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A groundbreaking lens on humanitarianism, which reframes global humanitarian responses to war and disaster through performance studies, revealing how aid, media, and public attention transform crisis into spectacle on a world stage.

As the world is challenged by a state of constant conflict and by disasters, both natural and manmade, support communities endeavour through humanitarianism to overcome human suffering and help to build more peaceful and safe futures. Humanitarian Performance argues that the humanitarian project—from its history and rationale to its contemporary practice—can be productively explored through the critical lens of performance studies. Using the outpouring of international support for projects to benefit survivors of the Asian tsunami, the War in Kosovo, and the crisis in Darfur as case studies, this timely volume explores humanitarian attention to these narratives and the stories of tragedy and survival that emerge. With the peculiar focus and international audiences that the media brings to local tragedies, these contemporary disasters—and the humanitarianism that they elicit—become a performance on the world stage.

Exploring the theological, social, and cultural dimensions of one of America’s most ambitious prophetic movements 

The Shakers’ Era of Manifestations ranks among the most astounding events in American religious history. During the 1840s, members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing embarked on an audacious project of receiving visions, revelations, and other manifestations from the spirit world and convincing both themselves and the world’s people of their reality. Gifted Shakers known as “instruments” surrendered their bodies to possessing spirits and celestial beings who, in turn, provided the Believers with an unimaginable number of revelatory communications that collapsed time and space, rewrote the Bible, and vastly expanded traditional Protestant beliefs and practices. The fruits of Shaker spiritualism would gain a permanent place in America’s public consciousness. 

Hundreds of volumes and thousands of pages of inspired writings, music, and art from the New Era or period of Mother's Work, as the Shakers called it, crowd the shelves of a half dozen major research libraries. The archive is so vast, so extraordinary, so seemingly bizarre that few scholars have dared tackle it in its totality. The authors of this volume, specialists in nineteenth-century American religious studies, have collaborated to produce an extensive analysis of Mother Ann’s Work. They examine a fascinating range of topics: speaking with the dead; the spectacle of Shaker rituals; race, gender, and family life; and the material culture of physical and spiritual things; as well as manuscripts, books, songs, objects, and art produced during the New Era. 

Shakers at the Center brings the sprawling elements of the Era of Manifestations together in a single volume. Written for students, scholars, and general readers alike, it will stand for years as the definitive history of the Shakers’ most fascinating and vexing historical period. 

Contributors include the volume editor as well as Emily Suzanne Clark, Brett Malcolm Grainger, Sonia Hazard, Dana Logan, Carol Medlicott, Sally M. Promey, Erik R. Seeman, Ryan K. Smith, and David Walker. 

A rethinking of realism that reveals its relevance to sexual and cultural politics.

Despite rumors of its demise in literary theory and practice, realism persists. Why this is, and how realism is relevant to current interdisciplinary debates in gender studies and cultural studies, are the questions underlying Spectacles of Realism. With particular reference to nineteenth-century French culture, the contributors explore the role realism has played in the social construction of gender and sexuality. Among their subjects are nineteenth-century physiologies, photographs, caricatures, and Balzac’s Comédie humaine; the ethnographic claims of Goncourt’s naturalism and the historical claims of Zola’s; and the allure of exotica displayed at new museums and international expositions.

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television arrived to electrify audiences with explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that offered audiences such thrills, with "sensation scenes" of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. In Spectacles of Reform , Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing that spectacle plays a crucial role in American activism. By examining how theater producers and political groups harnessed its power and appeal, Hughes suggests that spectacle was—and remains—central to the dramaturgy of reform.

Engaging evidence from lithographs to children's books to typography catalogs, Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard suffering from the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how they conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today's producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet.

To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Consequently, Spectacles of Reform will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.