Art Beyond the Edge

Mark LeVine and Bryan Reynolds, Art Beyond the Edge. Creativity and Conflict in a word on fire, UC Press (2026).

Seminar with the co-author, Prof Mark LeVine, Department of History, UC Irvine.

This talk lays out findings from almost 30 years of research, performance and arts-based activism in which the authors have engaged in conflict zones, as they are discussed in the forthcoming book Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (UC Press, 2026). The book articulates a template and gauge with which to assess the aesthetic and political power and efficacy of political art and performance activism using examples from the authors’ fieldwork and collaborations in multiple locations, including Chiapas, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Nigeria. LeVine first explores several theoretical innovations he has developed with his co-author Bryan Reynolds, including the concepts of theater of immediacy and emurgent art. He then constructs a set of three stages of intensifying aesthetic and political efficacy - what they term art's aeffective power: from the initial moments of creative subcultural exuberance while the governing system remains hegemonic and nominally functioning, through its more open political deployment as cracks in the system begin to appear and hegemony begins to weaken in the midst of a countercultural insurgence, to the explosive point where art "makes revolution irresistible" (in the words of playwright and documentarian Toni Cade Bambara), if rarely inevitable. The goal of this analytical matrix is both to help scholars better diagnose and critique highly aesthetic political performativity and artistic creation, while also providing a road map for political artists and performance activists to more successfully create aeffectively valent art.

Mark LeVine is Professor of Middle Eastern and African Histories and Cultures at UC Irvine and the founding Director of its Program in Global Middle East Studies. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Research and Professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University from 2009-22, as well as a fellow at numerous advanced studies centers globally, he is the author and editor of a dozen books, including most recently We'll Play till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslim World (UC Press, 2022), Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World (Routledge), Heavy Metal Islam (New Edition, UC Press, 2022, original edition, Random House, 2008), Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel (UC Press 2013), and the forthcoming Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (UC Press, 2026) as well as Marginalia of a Revolution (UC Press). From 2008-2018 he was a senior columnist at al-Jazeera English, and was the longest-serving Contributing Editor at Tikkun magazine. As a world musician and producer he has collaborated with groups globally, From Latin rock artist Ozomatli (Grammy Award, 2005) to Femi and Seun Kuti , and produced several documentaries for National Public Radio's Afropop Worldwide.