SOAS Research Online

Abstract

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 subfield. Organized along five themes—performativity and theatricality; identities; sites and scripts; body, voice, and gesture; and affect—the volume brings together leading scholars in the fields of politics and 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 social and political categories, 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 to develop a sophisticated understanding of political actions as a function of performance and a firmer basis for recognizing the political potential inherent in all acts of performance.