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50 books match the query 'Experiments' and 9 start with e

cover of Experiments in Democracy: Interracial and Cross-Cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912-1945

Experiments in Democracy

Interracial and Cross-Cultural Exchange in American Theatre, 1912-1945

Edited by Cheryl Black and Jonathan Shandell

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of American theatres and theatre artists fostered interracial collaboration and socialization on stage, behind the scenes, and among audiences. In an era marked by entrenched racial segregation and inequality, these artists used performance to bridge America’s persistent racial divide and to bring African American, Latino/Latina, Asian American, Native American, and Jewish American communities and traditions into the nation’s broader cultural conversation.
 
In Experiments in Democracy, edited by Cheryl Black and Jonathan Shandell, theatre historians examine a wide range of performances—from Broadway, folk plays and dance productions to scripted political rallies and radio dramas. Contributors look at such diverse groups as the Theatre Union, La Unión Martí-Maceo, and the American Negro Theatre, as well as individual playwrights and their works, including Theodore Browne’s folk opera Natural Man, Josefina Niggli’s Soldadera, and playwright Lynn Riggs’s Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs (the basis for the musical Oklahoma!). Exploring the ways progressive artists sought to connect isolated racial and cultural groups in pursuit of a more just and democratic society, contributors take into account the blind spots, compromised methods, and unacknowledged biases at play in their practices and strategies. Essays demonstrate how the gap between the ideal of American democracy and its practice—mired in entrenched systems of white privilege, economic inequality, and social prejudice—complicated the work of these artists.
 
Focusing on questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on the stage in the decades preceding the Civil Rights era, Experiments in Democracy fills an important gap in our understanding of the history of the American stage—and sheds light on these still-relevant questions in contemporary American society. 
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cover of Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond

Experiments in Mystical Atheism

Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond

Brook Ziporyn

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism.

Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In this book, Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism.

In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today.
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cover of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam

Experiments in Skin

Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

Duke University Press, 2021

In Experiments in Skin Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin as the site around which these ideas have been formed, Tu foregrounds the histories of militarism in the production of US biomedical knowledge and commercial cosmetics. She uncovers the efforts of wartime scientists in the US Military Dermatology Research Program to alleviate the environmental and chemical risks to soldiers' skin. These dermatologists sought relief for white soldiers while denying that African American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians were also vulnerable to harm. Their experiments led to the development of pharmaceutical cosmetics, now used by women in Ho Chi Minh City to tend to their skin, and to grapple with the damage caused by the war's lingering toxicity. In showing how the US military laid the foundations for contemporary Vietnamese consumption of cosmetics and practices of beauty, Tu shows how the intersecting histories of militarism, biomedicine, race, and aesthetics become materially and metaphorically visible on skin.
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cover of Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic

Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project

Edited by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, and Sharon Bridgforth

University of Texas Press, 2010

In Austin, Texas, in 2002, a group of artists, activists, and academics led by performance studies scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones formed the Austin Project (tAP), which meets annually in order to provide a space for women of color and their allies to build relationships based on trust, creativity, and commitment to social justice by working together to write and perform work in the jazz aesthetic.

Inspired by this experience, this book is both an anthology of new writing and a sourcebook for those who would like to use creative writing and performance to energize their artistic, scholarly, and activist practices. Theoretical and historical essays by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones describe and define the African American tradition of art-making known as the jazz aesthetic, and explain how her own work in this tradition inspired her to start tAP.

Key artists in the tradition, from Bessie Award–winning choreographer Laurie Carlos and writer/performer Robbie McCauley to playwrights Daniel Alexander Jones and Carl Hancock Rux, worked with the women of tAP as mentors and teachers. This book brings together never-before-published, must-read materials by these nationally known artists and the transformative writing of tAP participants. A handbook for workshop leaders by Lambda Literary Award–winning writer Sharon Bridgforth, tAP's inaugural anchor artist, offers readers the tools for starting similar projects in their own communities. A full-length script of the 2005 tAP performance is an original documentation of the collaborative, breath-based, body work of the jazz aesthetic in theatre, and provides both a script for use by theatre artists and an invaluable documentation of a major transformative movement in contemporary performance.

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cover of Experiments in the Dark: Visualizing Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar

Experiments in the Dark

Visualizing Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar

Pamila Gupta

University of Michigan Press, 2027

What kind of history are photographs? Experiments in the Dark explores this question through the lens of a twentieth-century East African Indian Ocean photo studio collection, Capital Arts Studio (CAS), and its proprietors Ranchhod and Rohit Oza in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Pamila Gupta gathers and reads a range of photographs and genres from the studio, exploring how they relate to Zanzibar’s vibrant visual cultures during the Omani sultanate, British colonial, and postrevolution periods. Gupta’s reading of this little-known photographic archive brings the work into a broader historical context of the Indian Ocean in a visual archive that has endured despite the forces of history.

Through a blend of archival reconstruction and curation, personal reflection, and interviews with Rohit Oza, the son of the studio’s founder Ranchhod Oza, Gupta focuses on the construction and curation of the CAS collection and what this archive can tell us about the South Asian and Goan diasporas, the wider Indian Ocean world, African fashion, urban lives, and image making in Zanzibar from 1930 to 2024.

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cover of Experiments in the Fading Light

Experiments in the Fading Light

Peck, Steven L.

Signature Books, 2025

Experiments in the Fading Light is a poetic exploration that combines science, faith, and the aesthetic dimensions of art and nature. The poems range from a mischievous reimagining of the twelfth-century nun Hildegard von Bingen’s work on animals to looking at the deep suffering brought on by illness and other sorrows. The work also explores the concept of faith and meaning in light of how complicated life has become in our contemporary world.
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cover of Experiments with Body Agent Architecture: The 586-year-old Spiritello in Il Regno Digitale

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

The 586-year-old Spiritello in Il Regno Digitale

Alessandro Ayuso

University College London, 2022

Explore the human figure as an agent of design through scholarly analysis and fiction narrative.

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture proposes the notion of body agents: non-ideal, animate, and highly specific figures integrated with design to enact particular notions of embodied subjectivity in architecture. Body agents present opportunities for architects to increase imaginative and empathic qualities in their designs.
 
Beginning with narrative writing from the viewpoint of a body agent who finds himself uncomfortably inhabiting a digital milieu, the book combines speculative historical fiction and original design experiments. It focuses on the process of creating multimedia design experiments, moving from the design of the body itself as an original prosthetic to architectural proposals emanating from the body.
 
A fragmented history of the figure in architecture is charted and woven into the designs, with chapters examining Michelangelo’s enigmatic figures in his drawings for the New Sacristy in the early sixteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s physically ephemeral putti adorning chapels and churches in the seventeenth century, and Austrian artist-architect Walter Pichler’s personal and prescient figures of the twentieth century. 
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cover of Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic

Experiments with Empire

Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic

Justin Izzo

Duke University Press, 2019

In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.
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cover of Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

Experiments with Power

Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

J. Brent Crosson

University of Chicago Press, 2020

In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of Crime Watch, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: obeah.

From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states.
 
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