Colonial Theatricality

Author(s):  
Lisa Skwirblies

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.

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 199-222
Author(s):  
Hannah Bradshaw

This article examines the early representations of Prince Albert that either satirize or attempt to reconcile the hierarchical ambiguities and issue of threatened masculinity that resulted from unconventional male consortship and female rule. It concludes that the latter was achieved through the development of a suitable and legible iconography for a nineteenth-century male consort in adherence with British iconographic tradition and values. Drawing from methods in nineteenth-century art history as well as gender and performance studies and anthropology, it argues that images of the male body play a fundamental role in the construction and perpetuation of masculine ideology and subjectivity through the creation of the semblance of an innate and axiomatic masculine archetype. In doing so, this article problematizes and historicizes masculinity by illuminating the plurality of expressions of masculinity and rejecting the essentialist narrative of masculinity as something measurable or quantifiable, as well as ahistorical, atemporal, apolitical and heteronormative.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oded Shenkar ◽  
Ilgaz Arikan

This paper broadens the scope and depth of business alliance research by way of interdisciplinary enrichment. The paper draws on the political science literature on nation-state alliances to generate insights into the establishment, operations and performance of inter-firm alliances. Shared theory bases of game theory and transaction cost economics, as well as theories, variables and research findings indigenous to political science are posited as a platform from which propositions regarding inter-firm alliances are derived.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Ulla Kallenbach ◽  
Annelis Kuhlmann

In recent years, the concept of dramaturgy has been expanded to include a wide range of new fields that rarely concern the analysis of the drama text itself, but rather the facilitation of creative processes. This article investigates dramaturgy as an analytical practice. The article provides an analytical, historical investigation of methodological approaches to drama analysis. The aim is to examine how drama analysis came to be regarded as a literary discipline that rarely considers aspects of performance and the material, scenic context for which the play was written. The study of drama thus became regarded as being distinct from theatre and performance studies. This approach, which has its roots in nineteenth century dramaturgy, effectively eliminated the spectator from its perspective in favour of a character and plot centred dramaturgy. It is the authors’ assertion that the drama text and theatrical performance should, nevertheless, be regarded as intrinsically interconnected and that the spectator must be “re-inserted” in the analysis of the written drama. The authors explore how we might re-think the field of dramaturgy as drama analysis by emphasizing the corporeal, spatial, performative, and cognitive aspects of the drama text together with an emphasis on the historical and scenic context.


Author(s):  
Tricia Lootens

This book examines the performance of the Political Poetess and its mythic, absolute identification with “separate spheres.” It explores the connection between “Political Poetess” and “Black Poetess” in relation to nineteenth-century women's patriotic poetry, “Politics” as practiced by nation-states, and ongoing conflicts around the histories of slavery and the meanings of “race.” The book is divided into three sections: the first considers racialized Poetess reception and performance, the second analyzes negotiations with the forms of “spheres” and of sentimental poetry, and the third deals with transatlantic readings. Each section focuses on a “nineteenth-century Poetess” who shifts, flickers, and mourns through the nineteenth century, the 1930s, the 1970s, the 1990s, and beyond.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Kastleman

Abstract This year saw the continued expansion of four vibrant conversations within the field of theater and performance studies. The first section of this review, ‘World Stages and Their Borders’, features scholarship that explores how theaters represent worlds beyond the nation’s territorial and symbolic boundaries. The second section, ‘Performing Critical Temporalities’, considers studies of minoritarian performance that engage with the lived experience of time. In the third section, ‘Theater After Liveness’, I discuss scholarship on modern drama that is in dialogue with theories of performance as a live event. A fourth section considers new works on the nineteenth-century theater, showing how ‘Celebrity, Publicity, and Amateurism’ are entwined. Finally, a brief concluding note outlines significant biographies and reference works released within the past year.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-465
Author(s):  
EVE TIGNOL

AbstractThis article reflects on the significance of genealogy for Sayyids and other Muslim elites in British North India by exploring some literary productions and political endeavours of the Aligarh movement. At the end of the nineteenth century, poems recalling the extra-Indian origins of Muslim elites became increasingly popular, as Altaf Husain Hali's Musaddas best exemplified. Translating an anxiety of seeing their power and influence reduced in the colonial world, such nostalgic discourse, intertwining representations of lineage and authority, promptly entered the political realm. The genealogy rhetoric deployed in Urdu poetry played a significant role in sustaining the claims of the leaders of the Aligarh movement as they strove to bolster a cohesive sharīf community identity and secure political leadership during the anti-Congress propaganda of 1888 as well as to obtain advantages from British officials according to their so-called political importance. In this context, this article emphasises that in Aligarh's nostalgic poetry, the greatest political weight was put on belonging to the ashrāf category rather than to the Sayyids, who only occasionally feature in the sources.


Modern Italy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Briquet

This article reflects on the reasons why clientelism has reached its status as a determining category in the scholarly interpretation of the Italian political system. By returning to the earliest formulations of the concept (in the controversies of the late nineteenth century on the widening of suffrage) and then its successive recreations up to the political crisis of the 1990s (as a typical manifestation of the political ‘anomalies’ of an ‘incomplete’ democracy), it relates this centrality to the uses made of the denunciation of clientelism in political and institutional struggles and the way political science has developed in Italy as an academic discipline.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 237-242
Author(s):  
Todd Landman ◽  
Hans-Joachim Lauth

The investigation of trade-offs in political science receives only limited attention, although many scholars acknowledge the importance of trade-offs across a variety of different areas. A systematic and comprehensive examination of the topic is missing. This thematic issue of <em>Politics and Governance</em> sheds light on this research deficit by providing a holistic but also an integrative view on trade-offs in the political realm for the first time. Researchers of trade-offs from different political areas present and discuss their findings, and promote a fruitful exchange, which overcomes the current isolation of the approaches. They consider the theoretical and methodological questions as well as the identification of empirical trade-offs. Furthermore, they provide insights into the possibility to balance trade-offs and strategies, which could help actors to find such compromises.


2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-139
Author(s):  
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson ◽  
Elizabeth W. Son

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?


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