A broad and inclusive volume of the celebrations and critiques of performance arts Focusing on the living arts-dance, theatre, music, performance art, ritual, and popular entertainment-performance studies expands our understanding of "performance" as both a vital artistic practice and a means by which to understand social and cultural processes. Bridging the gap between cultural studies, performing arts, and anthropology, performance studies explores myriad ways in which performance creates meaning and shapes our everyday lives. The broadest and most inclusive volume to date, The Ends of Performance both celebrates and critiques the institutionalization of the field. Only recently has the field given keen attention to the interpretive force and consequences of performance events, and it is these consequences that the The Ends of Performance articulates. Here performance studies illuminates the complex social and cultural formations of our time--the impact of virtual technology, the racialized discourses of legal and cultural citizenship, the impact of new medical discourses, and the medicalization of the body. Featuring work by leading theorists such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, and Richard Schechner, excursions into performative writing by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Della Pollock, and texts by performance artists Orlan and Deb Margolin, The Ends of Performance illuminates the provocative intellectual ends which motivate these varied approaches to performing writing, and to writing performance.

The first monograph on the influential contemporary Cuban–American interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco. Tomorrow, I will become an island is the first in-depth study of the performances, videos and social practice of the influential Cuban–American artist Coco Fusco. Featuring contributions by renowned scholars of art history, performance art and Cuban cultural politics as well as an essay by the artist herself, the book offers a comprehensive review of Fusco’s interdisciplinary art practice and her transnational perspective on race, gender and power. For more than three decades, Fusco has been a leader in conversations around the intersection of identity, feminism, culture, and politics in the Americas and beyond. Emerging during the 1980s as a pioneering advocate of multiculturalism in the arts, Fusco utilizes performance, video, exhibition making, archival research and writing to reflect upon the ways that intercultural relations and colonial histories shape the construction of the self and perceptions of cultural difference. Her work has critically examined society from a postcolonial perspective, engaging with debates about cultural politics throughout the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. This expansive approach is highlighted through a broad range of works that address themes including post-revolutionary Cuba, racial stereotypes, feminist politics, animal psychology, ethnographic displays, suppressed colonial records, military interrogation and sex tourism. The book will accompany an international touring retrospective of the artist’s work starting in 2023.

A broad and inclusive volume of the celebrations and critiques of performance arts Focusing on the living arts-dance, theatre, music, performance art, ritual, and popular entertainment-performance studies expands our understanding of "performance" as both a vital artistic practice and a means by which to understand social and cultural processes. Bridging the gap between cultural studies, performing arts, and anthropology, performance studies explores myriad ways in which performance creates meaning and shapes our everyday lives. The broadest and most inclusive volume to date, The Ends of Performance both celebrates and critiques the institutionalization of the field. Only recently has the field given keen attention to the interpretive force and consequences of performance events, and it is these consequences that the The Ends of Performance articulates. Here performance studies illuminates the complex social and cultural formations of our time--the impact of virtual technology, the racialized discourses of legal and cultural citizenship, the impact of new medical discourses, and the medicalization of the body. Featuring work by leading theorists such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, and Richard Schechner, excursions into performative writing by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Della Pollock, and texts by performance artists Orlan and Deb Margolin, The Ends of Performance illuminates the provocative intellectual ends which motivate these varied approaches to performing writing, and to writing performance.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 Jill Lane "A model for theatre scholarship on racial impersonation."--"Theatre Journal" "Blackface performance, treated in U.S. scholarship as if it were an exclusively national phenomenon, has not until now been the subject of an extended study for Cuba, where it was the main vehicle for shaping a sense of hybridity. Lane shows that performance reiterated the contradiction between blacks and whites while trying to overcome it. From acting up to impersonation, Lane links some liberating practices of anticolonialism in the Americas with the binding mechanisms for a new national unity."--Doris Sommer, Harvard University "A valuable source on nineteenth-century Cuban cultural manifestations. Highly recommended."--"Choice" "Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895" offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba's vernacular theatre, the "teatro bufo," and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of "mestizaje," Cuba's racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative. Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba's anticolonial wars, the "teatro bufo" was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the "negrito" to the "mulata," played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba's opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the "teatro bufo" to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation. Jill Lane teaches theatre studies and American studies at Yale University. Rethinking the Americas 2005 288 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3867-9 Cloth $59.95s 39.00 World Rights Literature, African-American/African Studies, Latin American/Caribbean Studies Short copy: "Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895" offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba.