Placing the disciplines of performance studies and surveillance studies in a timely critical dialogue, Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance not only theorizes how surveillance performs, but also how the technologies and corresponding cultures of surveillance alter the performance of everyday life. This exploration draws upon a rich array of examples from theater, performance, and the arts, vividly illustrating the book’s central argument: that the rise of the surveillance society coincides with a profound collapse of democratic oversight and transparency—a collapse that demands a radical rethinking of how performance practitioners conceptualize art and its political efficacy.

James M. Harding marshals an impressive range of performance and social theory in a thought-provoking excavation of what he identifies as the surveillance society’s most problematic fault lines and contradictions and concludes with an impassioned call for a new confrontational style of creative activism that Harding characterizes as “performance post-democracy.”