James Harding's Latest Book Receives Rave Review from Theatre Journal

Congratulations to Professor James M. Harding on his two most recent books: The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade (2017) and Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance (2018). 

Congratulations to Professor James M. Harding on his two most recent books: The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade (2017) - edited with Cindy Rosenthal - and Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance (2018).

The Sixties, Center Stage: Mainstream and Popular Performances in a Turbulent Decade, received a strongly positive review from Jason Fitzgerald in the recent March 2018 edition of Theatre Journal. Fitzgerald writes that Restaging the Sixites - Dr. Harding’s previous edited volume with Dr. Rosenthal - has become such an indispensable book for students of avant garde performance in the sixties that “it has earned the right to a shelf-mate.” The new volume, he argues, is a valuable addition as “it rewrites the premises and expands the scope of the original,” illuminating the subversive political underpinnings of mainstream and popular theatre. Fitzgerald praises the “surprising, rigorous, and forward-thinking scholarship” that Dr. Harding and Dr. Rosenthal bring together, writing that they “have made it possible to see with fresh eyes the artists, institutions, and performances that made up the [sixties] true "broad spectrum."”

Published just earlier this year by the University of Michigan Press, Dr. Harding’s most recent book Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance brings performance studies and surveillance studies into dialogue. The book theorizes how surveillance performs but also how the technologies and cultures of surveillance have changed how we all perform in everyday life. It further argues that artists and critics must reexamine and redefine performance if they in order to combat invasive surveillance in every aspect of modern life. Professor Elise Morrison of Yale University calls the book “an unequivocal call to arms, a stirring appeal for radical action in the face of alarming imbalances of power.”

Both The Sixties, Center Stage and Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance are available on Amazon. Congratulations on both the publications and the positive review, Dr. Harding!