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7 - Pathogenic Performativity

Urban Contagion and Fascist Affect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 7: This chapter looks at two recent performances, Arinzé Kene’s Misty (2018) and Neil Bartlett’s The Plague (2017), which depict cities under siege. Contagions, figurative and literal, spread among residents, destroying lives and tearing the fabric of the urban environment. In both productions the city is at war with itself, via the circulation of disease that passes between infrastructure and people. Focusing on these plays and their productions, this chapter explores how ideas of contagion are deployed to capture a sense of intangible danger spreading throughout the city, especially London, and how this formulation finds impetus in contemporary discourse that mobilizes the risk of economic, cultural, and political contagion as part of a divisive rhetoric. The chapter also considers how we might understand these forms of representation and discourse in light of the prevalence of ‘pathogenic performativity’, in which the language and phantasmagoria of contagion are deployed as tactics of governance, with theatre enabling its exposure or perpetuation.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Suggested Reading

Artaud, AntoninThe Theater and Its Double (1938), trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York, 1958.Google Scholar
Brennan, TeresaThe Transmission of Affect. New York, 2004.Google Scholar
Campkin, BenRemaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture. New York, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix, GuattariA Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, 1987.Google Scholar
Goddard, LynetteContemporary Black British Playwrights: Margins to Mainstream. Basingstoke, 2015.Google Scholar
Guattari, FélixChaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972–1977, ed. Lotringer, Sylvère, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor Adkins. Los Angeles, 2007.Google Scholar
Harvie, Jen. ‘Brand London 2012 and “The Heart of East London”: Competing Urban Agendas at the 2012 Games’. Contemporary Theatre Review 23, no. 4 (2013): 486501.Google Scholar
Le Bon, GustavThe Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). Scotts Valley, CA, 2010.Google Scholar
ReichWilhelmThe Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), trans. Vincent R. Carfagno. New York, 1970.Google Scholar
Sampson, Tony D. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. London, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarde, GabrielThe Laws of Imitation (1903). Worcestershire, 2013.Google Scholar
Walsh, Fintan, ed. Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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