The long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection considers:
- How militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques
- How performing arts practices can confront militarization
- The long and complex history of militarization
- How the war on terror has transformed into a values system that prioritizes the military
- The ways in which performance can be used to secure and maintain power across social strata
Performance in a Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such danger.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Sarah Bay-Cheng
Performance in the Age of Intelligent Warfare
Introduction
Sara Brady
Lindsey Mantoan
In the Absence of the Gun: Performing Militarization
I. Sites of Conflict
Katherine Zien
Mises-en-scène of Militarization: Decommissioning US Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone
Alexis Bushnell
Justine Nakase
Military Aid: The Spatial Performances and Performativity of Contemporary Refugee Camps
Eylül Fidan Akinci
Sacred Children, Accursed Mothers: Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey
Elin Nicholson
The Freedom Theatre and Cultural Resistance in Jenin, Palestine
Bart Pitchford
Tactical Performance Across a Revolutionary Timeline
II. Militarized History and Memory
Áine Sheil
How to Do Things with Music Criticism: Performances of Victory in German Wagner Reception, 1918–1933
Susanne Shawyer
"Stop the War in Chicago Please": Performative Protest and the Limits of Dissensus
Jessica Nakamura
Choreographies of Militarized Space: US Military Bases, Everyday Life, and Performance in Okinawa, Japan
Solveig Gade
Reviving the Tradition of the Battle Painting: The Militarization of Danish Culture
III. Performing the Soldier
tyler boudreau
Soldier Street Theatre
Lindsey Mantoan
No Easy Mission: Zero Dark Thirty and Gendered Heroism in the Post-Heroic Age
Sarah Beck
Going Outside the Wire: Service Members as Documentary Subjects in Black Watch and ReEntry
Cami Rowe
Challenging the Characterizations of Military Service: A Critical Comparison of British and American Counter-Recruitment Efforts
Michael St. Clair
Strategic Simulation and the American Military Imaginary
Scott Magelssen
Performing Flight: Test Pilots, Commercial Airlines, and the Cold War
IV. The Militarization of the Everyday
Lindsay Adamson Livingston
Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement
Emily Klein
Failure to Adapt: Affect, Apathy, and Doomed Reenactments in American Theatre’s Militarized Dystopias
Asher Warren
Weaponized Bureaucracy: Kill-Chains, Drones, and Tethers
Jacqueline Viskup
Re-staging Surveillance Tragedy as Critical Resistance
Kashif Jerome Powell
The Time to Break (Silence): Disavowing the Affects of Militarization and Death through the Performance of Black Existence
Afterword
Wendy S. Hesford
Constitutive Performance: Human Rights in a Militarized Culture
