Diana Taylor Speaks on the Politics of Passion

May 23, 2013

Diana Taylor, NYU professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, gave a lecture titled "The Politics of Passion" at Columbia Global Centers | Turkey on May 23.

Referring to activist political movements from Mexico to Occupy Wall Street, Taylor described the resurgence and centrality of the body in contemporary politics, where embodied performances act as vehicles for the creation of new meanings and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity. Her talk examined the extent to which performative politics has been crafting new spaces and options for convergence and potentiality in settings where electoral processes have been violated or corrupted, the media sequestered in the hands of power-brokers, and official institutions unable to adjudicate in ways acknowledged as transparent and legitimate. 

Taylor is working closely with Columbia University’s Women Creating Change initiative to organize a workshop program on the theme of Women Mobilizing Memory which will take place in Turkey in 2014. She is director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a collaborative, multilingual and interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. She has authored award-winning works such as "Theatre of Crisis:  Drama and Politics in Latin America," "Disappearing Acts:  Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War'" and "The Archive and the Repertoire:  Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas."