Diana Taylor

Political Spectatorship in the Americas is a book-length analysis of how embodied, mass media, and online spectatorship functions as a political act. By exploring current political practices with a new perspective—geographic (Americas) and methodological (embodied, mass media, online)—my study focuses on the convergence of theoretical debates on vision (art/film/photography), witnessing (trauma studies), spectatorship (performance/media studies), gender and critical race theory. After providing a brief overview of the psychoanalytic, neuroscientific and philosophical aspects of vision, I concentrate on its political dimensions—the ways in which the practice of spectatorship is constituted, the overlaps between embodied and mediated seeing, how the mass media (i.e., television, film) and digital technologies complicate previous notions of “liveness,” presence, aura, charisma, identification, participation, and human agency. Re-examining political spectatorship through the lens of theatre and performance studies allows me to explore the historical conditions that gave rise to both the western model of a representative democracy and theatrical representation at the same place and time. Theatre and politics are not metaphors for each other but, rather, profoundly interrelated systems of representation and negotiation.