Performance

‘Performativity’ became a watchword of cultural theory at the turn of the millennium. Yet, while ideas of performative play and the fluidity of identity have gained much traction in conceptual debates about the experience of being human, large chunks of literary theory still skirt past the question of how to account for actual performances by humans in the real world. What happens when literature stops being just a text on a page and unfolds within a communal setting as a live event? In her chapter, Emily Spiers demonstrates how spoken-word poetry makes particularly apparent an underlying and little conceptualized phenomenon that applies for all literature: the ‘perpetually unstable dynamic of literary connectivity’. Through the frame concept of ‘worlding’ as applied to the Badilisha online poetry platform, the chapter shows how the author–performer and audience share the tangible unfolding of ‘a potentiality of the literary act in time’ at the live scene of a spoken-word performance.