期刊名称:Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation
印刷版ISSN:1712-0624
出版年度:2012
卷号:8
期号:2
语种:English
出版社:University of Guelph. College of Arts
摘要:"Borders, Corridors, and Lines of Desire: Outposts of Improvisation on the Unmarked" is a large-scale, interdisciplinary, performative research project that aims to bring together our involvement with improvisation and our interest in ethnographically addressing the forces that expand and constrain culturally inflected ways of being throughout the borderlands of South Texas (USA). Borders and borderlands have long captured the attention of scholars and critically informed artists who rightfully regard these interstatial environs as frontiers of identity, where states are at "the extremity of their power" to shape the quotidian lives of the people who actually inhabit these fuzzy frontiers. In this project, we are interested in investigating, contemplating, processing, and communicating how individuals (either acting alone or collectively) are able to exercise their agency in responding to and challenging global flows, and how improvisation (as both a critical musicking practice and a fieldwork methodology) might move and illuminate this agency. Several key questions that are carrying us into our research project include: Does improvisation engender strong, flexible identities in individuals? Or do individuals with strong, flexible identities gravitate toward improvisation? To what extent does improvisation already play a part in the circulation of ethical dialogue and action throughout South Texas? How can one claim all of one's personal histories without locking oneself into fixed models that placate to the contours of iconic images? Could our research provide a critical localized and humanized perspective of what Appadurai has called "globalization from below"?