Author Description

"The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance is a unique collection of articles introducing cutting-edge research and scholarship on politics and performance, which contributes to exciting interdisciplinary work and to shaping a sub-field. Organised along five themes: performativity/theatricality, identities, sites and scripts, body/voice/gesture and affect, the volume brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and in Performance, who put forward critically informed interdisciplinary work on everyday social performances - from various embodiments of resistance to a less conscious and willed dimension of reproducing of social and political categories - crowd, as well as performances of political institutions and processes, in order to understand the contemporary world. The aim of the Handbook is to demonstrate that this disciplinary interweaving ultimately produces a richer, more complex view of our contemporary world than either field is able to do on its own. At the heart of the project is the ambition to introduce both performance and politics scholars to the tools of research and analysis needed in order to develop, on one hand, a sophisticated understanding of political actions as a function of performance, and on the other a firmer basis for recognizing the political potential inherent in all acts of performance"--