The Drama Review (TDR)

In early 2024 we issued a call for contributions to a special issue of The Drama Review (TDR), edited by Dhanveer Singh Brar, Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider. We invited potential contributors to write articles responding to the project’s central historical proposition about the relations between performance, possession and automation.

The historical account of automation needs to go back at least 500 years to the plantation economies of the Caribbean. In this history human subjects under capitalism always risk becoming automated and are constantly involved in resistance to the threat of automation. This was as true in the plantation as it is today in the Amazon fulfilment warehouse. These situations are different, but they participate in the same logic of production, of goods, services and subjectivities, alongside the refusal to allow this logic to run efficiently

We are especially concerned with styles of performance and cultural assemblages from across this 500-year history which animate this potential so as to reorder, confuse, and dissolve the terms of automation and the cultures in which it operates. We imagine that many examples of such performance will emphasise spontaneity, sociality and the expansion of human bodily and spiritual capacities. We are particularly interested in submissions which explore performances that take on external appearances of disorder and mismanagement in order to mask internally composed modalities of value and intention, or that propose alternate logics of organisation.

This special issue will be published in the Fall of 2025.