Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City. By Peter Bailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x plus 258 pp. $59.95)

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 485-487
Author(s):  
J. K. Walton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
And Performance

Reimagining the colonial wilderness: ‘Africa’, imperialism and the geographical legerdemain of the Vorrh

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Empirical Examination ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Dark Continent ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Popular Geopolitics ◽  
And Performance

Novelists and other cultural producers have long employed the African continent as a palimpsest to construct fantastical tales. From Sir John Mandeville to Joseph Conrad, Africa’s blank spaces on the map have been filled with monstrous creatures that fuel the western imagination. As a consequence, this constant othering of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ has had a deleterious impact for African states and their citizenries, as spectacularly evidenced in U.S. President Donald Trump’s now-infamous labelling of the entire continent as a host of ‘shithole countries’. This article wrestles with the continuation of this trend in popular culture via an empirical examination of the speculative fiction of the British novelist and performance artist, B. Catling. Publishing in 2015, The Vorrh is the first of the three novels set in a parallel Africa, specifically a former German colony that is home to remnants of the Garden of Eden. Focusing on the enchanted forest known as the Vorrh and the colony’s (fictional) capital, Essenwald, this article employs methods drawn from geocriticism and popular geopolitics to interrogate Catling’s built-world. This is done with the aim of connecting structures of iteration in the representation of fictional ‘Africas’ to the West’s imperially inflected geopolitical codes towards the actual physical and human geographies that constitute the world’s second largest and most populous continent.

The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance

2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Vervain ◽  
David Wiles
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Performance Space ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Valuable Point ◽  
New Comedy

In this article, David Wiles and Chris Vervain stake out the ground for a substantial programme of continuing research. Chris Vervain, coming from a background in visual and performance art, is in the first instance a maker of masks. She is also now writing a thesis on the masks of classical tragedy and their possibilities in modern performance, and, in association with the University of Glasgow, working on an AHRB research programme that involves testing the effect of Greek New Comedy masks in performance. David Wiles, Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, has published books on the masks of Greek New Comedy and on Greek performance space, and lectured on Greek masks. Most recently, his Greek Theatre Performance: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2000) included an investigation of the classical mask and insights provided by the work of Lecoq. He is now planning a book on the classical Greek mask. Wiles and Vervain are both committed to the idea that the mask was the determining convention which gave Greek tragedy its identity in the ancient world, and is a valuable point of departure for modern practitioners engaging with the form. They anticipate that their research will in the near future incorporate a symposium and a further report on work-in-progress.

Look, blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the grotesquerie of racial representation in Brazilian visual culture

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Racial Representation ◽  
Racial Domination ◽  
And Performance

This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of black people in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blackness is disposed within the nation’s formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of ‘stereotyping’, symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.

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