The following is an excerpt from Romana Huk's Introduction to IN-CONFERENCE : OXFORD BROOKES COLLOQUIUM: The Politics of Presence: Re-reading the Writing Subject in “Live” and Electronic Performance, Theatre and Film Poetry. The colloquium was organised by Professor Huk and took place at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford in 2000.
And finally, some talks were delivered extempore, like Anthony Joseph’s opening one about his personal translation from Caribbean to British life. He spoke of having to envision exile as a concept/experience “that becomes textual” in order to effect his own presence (which depends on loss of its bearings) on the page as well as in performance. This description of using fragmentary language to create his own “self-styled vacuum”—his own peculiar and historical displacement in language being understood as space, which encompasses both absence and location—provided a provocative start to the colloquium, given its modeling of historical and irreducible if involuted presence that remains unassimilated in more familiar models of dispersed presence as we tend to assume them in avant-garde poetics.
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