Product details
- ISBN 9781835952207
- Weight: 780g
- Dimensions: 170 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 20 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Intellect
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Performing Punctuation gathers writers/performers to highlight, question and contest colonising facets of English language punctuation, while looking for ways to reveal and rarefy these proprietary rules such that they are responsive, playful, generous, generative, and ultimately more inclusive.
A transdisciplinary collaborative book that brings awareness to the limiting effects of the prevailing dominance of English language and its vociferous use of punctuation. The book's content and design is guided by this question: How can English language punctuation discard its domineering and strident overcoat to enable a greater diversity of readers, listeners, performers, writers, and practices?
Performing Punctuation, bears out digressions, indiscretions, transgressions and fabulations of grammatical marks unfaithful to propriety. It makes public an on-going and refreshed movement to play humorously and tenaciously with those small but powerful writing marks that regulate, discipline and structure textual language and spoken discourse. These marks, symbols and rule-makers are anything but a mere neutral grammatical systems; they are language gremlins and pixies; inflecting and infecting agents with histories, voices and messages of their own accord. These marks are understood as part and parcel to the on-going colonising history of the English language.
The collection brings together of a range of voices – Māori and Pākehā – and the collaborative editorial relationship with contributors allows conversation to develop between the elements of the book.
Julieanna Preston’s transdisciplinary creative practice research is concerned with the agency and ethics of materiality, its relation to place, ecology and ways of being in the world. Her practice engages place-responsive live art performance, vocalisation, and performance writing. She currently teaches and supervises postgraduate students across art, design and architecture in Aotearoa NZ.
Anna Brown is New Zealand-based designer, researcher and educator. She is Professor of Design and Public Good at Massey University’s College of Creative Arts. She works with visual artists and curators to investigate through form, materials and typography how the vehicle of the book can amplify the content it contains.
