Chair and Discussant needed-ASEEES- The Performer as Alternative Authority

[Huseyin Oylupinar]

Dear List Members,

We are in need of a discussant and a panel chair for the panel titled “The
Performer as Alternative Authority”. Please see the panel topic below.
If you are interested  in serving at our panel, please contact Huseyin
Oylupinar at oylupina at ualberta.ca

This is posted on the behalf of Natalie Kononenko and Huseyin Oylupinar.

ASEEES 43rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC
November 17-20, 2011

The Performer as Alternative Authority

The performer is often viewed as an authority figure, a source of
information more genuine – and therefore more reliable – than political
authority, which can be self-serving and corrupt.  In Ukraine, the folk
minstrel or kobzar was the mouthpiece for religion, a counterbalance to
political authority in the tsarist period.  Soviet scholars used the kobzar
to legitimize their own revolutionary and anti-tsarist stance claiming that
minstrels supported the Soviet cause and helped Soviet partisans.  But the
counter-authority image of the performer led Stalin to suspect kobzari of
being anti-Soviet.  He therefore ordered their execution at a congress in
1939.  In post-Soviet, independent Ukraine, a new generation of kobzari
present themselves as the voice of the people, a corrective to political
corruption. 

Our own focus is on Ukraine and we would like to form a panel with scholars
looking at performers in other parts of the former Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe.  Were folk performers figures of alternative authority throughout
this geopolitical area?  What were their traits – and their fates – in the
Soviet period and subsequently?

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