Description: In the expansive and expanding field of Irish studies, performance has typically featured as drama, theatre, dance and music. Yet the categories of 'Irish culture' and 'Irishness' are highly performative, effected through a wide range of social practices, cultural formations, discursive utterances, and in timely need of critical address. As social and political change continues to have enormous effects on Ireland and its diaspora, it has become more important than ever to engage with the complex and under-researched area of performance in and of Irish culture. The new paperback edition of this seminal collection of essays, written by an international cohort of scholars, is to consider Irish culture through some of the paradigms and vocabularies offered by performance studies. As the title of the book makes clear, Brady and Walsh return to the evocative metaphor of crossroads to signal the intersection of disciplines. The roads mapped here are suggestive, multiplicitous, overlapping and often mobile. Practices, epistemologies, temporalities, geographies, and identities splinter in their wake, clearing the ground for the emergence of nuanced understandings of performance and cultural politics.

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