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A powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force. Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith. Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.
Research Methods in Performance Studies offers a unique approach for readers to engage with performance research and methods in practice. It examines ways of making performance, researching performance cultures, researching performers who themselves are engaged in research, and conducting research in the context of enduring and emergent themes of performance studies inquiry. This book features the work of eighteen scholar-artists currently working in performance studies who demonstrate—through applied projects—various methods for conducting performance research. The result is a wide array of novel scholarship including activist performance, slam poetry, video performance, stand-up comedy, adaptation for the Broadway stage, naturecultural performance, intersectional performance, performances of cultural and material preservation, and many others. Faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and performance practitioners alike will benefit from the approaches to performance studies research methods articulated by the scholar-artists featured in this collection.
What does the state do when public expectations exceed its governing capacity? The Performative State shows how the state can shape public perceptions and defuse crises through the theatrical deployment of language, symbols, and gestures of good governance—performative governance. Iza Ding unpacks the black box of street-level bureaucracy in China through ethnographic participation, in-depth interviews, and public opinion surveys. She demonstrates in vivid detail how China's environmental bureaucrats deal with intense public scrutiny over pollution when they lack the authority to actually improve the physical environment. They assuage public outrage by appearing responsive, benevolent, and humble. But performative governance is hard work. Environmental bureaucrats paradoxically work themselves to exhaustion even when they cannot effectively implement environmental policies. Instead of achieving "performance legitimacy" by delivering material improvements, the state can shape public opinion through the theatrical performance of goodwill and sincere effort. The Performative State also explains when performative governance fails at impressing its audience and when governance becomes less performative and more substantive. Ding focuses on Chinese evidence but her theory travels: comparisons with Vietnam and the United States show that all states, democratic and authoritarian alike, engage in performative governance.
The interviewees of this volume fall into three groups: the main players who brought about the rise of theory (Fish, Gallop, Spivak, Bhabha); a younger group of post-theorists (Bérubé, Dimock, Nealon, Warren); the anti-critique theorists (Felski); and new order theorists (Puchner, Wolfe). They discuss elemental questions, such as trying to grasp what was logic and what was rhetoric; trying to see down the road while fog and turmoil held visibility to arm’s length; and trying to pick legible meanings out of the cultural blanket of deafening noise. Theorists were not only good thinkers but also pioneers who were seeking profound transformations.
Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets “domestic films” not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular cinema is embedded both in national imagination and endless intertextual and intermedial frameworks. Moreover, films themselves become signs to be cited and recycled as illustrations of cultural, social, and political history as well as national mentality. In the age of television, “old films” continue to live as history and memory. In Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions, Anu Koivunen analyzes the historicity as well as the intertextuality and intermediality of film reception by focusing on a cycle of Finnish family melodrama and its key role in thinking about gender, sexuality, nation, and history. Close-reading posters, advertisements, publicity-stills, trailers, review journalism, and critical commentary, she demonstrates how The Women of Niskavuori (1938 and 1958), Loviisa (1946), Heta Niskavuori (1952), Aarne Niskavuori (1954), Niskavuori Fights (1957), and Niskavuori (1984) have operated as sites for imagining “our agrarian past”, our Heimat and heritage as well as “the strong Finnish woman” or “the weak man in crisis”. Based on extensive empirical research, Koivunen argues that the Niskavuori films have mobilized readings in terms of history and memory, feminist nationalism and men’s movement, left-wing allegories and right-wing morality as well as realism and melodrama. Through processes of citation, repetition, and re-cycling the films have acquired not only a heterogeneous and contradictory interpretive legacy, but also an affective force.
Contemporary scholars have sharply disagreed over the importance of the loquacious women of Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum. Using the methods of contemporary Cognitive Linguistics, Ideology and Metaphor develops a systematic, replicable reading of the text and its characters, showing how Pseudo-Philo uses these women’s stories to articulate the text’s theology and ideology. The analysis also explores how the author redefines the term «mother» in order to sanction the female authority to interpret and instruct. The conceptual blends that compose the text’s distinctive and sometimes dissonant metaphors are analyzed in detail. This monograph also explores how a re-written Bible establishes its authority and awards authority to specific characters and how rhetorical and narrative methodologies fit within cognitive linguistics.
The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.
The term "radical formalism" refers to strategies aimed at defamiliarising and revitalising conventional modes of formalistic reading and theorising form. These strategies disrupt and unsettle established norms while incorporating a metadiscursive awareness of their broader political implications. This volume presents a radical reconceptualisation of literary works from Greek and Roman antiquity. Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with critical theory and postcritique, as well as drawing inspiration from traditions rooted in Black art, poetry and philosophy-both directly and indirectly connected to the classical tradition-the essays in this collection explore subversions of canonical norms and resistances to the hegemony of textual order. This collection not only provides new, provocative insights into a corpus of texts that has exerted a lasting impact on modern literature and philosophy, but also challenges current interpretive methods, recasting the very practice of reading in relation to form, poetics, language, sound, temporalities and textuality.
This book is part of a three-volume book-set published under the general title of Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre. Each of the three books in the set has a unique subtitle that works to better focus its content, and differentiates it from the other two volumes. The contributors’ backgrounds and global spread adequately reflect the international focus of the three books that make up the collection. The contributions, in their various ways, demonstrate the many advances and ingenious solutions adopted by African theatre practitioners in tackling some of the challenges arising from the adverse colonial experience, as well as the “one-sided” advance of globalisation. The contributions attest to the thriving nature of African theatre and performance, which in the face of these challenges, has managed to retain its distinctiveness, while at the same time acknowledging, contesting, and appropriating influences from elsewhere into an aesthetic that is identifiably African. Consequently, the three books are presented as a comprehensive exploration of the current state of African theatre and performance, both on the continent and diaspora. Performative Inter-Actions in African Theatre 3: Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa offers essays that seek to re-conceptualise notions of drama and theatre in Africa, and therefore redefine our understanding of the practice, role, and place they occupy in a constantly evolving African socio-cultural contexts. Contributions in Making Space, Rethinking Drama and Theatre in Africa range from essays that explore notions of space in performance, to those that challenge the perceived orthodoxy of conventional forms and approaches to theatre.