Online Book Launch: The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance 

Edited by Shirin M. Rai, Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic, and Michael Saward

Wednesday 21 April 2021

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook.
 
The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors—drawn from a wide range of disciplines—investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).

 

Schedule:  

 13:00-13:10 Opening remarks, Shirin Rai (University of Warwick)  

 SESSION I (13:10-14:30) 

 Performance and the Politics of Struggle 

 Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites, Bishnupriya Dutt (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

 Atmospheres of Protest, Ilan Wall (University of Warwick)

 Protest and Performativity, Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Discussant: Mallarika Sinha Roy (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

 Break (14:30-14-40) 

SESSION II (14:40-16:00) 

 Performing Institutions  

 The Market: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices, Matthew Watson (University of Warwick)

 Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line, Sophie Nield (RHUL),

Interruption and Interpellation: Leaving the Theatre in Search of the Theatre, Sruti Bala (University of Amsterdam)

Discussant: Paula Diehl (Kiel University)

 Closing remarks, Angela Chnapko, senior editor at OUP, and Michael Saward (University of Warwick)

 

 

OPENING REMARKS AND PANEL 1 (auto-generated captions in english enclosed)

PANEL 2 AND CLOSING REMARKS (auto-generated captions in english enclosed)