Humor has always been important in Chinese drama. The four major role-types in traditional Chinese drama include the chou (usually translated as “clown”), the others being male roles, female roles, and “painted face” roles. Although placed last in the four-tier hierarchy, the humble clown with his comical facial makeup and humorous speech is an i…[Read more]

The metatheatricality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream has invited recent directors to tell particular kinds of socially progressive stories. This article uses the notion of “social reparation” to theorize remedial uses of Shakespeare in adaptations that give artists and audiences more moral agency. By imagining more inclusive local habitations and s…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, nearly all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933) wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, almost all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in…[Read more]

Based in the South throughout his career, the Black Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs wrote nearly fifty books and pamphlets, including five novels, almost all of which he issued through his own publishing companies. Griggs was a founder of American Baptist Theological Seminary, which several Civil Rights Movement leaders attended in the 1950s.…[Read more]

This talk introduces the concept of “prosthetic narration,” a narrative technique that mediates the engagement of disabled cognition such that the reader is invited to reimagine how one thinks and perceives. In his essay, “The Novel,” Émile Zola establishes the “intimate union” between the author and “the reality of the scene” as a premise of fic…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

The rise of global Shakespeare as an industry and cultural practice—the incorporation of Shakespearean performance in cultural diplomacy and in the cultural marketplace—is aided by digital tools of dissemination and digital forms of artistic expression. Shakespeare has evolved from a cultural nomad in the past centuries—a body of works with no pe…[Read more]

Latinx/o/a writing has existed long before 20th century state policies and publishing markets created the category we recognize today as “Latino/a literature.” This course will focus on the literary and cultural production of writers from the era of initial colonization through Latin American independence and the 19th century actions fueled by the…[Read more]

This essay examines ethnic strife and cultural friction in New Orleans during the Mexican-American war. Specifically, it explores how the Crescent City’s anglophone and francophone populations navigated the tension between national and transnational affiliation through performance. By considering both the material and the immaterial aspects of p…[Read more]

War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

The glocal scale offers a more productive frame for analyzing the transculturation of theatre, particular Brechtian theory and practice, than either the singularly local or the generalized global. Glocalization brings into focus networks of imaginative representation that may be missed in overbroad applications of global frameworks, particularly…[Read more]