Performance in Popular Culture reveals the intricate relationship between performance and popular culture by exploring how theatrical conventions and dramaturgical tropes have informed the way the social is constructed for popular consumption. Staged as a series of case studies, this book considers the diverse ways the social is imagined and produced in live and mediated performances, in images and texts, in interactive experiences and in cultural institutions. By looking at performance in popular culture, the world we live in becomes more visible, open to investigation and (perhaps) to change. Performance in Popular Culture engages a wide range of disciplines and theoretical frameworks: performance, theatre and cultural studies; comparative literature and media studies; gender and sexuality, critical race and post-colonial theories. Designed for accessibility at an undergraduate level, the case studies make use of visual materials, moving images and texts that are readily available to lecturers and students, to scholars and to the general public.

Fresh takes on key questions in black performance and black popular culture, by leading artists, academics, and critics

This volume is based on the premise that artistic performance is epistemological, a way of knowing self, culture, and other. The nine essays in this book, based on a broad range of ethnic, racial, and gender groups, share a common interest in exploring how performance reveals, shapes, and sometimes transforms personal and cultural identity. Editors Fine and Speer begin by examining the interdisciplinary roots of performance studies and the role of performance studies in the field of communication. They also discuss the power of performance to shape personal and cultural identity. The first two chapters explore the ritual nature of performance in two different cultural contexts: an African-American church service and an Appalachian storytelling event of the legendary Ray Hicks. In both arenas, the performers act as shamans, transporting the audience from their everyday, secular lives to the higher ground of the mythic spheres of heroic and fantastic events. The next three chapters discuss the notion of place and performance in various landscapes--the English countryside, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the farmland of the Midwest. Through analysis of the speech and songs of a modern Sussex yeoman, the ghost tales of Appalachian storytellers, and the narratives of Midwest farmers coping with hard times, the authors reveal a variety of ways in which narrative performances function to preserve people's relationship with the land. The last four chapters share a focus on women as storytellers. One chapter offers a feminist critique of personal narrative research and challenges normative assumptions about the storytelling behavior of women. Another chapter interprets a narration of a Galician woman's typical day to reveal how the performance expresses deeply held attitudes and beliefs of her cultural community. Words are not the only medium that women use to tell their stories. The next chapter examines the story cloths of Hmong women refugees from Laos as intercultural and dialogical performances. The last chapter explores self-discovery and identity in the storytelling of a woman in the last years of her life. This volume is particularly representative of the ways in which communication scholars approach performance studies, but will also interest researchers and students of folklore, anthropology, sociology, theatre, and related disciplines.

"This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements."

This volume offers transdisciplinary perspectives on the study of acting and performance in moving image forms. It assembles 26 international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art history and philosophy to investigate the art of acting and the presence of the human body in analog and digital film, animation and video art. The volume includes classical case studies and essays devoted to acting history and acting and genres, but its particular emphasis is on introducing a wide range of groundbreaking theoretical approaches - from continental and analytic philosophy to new media theory and cognitivist research - all of which interrogate the fundamental conceptions of »act« and »actor« that underwrite both popular and academic notions of performance in moving image culture.

The Muslim-majority nations of Malaysia and Indonesia are known for their extraordinary arts and Islamic revival movements. This collection provides an extensive view of dance, music, television series, and film in rural, urban, and mass-mediated contexts and how pious Islamic discourses are encoded and embodied in these public cultural forms.

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web. A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.