Uniquely covering literary, visual and performative expressions of culture, this volume aims to correlate the conjunctions of nation building, gender and representation in late 19th and early 20th century China and Japan. Focusing on gender formation, the chapters explore the changing constructs of masculinities and femininities in China and Japan from the early modern up to the 1930s. Chapters focus on the dynamism that links the remodeling of traditional arts and media to the political and cultural power relations between China, Japan, and the Western world. A true tribute to multidisciplinary studies.

Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

Rwanda: history and legend -- Performing justice: Gacaca, Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and the TRC -- Gacaca courts as Kubabarira: testimony, justice and reconciliation -- Reconciliation and the limits of empathy: grassroots associations -- Ukuri Mubinyoma (Truth in Lies): the performativity of rape and gender-based violence -- Transnational approaches to memorials and commemorations: crisis of witnessing.

Originally published: Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2012.

Performing the Nation in Interwar Germany argues that political aesthetics and mass spectacles were no invention of the Nazis but characterized the period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s. In so doing, it re-examines the role of state representation and propaganda in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi dictatorship.

Since the moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall, important German theater artists have created plays and productions about unification. Some have challenged how German history is written, while others opposed the very act of storytelling. Performing Unification examines how directors, playwrights, and theater groups including Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, and Rimini Protokoll have represented and misrepresented the past, confronting their nation’s history and collective identity. Matt Cornish surveys German-language history plays from the Baroque period through the documentary theater movement of the 1960s to show how German identity has always been contested, then turns to performances of unification after 1989. Cornish argues that theater, in its structures and its live gestures, on pages, stages, and streets, helps us to understand the past and its effect on us, our relationships with others in our communities, and our futures. Engaging with theater theory from Aristotle through Bertolt Brecht and Hans-Thies Lehmann’s “postdramatic” theater, and with theories of history from Hegel to Walter Benjamin and Hayden White, Performing Unification demonstrates that historiography and dramaturgy are intertwined.

This is the first book to examine and compare how rebels govern civilians during civil wars in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing from a variety of disciplinary traditions, including political science, sociology, and anthropology, the book provides in-depth case studies of specific conflicts as well as comparative studies of multiple conflicts. Among other themes, the book examines why and how some rebels establish both structures and practices of rule, the role of ideology, cultural, and material factors affecting rebel governance strategies, the impact of governance on the rebel/civilian relationship, civilian responses to rebel rule, the comparison between modes of state and non-state governance to rebel attempts to establish political order, the political economy of rebel governance, and the decline and demise of rebel governance attempts.