Full Description
Performing Punctuation gathers writers/performers to highlight, question and contest colonising facets of English language punctuation, while looking for ways to reveal and rarefy these proprietary rules such that they are responsive, playful, generous, generative, and ultimately more inclusive.
A transdisciplinary collaborative book that brings awareness to the limiting effects of the prevailing dominance of English language and its vociferous use of punctuation. The book's content and design is guided by this question: How can English language punctuation discard its domineering and strident overcoat to enable a greater diversity of readers, listeners, performers, writers, and practices?
Performing Punctuation, bears out digressions, indiscretions, transgressions and fabulations of grammatical marks unfaithful to propriety. It makes public an on-going and refreshed movement to play humorously and tenaciously with those small but powerful writing marks that regulate, discipline and structure textual language and spoken discourse. These marks, symbols and rule-makers are anything but a mere neutral grammatical systems; they are language gremlins and pixies; inflecting and infecting agents with histories, voices and messages of their own accord. These marks are understood as part and parcel to the on-going colonising history of the English language.
The collection brings together of a range of voices - Māori and Pākehā - and the collaborative editorial relationship with contributors allows conversation to develop between the elements of the book.
Contents
Welcome
chain /
/
/ link /
/
/ throat
To Listen Poetry
Between the Words
Shell on Sure, Graphic Shaming and / as Gender Slamming
Wetness — a sensuous politics of punctuation
A Short Line with a Long Shadow
WE ARE THE VĀ / NOW
Dots on a Page
Yes O Do Please Stop
Encountering One's Footprints in Snow or: On Paragraphs
Steppes
acut inside the questions
that are due to our souths
attempting
to write outside a limit
Bridging Portmanteau
beginning
........Same as it ever was........
PUNCT-ing
Holding Together Briefly:
I begin with ' and end with ?
Interrobanging
Girlspeak
The Meaning of This:
Performing Asemic Writing
23 Deluge
..--- ...-- / -.. . .-.. ..- --. .
Liberated from Language:
Punctuation's Performativity
in the Absence of Words
A holding practice
semicolon comma shift return
Homogenised, Pasteurised and
Recognisable: Empowering Children
to Decentre the Dominance of
Standard English Spelling,
Punctuation and Grammar
A Meaningful Site: Space (bar)
and Weak Rays
Exploded House (Philomena)
A conversation with Beatriz Ferreyra,
with her Echo(e)s, in her Absence,
without Time Signatures
Slashing and Asterisking
Noctalgia