Introduction: Performance and Citizenship

Performance, performativity and citizenship

Performance is a concept that is used with a multiplicity of meanings and covers a wide range of acts and practices, from theatrical performances to modern rituals and protest events. Richard Schechner and Victor Turner are often credited as the founders of the interdisciplinary and ‘inherently unstable’ discipline of performance studies (Schechner, 1998: 360, cited in Alexander, 2011: 19). These two scholars draw attention to how performance extends beyond the theatrical stage to illuminate the theatrical and dramatic effects of social life. While the fluid nature of the discipline is generally accepted as a distinctive feature of performance studies, the object of analysis of performance scholars is the repertoire; performances that are understood as intentional and deliberate action, which is enacted, presented, highlighted and displayed (Schechner, 2013: 2).

Drawing from a multiplicity of disciplines (performing arts, social sciences, gender studies, history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, semiotics, media studies and cultural studies), performance studies scholars examine dances, rituals, theatrical performances as much as artefacts in culture and the arts as practices and events – as performances. In the case of archival objects, such as a painting or a media production, ‘the performance studies scholar examines the circumstances in which the painting was created and exhibited; she looks at how the gallery or building displaying the painting shapes its reception’ (Schechner, 2013: 3). Thus, almost every aspect of social life or artefacts in culture and the arts can be studied as performance. The problem with such an encompassing notion of performance is that, as Edkins (2015: 135) notes, it risks turning performance into everything or nothing. However, performance is not purely the object of analysis of performance scholars, which includes those practices and events (dances, funerals, political rallies, rituals) or artefacts that involve intentional and theatrical enactments. As Taylor (2002: 45) notes: ‘performance also functions as the methodological lens that enables scholars to analyse events as performance. Civic obedience, resistance, citizenship, gender, ethnic identity, sexual identity, for example, are rehearsed and performed daily in the public sphere’ (italics added). In this sense, performance works as an epistemology that enables alternative ways of knowing and histories that are based on memory and events, rather than archival documents and texts (Taylor, 2014: 101).

In The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor (2003) shows how performed practices and behaviours exceed the limits of written knowledge because they cannot be contained and stored in the archive. Notably, performance studies research challenges written forms of knowledge while also foregrounding the need not to reduce gestures, embodied and expressive practices to narrative description (Conquergood, 2002; Schechner, 2013; Taylor, 2003). As Conquergood (2002: 146) puts it ‘dominant epistemologies that link knowing with seeing are not attuned to meanings that are masked, camouflaged, indirect, embedded, or hidden in context’. These authors are critical of the ways in which much scholarship in the humanities and social sciences remains locked into a western regime of knowledge that relies on the written word. They go on to emphasize how much scholarship has neglected to study expressive culture and performed experience as an alternative way of knowing, being and acting.

For some performance scholars these epistemological concerns go in tandem with an interest in the politics of performance, which is one of the five areas of performance studies identified by Conquergood; ‘how does performance reproduce, enable, sustain, challenge, subvert, critique, and naturalize ideology? … How does performance accommodate and contest domination?’ (Conquergood, 1991, cited in Schechner, 2013: 9). Conquergood (1995) is interested in resistance as the performance practices of subaltern groups. Taking a cue from this literature, the contributions in this special issue pay particular attention to the idea of performance as a contested and contesting practice. They look at how performances of various kinds allow people to resist and subvert dominant discourses and practices. These performances include the disruptive performances of citizen-audiences of a television programme (Lunt, this issue), the performances of working-class intellectuals attempting to disrupt the capitalist system (Stevenson, this issue), the performance documentary that uses enactments of victims and perpetrators to challenge official histories (Hill et al., this issue), the artistic performances of migrant artists as a means for articulating struggles for belonging and inclusion in the body politic (Rovisco, this issue), and participatory public art projects aimed at engaging ordinary citizens while also seeking to influence formal politics (Iannelli and Marelli, this issue).

While it is easy to see the repertoire as providing such anti-hegemonic challenges to the power of the archive, it is important to recognize that there are many performances and embodied practices – from lynchings of African-Americans to state-sponsored tortures and disappearances – that have contributed to sustain a repressive social order (Taylor, 2003: 22). Moreover, although repertoires of learned and ritualized practices allow for social change and resistance, they can also offer a deep insight into a particular culture (Turner, 1982). ¹ This understanding of performance as ritualized practice (à la Turner) is largely absent from the contributions to this special issue. This is because the focus on performance as disturbance and resistance offers a particularly apt analytical lens to understand citizenship as embodied practice and how citizens go on to perform citizenship in public life. Such a focus is justified because one of the aims of this special issue is to show how performance provides a useful lens for media and cultural studies scholars interested in studying practices, struggles and conflicts over belonging and citizenship.

Although few scholars in performance studies have tackled the issue of the performance of citizenship directly, Reinelt (2015), Balme (2015) and Nield (2015) offer interesting insights into how performance and expressive culture are important for understandings of citizenship and political agency. For Reinelt (2015), theatre is a worksite for citizenship and democracy not only because of its capacity to imagine and stage ‘lived citizenship’, but also because the repertoire of embodied practices and representations challenges ‘modes of knowing that are addressing the polity’ (Reinelt, 2015: 43). The underlying assumption here is that theatre can nurture through aesthetic means the political imagination of alternative futures and the critique of the present (the world-as-is). In a slightly different vein, Nield (2015) argues that the Occupy movement is a new kind of political protest based on ideas of theatrical appearance and the dramaturgy of public order. Drawing on Butler and Athanasiou (2013), Nield’s argument is that bodies claiming public space in a dramaturgical and symbolic fashion make citizens visible as political subjects. This concern with the dramaturgy of political protest and with how citizens get to perform and appear as political subjects in public space (italics added) resonates with Balme’s (2015) formulation of an agonistic theatrical public sphere. Drawing on Mouffe (2007), he argues that this expressive public sphere is not reduced to rationalistic modes of argumentation and certain kinds of speech acts, and allows for affective and ludic modes of expression: ‘a theatrical theory of the public sphere needs to build on an extended concept of “agonism” with its emphasis on emotion and affect without forgoing more rational modes of dispute’ (Balme, 2015: 11). These scholars have attempted to think about the relation between political agency and performance by illuminating how affective, ludic and non-verbal modes of communication are constitutive of citizenship in cultural and public spheres. Against this backdrop, this special issue also aims to show that citizens engage with the political in ways that are not solely discursive (e.g. claims-making), and that we need to move beyond thinking about citizenship as something that is purely achieved through ‘civic talk’ (Dahlgren, 2009).

Finally, a discussion of performance studies research is not complete without a discussion of ‘performativity’ and the ‘performative’, which have been developed by scholars coming from rhetoric and philosophy (Austin, Derrida, Butler). A performative is a discursive practice that produces that which it names. For Austin (1962 [1955]) a ‘performative utterance’ is a speech act that creates events and which can be seen as the performance of an action that may or may not succeed in realizing an intention depending on appropriate embedding in social convention and the appropriateness of the roles of participants. An example is when in a marriage ceremony the participants say ‘I do’ they thereby become married in the appropriate conditions and according to convention. Influenced by Austin’s (1962 [1955]) speech act theory, Butler’s notion of performativity has been very influential in approaches to gender and sexual identities and, more generally, the performance of identities, across the humanities and social sciences. In theorizing gender as a performance, Butler goes on to argue that gender is ‘constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 25). This notion of performativity rejects the very notion of a subject with an ontological status that precedes social action and is, therefore, distinct from the notion of performance as the embodied practice of existing subjects. In Butler’s original formulation of linguistic performativity there is no room for a subject, performer, or body who acts: ‘it is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject’ (Butler, 1994: 33). The gendered body is constituted through such acts, which are continuously repeated and rehearsed in mundane everyday activities (e.g. walking, talking, gesticulating) made meaningful (felicitous) by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies.

Butler is concerned not only with showing the constructed and artificial nature of gender, but also in highlighting how the rules that govern normative heterosexuality can be challenged through alternative performative acts (e.g. drag performances). As she puts it: ‘identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 25). While Butler is keen to distinguish between ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’, Taylor (2002) is equally forceful in her critique of ‘performativity’ and the ‘performative’ as false cognates for ‘performance’ because they foreclose agency and fail to encapsulate the non-discursive realm of performance: ‘while in Austin performative points to language that acts, in Butler it goes in the opposite direction, subsuming subjectivity and cultural agency into normative discursive practice’ (Taylor, 2002: 46). Similarly, McNay (2008) is critical of Butler’s (1999 [1990]) concept of performativity that ‘derives its shape from identity rather than action itself being constitutive of agency thereby failing … to differentiate adequately between different types of social and political agency or between available discursive resources, framing strategies and opportunity structures’ (McNay, 2008: 164).

Whereas the concept of ‘gender’ is here replaced by ‘citizen’, the notion of performativity remains important for any attempt to define the scope of performance studies research. Butler’s (2015) recent performative theory of assembly and her new ideas on political performativity represent a somewhat radical departure from her original conceptualization of gender performativity as an identity that exists through its doing and without a body. By analogy, political performativity opens new avenues to examine the relationship between citizenship, political subjectivity and performance.

From acts of citizenship to the performance of citizenship

Isin’s (2009) theorization of acts of citizenship offers an important point of departure for understanding practices of citizenship as performance focusing on what people do to achieve membership, inclusion and participation in the political community. This approach shows how particular actors challenge formal regimes of citizenship and engage in modes of being political, but also offers a useful springboard to think about citizenship as performance. As Isin puts it, it is important to recognize ‘acts as those that “create a scene”, which means both performance and disturbance’ (Isin, 2009: 379). He further suggests that by constituting ‘acts’ as an object of analysis we must focus ‘on a rupture that enables the actor (that the act creates) to create a scene rather than follow a script’ (Isin, 2009: 379). While Isin accepts that acts can be articulated via linguistic and non-linguistic means, he never explicitly borrows from performance studies approaches and pays little attention to the expressive dimensions of acts of citizenship. The notion of acts offers, nonetheless, a useful lens to research how creative subjects (Isin and Nielson, 2008: 38) become ‘activist citizens’ and has informed a wealth of scholarship on how citizenship is enacted, for example, by social movement actors or non-citizens (e.g. aliens, asylum-seekers) to challenge established modalities of citizenship (Frenzel et al., 2016; Gerbaudo, 2016). But, more importantly, the focus on ‘citizen-becoming’, that is, how people become citizens through particular political acts and practices, invites scholars to think about how acts that make a break or constitute a rupture are communicated by expressive means.

Ratto and Boler (2014) use the idea of DIY citizenship as a heuristic notion for understanding how people become citizens through alternative forms of political participation, creative practice and ‘critical making’. They call for new understandings of the public sphere and participatory democracy by proposing the idea of DIY citizenship, which they see as a hybrid of art and politics that can challenge exclusionary political structures and power imbalances in technologically mediated societies. This notion is important not only because it encourages the rethinking of binary distinctions such as cultural/political and professional/amateur, which constrain in important ways how scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences understands the relation between cultural production and politics (Ratto and Boler, 2014: 18), but also because it places creative and expressive practices at the heart of citizenship and political life.

DIY citizenship emerges, ultimately, as a mode of political poiesis, that is, ‘a productive practice in which ethical and social interventions cross through a number of different modalities and materialities’ (Ratto and Boler, 2014: 19). Although there is little acknowledgement of the significance of performance tools and concepts in Ratto and Boler’s approach, they clearly note that the term of DIY citizenship ‘is intended to highlight the diversity of ways in which citizenship is enacted and performed’ (Ratto and Boler, 2014: 3). This notion is, therefore, useful for thinking about the ways in which certain creative practices can be understood as DIY performances of citizenship that can challenge hegemonic political practices and discourses. This kind of lens is particularly evident in Rovisco’s contribution to this issue, on how the artistic performances of UK-based migrant and refugee artists can be interpreted as contestations of citizenship, and in Iannelli and Marelli’s article in this issue, which examines the work of artists engaged in participatory public art projects as they go on to advocate the arts as a site of political agency. Drawing on interviews and textual analysis of a film (Wait) and a performance (Welcome to Dreamland), Rovisco uses performance tools to examine how citizenship is staged and contested in the work of UK-based artists with a migrant or refugee background. Calling for an expanded notion of voice as an act of self-expression that is not purely discursive, she argues that artistic performances by migrant and refugee artists can enact in meaningful ways the struggles for belonging and inclusion in the body politic. Departing from the idea that contemporary performances of citizenship in the field of participatory public art need to be understood as civic cultures in action, Iannelli and Marelli demonstrate how the artists seek to directly influence formal politics and also the ways in which the artist-citizens go on to invite various types of audiences and publics to voice their concerns about urbanity and territorial governance to prompt social and political change in contemporary cities. The article aims to add to debates about forms of political agency by shifting the focus from the media sphere to the cultural sphere of public art. Iannelli and Marelli observe that, despite the artists’ scepticism towards institutionalized politics, they perform their civic identities because they believe that the relationships they build with participatory audiences and their collaborators have a positive impact in the public life of local communities.

The understanding of DIY citizenship resonates with Hall’s (2006) work on Black diasporic artists in post-war Britain. Hall argues that the visual arts offer a compelling and productive horizon of possibility for Black diasporic artists to express and channel their struggles for belonging and inclusion in the community of citizens. For Hall, artistic questions create a horizon of possible futures within which the first generation of artists born in the diaspora could ‘think the present’. This new horizon produced a polemical and politicized art in contrast to a more universalist and cosmopolitan outlook of the first wave of diasporic artists. Shifts in the artistic practices of Black diasporic artists from the late 1970s onwards signalled a turn to cultural questions of identity and belonging articulated through performance. Hall notes that questions of identity and belonging – “‘Who are we?”, “Where do we come from?”, “Where do we really belong?”’ (Hall, 2006: 18) are not only powerfully articulated in new aesthetic and thematic choices in the visual arts, but also in the styling of dress and body (e.g. the ‘dreadlocks’ that make up the iconography of Rastafarianism), music, and popular culture. Inspired by interactionist accounts of the use of personal front that combines manner and appearance in dramaturgy (Goffman, 1959), Hall articulates the notion of a ‘performative identity’ that paves the way for the ‘production of a new, black subject’ (Hall, 2006: 19). The foregrounding and performance of the Black body as a racial signifier in, for example, the genre of self-portraiture provided important critical answers for resisting ‘stereotyped, abject, black body of racialized discourse’ (Hall, 2006: 19).

Although Hall does not use the language of political rights or engage directly with debates on citizenship, he places the experiences of citizenship at the heart of his concern with illuminating how stylized action in popular culture and Black visual aesthetics constitute a site of resistance to those racialized discourses that sustain the inclusive/exclusive logic of citizenship (see Tyler and Marciniak, 2013: 146). The performance of identity in the arts and popular culture enables marginalized and oppressed Black communities and artists to carve out spaces of freedom and resistance to articulate their own struggles for belonging and inclusion in the political community.

There is a point of connection with Ratto and Boler’s call for rethinking the binary of cultural/political in Hall’s suggestion that, while it is important to recognize that many political struggles acquire a cultural dimension, critical scholarship should also acknowledge that art works do not pertain to ‘an inviolate aesthetic space, where only critics, curators, dealers and connoisseurs are permitted to play’ (Hall, 2006: 23). Equally important is Hall’s (1990) suggestion that the articulation of a performative identity by diasporic subjects destabilizes mono-linguistic and mono-ethnic affiliations to the national community. This proposition resonates with what performance scholar Conquergood (2002: 146) calls the ‘the visual/verbal bias of Western regimes of knowledge [which] blinds researchers to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares […]’. It also connects with Taylor’s (2003) argument about how the repertoire of embodied practices (performances, singing, dancing, theatre) resists being captured by the archive, which is based on western modes of knowledge and information storage. As in Hall’s work, we argue that strands in performance studies scholarship are concerned with exposing how the hegemony of textualism and the archive are often threatening for oppressed and marginalized groups, whether these are undocumented migrants, diasporic communities, indigenous groups, or citizens marginalized by mediated political communication. Approaches in performance studies research illuminate how embodied practices and extra-linguistic human action open up creative spaces for performances of resistance and subversion.

Hall’s work on diasporic identity and Black diasporic artists, Taylor’s (2003) work on the repertoire, and Conquergood’s work on performances of resistance (1995, 2002) offer insights and concepts that resonate with the study of performances of identity, and resistant or disruptive performance practices, in popular culture, the arts and new activisms (see Rovisco, 2016) and inform the analysis of practices of citizenship. Notably, the articles in this special issue by Rovisco, and by Hill, Askanius, Kondo and Urueta, are strongly informed by these traditions in cultural studies and performance studies research. While Rovisco borrows Taylor’s notions of ‘ghosting’ and the ‘scenario’ to show how artists use the resources of the creative imagination to make visible those personal stories of migration or displacement that remain invisible and unheard in the public sphere, Hill, Askanius, Kondo and Urueta are concerned with ideas of subjectivity, the performance of memory, and power to show how audiences from different regions respond to film in dramatically different ways. Drawing on Taylor’s (2003) notion of embodied memory, they analyse the films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) to show how performance can generate alternative perspectives on traumatic pasts and conflicting knowledges for audiences struggling to engage with challenging political and moral dimensions of film. A key finding of the research is how performance documentary challenges the affective relationships between filmmakers and their audiences through a raw and provocative engagement with the act of documenting genocide in historically and culturally specific contexts. The performance mode of documentary uses enactments of perpetrators and victims to challenge official histories, in ways that generate conflicting and critical knowledges for audiences struggling to engage with the subject matter of the films that address themes of moral ambiguity, violence and impunity.

Another important strand of research for understanding and conceptualizing the relation between citizenship and performance stems from Alexander’s (2011, 2017) analysis of politics, performance and power as a cultural pragmatics. He proposes an analytical model that treats performance as symbolic action and separates out the elements that compose social performance based on concepts drawn from performance studies: that is, background representations, scripts, actors, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scène, social and interpretive power, and audiences. Drawing on Durkheim’s (1915) cultural turn in his late work in the sociology of religion, but also on Schechner, Goffman and Turner, Alexander addresses the problem of ‘authenticity’ in modern, pluralistic, complex societies through an analysis of what makes social performances such as protests, political performances of politicians, election campaigns, public performances by intellectuals, and counter-performances, convincing and successful. As Alexander (2011: 28) puts it, ‘a successful performance depends on the ability to convince others that one’s performance is true’. While Alexander recognizes that in contemporary societies control over the media is vital for connecting performances with audience-publics (Alexander, 2011: 67), he also notes that one of the barriers to successful performances is ‘the fragmentation of the citizenry in multiple public spheres’ (2011: 76). An important consequence of this process is that, divided by race, class, religion, region, citizen-audiences can respond to social performances in dramatically different, sometimes opposed ways. Multiple and subaltern public spheres (Fraser, 1992) can, nonetheless, offer fertile ground for counter-performances when citizens mount critical and creative efforts to question or disrupt official discourses and performances. Not surprisingly, Alexander (2011: 87) sees citizenship as ‘the legal capacity for skeptical viewership, the right to criticize and choose among performances, and the right to form one’s own performances in response’. Alexander’s theory of cultural pragmatics has informed a wealth of research from music competitions (McCormick, 2015) to presidential elections (Mast, 2012), but has so far had a limited impact in cultural studies scholarship and media and communication studies. Hence, one of the aims of this special issue is to show how cultural pragmatics can usefully inform research on citizen performances.

The heuristic value of cultural pragmatics as an analytical model to study citizen performances is well illustrated by Lunt’s article in this issue on the performances of disruptive citizenship by members of the public in the context of two television programmes broadcast during the UK Brexit referendum campaign of 2016, and by Stevenson’s article on the performative qualities of intellectuals. Lunt’s key argument is that changes in the format of the television programmes, which meant that the programmes were managed by broadcasters rather than being controlled by participating politicians, created opportunities for citizens to articulate their political interests through individualized performances of communicative disruption. These performances can be seen as agentic and skilful deployments of material and symbolic resources through which citizen-audiences successfully challenge the performance of power of the prime minister, David Cameron. Lunt shows how the transformation of the format of the Brexit television programmes enabled citizens to create a ‘contested performative space’ where lay participants emerge as players on a stage with the purpose of disrupting the performance of power of the prime minister. Like Lunt, Stevenson is interested in understanding how citizens in the guise of public intellectuals deploy exciting stories and compelling performances. Stevenson’s article looks at the performative qualities of intellectuals illustrated by Raymond Williams’s writing and intellectual positions vis-à-vis his idea of an art of the commons. Stevenson argues that while Williams was not an especially charismatic speaker or a celebrity academic, it was his ability to connect his experience and location within the working class that lends his work an ‘authenticity’, and a sense of working-class subjectivity, that is missing in the work of other New Left intellectuals of his generation. Stevenson’s aim is to recover what he calls the ‘performative quality of Williams’s writing and intellectual positions’ in order to show how his ideas resonate with audiences beyond his intellectual circles. Stevenson shows how the performativity of William’s writing is grounded in his ability to emphasize how the sensibility of artists and working-class intellectuals disrupt the instrumentality and corruption of the capitalist system. In so doing, he also points out how Williams’s ideas about the culture of the commons and the long revolution depend on a shared educated and participatory democracy, and are useful to illuminate the visions of contemporary radical social movements against austerity and neoliberal capitalism.

Although there are important epistemological, methodological and ideological differences between cultural sociology approaches and cultural studies approaches (Smith, 1998), we suggest that cultural pragmatics can help bridge some of these tensions and divisions. The analytical model of cultural pragmatics offers a productive lens to study – as symbolic action – the performances of oppressed and marginalized groups struggling for inclusion in the community of citizens, as well as other forms of citizen participation and protest in nationally defined public spheres and beyond.

Finally, the articles in this special issue share in important ways Butler’s (2015) concerns with political agency as a mode of action that involves bodily appearances in public life. The articles offer a useful springboard for scholars in media, communication and cultural studies to begin considering political performativity as a conceptual lens to think about the lived and embodied dimensions of citizenship in terms of political agency. In so doing, they also open up a new space of debate for this scholarship to reflect upon the tension between Butler’s discursive theory of performativity and her theory of assembly as performance (Butler, 2015). In this latter theorization, Butler moves away from her earlier concern with gender performativity to consider the political meanings of bodily performance in the real-life bodies of precarious lives. Butler’s (2015: 9) new thesis is that ‘acting in concert can be an embodied form of calling into question […] powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political’. Performance is not just about speech acts, but about bodily action, movements and bodies that appear in public. In this, Butler comes surprisingly close to performance studies scholarship when she notes, for example, that contestations enacted by assemblies such as strikes, vigils and occupations of public space are not only about discourse, whether written or vocalized, but also about embodied actions that signify in non-discursive ways. She is ultimately concerned with understanding how bodily acts become performative. She goes on to propose ‘political performativity’ as a new vocabulary to understand and ‘describe the modes of agency and action undertaken by the stateless, the occupied and the disenfranchised’ (Butler, 2015: 80). Butler conceptualizes performative politics as a struggle that is sustained by an insistence on existing, mattering and appearing precisely when and where precarious subjects and bodies are erased from the public realm. Developing her stance in critical dialogue with Arendt’s theorization of the space of appearance, Butler is sceptical of the power of media images that circulate in global networks, to effectively mediate the condition of appearance of bodies ‘acting in concert’ in public space and virtual spaces. This is because the media can only offer an incomplete visual representation of political performativity; ‘some version of reality from the outside’ (Butler, 2015: 102). Against this backdrop, we suggest that Butler’s performative theory of assembly offers interesting insights to cultural studies scholarship by inviting the question of how critical scholarship might respond to the effacement and invisibility of precarious bodies and assemblages in the domain of visual and media representations. While Butler’s original conceptualization of performativity in Gender Trouble (1999 [1990]) left her vulnerable to accusations of ‘death of the subject’, the vocabulary of political performativity entertains the idea of a pre-discursive subject and offers new possibilities to think about how the performance of particular modalities of citizenship might be related to questions of visibility and political agency as articulated, for example, in forms of DIY citizenship. Thus, one of the aims of the special issue as whole is to suggest that more attention needs to be paid to forms of embodied expression, and who gets to appear and be visible in public life and those who do not; to the ways in which performances of various kinds become a vehicle for subjects whose stories are often unheard or distorted in the public sphere.

To conclude, our hope is that scholarship in cultural studies takes up more seriously the relation between citizenship and performance by drawing on the resources of the various strands of performance studies scholarship that informed the contributions to this special issue. In this introduction, we have shown how cultural pragmatics (Alexander, 2011) offers a useful theoretical and analytical lens to analyse counter-performances by citizens in television programmes and the performative qualities of a New Left intellectual such as Raymond Williams, and how the notion of performance understood as embodied and expressive practice (Schechner, 2013; Taylor, 2003) and political performativity (Butler, 2015) are useful analytical tools to analyse resistant and disruptive performances of citizenship in popular culture and the arts.