BOOK REVIEWED: Performing Left Populism: Performance, Politics and the People, edited by Goran Petrovic Lotina and Théo Aiolfi. London: Methuen Drama, 2023.
Many mainstream political commentators use “populism” as a pejorative term to evoke images of thoughtless mobs dazzled by politicians offering simple solutions to complex problems (“Build the wall!”). This edited volume of essays challenges the caricature of anti-democratic politics by using performance studies as a critical lens to examine the progressive uses of populist discourse and embodied representations of disruptive politics. The editors Goran Pertrovic Lotina and Théo Aiolfi convincingly argue that the rise of the far right in Europe and North and South America in the 2010s has led to political science scholarship becoming myopically focused on fascist and other right-wing authoritarian iterations of populism. Populism is not an inherently reactionary or oppressive set of ideas and values. As a performative mode of politics that articulates...