Crossroads ― Performance Studies and Irish Culture

In the expansive and expanding field of Irish studies, performance has typically featured as drama, theatre, dance and music. Yet the categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are highly performative, effected through a wide range of social practices, cultural formations, discursive utterances, and in timely need of critical address. As social and political change continue to have enormous effects on Ireland and its diaspora, it has become more important than ever to engage with performances in and of Irish culture.

This new paperback edition of Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture examines Irish culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies. As the title of the book makes clear, Brady and Walsh return to the evocative metaphor of crossroads to signal the intersection of disciplines. The roads mapped here are metaphorical and real, multiple and mobile. Practices, epistemologies, temporalities, geographies, and identities splinter in their wake, clearing the ground for the emergence of nuanced understandings of performance and cultural politics.

Sara Brady is Assistant Professor at the City University of New York, USA. She is the author of Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: 'Whatever It Takes' (2012) and media editor of Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd edition by Richard Schechner (2013).

Fintan Walsh is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. He is the author of Theatre & Therapy (Palgrave, 2013) and Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis (Palgrave, 2010). He is an editor of numerous collections including 'That Was Us': Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance (2013), Queer Notions: New Plays and Performances from Ireland (2010), and the co-edited volume Performance, Identity, and the Neo-Political Subject (2013).