Shirin M. Rai, Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Michael Saward (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance – Oxford University Press, March 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).

I have a piece in it entitled “Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology”. As is the model with these handbooks unfortunately it is hardback and ebook only, at least for now.

Introduction by Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic, Shirin Rai, and Michael Saward 

Part I: Performativity/Theatricality

1. Lisa Skwirblies – Colonial Theatricality 
2. Ameet Parameswaran – Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance: Beyond Theatre of Roots 
3. Adrian Kear – Authenticity/Theatricality: World Spectatorship and the Drama of the Image 
4. Kate Leader – Law, Presence to Absence: The Case of the Disappearing Defendant 
5. Sophie Nield – Towards a Theatrical History of the Picket Line 
6. Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga – Protest and Performativity 
7. Jean-Pascal Daloz – Representation 

Part II: Identities 

8. Katie Beswick – Class, Race, and Marginality: Informal Street Performances in the City 
9. Carole Spary – Gender, Politics, Performance: Embodiment and Representation in Political Institutions 
10. Edgaras Klivis – National Identity 
11. Ioana Szeman – Performance and Citizenship: The Roma in Europe 
12. Yana Meerzon – From Exile to Migration – Staging (the) Face of the Human Waste 

Part III: Sites 

13. Emma Cox – Island Impasse: Refugee Detention and the Thickening Border 
14. Kimberly Wedevan Segall – Media Sites: Political Revivals of American Muslim Women 
15. Nirmal Puwar – The Force of the Somatic Norm: Women as Space Invaders in the UK Parliament 
16. Matthew Watson – “The Market”: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices 
17. Charlotte Heath-Kelly – Staging Memorialisation: Performing the War on Terror and Resilient Nationalism 
18. Matt Davies – Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International: The Other City and the Aesthetic Subject 
19. Anna Leander – The Politics of Neo-Liberal Rituals: Performing the Institutionalization of Liminality at Trade Fairs 
20. Catherine Chinara Charrett – Empire: A Performative Approach to Imperial Frontiers and Formations in Palestine 

Part IV: Scripts

21. Desiree Lewis – Nativism: African Bodies and Photographic Performance 
22. Willmar Sauter – Immersion 
23. Stuart Elden – Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology 
24. Erzsébet Strausz – Pedagogy: (Mis)performing the Contemporary University 
25. Julia C. Strauss – Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy: The View from China and Beyond 
26. John Uhr – Political Leadership: “Saving the Show” 
27. Vicky Angelaki – Adaptation and Environment: Landscape, Community and Politics in Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm by Duncan Macmillan (2019) 

Part V: Body/Voice/Gesture

28. Sruti Bala – Hurling and Hailing: Scenes of Interruption and Interpellation 
29. Alan Finlayson – Performing Political Ideologies 
30. M.I. Franklin – Music: Women Rewriting Punk Performance Politics 
31. Lisa Fitzpatrick – Eroticism, and the Politics of Representing the Abused Body 
32. Bishnupriya Dutt – Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites 
33. Bree Hadley – What’s in a Name?: The Politics of Labelling in Disability Performance 
34. Stephen Coleman – Taking a Position: Contemporary Dance and the Communication of Deep Political Feeling 
35. Julia Peetz – The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back: Questions of Embodiment in the Performance of Politics 

Part VI: Affect 

36. Jordana Blejmar – Postmemory: Politics and Performance in Latin America 
37. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison – Performing Political Empathy 
38. Narelle Warren – Care 
39. Nobuko Anan – The Nation as Family: Motherhood and Love in Japan 
40. Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra – Constituency Performances: The “Heart” of Democratic Politics 
41. James Brassett – Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit 
42. Illan rua Wall – Atmospheres of Protest 
43. Goran Petrovic Lotina – Performance and Populism: Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity