NEW BOOK - Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia by Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo

Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia is a ground-breaking study of cross-cultural theatre in the Australasian region. Focusing on a range of theatrical events and practices in avant-garde, mainstream and community contexts, this book explores the cultural, political and ethical dimensions of Australia’s engagement with Asia. Aboriginal theatre is also featured as an important aspect of regional arts traffic. A complex and fascinating analysis that sheds light on international arts marketing, broader trends in cross-cultural performance training, and current debates in performance studies.

Pre-publication endorsement:

‘This brisk and succinct narrative inflects and counters the valorization of cosmopolitanism in global cultural discourse. Its major achievement is to locate diverse cosmopolitan practices within the embattled national imaginary of Australasian theatre. In countering official nationalism and legitimized xenophobia at intensely local and regional levels, it offers substantial evidence of how cosmopolitics can be put into practice at ground levels. This book is immediate and relevant.’ —Rustom Bharucha, author of The Politics of Cultural Practice and Theatre and the World

About the Authors:

HELEN GILBERT is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and co-convenor of the College’s interdisciplinary Postcolonial Research Group. Her books include Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre (1998), Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (with Joanne Tompkins, 1996) and Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology (2001).

JACQUELINE LO is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Convenor of the Literature, Screen and Theatre Studies Graduate Program at the Australian National University, Australia. She is the author of Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (2004) and Chair of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network

$144 Hb, ISBN 978-02300-0340-8
Published April 2007, 256 pages
Palgrave Macmillan