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This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
political power with which their author had to reckon. As we know, the political ambience to which the New Atlantis refers is hardly a revolutionary one. We might, however, speculate that, had Bacon been writing in the 1650s, he would have adjusted his tale to the political circumstances of the English Republic. At a later date his text might also have addressed educational reformers of the Comenian or Hartlibian stamp.22 In the 1620s, when Bacon was writing the New Atlantis, Price_03_Ch3 54 14/10/02, 9:21 am Persuasions to science 55 political reality and the
postnationalism is as good a framework as any other, but also demonstrates that the fractured narrative makes a range of interpretations possible. The emphasis on personal responses and emotions could be seen as an attempt to ground the political content in individual experiences instead of constructing overarching narratives or myths. The main criticism directed against the novel, however, is that the characters fail to engage, which ultimately means that their search for identity becomes less interesting and weakens the political power of the text. The absence of linear
conquest’, thereby acting as a form of imperial propaganda that encourages colonial expansion with ‘the southern hemisphere offer[ing] the space lacking in a crowded homeland’. 36 This myth-making of Australia as a land of boundless space returns us to Hiatt’s notion of the Antipodes as a ‘blank’ and ties the idea of the Antipodes to that of terra nullius . 37 Punch ’s participation, here, in the legacy of booster literature to the goldfields nonetheless also hints at the potential reversal of pecuniary and political power between colony and metropole, with a sense
contemporary formation. The Amazon crawl points to the intensity of responses to the computational currently evident, and the degree to which these continue both to distinguish and to blur distinctions between concerns around the ontology of the computational and those related to issues of social and political power, control, and domination. Anger around gender and race bias and the concern about human hatred is palpable as a framing of many of the works found in the Amazon trail (and clear elsewhere, of course). The strength of the feeling of disgust, not only with the
, Midnight’s Children (London: Cape, 1981), p. 406. See also Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s analysis of how gender articulates with female political power – of Indira Gandhi in particular – in Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 103–28. 15 See Ahmad, In Theory, p. 50. 16 Nalini Natarajan, ‘Woman, nation, and narration in Midnight’s Children’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp
authority have been conceptualised predominantly in stereotypical ‘good mother-bad mother’ terms.13 (This widely prevalent tendency is, incidentally, as Sunder Rajan recognises, exacerbated across the world by the relative lack of an adequate gender theory of political power for women.) As is clear from this sampling, to Third World women as well as to historically dispossessed women in the west, issues of at once identification with, yet exclusion from, a nationalist tradition of masculinised self-assertion speak with particular urgency. Women encounter the strong need to
and the civilian ‘keep’ or compound, women play several roles relative to the new nation, not only as ‘mothers of the struggle’ and providers, but as political activists, agents of history.3 The Zimbabwean example is apt in this context considering that women writers, like feminist critics of women’s writing, appear to encounter a particular difficulty in envisaging roles and spaces through which women might mobilise political power outside of conventional structures, such as that of the nation-state.4 Given existing hierarchies of privilege, the question is whether
political and social struggle between the ‘Liberal Commons and the Tory Lords’.41 He also adopts, in places, the language of destruction and fragmentation (especially when quoting aristocrats like the Duke of Northumberland on democracy, for whom the placing of political power in the hands of the many was anathema). But Cannadine dates the struggle, in its most bitter manifestations, both earlier, to the Liberal victory in 1880, at which point Frederick Calvert warned that ‘all our institutions are on trial’, and later, to the final ‘emasculation’ of the Lords in 1910
richly signifying work. On the international level, the ecclesiastical reform movement initiated by Pope Gregory VII did not die when Gregory did in 1085, but intensified as the Catholic Church strove to increase its political power, social influence and wealth, especially vis-à-vis the secular state. To those ends it campaigned to purify the lives of its ministers. Homosexuality per se was not a major focus of the reform movement: simony and clerical marriage were the main targets. Nonetheless, Boswell suggests that from the mid-eleventh century, two orientations