Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theatre, 1712–1784. By Helen M. Burke. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2002; pp. 356. $70 cloth, $35 paper.

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-298
Author(s):  
Mary Trotter

While Irish theatre history and criticism has closely linked performance, nationalism, and identity politics throughout the twentieth century, far less attention has been paid to the Irish theatre's profound role in nation building in previous centuries. Cheryl Herr, John Harrington, and others have reminded us of the nineteenth-century popular theatre's role in subverting British opinions of Irish history and identity. But the eighteenth century, the century of Thomas Sheridan, John O'Keeffe, and Smock Alley, as well as Jonathan Swift, the United Irishmen, and Grattan's Parliament, has received surprisingly little attention from the point of view of theatre history.

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Vladimir Dunaev ◽  
Valentina Kurganskaya ◽  
Mukhtarbek Shaikemelev

AbstractIn previous years, the evolution of nation-building politics in the Republic of Kazakhstan was characterized by an alternation of tactical schemes that actualized either the ethnocultural or civil-political foundations of statehood. At present, the emerging common Kazakhstani culture is becoming the basis for mutually agreed development of ethnocultural and civic identity as its own elements. In the system of common Kazakhstani culture, the civil and ethnocultural models of the nation are the poles or attractors of the process of self-organization of a single nationwide Kazakhstan identity. The optimal identity politics in the nation-building risk management in the conditions of modern Kazakhstan is to adopt the point of view of the whole set of identification models and to maintain the dynamic balance of conflicting identities through the mechanism of mutual checks and balances.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-336
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Taylor

This paper presents one case study of state-sponsored cultural activities that occurred throughout 2014, Turkmenistan's Year of Magtymguly, the 290th anniversary of this Turkmen poet's birth. Such activities constitute examples of public culture; they can organize representations of a society's past and present to reaffirm for participants the values and power structure of their society and revalidate its philosophical underpinnings. After examining this Turkic poet's iconicity, this paper compiles 2014's celebratory events from disparate sources, complementing broader general literature on Central Asia's spectacles of public culture and their role in nation-building and identity-formation. Rather than merely resulting from any top-down decision specifying required activities nationwide, the year's events involved numerous synergies as artists, museum and theater administrators, composers, and other cultural-sector workers benefited by responding to the potential of aligning their work with a theme as broad, as widely appreciated, and as eligible for various forms of support as this one. In addition, Turkmenistan's strong central leadership benefited from this widely shared and highly visible celebration, especially emphasizing one element within Magtymguly's eighteenth-century vision, an end to his people's tribal conflicts within a unified Turkmenistan under one leader.


Menotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rasa Vasinauskaitė

In the development of Lithuanian theatre, we find a number of facts and phenomena that can only be understood from a post-colonial perspective. Especially during the first independence, Soviet and even early post-Soviet periods, the discourse of theatre history and criticism felt a constant friction between “alien” and “own” aesthetic and ideological doctrines, between cosmopolitan and national [theatre] narratives. In this article, the origins of the national theatre are associated with the movement of national liberation from the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century and the movement of amateur theatre (the Lithuanian evenings) as a process of ethnic, linguistic and cultural decolonization. Amateur theatre movement united cultural and secular intelligentsia and strengthened its role in shaping the idea of historical, cultural and linguistic identity, later realized in the national theatre model. However, the National/State Theatre, established in 1920/1922 as a representative institution of the statehood and cultural identity of independent Lithuania, seemed to be “stuck” from different cultural influences, schools, aesthetic currents and spoke badly Lithuanian. Sporadically created by amateurs and more or less professional artists who left Russian theatrical schools, the national Lithuanian theatre has formed from the beginning as a complex body combining imperial and popular models. Imperial – because with the experience and impressions of such theatre and with such understanding of its social and artistic value, its future directors returned to Lithuania from Moscow and St. Petersburg, and popular, democratic – because intended for various social and ethnic groups, but speaking Lithuanian, it had to develop both aesthetic and patriotic feelings of its audience. The politicization of the State Theatre as a representative institution (especially after the introduction of the authoritarian Antanas Smetona power in 1926 and the influence of the Nationalist Party in all areas of culture) influenced the “crucial collision” of these two models in both the performances and their public/ critical reception. At the same time, these two models and their friction can be understood as one of the specific features of the young Lithuanian national/nationhood theatre: the stage reflected a long, but unrealized, acculturation and assimilation of the nation, while the often infertile search for national scenic expression reflected not only an attempt to liberate from the colonial/imperial past, but also the complexity and contradiction of this process.


Author(s):  
Sutapa Dutta ◽  

Nilanjana Mukherjee’s book looks at construction of space, leading from imaginative to concrete contours, within the context of the British imperial enterprise in India. Fundamental to her argument is that colonial definitions of sovereignty were defined in terms of control over space and not just over people, and hence it was first necessary to map the space and inscribe symbols into it. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, imperialism and colonization were complex phenomena that involved new and imminent strategies of nation building. No other period of British history, as Linda Colley has noted, has seen such a conscious attempt to construct a national state and national identity (Colley 1992). Although the physical occupation of India by the British East India Company could be said to have begun with the battle of Plassey (1757), nevertheless the process of conquest through mediation of symbolic forms indicate the time and manner in which the ‘conquest’ was conscripted


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>


Author(s):  
Remi Chukwudi Okeke

This study examines the linkages between relative deprivation and identity politics in a postcolonial state. It further investigates the relationship among these variables and nation-building challenges in the postcolony. It is a case study of the Nigerian state in West Africa, which typically harbours the attributes of postcoloniality and indeed, large measures of relative deprivation in her sociopolitical and economic affairs. The study is also an interrogation of the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. It has been attempted in the study to offer distinctive explanations over the problematique of nation-building in the postcolonial African state of Nigeria, using relative deprivation, identity politics and the neo-Biafran movement as variables. In framing the study’s theoretical trajectories and in historicizing the background of the research, ample resort has been made to a significant range of qualitative secondary sources. A particularly salient position of the study is that it will actually be difficult to locate on the planet, any group of people whose subsequent generations (in perpetuity) would wear defeat on the war front, as part of their essential identity. Hence, relative deprivation was found to be more fundamental than identity politics in the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. However, the compelling issues were found to squarely border on nation-building complications in the postcolony.


Peace Review ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-202
Author(s):  
Carl Pletsch

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