Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Fintan Walsh is Professor of Performing Arts and Humanities and Director of Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His recent books include the collection Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (Methuen Drama 2020) and the monograph Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland (2016). Fintan is a former editor of the Theatre Research International, and editor of the book series Contemporary Performance Texts.Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. In moving with, and through, the rip currents of death, love and queer inheritances, Walsh asks us to reimagine how and why we endure all that was and is yet to come. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.
anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness
This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resistance, as well as holding the potential for performers and audiences to work through painfully felt yet difficult to articulate experiences towards feelings of hope. Replete with rigorous, generous and creative readings, it is also a meditation on Walsh’s own emotional engagement with queer theatre and performance, and how our cultural attachments can sustain, enliven and contain us.
Noreen Giffney, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis
Lucid and engaging … <i>Performing the Queer Past</i> will reward anyone interested in theatre history, performance studies, LGBTQ+ art, or contemporary culture with Walsh’s sensitive, compelling readings.
Theatre Survey
'Tender and rigorous, this book invites readers to linger with difficult pasts and consider how best to grasp their hauntings, demands and manifestations in the present. This is a book about mourning as well as holding, a simultaneous act of exhumation and a laying to rest.'
anna six, author of Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness
‘This is an extraordinary book, in which queer theatre and performance become sites of celebration and resistance, as well as holding the potential for performers and audiences to work through painfully felt yet difficult to articulate experiences towards feelings of hope. Replete with rigorous, generous and creative readings, it is also a meditation on Walsh’s own emotional engagement with queer theatre and performance, and how our cultural attachments can sustain, enliven and contain us.’
Noreen Giffney, psychoanalytic psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis
Why do contemporary queer theatre and performance appear to be possessed by the past? What aesthetic practices and dramaturgical devices reveal the occupation of the present by painful history? How might the experience of theatre and performance relieve the present of its most arduous burdens?
Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries hailed as confirming the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people were over, this book turns our attention to artists fixed on history’s enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples including theatre, performance, installation and digital practices, Fintan Walsh explores how this work reckons with complex cultural and personal histories. Among the issues confronted are the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial and sexual objectification, the AIDS crisis and Covid-19, alongside more local and individual experiences of violence, trauma and grief.
Walsh traces how the queer past is summoned and interrogated via what he elaborates as the aesthetics and dramaturgies of possession, which lend form to the still-stinging aches and generative potential of injury, injustice and loss. These strategies expose how the past continues to haunt and disturb the present, while calling on those of us who feel its force to respond to history’s unresolved hurt.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Performing Queer Possession
1. Channelling Ghosts: the Haunted Present
2. Muscle Memories: Exe(o)rcising History
3. Re-enacting Violence: Sharing Responsibility
4. Arresting Objects: Transforming Matters
5. Wilde Spirits: Occupation and Commemoration
6. Grief’s Ricochet: Intermedial Returns
7. Epilogue: Shorelines of the Dispossessed
Notes
References
Index
Theatre has always offered immediate responses to political, social, economic and cultural crisis events that are local, national and global in dimension, establishing itself as a prime medium of engagement. Methuen Drama Agitations interrogates these manifold intersections between theatre and the contemporary: What is the relationship between theatre and reality? Which functions does the theatre perform in public life? Where does the radical potential of the theatre reside and how is it untapped?
Methuen Drama Agitations addresses issues from across a number of spectrums, including contemporary politics, environmental concerns, issues of gender and race, and the challenges of globalization. The series focuses on text as much as performance, on theory as much as practice. It investigates the lively dialogues between theatre and contemporary lived experience.
Advisory Board:
Anne Etienne (University College Cork, Ireland)
Alex Feldman (University of Haifa, Israel)
Lynnette Goddard (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)
Anton Krueger (Rhodes University, South Africa)
Esther Kim Lee (Duke University, USA)
Benjamin Poore (University of York, UK)
Marcus Tan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Sarah J. Townsend (Penn State University, USA)
Denise Varney (University of Melbourne, Australia)