Performance and Cultural Politics

Abstract

In Performance and Cultural Politics, editor Elin Diamond has brought together thirteen essay s that articulate the relationship between cultural studies and performance. As Diamond notes in her introduction, though “performance” and “performativity” have emerged as keywords of postmodernism, performance has generally been neglected within the field of cultural studies. The contributors to Diamond’s volume forward the project of redressing this omission. Treating such diverse topics as the trial of Oscar Wilde, lesbian sado-masochism, the excavation of the Rose Theatre, Holocaust museums in the U.S., the performance of oral history, ballet treatments of the Pygmalion myth, pop duo Milli Vanilli, and the Mardi Gras krewes of nineteenth-century New Orleans, the exemplary essays collected in Performance and Cultural Politics clarify how the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies, as a branch or manifestation of cultural studies, “[moves] beyond explicit theatre contexts and [confronts] performance issues within structures of power” (7). At the heart of Performance and Cultural Politics is the fundamental insight that performance is always and at once “a doing and a thing done” (1), embedded in pre-existing cultural performances but at the same time infused with the potential for transformation that is implicit in the act of representation. Further to this premise, the performances considered here are understood as “cultural practices” that “[negotiate] with regimes of power” to “conservatively reinscribe or passionately reinvent the ideas, symbols, and gestures that shape social life” (2).