We are thrilled to announce that What is Performance Studies? has officially been released by Duke University Press, in collaboration with HemiPress, and is available at: http://hemi.press/scalar/performance
This trilingual multimedia digital book asks 30 leading scholars from seven different countries throughout the Americas the same question: What is performance studies? Their answers are available here, recorded in video interviews and accompanied by short essays. The contents are transcribed, translated, and subtitled in three languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese)––offering a truly diverse perspective on performance studies that engages it from a variety of national, linguistic, and disciplinary locations. Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel’s written introduction provides both a history and an overview of the project, while four brief essays by Steuernagel, Taylor, Marcela A. Fuentes, and Tavia Nyong’o offer critical entry points to the interviews from different yet complementary perspectives. What Is Performance Studies? thus expands the genealogy of the field while opening new paths for thinking through, in, and with performance studies across the Americas.
Together with What is Performance Studies? we are also launching HemiPress (http://hemi.press), the Hemispheric Institute’s digital publications imprint, created to house and centralize our diverse publication initiatives. Using a variety of customized open-source platforms, HemiPress includes a digital book series, stand-alone essays, and the Institute’s journal emisférica, alongside interviews, cuadernos, and other online teaching resources. A digital ‘bookshelf” for our communities of readers across the Americas, HemiPress publishes state-of-the-art research in multiple languages and is actively developing new publication capacities and immersive formats for capturing the ‘live’ of performance.
Submitted by: Marcos Steuernagel