Nonconforming Criticism
Political Practices and Poetics at the Borderlands of Performance

By (author) Diana Damian Martin

ISBN13: 9781350178595

Imprint: Methuen Drama

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Hardback

Published: 27/11/2025

Availability: Not yet available

Description
Nonconforming Criticism examines forms of thinking at the borderlands of performance that defy, dispute and resist the category of criticism. Against the backdrop of forms of governance and regulation of thought under late liberalism, this book looks to those who refuse to reproduce colonial logics in criticism by investing in unruly experiments in thinking from, and through, performance. Focusing on the period between the early noughties and early twenty-twenties, the book analyses critical practices such as live writing, artist-led publications, zines, gatherings and experiments with video, sound and publishing from cultural workers and thinkers migrating across borders, knowledges and contexts. These practices are often peripheralized from established forms of criticism, yet they shape criticality as a form of political imagination. Unpacking the logics that shape professionalised criticism, and in dialogue with decolonial, abolitionist and feminist theorisations of politics and knowledge, the book focuses on nonconforming criticism as a practice of unlearning. Structured into three parts, the book constitutes a partial lexicon of Borders, Experiments and Practices. It moves through forms of thinking-in-public that reconfigure relations of sensing and meaning between criticism, performance and political life, against the imperial and separatist logics of criticism and its entanglements.
Introduction: On criticism that does not conform: neoliberal governance and structures of legibility Part One: CRITICISM as EXPERIMENT Chapter One: Regimes of Power, Cultures of Dissent Chapter Two: Affect, Attention, Relation Part Two: CRITICISM as EVENT Chapter Three: Poetics of Appearance Chapter Four: Digital Works Part Three: CRITICISM as RESISTANCE Chapter Five: Discursive Counter-Publics Chapter Six: Criticism as Political Event Conclusion: Critical Futurities Bibliography Index
  • Theatre studies
  • Educational: drama studies
  • Professional & Vocational
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List Price: £75.00