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Luis Valdez studies the life and work of this Chicano playwright, director, performer, and producer along with the implications of his legacy for Chicana/o/x communities and for all who engage with his work. Valdez’s work broadened the scope of theater and arts in the Chicano community, and his formation of El Teatro Campesino brought together students and farmworkers. This volume highlights his professional work and writings. It offers a unique investigation of Luis Valdez, his life, his oeuvre, and his contributions to the theater in the United States and beyond. This book combines: an in-depth biographical overview of Valdez’s life and career, focusing on defining experiences that set...
While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration. This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.” Organized thematically, the book has four sections: The...
The dance circle (called the cypher) is a common signifier of breaking culture, known more for its spectacular moves than as a ritual practice with foundations in Africanist aesthetics. Yet those foundations--evident in expressive qualities like call and response, the aural kinesthetic, the imperative to be original, and more--are essential to cyphering's enduring presence on the global stage. What can cyphers activate beyond the spectacle? What lessons do cyphers offer about moving through and navigating the social world? And what possibilities for the future do they animate? With an interdisciplinary reach and a riff on physics, author Imani Kai Johnson centers the voices of practitioners in a study of breaking events in cities across the US, Canada, and parts of Europe. Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop draws on over a decade of research and provides a detailed look into the vitality of Africanist aesthetics and the epistemological possibilities of the ritual circle.
In Under the Strain of Color, Gabriel N. Mendes recaptures the history of Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, a New York City institution that embodied new ways of thinking about mental health, race, and the substance of citizenship. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, the writer Richard Wright, and the clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic emerged in the context of a widespread American concern with the mental health of its citizens. Mendes shows the clinic to have been simultaneously a scientific and political gambit, challenging both a racist mental health care system and supposedly color-blind psychiatrists who failed to consider the consequences of oppression in their assessment and treatment of African American patients. Employing the methods of oral history, archival research, textual analysis, and critical race philosophy, Under the Strain of Color contributes to a growing body of scholarship that highlights the interlocking relationships among biomedicine, institutional racism, structural violence, and community health activism.
Jatinder Verma has been a pioneering figure in the development of British South Asian theatre, and a prominent spokesperson for the importance of increased diversity amongst playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and producers on the mainstream British stage. As co-founder and former Artistic Director of Tara Arts, he developed a new aesthetic style known as 'Binglish' which creates a hybrid dramaturgy of languages, training and performance forms, and styles of acting, and design, that operates to establish a negotiation between cultures which reflects contemporary Britain. Verma is acknowledged as being a leading practitioner and director, as well as writer about theatre and culture, wh...
This handbook brings together genres, aesthetics, cultural practices and historical movements that provide insight into humanist concerns at the crossroads of dance and theatre, broadening the horizons of scholarship in the performing arts and moving the fields closer together.
The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance traces how manifestations of Latine self-determination in contemporary US theatre and performance practices affirm the value of Latine life in a theatrical culture that has a legacy of misrepresentation and erasure. This collection draws on fifty interdisciplinary contributions written by some of the leading Latine theatre and performance scholars and practitioners in the United States to highlight evolving and recurring strategies of world making, activism, and resistance taken by Latine culture makers to gain political agency on and off the stage. The project reveals the continued growth of Latine theatre and performance through cha...
In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo shifts attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and U.S. imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, subservient wives, and natural dancers and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and Hip-Hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Pe...
Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia's most popular cultural forms -- cinema and dance -- historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, sexuality, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers t...
Argues for the political potential of drag and trans performance in Puerto Rico and its diaspora