ABSTRACT

Performance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes:
* Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo
* Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory
* Genealogies: Critical Performances
* Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law
In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies.
Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

part I|50 pages

Re-Sexing Culture

chapter 2|20 pages

Acting out Orientalism

Sapphic theatricality in turn-of-the-century Paris 1

chapter 3|13 pages

Posing the Question

Wilde, wit, and the ways of man

chapter 4|15 pages

Doing it Anyway

Lesbian sado-masochism and performance

part II|66 pages

Grave Performances

chapter 6|19 pages

Spectacles of Suffering

Performing presence, absence, and historical memory at U.S. Holocaust museums

chapter 7|21 pages

Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead

Sanctifying sullied space

part III|86 pages

Moving/Seeing

chapter 9|22 pages

After US The Savage Goddess

Feminist performance art of the explicit body staged, uneasily, across modernist dreamscapes

chapter 10|19 pages

Flat-Out Vision

chapter 11|19 pages

Liveness

Performance and the anxiety of simulation 1

part IV|48 pages

Identity Politics

chapter 12|20 pages

Kinship, Intelligence, and Memory As Improvisation

Culture and performance in New Orleans

chapter 13|26 pages

Forms of Appearance of Value

Homer Plessy and the politics of privacy

part V|20 pages

Performer/Performance