Additional information
by Mark Levine (Author), Bryan Reynolds (Author)
Art Beyond the Edge is not just a title: it's a designation, a call to action, and a means to achieve enduring impact. Reflecting over a quarter century of collaborative artistic production, research, and activism across five continents, this book is a field-breaking and era-defining exploration of art created during sociopolitical conflict and war, protests and calamities, and their aftermaths. With the goal of generating a critical theory that can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds propose a new and radical vocabulary, epistemological foundation, and praxiological roadmap for engagement with and in performance activism and political art. From Gaza to Chiapas, Baghdad to Kabul, the Niger Delta to the Congo River, the US to Ukraine, the authors establish an innovative matrix to analyze the conditions through which artistic production empowers struggles for freedom, dignity, and survival in a world on fire.
Back Jacket
"At last here is a book, Art Beyond the Edge, that speaks from the heart of conflict, the entrails of agony, injustice, and suffering, and yet affirms art as joy and creativity. Both global and regional, multimodal and interdisciplinary, this timely endeavor dares to give hope a name and art its salience on the brink of precarity. Thanks to these authors, art speaks and speaks for."--Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, author of History, the Human, and the World Between
"Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds go global creating 'transversal' performances--art that is dangerous, experimental, political, engaged, practical, theoretical, and collective. Agree or disagree, I was taken by their fierce book embodying 'emurgent' art, incandescent performances amid a world on fire, art that becomes 'a map to the future.'"--Richard Schechner, author of Between Theater and Anthropology
"LeVine and Reynolds make accessible rare and important case studies in theater, music, and performance from sites of tension, violence, and war. New vocabularies in Western aesthetics for art 'beyond' the edge engage with performative, non-generic artwork from global communities obscured, silenced, or erased by neo/post-liberal structures. This book generates discussion, conversation, argument, and polemic and addresses a central issue in our diverse world, where peoples around the world are seeking recognition and attempting to get it on their own terms."--Lynette Hunter, author of Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity
"This analytical record offers an incisive and unprecedented conceptual language for grasping how art becomes a crucial modality for creating new political subjects. Rarely have there been intellectual practices that match this project's courage and invention in the long struggles for emancipation."--AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture
"Is a revolutionary art possible at this juncture of history? In Art Beyond the Edge scholar-artists LeVine and Reynolds tell stories gathered over three decades and several continents about artists who create political transformation in danger zones. The result is an acutely theoretical as well as practical road map for those committed to defying oppression, challenging boundaries, and creating beauty in the eclipse of civil liberties worldwide. This book is a war cry for art and scholarship that refuse to be commodified, demand to be acknowledged, and ultimately heal a world in crisis, one performance at a time. A very important book."--Deborah Kapchan, editor of Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights
"In this innovative, globe-trotting work, LeVine and Reynolds follow cultural activists to the edge, the abyss, the bloody crossroads where art and politics collide, and show how creativity can rattle authoritarian rule. Across conflict zones--from Zapatista autonomous zones to Palestine and Afghanistan--they show how art (murals, theater, rock) can expand the limits of the 'realistic.' Art Beyond the Edge delivers, doing precisely what the artists it depicts do: disrupt, entertain, and open up new terrains of thought."--Hisham Aidi, American Book Award winner of Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture
Author Biography
Mark LeVine is Professor of History at UC Irvine, a Guggenheim Fellow, multi-award-winning musician, film producer, journalist, and cofounder of both the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change at UC Irvine and Kakuma Sound.
Bryan Reynolds is Distinguished Professor and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at UC Irvine, Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright. He has published over a dozen books and his plays and musicals have been produced at seventy-five venues in twenty-two countries.
