Call for Papers – Performing Postsocialism: Cultures of Performance-Making in Twenty-First-Century
China
9-10th Apr 2026
University of Vienna, Austria
Deadline: 15th May 2025
Organized as part of a research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), this symposium invites proposals that address the relationship between performance and postsocialism in twenty-first-century China. Since its initial formulations in the late 1980s and 1990s, the notion of postsocialism has captured the ideological ambiguities and cultural contradictions brought about by China’s late-twentieth-century transition to a socialist market economy and integration into the global capitalist system in the new millennium. Postsocialism denotes a fluid condition of socioeconomic unevenness and temporal dissonance that mirrors the stratification of traditional values with historical experiences of revolution and reform, and the persistence of socialist-era practices and institutions alongside the affirmation of new societal dynamics and cultural formations. The tension and interplay between past legacies and futural aspirations continues to shape the postmillennial sociocultural landscape, reflecting the ongoing relevance of the postsocialist framework for the analysis of contemporary China.… Read more ⤻
