ABSTRACT
According to Riikka Paloniemi and Annukka Vainio (2011), as early as 1992, the United Nations in its international programme dubbed Agenda 21 asserted that young people, who constitute about 30 percent of the world's population, are important stakeholders in achieving sustainable development (398-399). Much momentum has accumulated in the direction of youth activism for the climate and environment. Besides garnering much recognition from the international community as important actors in climate change policy and action, youth-led climate commitment has continued to grow in leaps and bounds. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, this movement mobilized millions of school-going children/youths across many cities throughout the world to skip classes on Fridays and protest, asking their governments and corporate bodies to concretely address the global climate and environmental crises and save their future.2 Greta Thunberg has spoken to world leaders on the need to curb carbon emissions and has addressed the issue of climate change at many high-level gatherings, including COP24, which was held from in December 2018 in Katowice, Poland;the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2019 and 2020;the European Economic and Social Committee and the European Commission in February 2019;an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican in April 2019;and the UK Parliament in Westminster, also in April 2019. [...]the School Strikes for Climate movement has not only caused the resignation of Belgian Environment Minister Joke Schauvliege (who had falsely claimed that children's climate protests were 'set-up') but has also been positively received by key global figures such as UN Secretary General António Guterres, who, following an unprecedented turnout of approximately 1.4 million young protesters in over 120 countries on 15th March 2019, remarked that "the climate strikers should inspire us all to act at the next UN summit".3 Moreover, on 12th April 2019, having witnessed the massive turnout of young protesters the month before, twenty-two renowned scientists across the globe published a letter in the journal Science acknowledging that "the concerns of young protesters are justified" and pledging their support for the youth strikes for climate (Hagedorn et al. 2019, 139-140).
ABSTRACT
Granted that only one essay specifically invokes the pandemic;still, I am struck by the fact that almost all of them focus on textual analysis and only occasionally invoke performance. [...]to the spectacular nature of direct violence, neoliberalism tends to manifest itself as a more hidden, "ordinary" violence, which our field continues to theorize as a political and aesthetic force.1 Analola Santana's article "Neoliberal Transactions: Staging Prostitution in the Mexican Nation" expands the conversation through a cogent analysis of how neoliberal violence is performed in Mexican drama;as in so much of the Global South, the damage of late capitalism is exacerbated by the forces of Western imperialism. Yet, as Sullivan also demonstrates, Suzanne's ferocious commitment to writing speaks to Kennedy's own determination to find a way to "be free of air," even "while finding no other source of breath and life." [...]he considers how plays such as American Son by Christopher Demos-Brown enact conservative ideas of reform, or what he calls reformance, which reiterate "a structure of repetition in which some change, or difference, is proposed and/or implemented without transforming the foundational structure."
ABSTRACT
The 2022 Festival had been promoted as the 'largest Queer Arts programme in the history of the festival', with arts events (dance, theatre, music, cabaret, comedy, live art, film, drag performances, ballroom, circus, craft, literary events and public art exhibitions) making up ninety out of the Festival's 180 events.1 Auckland Pride framed its decision to cancel the majority of its programming as part of an ethics of care for the rainbow community, deeming that it would be 'irresponsible' to proceed during an Omicron outbreak.2 While Auckland Pride's 2022 Festival had lost the game of live event production pandemic roulette, the size and strength of its planned queer arts programme reflects the prominence of queer performance in Aotearoa's contemporary cultural landscape. Over My Dead Body: UNINVITED by Jason Te Mete and Everything After by Shane Bosher ask us to attend to Aotearoa's queer history, by bringing visibility to the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Aotearoa's rainbow community;Yang/ Young/Ш by Sherry Zhang and Nuanzhi Zheng foregrounds the space of high school and the Chinese family, using the domestic landscape to explore intersectional politics through a narrative of triumph and pride that challenges the limitations of Western notions of 'coming-out'. The only play that Brooks had written at that point that he deemed a 'gay' play was Queen, a stream-of-con- sciousness monologue 'about the young gay guy experience'.13 Queen's April 2013 season at the Basement Theatre coincided with the New Zealand Parliament passing the Marriage Equality Bill. James Wenley quoted the words of queer MP Tamati Coffey in his review of Queen: 'This bill will validate my place in society ... it moves mountains for future New Zealanders, who will live in a time where it's normal to be able to love whoever they want to'.14 As recently as 2012, a major plot point of Benjamin Cleaver's musical Day After Night, directed by Wenley and performed at Basement Theatre, was the inability of the central gay couple to become legally married and adopt a baby together.
ABSTRACT
Generating countless websites, books, films, series, and podcasts, and encompassing nearly every major negative event that has taken place since the end of World War II, conspiracies have become a phenomenon that anyone as a citizen and thinking individual has had to cope with in the last few decades, arguably reaching a peak during the Trump presidency, with the rise of QAnon and various conspiracy theories about the current Covid-19 pandemic (Barkun 2017;Amarasingam and Argentino 2020;Mitchell et al. 2020;Uscinski et al. 2020). Not surprisingly, the rise of conspiracy theories has also coincided with an increasing scholarly interest, especially within psychology and the social sciences, although studies of conspiracies in literature and film have also grown in number during the last two decades. Just to mention two famous examples, the same Brown's Inferno (2013) draws upon the long-standing tradition of conspiracy theories related to Dante's Divine Comedy, and the works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to a long series of conspiratorial readings, arguably reaching a peak-at least in a Norwegian context-with Erlend Loe's and Petter Amundsen's mashup of theories about Shakespeare's persona and the coded messages that the English dramatist allegedly left in his texts (Loe and Amundsen 2006). Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's rejection of a fixed identity in late modern society and cultural production, she makes a clear argument against two main avenues of scholarly interpretation of the play, a Hegelian and Cartesian one: "I argue that Peer Gynt should be understood as expressing a fundamentally non-transcendent world-view" (Rees 2014, 13, 19). [...]according to Rees, Peer Gynt's status as a "national epos" is highly paradoxical, and the play hardly seems to contain a clear-cut "message" or to allow a straightforward interpretation, be it about cultural identity or otherwise.
ABSTRACT
Shakespeare has always been the source of inspiration to the generations all over the world stage. Toufann by Dev Virahsawmy is one such piece of clone. The world has taken a drastic turn in the 21st century. Digitalisation is the only normal in abnormality of the millennials with the upsurge of 'technology' as the 'spear' of Shakespeare and 'network' a 'villain' as Prospero creating 'magic' and 'illusion' in our lives. 'Virtual' has become 'real' and real has taken a backseat in the heaven called 'home'. In this techno-savvy, digital, virtual world;it is imperative for the 'Humanities' to adapt the new normal. Toufann is one such child of this techno-renaissance playwright Dev Virahsawmy, a Mauritian playwright creating a 'tempest' by virtual slides on computer.Caliban is no more looked as black, beast, filthy or low born;he is a smart, handsome, creative, technical man with a heart already lost to Cupid's bow. Miranda is a feminist;reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex pregnant with Kalibann's child. Ariel is a Robot;now emotionless, mechanical and artificial. Ferdinand is infertile, fickle minded and wants the companionship of Robot Ariel. The present paper will discuss the techno aspect of the play in detail with the tinge of focus on the turns of events in the neo-millennials.
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Covid-19 has continued to affect book reviewing this year, as reviewers whom we had to remind wrote us back saying everything from "I'm stuck in Dakar" or "I crushed my right index finger in an anchor mishap two months ago [and] ... typing was problematic for a number of weeks" to "in the midst of the pandemic I fell and broke my leg in two places," not to mention people's frequent child-care/remote learning challenges (for some books, we had to identify and ask as many as nine potential reviewers before one agreed) or the difficulties of getting books from publishers to reviewers in pandemic-bombed Brazil. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020, cloth US$ 79.00) Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life andLegacy of a Cuban Revolutionary, by Tiffany A. Sippial (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020, paper US$29.95) Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba, by Bretton White (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020, cloth US$ 85.00) The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America, by Jason T. Sharples (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, cloth US$ 45.00) Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices, edited by Devyn Spence Benson & Daisy Rubiera Castillo (Lanham MD: Monster in the Middle (New York: Riverhead Books [Penguin/Random House], 2021, cloth US$27.00), is the second novel by Virgin Islands-born Tiphanie Yanique-in "Bookshelf 2014," we called her first one, the multiple prize-winning Land of Love and Drowning, "a gem," and this one is as well. In the fictional town of Pleasantview, we meet Syrian shopkeepers, Muslimeen converts, Pentecostal churchgoers, street gang members, Hindus with roadside fruit and vegetable stands, sex workers trafficked from Venezuela and Colombia, lawyers, politicians, and police, as well as myriads of Black women, but the focus, always, is on family relations-misogyny, poverty, violence, and the allure and perils of migration (to New York, Barbados ...)