Performance in a Militarized Culture. 2017. Co-editor with Sara Brady. New York: Routledge.
The long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection considers:
- How militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques
- How performing arts practices can confront militarization
- The long and complex history of militarization
- How the war on terror has transformed into a values system that prioritizes the military
- The ways in which performance can be used to secure and maintain power across social strata
Performance in a Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such danger.
For a review of the book, see Warren Kluber’s “Theatres of War” in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 40.3 (Sept 2018): 130-136.
[W]ar is imagined as an agonistic conflict between clearly defined actors that progresses through a narrative arc in a demarcated space before an audience that empathically takes sides. Rather than identifying a single author, or a single authoritative performance, these studies trace the ways in which live and mediated performances interact with cultural background texts to conjure an image of a real dramatic event. Lindsey Mantoan exemplifies this method in her essay on the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Performance in a Militarized Culture, a book she co-edited with Sara Brady. Interweaving military strategy, media reportage, and the film Zero Dark Thirty in her analysis, Mantoan shows how the raid has been constructed as a dramatic rejoinder to the symbolic “castration” of the Twin Towers on 9/11 in which muscular American SEALs violently “penetrated” bin Laden’s compound to reassert a virile American heroism. (Kluber)
Lindsey Mantoan, Ph.D. 