This book maps South Asian theatre productions that have contextualised Ibsen’s plays to underscore the emergent challenges of postcolonial nation formation. The concerns addressed in this collection include politico-cultural engagements with human rights, economic and environmental issues, and globalisation, all of which have evolved through colonial times and thereafter. This book contemplates why and how these Ibsen texts were repeatedly adapted for the stage and consequently reflects upon the political intent of this appropriative journey of the foreign playwright. This book tracks the unmapped agency that South Asian theatre has acquired through aesthetic appropriation of Ibsen and thereby contributes to his global reception. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance studies.

This collection gathers a set of provocative essays that sketch innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Genre Theory in the 21st century. Focusing on the interaction between tragedy and comedy, both renowned and emerging scholarly and creative voices from philosophy, theater, literature, and cultural studies come together to engage in dialogues that reconfigure genre as social, communal, and affective. In revisiting the challenges to aesthetic categorization over the course of the 20th century, this volume proposes a shift away from the prescriptive and hierarchical reading of genre to its crucial function in shaping thought and enabling shared experience and communication. In doing so, the various essays acknowledge the diverse contexts within which genre needs to be thought afresh: media studies, rhetoric, politics, performance, and philosophy.

This book focuses on performance and performance-based artworks as seen through the lens of conservation, which has long been overlooked in the larger theoretical debates about whether and how performance remains. Unraveling the complexities involved in the conservation of performance, Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care (vol. 1) brings this new understanding to bear in examining performance as an object of study, experience, acquisition, and care. In so doing, it presents both theoretical frameworks and functional paradigms for thinking about—and enacting—the conservation of performance. Further, while the conservation of performance is undertheorized, performance is nevertheless increasingly entering the art market and the museum, meaning that there is an urgent need for discourse on how to care for these works long-term. In recent years, a few pioneering conservators, curators, and scholars have begun to create frameworks for the longterm care of performance. This volume presents, explicates, and contextualizes their work so that a larger discourse can commence. It will thus serve the needs of conservation students and professors, for whom literature on this subject is sorely needed. This interdisciplinary book thus implements a novel rethinking of performance that will challenge and revitalize its conception in many fields, such as art history, theater, performance studies, heritage studies, and anthropology.

This book examines historical and contemporary activist alimentary performance with an eye toward, or perhaps a taste for, what these performance modes can reveal about changing relationships between the senses, truth, justice, and ethical action amid the post-truth era’s destabilization of shared notions of truth. This inquiry emerges in response to an urgent need to understand how multisensory models of knowledge, truth, and justice can be ethically employed to nurture a more just society. Alongside this goal is a drive to understand the ways in which these modes of performance are being co-opted by authoritarians, white supremacists, anti-science activists, and others to shore up injustice, promote misinformation, and anxiously guard existing systems of power and privilege. From white supremacist milk-drinking performances to liberatory uses of culinary performance as pedagogy, Kristin Hunt analyzes both disturbing and inspiring alimentary events to understand how performers, cooks, scholars, artists, and activists can effectively cultivate models of alimentary performance that center plenitude, joy, and justice while pushing back against models rooted in anxiety, diminishment, and cruelty. The text should be of interest for students in performance studies, contemporary theatre, and theatre history as well as courses in food studies and popular culture.

This book explores histories which have only recently been rediscovered by artists and researchers. This study explores the history of Portuguese performance art, in its various "speculative" and "performative" forms. The author approaches this relationship with the re-emergence and centrality of these (semi-)peripheral histories at an international level, whilst identifying some of their unique traits: their cycles of emergence and retraction in Portuguese history; their multiple and complex ontologies; the intertwined relations between the art of performance and the social performance of the Portuguese (regarding topics as sensitive and fracturing as those of the long dictatorship, the colonial war and the revolutionary process, or even the integration of Portugal in the European Community and, more recently, the various 21st century social, political and economic crises). This reading in turn covers the development of the relationship between performance and hybridism, namely, analyzing the recent dimension of meta-hybridism, in the processes of artistic homage that contemporary Portuguese creators have been establishing through access to the histories and archives of this historical genre. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, performance art and arts in general.

Positive images of Africa contrast with negative images of misery, war and catastrophes often conveyed by the mass media. This selection of papers debate the images and stereotypes of Africa.

This text combines Boehmer's keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context.