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An exploration of the surrealist artists, musicians, and performers who forged a unique experimental arts community in Alabama

Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama: A Cultural History is the first book to uncover a remarkable chapter in American experimental art, music, dance and writing, tracing the activities of a creative group known as Raudelunas, the music collective Transcendprovisation, and the surrealist association initially called Glass Veal: a series of interrelated artistic and cultural movements that originated in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research and firsthand accounts, including interviews with twenty-six participants in these groups, sound recordings, publications, and other primary sources, Steven Harris traces the history of a vibrant creative community that began when three University of Alabama students started improvising music together and encouraged others to join them.

From these sessions emerged a dynamic network of performers and artists whose work challenged conventional boundaries between disciplines. Inspired by musical improvisation, surrealism, and pataphysics, participants embraced spontaneity and absurdity as they developed a positive expression of creativity that was both uniquely Southern and sharply distinctive from the dominant culture that surrounded them.

Harris situates these movements within broader histories of Alabama, Dada, pataphysics, surrealism, and improvised music and dance while charting their lasting influence on the artists who participated in them. Featuring a timeline of major events, biographies of key members, and an anthology of representative writings, Pataphysics and Surrealism in Alabama is an essential contribution to the history of American experimental culture.
 

The metaphor “beyond the pale” refers to something that’s unacceptable and, as James M. Harding argues in this book, “almost always refers to something—an activity, an action, or an act—that is performed.” In this book, Harding recalls that historically the pale marked contested political boundaries and that what lay beyond the pale was considered to be a dangerous frontier. Siding with seemingly excessive and unreasonable acts and with the artists and activists who produce them, Harding brings together a series of ideas and performances that operate beyond the pale and asks readers to examine them on their own terms.

Drawing on political science, critical theory, and philosophy, Harding investigates instances of self-immolation, life-threatening journeys across deserts and seas, radical political hoaxes, extreme speech acts, and anti-police activism. The book’s five chapters consist of a series of meditations, each with an easily identifiable scholarly logic and clear argument, though the connections between the meditations are left up to the reader. Together these meditations urge readers to understand that “beyond the pale” acts are frequently the product of a sense of urgency that preempts the dictates of accepted reason, conventional logic, and safety.

 In the aftermath of state-perpetrated injustice, a façade of peace can suddenly give way, and in South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, post-apartheid and postcolonial framings of change have exceeded their limits. Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice reveals how the voices and visions of artists can help us see what otherwise evades perception. Embodied performance in South Africa has particular potency because apartheid was so centrally focused on the body: classifying bodies into racial categories, legislating where certain bodies could move and which bathrooms and drinking fountains certain bodies could use, and how different bodies carried meaning. The book considers key works by contemporary performing artists Brett Bailey, Gregory Maqoma, Mamela Nyamza, Robyn Orlin, Jay Pather, and Sello Pesa, artists imagining new forms and helping audiences see the contemporary moment as it is: an important intervention in a country long predicated on denial. They are also helping to conjure, anticipate, and dream a world that is otherwise. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of African studies, black performance, dance studies, transitional justice, as well as theater and performance studies.

For more than five centuries, the Plaza Mayor (or Zócalo) in Mexico City has been the site of performances for a public spectatorship. During the period of colonial rule, performances designed to ensure loyalty to the Spanish monarchy were staged there, but over time, these displays gave way to staged demonstrations of resistance. Today, the Zócalo is a site for both official government-sponsored celebrations and performances that challenge the state. Performance in the Zócalo examines the ways that this city square has achieved symbolic significance over the centuries, and how national, ethnic, and racial identity has been performed there.
 
A saying in Mexico City is “quien domina el centro, domina el país” (whoever dominates the center, dominates the country) as the Zócalo continues to act as the performative embodiment of Mexican society. This book highlights how particular performances build upon each other by recycling past architectures and performative practices for new purposes. Ana Martínez discusses the singular role of collective memory in creating meaning through space and landmarks, providing a new perspective and further insight into the problem of Mexico’s relationship with its own past. Rather than merely describe the commemorations, she traces the relationship between space and the invention of a Mexican imaginary. She also explores how indigenous communities, Mexico’s alienated subalterns, performed as exploited objects, exotic characters, and subjects with agency. The book’s dual purposes are to examine the Zócalo as Mexico’s central site of performance and to unmask, without homogenizing, the official discourse regarding Mexico’s natives. This book will be of interest for students and scholars in theater studies, Mexican Studies, Cultural Geography, Latinx and Latin American Studies.

This book provides a comprehensive range of topics for monitoring, modelling and assessing the performance of photovoltaic plants, and enabling effective asset management. Using real-world data, the book emphasises practical usability, systematically covering the knowledge needed to perform these tasks, from the basics all the way through to the evaluation of key performance indicators. Source code used to perform data analysis is also included. This book is ideal for anyone working with photovoltaic systems or plants.

Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King’s bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet’s form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appeal to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by Molière and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy.

Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.

The invisibilization of political violence, its material traces, and spatial manifestations, characterizes conflict and post-conflict situations. Yet, artists, writers, and human rights activists increasingly seek to challenge this invisibility, contesting the related historical amnesia through counter-semantics and dissonant narratives. Adopting “performance” as a concept that is defined by repetitive, aesthetic practices—such as speech and bodily habits through which both individual and collective identities are constructed and perceived—this collection addresses various forms of performing human rights in transitional situations in Spain, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bringing scholars together with artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, Performing Human Rights addresses these instances of omission and neglect, revealing how alternate institutional spaces and strategies of cultural production have intervened in the processes of historical justice and collective memory.
 

This volume brings together research and artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives around motherhood.

Performing Maternities is a collection of essays, creative work, images, and scripts that emerged out of an online international symposium held at Brighton University in November 2020. Together, the contributors challenge, celebrate, and share the normative, the queer, the transgressive, the joy, and the pain of performing maternity. The book asks key questions about the construction of maternal identities and mythologies in the contemporary world; the ways these affect individuals in different social, economic, and sexual identities; and how—as mothers, writers, artists, parents, and grandparents—we can address and challenge those identities.
 

Retelling performances, collecting things, reading traces, mapping memories, gaming autobiographies: in European and Anglo-American theater since the turn of the millennium, a range of new nonliterary narrative practices such as these have taken root. Unable to be subsumed under a well-established narratological, dramatic, or postdramatic perspective, they call for a reexamination of the relationship between performance and narration. Performing Stories seeks to reconceptualize narrative against the backdrop of innovative theater formats such as collective storytelling games, theater installations, extensive autobiographical performances, immersive role-playing, and audio-video walks.


Nina Tecklenburg’s focus lies on narration less as literary composition than as sensate, embodied cultural practice—a participatory and open process that fosters social relationships. She gives central importance to the forces of narration that create and undo culture and politics. A foundational new book, Performing Stories presents a groundbreaking transdisciplinary perspective through new approaches that are stimulating to performance studies, narrative and cultural theory, literary criticism, and game and video studies.
 

An in-depth look at how Latina/x artists transform art into activism and reclaim space in the Twin Cities

In Place-Keepers, Jessica Lopez Lyman examines how Latina/x artists in the Twin Cities navigate and challenge the region’s deep-seated racial injustices. Using “Inter-Latina movidas”—subtle yet strategic actions through which Latina/x artists forge solidarities, mobilize for justice, and reclaim space—these artists respond to systemic oppression through public performances and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the state, nonprofits, and other institutions.

Centering Latina/x women and gender nonconforming artists from Chicana/Mexicana, U.S. Central American, and Caribbean backgrounds, Place-Keepers confronts reductionist theories of Latinidad that flatten ethnic and racial identities. It demonstrates how the creative and activist practices of these cultural organizers address urgent social struggles from resisting gentrification and environmental destruction to opposing police violence. Lopez Lyman situates these efforts within the broader history of racial justice organizing in Minnesota, tracing a lineage of resistance that long precedes the 2020 Minneapolis uprising following the murder of George Floyd.

Through firsthand accounts and revealing case studies, Place-Keepers charts how these artists harness aesthetics as a tool for movement-building, strategically redistributing resources and transforming policy. Expanding the foundational concept of “movidas” in Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x studies by highlighting maneuvers of infiltration, improvisation, individual ritual, and interdependence, Lopez Lyman establishes a crucial framework for understanding art as activism.

The eleven essays in this volume explore the complex interactions in early modern England between a technologically advanced culture of the printed book and a still powerful traditional culture of the spoken word, spectacle, and manuscript. Scholars who work on manuscript culture, the history of printing, cultural history, historical bibliography, and the institutions of early modern drama and theater have been brought together to address such topics as the social character of texts, historical changes in notions of literary authority and intellectual property, the mutual influence and tensions between the different forms of “publication,” and the epistemological and social implications of various communications technologies.

Although canonical literary writers such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Rochester are discussed, the field of writing examined is a broad one, embracing political speeches, coterie manuscript poetry, popular pamphlets, parochially targeted martyrdom accounts, and news reports. Setting writers, audiences, and texts in their specific historical context, the contributors focus on a period in early modern England, from the late sixteenth through the late seventeenth century, when the shift from orality and manuscript communication to print was part of large-scale cultural change. Arthur F. Marotti’s and Michael D. Bristol’s introduction analyzes some of the sociocultural issues implicit in the collection and relates the essays to contemporary work in textual studies, bibliography, and publication history.