Jason Camlot: The Afterlives of a Performance

No próximo dia 15 de outubro de 2024 (14h30), no Anfiteatro III da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra, terá lugar a conferência «The Afterlives of a Performance» por Jason Camlot (Concordia University). Trata-se de uma organização do Centro de Literatura Portuguesa (CLP), através do MATLIT LAB – Laboratório de Humanidades e do Doutoramento em Materialidades da Literatura (Projeto Vox Media: A Voz na Literatura), em parceria com o Mestrado em Escrita Criativa. 

Abstract:

In this talk, Dr. Jason Camlot, director of the SpokenWeb research network, will consider concepts and practical processes that inform how we think about and engage with historical literary events and their audiovisual documentation. Theorizing concepts of “event” and “entity” as defined within the context of archival time-based media, the talk will tell the story of the “afterlife” of a tape-recorded performance by poet Allen Ginsberg in the Sir George Williams University Poetry Series that took place on November 7^th, 1969. “Afterlife” will be approached as a (re)situation of the literary artifact within its material and metaphysical contexts as they concern matters of historical temporality, mediated transmission, and cultural memory. Rather than investigate the ways literary performances themselves are produced and consumed (through curation and audition), this talk will stress how the afterlife of a performance is produced, managed, and maintained through changing media formats, disciplinary protocols, and archival processes.

Camlot will open by considering the concepts of event and entity as they have been debated, discussed, and used in the research and archival development of numerous collections of documentary literary recordings through the SpokenWeb partnership. What defines a literary event as an archival entity that may be defined and fixed for the application of metadata, archival description, and thus made discoverable for research and teaching through digital platforms? Following this introduction of concepts and methods used to define and catalogue items within collections of time-based literary media, he will move into the story of the Ginsberg event and recording, showing how processes like storing, mastering, editing, filing, labelling, holding, digitizing, remastering, and circulating recordings function as cultural techniques, following Bernhard Siegert’s use of that concept, that is, as techniques that produce a latent sense of the performance’s relative worth. In this case, the tape recording of Ginsberg serves as a material trace of his performance and reveals a network of human and non-human actors across the university campus and beyond who were involved in its production, reception, maintenance, and circulation. A performance’s afterlife thus becomes an object of literary and archival value, and consideration of its afterlife helps us understand how our conception and perception of time, transmission, and memory inform our relationship to “the literary” as it was enacted through public events and socially embedded activities.

Author Bio:

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019). and the co-edited collections, Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge, 2023), Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Jeffrey Weingarten, WLUP, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019). Most recently he has co-edited (with Katherine McLeod) a special triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) on “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” You will find his article (co-authored with Andrea Murray and Darren Wershler) on “The Afterlife of Performance,” there. Jason is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021). And he is the principal investigator and director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio.