Dissonances from the Global South: song, art and performance in cultures of struggle

Taking up the important work of other theorists of performance, social memory and the political in Africa and Latin America we restate the need for a re-configured understanding of how performance - and in particular forms of expressive art - impinges on the practice of politics and is in fact embedded within it. Memory as held in the body can be both replayed within, and can re-form, the present. Thus, history overlays but is also redrawn through acts of performance. This in its totality may well be a significant point of creative dissonance emanating from the Global South as communities and artists in societies under stress make new forms of commentary through performance, which hold within them the penumbra of the past. We draw together aspects of body, voice and performance as articulated in the papers in this cluster. While there is no single critical position, a constant point emerging is the need to reconfigure how moments of creativity, past and present, should to be reinserted in the broader ambit of both national and transnational understandings of how we configure history and the present.