Performance Philosophies

Since it was launched in 2014, the Performance Philosophy book series has published over 30 titles on a wide variety of topics addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy (performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance) within a broad range of philosophical traditions (including critical theory, epistemology, the philosophy of language, phenomenology, aesthetics & the philosophy of art, deconstruction, political philosophy…) and performance practices (theater, dance, art, literature, music and sound studies among others).

We are excited to announce that the series is now being published by Bloomsbury. With this move, we are also interested in shifting the focus of the Performance Philosophy book series, a shift captured in the pluralizing of its name: Performance Philosophies. We are now looking forward to publishing monographs, essay collections, creative writing, poetic approaches, and other formats of scholarship and artistic research focused on anti-colonial, post-colonial, and decolonial philosophies of performance, as well as works that address the performative aspects of Latin American, African, Caribbean, Indigenous, and Asian philosophies. We continue to be committed to an understanding of creative practice as expressions of (non-standard) philosophical thought and insight, and to publish non-standard writing by performance makers and other cultural practitioners. We are particularly interested in works seeking to interrogate the relations of power that are transversal if not also constitutive of philosophy, performance, and of life itself. This sharpened focus on power, on scholarship that analyzes, critiques, and imagines it anew, is driven by our interest in considering the liberatory politics and emancipatory potentials of performance philosophies as a field of inquiry.

Power has been philosophically understood in a variety of ways: as the collective expression of organized class consciousness in a struggle over the mode of production that determines a social order (Karl Marx); as the organized contestation against the psycho-social effects of colonial relations and their aftermath (Frantz Fanon); as a microphysical relation of forces living across a multiplicity of technologies that always invites resistance (Michel Foucault); as the capacity of plural collectives to inaugurate new worlds (Hannah Arendt); as that set of forces that form a subject but are, simultaneously, re-articulated anew by the very subject that they help to form (Judith Butler); as the collective exercise of actions capable of sustaining the ‘good life’ (buen vivir) in which socio-natural and spiritual relations enable the autonomy of communal existence (Mariana Mora); as a beautiful experiment, a kind of social poesis of how to live otherwise, that refuses confinement and captivity (Saidiya Hartman)... Performance, broadly understood, actively participates in all these forms of power. Notably, performance does so as an anti-essentializing artistic and life practice, that renders undoable/re-doable what hegemonic forms of power would like to present as natural, as second nature. We do not intend to choose between these conceptualizations of power, nor is it our aim to privilege some over others. Rather, we are interested in how these and many other understandings of power can inform the ways in which the relationship between performance and philosophy can be reconsidered as a practice of refusal that is not only reactive but inventive as well, prefigurative. We are looking for projects interested in exploring and questioning, from a variety of perspectives, methodologies, archives, approaches and formats of thinking and knowledge production: in what ways do or might performance philosophies contest sedimented relations of power, or help to further naturalize them? How do some forms of refusal and contestation become relationally dependent on erasing, displacing, or rendering invisible others within different performance philosophies? What are the emancipatory or liberatory horizons opened by alternative practices and formats of various performance philosophies?

The series will continue to be edited by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Will Daddario, Alice Lagaay and Andrés Fabián Henao Castro in collaboration with Colleen Coalter, Senior Publisher on the Philosophy list.
We are very excited to receive any new project proposals that you want to send us.

Advisory Board: Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Alloa, Professor of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Dr. Luciana Da Costa Dias, Associate Professor of Aesthetic and Theatre Theory, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA, James R. Hamilton, Professor of Philosophy, Kansas State University, USA, Bojana Kunst, Professor of Choreography and Performance, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Professor of Theatre Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Fumi Okiji, Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, Prof. Martin Puchner, Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA, Prof. Alan Read, Professor of Theatre, King's College London, UK, Prof. Freddie Rokem, Emeritus Professor of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University, Israel, Prof. Phillip Zarrilli, Emeritus Professor of Performance Practice, University of Exeter, UK, Prof. Cosimo Zene, Emeritus Professor in the Study of Religions and World Philosophies, SOAS, UK,