In her 1979 touchstone address, “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,” Audre Lorde makes it clear that the only feminism that matters is one that includes and even centers the voices of “poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.” She argues that this type of representation is not a mere academic exercise, but a means of survival for women within these groups. Speaking at the Second Sex Conference in New York, Lorde also laments the lack of attention paid to the ways women can and should embrace their differences while still relying on a solidarity that she sees as foundational to creativity and liberation. Women of color have always borne the greatest share of domestic and physical labor in the United States, and thus creating this solidarity is a challenge; when workers are spread far and wide, scared of management, and just living month to month, it can be difficult to organize and unite them. In the 1970s, the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) took on this challenge, seeking to organize women of color economically, culturally, and politically, embodying Lorde's charge in the decade prior to her speech. One of the key methods of organizing by the TWWA was a series of original skits, many of which were performed during celebrations of International Women's Day (IWD, 8 March).

What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe:

Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

Although sectarian violence characterized life in Belfast for hundreds of years, 1864 marked a shift in how violence played out in the city. Unlike previous conflicts that occurred in open spaces and reflected long-held rural rituals, the riots of August 1864 took place in the city's rapidly developing urban streets. The violence broke out in response to celebrations around the foundation laying for a new statue of Daniel O'Connell, the late Catholic politician, in Dublin. Thousands of Belfast Catholics traveled to Dublin for the celebration. Upon their return to Belfast, ten thousand Protestant loyalists greeted them by burning an effigy of O'Connell on Boyne Bridge and staging a mock funeral and procession that attempted to enter a Catholic burial ground. The resulting violence and rioting continued for ten days on the city streets, where homes and businesses faced destruction on a scale previously unseen. Expelling residents of opposing views, rioters reinforced older ideas of “communal conflict” expressed through “disagreements over each group's place—literally and imaginatively—in the city” and strengthened notions of neighborhood geography based on religious beliefs. As historian Mark Doyle argues, the shifting patterns of violence resulted from “[t]he steady advance of working-class alienation from the state, the growing hegemony of violent extremists in working-class neighbourhoods, the sectarian alliance between Protestant workers and elites, the insecurity of the Catholics and, above all, the polarising effects of earlier outbreaks of violence.” Lasting reminders of conflict lingered as the city recovered, reminding anyone walking the streets of the city's violent past and the likely potential of future clashes.