Agitated States : Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty

From the earliest Puritan displays of piety and rectitude to the present-day epidemic of staged school massacres, the history of America has been characterized by a dual impulse: to cast public event and character as high drama, and to dismiss theater and theatricalization as un-American, even evil.

This book rethinks American history as theater, and theater as the ethos and substance of American life, ironically repudiated at every turn by the culture it produces. Beginning with the writings of John Winthrop and others, through the Federalist and romantic stages of American cultural life, and into the modern and contemporary periods, Anthony Kubiak finds an America not usually discovered by traditional or materialist approaches to history.

He deploys the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the cultural theory of SlavojZizek, and the performance theory of Herbert Blau in an unparalleled reappraisal of dominant American identity, culture, and history. Anthony Kubiak is Associate Professor of English, University of South Florida.

He is also author of Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History.