"At last here is a book, Art Beyond the Edge, that speaks from the heart of conflict, the entrails of agony, injustice, and suffering, and yet affirms art as joy and creativity. Both global and regional, multimodal and interdisciplinary, this timely endeavor dares to give hope a name and art its salience on the brink of precarity. Thanks to these authors, art speaks and speaks for."—Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, author of History, the Human, and the World Between
"Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds go global creating 'transversal' performances—art that is dangerous, experimental, political, engaged, practical, theoretical, and collective. Agree or disagree, I was taken by their fierce book embodying 'emurgent' art, incandescent performances amid a world on fire, art that becomes 'a map to the future.'"—Richard Schechner, author of Between Theater and Anthropology
"LeVine and Reynolds make accessible rare and important case studies in theater, music, and performance from sites of tension, violence, and war. New vocabularies in Western aesthetics for art 'beyond' the edge engage with performative, non-generic artwork from global communities obscured, silenced, or erased by neo/post-liberal structures. This book generates discussion, conversation, argument, and polemic and addresses a central issue in our diverse world, where peoples around the world are seeking recognition and attempting to get it on their own terms."—Lynette Hunter, author of Politics of Practice: A Rhetoric of Performativity
"This analytical record offers an incisive and unprecedented conceptual language for grasping how art becomes a crucial modality for creating new political subjects. Rarely have there been intellectual practices that match this project's courage and invention in the long struggles for emancipation."—AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture
"Is a revolutionary art possible at this juncture of history? In Art Beyond the Edge scholar-artists LeVine and Reynolds tell stories gathered over three decades and several continents about artists who create political transformation in danger zones. The result is an acutely theoretical as well as practical road map for those committed to defying oppression, challenging boundaries, and creating beauty in the eclipse of civil liberties worldwide. This book is a war cry for art and scholarship that refuse to be commodified, demand to be acknowledged, and ultimately heal a world in crisis, one performance at a time. A very important book."—Deborah Kapchan, editor of Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights
"In this innovative, globe-trotting work, LeVine and Reynolds follow cultural activists to the edge, the abyss, the bloody crossroads where art and politics collide, and show how creativity can rattle authoritarian rule. Across conflict zones—from Zapatista autonomous zones to Palestine and Afghanistan—they show how art (murals, theater, rock) can expand the limits of the 'realistic.' Art Beyond the Edge delivers, doing precisely what the artists it depicts do: disrupt, entertain, and open up new terrains of thought."—Hisham Aidi, American Book Award winner of Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture
