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In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan's seminal examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the representational violence governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this article argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. In this context, hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement. Within the aesthetic logic of humanitarianism supporting this regime, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other is continually forced to re-enact the traumatic scene of their own disappearance into the space of the image in order to fulfil a spectatorial desire to see and to be subjectivated through seeing. The article contends that the social construction of an intrinsically theatricalized humanitarian gaze is inimical to the political functioning of colonial-capitalist ways of seeing, thereby demonstrating that critical art practices are not exempt from operating within the parameters of this aesthetic regime. The article investigates the claims of Dutch artist Renzo Martens' performative documentary, Episode III: Enjoy poverty (2008), to expose the hypocrisy of Western food aid practices through the lens of performative intervention. Through close analysis of the film, it cautions against positioning hunger as an object 'outside' reflexive critical consideration of it. It demonstrates that there is no external material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for social and political change. In order to understand this 'different hunger', we must recognise our differential implication in, and relation to, the world in which hunger is manifest and not construct an idealised optic that would allow us to simply imagine ourselves acting upon it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers brief profiles of several authors including Adrian Kear, Jim Drobnick, and Kathleen Gough who contributed to the writing of the journal.

This essay onBlack Smoke Rising(Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of bothBlack Smoke Risingas a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication inParallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the culturalanxietyabout repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys andre-stagesthe spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the French philosopher Jacques Rancière's elegant revelation of the failings of political philosophy. It explores the apparent contradiction of terminologies expressed in his book "Disagreement" which reveals the uneasy meaning of the union in the phrase political philosophy. It also investigates the various transformation of the regime of truth and their impact on practical politics.

Investigates the mood of anxiety accompanying the public manifestation of images of prisoner abuse being conducted at the American occupied Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Gap between verisimilitude and veracity opened up by the “Daily Mirror's” claim that the pictures accurately 'portrayed' serving soldiers' actions; Politics of attempting to further instrumentalize the images' performative effects; Nature of the response to the images of human rights abuses emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

This article focuses on the philosophical concept of mimesis based on an image of a dancer. The image of a dancer is suggestive of a certain mimetic resistance to the logic of commodity capitalism, a disruption of its ability to mediate the purely economic terms of the relation. The mimesis at work within the image of the dancer collapses the distance between self and other and at the same time maintains it, giving the portrayal of interiority a distinctively outward-looking dimension. As such it is indelibly theatrical, presented to an audience of onlookers whose very presence interrupts the solipsistic fiction of autoerotic inwardness.

This article discusses theatre and the ethic of interruption. Something happens, and theatre interrupts. So when, in "The Author As Producer," Walter Benjamin describes epic theatre as the 'art of interruption', he emphasizes that this is a structural rather than simply stylistic problematic: 'interruption does not have here the character of a stimulant, he explains, but of an organizing function. More particularly, for Benjamin the purpose of interruption is to enable the theatre to 'discover' rather than 'reproduce' situations, to 'represent' them by 'uncovering' the materiality of social conditions.

Focuses on the critical importance of site-specific performance on alternative economy; Emphasis of the performance on archiving the memory in the building; Intervention of site-specific performance into a particular location.

Focuses on the background of the play 'Wolf Man,' written by Joe Kelleher and performed by Ernst Fischer, Adrian Kear, Maggie Pittard and Helen Spackman in London, England. Role of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the development of the play; Accounts on the interests of Freud on the behavior of wolves; Depiction of the play on the childhood trauma of Freud.

Focuses on the importance of time in cooking. Changes on the time consumed during food preparation due to modern technologies; Similarity of the essence of cooking to theatrical arts; Ability of a person to perform cooking as an art.

The author reflects on the etymology of the term appearance which is congruent to the group of terms such as image, mirror, and spectacle. Appearance denotes an aspect of being whose essence rests in giving itself to be seen and being derived from the root which meant to look or to see. It also notes how philosopher Giorgio Agamben perceived appearance which is the essence of species, whose visibility is regarded to provide the basis of its intelligibility.

This article forms part of the Editorial of the concurrent issues of Performance Research and GPS on the theme of Hunger, picking up from the 'Introduction' written by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, co-editors of these issues. Styled as a conversation with key contributors to the journal issues, the keynote speakers in the PSi conference and authors that inspired the initiative on hunger, Jazmin Badong Llana recalls the contexts and prompts of the journal issues and the 2022 conference of Performance Studies international (PSi) from which many of the featured articles began. She identifies the challenges that hunger as a material condition poses to performance and performance studies, tracing key critical threads on the supposed 'unrepresentability' of hunger in performance and the critique of humanitarianism as a framework for hunger relief and world aid, among others. The reflection ends with possible ways forward in responding to hunger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like his mother Queen Victoria, Edward VII kept a thriving kennel at Sandringham and developed close bonds with several of his dogs. His most well-known canine companion was Caesar of Notts, a wirehaired fox terrier who entered the royal kennels in 1903. Caesar went everywhere with Edward and their travels were often recounted in the popular press. Caesar's most famous role, however, came after Edward's death, when Caesar was included in the king's funeral procession on 20 May 1910. The image of the scruffy dog following the gun carriage carrying his dead master struck a poignant chord with the public and interest in Caesar exploded. Pictures and stories featuring the dog appeared in the contemporary press, and in other texts and material objects including books, paintings, and picture postcards. Using these primary sources as well as recent animal studies scholarship, this paper establishes the significance of the king's bond with Caesar, explains how Caesar became a symbol of the nation in mourning, and discusses the dog's part in shaping the public memory of Edward VII by highlighting the king's domestic attachments, and his empathy for the common people of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While games are commonly viewed as frivolous fun, their rapid proliferation across the US defense establishment compels us to think again. Spanning spheres as diverse as total immersion training, near-peer/cyber conflict, and future force strategies, a gaming renaissance is currently underway across the US military. Surprisingly, given international relations' (IR) interest in the production and projection of military power, the discipline has neglected to engage with this revival. This article argues that hyperreal games—that is, games that produce realities—play an increasingly important role in the attraction, production, management, and recovery of warfighters. Drawing upon one hundred hours of interviews undertaken with US military games designers, trainers, trainees, and veterans between 2017 and 2019, the article documents first-hand experiences of hyperreal gaming in warfighter recruitment, training, deployment, and rehabilitation. The core argument developed is that unlike simulations, which model scenarios , games are productive of people , values, and identity. If it is to understand games' use as a tool of warfighter subjectification, the article argues, IR must renew its focus on military gaming disaggregated from the broader hyperrealities of modeling, simulation, and exercises with which it has hitherto been conflated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose the category of "foreign policy performance" in order to argue that a recognition of foreign policy's theatricality can illuminate its contribution to generative processes of social construction and world-making. We focus on the practice of summit diplomacy, which operates according to a "theatrical rationality" that blurs the boundary between substantive and symbolic politics. Noting that Donald Trump's presidency called into question many of international relations' prevailing assumptions regarding foreign policy's formulation and execution, we suggest that a performance-oriented analytic can facilitate a critical reckoning both with Trump himself and with the "statesmanlike" norms he eschewed. We read Trump's performances at international summits with reference to professional wrestling, which for all its melodramatic absurdity is a venerable and complex theatrical tradition with a highly developed critical language. Guided by four pieces of wrestling argot ("heat," "heel," "kayfabe," and "cutting a promo"), we use process-tracing techniques to develop a wrestling-oriented reading of Trump's 2018 summit with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. We argue that using wrestling in order to read Trump and Kim's deviation from the conventional norms and repertoires of foreign policy performance enables a critical assessment of the stakes at play in their reconstruction and re-establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmodern American drama of the 1980s and 1990s is commonly defined by its abundant distrust in authenticity and the 'real.' Since around 2000, the emergence of a new type of documentary drama, in turn, has begun to recall and renegotiate postmodernism's scepticism of the 'real' and the theatrical conventions that resulted from it. As theatre scholar Carol Martin notes, contemporary theatre addresses the "larger cultural obsession with capturing the 'real'" in an age of mediatization as it poses questions about the iconography of the visual, the body, and dramatic and performative epistemes of representation (Martin, "Introduction" 1). This article examines the role of the 'real' in two examples of recent American documentary theatre, Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project's The Laramie Project (2001) and Lynn Nottage's Ruined (2008). Both plays are characterised by their use of verbatim and documentary techniques alongside a heightened emphasis on modes of narrativity. Drawing on Carol Martin's conception of the "theatre of the real" (2010; 2013) as a new type of American documentary theatre in American visual and literary culture in the twenty-first century, I argue that these two documentary plays aim to establish a poetics of 'the real' as an elemental ethical and theatrical category in their representations of war, citizenship, and cultural ideologies. I argue that both plays turn towards the ethical rather than - as postmodern theatre did - the epistemological repercussion of their stagings of the 'real.' These examples of recent American documentary theatre respond to, renegotiate, and challenge postmodernism's aversion to authenticity and complicate the idea that "truth is contextual, multiple, and subject to manipulation" (Martin, "Introduction" 3) as they investigate different scenarios and epistemes of truth through novel poetic techniques (embodiment, amateurism, the public sphere). Both plays elucidate how American documentary theatre in the twenty-first century negotiates the category of the 'real' at the nexus of spectatorship dramatic mode, and the ethics of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles II was a figure of controversy during his reign and continues to be one of the most iconic and well-known British monarchs; the portrayals of this King vary significantly from one author to the other and from one period to the next, but they invariably focus on his penchant for frivolity and his sexual liaisons. One of his favourite royal mistresses is Nell Gwyn, the oyster girl, turned orange seller, turned actress, turned mother of Dukes. The figure of 'pretty, witty' Nelly has fascinated biographers, filmmakers and novelists for centuries due to its Cinderella-like undertones and the natural fascination that the first female performers have exerted on the public imagination. This paper studies modern rewritings of Charles's and Nell's affair and of the two lovers themselves, to trace the attitudes towards the King's illicit affair and towards the actress's social climbing. The aim of this paper is to question the motivations for these re-imaginings and to help discover the reasons why the monarch and his "Protestant Whore" The name comes, legend has it, from Nell Gwyn herself and is an anecdote that has been recounted innumerable times. Granger explains that "the story [...] is a known fact; as is also that of her being insulted in her coach at Oxford, by the mob, who mistook her for the duchess of Portsmouth. Upon which she looked out of the window, and said, with her usual good humour, Pray, good people, be civil: I am the protestant whore. This laconic speech drew upon her the blessings of the populace, who suffered her to proceed without further molestation" (Granger 2010: 429). have become the focus of such varied re-writings and two of the most prominent characters of the British public imagination, surpassing the boundaries of their professions, to become part of popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'amateur' is bound up with love. Performers, cultural workers and other community members devote time out of 'love' to engage in and with creative embodied pursuits. 'Love', however, responds to changing social orders and modes of sociality. It plays a seminal role in cultural reproduction. Thinking through the performances of a social circus group as they collapse a 'capitalist pyramid', and the calls of a performance artist to create a collective 'manifesto of love' during an event memorializing a six-month-long student strike and the activist performances that had successfully challenged a 75 per cent tuition hike, this piece asks: What is the role of love in twenty-first-century amateur performance? Love is here explored as a fusional force of devotion and transformation, as well as a trap through which institutions draw on un- or underpaid labour to promote social cohesion. Amateur performance, it suggests, highlights what is not being performed within professional contexts, as well as who has the time and ability to perform without pay, and who cannot afford not to perform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an analysis of Billy Mullaney's performance SEMESTER, through the dual perspective of theatricality and attention. For SEMESTER, Mullaney is memorizing a semester's worth of quantum mechanics lectures and then performing them. Although he does not know quantum mechanics, he has managed to memorize it in a very disciplined way, which he calls 'a choreographic way of learning'. Questions about spectatorship, attendance and the value of theatre are generated in SEMESTER, this article argues. More specifically, it shows how theatricality, understood as the theatrics, exaggerations and basic mechanisms of theatre, is what keeps audiences on their seats watching and Mullaney delivering the lecture. Theatricality is considered here bound to how SEMESTER simultaneously and excessively demands as well as sabotages an absorptive mode of attention, which results in a process of noticing and displacing practices of attention that are habitual to lecture and theatre settings. Theatricality is thus examined through the perspectives of attention and absorption, finally proposed as a form of labour that signals a critical reconsideration of the value of theatre and of attendance as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents drag performance as a queer method of critique in the field of IR, which contributes to a longstanding move in IR to engage with aesthetics, and a more recent move to engage with performance art. The article discusses the author's making of a performance piece that revisited the EU's response to Hamas's success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Soft, camp, feminine, and childlike voices; a female body in men's clothing; and the translocation of bodies in spaces are used in the performance piece to disrupt the coherency of normalised diplomacy. Queer IR theory emphasises the imperative to dismantle logics of normality that prevent creativity in response to political issues. Performative drag practices disrupt anxious attachments to a ritualised discourse of strategic interests that shapes political initiatives. This article comments on other drag moments in politics, such as the anxiety around Jeremy Corbyn's dress, Barack Obama's anger translator, and Janelle Monáe's androgynous articulation of community. The form that research dissemination takes implicates the kind of knowledge that is produced. This article reviews three methodological provocations of drag, an alternative departure point of the 'what if', performing a politics of refusal, and a Brechtian technique of estrangement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and compares instances of multilingual expression in contemporary postdramatic theatre that are linked to the exploration of migration, cosmopolitanism, and cross-cultural encounter. Taking Jan Lauwers and Needcompany’s Isabella’s Room and Rimini Protokoll’s 100% Brussels as examples, the case study focuses on post-epic forms of narration and covert forms of authority. Moreover, it shows how multilingual expression and speaking with accents dismantle the unity of national languages and differentiate the performing collectives in both works. At the same time, acts of communal singing and dancing evoke a coherent and self-affirmative emotional sensibility that potentially includes the audience. Both performances operate within a postnational frame: while Isabella’s Room conceptualizes Europe as a space of entanglement, 100% Brussels foregrounds immigrant subjects who position themselves as cosmopolitan citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs the figure of the Loch Ness Monster as an anchor and an allegory for the operations of affect and appearance in contemporary performance. More specifically, I examine the dialectical relationships between the two, and explore how appearance performs when a critical project seeks to grasp reality as it exists apart from any subjective embellishments. Drawing on eyewitness accounts and continental philosophy, I claim that the Monster objectivizes a fundamental feature of subjectivity, namely the tension between appearance and reality, and that this tension is performed by the subjects who perceive it. As a performance of subjectivity, the Loch Ness Monster is simultaneously dependent on and exists independently of its material context. This analysis poses a challenge and a reminder to theatre and performance studies, where the possibility of affect being inherent to the contradictory relationship between appearance and reality must be fully accounted for in theoretical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This contribution starts from observing a remarkable absence of continuity in scholarly debates and discourses, in the field of theater and performance studies. Instead, our ‘debate’ seems to be hidden in a process of ongoing proliferation, moving in any kind of direction without any sense of orientation, which makes it very hard to identify a specific theatre and performance studies perspective or to identify approaches and methodologies specific to the field - something that is actually quite relevant when interdisciplinary exchange is to be amutualaffair. The problem of this wide variety of approaches is that it renders theatre and performance studies invisible as a specific practice with particular approaches. How are we to be recognized in an interdisciplinary field? By inquiring in the practice and politics of ‘naming’, and the absence of that, this contribution addresses the current state of affairs in the theatre and performance studies field, followed by the suggestion that we should perhaps give names to our tools and concepts and methodologies, to establish debates in which we enter into discussion and actually respond to each other. This contribution deliberately seeks to movethroughuneasy terms like ‘tradition’ or ‘branding’, to advocate a practice of naming. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s analysis of naming practices and activities (rather than classes or categories) and Rosi Braidotti’s citationality, this invitation is not a call for ‘closing the ranks’, instead it is a plea for articulating particularity; an invitation to develop a joint, accumulative practice, in which we continue acting fugitively, but with a plan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies a widespread 'deaf spot' in English-language criticism of the foreign-language film, namely the lack of attention given to the foreign-language voice. It points to the key driver behind this omission: an anxiety about the ability of the critic to capture sound through writing that is exacerbated when that sound carries language beyond the critic's comprehension. The article proposes a style of criticism that acknowledges the limitations caused by linguistic incompetence, but that also finds a 'way in' to the vocal soundtrack through attention to certain non-semantic qualities of voice. This interpretative practice is tested through an analysis of the vocal soundtrack of Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997), which is followed by a critical reflection on the relevance of this reading strategy to wider debates about foreign spectatorship, world cinema and the role of subjectivity within film criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparatively little work on folk devils and moral panics has focused on mirror image phenomena of collective joy, celebration, and hope. By introducing a theory of “moral euphoria” and the concept of “folk heroes,” and focusing on processes of “deification,” this article provides a fresh perspective within the moral panic literature, showing how certain actors may go from “folk hero” fame to “folk devil” infamy. Using the examples of Tony Blair and Barack Obama, the article shows how politicians are particularly significant sociological actors in this regard. The conclusion suggests wider implications for the role of academics in demonization and deification processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the performative memorial activities at the Second Holy Week that was arranged in acknowledgment of the deep emotional response of the people of Poland to the demise of Pope John Paul II. Topics discussed include the rhythms of sacralization as a form of public mourning, the monopolization of religious memory through spatial transformations and ephemeral expressions, and the archive and repertoire as two approaches to transmitting cultural memory.

Perspectives on the phenomenology of the autistic experience are presented with particular reference to the imagination in autism and what may be conceptualized as 'neurodivergent aesthetics'. Drawing upon a research project that explored the potential of drama as an 'intervention' in autism, an attempt is made to de-mythologize the condition by challenging stereotypes and by suggesting that the multimodalities of performance offer an appropriate space for 'encounters' with autistic states of being while also questioning the dualisms which distinguish between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the various roles played by photographers and photographic images in the grassroots memorials to the victims of the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings, as spontaneously displayed by anonymous citizens in public spaces. For purposes of comparison, parallels are drawn with similar memorials to the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. Although photographic depictions of the pain and suffering caused by the massacres seem to predominate in both cases, photographs served another-and at least in local terms-socially significant purpose, as this article will try to show, through its material anchoring in collective remembrance photographs contributed to the public memorialization of the events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores what might be at stake when art and performance exposes the apparently peripheral structures of value and labour that support the art-event. For example, in the piece attributed to John Baldessari in the11 Roomsexhibition at the 2011 Manchester International Festival (UK), the organizers attempted to stage a previously unrealized concept by Baldessari that centered around the display of a real human corpse. For various reasons, they were unable to do so and instead displayed printouts selected from a year of correspondence in which the bulk of activity was undertaken by relatively anonymous members of curatorial and technical staff. Or in Quarantine's theatre pieceEntitled(2011), technicians carry out the actions they would normally undertake during the day before an audience arrives, but, now that an audience is present, they narrate their actions as they perform them. One way of understanding these gestures is as attempts to present labour as something ‘real’ that might interrupt the fakery of art: the real corpse, the real stagehands, etc. However, drawing on Alice Rayner's reading of Derrida and Marx and John Roberts' arguments about the logic of the readymade, I argue that the usefulness of the staging of labour in this way is not in the way that it presents some authentic action that overcomes theatre's artifice, but instead in the peculiar failure of theatrical actions to be fully present. Rather than the ‘reality’ of the labour interrupting the ‘representation’ of the theatre, we might regard this as theatre that shows us labour as it really is; it is just that when we see it for what it is, it isn't there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on discussions on practice-led research that seek to describe the possible relations between theory, practice and various non-dance fields of knowledge. In order to explore some of the specificities of the relations between performance practice research and theory, but also between practice-led research and the professional arts scene, a further examination is made of recent developments in the European contemporary dance scene, where choreography is thought to have expanded, to address theory and to include a wide range of conceptual tools, materials and strategies. In particular, the case of Jérôme Bel is used to demonstrate how, even when one explicitly invokes theory with/in their work, as long as their doing takes place onstage (or within a performance setting), it already speaks to an economy of knowledge that is specific to performance-making, rather than that of performance-writing. Following Susan Melrose's proposition that practice emerges as a singular event that is significantly different from theoretical writing, this article then introduces Alain Badiou's notion of 'the event' as a concept through which to understand practice as a particular type of interruptive operation, in the way it functions to further knowledge within a performance research enquiry. Finally, then, the suggestion is put forward that the practitioner-researcher embraces a task of having to retain a sort of fidelity to whatever shifts or destabilizations occur within the theoretical writing from interruptions caused by performance-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how Kantor's model of the Bio-Object, as a form of object/human inter-animation, might be productive for the contemporary practitioner. It considers the material object in Kantor's theatre as a device that initiates the caesura that constructs and maintains the complex operation of what Giorgio Agamben calls the Anthropological Machine, and considers how this is active in The Dead Class (1975). It is an attempt to move beyond a eulogizing of the art objects in his work - to find a productivity of making amongst Kantor's expanding legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the various semblances of the postcard in Beirut. It traces the path of the postcard in order to arrive at the paradox of its enduring colonial legacy. Taking Barthes' notion of the photograph as 'a certificate of presence', the paper explores the boundaries between photograph and postcard in representations of Beirut. It focuses on the exchange between the 'postcard city' and the city itself that takes place in the evolution of the postcard from black and white photograph (old postcards of Beirut) to iconic colour landscapes (classic tourist postcards) The text is staged as a set of postcards: the practice of writing is spatialised and the paper is inflected with the iconography and the vernacular of the postcard. By spatialising the textual and textualising the visual, the paper attempts to negotiate the boundaries between critical theory and cultural practice and to raise questions about representation, memory and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relations between processes of emotionalization in society, therapeutic cultures in the workplace and new forms of emotional subjectivity and self-presentation. For many commentators, this subjectivity is culturally feminized, drawing as it does on first-person narratives, confessionals, emotional performances and ‘the personal’ and it is also highly problematic. In particular, the article speculates on the emergence of a somewhat hostile reaction by some prominent critics to these emotional selves, to whom they appear to represent a form of emasculation. Exploring a range of ‘archives’ in different discourse registers, the article suggests that these dismissive responses could be seen to signify growing cultural anxieties about the imagined feminization of the self and the workplace. The article concludes by proposing that while therapeutic cultures are politically ambivalent, the significance of the resources and solace that they offer should not be ignored or trivialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British tabloids are viewed as conservative about monarchy. However, on several occasions since Princess Diana's death, criticism of royalty has been extremely shrill. This detailed examination of one such occasion argues that commercial imperatives and tabloid journalistic practices in pursuit of a good story liberated information and views threatening to an un-modernised monarchy. However, it also shows how certain criticisms were deflected and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the live video coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey aired on Independent Television (ITV) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The author observes that the two British terrestrial broadcast organizations had adopted an entirely identical approach to the funeral coverage and shared the same sense of discretion while airing the program, owing to the criticisms of the royal family. A brief account of historical relationship between the two broadcasters in their coverage of media events and several tables showing the footage of the funeral process are also presented. The author states that it was virtually impossible to define and edit an event on the spot, as it was taking place in a ceremonial space.

Drawing on Derrida, Foucault, Dorothy Smith, Anzaldúa, Wallerstein, Said, and Gurdjieff, among others, this article argues that the strangeness of Abu Ghraib—“father of the strange (or of the stranger)”—has less to do with what went on inside the prison and more with the global prison yard. Strange is how we, global spectators of the prison abuses, continue to stand on shaky cardboard boxes of rising and falling empires with hoods of amnesia and evasion put on our minds, and sophisticated media wires of true or false fears manipulating our emotions. To escape from prison, a mystic once said, one must first realize one is in prison. The inquiry is used as grounds for advancing a discourse on Newtonian and quantal sociological imaginations in favor of a Sociology of Self-knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the proliferation of documentary theatre pieces in Great Britain and the relation of theatre to current events, with particular attention to the documentary play, "The Colour of Justice," by Nicolas Kent and the television drama documentary, "The Murder of Stephen Lawrence." The author discussed the case of Stephen Lawrence, an 18-year-old African-American teenager in Great Britain who was stabbed to death in 1993.

This article examines the effect of testimonial drama for the spectator who is placed in the position of receiver to the testimony. It considers the en vogue critical call to transform spectators into 'witnesses' and asks whether testimonial plays, in which characters bear witness, facilitate that transformation. I examine an extreme form of dramatized witnessing, Dubbeljoint Productions/JustUs Theatre Company's Binlids (1997), in which real people take the stage as witnesses. I argue that, paradoxically, the on-stage behaviour of witnesses is not conducive to producing spectatorial witnesses, because the character's desire for agency forecloses the range of possible audience reactions. Moreover, the reception history of Binlids demonstrates that any attempt to formulate the spectator as an engaged 'witness' may collapse under the multiplicity of responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]