Atmospheres of Protest

Commentators often remark upon the “festive” or “tense” atmosphere of major protests. This seems to signify the general outlook of the protestors or the relations between them and the police. It signals the potential of the protests to unfold in a peaceful, joyous manner or with violence. While “festive” and “tense” are useful ways of thinking about protest atmospheres, they are often used in a highly reductive manner. The literature on atmosphere from social movement studies also tends to reproduce this reductive idea of atmosphere, whereby it can be understood through unidimensional metrics. This chapter discusses the social movement literature and opens the debate about atmospheres of protest more widely. Ultimately there is a much greater variety of atmospheric conditions in moments of protest. These nestle together, changing and interacting as the conditions shift. Atmospheres are the affective tone of space. They are produced by those gathered in that space, by the spatial dynamics and the affective social conditions. Atmospheres affect those present, changing their capacity to act. Thus it is important that we understand their potential.

The Nation as Family

This chapter examines mother-child love linked to love for the nation within two Japanese plays. In Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell (1984), a pre–World War II silk factory represents the Japanese Empire, where a mother and her daughter are manipulated by the nation. However, they eventually challenge this symbolic realm that forces women to sustain the national lineage through their reproductive function. In Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2015), a homosexual transvestite’s relationship with his mother in the postwar period is depicted. As resistance to heteronormative ideas about family, and the nation as its extension, he commits matricide, but this leads to his melancholia as he cannot fully give up his desire to belong to a “normal” family and nation. These plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation by reconfiguring their love for their mother.

Law, Presence to Absence

The live presence of a defendant at trial is a long-standing feature of adversarial criminal trial. So much of what constitutes the adversarial method of adjudication is dependent on qualities that arise from this presence: confrontation and demeanor assessment, among other factors, play important roles in how truth is constructed. As such, performative matters—how a defendant enacts and inhabits her role, how she is positioned or silenced-- have long been of concern to legal scholars. These performative concerns are also centrally implicated in defendant rights, such as the right to a fair trial. But today we face new challenges that call into question fundamental beliefs around trials, defendant presence, and fairness. First, technological advances have led to defendants appearing remotely in hearings from the prison in which they are held. Second, the trial itself is arguably vanishing in most adversarial jurisdictions. Third, the use of trials in absentia means that criminal trials may take place in a defendant’s absence; in England and Wales for less serious offenses this can be done without inquiring why a defendant isn’t there. This chapter therefore seeks to understand the performative implications of these challenges by shifting the conversation from presence to absence. What difference does it make if a defendant is no longer there? Does being there facilitate greater fairness, despite the obvious issues of constraint and silencing? Drawing on sociolegal, political, and performance theory the chapter considers the implications of absence in the criminal trial, asking what happens when the defendant disappears.

Introduction

Beginning with two vivid examples that illustrate the Handbook’s core arguments—that politics is performative, performance is political, and that both of these matter to understanding our worlds—the introduction provides a current, contextual account of the shared syntax of politics and performance. It defines key terms, such as politics, performance, theatricality, and performativity, that inform the Handbook contributions. Through accessible and provocative engagements with new ways of thinking about politics and performance in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary modes, the introduction shows that these categories are interwoven and entangled in complex and consequential ways. It outlines the states of the art in theater and performance studies and politics, respectively, capturing key points of interconnection between these discourses in order to build on, extend, and reshape interdisciplinary conversations. Finally, it reflects on key challenges and opportunities that attend bringing the two broad fields together for mutual enrichment and building a new, hybrid field of study. Underlining the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics, the introduction suggests that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complex political world of the twenty-first century.

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals

Exploring the similarities between the Future of Enterprise Technology trade fairs and the ITU AI for Food Summit, this chapter focuses on trade fairs as spaces of political performance. It explores how trade fairs do politics and what the implications of this are. The chapter begins by showing that trade fairs play a crucial role in generating and enshrining the legitimacy and authority of decentralized, distributed market orders that are in constant change. The trade fairs are rituals where a “tournament of values” is performed through which the hierarchies of this order are negotiated. This helps manage but also enshrine the uncertainties associated with decentralized governance. Second, as ritual performances more generally, trade fairs engage the sacred and magical and the affective and embodied to anchor order not only broadly but deeply and individually. Finally, the chapter discusses the quality of the ordering performed in trade fairs, suggesting that what is performed in the trade fair is a form of institutionalized liminality. However, and contrary to the hopes Victor Turner placed in institutionalized liminality, here it is far from progressive. It builds inegalitarian instability into our societies. Precisely because of this, tending to trade fairs is of fundamental import. The trade fair form has become pervasive in governance, including when it involves public institutions (as epitomized by the AI for Good Summit). Understanding trade fairs as ritual political performance at the core of neoliberalism is therefore a condition intervening politically and for realizing the urgency of imagining alternative forms of governing.

Gender, Politics, Performance

The chapter introduces the reader to selected frames that are valuable in work on gender and political representation: embodiment, authenticity, and performative labor of (especially symbolic) representation. The chapter illustrates the dominant scripts of political representation and appeals to situated knowledge during claim-making in the Indian national parliament; the policing of gendered and religious behavioral scripts for authentic representation of minority women in Indian politics; salient intersections of caste, gender, and embodiment in the performance of symbolic representation in the election of India’s first female Speaker in Parliament; and more localized scripts of performing gender in party political spaces. It discusses the performances of women legislators in institutional and noninstitutional spaces with the aim of illustrating the intellectual and practical merits of applying a performance-based approach to analyzing gender and politics.

Performing Political Ideologies

This chapter shows the importance of performance studies to the theory and analysis of political ideas and ideologies. Reviewing ways in which these have been studied in political science it argues that there is a need to understand more about how ideologies are manifested in and through their public performance. In particular, drawing on Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA), it argues that rhetorical performances of ethos—of character in various dimensions—are fundamental to the manifestation of ideologies. Using examples from British and American political rhetoric the chapter demonstrates how political leaders perform fidelity to a political tradition, draw rhetorical authority from it, and promote, perform, and embody a particular sort of ideological ethos. The chapter further discusses how performances of ethos may draw on very general archetypes, the playing of parts in larger ideological social dramas, and the ways in which polities governs and sets limits to the range of performances possible.

The Market

The market has no independent objective existence beyond the practices that are embedded within particular market institutions. Those practices, in turn, involve learning particular techniques of performance, on the assumption that each market environment rewards a corresponding type of market agency. However, the ability to reflect what might be supposed the right agential characteristics is not an instinct that is hardwired into us from birth. Instead it comes from perfecting the specific performance elements that allow people to recognize themselves as potentially competent actors in any given market context. This chapter takes the reader back to some of the earliest accounts of these performance elements, showing that important eighteenth-century debates about how to flourish as a market actor revolved around little else. In the early eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe emphasized the need for market actors to create convincing falsehoods, hiding their true feelings behind a presentation of self where customers’ whims were always catered to. In the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith was still wrestling with the dilemma of how genuinely the self could be put on display within market environments, believing that customers had a responsibility to curb excessive demands so that merchants’ interests could be respected. This meant not forcing them into knowingly false declarations, so that moral propriety and economic expedience were not necessarily antagonistic forces in the development of merchants’ character.

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit

The chapter engages the outpouring of Brexit comedy as an important case study of the politics of humor. On one hand, the literature on comedy and politics has identified the subversive potential of jokes as a form of everyday resistance. On the other hand, sociological approaches have emphasized the role of stereotype and humiliation in jokes as part of a disciplinary function of humor. Building on these insights, the chapter reads prominent debates within comedy about Brexit as a vernacular form of politics. Jokes and satire perform and reperform discourses of identity. The chapter argues we should rephrase “Brexit comedy” or “the comedy of Brexit” as a socially consequential practice that teases at the (changing) social and political consensus.

Media Sites

This chapter looks at mass media as political performance in the sense that select ed bodies, images, and voices are part of a production with an intended audience. Alternative media offer different political performances in the sense that small-scale productions of marginalized communities use personal/ or communal voices to interrupt dominant structures. This chapter offers specific extended examples of the latter in particular, such as music videos and filmed performances. Distinguishing between mainstream press and its vernacular forms, this chapter suggests how alternative media performs a distinct psychological and political functions: enacting resiliencies, redefining citizenship, reviving racial solidarities. Contextualizing how mass media needs to be interpreted not for its neutrality but as a site of performance and politics offers a new lens on women’s protests.