Performance and Communities Performing Punctuation

Bol

This book invites readers and performers to reimagine and transform the rules that shape language and identity. Performing Punctuation challenges the colonial legacy embedded in the English language’s use of punctuation. It combines essays, performances, and experimental texts that converse across disciplines, creating space to rethink how language functions and whom it serves. Tracing the strident and rigid punctuation practices of English language laced with cultural and linguistic hierarchies, the book exposes the colonial roots of punctuation. Together, the contributions envision punctuation being recast as responsive, playful, generous, and inclusive — opening space for a wider diversity of readers, listeners, performers, writers, and practices. Spanning literature, poetry, visual and performance art, cultural studies, language education, postcolonial studies, language studies, film, and sound, Performing Punctuation offers insights for academics, practitioners, and students across the arts and humanities who seek to explore how language can be decolonized, reimagined, and performed. Julieanna Preston is an artist concerned with the ethics of materiality and ecologies in the context of place-responsive live art performance, vocalisation and writing. Anna Brown is a New Zealand-based designer, researcher and educator. Through form, materials and typography, she investigates how the vehicle of the book can amplify the content it contains. Performing Punctuation gathers writers/performers to highlight, question and contest colonising facets of English language punctuation, while looking for ways to reveal and rarefy these proprietary rules such that they are responsive, playful, generous, generative, and ultimately more inclusive. A transdisciplinary collaborative book that brings awareness to the limiting effects of the prevailing dominance of English language and its vociferous use of punctuation. The book's content and design is guided by this question: How can English language punctuation discard its domineering and strident overcoat to enable a greater diversity of readers, listeners, performers, writers, and practices? Performing Punctuation, bears out digressions, indiscretions, transgressions and fabulations of grammatical marks unfaithful to propriety. It makes public an on-going and refreshed movement to play humorously and tenaciously with those small but powerful writing marks that regulate, discipline and structure textual language and spoken discourse. These marks, symbols and rule-makers are anything but a mere neutral grammatical systems; they are language gremlins and pixies; inflecting and infecting agents with histories, voices and messages of their own accord. These marks are understood as part and parcel to the on-going colonising history of the English language. The collection brings together of a range of voices – Māori and Pākehā – and the collaborative editorial relationship with contributors allows conversation to develop between the elements of the book.

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Pagina's: 296, Paperback, Intellect Books