Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds, Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (University of California Press, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds (ML & BR): This book is the result of each of our twenty-five plus years of research, collaborative artistic creation, and activism in conflict zones and other highly marginalized spaces globally. When we first imaged this project, in 2009, we determined that the numerous sympathies in our research, art, and activism would make for a good collaboration. Beginning with our time in Iraq in 2013 and continuing through Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chiapas, Ukraine, and across sub-Saharan Africa, we worked together with local artists, grassroots activists, and scholars/researchers to better understand the ways in which politically valent and powerful art is produced today by marginalized communities. We feel that while there have been avenues of theory and critique that have pointed to the reasons why art and creative cultural production are so often co-opted and so rarely rise to the occasion of enabling or mobilizing people towards what is commonly understood as praxis, there really is very little, if any, research, writing, or art that specifically aims to delineate how to create more politically powerful and efficacious art. Already by chance on a small plaza by the Tigris River in Baghdad, and not long after in the hills of the West Bank, we saw what we came to term “emurgent” (stylistically new and urgently created) art with the power to create “theater of immediacy”—artistic performance or performance activism that both undermines and exceeds hegemonic parameters for experience while stimulating personal or group transformation. With those two experiences, we were off and running for the next dozen years.
We believe the book is extremely timely. Everything from the Iranian Lego music videos to Macklemore's “Hind’s Hall,” street theater in Nairobi, anti-Russian theater in Kyiv, muraling in Chiapas and the Occupied Territories, have reached a level of urgency not seen in at least a generation. Yet whether and how all this efflorescence of politically engaged artistic creativity translates into the kind of direct political mobilization that is so rarely seen (Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 being exceptions that prove the rule, as Mark explored in Jadaliyya in 2011) is a question that requires both theoretical perspectives and methodologies that we did not believe existed or were yet adequate to the task. Thus, we wrote this book to offer both a new vocabulary and a rubric that would help scholars, artists, practitioners, or political artists to better create and analyze politically intended artistic creation in the current moment of ever intensifying polycrisis and generalized states of exception.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
ML & BR: This book is both inter- and transdisciplinary. It is interdisciplinary in the sense that we are each coming from different disciplines yet converge in the context of social theory, particularly its critical theory iteration. It is transdisciplinary in the sense that what we have felt necessary to do in order to produce more accurate analyzes, diagnoses, and methodologies for creating art with greater political potential and power is to create a terminology and a rubric that floats above existing disciplinary boundaries while also driving deep into their genealogies to recover older questions. These questions return to Marx, are developed by Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, and are expanded and deepened by anti-colonial writers in the Global South as well as figures such as Deleuze and Guattari, that remain quite relevant if increasingly under attack. Mark comes from historical sociology and social theory grounded first in Palestine and the broader SWANA region and then sub-Saharan Africa. Bryan comes from critical theory and performance studies. Our goal here was to look at the multiple and multifarious forms of politically engaged cultural and artistic production in which we have participated or witnessed, and offer a way of analyzing them that would improve our understanding or ability to analyze their success and/or failures to participate in or even generate more powerful political action at the grassroots level. Because we have been extremely fortunate to be present in such moments across five continents and dozens of countries, we wrote the book to be globally comparative and thus applicable to as rich a variety of situations and circumstances as we have experienced in the last two decades working together.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
ML: For me, the book is a culmination of almost thirty years of research, beginning with the exploration of Palestinian and Zionist/Israeli literature, art, and music as sources for understanding the history and contemporary dynamics of the conflict, as part of my exploration of the Late Ottoman through contemporary histories of Jaffa and Tel Aviv. It continued with my focus on music in my second book, Why They Don't Hate Us, which began my interest in looking at forms of extreme youth music across North Africa, the Middle East, and into Central Asia. Specifically, I wanted to understand what the experiences of these artists and the sub- and sometimes countercultures they help create can tell us about the societies in which they are aesthetically embedded. This led to my next two books, Heavy Metal Islam and its 2022 follow-up, We’ll Play till We Die. Some of the research for those books became the basis of my work with Bryan that is featured in Art Beyond the Edge.
BR: This is an extension of my work in critical theory and performance activism globally, from stage to street. I developed my combined socio-cognitive theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology—what I refer to as transversal poetics—while analyzing the socioculturally subversive and dissident impact of theater in early modern England. This was extended to the criminalized cultures (Roma, rogues, and vagabonds) during the same period that were affected and enabled by the transversal power of theater and performance to push people beyond established parameters for identity formation and subjectivity into nondifferentiated and indeterminate subjective territories from which restoration becomes an impossibility, and reconfiguration and expansion are inevitabilities. I revealed how what often functions as an emergent property can be conditioned to empower people who want to change and better their lives through shifts in consciousness, identity, and societal occupation. Our book is an extension of my interest in how people can harness such forces to achieve greater agency or at least uncontrollable movement outside of hegemonic systems, however non-directional or guidable.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
ML & BR: Not surprisingly, we hope for a wide readership given its geographic, theoretical, and methodological scope. We intended the book to advance a critical theory of art, and through it politics, that are particularly relevant to the current moment. We believe the arguments, stories, and examples featured in the book can bring together scholars, students, and practitioners across Southwest Asia and North Africa, as well as sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and even students of the Russia-Ukraine war. Mostly, we hope that the terms and rubric we have created will be useful by scholars studying social movements and artistic production in conflict contexts globally, but particularly in the Middle East and Africa, which is where the majority of our collaborative work has taken place. If we can inspire artists to create and/or contextualize their art in ways that might help it achieve greater political impact, we would be thrilled.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
ML & BR: We are hoping to continue working with our collaborators in the countries we discussed in the book to create new art that can meet the challenges posed by the rapid rise of authoritarian, fascistic governance, and violence that we have seen all around us. In that regard, we deliberately chose to end the book with a discussion of the 2024 Gaza solidarity university encampments as the most powerful example we have seen of how emurgent art creating theater of immediacy can—to be sure, at great cost—help fundamentally transform the broader politics in a society. In this confrontation we believe that it is the students, cultural creatives, and activists coming of age today, growing up in the wake of Covid, genocide, and two Trump administrations, and now the threats (and some opportunities) of AI, who are best placed to make revolution, if not likely or even “irresistible” (as Tony Cade Bambara famously called for), then at least more attractive, and just maybe possible.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 4, pages 99 to 104, 116)
All the world might not be a stage but much of Palestine is, especially frontline regions in so-called Area C. Comprising the majority of the West Bank, Israel has long declared most of Area C off-limits to Palestinians, making no secret of its expectation to retain most of the area in the event of an eventual territorial compromise. As a theater-maker and a musician much of whose artistic lives have been spent on stages, it was impossible not to see the field between the village of Nabi Saleh and the main (Israeli-controlled) road, Road 465, as a kind of stage, one in which a very specific kind of performative resistance and imposition of colonial control are reenacted in a highly scripted yet powerful and occasionally improvisational way. It was on this field during our first visit together to Nabi Saleh in 2014, specifically while standing on a promontory a third of the way down, that the concept of theater of immediacy was born. This field, sloping down from the houses of Nabi Saleh to the road below, is biblically—and, indeed, cinematically— beautiful, spreading out an ideal mise-en-scène for transversality and ideoaeffective praxis. Its theatricality no doubt contributed to the scripted perception of the protests; and that script was followed, however loosely, because going off script could easily be deadly for Palestinians or cause an international incident for Israel should a foreign or Israeli participant be seriously injured or killed.
And so, most every Friday morning for much of the 2010s, dozens of activists would converge in Nabi Saleh, as well as in the nearby village of Bil’in, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, and other locations including the Jordan Valley or southern Hebron Hills. They would meet with local families who have been fighting to keep their land for decades, and after a briefing and some food, march to the “theater”—let us recall here that fields of battle have been referred to as “theaters” as far back as 1703. There they would square off against the Israeli military for an hour and a half or two hours of chanting, marching, teargas barraging, scurrying, occasionally rock-throwing, and engaging in minor physical altercations with occupation forces. The performance would continue right up until the moment when the Israeli commander on scene let one of the Palestinian elders know, like collaborating directors and producers, that it was getting too close to Friday night Shabbat and his soldiers wanted to get back to the military base. This meant, if the protests did not end, the guns would start being aimed at rather than above or near protesters and things would get uglier very fast.
Whether on Broadway or Road 465 of the West Bank, no matter how great the performance, the producers always have the last say. When they say the show is over, it is over, whether for the evening or for good. And ultimately the Israelis did decide to “end” the run of weekly performance activism in Nabi Saleh and Bil’in, although it continued in other locations such as in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. But while the “stage was lit,” when soldiers were ready to go home for the day, the protest would more or less end, hopefully with only minor injuries. Everyone would return to the homes of whoever was hosting the solidarity action in the village—in Nabi Saleh the indominable Tamimi family—and have one of the most delicious and rewarding meals of their lives. This gathering was every bit as powerful as the protest itself because it cemented the solidarity between the local Palestinians and their Israeli and international allies from around the world in ways that no amount of violence could break.
In our second collaborative Nabi Saleh experience, in 2015 (Mark had visited multiple times in previous years), before the tear gas cloud descended on us, we watched the scene unfold, trying to decide whether to head directly into the area where most of the young protesters confronted Israeli soldiers, and the tear gas, flash bang grenades, plastic-coated steel bullets, and other forms of “crowd control” weapon usage were concentrated in response. We focused our attention on the Israeli commander shouting into his large walkie-talkie directing the response from Road 465 that separated the village from its natural spring—the object of desire for the settlers from the neighboring colony of Halamish for more than fifty years—trying to discern a pattern by which to chart a way to the bottom. This was where half a dozen young Palestinians had already arrived and began screaming at soldiers, most notably the most well-known daughter of the Tamimi family, Ahed, who was thirteen years old at the time.
Ahed Tamimi’s fierce commitment, enhanced by her blue eyes and long, curly, reddish-tinged blond hair, have made her a national and international symbol of Palestinian civil resistance to the Occupation. Before her, the last woman’s face to adorn walls across the Occupied Territories was Leila Khaled, the first woman member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) whose image with a keffiyeh and AK-47 can still be found on walls from Gaza to Belfast. So important had Ahed become at her young age that Israeli and Zionist propagandists accused her of being an actor playing a Palestinian, arguing that Palestinians could not have light hair and eyes—a manifestly untrue claim, as is obvious as soon as you walk through any Palestinian village or town.
A few years later, seventeen-year-old Ahed would be jailed for more than eight months after slapping a soldier who had shot her fifteen-year-old cousin, Mohammad, in the face at close range with a plastic-coated steel bullet while he was playing with friends (before admitting responsibility, the Israelis claimed Mohammad fell off his bike). His skull was left deformed with a chunk missing and his face severely scarred despite multiple surgeries to repair the damage. Another relative of Ahed’s, seventeen-year-old Mohammad Munir Mohammad Tamimi, had been shot in the back and killed in 2012 by Israeli occupation forces, making her sacrifice all the more powerful. While the young protesters chanted, waved flags, and shouted at the phalanx of Israeli soldiers arrayed directly against them, older Palestinians as well as international solidarity activists stayed closer to the top of the field, out of direct range of “nonlethal” weapons.
This is how the weekly protests played out until 2016, upwards of 350 “performances” over five years; a good run by any measure. For most of an average week—that is, when Israeli forces were not invading their homes, spraying them and people with “skunk” or “shit” water that smelled so bad people could not remain in their homes, banging down doors, and beating up and arresting, or even shooting, members of the Tamimi family—the field was “dark,” like a theater between performances. People could generally move across it, going down and up from the main road without a problem because they were not doing so with political intention. The spring across the road, however, was another matter. Once the village’s main source of water, the spring had been officially off-limits for decades, although Palestinians would occasionally “occupy” it, leading to the immediate arrival of Israeli forces who would invariably evict them from the area. But on Friday afternoons the political “lights” went on and the field and the whole village were “lit.” Everyone on all sides—villagers, solidarity activists, soldiers, media— performed their roles according to script.
Although the violence was not unique in the scope of our travels, the experience of Nabi Saleh generated a spark that led directly to the guiding theoretical lens and claims of this book. As the inspiration amid the chaos generated the concept of theater of immediacy, we decided to create a theater piece about Nabi Saleh. Yet to develop the theoretical apparatus discussed in this book, we could think of no better or even other way to represent the dynamics of the protest, especially the fraught and from multiple perspectives potentially problematic involvement of children in them, than to stage them in a theater in Palestine as a collaboration between the Transversal Theater Company, of which Bryan is the artistic director, and the foremost Palestinian theater company, the Jenin-based Freedom Theatre.
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After returning home from that trip, we got to work on what became the musical/play Nabi Saleh, Bryan writing the script and Mark dramaturging the production. Before leaving, we already agreed with The Freedom Theatre to stage the production collaboratively with the Transversal Theater Company. Yet we also wanted the support of Freedom Theatre cofounder, Zakaria Zubeidi, whom Mark had known since 2011, before undertaking the project. Zubeidi was then under protective custody in the Palestinian Authority Prison in Ramallah after Israel had put an active capture or kill order on him. We also wanted to interview him about the history of The Freedom Theatre and his understanding of the role of art in political protest.