Contesting Performance is a collection of essays by international scholars that addresses the global development of performance research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The collection functions as a critical reader on diverse approaches to studying performance that contest dominant paradigms of performance studies.

Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as 'home' and 'frontier'...