“Coming together to lift a celebratory glass to their peculiarities, as if they have suddenly found themselves together again in Nick’s Pacific Street bar from Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life (1939), the carefully assembled guests of David RomÁn’s Performance in America add up to an improbable but exhilarating ensemble. Anyone who can make Elaine Stritch feel right at home at a party with the ghost of Sarah Siddons will show you the time of your life, and RomÁn is that kind of host, entertaining the divas of stage, screen, dance, and cabaret while cordially welcoming his readers. rsvp.”-Joseph Roach, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance
“In a work of immediate political relevance and lasting theoretical importance, David RomÁn forcefully establishes live performance at the center of America’s cultural life, showing how its unique capacity to mobilize ‘provisional collectivities’ in the here and now allows it to express and inform crucial national debates. RomÁn’s brilliant readings of various undervalued genres of popular performance are themselves a tour de force of critical performance, teaching us how to engage the vast ‘embodied archive’ in which American publics and counter-publics understand themselves.”-Una Chaudhuri, Professor of English and Drama, New York University
“RomÁn makes a persuasive case for the centrality of performance in contemporary U.S. culture. . . . In its analyses, tone, and scope, this book succeeds in achieving what its subjects accomplish: a critical reassessment of performance in America.”
- Debora Paredez (Theatre Research International)
