Performance and Politics: Elections

Recommended Reading:
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)—a major book on crowd psychology that influenced people such as Mussolini and Hitler.
Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, his classic 1922 study on the role of the citizen in democracy.
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1927), reprinted Transaction Publishers John Street, Politics & Popular Culture (1997) Temple UP Alan Schroeder,
Celebrity-in-Chief: How Show Business Took Over the White House (2004) Westview Press.
Lewis L. Gould, The Modern American Presidency (2003), Kansas UP.

Recommended Films:
The Triumph of the Will
Wag the Dog
The Revolution Will Not be Televised
The War Room
Our Brand is Crisis

Useful urls:
e-misférica 1.1
Comic Bush & Sosie at White House Correspondents Dinner
Colbert Roasts President Bush, White House Correspondents Dinner 2006

Artist Protest:
Huron Project
Elections and Conventions—2000 to present
How stuff works
How did it play—PBS discussion of 2000 convention Rep.
Cell phones as election tool in philippines
Medium Cool

Fall 2008
Prof. Diana Taylor ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Class: Tue 3:30-6:15
Office hours, Wed, 3:00-5:00 and by appointment

This course explores the many ways in which artists and activists and other social actors use performance to make a social intervention. We begin the course examining several theories about performance and politics (Brecht, Boal, Foucault, Ngugi wa Thiong'o among others) and then focus on issues of agency, space, event, and audience both online and off. Special attention will be paid to the role of performance in the 2008 presidential elections. Video screenings and guest lectures will provide an additional dimension for the course. Students are encouraged to develop their own sites of investigation and present their work as a final presentation and paper.