Reflecting twenty years of research and experience—after working with guerrilla fighters in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, with Iranian refugees in Istanbul, with interreligious reconciliation groups in Morocco, and with former political prisoners in South Africa—Segall offers a groundbreaking study of globalization, gender, and resistance in public spaces. With timely correctives to the media lens of the Arab and African Spring, the author views protest not just as an economic and political act but also as a potential space of healing and creativity amidst contentious and gendered territories. Analyzing blogs, graphic novels, performances, and public testimonials, this book is unique in its attention to local expressions and creative use of technology to speak of political identities. With its impressive range of generational and gendered voices, Performing Democracy suggests hybrid protests that are voicing trauma, seeking change.

Reflecting twenty years of research and experience—after working with guerrilla fighters in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, with Iranian refugees in Istanbul, with interreligious reconciliation groups in Morocco, and with former political prisoners in South Africa—Segall offers a groundbreaking study of globalization, gender, and resistance in public spaces. With timely correctives to the media lens of the Arab and African Spring, the author views protest not just as an economic and political act but also as a potential space of healing and creativity amidst contentious and gendered territories. Analyzing blogs, graphic novels, performances, and public testimonials, this book is unique in its attention to local expressions and creative use of technology to speak of political identities. With its impressive range of generational and gendered voices, Performing Democracy suggests hybrid protests that are voicing trauma, seeking change.

While political scientists and political theorists have long been interested in social and political performance, and theatre and performance researchers have often focused on the political dimensions of the live arts, the interdisciplinary nature of this labor has typically been assumed rather than rigorously explored. This volume brings together leading scholars in the fields of Politics and Performance--drawing on experts across the fields of literature, law,anthropology, sociology, psychology, and media and communiction, as well as politics and theatre and performance--to map out and deepen the evolving interdisciplinary engagement. Organized into seven thematic sections, the volume investigates the relationship between politics and performance to show thatcertain features of political transactions shared by performances are fundamental to both disciplines--and that to a large extent they also share a common communicational base and language.

The Things That Can't Be Said: Three Plays About Iraq is a trilogy of plays by renowned Iraqi American playwright/performer Heather Raffo including 9 Parts of Desire, Fallujah: The First Opera about the Iraq War, and Noura. In these three works Raffo explores the indelible effects of war on Iraqis, Americans, and the refugees caught between the two cultures. When considered together, these three works give voice to nearly two decades of rarely examined traumas that have reshaped cultural and national identity for both Americans and Iraqis since the events of 9/11. Heather Raffo is a renowned playwright and performer whose work has been described by The New Yorker as an example of “how art can remake the world.” An American with Iraqi heritage, her work is seen as a rare bridge between western and eastern cultures. With ongoing debates about the legacy of America's foreign wars and future role in the Middle East, this volume offers a uniquely historical and deeply human perspective on the political issues of our time. Spanning a decade and a half, together these works form a mosaic of untold stories that were ground breaking in their time and continue to profoundly impact communities and classrooms internationally. 9 Parts of Desire (2003): "First Choice/The Best Shows in London" by The Times, and as one of the “Five Best Plays” in London by The Independent. Its award winning, Off-Broadway premiere ran for nine sold out months and was a critics pick of the The New York Times, Time Out, and Village Voice. The play then received productions in nearly every major regional theatre market in American before being translated for international productions in Brazil, Greece, Sweden, Hungary, India, Turkey, Malta, France, Iraq, Egypt, and Israel. It was the first commercial hit on a national and international stage by an Arab American playwright helping to birth a new genre of Middle Eastern American Theatre. Fallujah (2016) received its world premiere at Long Beach Opera before transferring to NYC Opera. The first ever opera about the Iraq War it tells a U.S. Marine's account of the battle of Fallujah it focuses on moral injury and veteran suicide. Noura (2018) won the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and was hailed “The Most Ambitious Premiere” of the Women's Voices Theatre Festival by The Washington Post and “stirringly powerful” by The New York Times. Told from inside the marriage of an Iraqi family, the play explores the lingering cost of exile for both recent refugees and more established American immigrants. Drawing inspiration from Ibsen's A Doll's Hous and championed as a first of its kind feminist refugee narrative, it is already being included in university curriculum both in America and abroad.

The icon of the female protester and her alter-ego, the female superhero, fills screens in the news, in theaters, and in digital spaces. The female protester who is Muslim, though, has been subject to a legacy of discrimination. Superheroes in the Streets: Muslim Women Activists and Protest in the Digital Age follows the stories of both famous and grassroots Muslim female protestors, bringing careful attention to protest modes and online national icons. US Muslim women have long navigated public and digital spaces aware of the complex and nuanced histories that trail them. Given the pervasive influence of mainstream feminism, Muslim women activists are often made out to be damsels in distress. Even when mass media turns its attention to the activism of Muslim women, persistence of these false narratives demeans their culture and hypersexualizes their bodies. Following the stories of US Muslim women activists, author Kimberly Wedeven Segall shows how they have been reinventing the streets and remaking racialized codifications. Segall highlights their creativity in crafting protest media of posters, rap rally songs, and digital images of superheroes, carving public spaces into inclusive and digital territories. Each chapter teases apart the complexities of public banners and digital activism.

The Kurds, once marginal in the study of the Middle East and secondary in its international relations, have moved to centre stage in recent years. The contributors to The Kurdish Question Revisited offer insights into how this once seemingly intractable, immutable phenomenon is being transformed amid the new political realities of the Middle East.

What is the place and role of whites in South African political life today? Are whites genuinely willing participants in a ‘non-racial democracy’, willing to forego the racial privileges of the past or, despite legal equality, have they proved reluctant to relinquish power and continue, as black activists assert, to dominate many aspects of South African society? Building upon the burgeoning body of work on whiteness, this book focuses on how whites have adapted politically to the arrival of democracy and sweeping political change in South Africa. Outlining a variety of responses in how white South Africans have sought to grapple with apartheid’s brutal history, the author shows how their memories of the past have shaped their reactions to political equality. Although the majority feared the coming of democracy, only a right-wing minority actively resisted its arrival. Others chose (and are still choosing) to emigrate, used democracy to defend ‘minority rights’ or have withdrawn into psychologically or physically demarcated social enclaves. Challenging much current thinking, Southall argues that many whites have chosen to embrace the freedoms that democracy has offered, or to adapt to its often disconcerting realities pragmatically. Examining this crucial issue against the historical context of minority rule and its defeat, the author presents a new dynamic to the continuing debate on whiteness in Africa and globally.