Babel or Pentecost? Faith, Difference and Freedom in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenge for Public Theology

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-381
Author(s):  
Chris Shannahan
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractThis article emerges from many years work in diverse inner city communities. It suggests that urban Britain will be understood properly, and public theology engaged fully with contemporary society, by seriously exploring the normative and contested nature of difference. The article critiques the view that diversity poses a threat to communal life and exposes current examples of essentialist identity politics. It argues that identities premised on raciology are unsustainable, and this poses a challenge to which people of faith should respond with urgency. Thus, the article asserts that critical patterns of multiculturalism provide the basis for inclusive patterns of faith and identity, and that existing public theologies still need to engage in sufficient depth with the fluidity of identity in twenty-first century Britain. At heart, the article offers the new hermeneutical principle of liberative difference as having the capacity to reinvigorate patterns of faith and resource an inclusive liberative struggle in urban societies.

scholarly journals Intercultural adapturgy : twenty-first century women adapting Spanish golden age plays

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mary Elaine Vansant
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
First Century ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Adaptation Studies ◽  
Script Analysis ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Insight Into

Transferring work from one culture to another through translation or adaptation is a delicate process which requires careful consideration of both the positionality of the adapter and the intertextual reaction of the adapted work's target audience. In addition to traditional adaptation theories like intertextuality, the theatrical field of dramaturgy offers helpful insight into the adaptation process, especially as it relates to plays. This dissertation examines the ways that the combination of adaptation studies and dramaturgy, which Jane Barnette calls adapturgy, can inform intercultural adaptaitons of dramatic literature to create performable and effective theatre experiences for twenty-first century audiences. I achieve this goal by first examining two adapted plays: A Little Betrayal Among Friends by Caridad Svich, adapted from La traicion en la amistad by Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor, and Fever/Dream by Sheila Callaghan, adapted from La vida es sueno by Pedro Calderon de la Barca. I look at how dramaturgical and adapation theories can be applied to these plays via script analysis and contextual questioning. Then, using the skills gleaned from those two examples, I create my own translation and adaptation of Los empenos de una casa by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and I reflect on my adapturgical process of doing so. In creating both a translation, titled How to Build a Noble House, and an adaptation, titled With the Temptation, a Way of Escape, I both preserve the unique traits of the Spanish Golden Age for performance in the twenty-first century and amplify Sor Juana's comedic and social intentions for a contemporary society. I believe that both of these considerations, alongside a reflection on the adapter's positionality and the intentions of the producing organization and production team for a live production, are invaluable to both the field of adaptaiton studies and of dramaturgy.

Gothic Comedy

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Catherine Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

scholarly journals Cosmopolitan pleasures and affects; or why are we still talking about yellowface in twenty-first-century cinema?

2018 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Felicia Chan
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Diversity Management ◽  
Management Training ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
First Century ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Artistic Theory ◽  
Academic Discourses ◽  
Cameron Crowe

It is now widely acknowledged that the postracial fantasies ushered in by Barack Obama’s two-term election success are now in tatters. Yet debates on yellowface casting practices in contemporary Hollywood (also said to have evolved into “whitewashing” practices), in such films as The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), have resurfaced in recent times. These press controversies seem almost anachronistic after a generation of “intercultural” artistic theory and practice, “diversity” management training, and numerous academic discourses on otherness and difference, including those on cosmopolitan theory and practice. This article reviews yellowface practices and debates in contemporary times and puts them in dialogue with cosmopolitan aspirations of being “open to difference”, and argues that the latter cannot be taken as self-evident. It offers a way of thinking about yellowface practice via cosmopolitan pleasures evoked largely through modes of consumption, which “hollow out” the subjectivity of the character being depicted. On the site of the intersection between representation and subjectivity is where the identity politics occurs, yet, rather than universalising the issue, the article argues that a cosmopolitan approach should take on board localised conditions and contexts of production and reception in ways that acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the issues at hand.

scholarly journals Uncertain Mobilities

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin G. Pooley
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Societal Norms ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Considerable Concern

Contemporary society assumes high levels of unimpeded mobility, and disruptions to the ability to move quickly and easily can cause considerable concern. This paper examines the notion of mobility uncertainty and disruption from an historical perspective, arguing that interruptions to mobility have long been a characteristic of everyday travel. It is suggested that what has changed is not so much the extent or nature of disruption, but rather the resilience of transport systems and societal norms and expectations about travel. Data are taken from five examples of life writing produced by residents of the United Kingdom during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The texts are used to illustrate the travel problems encountered and the strategies adopted to deal with them. A concluding discussion examines these themes in the context of twenty-first century mobility.

scholarly journals Preoccupations of Some Asian Australian Women’s Fiction at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Ferrier
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Mind

This paper offers a look back over the rise of the visibility, and the rise as a category, of Asian Australian fiction from the beginning of the 1990s, and especially in the twenty-first century, and some of the main questions that have been asked of it by its producers, and its readers, critics, commentators and the awarders of prizes. It focuses upon women writers. The trope of “border crossings”—both actual and in the mind, was central in the late-twentieth century to much feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race-cognisant cultural commentary and critique, and the concepts of hybridity, diaspora, whiteness, the exotic, postcolonising and (gendered) cultural identities were examined and deployed. In the “paranoid nation” of the twenty-first century, there is a new orientation on the part of governments towards ideas of—if not quite an imminent Yellow Peril—a “fortress Australia,” that turns back to where they came from all boats that are not cruise liners, containerships or warships (of allies). In the sphere of cultural critique, notions of a post-multiculturality that smugly declares that anything resembling identity politics is “so twentieth-century,” are challenged by a rising creative output in Australia of diverse literary representations of and by people with Asian connections and backgrounds. The paper discusses aspects of some works by many of the most prominent of these writers. In its mediation, through similar-but-different travelling women’s eyes, of the past and present histories of different national contexts, Asian Australian fictional writing is a significant and challenging component of the “national” culture, and is continuing to extend its audiences within, and beyond Australia. 

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