Art Beyond the Edge

The new University of California Press book, written by UC Irvine Professors Bryan Reynolds and Mark LeVine, explores how art emerges from sociopolitical conflict and war across five continents

Bryan Reynolds, Distinguished Professor and Claire Trevor Professor of Drama at UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts, has published a new book, Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (University of California Press, 2026). Co-authored with Mark LeVine, professor and chair of the Global Middle East Studies program in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine, the book draws on more than 25 years of collaborative artistic production, research and activism around the world.

“The goal of the book is to generate a new radical vocabulary of critical theory that can meet the challenges of the twenty-first century,” shared Reynolds. “LeVine and I propose a new epistemological foundation and praxiological roadmap for engagement with and in performance activism and political art. From Gaza to Chiapas, Baghdad to Kabul, the Niger Delta to the Congo River, the US to Ukraine, the book establishes an innovative matrix to analyze the conditions through which artistic production empowers struggles for freedom, dignity and survival in a world on fire."

Examining sites of conflict on five continents, the book develops a framework for understanding how artistic production empowers struggles for freedom, dignity and survival. Rather than treating art made in danger zones as peripheral, Reynolds and LeVine position it as central to imagining political and social change.

The book has earned praise from leading scholars across performance studies, anthropology, and global studies. Performance theorist Richard Schechner called it a fierce book of incandescent performances "amid a world on fire," while sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone described its conceptual language as incisive and unprecedented, rarely matched in courage and invention.

About the Authors

Reynolds is a scholar, playwright, director and performer whose research encompasses critical theory, history, performance studies, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, sports studies and Global South studies. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Excess & Joy: Philosophical Transversations (2022); Intermedial Theater: Performance Philosophy, Transversal Poetics and the Future of Affect (2017); Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida; and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). As artistic director of the Amsterdam-based Transversal Theater Company, Reynolds’ plays and musicals have been produced at more than 80 venues across 25 countries on four continents. He holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Co-author Mark LeVine is professor of history at UC Irvine, a Guggenheim Fellow, an award-winning musician, film producer and journalist, and cofounder of both the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change at UC Irvine and Kakuma Sound.

Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire is available now from the University of California Press. 

To learn more about Bryan Reynolds, read his Department of Drama bio page here. For information on Mark LeVine’s research, visit his UC Irvine faculty bio page here.