Call for Papers (edited collection): Performing the ‘Left’: Explorations of the politics of culture in/between Turkey, Greece and Cyprus since the 1960s

The proposed volume intends to explore the intersection between politics and cultures of the ‘Left’ since the 1960s in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Our specific aim is to locate the moments where the ‘Left’ has been claimed and performed not only through political manifestos and speeches, but also through bodily acts, discursive practices and affective encounters: transformed into distinct modalities of everyday-life practices or bodily performances, danced or sung, but also painted, moulded into sculptures, versed, captured in photographic images or on reels of tape in documentaries and films.

Invited research areas and themes
The volume seeks to attract the contribution of scholars working in diverse fields of the humanities and the social sciences, such as history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, discourse theory and political theory. Potential contributors are encouraged to address the three national contexts from a comparative and/or transfer perspective; still, insightful studies on single countries are welcome. Potential submissions may be associated with, but not necessarily limited to, the following four main themes and their subtopics:

1. Performing Art and the ‘Left’ in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus
- Performing arts and their role in the construction of left-wing identities
- Literature, translation, internationalism and the ‘Left’
- Art festivals as places of affective and performative politics
- Art, the ‘Left’, and Greek-Turkish rapprochement
- Folk art as a terrain of hegemony between the Left and the Right

2. Performing the body and the ‘Left’
- Performing gender, generation and sexuality in ‘left’-wing politics
- Rallies, protests, festivals and the geographies of corporeal encounters in the city
- Bodies and bodily inscriptions echoing the political history of the ‘Left’ through exile, torture, displacement
- Left-wing solidarity, rapprochement and intercultural encounters as seen through the prism of a corporeal movement, approach, and contact

3. Performing the life of things. Songs, symbols and material culture
- Songs, images, objects or products and the affective attachments of the ‘Left’
- Left-wing approaches to mass consumption
- Cultural anti-Americanism as an element of a left-wing identity
- ‘Europe’ as a contested symbol dividing and bridging the ‘Left’

4. Performing movement and mobility in/between Greece, Turkey and Cyprus
- The local, the global and the glocalisation of left-wing identities in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus and in the diasporas. Mobility of left-wingers across national borders in Cyprus, Turkey and Greece, as well as in the diasporas: Did it function as a means of forging transnational, syncretic identities or was it predicated on subtle forms of nationalism? Are those tendencies necessarily mutually exclusive or could they actually be interrelated as facets of ‘glocalisation’, as defined by Roland Robertson?
- Left-wingers as agents of a ‘transnational space’ and the ‘Left’ as an experience of the diaspora: political and national affinities
- Borders as barriers for and as facilitators of the internationalist aspirations of the ‘Left’
- Tourism and face-to-face political interaction. Transnational contact through summer camps organised by the ‘Left’ as well as in excursions informally arranged by Greek, Turkish and Cypriot left-wingers

Prospective authors are strongly advised to read the extended version of our book description, which can be found at http://www.academia.edu/2461683/Performing_the_Left_Explorations_of_the_politics_of_culture_in_between_Turkey_Greece_and_Cyprus_since_the_1960s

Please send an abstract of approximately 500 words and a provisional bibliography to Dr Leonidas Karakatsanis, British Institute at Ankara (lkarak@biaatr.org) and to Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis, Humboldt University in Berlin (papadogn@cms.hu-berlin.de), by March 15, 2013.