critical examinations of their
embedded transgressive aesthetic.
Intended
Focus:
This timely
contribution is the first anthology focused on the body of work of
award-winning author, filmmaker, and journalist Fabienne Kanor. It tackles the
transgressive aesthetics that inform/arise from her filmic, literary,
performance, and journalistic engagements. The multivolume anthology will
foster a reading together of the literary, visual, and performing arts to
arrive at a transregional, trans-genre, and transdisciplinary conversation in
Africana studies writ large.
Kanor’s
body of work puts in place a complex connectedness and fragmentation of bodies
that often tell, perform, and suffer repulsive, offensive and detestable
behaviors. These experiences (of trauma, displacement, resistance, citizenship,
de-civilization, healing, desire, gender, or sexual identity) go against bodily
decorum and make tangible an epistemology that upholds a sense of collective
identity and memory. Through her transgressive representations of propriety,
consumption, and commodification, Kanor’s artistic works prevent the audience
from looking away and establish an engaged witnessing and agency. Through
multisensorial imagery (auditory, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic and
tactile) Kanor emphasizes the transgressional manifestation of her
protagonists/subjects; bringing the audience closer to her
protagonists/subjects’ body revealed through its many smells, touches,
densities, and forms. The artist rejects processes of beautification and does
not follow classic ideals of representational ideologies concerning women, the
Caribbean, or blackness (among others). She creates ambivalent paradigms of
being instead of a set of normalizing principles through subjects bending the
framework of canonical entelechy. Kanor’s works also take on the imperialist
discourse of slavery and shift the national archives’ valueas illustrated in
Humus (2006) where Kanor complicates the context of the archive and changes its
significance and meaning, by reinterpreting the enduring archive from a March
23, 1774 captain’s report focused on justifying the loss of a valuable cargo of
fourteen unnamed African women (who escaped from his ship’s hold to jump overboard)
to reinvesting them with embodied experiences, identities, and voices as she
narrates their own stories. In her artistic productions, Kanor unremittingly
struggles both with how to give voice to these voiceless, insufferable, and
unwatchable black experiences, and how to shoulder their legacy. As she traces
what Francophone studies scholar Françoise Lionnet calls “Geographies of Pain”
(1997), Kanor also performs a physical and transatlantic maroonage/passage into
the spaces that witnessed the slave trade or the places that continue to reveal
the brutalizing and dehumanizing effects of slavery on the inheritors across
race, gender and class (Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950). Echoing
Edouard Glissant, Kanor sees in places of confinement (whether geographical,
psychological, emotional, or social) a space that holds embodied “fermentation,
transformation, Creolization, dilution and exchange” (Francis, “Entretien avec
Fabienne Kanor, ‘l’Ante-llaise par excellence,’” 2016). Kanor’s creative process
is embodied through movement, development, and transformation or what Caribbean
scholar, Dominique Aurélia theorized as a “poétique du chancellement” (2016).
From Nantes to Saint-Louis Senegal, Martinique to Cameroon, Guadeloupe to
Louisiana, or Haiti to Nigeria (to name but a few), Kanor’s cartography of
creation marks her own acts of resistance as she refuses to lose sight of her
own humanity. Her filmic, literary and performance outsets remain rooted in
embodied “désontologue et réontologique” experiences (Anny Dominique Curtius,
2000).
This
multivolume anthology exposes the multi-modal art forms, practices, and
aesthetics found in Kanor’s works – inclusive of rituals, text-based works,
visual art, sound art, and performance art. It uncovers her trans-genre texts
as hybrid makings also signifying the hybrid bodies they represent. Hence,
issues of commodity, Creolization, trace, site, body, or landscape (to only
name a few) will be analyzed through their porous (rather than impenetrable)
boundaries between the literary, visual, and/or virtual. Contributions will
offer new theoretical and critical examinations of Fabienne Kanor’s creative
process: How can we investigate, theoretically or critically, Kanor’s
transgressive aesthetics? In what ways her transgressive works challenge
Western conventional perception of genres, the standardization of cultures and
the material archive? How do Kanor’s works historicize agencies of resistance,
test moral sensibilities, sabotage the voyeuristic gaze and sexualized pleasures?
How do they stimulate a new methodology for reading the black body?
Field of
Studies:
Transdisciplinary
critical studies are highly encouraged: Africana Studies; Caribbean Studies;
Conflict Studies; Cross-Cultural/Feminist Geography/Cartography; Ethnic and
Cultural Studies; Film Studies; Francophone Studies; Visual and Performing Arts
Studies; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Post/colonial Studies.
Corpus of
Study:
Fabienne
Kanor’s Audio Documentaries; Documentary Films; Critical Essays; Performances;
Movies; Novels; Plays; Short Stories
Themes of
study include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Activism; (Caribbean/African Diaspora) Activist politics; Feminism; Community;
- Archipelagoes; Islands; Trace; Site; Landscape; Ecosystem; Eco-criticism;
- Body; Bones; Commodity; Propriety; Consumption; Commodification; Dis/possession;
- Branding; Ethics and morals; Entertainment and interpretation;
- Neo/Colonization; Decolonization; Bondage; (Police) Brutality; Alienation;
- Citizenship; Emancipation; Belonging; Nation; Homeland; Geopolitics;
- Creolization; Créolité; Poétique of Relations; Caribbeanness; Négritude; Rhizome
- Diaspora; Dis/placements; Im/migration; Transnationalism; Trafficking; Tourism;
- Embodiment; Corporeality; Ancestral Voices; Memory; Knowledge;
- Film; Documentary; Imaging and Imagining; Lens; Gaze; Recording;
- Gender, sex and sexuality; Jouissance, Pleasure; Performance;
- Marginal identities, desires, and negotiations; Polycentric and heterogeneous identities
- Mass culture aesthetics; Shock culture aesthetics; Mediated representations;
- (Global mass) Media; Mass dissemination; Capitalist confluences;
- Monuments; Archives; (Afro/Caribbean) Historiography; (Living) Artifacts; Traditions;
- Performatic repertoire (oral traditions, music, dance, rituals); Cosmology;
- Power; “Power-knowledge;” “Microphysics of power;” Normalization;
- Re-counting; Recovering; Repetition; Circle;
- Transgression; Subversion; Unsoundness; Prohibition; Madness; Provocation; Aporia;
- (Kanor in) Translation;
- Trauma; Blès; Pain; (Gender-based) Violence;
- Sea; Liquids; Blood; Middle Passage; Cale; Bateau négrier; Ventre; Confinement;
- Polycentric/heterogeneous aesthetics; Multi/Sensorial; Polyvocal; Polyphony; Hybridity
- Survival; Resistance; Empowerment;
- Visual art; Sound art; Performance art; Symbolic drama; Ritualizing;
- Witnessing; Participating; Ownership; Depicting; Representing
Guidelines
and Important Dates for Contributors:
All
articles will be subject to blind peer review.
Materials:- An abbreviated CV and a list of research interests
- Abstracts/Proposals:
- Word Limit: 550
- Language: English or French
- Due date: September 15, 2018
- Late submissions will not be accepted
Notification
of Acceptance:
Complete
(Accepted) Articles Submission:
Main
Contact Person:
October 15,
2018
- Word Limit: 9,000 including notes and list of works cited
- Language: English or French
- Due Date: March 15, 2019
- Late submissions will not be accepted
Send
Materials/Inquiries to: Dr. Gladys M. Francis gfrancis5@gsu.edu
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