Identity, Culture and Performance Studies

The essays included in this special issue of RAEI aim at discussing the challenges raised by the definition of performance and performativity in relation to the politics of identity and culture in current cultural studies. Over the last fifty or sixty years, a growing interest in performance discourse – with its emphasis on the body, that is, on human experience, practices and affections – has taken place, floating free of theatre precincts and extending itself to other disciplines, including cultural studies. Performance Studies’ countercultural aspects are frequently stressed as they privilege “threshold-crossing, shape-shifting, and boundary-violating figures, such as shamans, tricksters, and jokers, who value the carnivalesque over the canonical, the transformative over the normative, the mobile over the monumental.” (Conquergood 1995), but a wider range of activities/roles played out by the postmodern subjects/actors on the contemporary British cultural stage have been actually focused upon, so that themes and issues discussed include: gender, race and ethnicity as they are enacted, idealized, negotiated and redefined; postmodern urban experience and identity; performativity and the arts; new technologies and the construction of new identities in the real or virtual world.