Communicating the Other across Cultures: From Othering as Equipment for Living, to Communicating Other/Wise

Whenever political and social decisions use categories of identity such as race, religion, social class, or nationality to distinguish groups of people, they risk holding certain groups as inferior and culturally “Other.” When people employ ideologies of imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and classism, they position certain groups as superior or ideal/ized people. Such ideological positioning causes […]

Magnet Theatre: Three Decades of Making Space

For three decades, Cape Town’s Magnet Theatre has served as a crucial space for theatre, education, performance and community throughout a turbulent period in South African history. Offering a dialogue between internal and external perspectives, this book analyses Magnet’s many productions and presents a rich compendium of their work. Cape Town’s Magnet Theatre has been […]

Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life

What does it mean to perform whiteness in the postcolonial era? To answer this question—crucial for understanding the changing meanings of race in the twenty-first century—Megan Lewis examines the ways that members of South Africa’s Afrikaner minority have performed themselves into, around, and out of power from the colonial period to the postcolony. The nation’s […]

Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television

Contradictory to its core, the sitcom—an ostensibly conservative, tranquilizing genre—has a long track record in the United States of tackling controversial subjects with a fearlessness not often found in other types of programming. But the sitcom also conceals as much as it reveals, masking the rationale for socially deviant or deleterious behavior behind figures of […]

War and Death in the Music of George Crumb: A Crisis of Collective Memory

This book analyzes two pieces by American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) as artifacts of American collective memory of war. *Black Angels* (1970) has long been associated with the Vietnam War, even though its relationship to the war specifically has changed over time. *Winds of Destiny* (2004) is specifically about the Civil War and shows how […]

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism)

The Selected Literary Letters of Paul Laurence Dunbar is a collection of 250 letters, transcribed and annotated, that reveal the personal and literary life of one of the most highly regarded African American writers and intellectuals. Editors Cynthia C. Murillo and Jennifer M. Nader highlight Dunbar not just as a determined author and master of […]

Before Equiano: A Prehistory of the North American Slave Narrative

In the antebellum United States, formerly enslaved men and women who told their stories and advocated for abolition helped establish a new genre with widely recognized tropes: the slave narrative. This book investigates how enslaved black Africans conceived of themselves and their stories before the War of American Independence and the genre’s development in the […]