Rebecca Kastleman – författare

Religion made the theatre modern. Since the late nineteenth century, theatre theorists have asserted that drama's origins lie in religious ritual. In this ambitious study, Rebecca Kastleman traces the surprising effects of that claim for the modern and contemporary stage. Across lucidly written chapters, she tracks the 'modern drama of religion,' a movement rooted in both the many modern plays that engage directly with religion and the dramatic debut of new religious practices in the modern theatre. Such works serve as crucibles for catalyzing skepticism, dissolving some religious attachments and strengthening others. Modern playwrights' fascination with religion expanded the frontiers of theatrical experimentation, such that in modernity, the purported origin of theatre in religious ritual came to signify the cutting edge of artistic invention. Spanning drama, performance, modernism, and religious studies, this study powerfully reconfigures the relations between all these fields.

Religion made the theatre modern. Since the late nineteenth century, theatre theorists have asserted that drama's origins lie in religious ritual. In this ambitious study, Rebecca Kastleman traces the surprising effects of that claim for the modern and contemporary stage. Across lucidly written chapters, she tracks the 'modern drama of religion,' a movement rooted in both the many modern plays that engage directly with religion and the dramatic debut of new religious practices in the modern theatre. Such works serve as crucibles for catalyzing skepticism, dissolving some religious attachments and strengthening others. Modern playwrights' fascination with religion expanded the frontiers of theatrical experimentation, such that in modernity, the purported origin of theatre in religious ritual came to signify the cutting edge of artistic invention. Spanning drama, performance, modernism, and religious studies, this study powerfully reconfigures the relations between all these fields.

Demilitarizing the Future draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and to consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution. The pieces collected in this anthology track across military training camps in the United States, the tenements of Palestine, and other sites in the global networks of warfare and military preparedness to consider the pathways by which more equitable futures might be envisioned and sustained. Representing fields from anthropology to poetry and from literary studies to community organizing, the authors together weave a multidisciplinary collection of creative scholarship. Rather than presuming that the aftermath of war requires the reimposition of new military infrastructures, the collection speaks to the socially and artistically generative potentialities of military waste infrastructures as well as their enduring toxicities. Militarism and preparedness for war undergirds the infrastructure and design of everyday lives across the globe and its satellites, but the processes of demilitarization offer their own affordances. Within this collection, the authors broaden our understanding of militarization to examine its excesses and their repurposing toward demilitarized futures.