Performance

"Performance" has multiple and often overlapping meanings that signify a wide variety of social behaviors. In this invitation to reflect on the power of performance, Diana Taylor explores many of its uses and iterations: artistic, economic, sexual, political, and technological performance; the performance of everyday life; and the gendered, sexed, and racialized performance of bodies. This book performs its argument. Images and texts interact to show how performance is at once a creative act, a means to comprehend power, a method of transmitting memory and identity, and a way of understanding the world.

Diana Taylor is University Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author and editor of several books, includingThe Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, and Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War", both also published by Duke University Press.