Maurya Wickstrom – författare

Performing Consumers is an exploration of the way in which brands insinuate themselves into the lives of ordinary people who encounter them at branded superstores. Looking at our performative desire to ‘try on’ otherness, Maurya Wickstrom employs five American brandscapes to serve as case studies: Ralph Lauren; Niketown; American Girl Place; Disney store and The Lion King; and The Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In this post-product era, each builds for the performer/consumer an intensely pleasurable, somatic experience of merging into the brand and reappearing as the brand, or the brand’s fictional meanings.To understand this embodiment as the way that capital is producing subjectivity as an aspect of itself, Wickstrom casts a wide net, drawing on:the history of capital’s relationship with theatrepolitical developments in the United Statesrecent work in political science, philosophy, and performance studies. An adventurous study of theatrical indeterminancy and material culture, Performing Consumers brilliantly takes corporate culture to task.

Performing Consumers is an exploration of the way in which brands insinuate themselves into the lives of ordinary people who encounter them at branded superstores. Looking at our performative desire to ‘try on’ otherness, Maurya Wickstrom employs five American brandscapes to serve as case studies: Ralph Lauren; Niketown; American Girl Place; Disney store and The Lion King; and The Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. In this post-product era, each builds for the performer/consumer an intensely pleasurable, somatic experience of merging into the brand and reappearing as the brand, or the brand’s fictional meanings.To understand this embodiment as the way that capital is producing subjectivity as an aspect of itself, Wickstrom casts a wide net, drawing on:the history of capital’s relationship with theatrepolitical developments in the United Statesrecent work in political science, philosophy, and performance studies. An adventurous study of theatrical indeterminancy and material culture, Performing Consumers brilliantly takes corporate culture to task.

Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and performance as mediums through which politically innovative temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes play texts by Aimé Césaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from Ni’Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields. Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting, repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.