In her challenging book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), political scientist Adom Getachew discusses self-determination in the Anglophone Black Atlantic, with special emphasis on post-colonial independence as well as Caribbean and African federations. It would be interesting to compare the political thought of intellectuals and statesmen such as George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley,…
Category: theatre
The tragedy of Haiti in history, drama, and performance
Last week, as I read in The New York Times the four-day series “The Ransom – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” and I continued work on Aimé Césaire’s superb drama The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, 1970) for my book-length project The Tragedy of Revolution, I took the train to Chicago and…
“Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” by Stephen Greenblatt (2018)
“We learn not simply what Trump tells us about Shakespeare but what Shakespeare tells us about Trump. Illuminating scene after scene, Greenblatt is especially fine on the mechanisms of tyranny.”
The tragedy of revolution is that liberation conspires with terror.
Watching the other day Nicholas Hytner’s promenade staging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I heard Cassius say: “Men at some time were masters of their fates./The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars./But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (1.2.140-3). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToqgxNizM-I The reference to fate reminded me of a recently published essay. Since I have…
Bonnie Honig on agency in “Antigone”
Antigone’s actions are “embedded in and enacted on behalf of forces, structures, and networks larger than the autonomous individual that modern liberals, humanists and even radical democratic theorist tend to both love … and berate” (Honig, Antigone, Interrupted, 8). “Under the name of Antigone, A,I tracks not an exemplary individual but rather a set of…
Charles McNulty: “How theater should respond to a democracy in meltdown”
“Today would seem to be a prime time for agitprop.”
“All the President’s Shakespeare”
“What Trump administration officials would you cast in Macbeth?”
Laurent Dubois: “Heroines of the Haitian Revolution”
“What is the role of an artist in the face of political repression? What is the place of culture in the midst of injustice and terror? Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916–1973), author of powerful novels representing the experience of living under the Duvalier dictatorship, confronted such questions throughout her life. One of Vieux-Chauvet’s earliest novels,…
J. Michelle Coghlan: “Afterlives of the Paris Commune”
Coghlan’s book Sensational Internationalism: The Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century (2016) recovers the now largely forgotten story of the Paris Commune’s spectacular afterlife as specter and spectacle in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American culture.
“Revolt. She said. Revolt again” by Alice Birch
The New England premiere of a feminist play that “morphs language and explodes boundaries to explore the myriad ways women are styled, shaped, and confined to fit society’s expectations, asking us: What happens when we rebel?”