Synopses & Reviews
There is extraordinary diversity, depth, and complexity in the encounter between theatre, performance, and human rights. Through an examination of a rich repertoire of plays and performance practices from and about countries across six continents, the contributors to this volume seek to open the way toward understanding the character and significance of this encounter. Divided into three interrelated sections, the book focuses on a range of critical and timely human rights questions as they relate to transitional justice, memory politics, citizenship, the 'War on Terror,' transnational spectatorship, and the global economic order. Authors ask what artists, audiences and readers imagine, expect, and desire from the engagement of theatre and performance with these crucial questions. Ultimately, this book aims to provide nuanced, global perspectives on the emerging and transformative aesthetics, ethics and effects of this encounter at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Review
Review
"Memory politics and the politics of reconciliation, transnational migration and globalized neoliberal economics, postliberal detention and postnational citizenship, statelessness and states of exception - all are topics we associate today with human rights. Yet much theatre and performance scholarship has remained attached to the narratives of empathy, catharsis, and chaos of an outmoded rhetoric of universalized humanity. As a welcome corrective, the editors of this volume propose we think of theatre and performance practices within carefully detailed critical public spheres and in so doing offers critical possibilities for re-imagining not only human rights in performance but imagining differently theatre and performance in contemporary human rights activism and advocacy." - Jean Graham-Jones, Professor of Theatre, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
"This is the book that scholars of literature and human rights have been waiting for, the one that pushes past the current focus on narrative to examine theatre and performance in relation to a broad range of human rights violations and claims . . . A must-read for scholars of theatre and performance, and of human rights." - Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Associate Professor of, English, Babson College, USA
Review
"Memory politics and the politics of reconciliation, transnational migration and globalized neoliberal economics, postliberal detention and postnational citizenship, statelessness and states of exception - all are topics we associate today with human rights. Yet much theatre and performance scholarship has remained attached to the narratives of empathy, catharsis, and chaos of an outmoded rhetoric of universalized humanity. As a welcome corrective, the editors of this volume propose we think of theatre and performance practices within carefully detailed critical public spheres and in so doing offers critical possibilities for re-imagining not only human rights in performance but imagining differently theatre and performance in contemporary human rights activism and advocacy." - Jean Graham-Jones, Professor of Theatre, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
"This is the book that scholars of literature and human rights have been waiting for, the one that pushes past the current focus on narrative to examine theatre and performance in relation to a broad range of human rights violations and claims . . . A must-read for scholars of theatre and performance, and of human rights." - Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg, Associate Professor of, English, Babson College, USA
Review
"Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater is a welcome addition to a growing field of scholarship on contemporary theater and human rights." - College Literature
About the Author
Brenda Werth is an associate professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University. Her research focuses on Latin American theatre, performance, memory studies, and human rights. She is author of the book Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina (2010). Her current project explores urban imaginaries in twenty-first-century theatre and performance in the Americas. Paola S. Hernández is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (2009) studies how theatre explores and reacts to the effects propagated by economic and cultural globalization through texts, aesthetics, characters, production, and theatre practitioners. She has published articles on political theatre, urban interventions, and biodramas in journals such as Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Symposium, and Teatro XXI. Her current research focuses on contemporary documentary theatre in Peru, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.Florian Nikolas Becker is an associate professor of German and Comparative Literature at Bard College and Director of Bard Programs at European College of Liberal Arts of Bard in Berlin. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and at Princeton. Recent articles have appeared in Modern Drama, the Brecht Yearbook, and the Routledge Handbook of Human Rights. He has completed a monograph entitled Theater and Praxis: Realism as Critique in Twentieth-Century German Drama and is currently co-editing a companion to the works of Heiner Müller.
Table of Contents
Foreword:
J.LaneIntroduction: Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theatre;
F.N.Becker,
B.Werth &
P.HernándezPART I: TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Dead Body Politics: Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani at Peru's Truth Commission; A.LambrightWhere 'God is Like a Longing': Theatre and Social Vulnerability in Mozambique; L.MadureiraThe ESMA: From Torture Chambers into New Sites of Memory; P.HernándezSurpassing Metaphors of Violence in Postdictatorial Southern Cone Theatre; B.WerthPART II: THE 'WAR ON TERROR' AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER
Place and Misplaced Rights in Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom; L.MantoanChallenging the 'fetish of the verbatim': New Aesthetics and Familiar Abuses in Christine Evans's Slow Falling Bird; C.WilsonStages of Transit: Rascón Banda's Hotel Juárez and Sarah Misemer Peveroni's Berlín; S.MisemerMigrant Melodrama, Human Rights, and Elvira Arellano; A.PugaPART III: TRANSNATIONAL PUBLICS
'Get up, Stand up, Stand up for your Rights': Transnational Belonging and Rights of Citizenship in Dominican Theatre; C.StevensTheatres of Vigil and Vigilance: A Playwright's Notes on Theatre and Human Rights in the Philippines; J.Barrios'The Spectacle of Our Suffering': Staging the International Human Rights Imaginary in Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul; E.AnkerBroadway Without Borders: Eve Ensler, Lynn Nottage, and the Campaign to End Violence against Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo; K.Bystrom