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Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy focuses on mapping, analyzing, and evaluating memories, rituals, and artistic responses to the theme of “liberation.” How is the national framed within a dynamic system of intercultural contact zones highlighting often competing agendas of remembrance? How does the production, (re)mediation, and framing of narratives within different social, territorial, and political environments determine the cultural memory of liberation? The articles compiled in this volume seek to provide new interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives on the politics and cultures of liberation by examining commemorative practices, artistic responses, and audio-visual media that lend themselves for transnational exploration. They offer a wide range of diverse intercultural perspectives on media, memory, liberation, (self)Americanization, and conceptualizations of democracy from the war years, through the Cold War era to the 21st century.
Given that strong asymmetrical dependencies have shaped human societies throughout history, this kind of social relation has also left its traces in many types of texts. Using written and oral narratives in attempts to reconstruct the history of asymmetrical dependency comes along with various methodological challenges, as the 15 articles in this interdisciplinary volume illustrate. They focus on a wide range of different (factual and fictional) text types, including inscriptions from Egyptian tombs, biblical stories, novels from antiquity, the Middle High German Rolandslied, Ottoman court records, captivity narratives, travelogues, the American gift book The Liberty Bell, and oral narratives by Caribbean Hindu women. Most of the texts discussed in this volume have so far received comparatively little attention in slavery and dependency studies. The volume thus also seeks to broaden the archive of texts that are deemed relevant in research on the histories of asymmetrical dependencies, bringing together perspectives from disciplines such as Egyptology, theology, literary studies, history, and anthropology
Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years. This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides: · a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works. Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.
This book examines the ways in which North American Indigenous identity has been (re)imagined, represented, and negotiated in German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, and Czech culture. Employing a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach and drawing on a range of media—from literature, comics, and film to photography, painting, and the performative arts—across different historical and cultural backgrounds, it aims to both contribute innovative scholarship on Indigenous studies in Europe and open a new avenue in the field by focusing on Central European settings that have received little or no critical attention to date. The book’s novelty also comes from its focus on the latest developme...
Performing the Matrix. Mediating Cultural Performances presents a collection of case studies and analyses dealing with performances of the matrix that take up questions of identities and social thinking, visualization and perception, the discursive power of texts and historiographic paradigms, and artistic strategies of political intervention. Since 1999 The Matrix has become a popular catchword through the homonymous Wachowski brothers’ movie. As both a traditional concept and a popular phenomenon, ‹matrix› can take on a new value when reconsidered in the light of performance studies. A behind-the-scenes look at theatre, performance, political activism and events may reveal a productive mediating structure that can metaphorically be described as a matrix. This mediating structure and its materializations are fundamentally reshaping modern culture. Accordingly ‹politics of visibility›, ‹media networking›,‹telepresence› and ‹liveness› are considered to be understood as performances of the matrix. If so, how does this understanding of cultural performances ‹as always already mediatized› influence contemporary concepts of performance and media?
For all professionals and students who want to improve their prospects in business, this book prepares and positions them to build dream careers, giving them the education and guidance required to develop vital soft skills, and work remotely and independently. After establishing a foundation for solid professional communications on a personal level, it quickly opens doors to business insights and opportunities that are exciting, inspiring, and highly sustainable. Immersing readers into the key realms of business success and exploring the full spectrum of essential communications practices, they gain knowledge and trade skills of immense value, including: • The basics of positive, proactive...
New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthl...
How do film and television makers around the world depict public housing? Why is public housing so often chosen as the backdrop for drama, horror, social critique, rebellion, violence, artistic creativity, explorations of race relations and political intrigue? Home Screens answers these questions by examining the ways in which socialized housing projects around the world are represented on screen. The volume brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars, who explore documentary and fictional portrayals of the architecture of public housing, and the communities that inhabit it, ranging from the 1950s to the present. Examining international film and media texts such as Die Architekten (1990), Swagger (2016), Cooley High (1975), Mee-Pok Man (1995), Treme (20102013), Mamma Roma (1962), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), and Below the Lion Rock (19721976), essays within this book consider public and private attitudes toward socialised housing, explaining how onscreen representations shape perceptions of these ubiquitous, often-stigmatized urban locations.
Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature discusses the extent to which transnational concepts of identity and community are cast within nationalist frameworks. It analyzes how the different narrative perspectives in texts by Olaudah Equiano, Catharina Maria Sedgwick, Henry James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Mohsin Hamid shape protagonists’ complex transnational subjectivities, which exist between or outside national frameworks but are nevertheless interpellated through the nation-state and through particular myths about liberal, sentimental, or cosmopolitan subjects. The notion of ambivalent transnational belonging yields insights into the affective appeal of the transnational as a category of analysis, as an aesthetic experience, and as an idea of belonging. This means bringing the transnational into conversation with the aesthetic and the affective so we may fully address the new conceptual challenges faced by literary studies due to the transnational turn in American studies.
Locating Asian Australian Cultures is a timely and challenging interdisciplinary compilation that sets a contemporary benchmark for Asian Australian studies and its future directions. In the dynamic field of diasporic Asian studies, Asian Australian Studies is an emerging and contentious area. While cognisant of issues and critical developments in North America, Europe, and Asia, Asian Australian studies forges its own specific engagements with questions of identity, racialization, and nationalisms in a world of globalized cultures and movements. This book deliberately engages with international perspectives on Asian Australian studies that offer contingent connections and address crucial qu...