emisférica

emisférica is the Hemispheric Institute’s peer-reviewed, online, trilingual scholarly journal. Published biannually, journal issues focus on specific areas of inquiry in the study of performance and politics in the Americas. The journal publishes academic essays, multimedia artist presentations, activist interventions, and translations, as well as book, performance, and film reviews. Its languages are English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

  • 14.1 Expulsion

    14.1 Expulsion

    This issue investigates expulsion, and the technologies of citizenship and non-citizenship through which the state and capital create and extract value from expellable populations.

  • 13.1

    13.1 Estados de devoção

    Esta edição mapeia as interseções da religião, da subjetividade e do Estado, na esteira dos regimes neoliberais nas Américas.

  • e-misférica 12.1 Caribbean Rasanblaj

    12.1 Caribbean Rasanblaj

    Rasanblaj, n. assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits). This is an emisférica double issue.

  • e-misférica 11.1: Decolonial Gesture

    11.1: Decolonial Gesture

    This issue looks at the discontinuities, breaks, and unravelings that signal the decolonial, exploring the power and epistemology of colonialism and its legacies in the present.

  • e-misférica 10.2: Dissidence

    10.2: Dissidence

    This issue investigates global strategies and tactics of dissidence against dominant state regimes and economic orders, engaging with theories of dissidence and modes of standing apart within the Americas and beyond.

  • emisférica 10.1 Bio/Zoo

    10.1 Bio/Zoo

    Through the prism of biopolitics, this issue investigates the notion of species and modes of domination, governance, and antagonism based on claims to biological life.

  • e-misférica 9.1-9.2 On the Subject of Archives

    9.1 On the Subject of Archives

    This double issue looks at archives as calls to action. Rather than stable repositories, archives here are imagined as acts and practices in transit that mobilize different media and are mobilized by them.

  • e-misférica 8.2 #narcomachine

    8.2 #narcomachine

    This issue examines the logics, geographies, and grammars of narco-trafficking as an elusive yet ubiquitous social formation that we name the “narco-machine.”

  • emisférica 8.1 Performance ≠ Life

    e-misférica 8.1 Performance ≠ Vida

    Focused on performance art in Latino/a America, this issue explores how non-objectual actions compose forms of relation, critique, and abstraction in the domains of politics and the social.

  • e-misférica 7.2 After Truth

    7.2 After Truth

    This issue examines the changing shape and status of “truth” in the neoliberal aftermaths of both official and unofficial transitional justice projects in the Americas and beyond.

  • e-misférica 7.1 Unsettling Visuality

    7.1 Unsettling Visuality

    This issue investigates the conjuncture of performance and the visual, exploring when and how performance may unsettle the relationship between visual representation and social reproduction, and thus open new ways of seeing.

  • e-misférica 6.2 Culture + Rights + Institutions

    6.2 Culture + Rights + Institutions

    This issue explores relations between culture, rights, and institutions, analyzing the discourse of “cultural rights,” the ways that performance functions as a vehicle for claiming such rights, and institutional agency in relation to the law, citizenship, the museum, the university, and more.

  • e-misférica 6.1 Contagion

    6.1 Contagion

    Through a focus on “contagion,” this issue explores the enactment of social, aesthetic, and political formations of the social body when threatened or transformed by the presence of an/other.

  • e-misférica 5.2 Race and its Others

    5.2 Race and its Others

    This issue examines the relationship between race and performance in the Americas, focusing on the ways in which different racial formations are transformed as they come into contact and conflict.

  • 5.1 Traveling Virgins

    5.1 Traveling Virgins

    As the movement of people across national borders intensifies, religious practices become increasingly mobile, turning virgins, saints and other devotional figures into migrants.

  • 4.2 Body Matters/Corpografías

    4.2 Body Matters

    This issue examines the centrality of body politics in the production and reproduction of inequalities, focusing on the dynamics of visibility and invisibility and on the struggles of those deemed expendable.

  • e-misférica 4.1 Passions Performance Public Affect

    4.1 Passions Performance Public Affect

    The realm of affect has long been and continues to be constitutive of the relationship between politics and the body: of forms of government and socio-historical forms of subjectivity.

  • 3.2 Hybrid Imaginaries / Fractured Geographies

    3.2 Hybrid Imaginaries / Fractured Geographies

    Borders are everywhere. They divide us and allow us to come together. They mark our territories, our bodies, and our speech. They are real and imagined, porous and hard, visible and invisible, but above all political

  • emisférica 3.1 Performance and the Law

    3.1 Performance and the Law

    To embody the letter of the law is to make habit of iterating its text through actions. Through distinct rituals, law is repeated, reinforced, implemented, avoided, enacted, dictated, and broken.

  • emisférica 2.2 Sexualities & Politics in Americas

    2.2 Sexualities & Politics in Americas

    How does the subject gain agency by performing a sexuality that subverts normative regulations? What forms of political violence are exerted on the sexed body?

  • emisférica 2.1 Aboriginal Performance

    2.1 Aboriginal Performance

    Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars and activists examine the use of performance as a gesture against the erasure of Indigenous presence in the Americas.

  • emisférica 1.1 Enacting Democracy

    1.1 Enacting Democracy

    Focusing on the intimate relationship between performance and democracy, this issue examines the performative practices and strategies of social movements across the Americas.