In what ways can performance be mobilized to resist? This is the question that the present volume explores from within the context of qualitative research. From an arts-based approach, authors suggest methods on how artistic practice resists. The volume addresses how critical performance autoethnography might retain its ethical and democratic potential without falling into dogmatism or hegemony. This vision for democracy can even be accomplished through improvised, process-centered pieces that weave together thoughts from several key scholars, all to give us a critical perspective on how performative autoethnography is paradigmatically situated. The performance texts collected here question and resist, showing how the experience of art-making can move us through political and public spaces with liberatory potential, challenging social and ideological hegemonies and to generate social movements. Imaginative arts-based practices allow us access to emotional and embodied phenomena that remain otherwise foreclosed by traditional forms of inquiry. From poetics to public performances, subversive interventions, and more, these chapters bring a radical performative discourse to the fore. In so doing, the chapters work to create a framework for just performance, showing us how we might live performance as resistance.
Introduction
The Generic Activism of Just Performance
James Salvo
Chapter One
The World’s Resistance in Arts-Based Research
Richard Siegsemund
Chapter Two
Failing Better: The Ethics of Critical Performance Autoethnography
Sophie Tamas
Chapter Three
Performance Autoethnography: Many Surfaces, Many Forms, Many Interpretations
Desiree Yomtoob
Chapter Four
Paradigmatic Situatedness of Performative Autoethnography: A Postcritical Perspective
William M. Sughrua
Chapter Five
Quest for Lunch and Comfort Zones: About Personal-Becoming-Political Encounters
Inge G. E. Blockmans
Chapter Six
Compositions: A Visual Essay
Jasmine B. Ulmer
Chapter Seven
Art-Making in Public—Impacting Positive Transformation
Aravindhan Natarajan
Chapter Eight
Poetics of Rage as Performative Creative Subversion: Autoethnography and Social Drama
César Antonio Cisneros Puebla
Chapter Nine
Saving Our Soul: Imagination as Activism
Nancy Gerber
Chapter Ten
Escaping into Liberatory and De/Colonial Possibilities: Juxtaposing Absurdity and Creativity
Kakali Bhattacharya
About the Authors
Index
