Booklist: Multicultural and Models from Other Cultures

Booklist: Multicultural and Models from

Other Cultures

 


Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture
Johannes H. Birringer
Athlone Press, 2000
ISBN: 0485004186
 

Book Description: Performance on the Edgetakes the reader on a journey across geographical borders and conceptual boundaries in order to map out the new territory of contemporary theatre, dance, media arts and activism. Working across social, cultural and political fault lines, the book explores performance as both process and contact, as the commitment to political activism and the reconstruction of community, as site-specific intervention into the social and technological structures of abandonment, and as the highly charged embodiment of erotic fantasies. The book addresses the politics of community-oriented and reconstructive artmaking in an era marked by the AIDS crisis, cultural and racial polarization, warfare, separatism and xenophobia. Provocatively illustrated with work from North and Central America and Eastern and Western Europe, the book challenges our assumptions about the relations between media and activism, technological imperatives and social processes and bodily identities and virtual communities.
 


The Field of Cultural Production
Pierre Bourdieu
Columbia University Press, 1993
ISBN: 0231082878
 

Book Description: Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary, art, and cultural criticism in the late 20th century: aesthetic value and judgment, the social contexts of cultural practice, the role of intellectuals and artists, and the structures of literary and artistic authority. Bourdieu elaborated a theory of the cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He analyses the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.
 


Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas
Phoebe Farris-Dufrene, editor
Humanity Books, 1999
ISBN: 10573925926
 

Book Description: This work is unique in bringing a diversity of voices to the discussion of art in the Americas. The contributors, scholars, and artists of color in North and South America from wide ranging multicultural backgrounds--Asian American, Native American, and Latin American--bring their critical perspective to discussions of art and politics, art and feminist issues, art and the environment, indigenous art, and art in the various economic systems. The book focuses on how art, and artists of color, are influenced by the social and political issues in various Western countries, states and cities. Throughout, it conveys a sense of how art and artists must interact with society--calling for action by artists to responsibly challenge the dominant powers through art that is politically and socially relevant.
 


Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance
Susan Chandler Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus
The University of Michigan Press, 2001
ISBN: 0472067605
 

Book Description: International perspectives on a form of activist, participatory theater with marginalized groups in cities around the world. Performing Democracyexplores aspects of a developing form of performance that works to change social conditions for marginalized groups or to preserve the traditions and cohesion of the community. The book combines critical analysis with field reports on specific projects and productions to explore the issues that confront community-based performance. The range of topics is impressive, and includes performances in North America, Australia, the Middle East, Bosnia, Taiwan, Korea, England, and the Netherlands. Many articles include production photos. The book's first section focuses on how performance can contribute to the definition, creation, and preservation of community. Next, contributors address issues of authority within the production of community-based performance. A final section considers community-based performance's efforts to encourage individuals to feel empowered in everyday life and in their relation to government. The range of performance genres covered includes community history plays, agitprop, forum theater workshops, puppetry, avant-garde plays, dance, and oral epics. The projects involve many different kinds of communities, including the inner city, youth, seniors, ethnic groups, activists, gays and lesbians, immigrants, and prison inmates.
 


Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
bell hooks
The New Press, 1995
ISBN: 1565842634
 

Book Description: In Art on My Mind, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community. For this collection, hooks has written thirteen new pieces; featured among the new pieces are interviews with and critiques of the works of Alison Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, LaVerne Wells-Bowie and Margo Humphreys, as well as essays on photography, architecture, and the representation of black male bodies.
 

Key Points from the Introduction: “Art on My Mind emerged as a response to the dearth of progressive critical writing by African-Americans on art and aesthetics. The book represents my critical response to the ongoing dialogues about art, visual politics, and aesthetics…As we critically imagine new ways to think and write about visual art, as we make spaces for dialogue across boundaries, we engage a process of cultural transformation that will ultimately create a revolution in vision.”
 


Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America
Lucy R. Lippard
The New Press, 2000 (paperback)
ISBN: 1565845730
 

Book Description: Mixed Blessingsis the first book to discuss the cross-cultural processes taking place in the work of contemporary Latino, Native-, African-, and Asian-American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different media, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art; it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures. Lippard challenges conventional approaches and explores the role of images in a changing society. Among her subjects are the uncertainty of exile; the confusion of identity in attempts to climb out of the melting pot; and art that speaks for itself, reversing stereotypes and reclaiming history and memory.
 

Excerpted Book Review: Lucy Lippard's intellectual devotion to the power of women and persons of color enacted and idealized within their works of visual art has brought her to a level of discourse that is rich in democratic possibility and promise." (Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of African and African-American Art history, Yale University)
 


Community Theatre: Global Perspectives
Eugene van Erven
Routledge Press, 2001
ISBN: 0415190312
 

Book Description: Community theatre is an important device for communities to collectively share stories, to participate in political dialogue, and to break down the increasing exclusion of marginalized groups of citizens. It is practiced all over the world by growing numbers of people. Eugene van Erven, who is one of the world's foremost experts on Asian political theatre, has now put together the first comparative study of the work and methodological traditions that have developed in community theatres around the world. It's an incredibly wide ranging study based on van Erven's own experiences working with community theatre groups in six very different countries (the Philippines, the Netherlands, United States, Costa Rica, Kenya, and Australia). Includes a unique video record of van Erven's journey, specially produced to accompany the book.