The Faculty of Governance, Economics, and Social Sciences will host Profressor Jamal Akabli for a book presentation titled “Street Performances as Disruptive-Interactive Heterotopias “on Tuesday, April 7th at 5 p.m. His publication will showcase how street performances disrupt everyday life and transform public spaces into areas of contestation and imagination.

Abstract:

This edited volume contends that street performances are best understood as disruptive-interactive heterotopias which, by interrupting and disrupting the flow of everyday life, unsettle spatial, temporal, and cognitive certainties while reconfiguring public space into a site of contestation, imagination, and meaning-making. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias as countersites where reality is simultaneously represented, inverted, and challenged, the book demonstrates how artistic, ritualistic and political performative practices occupy and transform streets, squares, and even stadiums into highly charged arenas in which the boundaries between performer and spectator, art and life, aesthetics and politics are blurred, thereby producing epistemological ruptures that displace individuals from their socially assigned roles and reinsert them, however momentarily, into altered modes of being and perception. Across its richly dense and varied contributions, the volume retraces a transhistorical and transcultural genealogy of such performances, from medieval mystery plays to contemporary interventions, and protest movements, all of which foreground the body as both medium and message in the enactment of dissent and collective identity. Through its panoply of voices, the book calls for a sustained critical attentiveness to these forms in motion, insisting that street performances are indispensable to any serious inquiry into contemporary performance cultures in their entanglement with power, space, and lived experience.