Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and Anticolonial Indigeneity in Santiago De Chile

The book "Performing the Jumbled City" is a multi-modal ethnography that explores the ways in which knowledge is built and shared through the interaction between individual and collective essays. It is constructed as a particular kind of edited collection, shifting between different authorships, and is organized around the original script of the site-specific performance Santiago Waria and the related exhibition MapsUrbe. The essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations that disrupt the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city, defying the spatialities usually assigned to colonized bodies and subjects. It actively engages with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people, raising questions in terms of decolonization, the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship, and knowledge production.

Format: Hardback
Length: 376 pages
Publication date: 30 August 2022
Publisher: Manchester University Press

Performing the jumbled city is a complex art form that transcends its materiality. Connected to a dedicated website hosting additional audio-visual materials, the book serves as a connecting device, allowing an exchange between texts, audio-visual materials, and original artworks, positioning it in the emerging field of multi-modal ethnography. From this perspective, and as an edited collection co-authored with urban indigenous artists and activists, it interrogates the ways in which knowledge is built and shared. The book is constructed as a particular kind of edited collection, shifting between different authorships. The resulting interaction between individual and collective essays brings together scholars and activists' perspectives in a rich exchange between textual, visual, and dramatic sections. The book is organized around the original script of the site-specific performance Santiago Waria and the related exhibition MapsUrbe.

Making a claim for creation rather than recuperation, the essays contained in the book present alternative imaginations that disrupt the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city, defying the spatialities usually assigned to colonized bodies and subjects. As such, and actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonization, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship, and knowledge production.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781526161871