This book is an analysis and study of postmodernism political theatre and the politics of representation. Traversing a wide span of twentiethcentury political theatre and performance practices in the West the author analyses and questions the performance practices of the historical and neoavantgardes modernist political theatre and postmodern performance in order to explore the relationships between politics performance and postmodernism. Chinna contends that it is the provisional and contingent strategies of performance which set the model for the postmodern. Drawing on the poststructuralist theories of JeanFrancois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida among others the postmodern is defined as a performance model like deconstruction endlessly deferring unequivocal meaning and final closure. It is argued that historical avantgarde performance practices such as Dada as well as the neoavantgardes from the 1950s onward were always trapped within a dialectic of representation and the real in their quest for a merging of art and life.