scholarly journals Menace and Play

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamonn Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Brian Friel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Dramatic Practice ◽  
Martin Mcdonagh

Irish Drama has changed radically over the last century, and especially during the last decade of the twentieth century. Globally, the state of Irish theatre has never seemed healthier. The vibrancy and recent accomplishments, in terms of box office and awards, of Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, Marie Jones, and of course Brian Friel bear this out. Just as clearly, there has been a dissolution of a dramatic practice that goes back to J.M. Synge and Sean O'Casey, that consolidated in the late 1950s and early 60s, and that later matured and modified, while retaining reasonably consistent artistic aspirations and fundamentals. I map this transition by portraying what seems to me to be shared dramaturgical conventions of an older male generation and the demise or depreciation of those practices (there is still residual evidence of it) in a younger one. I will argue that it is a shift from a post-colonial to a postmodern consciousness that accounts for much of the changes. To make my case, I will work primarily with Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Frank McGuinness and offset them against Sebastian Barry, Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh and Mark O'Rowe.

Jainism in Danger? Temple entry and the rhetoric of religion and reform in post-colonial India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Open The Doors ◽  
The Relationship

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.

The Developmental State

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-100
Author(s):  
Luis Eslava
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
The State ◽  
The South ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Institutional Formation ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Impact

The battle for international law during the era of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century was to a large extent a battle fought over the nature, function and objectives of the state—above all, over their relationship to the idea of ‘development’. A particular normative and institutional formation resulted from this battle: the ‘developmental state’, the impact of which on (in)dependence in the South was and continues to be profound. However, the ‘developmental state’ did not spring ready-made out of nowhere. On the contrary, using Latin America’s much earlier experience of colonialism, decolonization and independent statehood as a starting-point, this chapter draws attention to the long and complex process through which the developmental state’s most important elements emerged, defining what was thinkable and doable there and elsewhere in the post-colonial world.

Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cave
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Key Features

Modernism, defined here initially in its key features across the art forms, was a strong countercurrent to the dominant style of realism in Irish theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century. This is particularly evident in the dance dramas of W. B. Yeats and his other experiments with non-realist dramatic forms. Séan O’Casey, in his controversial playThe Silver Tassieand later works, drew on the bold techniques of expressionism. Denis Johnston, who emerged as a playwright from the 1920s Dublin Drama League, gave the Gate Theatre one of its key early successes inThe Old Lady Says No!. And it was in the Gate, with Hilton Edwards as director and Michéal Mac Liammóir as designer and actor, that Irish audiences were exposed to the internationally influential style of presentational staging.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Performance Examining ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
The Impact

The familiar narrative in this field has focused on playwrights: from the foundational work of W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge of the early twentieth-century national theatre movement to contemporary figures such as Martin McDonagh, Marina Carr, and Enda Walsh, sometimes including Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett. These playwrights are all given detailed analysis in this volume, while extending the conspectus to the full phenomenon of modern Irish theatre. Two sections of the book are devoted to performance, examining the neglected work of directors and designers, as well as exploring acting styles and playing spaces. While the Abbey, as Ireland’s national theatre, has been of central importance, individual chapters bring out the contesting voices of women in a male-dominated arena, the position of Irish-language theatre, and ‘little theatres’ that challenged the hegemony of the Abbey. The middle of the twentieth century saw what amounted to a new revival of Irish drama with the emergence of a generation of playwrights responding in innovative ways to a modernizing Ireland, again diversified by the establishment of regional companies and alternative dramaturgical directions from the 1970s. The contemporary period in Irish theatre has featured a movement beyond scripted plays to more experimental work. The impact and interactions of Irish theatre are finally placed within the wider world of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. The forty-one chapters of the volume offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of modern Irish theatre.

THE COSMOPOLITAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FEDERALISM

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
MERVE FEJZULA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial State

Abstract This article examines the historiographical debate over federalism between the 1930s and 1960s. In their most sweeping iterations, revisionists have sought to unravel the history of the nation-state, by using the history of anti-colonial federalist demands for equal incorporation into imperial states as evidence against a teleology of nationalist independence. In perceiving the democratic potentialities embedded within imperial state forms, revisionists argue that anti-colonial federalists therefore belong within a cosmopolitan tradition of seeking democratic supra-national governance beyond empire and nation. Some iterations of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’ have unfortunately channelled debate into an opposition between federalism and nationalism, while also generating methodological republicanism, the tendency to view proto-republics within imperial formations. This review challenges these interpretive shortcomings and argues instead that federalism ought to be understood as part of a contest about the state as such. By integrating scholarship on French and British imperial federalism with recent work on regional federalisms in European and African contexts, this essay centres a whole range of ideological variations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that adapted federalism to their critiques of the state. Ultimately, this reframing of federalist historiography enables new insights into contests about, and not just over, twentieth-century states.

Lost in the Post: Technologies of Imagination, and the Soviet Legacy in Post-Socialist Mongolia

Inner Asia ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sneath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Position ◽  
National People ◽  
Soviet Legacy ◽  
To Receive ◽  
State Socialist

AbstractVerdery has suggested exploring the parallels between post-socialist and postcolonial studies. Mongolia has, like many post-colonial states, experienced a series of almost simultaneous transformations in the twentieth century. After the advent of Soviet control in the 1920s Mongolia began to receive Leninist Modernisation and all the trappings of the Soviet version of the European nationstate. The imaginative project of Soviet order shaped the notion of the ‘nation’ and required an equivalent notion of the Russian Narod or ‘people’. The State Socialist ‘theatre state’ with its newly imagined (national) People as a compulsory audience, employed various ‘technologies of the imagination’ – parades, show trials, festivals, meetings and speeches etc. Relations between the Russian and Mongolian peoples were framed in terms of a fraternal metaphor – ah (elder brother). Today Mongolia finds itself in an economic and political position that is comparable to many post-colonial nations. It is now subject to the same discourse of development and the national and transnational institutions that shape conditions in the former colonies. The explicitly junior status of Mongolia with respect to a big Russian brother has been replaced with the implicit infantilisation of western-led Developmentalism, and the danger of a sensation of exclusion that Ferguson calls ‘abjection’.

Irish Theatre in Europe

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ondřej Pilný
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
General Category ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Czech Lands ◽  
Martin Mcdonagh

While Irish drama has achieved a distinctive reputation within the Anglophone world, the situation in continental Europe has been much more complex. Wilde and Shaw continue to be widely revived but are rarely identified as Irish. Even more strikingly, contemporary Irish playwrights such as Martin McDonagh and Enda Walsh, both extremely popular in Europe, are assimilated within a general category of British theatre, while Brian Friel’s work is much less well known. There have been established theatrical traditions of playing some Irish dramatists in individual countries, as in the case of Synge in the Czech lands, or the later plays of O’Casey in postwar Germany and in Eastern Europe. Specific productions such as the German and Czech stagings of Behan’sThe Hostageillustrate well the local political and theatrical contexts which made for their success. By contrast, Irish theatre companies travelling to Europe have had a quite mixed reception.

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