Presents a collection of critical essays on Williams and his works, arranged in chronological order of publication.

Albuquerque analyzes the use of violence in Latin American theatre from the 1950s through the 1980s. He argues that in the face of repression and torture, some playwrights counter victimization with art as urgent as street confrontation. A study from both Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The story behind the 1940s Commission on Freedom of the Press--groundbreaking then, timelier than ever now "Bates skillfully blends biography and intellectual history to provide a sense of how the clash of ideas and the clash of personalities intersected."--Scott Stossel, American Scholar "A well-constructed, timely study, clearly relevant to current debates."--Kirkus, starred review In 1943, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce sponsored the greatest collaboration of intellectuals in the twentieth century. He and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins summoned the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the Pulitzer-winning poet Archibald MacLeish, and ten other preeminent thinkers to join the Commission on Freedom of the Press. They spent three years wrestling with subjects that are as pertinent as ever: partisan media and distorted news, activists who silence rather than rebut their opponents, conspiracy theories spread by shadowy groups, and the survivability of American democracy in a post-truth age. The report that emerged, A Free and Responsible Press, is a classic, but many of the commission's sharpest insights never made it into print. Journalist and First Amendment scholar Stephen Bates reveals how these towering intellects debated some of the most vital questions of their time--and reached conclusions urgently relevant today.

Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms. Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history. "Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking." --Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality. John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

Traditional histories of North and South America often leave the impression that Native American peoples had little impact on the colonies and empires established by Europeans after 1492. This groundbreaking study, which spans more than 300 years, demonstrates the agency of indigenous peoples in forging their own history and that of the Western Hemisphere. By putting the story of the indigenous peoples and their encounters with Europeans at the center, a new history of the "New World" emerges in which the Native Americans become vibrant and vitally important components of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. In fact, their presence was the single most important factor in the development of the colonial world. By discussing the "great encounter" of peoples and cultures, this book provides a valuable, new perspective on the history of the Americas.

Literary Worlds and Deleuze contributes to debates on mimesis by offering an ‘expressionist’ take on the matter of the generation of literary worlds in drama. In examining postdramatic plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, and Laura Wade, the book outlines a dynamic ontology of mimesis. Rather than pertaining to a static ontology of ‘being’, expressionist mimesis is generative and renews itself constantly without arriving at an entelechial end. In exploring the fluxional field of forces and relations that underlie the order of representation, expressionist mimesis is well suited to account for the ontologically uncertain realities of postdramatic theatre. The concepts of ‘expression’ and ‘the event of sense’ (Gilles Deleuze) become part of a generative model that incorporates pre-linguistic and supra-conceptual constituents within the genesis of representation.