Northwestern University Press – serie

This work has inspired the work of countless actors, directors, and writers in theatre, television and film. Spolin's improvisational techniques have changed the very nature and practice of modern theatre. This third edition updates the more than 200 now-classic exercises and adds 30 new ones. It adds 30 traditional theatre games that are frequently used as warm-ups. It includes Spolin's explanations of key concepts crucial to her programme, and collects "The Sayings of Viola Spolin" and adds a glossary of phrases for teachers and directors, with Spolin's definitions of their meaning and value. Most significantly, though, this edition makes available "The Lone Actor". In this section, Spolin offers games for individuals to play when they are alone. It is an important piece that should expand Spolin's teachings and influence to an entirely new audience.

In this highly praised and seminal work, Alan Merriam demonstrates that music is a social behavior—one worthy and available to study through the methods of anthropology. In it, he convincingly argues that ethnomusicology, by definition, cannot separate the sound-analysis of music from its cultural context of people thinking, acting, and creating.The study begins with a review of the various approaches in ethnomusicology. He then suggests a useful and simple research model: ideas about music lead to behavior related to music and this behavior results in musical sound. He explains many aspects and outcomes of this model, and the methods and techniques he suggests are useful to anyone doing field work. Further chapters provide a cross-cultural round-up of concepts about music, physical and verbal behavior related to music, the role of the musician, and the learning and composing of music.The Anthropology of Music illuminates much of interest to musicologists but to social scientists in general as well.

The thirteen stories of "Dialogues in Paradise "are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience

What does it mean to be "an excellent teacher?" To Dorothy Heathcote, one of this century's most respected educational innovators, it means seeing one's pupils as they really are, shunning labels and stereotypes. It means taking risks: putting aside one's comfortable, doctrinaire role and participating fully in the learning process. Above all, it means pushing oneself and one's students to the outer limits of capability - often, with miraculous results.In this lively collection of essays and talks from 1967-80, Heathcote shares the findings of her groundbreaking work in the application of theatre techniques and play to classroom teaching. She provides a time-tested philosophy on the value of dramatic activity in breaking down barriers and overcoming inertia. Her insistence that teachers must step down from their pedestals and immerse themselves in the possibility of the moment makes for magical and challenging reading.

One of Latin America's most important and prolific writers, Griselda Gambaro has focused on the dynamics of repression, complicity, and violence--specifically, the terror of violent regimes and their devastating effects on the moral framework of society. Information for Foreigners is a drama of disappearance, an experimental work dealing with the theme of random and meaningless punishment in which the audience is led through darkened passageways to a series of nightmarish tableaux. The collection also includes The Walls and Antigona Furiosa.

In this work, acclaimed Jungian James Hillman examines the concepts of myth, insights, eros, body, and the mytheme of female inferiority, as well as the need for the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality. By examining these ideas, and the role they have played both in and outside of the therapeutic setting, Hillman mounts a compelling argument that, rather than locking them away in some inner asylum or subjecting them to daily self-treatment, man's "peculiarities" can become an integral part of a rich and fulfilling daily life.Originally published by Northwestern University Press in 1972, this work had a profound impact on a nation emerging self-aware from the 1960s, as well as on the era's burgeoning feminist movement. It remains a profound critique of therapy and the psychological viewpoint, and it is one of Hillman's most important and enduring works.

This chapbook collection offers new poems from the prolific career of a community leader, activist, and healer. Luis J. Rodríguez’s work asks profound questions of us as readers and fellow humans, such as, ""If society cooperates, can we nurture the full / and healthy development of everyone?"" In his introductory remarks, Martín Espada describes the poet as a man engaged in people and places: ""Luis Rodríguez is a poet of many tongues, befitting a city of many tongues. He speaks English, Spanish, ‘Hip Hop,’ ‘the Blues,’ and ‘cool jazz.’ He speaks in ‘mad solos.’ He speaks in ‘People’s Sonnets.’ He speaks in the language of protest. He speaks in the language of praise.

Studies of eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser reveals the rich cultural exchange among writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish in the Ukrainian territories, from Nikolai Gogol's 1829 The Sorochintsy Fair to Isaac Babel's stories about the forced collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside in 1929. The marketplace, which was an important site of interaction among members of these different cultures, emerged in all three languages as a metaphor for the relationship between Ukraine's coexisting communities, as well as for the relationship between the Ukrainian borderlands and the imperial capital. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have also been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish writers, such as Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko and Sholem Aleichem. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine.

Nowhere to Arrive takes as its subjects the whiplash of travel, the shuttling between disparate places and climes, and an unremitting sense of dislocation. These poems court the tension between the familiar and the foreign, between the self as distinct and the self as illusory. They look plainly at the startling strangeness of varied landscapes and mindscapes, and interrogate a state of unrootedness - one thrown into relief by the speaker's years abroad in Southeast Asia.At the chapbook's center are two long poems, titled "Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season" and "Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season," that examine the escapist narratives that draw tourists and expatriates to Cambodia, and the speaker's own privileged positioning.On a formal level, the poems in Nowhere to Arrive make room for the unsaid and that which cannot be articulated. Here, we have a vocabulary of silence alongside stark imagistic juxtapositions, poems that celebrate compression and the force of paratactic constructions. Attentiveness and concentration emerge as virtues, as the speaker surveys the vast territory of the present with a wakeful gaze.

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present.Patricia Ybarra examines IMF interventions, NAFTA, shifts in immigration policy, the escalation of border industrialization initiatives, and austerity programs. She demonstrates how these policies have created the conditions for many of the most tumultuous events in the Americas in the last forty years, including dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis; femicides in Juárez, Mexico; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; and the rise of narcotrafficking as a violent and vigorous global business throughout the Americas.Latinx artists have responded to these crises by writing and developing innovative theatrical modes of representation about neoliberalism. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latino politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents.

In A Death in Harlem, famed scholar Karla Holloway weaves a mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s 1929 best-selling novel Passing, Holloway takes readers back to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing—passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem. A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

The Blackademic Life critically examines academic fictions produced by black writers. In it, Lavelle Porter evaluates the depiction of academic and campus life in literature as a space for black writers to produce counternarratives that celebrate the potentials of black intelligence and argue for the importance of black higher education, particularly in the humanistic tradition.Beginning with an examination of W. E. B. Du Bois’s creative writing as the source of the first black academic novels, Porter looks at the fictional representations of black intellectual life and the expectations that are placed on faculty and students to be racial representatives and spokespersons, whether or not they ever intended to be. The final chapter examines blackademics on stage and screen, including in the 2014 academic film Dear White People and the groundbreaking television series A Different World.

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise.The volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption common to scholarship on the period that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Döblin, Ernst Jünger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human, and thus also radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.

This is the first book to dedicate scholarly attention to the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most significant writers and theater-makers of the twenty-first century. Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by scholars and artists who span generations, geographies, and areas of interest, the volume examines McCraney’s theatrical imagination, his singular writerly voice, his incisive cultural critiques, his stylistic and formal creativity, and his distinct personal and professional trajectories.Contributors consider McCraney’s innovations as a playwright, adapter, director, performer, teacher, and collaborator, bringing fresh and diverse perspectives to their observations and analyses. In so doing, they expand and enrich the conversations on his much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work, which includes the plays Choir Boy, Head of Passes, Ms. Blakk for President, The Breach, Wig Out!, and the critically acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays: In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, as well as the Oscar Award–winning film Moonlight, which was based on his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

In her anticipated second novel, Karla Holloway evokes the resilience of a family whose journey traces the river of America’s early twentieth century. The Mosby family, like other thousands, migrate from the loblolly-scented Carolinas north to the Harlem of their aspirations—with its promise of freedom and opportunities, sunlit boulevards, and elegant societies.The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe. As the Great Depression creeps across the world at the close of the twenties, however, the farsighted see hard times coming.The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then Chloe goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.The urgent investigation tests Thomas’s abilities to draw out the secrets Harlem harbors, untangling the color-coded connections and relationships that keep company with greed, ghosts, and grief. With nuanced characters, lush historical detail, and a lyrical voice, Gone Missing in Harlem affirms the restoring powers of home and family.

This volume marks a new chapter in the long-standing debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault regarding argumentative methods and their political implications. The essays chart the undertheorized dialogue between the two philosophers on questions of life, death, punishment, and power—an untapped point of departure from which we might continue to read the convergence and divergence of their work. What possibilities for political resistance might this dialogue uncover? And how might they relate to contemporary political crises?With the resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism across the globe, the rise of white supremacist and xenophobic violence, and the continued brutality of state-sanctioned and extrajudicial killings by police, border patrols, and ordinary citizens, there is a pressing need to critically analyze our political present. These essays bring to bear the critical force of Derrida's and Foucault's biopolitical thought to practices of mass incarceration, the death penalty, life without parole, immigration and detention, racism and police violence, transphobia, human and animal relations, and the legacies of colonization. At the heart of their biopolitics, the volume shows, lies the desire to deconstruct and resist in the name of a future that is more just and less policed. It is this impulse that makes reading their work together, at this moment, both crucial and worthwhile.