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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift
Ritual, Spectacle, And Theatre In Late Medieval Seville (Chapter 1), Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
From the fall of Islamic Išbīliya in 1248 to the conquest of the New World, Seville was a nexus of economic and religious power where interconfessional living among Christians, Jews, and Muslims was negotiated on public stages. From out of seemingly irreconcilable ideologies of faith, hybrid performance culture emerged in spectacles of miraculous transformation, disciplinary processionals, and representations of religious identity. Ritual, Spectacle, and Theatre in Late Medieval Seville reinvigorates the study of medieval Iberian theater by revealing the ways in which public expressions of devotion, penance, and power fostered cultural reciprocity, rehearsed religious difference, and ultimately helped establish Seville …
Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick
Shakespeare's Blush, Or "The Animal" In Othello, Steven Swarbrick
Publications and Research
This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactual statement (“Were I the Moor, I would not by Iago”) that is most significant about his relation to Othello. From there I consider the overlap between the play’s representations of animality and black skin. Read in the context of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on animals, I consider the deconstructive value of linking …
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …
Dance In The Museum, Claire Bishop
Dance In The Museum, Claire Bishop
Publications and Research
This paper argues that the art world’s current fascination for dance follows on from a previous high point of interaction in the late 1960s and 1970s, and before that, a moment in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It traces these first, second and third waves of dance in the museum at three institutions: the Tate in London, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Three institutional histories are sketched, drawing out the differences between their approaches. The conclusion presents the four most pressing possibilities/problems of presenting dance in the museum: …
Amanda Knox And Bella Figura, Denise Scannell Guida
Amanda Knox And Bella Figura, Denise Scannell Guida
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance On The Early Spanish Stage, Christopher B. Swift
Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance On The Early Spanish Stage, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
Radical Theatricality describes medieval and early modern oral traditions through the culture of “jongleuresque” performers: juglares, trovadores, and other itinerant players, who have been relegated to the fringes of theatre history.
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
The Sacred Performative: Holy Wednesday And Colonial Ritual/Theatre, Christopher B. Swift
Publications and Research
"Holy Wednesday" is a late sixteenth century adaptation of a Spanish auto sacramental (sacred play) written in alphabetized Nahuatl, the predominant pre-Columbian language spoken on the High Central Plateau of Mexico. The author remains unknown, however he was likely a Nahua amanuensis educated by Franciscans at Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Religious drama was one of the important evangelizing tools of the Catholic brotherhoods in colonial Mexico and although a record of performance of Holy Wednesday does not exist, this dramatic depiction of the final meeting of Christ and Mary prior to the crucifixion was almost certainly performed as …