Overview

Shannon Jackson explores a range of disciplinary, institutional, and political puzzles that engage the social and aesthetic practice of performance in this collection of twenty essential essays spanning her career. Back Stages starts by considering the historical connection between performance practice and movements of social reform, while later writings analyze disciplinary debates on the place of performance in higher education and within the contemporary field of socially engaged art, tracking fraught and allied relationships to literary studies, art history, visual culture, theater, social theory, and critical theory. At a time of increased aesthetic experimentation and political debate within the art world, these essays alight on artists, groups, and cultural organizations whose experiments have challenged conventions of curation and critique, including Theaster Gates, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Harrel Fletcher, and My Barbarian. Throughout Jackson navigates the political ambivalences of performance, from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century, tracking shifts in participatory art that seek to resist capitalism, even as such performance work paradoxically risks neoliberal appropriation by a post-Fordist experience economy. Back Stages surfaces unexpected cross-disciplinary connections and provides new opportunities for mutual engagement within a wide network of educational, artistic, and civic sectors. A substantial introduction excavates the critical links between the essays and a variety of disciplines and movements.

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9780810144842

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Reviews

More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now, Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again. --Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment Shannon Jackson is the great participant-observer of performance. These essays, written over twenty years, are vibrant with insights, observations, and reflections. Reading them allows us to relive and rethink performance studies at its best. Highly recommended. --Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate This anthology's breadth of exploration exemplifies Jackson's depth of knowledge and agility in moving confidently and with compelling insight across a range of performative practices--particularly socially-engaged forms--connecting disciplines and their histories while offering more expansive methods for their interpretation and analysis. Back Stages is an essential contribution to the field. --Paula Marincola, executive director of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

More than anyone, Shannon Jackson has helped us grapple with the gestures, trajectories, and vibrant interanimations among visual, mediatic, theatrical, and performance-based arts. Across decades of commitment, her work has invited us into sumptuous critical entanglements where arts' histories meet performance studies, where arts work is social work and social work performs. Now, Back Stages offers a vital collection of Jackson's influential essays curated to show the arc of her oeuvre and including some new work as well. The book will be an essential reader for all of us who meet at the crossroads of arts disciplines or gather where making meets thinking meets making again. -Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment Shannon Jackson is the great participant-observer of performance. These essays, written over twenty years, are vibrant with insights, observations, and reflections. Reading them allows us to relive and rethink performance studies at its best. Highly recommended. -Martin Puchner, author of The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate This anthology's breadth of exploration exemplifies Jackson's depth of knowledge and agility in moving confidently and with compelling insight across a range of performative practices-particularly socially-engaged forms-connecting disciplines and their histories while offering more expansive methods for their interpretation and analysis. Back Stages is an essential contribution to the field. -Paula Marincola, executive director of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

Author Information

Shannon Jackson is the Cyrus and Michelle Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater; Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics; Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity; and Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity. Her writing has also appeared in dozens of museum catalogs, journals, and edited collections. Jackson has received numerous awards, including a 2015 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and she serves on the board of the Kramlich Art Foundation and the Oakland Museum of California, among others.

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