Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy-divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, ...hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations.
Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas-Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker-who were icons in their own time,Moving Performancesconsiders what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva's detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva's moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife.
As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect,Moving Performancesalso introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture.Music Hall and Modernitydemonstrates how such pioneering cultural ...critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of "the people."In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.Music Hall and Modernityoffers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.
Purpose
It is well known that some patients experience difficulties adapting to new glasses. However, little is known about what patients themselves understand of the adaptation process, and how this ...influences their attitudes and the decisions they make when adapting to a new pair of glasses. Nor is it understood whether these factors affect their wearing habits.
Methods
We conducted four focus groups. Participants were 22 glasses wearers (mean ± SD age 43 ± 14 years, range 21–71 years) who reported they: (1) wore spectacle correction for distance vision (single vision, bifocal or progressive lenses); (2) had struggled to get used to a new pair of glasses and (3) sometimes chose not to wear their distance correction. Focus groups were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically.
Results
We identified three themes. Trust is about how participants' trust in their optometrist and themselves influences the likelihood of them adapting successfully to new glasses. Conflict describes how the advice patients have received about adapting to glasses can conflict with what they have experienced and how this conflict influences their expectations. Part of Me explores how participants' experiences and feelings about their glasses are important to adaptation and this includes physical, visual, emotional and behavioural aspects.
Conclusions
The traditional optometric perspective of adaptation to glasses is much narrower than that held by patients, and significantly underestimates the physical, behavioural and emotional adaptation that patients must go through in order to feel fully comfortable wearing their glasses. Patients should receive significantly more information about adaptation, including symptoms that may be experienced and why these happen, practical tips to aid adaptation, and when and how to raise concerns. Patients should also receive information about the day‐to‐day effects of blur adaptation to avoid them not wearing their glasses, including for vision‐critical tasks such as driving.
In February 2020, Turkey announced that the country would no longer prevent refugees and migrants from crossing into the European Union. The announcement resulted in mass human mobility heading to ...the Turkish border city of Edirne. Relying on freshly collected data through interviews and field visits, this article argues that the 2020 events were part of a state-led execution of ‘engineered migration’ through a constellation of actors, technologies and practices. Turkey’s performative act of engineered migration created a spectacle in ways that differ from the spectacle’s usual materialization at the EU’s external borders. By breaking from its earlier role as a partner, the Turkish state engaged in a countermove fundamentally altering the dyadic process through which the spectacle routinely materializes at EU external borders around the hypervisibilization of migrant illegality. Reconceptualizing the spectacle through engineered migration, the article identifies two complementary acts by Turkish actors: the spectacularization of European (Greek) violence and the creation of a humanitarian space to showcase Turkey as the ‘benevolent’ actor. The article also discusses how the sort of hypervisibility achieved through the spectacle has displaced violence from its points of emergence and creation and becomes the routinized form of border security in Turkey.
On 17 June 2017, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called on pro-regime vigilantes to ‘fire at will’ or to act on their own discretion in putting the state’s Islamic ...teaching into practice without the need to consult either their superiors or the relevant authorities. Our article argues that, since 1979, the policy of ‘firing at will’ has been the defining feature of the Islamic Republic’s model of governance and corresponds to the spirit of its constitution. Inspired by the scholarship on disciplinary policies, this article seeks to contextualize the ‘firing at will’ policy within the ethno-religious and racial discourse embodied in and warranted by the Islamic Republic’s constitution. Finally, by discussing the state’s violent treatment of Kurdish kolbers (cross-border laborers), we will show how the Iranian state’s internal colonial policies have engendered a state of exception and normalized the daily spectacle of violence in Eastern Kurdistan.
El presente ensayo explora el itinerario de la crítica que Nietzsche ejerció sobre el arte de Wagner en tres pasos. Primero, se trata de reconocer la juvenil admiración del filósofo por la ópera ...wagneriana entendida como un renacimiento del drama musical antiguo. Luego, se explora el tránsito hacia su desilusión en la clave de la influencia de Schopenhauer sobre Wagner. Finalmente, el ensayo remata en la crítica madura de Nietzsche sobre Wagner, donde se advierten los prolegómenos decimonónicos de la transformación general del arte en espectáculo en el sentido contemporáneo.
Les conséquences d’un progrès technologique ultra-rapide ne préoccupent pas seulement les chercheurs, théoriciens et constructeurs, mais également les artistes. Ces derniers s’intéressent de plus en ...plus aux idéologies et aux mythologies que le développement technologique et la montée en puissance de l’intelligence artificielle font émerger. Le théâtre s’est prononcé déjà plusieurs fois à ce propos, d’abord par rapport à la technique, notamment à travers les réalisations et la pensée des avant-gardes des années 1920, puis à la technologie, en intégrant ses propres moyens d’expression. Le spectacle contemporain nous confronte à une multitude de dispositifs technologiques permettant aux metteurs en scène de se positionner sur la question de l’intelligence artificielle en créant à la fois des messages d’alerte et des spéculations sur un futur possible. Quelles sont les frontières entre l’humain et l’intelligence artificielle ? Comment se réapproprier le présent pour devenir les acteurs du monde à venir ? Quel message nous transmet la scène contemporaine à ce sujet ? Nous abordons ces questions à travers des spectacles tels que Artefact de Joris Mathieu, Pygmalion et Frankenstein d’Improbotics, La Vallée de l’étrange de Stefan Kaegi et Contes et Légendes de Joël Pommerat.
The boom and bust cycle of shopping malls has had profound repercussions for U.S. cities. Now, lifestyle centers are ascending, and this latest form of retail development is more costly than the ...development of classic suburban-style shopping malls. Concerns regarding the sustainability of lifestyle centers are highlighted in this article, which is a critical political economic assessment of how the emergence of lifestyle centers and the boom and bust cycle of shopping malls diverge and converge. This article uses qualitative methods in a case study of shopping malls and lifestyle centers in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metropolitan region, onboarding a political economic understanding of creative destruction, neoliberal governance strategies, and drawing on Guy Debord's notion of ‘the society of the spectacle.’ It is concluded that the boom and bust cycle of retail development is part of the continual production and degradation of spectacle-(re)enforcing built environments within advanced capitalism, and that stopping boom and bust retail trends requires a radical reorientation of planning, design, and policy-making toward new spatial ideologies informed by truly participatory community engagement.
•Relates lifestyle center production to mall boom and bust in Dallas-Fort Worth•Lifestyle centers and shopping malls interpreted via Debord's notion of spectacle•Processes behind mall decline speak to possible future of lifestyle center decline.•Recommends reorientation toward participatory planning, design, and policy
