Stanford Humanities Center
Branislav Jakovljević is Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, and he teaches in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His most recent book is The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors (2025, University of Michigan Press). He is the author of the award-winning book Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945–1991 (2016), and of a number of other books and articles published internationally.
SHC Project
Theaters of Atrocities: On Ethical Limits of Performance
In Theaters of Atrocities, I study performances that investigate the ethical boundaries of their own medium. My case studies range from local incidents, such as an instance of theatricalized torture during Bosnian war, to more recent responses of live arts to challenges of environmental ethics, which have planetary implications. Consideration of art and ethics is hardly a new topic, and it appears regularly in humanistic literature from Plato until the present. Theater sharpens the perspective on this subject because of the overlap between representation and human body that is constitutive of art forms that use performance as its medium. In western history, there are several significant instances of documented violation of ethical boundaries in performance, and they have received ample scholarly attention. For example, the classicist K. M. Coleman famously described the practice of theatricalized executions in ancient Rome as “fatal charades.” Closer to our own historical moment, in her book Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya V. Hartman theorizes coercive performances of slaves in antebellum America. In Theaters of Atrocities, I draw on these and other sources, and also depart from them. For instance, whereas both Coleman and Hartman focus on violent acts that shatter the boundaries between the aesthetic and the ethical, I am looking beyond the specific sites of violence to investigate the transformations of the social status of live performance within the societies and political regimes that are allowing these atrocious acts to happen.
Books in English:
2025. The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors. University of Michigan Press.
2021. Radomir Konstantinović, The Philosophy of Parochialism, editor, co-translator. University of Michigan Press.
2016. Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945-1991, University of Michigan Press. (Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theater for 2016-17 and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award, 2017; translated into Serbian, 2019, and Slovene, 2021).
2009. Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event. Northwestern University Press.
Selected Articles:
“War for the End of the World, at the End of the World.” The Resilience of History: The Yugoslav Wars through Art, edited by Blaž Kovšček and Gregor Moder. Ljubljana: Maska, 2024:53-78.
“Performance Art and the Novel.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, no. 138 (Fall 2024), pp. 152-159
“The Relay of Radicalism: What is Partisan Art to New Art Practice in Yugoslavia?” TDR: The Drama Review, 68:3 (T263), 2024: 209-219.
“Madness as a Form of Knowledge: Pavel Ivanovich Karpov’s Creativity of the Mentally Ill.” ArtMargins. 11:1-2, February-June 2022, pp. 127-151.
“The Ownership of Evil: 1968, 1989 and the Mainstreaming of the New Right.” Primerjalna književnost. Vol. 43, no. 3 (Fall 2020), pp. 49-63.
“Père Gynt: Mendacity for the 21st Century.” TDR: The Drama Review. Vol. 64, no. 3. (Winter 2020, T247), pp. 8-13.
“Illness as Intel.” TDR Continued, Forum: After Covid-19, What? Vol. 64, no. 3. (Winter 2020, T247), pp. 195-196.
“Performance Art and Illiberal Democracy: Marina Abramović’s The Cleaner in Belgrade.” TDR Continued. Vol. 64, no. 1 (Spring 2020 T245), pp. 182-189.
“For an Art of Participation: Common Goods for the Commons.” Performance Research. Vol. 23, No. 4/5 (June/July/August 2018), pp. 210-213.
“Fording the Stream of Conscience: Peter Handke’s River Journeys” in Theatre in the Context of Yugoslav Wars, Jana Dolečki, Senad Halibašić, and Stephan Hullfeld, eds. London: Palgrave-MacMillan (2018), pp. 243-270.
