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Despite its now totemic constitutional status, Magna Carta is not explicitly mentioned in Shakespeare's history play of King John. King John has been interrogated by literary scholars for references to the charter and investigated by historians for potential oversight. Yet, often overlooked are the sporadic references to Magna Carta in nineteenth-century productions of the play. During the nineteenth century, Magna Carta's legal significance waned as clauses were removed from legislation. Its political purchase is well-documented, including its use by the Chartists, and its use in nationalist-based support for wars at the start and end of the century. What is often unheeded in legal scholarship, is the shifting cultural significance of the charter. A performance history of Shakespeare's King John exposes the different treatment of Magna Carta in productions of Shakespeare's play and related theatrical representations of the charter in popular melodrama and pantomimes in the nineteenth century. This paper uses archival material of theatre productions to interrogate the status of Magna Carta through a performance history of Shakespeare's King John in nineteenth-century London. Investigating the representations of Magna Carta in theatre productions offers a complex picture of the charter's place in the history of British constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks to Mexico City's Casa Club Roshell, a travesti house and gender workshop, and the homonymous film Casa Roshell (2017) directed by Camila José Donoso, to examine the interstitial geographies of trans- performance. Framed by a context of gender and sexual violence, the author argues that the interstice, understood as a non-normative space in the city and as an encounter, upturns the double binds that suture trans and travesti life, specifically the binarisms of public/private, inside/outside, and visible/invisible, and serves instead as a space of mediation. The author uses a performance studies lens and contends that attention to the aesthetic practices of trans and travesti subjects, and transfeminist art-makers, provides further insight into the spatial contradictions that frame contemporary queer and trans* geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay discusses the challenges and opportunities of scholarly research during the pandemic, focusing on the author's experience of researching and writing Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The colonial and imperialist foundations of Canadian museums have resulted in a near erasure of Black stories from the national narrative. This article documents and analyzes the participatory processes, collaborations and community rebuilding that made up the decolonial curatorial practice and museological model of Hope Meets Action: Echoes Through the Black Continuum, the story of Afro-diasporic "British Columbia" history, past, present and future. Staged at the Royal British Columbia Museum, the exhibition was, told, curated, and artistically designed by Black voices to reclaim the complicated history of stolen people on stolen lands, and the contributions of Black leaders as they echo across the centuries into the present. The exhibition choreographed the myriad community voices who shaped it. Black activism, questions of Black identity, commentary on the Black spectacle, Black bodies, and Black women, in particular, were set against the white-centring colonial walls of this provincial museum, thus creating an experiential space to challenge the myth of "museum neutrality," assert the rights to self-defined Black presence. and strain the line between performance and presentation. This article documents the processes, lessons learned, and insights to encourage the difficult work of Black activism, resistance, and transformation in museums and Black performance spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we protect ourselves when telling difficult stories in performance, especially when it is our own story? Writing and performing are both vulnerable roles to play within the theatre, so ensuring our own safety within each aspect of theatrical performance is necessary. This article explores strategies the author utilized to create safety for themselves at each point in the creation process for auto-performance, which also extended to their audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article acknowledges for the first time in an academic context the significant role played by social circus in conflict transformation across Northern Ireland and, more specifically, urban regeneration in Belfast after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The focus is on the Belfast Community Circus School (BCCS) and the annual Festival of Fools, which emerged from the social mission and practical delivery of BCCS activities. BCCS was founded in the mid-1980s to offer children and young people in Belfast an alternative, creative outlet for their feelings and to establish "common ground" between communities amid conflict. This essay takes its lead initially from BCCS founders, reconsidering their motivations and the fundamental tenets of the School – as expressed by teachers and former pupils – alongside other studies of social circus in action around the world throughout a similar period. It also theorises the political intent and impact of BCCS through reference to the performance philosophy of Alan Read. Evidence in support of the argument is drawn from a range of available sources including policy and strategy documents, annual reports, performance evaluations, and interviews with key figures within the organisation. From this body of evidence, it becomes clear that, in the move towards what we might term (after Read) a Republic of Play, a change in BCCS, its own sense of identity and purpose within society was inevitable, as Northern Ireland continues the process of reconciliation and post-conflict transformation. Finally, then, the article attends to the recent transformation within BCCS itself, which in 2021 became Circusful: an organization with its own set of social and economic goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the pivotal transition in Iranian feminist activism through ‘Baraye’, a digital poem collectively written by Iranian users on Twitter during the Woman Life Freedom (WLF) movement, linked to the #MahsaAmini trend launched in September 2022. Initially sparked by tweets featuring the hashtag #MahsaAmini, this trend quickly evolved into a powerful form of digital activism, articulating widespread grievances and aspirations. Shervin Hajipour’s viral song ‘Baraye’, composed from these tweets, amplified the movement’s message and garnered international recognition, including at the Grammy Awards. As a part of the Feminist Media Activism in Transition special issue, this study highlights the relationships between social media and new forms of feminist activism, with ‘Baraye’ as an emblematic work of instapoetry that transcends geographical boundaries and fosters deep emotional and ideological connections among participants. The collective crafting of ‘Baraye’ by Iranians enabled suppressed voices, including marginalized ethnic, religious, and LGBTQIA+ communities, to express their demands and dissent. By employing digital humanities techniques to collect, curate, and analyse pertinent tweets, and drawing upon theories of performance studies, particularly Diana Taylor’s work, this research underscores this instapoem’s impact on Iranian feminist media activism and beyond. By looking at it as a performance, the work seeks to demonstrate how ‘Baraye’ blurs the line between physical presence and digital expression, marking a significant transitional moment in Iranian social movements. The essay aims to offer a different perspective on new modes of activism by examining ‘Baraye’ from the perspectives of performance and new media studies, emphasizing the role of digital platforms in fostering poetic digital activism and offering fresh insights into the interplay between technology and feminist movements in Iran. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the veneer of Orientalism in the course content related to dance practices from East Asia, reflecting on pedagogy and experience in teaching the topic of "Chinese" dance, within the demographics of a majority White university. It examines how existing curriculum structure shapes the ways students learn about dance forms other than Euro-American dance forms. Strategies and practices are discussed, and examples from a classroom and a production are provided, in order to add to the larger conversations happening in the United States and elsewhere, about decolonizing our curricula and harnessing the transformative power of dance. This is a call to action to revolutionize the ways we learn and educate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of the Marian icon and the ensuing encoding and disruption of its regime of visibility is a constant presence within the contemporary Latin American cultural scene. This is particularly true vis-a-vis the depatriarchalization of bodies undertaken by feminist and queer collectives in the region. This essay addresses precisely the performative practice of Mujeres Creando, a Bolivian collective that puts forward performances based on disidentification with the Marian icon. More specifically, this piece analyzes how Mujeres Creando displaces both the virginal maternal body and the categorical imperatives of heterosexuality on reproductive bodies. This movement exposes the historical sediment that shapes the becoming of bodies with reproductive potential into feminized bodies. The analysis includes two performances: La Virgen Barbie (The Barbie Virgin, 2010b) and La Virgen del Cerro (The Virgin of the Mount, 2011), both directed by María Galindo. On a methodological level, the essay draws on the theoretical underpinnings of performance studies, visual and image studies, feminist and queer theory, and Latin American decolonizing thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the application of a performance criticism framework within scholarship on the Hebrew Bible. A natural progression from conversations concerning orality, performance studies allows for increased explication of the biblical texts, most notably pertaining to life, religion, and culture in ancient Israel. The addition of 'lived religion' through a performance studies lens advances the understanding of peoples and areas of life commonly deemed absent from the biblical record. Instead, they are present in the form of an audience witnessing or hearing the performances of, or contained within, these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of essays explores the ways in which Iberian cultural production has constructed kings and queens since 1975. Our focus is the royal figure who inherits their status and power through 'blood' and justifies their power invoking the transcendental mystique of monarchic sovereignty. In one way or another, the figures of Juan Carlos I and his son Felipe VI permeate all cultural representations of monarchical rule produced during the democratic period; and these representations shape our political understanding of the two kings and become a site to contest hegemonic understandings of Spanishness, post-Francoist Spain and Iberian political communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1882 photography book by British photographer Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, Tahiti: A Series of Photographs, features an image of a family of service workers. Wortley, who only briefly passed through the island, refers to the couple in the photograph as his 'servants'. This article traces the margins of the journey of Wortley, as well as that of Lady Annie Brassey, an ultra-wealthy traveller and photography enthusiast who visited Tahiti in 1876 and who contributed the letterpress to Wortley's book. By analysing the text and images of the book and looking at the historical context of Tahiti at that time, and the place European military personnel, travellers, entrepreneurs, royals and local workers had in the island's economy and society, this article argues for the incentives and implications of trivializing and invisiblizing Tahitian labour. Looking at our engagement with a photograph as a transtemporal performance, beginning in the photograph's commission, through the moment of encounter and until its printing and viewing years later, this article considers as a beginning of an entanglement the encounter between Wortley and the Tahitian family. I discuss how, by travelling in 2022 to Tahiti and revisiting Wortley's photographs in different locations around the island, I aimed to influence those entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Jean Baudrillard's status as a translingual writer, particularly through his performance of "Motel Suicide" (1996a) at the 1996 conference "Chance: Days in the Desert" in Nevada. It argues that Baudrillard's bilingual (French-English) performance stages ideas about translation that had become increasingly crucial to his theoretical project. Offering the first close reading of the performance itself, this article begins by retracing Baudrillard's theoretical engagement with cultural translation, particularly through his translingual experiences in the U.S. This framework explains not only how he found himself in this role of performer in the American west, but also how the performance articulated a vision of translingual exchange, translation, and polyvocality as critical responses to a sense of alienation in the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 'Manifesto to Decentre Theatre and Performance Studies' (2021), Swati Arora explores the intangible and invisible borders that function to exclude certain people and knowledges, usually indexed by race, gender, class, and geography, from the academy. As a new working group convenor, I'm interested in thinking through what hidden borders might operate through the Call for Paper and panel selection process. What are prospective panellists really being asked to demonstrate? What unofficial knowledges are privileged and who has access to these? How can we reorient this process towards questioning and away from demonstration of knowledge? In this short provocation I reflect my own experience of selecting abstracts and ask what work might be done to develop a more transparent and empowering model of panel curation. This is a short provocation that was prepared for the roundtable discussion on 'Decolonisation and Solidarity' as part of the conference, Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance, which took place at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, on 30 June and 1 July 2022. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asserts that the particularly personal nature of Lutheran preaching compels preachers to be personally present with the words they proclaim and the people in front of them as they give them the gift of the gospel. Lutheran preaching prioritizes and drives toward the explicit proclamation of Christ crucified that declares Christ's promises to be true "for you." This is personal. The gospel is proclaimed not in general for all, but for each. The preacher gives the gospel to the people in front of them, just as the bread and cup are given to the people in Holy Communion. Such an intimate task invites an intimate presence. After unpacking the term "personally present," this essay outlines three interrelated elements of Lutheran preaching that reveal the importance of the presence of the preacher, and a few words are offered to suggest ways in which these learnings may be of interest to those of other traditions. Finally, four exercises are provided to help homileticians foster this presence in their students and to assist preachers in fostering this presence during their preaching preparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a new generation of independent professional wrestlers, the combat art of wrestling is no longer confined to the ring (where wrestling matches take place), it spills out across the digital spaces of social media, such as Twitter. Back breakers, piledrivers and sharpshooters (wresting attacks) may be what gets a wrestler over with the crowd during a live performance, but razor barbed tweets and engaging video promos (short, recorded messages), can be just as effective at gaining popularity. Independent professional wrestlers are using social media and digital technology to redefine what it means to be a professional wrestler and earn a living from this often-misunderstood popular entertainment. Unlike global stars like Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, independent wrestlers are often famous only to small but dedicated enclaves of fans. Using the theory of micro-celebrity, together with data gained through interview, this article explores developments in on- and offline performance and celebrity. It develops understanding of independent wrestling as a distinct sub-genre which has largely been overlooked in scholarship. It then explores the concept of micro-celebrity, which is the idea of a fame attached to online performance. Finally, it explores these ideas in relation to one contemporary wrestling persona – Charles Crowley. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Music inherently challenges norms of performance practice, expression, interpretation, perception, and audience reception. Given the centrality of these themes to musical performance studies and the significant recording and performance traditions of many works of New Music, it is surprising that so little attention has thus far been dedicated to this repertoire. In response to this lacuna and Clarke and Doffman's (2014) prospective paradigm for a performance studies of New Music, this article offers a close reading of the relatively limited empirical performance literature, highlighting the novel and varied epistemological affordances of the works in question, with consideration for repertoire chosen; selection of recordings; methodological approaches; themes addressed; the relevance of score analysis; the role of the performer; and the import of the research for audiences. I then contribute my own practice-based research on Stockhausen's Klavierstück X (1961), illustrating the creative potential of self-reflexive performance analysis for performers of complex music. I thus offer a state of play for empirical research, while showcasing further aims and objectives, allied to the peculiar exigencies, performance ecologies, and aesthetic qualities of New Music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rereading Toni Morrison's novel Beloved , this article explores how Morrison's work at the limits of language performs the haunting ties between the Reconstruction era and the present day by offering readers a way to experience a rememory of their own. By repeatedly emphasizing the inadequacy of language in expressing traumatic experience, Beloved encourages its readers to, like its characters, look beyond language and seek out a kind of ineffable, embodied knowledge to better understand the lingering traumas of slavery. Through Morrison's concept of "invisible ink," which points to the inevitability that lived experience cannot be captured in language by the author alone but must be filled in by an active reader, this article makes a larger argument: that Beloved acts as both an invitation and a guide to read the ghostly, invisible ink of history that exists outside the novel, haunting our world itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sinha's Animal's People is a novel premised on sound, through the transcription of Animal's voice and recorded interviews. Despite its centrality, sound is occluded by the novel's own textual form. This essay explores the metatextual relationship between sound and text, subaltern voice and novelistic form, by focusing on a particular moment of "guided listening" in Animal's narration. I propose that Animal's invitation to the reader, to hear beauty in the deathly silence of the Kampani's abandoned, toxic factory, compels a mode of counterintuitive listening. This moment presents an impasse, advocating experimentation and a reflexive encounter with the novel going forward. In doing so, Animal's "guided listening" reconfigures Animal's voice not as a matter to be recuperated by the reader and represented through the text, but rather as a voice whose agency lies in its capacity to reorganize the novel's associative economies and inspire the reader to do the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noah Hawley’s anthology series Fargo (FX, 2014- ) has received critical acclaim for its equally humorous and violent depiction of small-town delinquency. Participating in a range of criminal conflicts in and around Fargo, perpetrators are at the heart of the series’ thematic interest. However, Fargo self-reflexively deviates from classic crime and detective fiction schemes and rearranges generic conventions into a pastiche of cultural references. As I demonstrate in this article, the series’ playful rearrangement of familiar elements also affects the depiction of perpetrators. While the series features classic criminal characters such as hitmen and gang members, it is also interested in portraying previously blameless characters who gradually develop criminal potentials—characters who evolve from ordinary citizens to murderers, from oppressed to oppressors, from victims to perpetrators. I argue that the evolution of these unlikely villains is complemented by the choice of actors for the respective roles. The “recycling of the bodies of actors” is part of what Marvin Carlson has termed “ghosting” in theatre studies (The Haunted Stage 10). By interspersing reminiscences of some actors’ previous roles, Fargo deliberately activates the audience’s cultural memory to alienate them from established connotations and create new, uncommon villains. In this vein, the series prompts its audience to reflect on their own expectations that are based on cultural conventions and problematizes the issue of role-playing in the evolution of perpetrators both on a thematic and on a performative level.

In this essay, Tami Spry's impact upon performance, performance studies, and qualitative inquiry writ large is explored through three interrelated concepts found in her work: bodies, space, and matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This performative essay uses poetry and personal narrative to trace my co-constituted scholarly lineage under scholar/mentor Dr. Tami Spry. To honor her legacy throughout performance studies, I share journal entries from 2009 while taking my first course in performance studies with Dr. Spry in Alnwick, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to essay cluster Transnational Pathways of Eurasian Performance Arts.

Raised and educated in the United States, Esther Jean Langdon conducted intensive field research among the Siona (Western Tukanoan), in the Colombian Amazon and has worked, for the last four decades, at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, in the south of Brazil. In this article, we look over her intellectual production and emphasize resonances among the subjects around which her work is articulated: indigenous health, shamanism, and performance. From these considerations, we highlight the main concepts—practice, dialogicity and emergence—that characterize her theoretical and ethnographical contributions.

As a result of the new aesthetics and compositional techniques of musical modernism around and after 1900, the expectations of a concert and opera audience and the actual musical production of the musical avant-garde increasingly drifted apart. Scandal concerts multiplied and heated debates were carried out in the feuilleton. Musicians reacted to this discourse not only by establishing their own communities of interest and presentation platforms for new music. In addition, there was an increased interest among composers to communicate their music to an audience in such a way that it was understood. Introductory lectures, essays, interviews, program notes, and conversations increasingly accompanied performances or new releases of new music. These composers’ statements have been used by musicological research so far largely as sources of information about the respective works. Hardly has research reflected upon the fact that these utterances are (1) communicative acts that presuppose a real or imagined audience and are (2) embedded in a discursive framework to which they respond directly or indirectly.In the article, I discuss these two aspects using examples from the composer Alban Berg. The first is his Wozzeck lecture, which he held for the first time in 1929 on the occasion of the Oldenburg premiere of the work and repeated several times in the following years at other performance venues. In the lecture, Berg uses more than fifty sound examples on the piano to refer primarily to recurring chords and harmonies. Clearly discernible here is the performative strategy of conveying to the audience a specific sonority of non-tonally bound chordal combinations through concrete, sensual auditory impressions. Berg also emphasizes the compositional regularities in Wozzeck, which can be read as a reaction to the repeated reproach of the press that modern music does not follow any regularities. Similar considerations are present in the radio dialogue “What is atonal?” which was broadcast on Radio Wien on April 23, 1930, as a fictitious dialogue between Berg and the journalist Julius Bistron. A detailed analysis of the dialogue script shows that Bistron acted as a representative of various audience segments throughout the lecture. The last section of the article suggests how theories of communication, media, and performance can be used for the examination of such lectures and dialogues and how this deepens our understanding of these communicative acts within the highly controversial field of new music in the twentieth century.

All’interno della produzione artistica contemporanea e nei suoi processi creativi il rischio assume significati diversi e valenze fenomeniche inattese, in particolare nella danza e nel circo contemporanei. Un corpo sul limite della caduta, l’errore, la riuscita dell’azione o il suo fallimento acquisiscono un potere di significazione drammaturgia ed estetica, aprono delle possibilità per nuove relazioni con l’osservatore. Il rischio assume altresì un valore politico sovversivo – se letto in una prospettiva culturale - contro l’economia del successo e della produttività, soprattutto nell’ambito artistico odierno. In questo contributo verranno affrontati esempi differenti, slittando tra danza e circo, per cercare di comprendere come correre il rischio sia la via per sintonizzarsi con la dimensione più umana dello spettatore.

An experimental study is conducted to investigate the effects of different operating parameters on the performance of liquid–gas jet pumps. A square nozzle with an area ratio of 2.25 is designed for the liquid–gas jet pump, and an experimental setup for the liquid–gas jet pump system is constructed. By varying parameters such as inlet flow rate, temperature, and inlet pressure, the variations in the pumping capacity and pumping ratio of the system are studied. The performance of liquid–gas jet pumps with square nozzles and traditional circular nozzles under the same working conditions was compared through experimental data. Explore the performance advantages and disadvantages of liquid–gas jet pumps with different shaped nozzles under the same working conditions. The experimental results indicate that as the inlet flow rate of the liquid–gas jet pump increases, the pumping capacity of the system increases, leading to an increase in the pumping ratio. The operational efficiency slightly decreases with a rise in the working water flow rate. The pumping ratio of the system increases with an increase in the inlet pressure, reaching a peak value of around 4.0 when the inlet valve is fully open. Inlet pressure significantly affects the efficiency of the liquid–gas jet pump, with the highest efficiency point achieved at Pa (inlet air pressure) = 60 kPa, reaching an operational efficiency of 42.48%. When Pa exceeds 70 kPa, the operational efficiency rapidly declines. Comparing the performance of square and circular nozzle liquid–gas jet pumps under the same operating conditions, the performance of the square nozzle liquid–gas jet pump outperforms that of the circular nozzle counterpart. The pumping system's performance decreases continuously with an increase in the working liquid temperature; however, the decline in pumping performance becomes gradual after exceeding 40 °C. As the water level rises, both the pumping capacity and pumping ratio of the system increase. After the liquid level reaches 40 cm, the changes in the pumping system's performance become less pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the Apsara, a celestial dancer in Cambodian myth, is closely associated with Cambodian cultural preservation practices like Cambodian classical dance. The Apsara, its aesthetic features and its association with Cambodian cultural preservation have taken on new meaning in Cambodia's diasporic communities. In the diaspora, Apsara aesthetics have come to symbolize Cambodian heritage, history and identity, becoming a major feature of performances by Cambodian diasporic artists. However, orientalist expectations of Asian performers in the diaspora, paired with both the forgotten history of colonial intervention in Cambodian arts and state-sanctioned initiatives towards Cambodian nationalism, contributes to orientalist (and thus racialized) expectations of Cambodian diasporic performance. Mixed-race artists fail to fit neatly into the dominant narratives of Cambodian performance and have been marginalized by the Cambodian diasporic community's dominant conceptions of performance that are rooted in cultural preservation. As people that sit outside of the aestheticized markers of Cambodian-ness, mixed-race artists often struggle to have their work and their subjectivities recognized by their communities. To circumvent questions of their racial legibility, mixed-race Cambodian American artists construct performances that are strategically padded with markers of Khmer identity by engaging with Apsara aesthetics. This article will explore how three different SoCal-based artists have negotiated their Cambodian American identity and cultural politics through performance and/or performance related materials (ads, images, etc.). I will be using examples from the work of music artist and violinist Chrysanthe Tan, theater practitioner Kalean Ung, and autoethnographic engagement with my own creative projects to show how examining the work of multi-racial Cambodian American performing artists can bring forth the complex dynamics of Cambodian diasporic cultural politics and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Have digital tools and methods accelerated the rate of scholarly production over the last 20 years? If so, has this acceleration been beneficial for scholarship? This article considers examples of accelerated historical scholarship as well as calls for a "slow history." Through an analysis of the author's own experiences with the digital humanities, it examines the advantages and disadvantages of digital technologies in the field of history. It concludes that online resources and digital technologies have expanded the archive for the historian and created new ways to reach other specialists and the general public. Nevertheless, historical scholarship must still rely on carefully crafted, well-argued prose whose production cannot be accelerated by new digital technologies, although recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence may ultimately challenge this situation. In recent decades, the field (or, at times, discipline) of digital humanities (DH) has revolutionized the scholarly profession and beyond—and with good reason. Seen at times as a democratizing force, DH has led to the creation of an increasing number of open- access databases and scholarly publications, the launching of massive archival digitization initiatives, and the development of numerous digital tools that help streamline the work of the academic researcher, student, and educator. In many ways, then, its benefits are manifest. Yet, recent years have also begun to reveal numerous problems that could influence various aspects of our trade as well as what—and how—information will be available in the future. This article discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of DH and invites the reader to reflect on what we can do to help mitigate these problems. Exciting new modes of digital scholarship have emerged in recent years, providing us with expanded windows onto the past. This process has been accelerated by somewhat democratized ways of digitizing and analyzing source material. A main issue of contemporary knowledge production using digitized sources is how power can so easily be reinscribed into access to archives. The choice to digitize collections, even the existence of collections themselves, creates a great opportunity for research but also runs the risk of reinforcing the privilege and worldviews that have shaped and continue to shape the very processes of digitization and digitalization. Drawing on examples of Western and non-Western digital scholarship, this article argues that, although the digital facilitates greater public knowledge of collections, when it comes to decolonizing our research subjects, it also introduces significant layers of complexity. This article advances an analysis of the development and state of critical digital humanities. It posits two modalities for this approach to digital humanities (DH). The first is a modality of inward-looking, functional self-critique that comprises a rethinking of computational genesis stories, logics and methods, institutions and infrastructures, and digital capitalism, and the second is an outward-looking critique best understood as a form of situated sociopolitical engagement that embraces epistemic and social justice projects that are decolonial, anti-racist, inclusive, collaborative, and multilingual. Through these analyses, the article offers a vision of critical digital humanities in its mission to critique the ideologies, social inequities, and epistemological hierarchies that are built into technological products and computational logics and that are concomitantly fostered by knowledge- creation industries of universities, corporations, governments, and the GLAM[R] sector. In this way, the article shows how critical digital humanities helps us to envision the role that DH can play in processes of recovery, reparations, emancipation, and community-building. Drawing upon over 20 years as Editor-in-Chief of H-France, I argue that the scholarly profession, established in Cold War era, pre-digital institutions, has only begun to adapt to the transformations introduced by the global digital humanities. A generational shift is currently underway as younger scholars more natively adept with digital technologies use their skills and forms of new media to press for changes in hiring and tenure practices, to demand greater progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, and to insist that the academy confront the collapse of academic positions in the humanities and provide training for and recognition of alternative career paths. I call upon professional organizations to undertake difficult conversations and take leadership in reshaping professional organizations for a post–Cold War, digital age, especially in terms of funding priorities. Scholarly organizations will best gain influence through collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore performances of letter writing within the archives of the London-based theatre company Clean Break, who work with justice-experienced women and women at risk. Clean Break's archive at the Bishopsgate Institute in London contains an extensive collection of production ephemera and letters. Charting the company's development across forty years of theatre productions, public advocacy, and work in prisons and community settings, these materials of the archive—strategic documents, annotated playscripts and rehearsal notes, production photography and correspondence—reveal the acute importance of the letter to people living on the immediate borderlands of the prison. Despite these generative resonances, however, the epistolary form is very rarely used in Clean Break's theatre: as the archive reveals, since the company was founded by two women in HM Prison Askham Grange in 1979, stagings of letters have occurred in only a handful of instances. In this archival exploration of the epistolary in three works by Clean Break—a film broadcast by the BBC, a play staged at the Royal Court, and a circular chain-play written by women in three prisons—I investigate what lifeworlds beyond prison epistolary forms in performance propose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a short introduction to 'Sondheim from the Side', the Special Issue on the late influential American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, which focuses on the reception experience of minoritarian artists and critics to his body of work. Historicizing the impetus for the collection in the wake of Sondheim's death in November 2021, and citing a number of queer and feminist scholars on the politics of reception – including Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Jane Gallop, Eve Sedgwick, David Román and Carolyn Steedman – this article theorizes the emphasis that the collection places on critically generous, first-person articles that centre rather than occlude the author's social location and affective experience of various works, and it links this emphasis to methods in the field of performance studies. Borrowing from Special Issue contributor Gabrielle Hoyt and Jewish rituals of mourning, the introduction also frames the collection itself as a kind of prayer, or Kaddish, for the deceased artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Decolonization' has superseded 'postcolonial' as the most compelling catchword of the present moment. Broadly speaking, the term possesses two parallel genealogies: African decolonization and Latin American decoloniality. But where are Asian territories such as India and Hong Kong, and, more specifically, fields such as theatre history, located in the debate? This article analyzes the stakes and struggles, inner contradictions and blind spots, involved in decolonizing or decentring the curriculum. It asks whether the decolonial temporalities of our time constitute an adequate lens to theorize theatre history by firstly examining the term's misuse by popular historians, media, and government; and, second, by interrogating a spectrum of positions on 'Indian Theatre' from the nineteenth century onwards. Through this double focus, the article probes the scholarly possibilities for undoing the dominant mode when the 'decolonization trope itself becomes a tool for colonization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasiveness of digital media has profoundly transformed how we preserve and promote intangible cultural heritage (ICH). With the growing popularity of Douyin, a video-focused social networking platform, ICH inheritors in China have begun to post videos that showcase their artisanship. On the one hand, the affordances of Douyin encourage its users to keep up with the latest trend, subjugating them to mimetic participation; on the other hand, heritage policies in China foster the top-down formation of nationalist identity. Therefore, how heritage practitioners negotiate between the top-down authority of policies and the horizontal mimesis of the platform is a matter of concern. This paper applies performance analysis to explore the Douyin videos of a Chinese craftsperson, Li Niangen, a municipal ICH inheritor whose Douyin videos are highly popular. ICH policies in China and the affordances of the platform may support the formation of distinct identities. However, by assuming multiple and even contrasting roles in his videos, Li is fully engaged in none of them. This paper proposes that the presentation of multiple roles copes with the conflicting logic in Chinese society. In addition, the misalignment of these roles may simultaneously utilise and unsettle the administrative and digital authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the Stratford Festival's 2022 production of Hamlet, directed by Peter Pasyk and starring Amaka Umeh, to examine the performance conditions which shaped the play's metatheatrical speech acts and subsequent audience responses. Building on J.L. Austin's theory of speech acts and recent work by Stephen Purcell on Shakespearean metatheatricality, this article demonstrates spontaneous audience responses within the Stratford Hamlet as essential to the co-creation of the performance. This performance analysis also proposes new theoretical language for how metatheatrical speech acts provoke responses in a thrust-stage performance space such as Stratford's Festival Theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]