A Critical Companion To Lynn Nottage

A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage places this renowned, award-winning playwright's contribution to American theatre in scholarly context. The volume covers Nottage's plays, productions, activism, and artistic collaborations to display the extraordinary breadth and depth of her work. The collection contains chapters on each of her major works, and includes a special three-chapter section devoted to Ruined, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The anthology also features an interview about collaboration and creativity with Lynn Nottage and two of her most frequent directors, Seret Scott and Kate Whoriskey.

This book translates recent scholarship into pedagogy for teaching Edith Wharton’s widely celebrated and less-known fiction to students in the twenty-first century. It comprises such themes as American and European cultures, material culture, identity, sexuality, class, gender, law, history, journalism, anarchism, war, addiction, disability, ecology, technology, and social media in historical, cultural, transcultural, international, and regional contexts. It includes Wharton’s works compared to those of other authors, taught online, read in foreign universities, and studied in film adaptations.

In this innovative study of performance in international relations, James R. Ball III asks why states and their representatives come to the United Nations to perform for a global audience and how those audiences may intervene in the spectacle of global politics. Theater of State looks at key spaces in which global politics play out: in debating forums of the UN, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and in peacekeeping operations in Africa and the Middle East, as well as in a variety of related media productions. Ball argues that culture and politics form a unified field organized by the theatricality of its actors and the engaged spectatorship of its audiences. He provides a theory of global political spectatorship: of how the world watches itself in institutions and beyond, and of what citizens and diplomats do by watching. This study of the lived experience of spectacular politics on the world stage draws on theories of theater, performance, and politics to offer new ways of approaching issues of war, cosmopolitanism, international justice, governance, and activism. Situated at the nexus of two disciplines, performance studies and political science, this volume encourages conversations between the two so that each might offer lessons to the other.

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Theresa Rebeck: Omnium Gatherum (2003), Mauritius (2007), and The Understudy (2008); * Sarah Ruhl: Eurydice (2003), Clean House (2004), and In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play) (2009); * Lynn Nottage: Intimate Apparel (2003), Fabulation or Re-Education of Undine (2004), and Ruined (2008); * Charles Mee: Big Love (2000), Wintertime (2005), and Hotel Cassiopeia (2006).

Papers solicited from the presenters for the cancelled 2020 Southeastern Theatre Conference.

What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

What is international law, and how does it work? This book argues that our answers to these fundamental questions are shaped by a variety of social cognition and knowledge production processes. These processes act as invisible frames, through which we understand international law. To better conceive the frames within which international law moves and performs, we must understand how psychological and socio-cultural factors affect decision-making in an international legal process. This includes identifying the groups of people and institutions that shape and alter the prevailing discourse in international law, and unearthing the hidden meaning of the various mythologies that populate and influence our normative world. With chapters from leading experts in the discipline, employing insights from sociology, psychology, and behavioural science, this book investigates the mechanisms that allow us to apprehend and intellectually represent the social practice of international law. It unveils the hidden or unnoticed processes by which our understanding of international law is formed, and helps readers to unlearn some of the presuppositions that inform our largely unquestioned beliefs about international law.