The Grammar of Politics and Performance

This volume brings together important work at the interstection of politics and performance studies. While the languages of theatre and performance have long been deployed by other disciplines such as psychology (Freud’s primal ‘scene’), sociology (Goffman’s ‘backstage’), and politics (politicians ‘play’ to the public, stage debates), this metaphorical attribution has seldom been taken seriously and pursued systematically to discover the actual nature of the relationship between performance as a set of behavioural practices and the forms and the transactions of these other realms.

Rather than take these for granted, this book investigates the relationship between politics and performance to discover structural similarities we are calling ‘grammar’. Designed to mean that certain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines, the concept of grammar also emphasizes the common communicational base or language of these fields. Neither politics nor performance can take place without actors who perform and spectators who receive, evaluate and react to these actions. In each of the essays included in this collection, key processes of both politics and performance are identified and analyzed, demonstrating the critical and indivisible links between the fields. At the heart of the project is the ambition to bring about a paradigm change, such that politics cannot be analyzed seriously without a sophisticated understanding of its performance. These essays were chosen for the volume because they display a concrete set of events, practices, and contexts within which politics and performance are inseparable elements.

This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in both International Relations and Performance Studies.

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.

Janelle Reinelt is Professor in the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.