Toward a Politics of Hope: Performing Political Reality in the Age of Obama

This performance text situates itself within and against the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Republican National Convention, Election Day, and the January 20, 2009, Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Melding popular fictions, media coverage, and the real (and at times fictionalized) voices of the Washington punditry and other contemporary figures, the text presents an alternative voice to the cultural pedagogies at play during the historic election season, underpinned as it was by the eight-year legacy of one of the worst presidencies in U.S. history-a presidency that witnessed a major terrorist attack on American soil, two wars of aggression, the drowning of a major city, and an economic meltdown of the likes not seen since the Great Depression.