International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice

Description

In recent years we have witnessed an increasing convergence of work in International Politics and Performance Studies around the troubled, and often troubling, relationship between politics and aesthetics. Whilst examination of political aesthetics, aesthetic politics, and politics of aesthetic practice has been central to research in both disciplines for some time, the emergence of a distinctive ‘performative turn’ in International Politics and a critical return to the centrality of politics and the concept of ‘the political’ in Performance Studies highlights the importance of investigating the productivity of bringing the methods and approaches of the two fields of enquiry into dialogue and mutual relation. Exploring a wide range of issues including rioting, youth-driven protests, border security practices and the significance of cultural awareness in war, this text provides an accessible and cutting edge survey of the intersection of international politics and performance examining issues surrounding the politics of appearance, image, event and place; and discusses the development and deployment of innovative critical and creative research methods, from auto-ethnography to site-specific theatre-making, from philosophical aesthetics to the aesthetic thought of new securities scenario-planning. The book’s focus throughout is on the materiality of performance practices—on the politics of making, spectating, and participating in a variety of modes as political actors and audiences—whilst also seeking to explicate the performative dynamics of creative and critical thinking. Structured thematically and framed by a detailed introduction and conclusion, the focus is on producing a dialogue between contributors and providing an essential reference point in this developing field. This work is essential reading for students of politics and performance and will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR, performance studies and cultural studies. Cover......Page 1 Title Page......Page 10 Copyright Page......Page 11 Table of Contents......Page 12 List of illustrations......Page 14 List of contributors......Page 15 Introduction......Page 20 PART I Logics of staging......Page 36 1 Traces of presence......Page 38 2 Facing and defacing......Page 59 PART II Aesthetic thought and the politics of practice......Page 80 3 Justice and the archives: ‘the method of dramatization’......Page 82 4 The ‘little cold breasts’ of an English girl, or art and identity......Page 97 5 Animating politics......Page 103 6 A golden surface: on virtuosity and cosmopolitics......Page 115 PART III Ontological and ethnographic co-performance......Page 130 7 Theatre as post-operative follow-up: The Bougainville Photoplay Project......Page 132 8 Stagecraft/statecraft/mancraft: embodied envoys, ‘objects’ and the spectres of estrangement in Africa......Page 149 9 Impossibilities: generative misperformance and the movements of the teaching body......Page 169 PART IV Bodies politic and performative......Page 178 10 Performing audience: the politics of relation and participation in Coriolan/us......Page 180 11 Bellies, wounds, infections, animals, territories: the political bodies of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus......Page 198 PART V Dramaturgies of scenario and security......Page 220 12 Power, security and antiquities......Page 222 13 Staging war as cultural encounter......Page 240 14 Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures......Page 253 Select bibliography......Page 271 Index......Page 290