Results by title

Considered one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski revolutionized contemporary theatre in multiple ways. Perhaps best known for his notion of ‘poor theatre,’ Grotowski went beyond the confines of conventional theatre to systematically explore the possibilities of the human being in a performative context. In Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory, Dominika Laster analyzes core aspects of Grotowski’s work such as body-memory, vigilance, witnessing, verticality, and transmission, arguing that these performance praxes involve a deliberate blurring of the boundaries of the self and other.

This comprehensive study traces key thematic threads across Grotowski’s research, examining lesser-known aspects of his work such as performance compositions structured around African and Afro-Caribbean traditional songs and ritual movement as well as textual material from the Christian Gnostic tradition. As an active process of research and questioning conducted through the “body-being” of the performer, Grotowski’s work represents a practical realization of the often highly theoretical and abstract discussions of one of the field’s main preoccupations: embodied practice as a way of knowing.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reinforced the dynamics of decolonization that had already gained traction after the political transformations post-1991. Especially, Ukrainian artists have been creating works that address these traumatizing as well as transformative experiences of the war by keeping records and analyzing the ongoing events at the same time. All over the region, documentary art has become a tool to counter-act the media wars waged. The book reflects on documentary approaches proving to be an interdisciplinary and collaborative artistic tool in politically charged times. This volume discusses documentary film, theater, and literature from the 1960s to the 2020s in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states with a focus on contemporary practices. Methodologically innovative case studies address contemporary “witness art”—for example verbatim theater and spoken word poetry. The contributions expand on the political, medial, and aesthetic developments that shaped Soviet attitudes towards documentary arts. The essays outline how these concepts still influence contemporary practices, but also present new developments in documentary aesthetics in the region.

Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies

The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.

Visuality of Violence unpacks the way visual documentations and depictions of the practice of racial violence are used in imperialism, capitalism, and neoliberalism in the United States. Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas traces the continuity of racial value through the shifting narratives of race by examining the long-running TV series, COPS, and the museum exhibition, Without Sanctuary, which features photographs of lynching. These case studies provide an innovative holistic mapping of the policing and incarceration of Black and Brown people.  

Addressing the frequently ignored experiences of Asian and Native Americans, among others, in its comparative undertaking, Visuality of Violence exceeds intersectional mapping to uniquely charge the spectacle of racial violence as a foundational practice in its continued presence in contemporary society. Cuevas argues that the visual presentations of the racial body throughout history requires a reckoning and acknowledgement of the material and legal effects of the images, narratives, and practices used to maintain hegemonic racial order and inequality.

In holding a theoretical mirror to history, Visuality of Violence reveals liberal mythical reliance on the ideals of western law and its rationalities as the location of justice and freedom, thereby presenting its readers with a new understanding in the quest for peace and liberation.

In the series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality

A new, ethically based theory of identity by a major scholar.

Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement-that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition-this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author’s critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing.

Central to this project is Oliver’s contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors’ accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is “beyond recognition.” Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing-the possibility of address and response-which puts ethical obligations at its heart.