1,721,017 research outputs found
Introduction: Identity, Culture and the Performance Paradigm
No full textA short outline of the British contemporary literary and cultural scene is delineated, especially by highlighting the fruitful interconnections between literary, cultural and performance studies. The question of identity is mostly emphasised in relation to both the framework of postmodern theory (contemplating together with the death of the author that of the subject) and the latest ruminations around the possible recovery of a performative agency in a post-postmodern context. Identity as process and as performance, recuperating the individual’s bodily and affective dimension, is actually identified as a possible locus of resistance to pre-scripted discursive roles, while culture itself, likewise seen in its processual dimension, is proposed as a potential site of cultural efficacy and critique
Identity, Culture and Performance Studies
No full textThe essays included in this special issue of RAEI aim at discussing the challenges raised by the definition of performance and performativity in relation to the politics of identity and culture in current cultural studies. Over the last fifty or sixty years, a growing interest in performance discourse – with its emphasis on the body, that is, on human experience, practices and affections – has taken place, floating free of theatre precincts and extending itself to other disciplines, including cultural studies. Performance Studies’ countercultural aspects are frequently stressed as they privilege “threshold-crossing, shape-shifting, and boundary-violating figures, such as shamans, tricksters, and jokers, who value the carnivalesque over the canonical, the transformative over the normative, the mobile over the monumental.” (Conquergood 1995), but a wider range of activities/roles played out by the postmodern subjects/actors on the contemporary British cultural stage have been actually focused upon, so that themes and issues discussed include: gender, race and ethnicity as they are enacted, idealized, negotiated and redefined; postmodern urban experience and identity; performativity and the arts; new technologies and the construction of new identities in the real or virtual world
Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This
No full textThis article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).This work was supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2015- 63895-C2-1-R)
- …
