Silvija Jestrovic – författare

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook.The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors--drawn from a wide range of disciplines--investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook.The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors--drawn from a wide range of disciplines--investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).

Political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance. Theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts. Yet the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. Further, it is crucial to bring the concepts of theatre and performance deployed by other disciplines such as psychology, law, political anthropology, sociology among others into a wider, as well as deeper, interdisciplinary engagement. Embodying and fostering that engagement is at the heart of this new handbook.The Handbook brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance to map out the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. The authors--drawn from a wide range of disciplines--investigate the relationship between politics and performance to show that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, and that they also share, to a large extent, a common communicational base and language. The volume is organized into seven thematic sections: the interdisciplinary theory of politics and performance; performativity and theatricality (protest, regulation, resistance, change, authority); identities (race, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, indigeneity); sites (states, borders, markets, law, religion); scripts (accountability, authority and legitimacy, security, ceremony, sustainability); body, voice, and gesture (representation, leadership, participation, rhetoric, disruption); and affect (media, care, love empathy, comedy, populism, memory).

In a world flooded with information, images, and sounds - where the distinction between real and simulated becomes increasingly blurred - one of the most pressing concerns of the theatre is how to subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well-known fresh and meaningful again. Situating the practice of theatrical estrangement firmly in its social and political contexts, Theatre of Estrangement looks at how this concern has manifested itself in Russian and German avant-garde theatre.Silvija Jestrovic traces the concept of estrangement from its early formulation in the Russian Formalist School of Literary Criticism embodied in the experiments of the Russian avant-garde, to its so-called apotheosis in the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Drawing from a variety of sources - theatrical performances, dramatic works, visual art, film, political events, biographical data - she demonstrates that theatrical estrangement is not only an abstract theoretical postulate, but also a practical artistic strategy shaped by the cultural and historical climate. In the historical avant-garde, Jestrovic argues, estrangement became a way of thinking, a means of comprehending the world, and even a lifestyle. Yet, devices of making the familiar strange are destined to erode in one historical and cultural context and become rediscovered in another to rejuvenate stale art forms and open the door to a fresh and more critical perception of reality. Theatre of Estrangement attempts to make that rediscovery.

Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.

This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?

This book takes Roland Barthes’s famous proclamation of ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to investigate concepts of authorial presence and absence on various levels of text and performance. By offering a new understanding of ‘the author’ as neither a source of unquestioned authority nor an obsolete construct, but rather as a performative figure, the book illuminates wide-ranging aesthetic and political aspects of ‘authorial death’ by asking: how is the author constructed through cultural and political imaginaries and erasures, intertextual and intertheatrical references, re-performances and self-referentiality? And what are the politics and ethics of these constructions?