Reframing the Iraq war through erformance : politics, rhetoric, and resistance
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 2003 the United States government launched a war against Iraq, a country that had not attacked it first. The Bush administration rallied support for this war using aesthetic, discursive, and performative devices that framed the war as necessary for national security and an ethical imperative for humanitarian intervention. At a time when the government relied on the tools of performance to justify and wage war, artists struggled to find new aesthetic and political approaches to theater, protest performance, and the media. Marked by a lack of formal innovation, performance during the war was variously a methodology for historicizing war as it happened, an embodied means of resistance, and an attempt to understand the effects and affects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Although trapped in the same political logic and capitalist systems they attempted to critique, performances about the Iraq War nonetheless reframed the war, enabling the public to see it differently. "Reframing the Iraq War through Performance: Politics, Rhetoric, and Resistance" argues that performance genres such as documentary, tragedy, and satire challenged the logic and emotional appeal of the government's call for war in order to create space for resistance. This project analyzes the relation between form and content in order to argue that particular modes of performance are uniquely positioned to reconceptualize specific frames of war. I examine the ways in which personal narratives in documentary plays reveal problems with the freedom agenda, adaptations of Greek tragedies to the Iraq war demonstrate contradictions embedded in American exceptionalism, and the satirical performances in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report challenge the manipulation of truth by the government and media.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Mantoan, Lindsey |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Jakovljević, Branislav |
| Thesis advisor | Jakovljević, Branislav |
| Thesis advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Rayner, Alice |
| Advisor | Menon, Jisha, 1972- |
| Advisor | Rayner, Alice |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Lindsey Mantoan. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Lindsey Mantoan
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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