Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Radical in Performance investigates the crisis in contemporary theatre, and celebrates the subversive in performance. It is the first full-length study to explore the link between a western theatre which, says Kershaw, is largely outdated and the blossoming of postmodern performance, much of which has a genuinely radical edge. In staying focused on the period between Brecht and Baudrillard, modernity and postmodernism, Baz Kershaw identifies crucial resources for the revitalisation of the radical across a wide spectrum of cultural practices.
This is a timely, necessary and rigorous book. It will be a compelling read for anyone searching for a critical catalyst for new ways of viewing and practising cultural politics.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of illustrations (p. xi)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiii)
• Prologue: radicalising performance (p. 1)
• Introduction: pathologies of hope (p. 5)
• Part I Theatre and performance: on the cusp of a paradigm shift (p. 27)
• 1 The limits of theatre (p. 29)
• 2 The excesses of performance (p. 57)
• Part II Performance, participation, power (p. 87)
• 3 Fighting in the streets: performance, protest and politics (p. 89)
• 4 The shadow of oppression: performance, the panopticon and ethics (p. 126)
• 5 The death of nostalgia: performance, memory and genetics (p. 157)
• 6 The sight of the blind: performance, community and ecology (p. 187)
• Epilogue: the radical in performance (p. 217)
• Bibliography (p. 221)
• Name index (p. 236)
• Subject index (p. 245)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Kershaw (Univ. Of Bristol, UK) interweaves scenes of himself as a young worker/radical/political detainee with an overview of the modernist/postmodern divide as it pertains to the politics of performance inside and beyond the bourgeois-colonized theater estate. The author calls as witnesses to and agents of the postmodern destabilization of the past's cultural pathologies Bourdieu, Foucault, Bachelard, Debord, de Certeau, and numerous contemporary US theorists. Citing the rise of the globalized, postcolonial, consumerist product (Miss Saigon, etc.) as a negative sign and the "miasma of ideological relativity," Kershaw warns that politically performative radicalism could become as irrelevant as the limits it historically transgresses, history itself having been replaced by more pliant memory. The author searches for sources of radicalism in political demonstrations, the reclamation of black face minstrelsy, prison drama, heritage performance, and reminiscence theater, which he dubs collectively "pathologies of hope." The book's central trope is dis/empowerment, especially of its protagonistic audience, in whose name performance (and through performance, power) must be democratized, opened to create a "fresh space." This book's historical purview (1960s-'90s) and earnest radical perspective match those in Kershaw's The Politics of Performance (CH, Jan'93). He is still fighting the good fight of his postwar British generation. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. S. Golub; Brown University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Baz Kershaw is Professor of Drama at the Department of Drama, University of Bristol. He is the author of The Politics of Performance.