Performing Statecraft: The Postdiplomatic Theatre of Sovereigns, Citizens, and States

The crafts of governance and diplomacy are spectacular, theatrical, and performative. Performing Statecraft investigates the performances of states, their leaders, and their citizens on an expanded field of the global arts of statecraft. What is the role of performance in governance and diplomacy? How can we advance interventions into global politics by artists, scholars, and activists?
Treating theatre as both an art form and as a practice of political actors, this book draws together scholarship on the use of theatre as a soft power tool, arts activism on the world stage, embodied dimensions of governance, sports performance by heads of state, the performativity of national dress, speechmaking and colonialism, war and medicine, singing diplomats, indigenous sovereignties, performed nationalisms, and related themes. Performing Statecraft brings the perspective and methods of performance studies to bear on global politics, offering exciting new insights into encounters between states, sovereigns, and people.
Whether one is watching a campaign speech, a nightly news broadcast, a sacred dance, or a theatre company in exile, these chapters make clear the importance of performance as a tool wielded by amateurs and professionals to articulate the nation in global spaces. Attending to such performances reveals how worlds are made where official statecraft and citizen statecraft converge and conflict. Tracing these conflicts, new histories appear in which a performing body reasserts itself as an essential component of a global politics that embraces dissent and recognizes the vulnerability of power.