Religious practice and belief remain astoundingly diverse across North and South America. At a time when globalization is taken to mean the ever greater homogenization of cultures, Performing Religion in the Americas reveals how individual cultures are more resilient than ever and that religion is a particularly rich area of diversity.

Religion is an especially rich arena for the analysis of political and cultural performance because the complexity of devotional practice and the intensity of faith can permeate all other parts of social life. The performance of religion highlights how...

"Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium" is a collection of essays covering a wide range of historical and theoretical topics, from Brecht in Japan to 'children's' bodies in postmodern Japanese performances, from the notion of beauty in contemporary cultural theory to practical and theoretical readings of more recent intercultural performances, involving not only Japanese but also other Asian theatre practitioners. It is one of the first full-length studies of Japanese performance culture written in English by a Japanese native. This work is an...

In her landmark study Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that utopia occurs in fragmentary "utopian moments," often found embedded within performance. While Dolan focused on the utopian performative within a theatrical context, this volume, edited by Rachel Bowditch and Pegge Vissicaro, expands her theories to encompass performance in public life--from diasporic hip-hop battles, Chilean military parades,...