Drawing on rich insights from cultural, post-structural and postcolonial studies, this book demands that we rethink Carnival and the carnivalesque as not just celebratory moments or even as critical subtext, but also as insightful performatives of social life anywhere, given the entangled times and spaces of these performances. The authors review Carnival’s performative aspects not merely as a calendrical festival, but rather center attention on the relationship between carnival and everyday life, and on how people negotiate their social spaces and possibilities in the context of modern power. The book therefore seeks to highlight the knotted time-spaces of power and to demonstrate the dynamic interplay between state spaces and people’s spaces that are being weaved by carnival's interlocutors. It demonstrates how Carnival and the Carnivalesque become analytic optics through which the relations of power in the social and political life of subjects who seek to tacitically or strategically vary their given identities, can be productively engaged. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.

Drawing on rich insights from cultural, post-structural and postcolonial studies, this book demands that we rethink Carnival and the carnivalesque as not just celebratory moments or even as critical subtext, but also as insightful performatives of social life anywhere, given the entangled times and spaces of these performances. The authors review Carnival’s performative aspects not merely as a calendrical festival, but rather center attention on the relationship between carnival and everyday life, and on how people negotiate their social spaces and possibilities in the context of modern power. The book therefore seeks to highlight the knotted time-spaces of power and to demonstrate the dynamic interplay between state spaces and people’s spaces that are being weaved by carnival's interlocutors. It demonstrates how Carnival and the Carnivalesque become analytic optics through which the relations of power in the social and political life of subjects who seek to tacitically or strategically vary their given identities, can be productively engaged. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture.

Performance and Cultural Politics is a groundbreaking collection of essays which explore the historical and cultural territories of performance, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The essays, exploring performance art, theatre, music and dance, range from Oscar Wilde to Eric Clapton; from the Rose Theatre to U.S. Holocaust museums. The topic includes: * Sex Play: Stereotype, Pose and Dildo * Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory * Genealogies: Critical Performances * Identity Politics: Passing, Carnival and the Law In the concluding section, `Performer's Performance', performance artist Robbie McCauley offers the practitioner's perspective on performance studies. Interdisciplinary, thought-provoking and rich in new ideas, Performance and Cultural Politics is a landmark in the emerging field of performance studies.

Written in two parts, part 1 explores the development of Calypso, from it's emergence in the pre-colonial period to the post colonial period. In part 2, the focus is on the new Carnival musical practices of soca, rapso, chutney, soca and ragga soca, and the ways in which they contirbuted to the redefination of Trinidadian cultural politics in the neoliberal era. The new rationailities, contigencies, desires and musical experments that animated the new musics and enabled them to gradually displace calypso from its centrality as national expression is examined.

Like many Caribbean nations, Trinidad has felt the effects of globalization on its economy, politics, and expressive culture. Even Carnival, once a clandestine folk celebration, has been transformed into a major transnational festival. In Trinidad Carnival, Garth L. Green, Philip W. Scher, and an international group of scholars explore Carnival as a reflection of the nation and culture of Trinidad and Trinidadians worldwide. The nine essays cover topics such as women in Carnival, the politics and poetics of Carnival, Carnival and cultural memory, Carnival as a tourist enterprise, the steelband music of Carnival, Calypso music on the world stage, Carnival and rap, and Carnival as a global celebration. For readers interested in the history and current expression of Carnival, this volume offers a multidimensional and transnational view of Carnival as a representation of Trinidad and Caribbean culture everywhere. Contributors are Robin Balliger, Shannon Dudley, Pamela R. Franco, Patricia A. de Freitas, Ray Funk, Garth L. Green, Donald R. Hill, Lyndon Phillip, Victoria Razak, and Philip W. Scher.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics offers a thorough examination of the complex relationship between art and politics, and the many forms and approaches the engagement between them can take. The contributors - a diverse assembly of artists, activists, scholars from around the world – discuss and demonstrate ways of making art and politics legible and salient in the world. As such the 32 chapters in this volume reflect on performing and visual arts; music, film and new media; as well as covering social practice, community-based work, conceptual, interventionist and movement affiliated forms. The Companion is divided into four distinct parts: Conceptual Cartographies Institutional Materialities Modalities of Practice Making Publics Randy Martin has assembled a collection that ensures that readers will come away with a wider view of what can count as art and politics; where they might find it; and how it moves in the world. The diversity of perspectives is at once challenging and fortifying to those who might dismiss political art on the one hand as not making sufficient difference and on the other to those embracing it but seeking a means to elaborate the significance that it can make in the world. The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics brings together a range of issues and approaches and encourages critical and creative thinking about how art is produced, perceived, and received.

Carnival, that image of sensuous frivolity, is shown by Abner Cohen to be a masquerade for the dynamic relations between culture and politics. His masterful study details the transformation of a local, polyethnic London fair to a massive, exclusively West Indian carnival, known as "Europe's biggest street festival," which in 1976 occasioned a bloody confrontation between black youth and the police and which has since become a fiercely contested cultural event. Cohen contrasts the development of the London carnival with the development of other carnivalesque movements, including the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of California. His valuable analysis of these relatively little-explored urban cultural movements advances further the theoretical formulations developed in his previous studies.

Examines the changes in publishing, movie making, and television programming since the 1960s that have affected Americans' tastes.

In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial. For a short yet pivotal period, argues Isabelle Lehuu, the world of print was turned upside down. Unlike the printed works of the eighteenth century, produced to educate and refine, the new media aimed to entertain a widening yet diversified public of men and women. As they gained popularity among American readers, these new print forms provoked fierce reactions from cultural arbiters who considered them transgressive. No longer the manly art of intellectual pursuit, reading took on new meaning; reading for pleasure became an act with the power to silently disrupt the social order. Neither just an epilogue to an earlier age of scarce books and genteel culture nor merely a prologue to the late nineteenth century and its mass culture and commercial literature, the antebellum era marked a significant passage in the history of books and reading in the United States, Lehuu argues. Originally published 2000. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? Can it be a genuine form of political resistance? What is the purpose of art in a world on fire? In this exhilarating and deeply inspiring work, Amber Massie-Blomfield considers the work of artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers—such as Gran Fury, Billie Holiday, Alexis Wright, Claude Cahun, Rick Lowe, and Joseph Beuys—alongside collectives, communities, and organizations that have used protest sites as their canvas and spearheaded political movements. From writer Ken Saro Wiwa combatting oil pollution in Nigeria and Susan Sontag directing Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo to the women stitching subversive patchworks in Pinochet’s Chile and the artist-activists who blocked the building of a new airport in France, with stories drawn from environmentalism, feminism, anti-fascism, and other movements, Acts of Resistance brings together remarkable acts of creativity that have shifted history on its axis.