Interrupting the cognitive empire: keynote drama as cultural justice

Abstract

ABSTRACT The authors of this paper present a performative, practice-led interpretation of interrupting keynotes. They analyse keynotes in which a performance poet interrupts the white, female, professorial, northern scholar, with his own poetry as a poet of the global south. Using Benjamin’s essay on Brecht’s Epic theatre and interruption as a critical device, the authors will consider how oral scholarship might offer ways of disturbing the epistemological dominance of scholarly forms such as the keynote. By creating, through interruptions, a performative poetics as a practice-led decolonial scholarship, the authors explore the keynote as form, within an intercultural, artistic, hospicing and conflict transformational frame.