NTU 2016 - 2016 NTU International Theatre Conference

In the 1980s, Anderson proposed the concept of “imagined community” to explain the emergence of nation-state. Appadurai in the 90s further extended its notion of collective imagination to discuss global culture in the postelectronic world. Through collective reading, criticism and pleasure, a “community of sentiment” is made possible. With the help of mass media and migration, individuals and groups have responded to modernity in their own terms and deployed their imaginations differently in the practice of their everyday lives. The experiments with modernity vary and have gone beyond the regulations of the state. The global flows and interactions can no longer be understood in terms of center-periphery/ east-west models, but rather in terms of disjunctures. People do not necessarily accept mainstream culture as it is; they tend to incorporate their agenda and preferences while annexing the global into their own practices of the modern.
Thus in this conference we ask: how does the consumption of the mass media throughout the world provoke resistance, irony and selectivity, and in what forms do they appear in the performing arts? How do global and indigenous cultures circulate in current global cultural economy? How do cultural practices resist or succumb to tourism and commoditization? How do canonical works get re-imagined and indigenized? Under this theme, the conference welcomes, but is not limited to, papers addressing the above issues