Results by title

Offering a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics

Through careful readings of key political performances in Chile's transition from military dictatorship to neoliberal democracy, Jennifer Joan Thompson examines how the production and aesthetics of theater are intertwined in processes of democratization, enactments of citizenship, and the development of cultural policy. Performing Citizenship in Postdictatorship Chile: Cultural Policy and the Making of Political Dramaturgies reveals how artists performed changing models of democratic citizenship. Thompson traces the ways artists confronted and resisted the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, how they then reimagined the body politic during the early transitional period and challenged official constructions of history and memory as the transition to democracy progressed, how they critiqued Chile’s neoliberal economic model and its violence, and, finally, how they have made claims for feminist and Indigenous citizen subjectivities throughout Chile’s current social crisis. Incorporating archival and ethnographic research alongside readings of theatrical and political performances, this study offers a nuanced understanding of the performing arts’ relationship to politics, one that accounts for the ways artists and the state collaborate in the production of the political imagination.

With a new preface Bill V. Mullen updates his dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history. Mullen's study includes reassessments of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation and a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville. He also takes an in-depth look at the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about African Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.