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Performing Anti-Slavery
by Gay Gibson CimaIn Performing Anti-Slavery, Gay Gibson Cima reimagines the connection between the self and the other within activist performance, providing fascinating new insights into women's nineteenth-century reform efforts, revising the history of abolition, and illuminating an affective repertoire that haunts both present-day theatrical stages and anti-trafficking organizations. Cima argues that black and white American women in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement transformed mainstream performance practices into successful activism. In family circles, literary associations, religious gatherings, and transatlantic anti-slavery societies, women debated activist performance strategies across racial and religious differences: they staged abolitionist dialogues, recited anti-slavery poems, gave speeches, shared narratives, and published essays. Drawing on liberal religious traditions as well as the Eastern notion of transmigration, Elizabeth Chandler, Sarah Forten, Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Ellen Craft and others forged activist pathways that reverberate to this day.
Performing Arctic Sovereignty: Policy and Visual Narratives (Routledge Research in Polar Regions)
by Corine Wood-DonnellyThe Arctic is 5.5 million square miles and has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years, yet it is still a frontier of development. But who owns the Arctic? This book charts the history of performances of sovereignty over the Arctic in the policy and visual representations of the US, Canada and Russia. Focusing on narratives of the effective occupation of territory found in postage stamps, it offers a novel analysis of Arctic sovereignty. Issues such as climate change, plastics pollution and resource development continue to impact the future of this space centred around the North Pole. Who is responsible for the region? This book examines how countries have absorbed Arctic territory into their national consciousness, examining the choice of, and use of, symbols and images in postage stamps. It looks at the story of how these countries have represented their Arctic frontiers and territorial peripheries. The book argues that the performance of policy in these regions has caused relative sovereignty to become a reality. It provides an intriguing account of how these countries have, in their distinctive ways, established, legitimised and reinforced their political authority in these regions. This book will appeal to Geographers and is recommended supplementary reading for students in political history and regional studies of the North.
Performing Arts and Therapeutic Implications
by Tanvi Bajaj Swasti Shrimali VohraPresenting an alternative perspective, this book proposes that performing arts forge an emotional bond between the performer and the audience, making the act of performance a therapeutic and restorative experience, and not merely recreational. Studying the life-experiences of six artists, and their unique engagement with three art forms — music, drama and dance — the book highlights the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual effects of performing arts both on the performers and the audience. More importantly, it takes the current understanding of the therapeutic role of arts beyond a deficit model of health that focuses on their use in curing illnesses, disabilities and imbalances, towards a more positive growth-centric model that relates them to promoting holistic mental health, well-being and happiness. It thus bridges the gap between the theoretical understanding of creative arts therapy and the practical experience of performing arts in non-therapeutic settings. Further, it assumes increasing relevance with respect to fast-changing lifestyles to which stress and ill-health are often attributed. The book will appeal to artists, educators and researchers of performing arts, applied psychology, counselling and therapy, and cultural studies, as well as interested general readers.
Performing Asian Transnationalisms: Theatre, Identity, and the Geographies of Performance (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Amanda RogersThis book makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary engagements between Theatre Studies and Cultural Geography in its analysis of how theatre articulates transnational geographies of Asian culture and identity. Deploying a geographical approach to transnational culture, Rogers analyses the cross-border relationships that exist within and between Asian American, British East Asian, and South East Asian theatres, investigating the effect of transnationalism on the construction of identity, the development of creative praxis, and the reception of works in different social fields. This book therefore examines how practitioners engage with one another across borders, and details the cross-cultural performances, creative opportunities, and political alliances that result. By viewing ethnic minority theatres as part of global — rather than simply national — cultural fields, Rogers argues that transnational relationships take multiple forms and have varying impetuses that cannot always be equated to diasporic longing for a homeland or as strategically motivated for economic gain. This argument is developed through a series of chapters that examine how different transnational spatialities are produced and re-worked through the practice of theatre making, drawing upon an analysis of rehearsals, performances, festivals, and semi-structured interviews with practitioners. The book extends existing discussions of performance and globalization, particularly through its focus on the multiplicity of transnational spatiality and the networks between English-language Asian theatres. Its analysis of spatially extensive relations also contributes to an emerging body of research on creative geographies by situating theatrical praxis in relation to cross-border flows. Performing Asian Transnationalisms demonstrates how performances reflect and rework conventional transnational geographies in imaginative and innovative ways.
Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Asian America)
by William GowIn 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the heart of this argument are the voices of everyday people including Chinese American movie extras, street performers, and merchants. Drawing on more than 40 oral history interviews as well as research in more than a dozen archival and family collections, this book retells the long-overlooked history of the ways that Los Angeles Chinatown shaped Hollywood and how Hollywood, in turn, shaped perceptions of Asian American identity.
Performing Citizenship: Bodies, Agencies, Limitations (Performance Philosophy)
by Sibylle Peters Paula Hildebrandt Kerstin Evert Mirjam Schaub Kathrin Wildner Gesa ZiemerThis open access book discusses how citizenship is performed today, mostly through the optic of the arts, in particular the performing arts, but also from the perspective of a wide range of academic disciplines such as urbanism and media studies, cultural education and postcolonial theory. It is a compendium that includes insights from artistic and activist experimentation. Each chapter investigates a different aspect of citizenship, such as identity and belonging, rights and responsibilities, bodies and materials, agencies and spaces, and limitations and interventions. It rewrites and rethinks the many-layered concept of citizenship by emphasising the performative tensions produced by various uses, occupations, interpretations and framings.
Performing Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child (Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present)
by Bryoni TrezisePerforming Contemporary Childhoods: Being and Becoming a Viral Child examines the changing nature of contemporary childhoods by exploring how children’s and young people’s digital media create new ideas about youth agency. Visual cultures of childhood have been traditionally traced in photography. Material cultures of childhood have been likewise traced in archives, scripts and even toys. This book shows that performance cultures and their digital literacies – expressed in viral forms such as TikTok dance challenges, tweets and viral GIFs – create new ideas about childhood by positioning young people as authors and owners of their self-representations. With the global pandemic in its immediate backdrop, the book finds that reshaped social relations and a context of crisis in our political, social and ecological realms cultivate nostalgia for ideals of innocent childhood that only promise to be disrupted by the complex, ambiguous and ultimately resistive acts young people appear to generate for and about themselves. This book is ideal for students and scholars of childhood studies, performance studies, social and cultural history and visual and digital culture.
Performing Cultures of Equality (GRACE Project)
by Emilia María Durán-AlmarzaThis book examines the enactment of gendered in/equalities across diverse Cultural forms, turning to the insights produced through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance. It builds on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project and offers both theoretical and methodological analyses of an array of activities and artworks. The performative manifestations discussed include theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts from multiple geopolitical locales. Engaging with the key concepts of re-enactment and relationality, the contributions explore the ways in which in/equalities are relationally re-produced in and through individual and collective bodies. This multi- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays creates fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies, sitting at the crossroads of ethnography, event studies, social movements, visual studies, critical discourse analysis, and contemporary approaches to textualities emerging from post-colonial and feminist studies.
Performing Digital Activism: New Aesthetics and Discourses of Resistance (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture)
by Fidèle A. VlavoFrom the emergence of digital protest as part of the Zapatista rebellion, to the use of disturbance tactics against governments and commercial institutions, there is no doubt that digital technology and networks have become the standard features of 21st century social mobilisation. Yet, little is known about the historical and socio-cultural developments that have transformed the virtual sphere into a key site of political confrontation. This book provides a critical analysis of the developments of digital direct action since the 1990s. It examines the praxis of electronic protest by focussing on the discourses and narratives provided by the activists and artists involved. The study covers the work of activist groups, including Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater and the electrohippies, as well as Anonymous, and proposes a new analytical framework centred on the performative and aesthetic features of contemporary digital activism.
Performing Disfiguration: Pain, Affect and Staging of Relationalities in Performances (Performance Studies & Cultural Discourse in South Asia #3)
by Akhila Vimal C.This book explores the processes of disfiguration in the 'classical' and 'ritual-healing' performances of India, with a particular focus on the rich and diverse performance traditions of Kerala. It examines three modes of disfiguration—'blood,' 'madness,' and 'laughter'—to offer unique insights into how these elements shape the performative body. By drawing on Kerala&’s distinctive cultural and ritual contexts, this work provides a deep understanding of the region&’s embodied practices. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, the book blends performance studies with detailed ethnographic descriptions to capture the nuances of 'pain' and 'affect.' It challenges and subverts normative notions of performance, offering a fresh lens through which to view these dynamic traditions. This book serves as an invaluable resource for scholars of dance, performance studies, and practitioners seeking to explore the interplay between region, ritual, and disfiguration in Indian performance forms.
Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change
by Mark Pedelty John Holmes McDowell Jennifer C. Post Aaron S. Allen Jeff Todd Titon Eduardo S Brondizio Assefa Tefera Dibaba Rebecca Dirksen Mary Hufford Chie Sakakibara Rory Turner Lois WilckenPerforming Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression--storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of people's responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people's critical perspectives--gained through intimate struggle with life-altering force--to the global dialogue surrounding humanity's response to climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental catastrophe. Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope, Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front lines of today's global emergency. Contributors: Aaron S. Allen, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Assefa Tefera Dibaba, Rebecca Dirksen, Mary Hufford, John Holmes McDowell, Mark Pedelty, Jennifer C. Post, Chie Sakakibara, Jeff Todd Titon, Rory Turner, Lois Wilcken
Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Bettina Hofmann Monika MuellerPerformance and performativity are important terms for a theorization of gender and race/ethnicity as constitutive of identity. This collection reflects the ubiquity, diversity, and (historical) locatedness of ethnicity and gender by presenting contributions by an array of international scholars who focus on the representation of these crucial categories of identity across various media, including literature, film, documentary, and (music) video performance. The first section, "Political Agency," stresses instances where the performance of ethnicity/gender ultimately aims at a liberating effect leading to more autonomy. The second section, "Diasporic Belonging," explores the different kinds of negotiations of ethnic performances in multi-ethnic contexts. The third part, "Performances of Ethnicity and Gender" scrutinizes instances of the combined performance of ethnicity and gender in novels, films, and musical performances. The last section "Cross-Ethnic Traffic" contains a number of contributions that are concerned with attempts at crossing over from "one ethnicity into another" by way of performance.
Performing Fantasy and Reality in Contemporary Culture (Routledge Advances in Sociology)
by Anastasia SereginaWe frequently engage with that which we consciously perceive not to be real, yet fantasy, despite its pervasive presence and strong role in everyday life through its connection to identities, communities, desires, and meanings, has yet to be properly defined and researched. This book examines fantasy from a performance theory perspective. Drawing on multidisciplinary literature, it presents ethnographic and art-based research on live action role-playing games to explore fantasy as a bodily and negotiated phenomenon that involves various kinds of engagement with one’s surroundings. Overall, this book is a study of various forms and roles that fantasy can take on as part of contemporary Western culture. The study suggests that fantasy emerges as a different type of interpretation of normalised performance and reality, and can thus provide individuals with the tools to wield agency in everyday life. The book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, literature and performance studies.
Performing Fear in Television Production: Practices of an Illiberal Democracy (Asian Visual Cultures)
by Siao Yuong FongWhat goes into the ideological sustenance of an illiberal capitalist democracy? While much of the critical discussion of the media in authoritarian contexts focus on state power, the emphasis on strong states tend to perpetuate misnomers about the media as mere tools of the state and sustain myths about their absolute power. Turning to the lived everyday of media producers in Singapore, this book poses a series of questions that explore what it takes to perpetuate authoritarian resilience in the mass media. How, in what terms and through what means, does a politically stable illiberal Asian state like Singapore formulate its dominant imaginary of social order? What are the television production practices that perform and instantiate the social imaginary, and who are the audiences that are conjured and performed in the process? What are the roles played by imagined audiences in sustaining authoritarian resilience in the media? As argued in the book, if audiences function as the central problematic that engenders anxieties and self-policing amongst producers, can the audience become a surrogate for the authoritarian state?
Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory
by Bryoni TrezisePerforming Feeling in Cultures of Memory brings memory studies into conversation with a focus on feelings as cultural actors. It charts a series of memory sites that range from canonical museums and memorials, to practices enabled by the virtual terrain of Second Life, popular 'trauma TV' programs and radical theatre practice.
Performing Folklore: Ranchos Folclóricas from Lisbon to Newark
by Kimberly DaCosta HoltonThrough the lens of expressive culture, Performing Folklore tracks Portugal's transition from fascism to democracy, and from imperial metropole to EEC member state. Kimberly DaCosta Holton examines the evolution and significance of ranchos folclóricos, groups of amateur musicians and dancers who perform turn-of-the-century popular tradition and have acted as cultural barometers of change throughout 20th-century Portugal. She investigates the role that these folklore groups played in the mid-twentieth-century dictatorship, how they fell out of official favor with the advent of democracy, and why they remain so popular in Portugal's post-authoritarian state, especially in emigrant and diasporic communities. Holton looks at music, dance, costume, repertoire, venue, and social interplay in both local and global contexts. She considers the importance of revivalist folklore in the construction and preservation of national identity in the face of globalization. This book embraces "invented tradition" as process rather than event, presenting an ethnography not only of folkloric revivalism but also of sweeping cultural transformation, promoted alternately by authoritarianism, democracy, emigration, and European unification.
Performing Gender and Comedy: Theories, Texts and Contexts
by Hengen SFirst Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Performing Gender at Work
by Elisabeth KelanProviding aaunique insight into how gender is performed in contemporary high-tech work andaintroducing a creative and novel way of analyzing the fluidity and rigidity of gender at work through discourse analytic methods the author highlights how changes in the world of work interact with changes in gender relations. a"
Performing Heritage
by Navina JafaCentred in academic theory in the area of exhibiting culture, this book seeks to explore the art and politics of cultural representation. While thus far this discussion has been restricted to the closed spaces of museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the like, here, this densely interdisciplinary problematic is approached through the unique and increasingly popular medium of Heritage Walks. Focusing on the idea of the living exhibit, the author employs her decades-long career in the field of academic cultural tourism and the performing arts to develop a uniquely critical frame and methodology for engaging with cultures in a dynamic and performative manner. The book argues that heritage walks are necessarily creative and academically invested, and can be an effective medium for rethinking the disciplines of history, sociology and conservation and the challenges they face in contemporary post-colonial India. Through an acutely experiential account, the author bridges the gap between applied and academic theory in the fields of visual anthropology, museology, heritage conservation and cultural studies among others, providing the much needed scholarship in studies of living heritage.
Performing Homescapes (Performing Landscapes)
by Sally Mackey Adelina OngPart of the Performing Landscapes series, Performing Homescapes is an edited collection comprising a contemporary exploration of performing many iterations of landscapes of homes. Authors were invited to respond to a detailed brief with home to be deliberately reconsidered as homescape, represented by landscapes, sites and practices often outside, and occasionally including a conventional home-as-house and intimate dwelling. We wanted a diverse range of geographical sites to be represented and a global offer, encompassing a pluriverse of homescapes. Voices, practices, and epistemologies from the Global South and global majority were important to us, including Indigenous ways of knowing and practicing. This curated collection offers an expanded understanding of the performance of home/scapes as a new intervention into the fields of performance and home scholarship. Performing Homescapes moves beyond spatial meditations within rooms of a house to offer an original critical engagement with the social, political, ecological and cultural landscapes that shape and sustain affects related to the notion of home, unhomeliness and, even, solastalgia. While the impact of the social, political and cultural landscapes on relationships with - and within - the house are implied in most academic literature on forms of performing home, it is foregrounded in the chapters of this edited collection. In addition, certain chapters attend to the more-than-human, human relationships with the Earth as homescape and the co-creation of homescapes within and beyond dwellings.
Performing Human Rights: Artistic Interventions into European Asylum (Routledge Series in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Theatre and Performance)
by Anika MarschallThis book enhances critical perspectives on human rights through the lens of performance studies and argues that contemporary artistic interventions can contribute to our understanding of human rights as a critical and embodied doing. This study is situated in the contemporary discourse of asylum and political art practices. It argues for the need to reimagine human rights as performative and embodied forms of recognition and practical honouring of our shared vulnerability and co-dependency. It contributes to the debate of theatre and migration, by understanding that contemporary asylum issues are complex and context specific, and that they do not only pertain to the refugee, migrant, asylum seeker or stateless person but also to privileged constituencies, institutional structures, forms of organisation and assembly. The book presents a unique mixed-methods approach that focuses equally on performance analyses and on political philosophy, critical legal studies and art history – and thus speaks to a range of politically interested scholars in all four fields.
Performing Identities: Celebrating Indigeneity in the Arts
by GeoffreyV. DavisPerforming Identities brings together essays by scholars, artists and activists engaged in understanding and conserving rapidly disappearing local knowledge forms of indigenous communities across continents. It depicts the imaginative transactions evident in the interface of identity and cultural transformation, raising the issue of cultural rights of these otherwise marginalized communities.
Performing Identity: Actor Training, Self-Commodification and Celebrity
by Barry KingThis book examines how the persistent and deepening casualization and precarity of acting work, coupled with market pressures, has affected the ways in which actors are trained in the US and UK. It reviews the existing state of training, looking at various theories of what the actor does, debates about casting, and the impact of reality television and social media. In the increasing effort to find ways to overcome the precarious labour market for actors and other performers, the traditional emphasis on theatrical character has been replaced by the celebration of the persona – a public image of the performer as a personal brand. As a result, a physiocratic elite, that literally incorporates the collective labour of cultural workers into the star or celebrity body, has formed. This book explores how the star or celebrity’s appearance and comportment are positioned as the rule of nature, formed and abiding outside capitalism as a mode of production. This book will be of interest to those studying theatre studies and performance, contemporary stardom and celebrity and the impact of technology on the formation of identity.
Performing Image (The\mit Press Ser.)
by Isobel HarbisonAn examination of how artists have combined performance and moving image for decades, anticipating our changing relation to images in the internet era.In Performing Image, Isobel Harbison examines how artists have combined performance and moving image in their work since the 1960s, and how this work anticipates our changing relations to images since the advent of smart phones and the spread of online prosumerism. Over this period, artists have used a variety of DIY modes of self-imaging and circulation—from home video to social media—suggesting how and why Western subjects might seek alternative platforms for self-expression and self-representation. In the course of her argument, Harbison offers close analyses of works by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Mark Leckey, Wu Tsang, and Martine Syms.Harbison argues that while we produce images, images also produce us—those that we take and share, those that we see and assimilate through mass media and social media, those that we encounter in museums and galleries. Although all the artists she examines express their relation to images uniquely, they also offer a vantage point on today's productive-consumptive image circuits in which billions of us are caught. This unregulated, all-encompassing image performativity, Harbison writes, puts us to work, for free, in the service of global corporate expansion. Harbison offers a three-part interpretive framework for understanding this new proximity to images as it is negotiated by these artworks, a detailed outline of a set of connected practices—and a declaration of the value of art in an economy of attention and a crisis of representation.
Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences
by H. Glenn Penny Laura R. GrahamThis engaging collection of essays discusses the complexities of “being” indigenous in public spaces. Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny bring together a set of highly recognized junior and senior scholars, including indigenous scholars, from a variety of fields to provoke critical thinking about the many ways in which individuals and social groups construct and display unique identities around the world. The case studies in Performing Indigeneity underscore the social, historical, and immediate contextual factors at play when indigenous people make decisions about when, how, why, and who can “be” indigenous in public spaces. Performing Indigeneity invites readers to consider how groups and individuals think about performance and display and focuses attention on the ways that public spheres, both indigenous and nonindigenous ones, have received these performances. The essays demonstrate that performance and display are essential to the creation and persistence of indigeneity, while also presenting the conundrum that in many cases “indigeneity” excludes some of the voices or identities that the category purports to represent.