This book investigates transnational processes through the analytic lens of cultural performance. Structured around key concepts of performance studies––commons, skills, and traces––this edited collection addresses the political, normative, and historical implications of cultural performances beyond the limits of the (US) nation-state. These three central aspects of performance function as entryways to inquiries into transnational processes and allow the authors to shift the discussion away from text-centered approaches to intercultural encounters and to bring into focus the dynamic field that opens up between producer, art work, context, setting, and audience in the moment of performance as well as in its afterlife. The chapters provide fresh, performance-based approaches to notions of transcultural mobility and circulation, transnational cultural experience and knowledge formation, transnational public spheres, and identities’ rootedness in both specific local places and diasporic worlds beyond the written word. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of American studies, performance studies, and transnational studies

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This pivot considers the history, methodology and practice of Asian theatre and investigates the role of Asian theatre and film in contemporary transnational Asian identities. It critically reviews the topics of transnationalism and intercultural political difference, arguing that the concept of Transnational Asian theatre or 'TransAsia' can promote cultural diversity and social transformation. The book notably offers an understanding of theatre as a cultural laboratory, a repository for diverse histories and a forum for intercultural dialogue, allowing for a better understanding of sociocultural patterns surrounding transnational Asian identity and mobility.

Through the study of a large variety of musical practices from the U.S.-Mexico border, Transnational Encounters seeks to provide a new perspective on the complex character of this geographic area. By focusing not only on norteña, banda or conjunto musics (the most stereotypical musical traditions among Hispanics in the area) but also engaging a number of musical practices that have often been neglected in the study of this border's history and culture (indigenous musics, African American musical traditions, pop musics), the authors provide a glance into the diversity of ethnic groups that have encountered each other throughout the area's history. Against common misconceptions about the U.S.-Mexico border as a predominant Mexican area, this book argues that it is diversity and not homogeneity which characterizes it. From a wide variety of disciplinary and multidisciplinary enunciations, these essays explore the transnational connections that inform these musical cultures while keeping an eye on their powerful local significance, in an attempt to redefine notions like "border," "nation," "migration," "diaspora," etc. Looking at music and its performative power through the looking glass of cultural criticism allows this book to contribute to larger intellectual concerns and help redefine the field of U.S.-Mexico border studies beyond the North/South and American/Mexican dichotomies. Furthermore, the essays in this book problematize some of the widespread misconceptions about U.S.-Mexico border history and culture in the current debate about immigration.

In this autobiographical, bi-cultural, and interdisciplinary production, I use piano, voice, dance, and acting to create a performance that weaves together Chinese and American cultural differences and similarities. The performance is an account of how I have learned to navigate the world as an academic and composer with the obstacles and successes that come with such a journey. I combine modern North American techniques with traditional Chinese ways of knowing through three art forms: theater, music, and dance. These very different musical traditions cooperate to connect performers and audiences. Chinese performers and audiences are reacquainted with their cultural roots, while U.S. audience members see something new in themselves as they experience this performance. This strategy increases the variety of receptive audiences for my compositions and will allow for greater intercultural interaction and visibility between different cultures.

Aquí and Allá: Transnational Dominican Theater and Performance explores how contemporary Dominican theater and performance artists portray a sense of collective belonging shaped by the transnational connections between the homeland and the diaspora. Through close readings of plays and performances produced in the Dominican Republic and the United States in dialogue with theories of theater and performance, migration theory, and literary, cultural, and historical studies, this book situates theater and performance in debates on Dominican history and culture and the impact of migration on the changing character of national identity from end of the twentieth century to the present. By addressing local audiences of island-based and diasporic Dominicans with stories of characters who are shaped by both places, the theatrical performances analyzed in this book operate as a democratizing force on conceptions of Dominican identity and challenge assumptions about citizenship and national belonging. Likewise, the artists’ bi-national perspectives and work methods challenge the paradigms that have traditionally framed Latin(o) American theater studies.

This book provides a timely intervention in the fields of performance studies and theatre history, and to larger issues of global cultural exchange. The authors offer a provocative argument for rethinking the scholarly assessment of how diverse performative cultures interact, how they are interwoven, and how they are dependent upon each other. While the term ‘intercultural theatre’ as a concept points back to postcolonialism and its contradictions, The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures explores global developments in the performing arts that cannot adequately be explained and understood using postcolonial theory. The authors challenge the dichotomy ‘the West and the rest’ – where Western cultures are ‘universal’ and non-Western cultures are ‘particular’ – as well as ideas of national culture and cultural ownership. This volume uses international case studies to explore the politics of globalization, looking at new paternalistic forms of exchange and the new inequalities emerging from it. These case studies are guided by the principle that processes of interweaving performance cultures are, in fact, political processes. The authors explore the inextricability of the aesthetic and the political, whereby aesthetics cannot be perceived as opposite to the political; rather, the aesthetic is the political. Helen Gilbert’s essay ‘Let the Games Begin: Pageants, Protests, Indigeneity (1968–2010)’won the 2015 Marlis Thiersch Prize for best essay from the Australasian Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies Association.

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world's fairs as transnational sites of memory.

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural productions, examining how they serve as ways of perceiving American culture. Visiting literature, film, and music, it considers how manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, including how they have been commodified.