Nonconforming Criticism: Political Practices and Poetics at the Borderlands of Performance

Published Open Access, Nonconforming Criticism examines forms of thinking at the borderlands of performance that defy, dispute and resist the category of criticism.

Against the backdrop of forms of governance and regulation of thought under late liberalism, this book looks to those who refuse to reproduce colonial logics in criticism by investing in unruly experiments in thinking from, and through, performance. Focusing on the period between the early noughties and early twenty-twenties, the book analyses critical practices such as live writing, artist-led publications, zines, gatherings and experiments with video, sound and publishing from cultural workers and thinkers migrating across borders, knowledges and contexts. These practices are often peripheralized from established forms of criticism, yet they shape criticality as a form of political imagination.

Unpacking the logics that shape professionalised criticism, and in dialogue with decolonial, abolitionist and feminist theorisations of politics and knowledge, the book focuses on nonconforming criticism as a practice of unlearning. Structured into three parts, the book constitutes a partial lexicon of Borders, Experiments and Practices. It moves through forms of thinking-in-public that reconfigure relations of sensing and meaning between criticism, performance and political life, against the imperial and separatist logics of criticism and its entanglements.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

• Publication date: 17 September 2026
• Page count: 216
• Dimensions: Height 246 mm; Width 176 mm; Thickness 18 mm
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781350178595