Popular Entertainments

This working group explores the multitude of global live popular entertainments in both historical and contemporary contexts. We focus especially on those forms that have been neglected by academic researchers and recognize their national and transnational significance as conveyors of meaning.

KEYWORDS

popular
entertainment
popular performance
popular theatre
historiography of the popular

Email address:

Working group general email address coming soon. In the meantime, please reach out to the conveners.

Co-conveners:

Dr. Susan Kattwinkel, College of Charleston, South Carolina, USA, kattwinkels@cofc.edu

Dr. Aastha Gandhi, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, agandhi@aud.ac.in

CFP2025:

For the IFTR conference in 2025 the Popular Entertainments Working Group wishes to take advantage of the conference theme of Performing Carnival and its keywords of Ekstasis, Subversion, and Metamorphosis to highlight the omnipresence of popular entertainments both temporally and spatially.

At the 2024 conference in Manila, we discussed the tendency for popular entertainments to be dismissed as culturally and temporally delimited and lacking in aesthetics and social criticism. We welcome proposals on all aspects of popular entertainment. We would especially welcome abstracts within the context of the conference theme and/or that consider how popular entertainment:

cultivates intermediality, intercultural, and chronological networks

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is situated within an aesthetic context
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serves the subversive aspects of the carnivalesque

embraces intermediality and crosses temporalities through embodiment

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recuperates lost voices
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repurposes the negative language used against popular entertainment

survives and adapts to legislation and regulation

creates grounds for resistance and transformation

For those who are interested, we’d like to consider Stuart Hall’s essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” Working group member Jason Price will be leading a discussion of the article on Zoom in late December or early January. (Information forthcoming soon.) Submissions that engage with the article and one or more of the prompts above may be considered for a general panel to be proposed by the working group. IT IS NOT REQUIRED THAT YOU ENGAGE WITH THE ARTICLE FOR YOUR ABSTRACT TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THE WORKING GROUP.

Group Meetings

The Popular Entertainments Working Group operates by circulating members’ draft papers in advance of the conference, enabling a more focused discussion. Once papers are circulated, members are then asked to nominate another paper they’d like to moderate. The group allocates approximately twenty minutes for discussion of each paper. Members are asked to speak about their research for ten minutes; visual or AV material that amplifies or supports their paper in some way is encouraged. (As all papers are read in advance, presenters are not required to provide an oral summary of their paper.) A moderator assigned to the paper will then lead the remaining ten minutes of discussion.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be submitted no later than 15 January 2025 via

IFTR’s Cambridge Core portal. Please specify ‘Popular Entertainments’ working group

when submitting your abstract.

Accepted participants will be asked to submit full papers (no more than 5000 words) to the convenors in early May for distribution. Papers need not be in a finished state: drafts and works-in-progress are acceptable. Once gathered, all papers will be made available to group members for reading and a discussant will be allocated to each.

Please send any questions to the conveners of the Popular Entertainments Working Group.

ABOUT:

The Popular Entertainments Working Group was set up at the 2006 Helsinki IFTR conference to give an enduring scholarly voice to the investigation of popular entertainments.

Current discussions include such areas as popular entertainments in the context of a mediatised culture, street performances, historic and contemporary forms of circus, music theatre, vaudeville, minstrelsy, and the role of children in the entertainment business.

The Working Group continues to be interested in exploring such issues and themes as:

the role of popular entertainments in the formation of national identities;

the influence of popular entertainments on national theatres;

the performative practices of variety and circus shows and other forms of popular entertainment;

spaces and spatiality of the popular: the unbounded venue;

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documenting non-text based performance;
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transnational careers of popular performers;

the implications of (world wide) travel of circus/variety shows;

popular entertainment and notions of 'liveness';

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popular entertainments as industries;
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the role of the spectators and their reception of performances that challenge the conventional boundaries of performative behaviour and physical endurance;

strategies for retrieving and analysing popular entertainment data;

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spectacle and celebration;
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the economics of the popular;
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performing the popular;
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sport as popular entertainment.
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The Popular Entertainments Working Group strives to bring together new, emerging, and established scholars and scholar/practitioners and welcomes participants from a range of complementary disciplines.

RECENT PUBLICATION:

Researching Popular Entertainment, Kim Baston, Jason Price, eds. Routledge, 2024.

Researching Popular Entertainment is an essential volume for scholars delving into the vibrant yet complex world of popular entertainment.

Written by a global network of experts, this book addresses the unique challenges researchers face in this field. The often-dismissed status of popular entertainment, coupled with its reliance on physicality and improvisation over scripted performances, has meant archival and textual sources tend to be more limited than in related theatre and performance disciplines. This scarcity requires historians to find alternative pathways through the available materials to recuperate seemingly insignificant figures and performance forms from our cultural past. The book provides a candid look into the research processes of its authors, highlighting some of the approaches they have adopted to overcome these challenges. It emphasizes that reading performance as entertainment is a deliberate methodological choice. Regardless of whether a work is deemed high or low art, legitimate or illegitimate, understanding how it captivates its audience is central to the study of entertainment.

Readers will benefit from its in-depth analysis and practical guidance, making it an indispensable resource for anyone studying popular entertainment.

For more information: https://www.routledge.com/Researching-Popular-Entertainment/Baston-Price/p/book/9781032566436?srsltid=AfmBOoq-ERkycx7roNpLkfY0yMr2hQAYC0_1sFBGoN7BunWhmC1jeKet

Previous Publications:

1. Journal

The group's discussions initiated the publication of the international peer-reviewed online journal Popular Entertainment Studies. It has now been operating since 2010 and has just been accepted by the Thomson Reuters organisation for inclusion in its Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Current Contents/Arts and Humanities. The journal is an open access.The Working Group's involvement with the journal is ongoing and it provides a venue for the submission of papers delivered at the FIRT/IFTR annual conferences.

2. Conferences

Two further outcomes have been the mounting of the international conferences held at the University of Newcastle, Australia:

A World of Popular Entertainments – June 2009 – Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (co-convenors)
Another World of Popular Entertainments – June 2013 – Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow (co-convenors).

The first of these resulted in an edited volume the content of which can be viewed below:

Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow, eds. A World of Popular Entertainments: An Edited Volume of Critical Essays (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 295 pp. ISBN 978-1443837309.