Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008–2020)

Gómez-Peña Unplugged is an anthology of recent and rewritten classic writings from Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a figure who stands alone as unique and ground-breaking in the history of performance art and as the artistic director of transdisciplinary performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. 
Throughout this collection, Gómez-Peña tackles literature, theory, pedagogy, activism and live art in an eclectic mix that demonstrates how the process of writing is simultaneously a performative exercise in embodied language. The writing stands as a call for action, utilizing what Gómez-Peña terms “imaginary activism” and “radical citizenship”; it invites the reader to embrace a borderless, polygendered, crossgenerational and race-literate ethos. This timely anthology comes straight from the heart of a troubled Trump-era United States and a crime cartel–ridden Mexico. Artists and writers are prompted to engage in radical performance pedagogy within the civic realm and to think of themselves as public intellectuals and “artivists” participating in the great debates of our times. 
By encouraging emerging artists and writers to wildly imagine their practice beyond the normative art world and academia, this book is a fundamental read for scholars and students of performance art, political theatre, cultural studies, literature, poetry, activism and race and gender politics. 
Performance Art, Live or Time-Based Art, Cultural Studies, Experimental Poetry, Multiculturalism, Social Practice, Chicano/Latino/Border Art & Literature, Relational Aesthetics, Public Art, Artivism, Activism, Psychomagic Ritual, Literary Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Ethnic & Gender Studies, Queer & Women Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Techno-Art, Cyborgian Studies, Exoticized & Fetishized Identities, Deconstruction Stereotypes & Binaries, Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Nationalism, Radical Citizenship, Anti-Racism, Race & Gender Literacy

Arts & Photography

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo

History & Criticism

Routledge

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society marks a transformation from its sister book, Exercises for Rebel Artists, into a pedagogical matrix suited for use as a performance handbook and conceptual tool for artists, activists, theorists, pedagogues, and trans-disciplinary border crossers of all stripes. 
Featuring a newly reworked outline of La Pocha Nostra's overall pedagogy, and how it has evolved in the time of Trump, cartel violence, and the politics of social media, this new handbook presents deeper explanations of the interdisciplinary pedagogical practices developed by the group that has been labeled "the most influential Latino/a performance troupe of the past ten years." 
Co-written by Guillermo Gómez-Peña in collaboration with La Pocha Nostra’s artistic co-director Saúl García-López and edited by Paloma Martinez-Cruz, this highly anticipated follow-up volume raises crucial questions in the new neo-nationalist era. Drawing on field experience from ten years of touring, the authors blend original methods with updated and revised exercises, providing new material for teachers, universities, radical artists, curators, producers, and students. 
This book features: Introductions by the authors and editor to Pocha Nostra practice in a post-democratic society. Theoretical, historical, poetic, and pedagogical contexts for the methodology. Suggestions for how to use the book in the classroom and many other scenarios. Detailed, hands-on exercises for using Pocha Nostra-inspired methods in workshops. A step-by-step guide to creating large-scale group performances. New, unpublished photos of the Pocha Nostra methods in practice. Additional texts by Reverend Billy and Savitri D., Dragonfly, Francesca Carol Rolla, VestAndPage, Micha Espinosa, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Praba Pilar, L. M. Bogad, Anuradha Vikram, and Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, among many others. 
The book is complemented by the new book Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008–2019).

García-López, Saúl

This anthology of Gómez-Peña's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this migrant provocateur.

Dangerous Border Crossers

Individual Artists

This anthology of Gómez-Peña's performance chronicles, diary entries, poems, essays, and texts, sheds an extraordinary light on the life and work of this migrant provocateur.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña has spent many years developing his unique style of performance-activism; his theatricalizations of postcolonial theory. In Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what's left for artists to do in a post-9/11 repressive culture of what he calls 'the mainstream bizarre'.Over forty-five photos document his artistic experiments and the text not only explores and confronts his political and philosophical parameters; it offers groundbreaking insights into his, and his company's, methods of production, development and teaching.The result is an extraordinary and inspiring glimpse into the life and work of one of the most daring, innovative and challenging performance artists of our age.

Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy

Performing Arts

Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy

In Exercises for Rebel Artists, Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes use their extensive teaching and performance experience with La Pocha Nostra to help students and practitioners to create ‘border art’. Designed to take readers right into the heart of radical performance, the authors use a series of crucial practical exercises, honed in workshops worldwide, to help create challenging theatre which transcends the boundaries of nation, gender, and racial identity. The book features: <ul>
<li>Detailed exercises for using Pocha Nostra methods in workshops</li> <li>Inspirational approaches for anyone creating, producing or teaching radical performance</li> <li>A step-by-step guide for large-scale group performance</li> <li>New, unpublished photos of the Pocha Nostra method in practice</li> </ul> Exercises for Rebel Artists advocates teaching as an important form of activism and as an extension of the performance aesthetic. It is an essential text for anyone who wants to learn how use performance to both challenge and change.

Sifuentes, Roberto

Humor & Entertainment

The New World Border is a carnivalesque inversion of ethnic and geo-political ideology, a disorienting free-fall into the space between cultures and a head-on collision with the real and imagined borders that separate North and South.
Hero of a thousand syncretic faces—intercultural interpreter, reverse anthropologist, experimental linguist and political artist of the first order—Guillermo Gómez-Peña has won international acclaim for his efforts to create a hybrid culture and to articulate a borderless ethos.
In this new collection of essays, poems and performance texts, Gómez-Peña muses, often tongue-in-cheek, on matters of race, nationality, language and identity. With a heady mix of pop culture, provocative iconography, political satire, ethnic stereotypes and guerrilla theory, he explores "the territory of cultural misunderstanding."
"In everything he does, he remains an indomitably playful phrasemaker; a fertile rethinker of cultural contradictions, clichés, and conundrums; and an inspiring recruiter for a playground army of cultural pluralists."—The Village Voice
"Gómez-Peña invites the reader into uncharted territory: the vast, intercontinental border zone where people live between and across cultures and countries, creating a thoroughly hybrid society where the only cultural "others" are those who stubbornly resist "mestizaje". The New World Border is both wildly entertaining and thoughtfully incisive, inducing a kind of cultural vertigo that erases the borders between 'us' and 'them'. The New World Border is a required addition to all literary and multicultural studies collections!"—Midwest Book Review
"Guillermo Gómez Peña is a clear example of the work that originates from and about the border. His work deals with borders, with their existence, construction, reconstruction, definition, and eventual questioning. In this context, the aim of this essay is to explore the way the artist puts into practice his conceptualization of the border reality in The New World Border: Prophecies for the End of the Century, which toured worldwide and in front of very diverse, international audiences."—Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English

The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

City Lights Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gómez-Peña, Guillermo

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008–2020)

Gómez-Peña Unplugged: Texts on Live Art, Social Practice and Imaginary Activism (2008–2020)

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society

La Pocha Nostra: A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society

Dangerous Border Crossers

Dangerous Border Crossers

Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism and Pedagogy

Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy

Exercises for Rebel Artists: Radical Performance Pedagogy

The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and Loqueras for the End of the Century