Grammar of Politics and Performance

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.Janelle Reinelt is  Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

• 1. Introduction 2. Performing Democracy: Roles, Stages, Scripts 3. Performance at the Crossroads of Citizenship 4. ‘I am an American’: Protesting Advertised ‘Americanness’ 5. Characterisation and Systemic Gender Violence: the Example of Laundry and the Figure of the Mother in Irish Culture 6. Theatricality vs. Bare Life: Performance as a Vernacular of Resistance 7. Becoming a Democratic Audience 8. Street Arts, Radical Democratic Citizenship, and a Grammar of Storytelling 9. Tahir Square, EC4M: the Occupy Movement and the Dramaturgy of Public Order 10. Temporality, Politics and Performance: Missing, Displaced, Disappeared 11. Performance and Politics: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament 12. Bringing the Audience Back In: Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission and the Efficacy of Public Hearings 13. Betrayal and What Follows: Rituals of Repentance, Healing and Anger in Response to the Church Sexual Abuse Scandal in Ireland 14. Closet Grammars of Intentional Deception: The Logic of Lies, State Security, and Homosexual Panic in Cold War Politics 15. Afterword

Through a compelling interdisciplinary collaboration the authors of this book advance a new and radical political grammar; one that merges politics and performance to confront the widespread disillusion with conventional channels of democratic participation.Roland Bleiker, Professor of International Relations, University of Queensland, Australia.A fine collection of perceptive interventions into current debates at the intersection of performance and politics. It offers a distinctive combination of material, spatial and rhetorical analysis that will be vital reading for scholars and students in politics and performance studies.Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London, UK.