For this special issue on “Magic,” Theatre Journal invites submissions that consider magic as concept and practice, broadly construed, with a particular interest in how magic aligns with other terms like alchemy, transformation, trickery, prophecy, conjuring, and ceremony. Magical practices, phenomena, practitioners, and events are not often at the forefront of theatre, performance, and dance studies’ scholarship. Through categorization as, on the one hand, popular entertainment, and, on the other hand, a component of spiritual or ritual practice, magic has seemed beyond the scope of the concert and/or avant-garde traditions that have tended to dominate Eurocentric theatre history and theory. Yet, magic is also a common descriptor applied to the theatrical event by critics, spectators, and promoters alike, and a foundational assumption of what staged performance uniquely provides that can be traced to the oft-repeated claim that theatre requires us to suspend our disbelief. “Magic” is a historically contingent term nonetheless relevant to varying geographies and time periods; magic’s possible activation of imagination, transformation, and healing shares trans-geographic and cross-temporal cultural significance. Understanding whose performances are indexed as “magic,” and by whom, reveals continuities of magic’s availability as a term of imperialism alongside its ability to sustain individuals and communities.
Submissions might address magic and its technologies, affects, dramaturgies and sensations; magic’s connection to the performance of community roles like knowledge holding and ancestral memory; the use of “magic” to brand various performance practices and as a driver of performance’s economics; the myriad ways that magic is colonized, gendered, and racialized in performance history and theory; and critical approaches to various artists for whom magic is a core element of their practice. Overarching questions of the special issue include: How might we understand performance histories and theories via practices of magic considered commercial, vernacular, ritual, and/or experimental? How do performances of magic function as methods of organization, community-building, social formation, and political articulation? What alternatives to the limitations of empiricism can magic offer to theatre, performance, and dance studies as world-making endeavors?
This special issue will be edited by Theatre Journal coeditor Ariel Nereson. We will consider both full length essays for the print edition (6,000-9,000 words) as well as proposals for short provocations, video and/or photo essays, and other creative, multimedia material for our online platform (500-2,000 words). For information about submission, visit: https://jhuptheatre.org/theatre-journal/author-guidelines.
Article submissions (6,000-9,000 words) should reach us by December 1, 2024. If this deadline is not possible for you due to extenuating circumstances, please contact Ariel Nereson to inquire about a possible extension. She welcomes questions and inquiries at anereson@buffalo.edu.
The deadline for submissions to the online platform (500-2,000 words) is April 1, 2025. Online editor Tarryn Chun welcomes questions and inquiries regarding submissions to the online platform at tchun@nd.edu.
Submit via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/theatrejournal.
Laura Edmondson