Contemporary Theatre Review currently has three calls open for Special Issues.

All queries and abstracts should be sent directly to the guest editors. Please find further information for both special issues at the bottom of this page.

Post-Imperial Theatre in the Age of Populism: Temporality, Affect, and Governmental Aesthetics

Guest Editors:

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan: [email protected]

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan: [email protected]

As populist regimes and movements proliferate globally, many draw on imperial pasts – reviving symbols, restaging histories, and reorganizing collective memory through theatrical means. Understanding what is at stake in these performances requires moving beyond the assumption that empire belongs to the past and that populism represents a new political formation. In the age of populism, theatre operates as a political technology that organizes time, mobilizes affect, and aestheticizes governance. (Post)imperial imaginations and infrastructures enable theatre not merely to reflect populist power but to participate in the consolidation of political narratives and visions of the future. These processes are also central to the forms of public polarization through which populism operates. Examples such as Hindu nationalist historical dramas celebrating warrior-kings on contemporary Indian stages or neo-Ottomanism circulating across performance genres in Turkey – including public theatre productions as well as promotional videos by trans sex workers – reveal the diverse yet connected ways imperial afterlives unfold under populism.

This special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, rather than treating empire as a settled historical past and populism as a contemporary style layered onto it, explores these dynamics by approaching populism as a post-imperial technology of rule. Populist governmentality intervenes in the imperial afterlives of nation-states, transforming nostalgia, resentment, and suspended futurity into affective and aesthetic resources, while post-imperial fantasies and infrastructures shape political subjectivities and struggles over legitimacy. Just as populist regimes and movements use theatre to consolidate authority amid sovereign instability, so do oppositional and dissident actors draw on theatrical means to contest, reimagine, or reclaim political narratives. Yet these counter-performances are rarely straightforward acts of resistance; they often generate ambivalence and complicity as much as emancipatory promise.

While providing critical insights into performance and politics, the literature on theatre and performance under populism is largely shaped by broader trends in the field. The continuing power of methodological nationalism has limited connective and comparative approaches, which are vital given how populist regimes and movements do not simply share characteristics; they build formal and informal alliances as they actively learn from one another. Existing approaches often miss how theatre and performance operate through complex negotiations with power, more often creating ambivalence, complicity, and failure than clean resolution – a complexity this special issue takes as its starting point. The urgency of our contemporary moment has occluded the thematic as well as infrastructural connections between empire and populism. At a critical time when populist regimes and movements continue to consolidate power globally, our special issue addresses the pressing gaps in the literature by facilitating dialogue among a globally diverse group of scholars. We will employ empirically grounded and theoretically informed frameworks to explore the post-imperial substrate on which populist performance and performativity so often rests.

We foreground temporality, affect, and governmental aesthetics to move beyond both reductive accounts of propaganda and romantic narratives of resistance that dominate the literature. We aim to examine ambivalence, complicity, and failure as constitutive features of post-imperial theatre under populism. The issue understands “post-imperial” capaciously, encompassing post-colonial, post-Soviet, and post-hegemonic formations, and is interested in how these varied afterlives of empire interact with and enable populist governance in structurally distinct ways. We welcome close analysis of specific contemporary productions and dramatic texts as sites of inquiry, particularly as they engage with broader theoretical, methodological, and historiographical questions.

The issue will bring together articles of 6,000–8,000 words, alongside contributions to CTR’s Documents and Interventions sections.

We invite contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following thematic areas:

• Temporality
  How post-imperial pasts are activated, contested, and made to bear on the present and future under populism – including archival reactivations; transformed repertoires; the politics of (post-)memory; promised as well as foreclosed futures; contested worldmaking; duration; and interventions in the present.
• Affect and Embodiment
  How theatre mobilizes feeling and stages bodies as sites of political claim-making under populist conditions – including affective economies; senses of belonging; negotiations of abjection; stagings of the national body as well as its gendered, racialized, queer, and broader minoritarian Others.
• Governmental Aesthetics
  How theatrical form and infrastructure participate in the exercise, legitimation, and contestation of post-imperial power – including dramaturgies of geopolitical power; entanglements of political economy, institutional infrastructure, and aesthetic strategies; translation, transliteration, and the politics of language; commemorative and ceremonial productions; festivals, diasporic performances, and soft power; techniques for staging legitimacy, authority, and moral hierarchy.
• Value
  How value is produced, assigned, refused, and redistributed in post-imperial theatrical ecologies under populism – including discredited, banned, and recycled repertoires; emerging genres; distribution of resources; reconfigurations of theatrical labour; digitization and artificial intelligence; the politics of failure; and performances that repurpose, awkwardly inhabit, or endure populist imperial scripts without fully resisting or affirming them.

The special issue welcomes contributions engaging a wide range of post-imperial contexts – post-Ottoman and post-Habsburg states in Central and Southeastern Europe, postcolonial contexts such as India and the Philippines, post-Soviet formations, as well as states navigating post-hegemonic transitions, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, and populist movements globally. We thus aim to offer a critical rethinking of how post-imperial power is performed and rendered sensible under contemporary populism. Practice-based research and artist-led inquiry are particularly welcome across these thematic areas, as are comparative and connective perspectives.

The timeline for submissions is as follows:

Proposals due: 15 July 2026

Notification of acceptance: August 2026

First draft due: February 2027

Final drafts due: August 2027

Publication: February 2028

To express interest in contributing to this special issue, please email an abstract of no more than 300 words to both editors by 15 July 2026. Please indicate the type of submission in your email subject line (e.g., “Research Article – Post-Imperial Theatre in the Age of Populism”). We welcome proposals for research articles (6,000–8,000 words including notes), for the Documents section (production notes, designs, manifestos, and interviews with theatre-makers), or for Interventions (multimedia and experimental formats published on the journal’s online platform).

To submit an abstract or if you would like further information, please contact the special issue editors:

Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, University of Milan: [email protected]

Christina Banalopoulou, University of Milan: [email protected]