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The contributors explore modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programmes in China and Zaire, and psychiatrists and their patients in Morocco and Ireland.
Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim's study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of "Chineseness" across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At the height of the Cold War, the "Bamboo Curtain" divided the "two Chinas" across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People's Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China's narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley’s project of “benevolent assimilation,” they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.’s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibl...
Through close readings of contemporary made-in-Singapore films (by Jack Neo, Eric Khoo, and Royston Tan) and television programs (Singapore Idol, sitcoms, and dramas), this book explores the possibilities and limitations of resistance within an advanced capitalist-industrial society whose authoritarian government skillfully negotiates the risks and opportunities of balancing its on-going nation-building project and its a oeglobal citya aspirations. This book adopts a framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci that identifies ideological struggles in art and popular culture, but maintains the importance of Herbert Marcusea (TM)s one-dimensional society analysis as theoretical limits to recognize the power of authoritarian capitalism to subsume works of art and popular culture even as they attempt consciouslya "even at times successfullya "to negate and oppose dominant hegemonic formations.
Dramaturgy, in its many forms, is a fundamental and indispensable element of contemporary theatre. In its earliest definition, the word itself means a comprehensive theory of "play making." Although it initially grew out of theatre, contemporary dramaturgy has made enormous advances in recent years, and it now permeates all kinds of narrative forms and structures: from opera to performance art; from dance and multimedia to filmmaking and robotics. In our global, mediated context of multinational group collaborations that dissolve traditional divisions of roles as well as unbend previously intransigent rules of time and space, the dramaturg is also the ultimate globalist: intercultural mediat...
This book focuses on Derek Walcott’s literary and artistic wor(l)d. Western postcolonial critique has depicted the Nobel Prize laureate as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century world. This, however, devalues his fundamental contribution to the realm of Caribbean theatre and art. The text examines Walcott’s multimodal production, a combination of West Indian folkloric forms and Western-oriented structures and themes, by discussing three of his works—two plays, The Joker of Seville and Pantomime, and a long poem, Tiepolo’s Hound. These epitomise respectively a response to Spanish, English, and French cultural legacies in the New World as postcolonial re-writings of Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe, and Camille Pissarro’s stories. Following Quijano and Mignolo’s decolonial approaches and Riane Eisler’s partnership perspective, the book uncovers the strategies used by Walcott to respond to the colonial matrix of power.
A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh is a collection of essays based on presentations at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference at Hertford College, Oxford in 2003. There are twelve different essays by authors from various countries, including Australia, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Drawing on historical sociology, transnational histories and Asian traditions, Duara seeks answers to the pressing global issue of environmental sustainability.
A common assumption about cities throughout the world is tht they are essentially an elaboration of the Euro-American model. Postcolonial Urbanism demonstrates the narrowness of this vision. Cities in the postcolonial world, the book shows, are producing novel forms of urbanism not reducible to Western urbanism. Despite being heavily colonized in the past, Southeast Asia has been largely ignored in discussions about postcolonial theory and in general considerations of global urbanism. An international cast of contributors focuses on the heavily urbanized world region of Southeast Asia to investigate the novel forms of urbanism germinating in postcolonial settings such as Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Hanoi, and the Philippines. Offering a mix of theoretical perspectives and empirical accounts, Postcolonial Urbanism presents a panoramic view of the cultures, societies, and politics of the postcolonial city.
Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical proje...