On Generosity offers critical examinations of the ethics and practices of generosity, as well as generosity’s inherent performativity. Without recourse to a naïve faith in its potential, but also without devolving into cynicism about its limits, this volume takes a fresh look at how generosity appears in performance and how generosity is performed. Contributors analyse practices and discourses of generosity in political and economic interventions, in everyday life, in social practice art and as represented in theatrical performances. Generosity is considered as a performative relation, and the volume includes enquiries into the generosity and generativity that may lie at the heart of performance itself. This is amplified in a special showcase section, ‘Cabinet of Generosities’, which proliferates examples of performance works that engage generosity as practice and as theme.
Editorial
Laurie Beth Clark, Michael Peterson
A Rhapsody For You
Helen Paris
To Offer/To Exchange : A conversation
Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Charles Simonds
Toxic Colonialism and the Gesture of Generosity
Jisha Menon
To Be Undone
Patrick Anderson
Whole Parts : On rupture and the other side of generosity [artists' pages]
Jeannine Shinoda
Have I Done Enough? : Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton’s culture of generosity
Laura MacDonald
Performing Philanthropy from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates
Alisa Zhulina
Radical Care : Performative generosity and generativity in Third Theatre
Jane Turner, Patrick Campbell
Assister au Spectacle [artists' pages]
Julia-Kristina Bauer, Carl Lavery
The Gift of Cake : Baking together in performance
Jenny Lawson
Even Better than the Real Thing : Economies of ontological authenticity in socially engaged art practice
Ciaran Smyth
Performing Labour’s (Non)Futures : Universal basic income and the monetary imagination
Christian Riley Nagler
Contagion as Method : Generating stages of enunciation
Anyely Marín Cisneros, Rebecca Close
Cabinet of Generosities
Clara Rocha, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Nick Kline, Tomaž Krpič, Kirsty Máté, Kirsty Máté, Walmeri Ribeiro, Arianna Richardson, Cristiane Bouger, Joseph Connelly, Carolyn Defrin, Mark Flisher, Mark Flisher, Richard Gough, Mark Harvey
Letter to the Editors [artists’ pages]
Mick Douglas, Amaara Raheem
Notes on Contributors