Performed Otherwise: The Political and Social Possibilities of Asian/American Performance

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson ◽  
Elizabeth W. Son
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
And Performance

For this special edition of “Critical Stages,” Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?

Colonial Theatricality

2021 ◽  
pp. 26-42
Author(s):  
Lisa Skwirblies
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Social Domain ◽  
The Cross ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Political Realm

This chapter argues that references to the theater are never merely innocent metaphors but instead are historically and culturally determined modes of perception that allow us to see certain problems in the political realm such as authenticity, representation, and spectatorship as essentially theatrical problems. This is particularly the case in nineteenth century colonial discourse with its technique of theatricalizing the colonized people and places. As a “travelling concept,” theatricality is not bound exclusively to the realm of the theater nor to the discourses of theater and performance studies; it holds meaning and potential as an instrument for analysis in the field of political science as well. The cross-disciplinary possibilities of the term theatricality lie in the term’s applicability for a better understanding of both the theater-like character of the political and social domain as well as of the grammar of performance as an aesthetic medium.

scholarly journals On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Kim Daniher
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Canadian Theatre ◽  
Canadian Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Politics Of Race

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment . Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

Asian Americanist Critique and Listening Practices of Contemporary Popular Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Summer Kim Lee
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
American Popular Music

What is Asian American popular music? How do we identify it, define it, and listen to it? What work is being done by naming a genre as such, and need it even be named? Asian Americanist scholars and music critics have grappled with these questions, articulating the political desires for Asian American representation, recognition, and inclusion, while at the same time remaining wary of how such desires reiterate liberal multiculturalist discourses of assimilation and inclusion. A growing body of interdisciplinary work in American studies, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer studies, and sound and popular music studies has addressed the historical emergence, visibility, and representation of Asian Americans in popular music. This work has become less concerned with finding out what “Asian American popular music” is and more interested in how Asian Americanist critique can be rooted in minoritarian listening practices so that one might consider the myriad ways Asian Americans—as professional and amateur performers, musicians, virtuosic singers, karaoke goers, YouTube users, listeners, critics, and fans—actively shape and negotiate the soundscapes of US popular music with its visual, sonic, and other sensorial markers of Asian racialization.

THE PERFORMANCE AND PEDAGOGY OF NEOLIBERAL AFFECT

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eng-Beng Lim ◽  
Lisa Duggan ◽  
José Esteban Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global University ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Short Essays

Editor's Note: Under Mike Sell's excellent editorship, the Critical Stages column in Theatre Survey was developed as a venue for representing current issues for subdisciplinary divisions within the broader field of theatre and performance studies. As the new editor for the column, I hope to build upon Sell's previous editorial work by shifting the form of these short essays in two ways: first, by spotlighting concerns that reach both inside the many corners of our field and outside into a range of broader “publics”; and second, by engaging multiple scholars and artists in “conversations” in order to provide plural perspectives on these concerns. For this first column of my editorship, Eng-Beng Lim, Lisa Duggan, and José Esteban Muñoz track several micro- and macromaneuverings of neoliberalism—from the classroom to the department to the “global university”—and consider how theatre and performance scholars might approach the political difficulties currently threatening the mission of higher education.

Approaches to Dance (2): Influences

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Kant
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Comic Opera ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Humboldt University ◽  
East German ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Weimar Culture ◽  
Intellectual Formation

This statement is an attempt to reflect on my intellectual formation and how certain influences, both from home (a place suspended between Germany with the remnants of its Weimar culture and Britain as the place of exile) and from subsequent experiences, led me to adopt an historical approach to dance studies and to emphasise the context in which artistic activity unfolds. My education at Berlin's Humboldt University and the Comic Opera shaped my perspectives on theatre and performance. The East German milieu in general forced me to confront the immediate past and think about the political and ideological legacies of the cultures in which I grew up.

Cultural Labour

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Folk Performance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

scholarly journals A systematic review of definitions of motor vehicle headways in driver behaviour and performance studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Motor Vehicle ◽  
Driver Behaviour ◽  
And Performance

scholarly journals Evaluating the Role of Government Collaboration in the Perceived Performance of Community-Based Nonprofits: Three Propositions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Nederhand
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Network Ties ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Perceived Performance ◽  
Political Network ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Nonprofit Collaboration ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The topic of government-nonprofit collaboration continues to be much-discussed in the literature. However, there has been little consensus on whether and how collaborating with government is beneficial for the performance of community-based nonprofits. This article examines three dominant theoretical interpretations of the relationship between collaboration and performance: collaboration is necessary for the performance of nonprofits; the absence of collaboration is necessary for the performance of nonprofits; and the effect of collaboration is contingent on the nonprofits’ bridging and bonding network ties. Building on the ideas of governance, nonprofit, and social capital in their respective literature, this article uses set-theoretic methods (fsQCA) to conceptualize and test their relationship. Results show the pivotal role of the nonprofit’s network ties in mitigating the effects of either collaborating or abstaining from collaborating with government. Particularly, the political network ties of nonprofits are crucial to explaining the relationship between collaboration and performance. The evidence demonstrates the value of studying collaboration processes in context.

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