Videogames are the medium of loss and death. Videogame characters frequently fall from cliffs (Super Mario Bros.), get shot (Space Inva-ders), and go bankrupt (Theme Hospital). Sometimes they die in swimming pools (The Sims), are butchered by rotating blades (Super Meat Boy), impaled (Tomb Raider), or flattened by rolling boulders (Crash Bandicoot)…
The auto-ethnographic components and analyses in this book are shaped by projects that I have used a variety of terms to name: Community Theatre, Theatre for Social Change, Applied Theatre, Social Theatre, and Political Theatre. While I acknowledge that each of these terms comes with its own histories and complications, the issue of nomenclature is not one that I enga…
Exploring the legitimate scope and space for theatre in a conflict zone like Kashmir is an extremely uphill task. It involves many social, cultural, religious, political and economic challenges, and above all, the risk to one’s life, property and reputation. Jammu and Kashmir have been a bone of contention since 1947, when this Subcontinent was divided…
This book is grounded in the belief that there is a need to talk more about mental health from the perspective of both historical and current issues and practices. This is what Catharine Coleborne, internationally renowned scholar in the field of mad studies and histories of mental health and psychiatry, also maintains in her most recent book Why Talk About Madness (2020). Here, Coleborn…
The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins focuses on the many debates surrounding these movements: the Marquis de Sade's Surrealist deification, issues of quality (How good is Dali?), the ide…
We take it for granted that some ancient figures become heroes, and others do not. When we consider the question at all, it is usually assumed that such transformations are largely a matter of chance. And while there may be cases in which sheer luck is involved, this book shows that heroes can also be shaped by the tide and pull of historical forces and determined personalities. He…
Barry Unsworth, the British Booker Prize- winning author, was, in a sense, the creative catalyst for this volume. While researching the late- twentieth- century revival of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis on international stages, Edith Hall was led from drama to fi ction by reading Unsworth’s 2002 novel, Th e Songs of the Kings . 1Unsworth’s novel pinpointed on…
To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony?
World War II radically altered the image of many European cities. Some, like Warsaw and Dresden, were almost completely destroyed, and became symbols both of war-time barbarism and of the recuperative power of their respective nations. Others, like Wroc?aw (previously Breslau) and Lviv (previously Lwów-Lvov), were assigned by the signatories of international treaties to a different st…
The contributors to Made in Asia/America explore the historical entanglements of video games, Asia, and America, showing how examining games offer new ways of imagining empire, race, and coalition.