The author takes readers on a journey in the footsteps of Harlequin and Pulcinella, two well-known commedia dell'arte masks, to show the historically fluctuating way in which they participated in building "Italianness" in the eyes of foreign theatre audiences (the history of the Harlequin mask in France, Italy and Poland in the XVII and XVIII century) and local ones (the history of the Pulcinella mask, or the Italian dialect theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which historians, at a certain point, erased from the process of the creation and construction of the Italian national community). Using modern performance studies methodologies, this book effectively cuts the distance between past and present theatre practices, opening new prospects for an active and clearly situated epistemology for theatre studies, cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies.

Situated Knowing aims to critically examine performance studies' ideological and socio-political underpinnings while also challenging the Anglo-centrism of the discipline. This book reworks the concept of situated knowledges put forward over thirty years ago by American biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in order to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm of objectivity in sciences by emphasising the role of the embodied and partial socio-cultural perspective of the scholar in the production of knowledge. Through carefully selected case studies of contemporary natural, cultural and technological performances, contributors to this volume show that the proposed approach requires new genealogies of traditional concepts, emerges from encounters with contemporary performative arts or contact zones and may potentially go beyond the human in order to include non-human ways of being in the world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies and theatre studies.

Situated Knowing aims to critically examine performance studies' ideological and socio-political underpinnings while also challenging the Anglo-centrism of the discipline. This book reworks the concept of situated knowledges put forward over thirty years ago by American biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in order to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm of objectivity in sciences by emphasising the role of the embodied and partial socio-cultural perspective of the scholar in the production of knowledge. Through carefully selected case studies of contemporary natural, cultural and technological performances, contributors to this volume show that the proposed approach requires new genealogies of traditional concepts, emerges from encounters with contemporary performative arts or contact zones and may potentially go beyond the human in order to include non-human ways of being in the world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies and theatre studies.