Arts and Humanities Commons^™

State Of Praxis In The Oath Of Vayuputras: An Eco-Critical Perspective, Karthik S, Sangeeta Mukherjee

Department of English Publications

The depletion and drying of river water across India is a growing problem in the contemporary period. According to the CPCB report on Assessment of Impact of Lockdown

on Water Quality of Major Rivers (2020-21), during the Corona Virus pandemic the water quality of rivers is alleviated a bit little due to minimum discharge of industrial waste, no access to pilgrimage, vehicle etc. On the other hand, it can be observed that dead bodies of the Covid-19 patients are dumped in the most sacred river Ganga in India which has increased the pollution level of the river and also will …

Sport, Space And Gender: Embodying Alternate Girlhoods With The Wolves, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to throw like a girl? If we empower girls to throw – and to kick, to jump, to fly through the air like never before – how does that space-making impact the humans into which they grow? Does staging girls at sport help us to understand sport as a space-making activity every girls needs, and to which every girl has a right? This article reflects on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Wolves as it explores the relationship between the practice of sport and the practice of gender.

Practising Diversity At The Stratford Festival Of Canada: Shakespeare, Performance And Ethics In The Twenty-First Century, Erin Julian, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to ‘practise’ diversity in Shakespeare production in the twenty-first century, specifically in an Anglo-American context? How is ‘practising’ diversity, from devising and directing to work in the rehearsal hall and on audience engagement, materially different from the now-familiar (but still important) goal of ‘representing’ diverse bodies on stage? In the last twenty years, debates about what the diversification of Shakespeare performance – along racial lines, gender lines, the lines of age and ability – means or could mean, and the simultaneous interrogation of what ‘Shakespeare’ signifies, for whom, and to whose benefit, have become increasingly urgent …

How Do You Stage A Problem Like Kevin Spacey? Reflections On Performance And Consent, With Help From Ellie Moon And Adam Lazarus, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

How can theatre and performance open avenues for a nuanced exploration of consent in the wake of #MeToo? What aesthetic, generic, and dramaturgical choices may best contribute to this kind of exploration? As audience members, do we need to be made properly uncomfortable in our seats in order to think deeply about consent at the theatre? What are the ethical boundaries of such discomfort? Kim Solga investigates these questions and more as she revisits her experiences seeing Ellie Moon’s Asking for It and Adam Lazarus’s Daughter shortly after the Weinstein allegations broke in late 2017.

Living The Interdiscipline: Natalie Alvarez Speaks With Kim Solga About Conceiving, Developing, Managing, And Learning From A Large-Scale, Multidisciplinary, Scenario-Based Project Supporting Police De-Escalation Training In Ontario, Kim Solga, Natalie Alvarez

Department of English Publications

Ryerson University theatre professor Natalie Alvarez is currently helming a large, interdisciplinary team in southern Ontario that is testing the power of Forum Theatre to build better, more responsive scenarios for police officer training in de-escalation and mental crisis response. In this interview, Alvarez sits down with issue editor Kim Solga to talk about where this project came from, what challenges arise when working in an intensively interdisciplinary way – and how theatre and performance can serve effectively as a methodology at the heart of a wide range of scholarly investigations, both inside and outside of the arts and humanities.

Tactics: Practical And Imagined, Kim Solga, Diana Damian Martin, Sharon Green, Clara Nizard, Max Schulman, Theron Schmidt

Department of English Publications

Since December 2017, a group of us (including Kim Solga, Sylvan Baker, Diana Damian Martin, Rebecca Hayes Laughton, and Katherine Low) have been convening working sessions at various schools and conferences that address the questions and problems animating this issue of RiDE. In this final article, a handful of our respondents from ASTR 2018 in San Diego ruminate upon, list, and re-member tactics they have used, or dreamed of using, to make it through the neoliberal academic day-to-day. Their thoughts are accompanied here by a handful of photos that document the documentation we produced at our first symposium.

Theatre & Performance, Crisis & Survival, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

In this introduction, guest editor Kim Solga reflects on the origins of the issue, details its scope, offers grounding definitions of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘the neoliberal university’, and charts one possible way forward, in hope.

Immunitary Foreclosures: Schelling And British Idealism, Tilottama Rajan

Department of English Publications

This paper considers how Schelling’s earlier work functions as a fifth column for the Germano-Coleridgeans, particularly Coleridge himself and Green. I consider their engagement with Schelling’s First Outline in relation to the Hunterian collection bought by the Crown in 1799, which made the life sciences a public concern within the framework of how knowledge was to be organized. The paper explores the pressure the life sciences put on philosophy and the constraining of both, in the context of British Idealism, by religious imperatives that are internal, conceptual censors, and external (cultural and institutional) censors. Consolidating his work between the Romantic …

Blake, Hegel, And The Sciences, Tilottama Rajan

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Living A Feminist Life, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

Very early in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed asks: ‘Where is feminism? It is a good question. We can ask ourselves: where did we find feminism, or where did feminism find us?’ (4). I read these lines on the Tube. I can’t remember where I was going, but I remember looking up, feeling the rocking of the carriage, hearing the sound of the train hit the points on the track. I met nobody’s eyes (I try not to on the Tube), but I had trouble looking down again. Ahmed’s words had pierced me.

The Other Side Of Our Game, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Introduction:The Impossible Modern Age, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

On Reckoning, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

How can settler-colonial subjects bear witness to survivors of Canada’s residential school system? Kim Solga attends ARTICLE 11’s Reckoning at the Theatre Centre and asks questions about the strategies it uses to bring audiences into the conversation about truth and reconciliation.

For The Progress Of “Faustus And Helen”: Crane, Whitman, And The Metropolitan Progress Poem, Jeremy Colangelo

Department of English Publications

This essay is meant to invigorate a critical discussion of the progress poem—a genre that, while prevalent in American literature, has been virtually ignored by critics and scholars. In lieu of tackling the genre in its entirety, a project too large for just one article, the author focuses the argument through the well-known alignment between Walt Whitman and Hart Crane on the subject of the modern city. It is through the progress poem genre that Crane and Whitman’s peculiar place in metropolitan poetics can best be understood, and it is through their poetry that scholars can begin to approach the …

Yaari With Angrez: Whiteness For A New Bollywood Hero, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

What Are You Reading?, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

In May 2010, a general election in the United Kingdom produced a coalition government headed by David Cameron's Conservatives and (nominally) the Liberal Democrats under deputy PM Nick Clegg. The coalition (still in power in 2014) quickly plunged the nation into a period of postcrash austerity the likes of which had not been seen for generations. When I landed at Heathrow in June 2012 to start a new job at Queen Mary University of London, the ground was thick with casualties—and getting thicker. Significant challenges to the U.K. welfare state have been launched before, of course: most visibly and famously …

What Feminists Do When Things Get Ruff, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

This past spring I wrote a post for my teaching blog about learning to live with failure – to experience what it means to mess up, or to be messed up, without needing desperately to get outside of that feeling, to move quickly on and away from the terror of what seems in the moment like a shattering personal disaster.1 This is a skill that artists and students especially need: getting back on the proverbial horse after corpsing on stage, or after failing that crucial term paper, can be utterly gut-wrenching, madness-inducing stuff. Then, literally a few days after …

Virtuosity On Virtu(E)Osity And Theatrical Community, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

’Tis Pity She’S A Realist: A Conversational Case Study In Realism And Early Modern Theater Today, Kim Solga, Roberta Barker, Cary Mazer

Department of English Publications

In this introduction to Barker and Solga’s 2013 special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin, Barker, Solga, and Cary Mazer discuss the use of emotional realist acting techniques in Cheek By Jowl’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, assessing its political potential as well as reflecting on the risks it takes. The essay ranges beyond Cheek By Jowl to introduce some of the core questions explored by the issue as a whole.

Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches To Teaching Women Writers, Karen Gevirtz, Martha Bowden, Jonathan Sadow

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

Review Of "Of Love And War" By Judy Hayden, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

From Tawa'if To Wife? Making Sense Of Bollywood's Courtesan Genre, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Although constituting what might be described as only a thimbleful of water in the ocean that is Hindi cinema, the courtesan or tawa'if film is a distinctive Indian genre, one that has no real equivalent in the Western film industry. With Indian and diaspora audiences generally, it has also enjoyed a broad popularity, its music and dance sequences being among the most valued in Hindi film, their specificities often lovingly remembered and reconstructed by fans. Were you, for example, to start singing "Dil Cheez Kya Hai" or "Yeh Kya Hua" especially to a group of north Indians over the …

One Dead White Guy At A Time: Miss Julie: Sheh’Mah, By Tara Beagan, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays collects works of contemporary theatre, each of which may be defined as "realist" through both a crucial link to the past and a zest for re-tooling old definitions. Grounded by Gwen Pharis Ringwood's pioneering Still Stands the House, the anthology also features Trey Anthony's 'da Kink in my hair, Tara Beagan's Miss Julie: Sheh'mah, Madeleine Blais-Dahlem's sTain, Hillar Liitoja's The Last Supper, selections from the Impromptu Splendor series by National Theatre of the World, Theatre Replacement's BioBoxes, and Zuppa Theatre's Penny Dreadful, as well as a series of text-specific introductions and a resource page for …

Peter Dickinson World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays On Performance, Place, And Politics, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

Peter Dickinson’s World Stages, Local Audiences is a book I really, really wanted to like. It takes significant risks in style and structure. It is personal and invested. It is compelled by the same kinds of ques- tions—about political performance, social justice, community affect, and cultural change—that motivate a great deal of my own work. It is relentlessly eclectic in its choice of primary sources, examining everything from the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics to the drama of Tony Kushner to the media spectacles of professional soccer. It is a scholarly nomadology (136-175)—a term I suspect Dickinson won’t mind me applying …

Cell Phones From Hell, Steven Bruhm

Department of English Publications

Recently Hollywood has remade a number of movies from the 1970s, movies in which young women are terrorized by a murderer calling from a telephone located elsewhere in the house. In the remakes, the murderer uses a cell phone, which effectively destroys the sense of space and distance on which earlier horror films were predicated. In one way, these films gesture to Jean Baudrillard's idea of “the transparency of evil,” in that they depict the collapse between the speaking self and the technologies of monstrosity against which the self might be defined. In another way, though, the films proliferate sites …

Realism/Terrorism: The Walworth Farce, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

Kim Solga reviews The Walworth Farce – a "farce" in name only – as a play that is actually about the dangerous performatics of memory. As it explores the ways in which the theatre both enables and *dis*ables the drive to remember, it thinks seriously about traumatic re-enactment and the limits of the theatre as a site for such.

Film Review: Gulliver's Travels, Karen Gevirtz

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.

A Mutiny Of Silence: Swarnakumari Devi's Sati, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Aim:
To discuss how Swarnakumari Devi's family connections as much as her sex contributed to why her work faded from the memory of nationalist India.

Introduction:

The historical context that helped to produce the writing of Swarna-kumari Devi Ghosal also gives us a glimmer into some of the possible reasons why her work faded from the literary memory of nationalist India. Some of that context is hinted at in the back pages of her collection of short stories in English, published in 1919 by Ganesh and Co., Madras. Reminding us of the inescapable connection between capitalism and knowledge, these back …

Artifacting An Intercultural Nation: Theatre Replacement's Bioboxes, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

At first, BIOBOXES, by Vancouver's Theatre Replacement, seems like straightforward multiculti fare—theatre celebrating Canada's cultural mosaic. But then you step inside the tiny boxes and find yourself a spectator to your own investments in multicultural performance.

Realism And The Ethics Of Risk At The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

No abstract provided.