Playing for Affect in Counterpublics: An interdisciplinary Investigation into the Transformative Potential of Spoken Word Hybridity.

Wareham Morris, Katy (2021) Playing for Affect in Counterpublics: An interdisciplinary Investigation into the Transformative Potential of Spoken Word Hybridity. In: Spoken Word in the UK. Routledge. ISBN 9780367352530; Hardback: 9780367352523; eBook: 9780429330223

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Abstract

This chapter operationalises interdisciplinary discourses, namely theories and concepts familiar to contemporary media and cultural studies and, creative reflective practice to interrogate the experimental hybridity of spoken word performance. It explores how the form utilises playful performance techniques and performativity to represent the personal as political and to engage the audience in critical, formative interactivities that undermine dominant hegemonies. This chapter is interested in these nuanced and complex creative practices when executed in both live and virtual discursive spaces, or counterpublics. It argues that this playful hybridity has the potential to unite the performer and audience in creative problem solving, including reciprocal participations that make the ‘performing’ of pluralistic identities visible and intelligible. These embodied collaborations, particularly those which are digital and therefore multimodal, challenge the social and cultural orders of ‘reality’, ‘representation’ and ‘subjectivity’ suggesting that the playful hybridity of spoken word performance has transformative potential, discernible as interminable affective assemblage.

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