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University of California Press

About the Book

Art Beyond the Edge is not just a title: it's a designation, a call to action, and a means to achieve enduring impact. Reflecting over a quarter century of collaborative artistic production, research, and activism across five continents, this book is a field-breaking and era-defining exploration of art created during sociopolitical conflict and war, protests and calamities, and their aftermaths. With the goal of generating a critical theory that can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds propose a new and radical vocabulary, epistemological foundation, and praxiological roadmap for engagement with and in performance activism and political art. From Gaza to Chiapas, Baghdad to Kabul, the Niger Delta to the Congo River, the US to Ukraine, the authors establish an innovative matrix to analyze the conditions through which artistic production empowers struggles for freedom, dignity, and survival in a world on fire.

About the Author

Mark LeVine is Professor of History at UC Irvine, a Guggenheim Fellow, multi-award-winning musician, film producer, journalist, and cofounder of both the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change at UC Irvine and Kakuma Sound.

Bryan Reynolds is Professor at UC Irvine, Artistic Director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, a director of theater, a performer, and a playwright. He has published over a dozen books and his plays and musicals have been produced at seventy-five venues in twenty countries.