The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a modern social drama that enabled the nation's apartheid past to be constructed as a cultural trauma, and by doing so created a new collective narrative of diversity and inclusion. The TRC relied primarily on testimonies from victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence who came forward to tell their stories in a public forum. Rather than simply serving as data for setting the historical record straight, this book shows that it was not only the content of these testimonies but also how these stories were told and what values were attached to them that became significant. Goodman argues that the performative nature of the TRC process effectively designated the past as profane and simultaneously imagined a sacred future community based on democratic idealism and universal solidarity.

Reveals the theatrical dimensions of civilian support for the revolutionary GI Movement of the 1960s-70s Performance played a role both crucial and complicated in the antiwar activism of the 1960s and 1970s. As soldiers and civilian actors, activists, and celebrities worked together to end the Vietnam War, their theatrical acts of solidarity and resistance connected liberation struggles across the lines of race, gender, enlisted status, and nationality. F*ck The Army! offers the first, fully narrated history of the FTA, an antiwar variety show featuring Jane Fonda that played to tens of thousands of active-duty troops over the course of nine months in 1971. From its very conception, the civilian-led show was directed towards the project of making visible the growing antiwar movement organized by GIs, inspired by but also acting as a rebuttal to the increasingly out-of-touch USO tours presented by Bob Hope. Through an analysis of the FTA’s tactical performances of solidarity and resistance, Lindsay Goss brings into view the theatrical dimensions of the GI movement itself, revealing it as representative of the revolutionary and theatrical politics and tactics of the period. The volume highlights how, due to the movement’s subsequent historical erasure, a renewed anti-theatricality emerged from the 1960s and became a potent feature of contemporary political discourse. The author’s deft methodological and analytic strategies, in tandem with her elegantly accessible style demonstrate how seemingly little-known performance practices can activate consequential understandings of what we thought we knew about the recent past. At the same time, she encourages essential conversations about pressing contemporary issues that demand our attention. At its core, F*ck The Army! reveals the fundamentally theatrical character of radical activism when it seeks to challenge the status quo.

Magical Transformations on the Early Modern Stage furthers the debate about the cultural work performed by representations of magic on the early modern English stage. It considers the ways in which performances of magic reflect and feed into a sense of national identity, both in the form of magic contests and in its recurrent linkage to national defence; the extent to which magic can trope other concerns, and what these might be; and how magic is staged and what the representational strategies and techniques might mean. The essays range widely over both canonical plays-Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Doctor Faustus, Bartholomew Fair-and notably less canonical ones such as The Birth of Merlin, Fedele and Fortunio, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Devil is an Ass, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Witch of Edmonton, putting the two groups into dialogue with each other and also exploring ways in which they can be profitably related to contemporary cases or accusations of witchcraft. Attending to the representational strategies and self-conscious intertextuality of the plays as well as to their treatment of their subject matter, the essays reveal the plays they discuss as actively intervening in contemporary debates about witchcraft and magic in ways which themselves effect transformation rather than simply discussing it. At the heart of all the essays lies an interest in the transformative power of magic, but collectively they show that the idea of transformation applies not only to the objects or even to the subjects of magic, but that the plays themselves can be seen as working to bring about change in the ways that they challenge contemporary assumptions and stereotypes.

Occupy Wall Street burst onto the stage of history in the fall of 2011. First by the tens, then by the tens of thousands, protestors filled the streets and laid claim to the squares of nearly 1,500 towns and cities, until, one by one, the occupations were forcibly evicted. In The Occupiers, Michael Gould-Wartofsky offers a front-seat view of the action in the streets of New York City and beyond. Painting a vivid picture of everyday life in the square through the use of material gathered in the course of two years of on-the-ground investigation, Gould-Wartofsky traces the occupation of Zuccotti Park--and some of its counterparts across the United States and around the world--from inception to eviction. He takes up the challenges the occupiers faced, the paradoxes of direct democracy, and the dynamics of direct action and police action and explores the ways in which occupied squares became focal points for an emerging opposition to the politics of austerity, restricted democracy, and the power of corporate America. Much of the discussion of the Occupy phenomenon has treated it as if it lived and died in Zuccotti Park, but Gould-Wartofsky follows the evicted occupiers into exile and charts their evolving strategies, tactics, and tensions as they seek to resist, regroup, and reoccupy. Displaced from public spaces and news headlines, the 99 Percent movement has spread out from the financial centers and across an America still struggling to recover in the aftermath of the crisis. Even if the movement fails to achieve radical reform, Gould-Wartofsky maintains, its offshoots may well accelerate the pace of change in the United States in the years to come.

Presently the world is undergoing tremendous social, cultural and economic transformation. For sociologists, the challenge is arriving at a sound mapping of this tumultuous world stage. In this book, the contributing authors consider solidarity as a cognitive problem of basic science. They examine how solidarity is produced and reproduced, how it is related to social processes, and how such processes can be formalized and create conditions for productively studying their properties. Mathematical models and representations are presented by the authors as a coherent set of tools for understanding many social phenomena.

The first comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre from its origins, The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical offers both a historical account of musical theatre from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of key works and productions that illustrate its aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings.

The Routledge Reader in Politics and Performance brings together for the first time a comprehensive collection of extracts from key writings on politics, ideology, and performance. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, and including new writings from leading scholars, the book provides material on: * post-coloniality and performance theory and practice * critical theories and performance * intercultural perspectives * power, politics and the theatre * sexuality in performance * live arts and the media * theatre games.