European Others

Considers the complications of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in Europeanizing from below

"The essays represent a selection of papers delivered at an international conference held under the title 'Europe and its Others: Interperceptions, Past, Present, Future', at St Andrews University in June 2007, under the aegis of the Institute for European Cultural Identity Studies"--Introd.

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.

Looks at immigration and asylum legislation and polices in Europe to investigate how immigrants are 'othered' by them.

Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe is the first book to focus directly on the visual representation of marginal and outcast people in early modern Europe. The volume offers a comprehensive and groundbreaking analysis of a wide range of images featuring Jews and Turks, roguish beggars, syphilitics and plague victims, the 'deserving poor', toothpullers, beggar philosophers, black slaves, itinerant actors and street hawkers. Its broad geographical and chronological scope allows the reader to build a wider picture of visual strategies and conventions for the depiction of the poor and the marginal as they developed in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Britain and Ireland. While such types had often been depicted in earlier centuries, the essays show that they came to play a newly significant and formative role in European art between 1500 and 1750. Marking a clear departure from much previous scholarship on the subject - which has tended to view representations of poverty as passive by-products of non-visual forces - these essays place the image itself at the centre of the investigation. The studies show that many depictions of socially marginal people operated in essentially hegemonic fashion, as a way of controlling or fixing the social and moral identity of those living on the edge. At the same time, they also reveal the inventiveness and originality of many early modern artists in dealing with this subject matter, showing how the sophisticated visuality of their representations could render meaning ambiguous in relation to such controlling discourses.

Considers the complications of race, religion, sexuality, and gender in Europeanizing from below

This book examines the EU public diplomacy towards China with the case of the Jean Monnet Programme. The author discusses how the EU’s functional and normative knowledge has been disseminated across physical and psychological borders.

The political landscape in Europe is currently going through a phase of rapid change. New actors and movements that claim to represent 'the will of the people' are attracting considerable public attention, with dramatic consequences for election outcomes. This volume explores the new political order with a particular focus on discursive constructions of 'the people' and the category of populism across the spectrum. It shows how a unitary representation of 'the people' is a central element in a vast range of very diverse political discourses today, acting to anchor identities and project antagonisms in a multitude of settings. The chapters in this book explore commonality and contrast in representations of ‘the people’ in both radical and mainstream political movements, looking in depth at recent political discourses in the European sphere. The authors draw on approaches ranging from Essex-style discourse theory over critical discourse studies, corpus analysis and linguistic pragmatics, to investigate how historically situated categories such as the people and populism become fixed through local linguistic, textual and narrative practices as well as through wider ideological and discursive patterns. As of January 2023, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.