American Cultures as Transnational Performance

Book excerpt: This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies