Promotional Information

Admirably lucid ... a significant challenge to much scholarship on this crucial decade. -- T. V. Reed, author of The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle An important piece of intellectual history, art history synthesis, or reinterpretation of aspects of 1960s politicized performance. Peariso's argument is fresh and original. -- Bradford Martin, author of Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Performance in Sixties America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction | Stereotypes, Opposition, and “the Sixties”

1. Monkey Theater

2. “Watch Out for Pigs in Queen’s Clothing”: Camp and the Image of Radical Sexuality

3. “Erect . . . Strong . . . Resilient and Firm”: Eldridge Cleaver and the Performance of “Black” Liberation

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Craig J. Peariso is assistant professor of art history at Boise State University.

Reviews

"Craig J. Peariso’s work challenges traditional narratives regarding some of North America’s most significant political iconoclasts of the 1960s."
*TDR: The Drama Review*

"Radical Theatrics is a thought-provoking book that should educate and trouble anyone desperate to change the world and confused about what to do when those efforts stall."
*Journal of American History*

"This intriguing book presents a revisionist revaluation of the more problematic radical edges of political performance art in the United States of the mid-to-late 1960s. . . . Peariso has successfully shown that awkward decade was up for it in many compelling ways. . . . [Radical Theatrics] launches a sophisticatedly argued call for newly creating politico-aesthetic styles of ‘anti-representational’ performance."
*Studies in Theatre and Performance*

"Peariso’s study of ‘failed’ sixties radicalism is an important contribution to our growing understanding of the complexities of radicalism in the postmodern, where performance is everywhere and manifold."
*Labour / Le Travail*