Opening Acts: Performance in/as Communication and Cultural Criticism offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture.offers new, rigorous ways to analyze communication and culture through performance. Editor Judith Hamera, along with a distinguished list of contributors, provides students with cutting-edge readings of everyday life, space, history, and intersections of all three, using a critical performance-based approach. This text makes three significant contributions to the field - it familiarizes readers with the core elements and commitments of performance-based analysis, links performance-based analysis to theoretical and analytical perspectives in communication and cultural studies, and provides engaging examples of how to use performance as a critical tool to open up communication and culture.

Introduction: Opening Opening Acts - Judith HameraSection 1: Engaging the EverydayIntroduction - Judith Hamera1. Becoming Other-Wise: Conversational Performance and the Politics of Experience - Leonard Clyde Hawes2. Telling Twisted Tales: Owning Place, Owning Culture in Ethnographic Research - Bryant Keith AlexanderSection 2: Animating LocationsIntroduction - Judtih Hamera3. Bridging Haunted Places: Performance and the Production of Mostar - Sonja Arsham Kuftinec4. Looking for Stonewall¿s Arm: Tourist Performance as Research Method - Michael S. BowmanSection 3: Interrogating HistoriesIntroduction - Judith Hamera5. Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech - Dwight Conquergood6. Diverging Paths in Performance Genealogies - Ruth Laurion BowmanSection 4: Synthesizing ScholarshipIntroduction - Judith Hamera7. The Mechanical Bride of Yonville-l¿Abbaye (Batteries Not Included): Remapping the Canonical Landmark - Paul EdwardsSection 5: Embracing PerformancesIntroduction - Judith Hamera8. Performing Theory/Embodied Writing - D. Soyini MadisonAbout the EditorAbout the ContributorsIndex