Embodied Paradigms: Performative Responses to Byzantium

Bhalla, Niamh and Kotoula, Dimitra (2026) Embodied Paradigms: Performative Responses to Byzantium. In: The Routledge Handbook of the Modern Reception of Byzantium. Routledge, London and New York, pp. 557-567. ISBN 9781032077802

Abstract

Byzantine performativity has echoed through the ages, mingling with other traditions in ways both enduring and nebulous. This introductory essay to the final section of the Handbook explores Byzantine reception through the lens of performativity, arguing that performance constitutes both a defining characteristic of the culture of the eastern Roman Empire and a synthesizing thread connecting Byzantium to its modern receptions. Byzantium is discussed as a performative culture par excellence, encompassing art, architecture, liturgy, imperial ceremonial, social rituals and more. Byzantine visual arts themselves are argued to have functioned as performances that intersected with embodied practices, coalescing with ritual and ceremonial life to express theological and political concepts. Such inherited embodied paradigms have manifested across diverse modern performance types, demonstrating citationality in the Derridean sense. Contemporary artists have brought Byzantine iconography into the streets through graffiti and street art, while others evolved Byzantine traditions as socio-political commentary, radically reworking Byzantine themes to address marginalization, war, and modern technological realities. Such creative receptions – spanning jewellery, haute couture, video games, film and beyond – reveal dissonant yet compelling engagements with the Byzantine tradition. The essay introduces an expanded field of Byzantine performativity. Far from declining into obsolescence, Byzantium's performative legacy continues to generate and inspire; its reverberating, performative Byzantinisms live on as fecund heuristics even now.

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