A complex study of the links between science and the moving body and its expressive capacities, this work develops important connections about how actors can train themselves to move out of habitual ...responses to acting tasks by "shifting their initiation point." Because consciousness, as a manifestation of the body, grows out of perception and action, then actors must increase their range of approaches to acting that explore the relationships of acting to the self, other performers, and to the performance environment. ...the authors' work attempts to provide opportunities-drawing on modifications of Augusto Boal's image-theatre work-to create and develop a different space for public sharing. ...Joan Robbin's essay, "Forging Cultural Dialogue with an Undergraduate International Play Festival," tracks the inception and development of the festival-the commission and production of sixteen plays from fifteen countries-since 2001 at Ohio Northern University.
Silverman discusses Herman Melville's "Pierre." If Melville's letter expresses sentimental feeling, it does so in specific relation to issues of authorship and audience.
Richard Rorty is interviewed. He discusses holism, which as he argues "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," is not merely a question of antifoundationalist polemic.
With emancipation a fait accompli by 1865, one might ask why Kentucky-born Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907), former Confederate soldier, son of a border state slaveholder, began painting slaves ...then. Noble had known the “peculiar institution” at first hand, albeit from a privileged position within the master class. As a result, his choice to embark upon a career as a painter using historical incidents from slavery makes for an interesting study. Were the paintings a way of atoning for his Confederate culpability, a rebel pounding his sword into a paintbrush to appease the conquering North? Or was he capitalizing on his unique geographic perspective as a scion of slave-trafficking Frankfort, Kentucky, soon to head a prestigious art school in Cincinnati, the city where so many runaways first tasted freedom? Between 1865 and 1869 Noble exhibited in northern cities a total of eight paintings with African American subjects. Two of these, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis (1865, repainted ca. 1870) and Margaret Garner (1867), featured mixed-race women, or mulattos, as they had come to be called. From a young female up for auction, to the famous fugitive Margaret Garner, his portrayals show a transformation taking place within perceptions of biracial women in post-emancipation America. Opinions about mulattos surfaced in a range of theoretical discussions, from the scientific to the political, as strategists North and South envisioned evolving social policy.
According to many critics, the novel Stowe prefaces, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and their Friends, seems to share her doubts concerning the capability of "the race at present held as slaves" to ...govern themselves. Duane suggests that The Garies' cold reception can be traced, at least in part, to the discomfiting answers the novel provides to Stowe's questions about black self-government, answers that defy a venerated plotline where racial oppression is imposed from outside the black community and courageous protest emanates from within.
Black in the U.S.S.R Matusevich, Maxim
Transition (Kampala, Uganda),
01/2008
100
Journal Article
In some significant ways Soviet passports differed from similar identity papers issued by most other modern states: they contained such information as your place of residence, marital status, ...military rank for reserve soldiers and officers, and, most notoriously, the so-called line no. 5 identifying the bearer's ethnicity. Jews in the Soviet Union routinely found themselves negotiating a murky space-framed by Soviet laws and political slogans, but somewhat dissociated from them in content. Hannibal's presence in Russian history has always been surrounded by a kind of romantic aura-in part due to his own unconventional life story, but also because of the keen interest that Pushkin displayed toward his exotic progenitor, going even so far as to attempt to write a comprehensive (though unfinished) Hannibal biography, The Arap of Peter the Great. At about the same time that Stowe's heart-wrenching portrayal of black life in America created a literary sensation among Russia's educated classes, a black American actor, Ira Aldridge, conquered the "hearts and minds" of the theater-going public in St. Petersburg and Moscow. ...his last days (he died in 1867 while on a tour of Russian-controlled Poland), Aldridge would cherish the acceptance and recognition he found among all classes of Russian society, as he did his close personal friendship with the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.
Critics of "The Monster" have thus tended to interpret this decline as Crane's larger moral comment about a disappointing lack of human brotherhood among social groups-or, more concretely, as his ...critique of small-town racist practices.1 What is lacking in the townspeople of Whilomville, for these readers, is exemplified in the failure to find an answer to Reifsnyder's question; they lack, that is, the kind of universal human sympathy that would allow them to recognize not only Henry's sacrificial act, but also his fundamental human sameness and, thus, his right to a place in their community. Within the context of sentimental humanism-most famously exemplified by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and that novel's strategies for making readers "feel right" about the plight of enslaved black Americans-sympathy could effect social change thanks to the remarkable power of fellow feeling to transcend social differences, revealing a common humanity.
During the long nineteenth century, musical culture in the United States underwent dramatic expansion. What in the eighteenth century were scattered and disparate beginnings—congregational singers, ...transplanted professional musicians from Europe, "gentleman amateurs" (in the words of Gilbert Chase), and the unrecognized musical cultures of African slaves and indigenous peoples—grew into a robust and diverse musical society with widespread ownership of musical instruments and an emergent group of homegrown amateur and professional musicians performing folk, art, and popular musical idioms. This changing musical culture was documented, in part, by the era's fiction writers and poets, who depicted the role of music in the lives of Americans in novels, short stories, sketches, and poems. Fictive writings became a repository for expressing ideas about music's cultural functions, its role in social relationships and identity formations, and its influence on human affections, commerce, language, and broader cultural beliefs. These fictive representations of musical practices and performances constitute a mode of descriptive musical ethnography that explains the uses of music in the United States during the nineteenth century. This dissertation approaches U.S. fiction and poetry as a resource for the cultural study of music. It argues that the specialized use of fiction and poetry to depict cultural, social, physical, and psychological experiences of music produces a fictive musical ethnography that anticipates the descriptive reporting of ethnomusicologists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With chapters that discuss representations of musical instruments, social practices of musical listening, the belief in poetry as a kind of music, and the use of literary forms—including epistolary, sketch, novel, autobiography, and poetry—to depict the internalized or interior experiences of music, the dissertation studies fictive writings as a narrative mode for reporting the human uses of music and ideas about music making.
This study establishes a relationship between literary and visual cartographies of the North American West by analyzing regional fiction by Mary Hallock Foote, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Mourning Dove ...in relation to contemporaneous maps, thus offering a more thorough understanding of how particular women writers produced, challenged, and supported notions of the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.I first situate literary regionalism as a genre that emerged during the nation's growing geographical interest and argue that it intersects with a particular cartographic narrative concerning the perceived closing of the western frontier. In Chapter 2, I read Mary Hallock Foote's first novel, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp (1883) alongside maps that advertise the claims of Leadville, Colorado, and argue that the fiction undermines the cartographic narrative of a transparent, profitable mining industry. Rather than perpetuate the myth that fortunes are easy to find, Foote links mapping and boundaries to violence. Next, I argue that Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona (1884) gains new significance in light of her concern with the mapping and surveying of Indian reservations, evident in her other writings. Ramona came out the same year that the Office of Indian Affairs published the Map of Indian Reservations within the Limits of the United States. The second iteration of the map, published five years later, includes an inset of the Mission region not included in the original, a modification that is a testament to the influence of her work. Finally, I read Mourning Dove's Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Range (1927) as a counter to the rationalized versions of the Flathead Indian Reservation depicted in maps marketing the opening of the reservation for non-Indigenous settlement with a highly romanticized version of the landscape. The novel contests the cartographic erasure of the indigenous population by describing the landscape from the perspective of an indigenous woman. The pairing of maps with specific examples of regional literature offers new insights regarding regionalism's simultaneous critique and solidification of mainstream culture, allowing us to rethink the power of regionalism in cartographic terms.
This dissertation builds upon and adds to scholarly consideration of the relationship between the state and the individual in a commercial republic. I argue that mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth ...century discursive negotiations reflect a significant transformation in the modalities of civic virtue and civic identity, an interstitial subjectivity, in between and yet overlapping with private and public self-constructions. J.G.A. Pocock's influential scholarly theorization of civic virtue traces the movement from a classical republican virtu defined by martial or civic service to the nation state, to the Augustan British connection of virtue to property ownership, which conferred intellectual autonomy and full subjectivity on citizens. Pocock's thesis is that the onset of a credit economy in eighteenth-century Britain, as a system defined by relational and fluctuating values, spelled the death of subjective stability, and therefore, of civic virtue. I argue that out of this instability, which decentered the socio-politically empowered citizenry, arose a rich and democratizing evolution in the discourse of modern civic virtue. This transformation made virtuous public subjectivity available to socio-politically marginalized citizens by defining it through transnational and imaginative affiliations.
