Each act/Act in this book demonstrates how performance and activism are mutually constitutive: together public space is transformed, heightened, and made more communal; the urgency of dissent and the rhetoric of protest is made more coherent, poignant, and accessible through the symbolic; the dichotomies separating modernity and tradition – the enlightened and unenlightened, the advanced and the backward – become dialectical, made more complicated by integrating opposites to create alternative thoughts and practices; and abstract moral arguments and political theory are unveiled in action and their consequences made more apparent through the body and embodied interpretations of daily life.

Performance and activism are mutually constitutive because performance demands that we pay attention to the deep particularities of human action. A performance analytic requires that we attend to the layers of contexts and motivating factors that generate acts of activism. We cannot simply theorize or perform the surfaces or symptoms of these acts. Performance aims to delve into the undercurrents, the deep particularities, to ask: How is it what it is? Searching the deep particularities of these acts of activism excavated a political economy of poverty that is inseparable from human rights and social justice. Thomas Pogge reminds us that severe poverty and the powerlessness it entails are all but impossible for some of us to imagine. “Severe poverty today, while no less horrific than that experienced by the early American settlers, is fundamentally different in context and causation.”