This course focuses on political spectacle, and the many ways in which politicians and state actors perform authority and ‘truth.’ It also explores the ways in which artists and activists use performance to make political interventions through various methods, including disruption and persuasion. We begin the course examining several theories about performance and politics (Brecht, Boal, Foucault, Girard, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Rancière, Mouffe, Butler, among others) and then focus on political stagings, including discursive, visual, and performed strategies, space, scenarios/ scripts, event-ness, audience, gender, sexuality, and race both online and off in relation to major political events, movements, and contestations. In addition to examining political performances by politicians, we explore the work of major practitioners. Video screenings and guest lectures will provide an additional dimension for the course. Students will post weekly reading responses and collaborate in the creation of a final, web-based project on some aspect (which we will decide as a group) of political spectacle.