Nonconforming Criticism: Political Practices and Poetics at the Borderlands of Performance

(Hardback)

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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.

Author Bio

Diana Damian Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, UK. She leads the BA (Hons) Experimental Arts and Performance course, and is also a researcher and educator. Her work concerns alternative critical practices, queer and transnational feminist modes of exchange, experimental performance and political organising, as well as migration, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She explores the inter-relation between migration, ecologies of knowledge and regimes of power and has published in Performance Philosophy, TDR/The Drama Review, Contemporary Theatre Review, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, RiDE as well as co-authored a number of creative publications including States of Wake: Dedicating Performance (2020) and Critical Interruptions Vol 1 (2020). She co-hosts The Department of Feminist Conversations and Something Other, Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions and Migrants in Culture, a migrant-led agency moving towards our collective capacity to imagine and live without borders.