Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew(Studies in International Performance)

Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew brings to readers a fresh and rejuvenating sense of what the political might be if we re-think it outside of our common understandings of the concept and how we practice it. This politics thought anew concerns what it is to live, to really exist. The central assumption of this book is that we must not overlook the ways in which neoliberalism, specifically, shrinks our imaginations of what life might be. This book describes, for the first time, performances of and for refugees in Palestine, as well as other Palestinian performance. It also describes, for the first time, the situation of the Irish Travellersfroma performative perspective,whose nomadism has become a crime. In the descriptions of other types of performances, including Theatre for Development's and Doctors Without Borders' interactive traveling exhibition -the Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City -readers will find a sustained analysis of the divide across which humanitarianism and development are practiced and what might oppose that divide. Along with the final, brief study of Bodies: the Exhibit, all these situations are ones where blockades of the human, either physically or imaginatively, are intended. In all of these studies, however, there are glimpses of new spaces and new politics which counter the power of the blockades. These are glimpses of agreater imagination of what it is to live, and of political capacities which can be resurrected regardless of the extent to which they've been unacknowledged. Guided byvisionary contemporary philosophy, with a focus on Alain Badiou, Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism brings new, challenging and affirmative vocabularies and theoretical tools to those interested in theatre and performance, and all those interested in the political possibilities of today.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Making the Space of the New Present: Palestine/Theatre and the TEAM's Architecting Efficacy, Sufferers, Camps and Redistribution: Theatre for Development and The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City Nomads: Irish Traveller Theatre, Housing, and Appearance Exhibited Bodies, Mr. Biopower, and the Inhuman: A Brief Continuation and a Coda Bibliography Index

About the Author :
MAURYA WICKSTROM Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), USA, and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA. She is the author of Performing Consumers: Global Capital and its Theatrical Seductions. Her articles have been published in TDR, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Annual, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her essay, Housed: The Irish State, Neoliberalism and Irish Traveller Theatre appeared in Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, edited by Joseph Roach.

Review :
'Generous in its international reach, daring in its theoretical inclusiveness, precise in its politically nuanced analysis, Maurya Wickstrom's work is that unusual thing: a book that recognises and illuminates what performance has to do with the disaffected and the disempowered.' - Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, King's College London