Diamond, Elin

Diamond, Elin

Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times

This book is a provocative new study of global feminist activism that opposes neoliberal regimes across several sites including Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States. The feminist performative acts featured in the book contest the aggressive unravelling of collectively won gains in gender, sexual and racial equality, the appearance of new planes of discrimination, and the social consequences of political economies based on free market ideology. The investigations of affect theory follow the circulation of intensities – of political impingements on bodies, subjective and symbolic violence, and the shock of dispossession – within and beyond individuals to the social and political sphere. Affect is a helpful matrix for discussing the volatile interactivity between performer and spectator, whether live or technologically mediated. Contending that there is no activism without affect, the collection brings back to the table the activist and hopeful potential of feminism.

Pinter's Comic Play

Examines the basis of Harold Pinter's tense comedy and how it functions in his plays as well as covering the major drama from The Room to Other Places. Diamond argues that the metaphysical fear and emptiness so characteristic of the Pinter situation are inseparable from his use and abuse of literary and popular comic traditions.

Performance and Cultural Politics

Performance & Cultural Politics gathers together some of the foremost scholars of performance studies to examine the historical and cultural territories of performance. "Culture" in the twentieth century, says ethnographer James Clifford, "is no longer an object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of symbols and meanings that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is contested, temporal, emergent." The essays in this volume explore performance, which encompasses theater, performance art, dance, and music, as a vital component of this hybrid, contested culture. The contributors to this landmark volume focus on topics varying from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; the Rose Theatre to the U.S. holocaust museums. They provide new interpretations of performance and its relation to issues of history, memory, mourning, racism, homophobia, and performativity. Performance artist, Robbie McCauley, concludes with a practitioner's perspective on art-making and politics that offers fresh insights into questions raised by other essays.Performance & Cultural Politics is interdisciplinary, thought-provoking, and rich in new ideas. It is essential reading for students and scholars of performance.

Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater

In Unmaking Mimesis, Professor Elin Diamond interrogates the concept of mimesis in relation to feminism, theater and performance. She combines psychoanalytic, semiotic, and materialist perspectives with readings of plays by such diverse dramatists as Ibsen, Brecht, Aphra Behn, Caryl Churchill and Peggy Shaw. Through provocative readings of theater, theory and feminist performance, Professor Diamond demonstrates the continuing force of feminism and mimesis in critical thinking today.

The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill

 

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood - providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation - her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.