The Contaminated Audience: Researching Amateur Theatre in Wales before 1939

2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Cochrane
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Audience Response ◽  
Subjective Value ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Amateur Theatre ◽  
And Performance

As concepts of nationhood and national identity become increasingly slippery, so the theatre historian attempting to recover neglected histories submerged within the dominant discourse of the nation state needs to be wary of imposing an ideologically pre-determined reading on the surviving evidence of performance practice and audience response. It is also important to acknowledge that theatre practice which represents the majority experience of national audiences does not necessarily conform to the subjective value judgements of the critic-historians who have tended to produce a limited, highly selective historical record. In attempting to re/write the history of twentieth-century British theatre Claire Cochrane has researched the hitherto neglected area of amateur theatre which was a widespread phenomenon across the component nations. Focusing in this article on the cultural importance of amateur theatre in Welsh communities before the Second World War, she explores the religious, socio-political, and topographical roots of its rapid expansion, and the complex national identities played out in the collaboration between actors and audience. Claire Cochrane lectures in drama and performance studies at University College Worcester. Her most recent book is Birmingham Rep: a City's Theatre, 1962–2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). She is currently working on a history of twentieth-century British theatre practice for Cambridge University Press.

Madhouse

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Learning Disability ◽  
Social History ◽  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immersive Theatre ◽  
Disability Research ◽  
History Of Institutions

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.

“An Essential Expression of the People”: Interpretations of Hasidic Song in the Composition and Performance History of Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem

2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-820 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

Abstract This article examines Ernest Bloch's Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life, considering its score, its performance history, and early recordings of the second movement, “Nigun,” by Yehudi Menuhin, Joseph Szigeti, and Mischa Elman, to investigate the idea, promoted by the composer and many of his performers and critics, that the music represented Jewish identity through the evocation of Hasidic song. Bloch's score and Menuhin's performances were described as expressing what was often characterized during the early twentieth century as a self-affirming racial feeling that linked the modern diaspora in America to Eastern European Hasidic Jewish communities. With Baal Shem, Bloch and his performers and listeners participated in a self-conscious effort to construct a modern Jewish identity that they believed could be conveyed in the sounds and structures of art music. Menuhin's lifelong friendship and collaboration with Bloch underscores the crucial roles of Bloch's performers in working with the composer to devise compositional and performance tropes for the representation of Hasidic song, and in creating his broad reputation as a composer of a definitive Jewish music, a reputation Bloch would sometimes embrace and at other times disavow.

VII. Foreign Investment in India and Indonesia, 1920–1960

Itinerario ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-162
Author(s):  
B.R. Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
And Performance

Discussing the issue of foreign investment in colonial economies, such as those of India and Indonesia, in the first half of the twentieth century gives rise to a number of problems. In addition to the obvious difficulties of data collection there are also complex conceptual and definitional issues. The aim of this paper is to set out what we know about the quantities and performance of foreign investment in the two economies, and to use this information to draw more general conclusions about the economic history of the two areas. In analysing the material only those lines which seem to offer a genuinem comparative perspective will be followed. We are interested in those aspects of the history of foreign investment in India which can tell us something about the history of foreign investment in Indonesia, and vice versa. It is convenient to split the subject into two time periods, 1920-38 and 1945-60.

Clerics and Communists

2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (9) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Bashir Saade
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Index Volume ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Complex Interaction ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The West ◽  
Primary Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mcgill University

<div class="bookreview">Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, <em>The Shi'ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism, and Hizbullah's Islamists</em> (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014), 350 pages, $49.95, hardcover.</div>In the West today, political Islam is mostly equated with ISIS's spectacle of violence, and with the narrow, bigoted understanding of religion and society that inspires it. It will thus intrigue many readers to discover that the legacy of Islamic intellectual and political activity, from the turn of the twentieth century until today, bore the imprint of a complex interaction between Communist and leftist traditions. A recent book by two professors at McGill University, Rula Jurdi Abisaab and Malek Abisaab, takes on the ambitious task of tracing the history of the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes confrontational relationship among Shi'i communities and clerics in Lebanon, along with occasional discussions of related issues in Iraqi politics. Based on a rich set of primary documents from both countries, the authors describe in great detail the rise and fall of the Communist experience in the region, the shortcomings of the left as it was gradually superseded by Islamic party formations, and the deep debt of the latter to the former.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

The Wizard of Oil: Abraham James, the Harmonial Wells, and the Psychometric History of the Oil Industry

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROCHELLE RAINERI ZUCK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oil Industry ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Oil Fields ◽  
Geographic Proximity ◽  
Practical Applications ◽  
Oil Reserves ◽  
Scientific Innovation ◽  
History Of

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an “oil wizard” reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of “practical spiritualism” and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern “scientific” oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.

“Stubborn things: evidence, postmodernism and the craft of history.”

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Muldoon
Keyword(s):  
Design Methodology ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Traditional Management ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Management History ◽  
Book Versus ◽  
History Of

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the recent book A New History of Management (NHM) and to discuss the strengths and limitations of the book versus traditional management history as practiced by Wren and Bedeian. Design/methodology/approach I analyze NHM by looking at the evidence presented in the book versus the historical record. Findings Although there are some strengths to NHM, the scholars often fail to address the larger historical evidence, which reduces the value of their work. Originality/value The value is to start a discussion of the nature of management history by discussing traditional versus postmodern history. Hopefully, the authors can commence with a dialogue to further historical research.

scholarly journals Thinking in Archipelagic Terms: An Interview with John Brannigan

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (35) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
John Brannigan ◽  
Marcela Santos Brigida ◽  
Thayane Verçosa ◽  
Gabriela Ribeiro Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Brendan Behan ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.

A short history of written Wu, Part II: Written Shanghainese

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Snow ◽  
Shen Senyao ◽  
Zhou Xiayun
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Receive

AbstractThe recent publication of the novelMagnificent Flowers(Fan Hua繁花) has attracted attention not only because of critical acclaim and market success, but also because of its use of Shanghainese. WhileMagnificent Flowersis the most notable recent book to make substantial use of Shanghainese, it is not alone, and the recent increase in the number of books that are written partially or even entirely in Shanghainese raises the question of whether written Shanghainese may develop a role in Chinese print culture, especially that of Shanghai and the surrounding region, similar to that attained by written Cantonese in and around Hong Kong.This study examines the history of written Shanghainese in print culture. Growing out of the older written Suzhounese tradition, during the early decades of the twentieth century a distinctly Shanghainese form of written Wu emerged in the print culture of Shanghai, and Shanghainese continued to play a role in Shanghai’s print culture through the twentieth century, albeit quite a modest one. In the first decade of the twenty-first century Shanghainese began to receive increased public attention and to play a greater role in Shanghai media, and since 2009 there has been an increase in the number of books and other kinds of texts that use Shanghainese and also the degree to which they use it.This study argues that in important ways this phenomenon does parallel the growing role played by written Cantonese in Hong Kong, but that it also differs in several critical regards. The most important difference is that, to date, written Shanghainese appears almost exclusively in texts that look back to “old Shanghai” and/or to traditional alley life in Shanghai, and that a role of the type written Cantonese has in Hong Kong is not likely to be attained unless or until Shanghainese texts that are associated with modern urban Shanghai life, especially youth culture, begin to appear.

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