scholarly journals THE CANADIAN DOCUMENTARY DRAMA: TRAJECTORY OF ITS GROWTH AND SALIENT FEATURES

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Devang Nanavati

The Canadian documentary drama is a unique genre of dramatic art in terms of its conceptual growth, its objectives marked by post-colonial hues and its insistence to explore truth of a given issue holistically. The present paper attempts to discuss as to how a Canadian docudrama differs from the other dramatic genres like history play, problem play or commitment play- in spite of the fact that it certainly weaves into its structure historical data, discusses contemporary social problems and exposes the politics of socio-economic and racial colonization. Although this region-specific dramatic art had become remarkably popular in Canada in 1970s and 1980s, its artistic potential certainly transcends spatio-temporal boundaries because it has the capacity to de-colonize any community by interrogating and undermining the hypocrisy of its existing myths of human progress. Hence, while tracing the development of this stage art, this paper also aims to discuss various features of this art form.

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-291
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Vasquez ◽  
Anna L. Peterson

In this article, we explore the debates surrounding the proposed canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken defender of human rights and the poor during the civil war in El Salvador, who was assassinated in March 1980 by paramilitary death squads while saying Mass. More specifically, we examine the tension between, on the one hand, local and popular understandings of Romero’s life and legacy and, on the other hand, transnational and institutional interpretations. We argue that the reluctance of the Vatican to advance Romero’s canonization process has to do with the need to domesticate and “privatize” his image. This depoliticization of Romero’s work and teachings is a part of a larger agenda of neo-Romanization, an attempt by the Holy See to redeploy a post-colonial and transnational Catholic regime in the face of the crisis of modernity and the advent of postmodern relativism. This redeployment is based on the control of local religious expressions, particularly those that advocate for a more participatory church, which have proliferated with contemporary globalization


2016 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-624
Author(s):  
John D. Cox

AbstractShakespeare's most innovative genre was the history play, because it has no precedent in either classical or medieval tradition. In contrast to the focused teleology of Christian medieval drama, Shakespeare's history plays manifest an implicit idea of history that was secular, political, and open-ended. They emphasize human action in a political arena, where the criterion for success is the ability to act in time, without regard to one's spiritual state. Time determines royal succession, which is the focus of all Shakespeare's history plays, as it was the focus of political concern in England in the 1590s, when the plays were written. His emphasis on time and royal succession distinguishes his implied political theory from the moralism and authoritarianism of official Tudor state doctrine on one hand and from the pragmatism of Machiavelli on the other.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-79
Author(s):  
Florian Hartmann

Abstract In the course of the 11th century, the economic and demographic growth within the Italian cities and its consequential social problems led to an increasing tension between the aristocratic vassal milieu comprising the bishop on one side and the urban elites on the other. Amongst others, one consequence was the takeover of domination by communal institutions resulting in an independent political participation of the citizens. However, these new communes suffered from a lack of legitimacy. The contemporaries were well aware of the contingency of the communes. The communal discourse as taught in the rhetoric system of the ars dictaminis reveals how domination was conceptualized in the 12th century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
M. Amsaprabhaa ◽  
Y. Nancy Jane ◽  
H. Khanna Nehemiah

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the globe has enforced lockdown restrictions that influence the people’s socio-economic lifecycle. The objective of this paper is to predict the communal emotion of people from different locations during the COVID-19 lockdown. The proposed work aims in developing a deep spatio-temporal analysis framework of geo-tagged tweets to predict the emotions of different topics based on location. An optimized Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach is presented for finding the optimal hyper-parameters using grid search. A multi-class emotion classification model is then built via a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to predict emotions for each topic based on locations. The proposed work is experimented with the twitter streaming API dataset. The experimental results prove that the presented LDA model-using grid search along with the RNN model for emotion classification outperforms the other state of art methods with an improved accuracy of 94.6%.


Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Barry Allen

Abstract Indigenous cultures of North America confronted a problem of knowledge different from that of canonical European philosophy. The European problem is to identify and overcome obstacles to the perfection of knowledge as science, while the Indigenous problem is to conserve a legacy of practice fused with a territory. Complicating the difference is that one of these traditions violently colonized the other, and with colonization the Indigenous problem changes. The old problem of inter-generational stability cannot be separated from the post-colonial problem of sovereignty in the land where the knowledge makes sense. I differentiate the question of the value of knowledge (Part 1), and its content (Part 2). The qualities these epistemologies favor define what I call ceremonial knowledge, that is, knowledge that sustains a ceremonial community. The question of content considers the interdisciplinary research of Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as well as the issue of epistemic decolonization.


Author(s):  
Edgar Zavala-Pelayo

Abstract The paper seeks to fill the gap in the literature that on the one hand adopts productively a Foucauldian genealogical approach to analyze religious phenomena yet on the other hand offers only minimum details, or no account, of methodological criteria and analytical procedures. Drawing retrospectively on the methodological experiences and insights of the author’s previous genealogical exercises, and the findings of some of the works above, the paper develops a contextual genealogical approach to study the religious in colonial and post-colonial settings with a Christian background. Based on a critical adoption of Nietzschean and Foucauldian tenets and six strategic analytical axes, the approach is presented as an open and flexible context-oriented methodological alternative for the necessarily constant rethinking of the religious in the present.


Author(s):  
Michael Hogan

A tumultuous period in Mexican history began with the Reform Movement of President Benito Juárez, followed by the French invasion and installation of Maximillian as emperor, the defeat of his troops by the liberal army, and the restoration of the Mexican Republic in 1877. Although most of the basic facts of these events are not in dispute, the narrowness of the lens used to examine them is. Some data have been systematically ignored by national historians, and there are also contradictory interpretations of the published historical data. One common reflection on this period is the depiction of Maximilian as liberal whom some argue contributed in a positive way to Mexico. However, some Mexican scholars dispute this. The other widely held belief is that Benito Juárez can be credited with the restoration of the republic and the betterment of the working poor and indigenous. Although criticism of Juárez is uncommon in official circles, where he is idolized, some Mexican scholars are more skeptical of these claims. The missing or generally ignored data concern the contribution of the United States to the defeat of the French and Austrian armies, which is not mentioned in any survey texts and is minimized in most articles. The fuller inclusion of these data coupled with a closer look at the contributions and failures of both the Maximilian and Juárez regimes provides a clearer picture of the epoch and generates new insights.


2020 ◽  
pp. 219-245
Author(s):  
Paweł Bukowiec

The article attempts to perform a comparative study of the phenomenon of the so-called linguistic switch, i.e., a change of languages in which the writer creates his/her works. One side of the analysis focuses on nineteenth-century Lithuanian poets, represented mainly by Antanas Baranauskas, and the other on the contemporary Kenyan prose writer Ngu˜g˜ wa Thiong’o. The juxtaposition of ı such extremely distant authors: 1. allows a better understanding of the specificity of multilingualism in both eighteenth-century Lithuanian literature and contemporary fiction; 2. proves once again the universality of postcolonial sensitivity; 3. constitutes an attempt at comparative thinking in the context of world literature.


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