Contemporary Conversations Research Articles

Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 by Richard Schoch

Reviewed by: Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 by Richard Schoch Edward Ziter WRITING THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH STAGE, 1660–1900. By Richard Schoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; pp. 404. In past writings Richard Schoch has argued that the theatre was a central site for the development and dissemination of historical thought in nineteenth-century England. With Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660–1900 he shifts his attention from theatre as historiography to the historiography [End Page 441] of the theatre. This is clearly an understudied subject. While a few scholars have examined the texts that form the core of Schoch’s study, many have done so only to dismiss them, and no scholar has brought the rigor and sustained analysis displayed in this book. In short, Schoch really believes that the annotated copies of Langbaine’s An Account of the English Poets (1691), David Erskine Baker’s The Companion to the Playhouse (1764), and John Payne Collier’s History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831) are important and demand study, and he does a fine job of convincing his reader. He accomplishes this (daunting) task because he is principally concerned with these and other texts as poles in a dynamic field of historical imagining, rather than as markers in historicism’s progress. Schoch makes the case that debates about the nature of the past—debates that are now understood as a part of our emerging modernity—were on full display as British thinkers first began to construct the history of their national stage. Even more compellingly, he shows that theatre’s status as an embodied activity, as a selective occupation, and as a storehouse of texts shaped the contours of this debate. The historiography of the theatre differed from historiography more generally. How could it not, Schoch explains, when the theatre functions as an archive, a repertoire, a guild, and a space of convivial gathering. He shows how different forms of theatre historiography not only documented a body of plays, but also preserved myths of the transmission of acting choices and codes of professional behavior, while generating the idea of a communal group of play-goers and scholars connected through their shared knowledge of the art. The book foregrounds the work other scholars have done to expand our understanding of theatre as historiography, such as Diana Taylor’s examination of the tension between repertoire and archive and much of Joseph Roach’s work on performance genealogies in the same period. Schoch criticizes some scholars for their failure to recognize the significance of the texts that he analyzes. Key to this significance is his assertion that a range of Restoration and early eighteenth-century texts often read as limited primary materials can be productively read as theatre history when situated within contemporary conversations of the stage. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume asserted that nothing published before the 1708 Roscius Anglicanus could be described as a historical review of literature or drama; Schoch begins his analysis forty-eight years earlier. Jacky Bratton’s dismissal of the Biographia Dramatica (1782) and earlier playlists as being purely focused on play texts posits an anachronistic text-performance binary, according to Schoch. By contrast, reading playlists with para-texts reveals that writing on the theatre assumed an embrace between page and stage even in these early texts: “antipathies came much much later” (74). While Schoch does not tell a linear story, he does posit a beginning and an end. He sees a multitude of types of writing on theatre history emerging in the Restoration, writing that was prompted by the popularity of reading plays during the Interregnum (48) and by a wish to assert artistic continuity with the theatre before the Civil War (218). He ends his study with the nineteenth century, because there he sees the emergence and eventual dominance of “performance reconstructions as based on authoritative primary sources” (9). Theatre history in the interim comes in a variety of forms: “catalogue, calendar, chronicle, list, dictionary, dialogue, documentary, transcription, marginalia, biography, and narrative” (10). Such forms have been heretofore sidelined by a progressivist view of history that excludes documents that do not move us closer to narrative historiography...

Performing Black British Male Identity in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon

CLA JOURNAL 85 84 CLA JOURNAL Performing Black British Male Identity in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon Tosha Sampson-Choma In his 1997 presidential address, former College Language Association president Dr. Thomas Hammond presented “Paris-New York: Venues of Migration and the Exportation of African American Culture.” In discussing CLA’s 1997 theme, “Literature in Migration: City, Country, World,” Hammond correctly predicted, “…the traditional boundaries which have divided us geographically, and thereby have been properties largely responsible for the creation of certain cultural properties, are less likely to be so rigid in the future. What I would like to suggest is that perhaps those cultural boundaries were never so well defined as one might have imagined” (136). Hammond’s premonition has certainly come to fruition in the twenty-first century. In erasing the markers that separate Blacks geographically, socially, politically, Hammond asserts that one can appropriate an ideological concept intended for an audience and direct it to another. Black British writer Andrea Levy creates this very scenario in her novel, Fruit of the Lemon when the character Carl Jackson takes an American genre and uses it for his own empowerment and self-agency. The novel draws from Blaxploitation films of the U.S. to imagine how a Black British man could empower himself, and in doing so, Levy revises and improves upon the empowering but misogynist ideology of those films. Fruit of the Lemon reveals how important cultural narratives from one culture can transfer to, be meaningful, and undergo revision in a second culture. In February 2017, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—a segment of the NewYork Public Library system—unveiled a yearlong exhibit titled, Black Power! The exhibit is an examination of the Black Power Movement in its 50th year and provides a detailed overview of the Movement, including less known historical information, captivating visual imagery, and empowering prints, articles, and documents that capture this important period. Among the many articles on display are posters reflecting the global nature of the Black Power Movement and the pan-African spirit within the Movement. From international representations of Angela Davis to Black Power speech in Algeria, Trinidad, Nigeria, Japan, the Middle East and elsewhere, the Movement was global. Not only did Black Power take a political form, but it inspired the Black Arts Movement and also ignited popular culture through the production of Blaxploitation films. As part of the Black Power! Exhibit, the Schomburg has included a section on Blaxploitation and its cultural significance: Performing Black British Male Identity in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon For the first time, films portrayed cool, assertive black men and women with power and swagger, who rejected oppression, and fought“the Man” in a reflection of the new consciousness brought forth by the Black Power Movement…While audiences who flocked to the movies found them empowering, black organizations…formed the Coalition Against Blaxploitation in 1972. They denounced Blaxploitation films for stereotyping African Americans as pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, addicts, and hit men, and argued that the films’ glorification of violence was a form of cultural genocide. The 50th anniversary Black Power! Exhibit provides an opportunity to reflect on the far-reaching impact of Black Power and the convergence of political, artistic, and popular culture mediums to express the spirit of resistance brought out by oppressive experiences of pan-African people. In considering the international impact of the Black Power Movement and Blaxploitation’s popularity (albeit brief), Black British author, Andrea Levy contributes to the contemporary conversation through her novel, Fruit of the Lemon. Set in the late 1970s, Fruit of the Lemon highlights the struggles of sister and brother Faith and Carl Jackson, two young adults in their twenties who strive to establish a clear identity and future while pursuing their independence from their parents. Levy underscores the deficit of positive models of Black identity within the British landscape. While Fruit of the Lemon has been analyzed as a bildungsroman reflecting a second-generation Jamaican immigrant woman’s experience, the secondary plot related to Faith’s brother Carl and his journey towards Black manhood has not received sustained critical attention. Through Carl’s characterization, Levy reveals the challenges...

(Re)turning to practice in teacher education: embodied knowledge in learning to teach

Contemporary research conversations about the utility of practice theories to professional education support the reconceptualisation of pre-service teacher education in ways that provide strong preparation for continued professional learning. This paper reports on an empirical inquiry that introduced a theoretically informed practice-based intervention in a pre-service teacher education course in order to judge the utility of such an approach for student learning. Innovations within the Study of Teaching programme illustrate the bringing together of pedagogies of observation, pedagogies of enactment, and pedagogies of reflection toward an integrated theory of teacher education that focuses on the teaching body as a central site for research and for the building of preparatory knowledge and skill for ongoing learning. Data was collected from pre-service teachers involved in the programme through video and audio recordings along with individual and focus group interviews, questionnaires and student reflection on video recordings. These were analyzed within an emerging theoretical framework derived from both practice-theoretical literature and international empirical research into core practices. Initial findings suggest that a focus on practice within pre-service teacher education may enhance traditional understandings of ‘practice-based’ approaches that situate the study of practice outside of the university, in school settings. These findings have implications for the ongoing reform of teacher education in increasingly regulated contexts framed in terms of teacher quality.

The Contemporary Conversation about the French Connection “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”: Neoliberal Equ

Today’s uses of parity and diversity say much about the principle of equality in 21st-century French society. This article analyses the role they play in the contemporary conversation about the French republican motto ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite’. To that end, it addresses the way in which the uses of parity and diversity question the dilemmas of “republican equality”, along with the political dimension of the advent of neoliberalism.

Excavating a Buddhist Past in Contemporary Urdu Letters

The conflation of Urdu literature and language with Islam is one of the most noxious ramifications of Orientalist legacy in South Asia, and much reconstructive work needs to be done to deflate the tautologies of Urdu-Muslim and Hindi-Hindu. Buddhism is integral to any account of South Asian religious and intellectual history, and yet it is absent from many contemporary conversations about the history, the present, and the future direction of the area's cultures. Its rich cultural history in South Asia presents a hopeful possibility for diffusing Muslim-Hindu tensions. The 1989 novel Makan by the Indian writer Paigham Afaqui and the 1990 novel Aab-e-gum by the Pakistani writer Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi use Buddhism extensively to defy the conflation of Urdu literature with a normative Muslim identity.

Beyond cyborg subjectivities: Becoming-posthumanist educational researchers

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to (re)interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research.

Claudia Jones speaks to “half the world”: gendering Cold War politics in the Daily Worker, 1950–1953

As feminist scholarship has illustrated, historical resurgences of global migration raise questions about the intersections between war politics, persecution of activists, and its gendered implications. Informed by a new historicist approach, this article seeks to contextualize contemporary scholarly conversations on journalism, migration, and feminist studies by conducting a historical analysis of a bi-weekly column entitled “Half the World.” This column was published in the Daily Worker and was written by little-known Caribbean activist and journalist Claudia Jones. A close reading of all printed columns between 1950 and 1953 illustrate that despite Jones’ tendency to reinforce gendered dichotomies of war discourse, where women represented peace and men violence, she also placed women as the creators of a national and transnational movement against US intervention in Korea. Jones’ story, therefore, contributes to previous feminist histories on the role female journalists and activists have played in shaping the relationship between gender, nation, and war politics.

College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students

Jeffrey Selingo argues that the problems that plague contemporary American higher education are exacerbated by missed opportunities to plan strategically. He also outlines the development of numerous disruptive forces, including significant economic challenges and the emergence of educational technology, which fosters innovative means to provide education and related services. Of particular interest to higher education professionals may be Selingo’s minimal but meaningful attention to issues of developing the whole student, which he discusses primarily as a luxury in which primarily elite colleges can invest. The book calls for faculty, administrators, and others concerned about developing students to engage significantly in the contemporary conversation shaping the educational institutions of our future.

Curbing the Killing Fields: Making South Africa Safer

South Africa is often held up as an enviable example of a country that avoided a full- blown civil war. Twenty years into the new constitutional democracy, however, the continuation of social conflict and criminal violence begs the question as to whether South Africa deserves to be described as “post-conflict.” In this article, we take stock of contemporary conversations about crime. First, key dimensions of South Africa’s crime problem are described, drawing on a composite report on violent crime published in 2009 by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (Johannesburg). We then focus on three recent episodes to illustrate some of the dimensions of violence in South Africa’s multi-faceted society. Finally, we take stock of some select approaches to dealing with violent criminality and review ideas for containing crime and making South Africa safer.

Fearless Speech and the Discourse of Civility in <em>Salt of the Earth</em>

The film Salt of the Earth depicts what Alicia Schmidt Camacho calls the “prehistory” of the Chicana/o Movement, and it casts both longstanding and contemporary conversations about civility in a fuller light. To date, scholarship on the film has focused on how its main character, Esperanza Quintero, develops her voice over the course of the film. We argue that a reading of the film’s material aspects—what, specifically, happens to the brown bodies in the film—renders a more complicated understanding of Esperanza’s speech and reveals that the discourse of civility often is a prelude to physical violence. In the ways the film’s characters resist the boundaries of civility and articulate alternatives to those boundaries, we find a familiar echo of the struggles in our own times.

Terrifying Performances: Black-Brown-Queer Borrowings in Loins of Punjab Presents

Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B.D.G.’s intimacies are depicted, and analyzes the performance styles they use to express critical perspectives on racism, homophobia, and Islamophobia. I argue that Otto and B.D.G.’s performances offer alternative ways to think through contemporary conversations around cultural appropriation and interracial desire in ways that decenter whiteness or a white desiring subject. However, I also observe how their critical deployments of hypermasculinity potentially skew public conversations about racialized violence.

Neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but organicism: what the philosophy of biology was.

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse.

A Seat at the Table: Affective Formation and United Methodist Higher Education

The increasingly pronounced distinction between educational institutions that retain their ecclesial identity and those that jettison religious commitments reflects a bifurcated educational landscape in which institutions are characterized either as a “church-related” or a “Christian college and university.” This development can be understood as the emergence of separate tables around which disparate conversations exist among those who identify themselves according to the terms of each tradition.James K. A. Smith's Cultural Liturgies series emerges from the Christian college and university tradition and has introduced affective formation into the parlance of contemporary conversations related to Christian higher education. Although United Methodists traditionally identify their higher education institutions as church-related colleges and universities, the Wesleyan theological commitment to forming holistic affections displays theological resonance with contemporary conversations about affective formation. Rereading Smith's account in light of a Wesleyan understanding of affective formation illustrates the continuity between Wesleyan theological commitments and contemporary discussions about affective formation while also expanding Smith's account in distinct ways. Doing so demonstrates the illuminative potential of intellectual engagement across institutional and disciplinary lines and provides a model for similar engagement within the bifurcated landscape of higher education.The argument suggests that United Methodists should not only have a seat at the table of contemporary conversation about affective formation, but that they can learn much from the conversation. Prescriptive conclusions follow for United Methodists and for all communions based on this reanalysis of affective formation and the United Methodist theological tradition.

Playing the Race Card: Antiracial Bordering and Rhetorical Practices of New Racism

Communication scholars across the discipline have investigated the ways border metaphors influence racial identity formation and analysis. Intervening in contemporary conversations about racial borders and borderlands, the Race Card Project and accompanying NPR website was designed as a national forum to inspire and encourage a multi-media conversation about race across the United States. Exploring the metaphors they use, the logics they deploy, and the evidence they call upon to substantiate their claims, we contend that Race Card participants engage in a discursive practice that we call antiracial bordering to mitigate their experiences with racism in the United States; however, in so doing, they leave colorblind racist logics intact by devaluing borders (and subsequently categories). Specifically, by crafting antiracial bordering, Race Card participants engage in a post-racial rhetoric that is characterized by 1) discourses of management and transcendence, 2) discourses of scientific reason, and 3) discourses of heteronormativity that serve to sediment the racist logics they set out to trouble. After tracing the nuanced ways each of these discourses characterize antiracial bordering practices and the work they do to uphold colorblind logics of race, we conclude by theorizing the productive (anti-racist) value of constructing and maintaining borders.

“I Understand the Struggle”: Leveraging the Lived Experiences of African American Teachers in TESOL

Although TESOL in-service teacher education committed to culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris, 2012) has underscored the critical role of teachers' professional subjectivities for student achievement, relatively few studies have attempted to capture the perspectives of African American classroom teachers working with English language learners in U.S. contexts. The authors bring qualitative data from a participatory study to argue that the vivencias of Ellie Washington, an African American first-grade teacher born and raised in the segregated southern United States, was the lens through which she understood the TESOL in-service development in which she had participated 5 years earlier, her advocacy for Latino transnationals, and her hesitations about the exclusivity of ESL programming. Extending contemporary conversations about teacher quality in the “aftermath of scripted curriculum policies” (Maniates & Mahiri, 2011, p. 10), this article centers on how Washington's lived experiences shaped her interactions with Latino immigrant schoolchildren in rural North Carolina. The authors argue that, in spite of a needed emphasis on developing classroom teachers' sociocultural competencies for working with children of immigration, too often there is an erasure of the lived experiences of teachers of color and the funds of knowledge (Moll, 2014) those experiences potentially represent for highly qualified teaching.

There Are No Schools in Utopia: John Dewey’s Democratic Education

“The most utopian thing in Utopia is that there are no schools,” writes John Dewey (1933/1989, 136). With these words, Dewey opened his talk to kindergarten teachers on April 21, 1933 at Teachers College, Columbia University. Published a couple days later in the New York Times under the title, “Dewey Outlines Utopian Schools,” we find Dewey in this little-discussed talk fancifully imagining himself among the Utopians—somehow transported from the economically depressed United States of the 1930s to Utopia, where the economy of acquisition is nothing but a memory.1 Finding himself in Utopia, Dewey, of course, asks about the schools, quizzing the Utopians on everything from their pedagogy to their educational goals. What he discovers is a radical critique of education as it was (and still is) often practiced. The emphasis on standards and the competitive and punitive systems of examinations that enforce them appear deeply misguided to the Utopians. They contend that it is our economic system and its emphasis on “personal acquisition and private possession” that has reduced education to the mere acquisition of facts, necessary for the further acquisition of things. According to the Utopians, once their acquisitive economy had passed away, education itself was transformed, liberated in a way that enabled teachers to concentrate their attention on identifying and developing the unique capacities of each student. Instead of a single-minded focus on delivering the facts of the curriculum, the Utopians were able to see the child as the gravitational center of the educational enterprise. The contemporary conversation about education in America, and in many other western educational contexts, could not be further from this vision. American society is more driven by acquisition than ever, and its children are exposed to an unprecedented onslaught of advertising aimed at training them in the practice of consumption.2 In school, the same children are scrutinized by high-stakes, standardized examinations that stand as the goal and measure of learning. Education itself—in

A Culture of Opportunities - Developing the Entrepreneurial Culture Construct

What is an entrepreneurial culture? In this paper we review and critique this oft used but incompletely understood concept. Despite decades of application in the strategic management, innovation, and entrepreneurship literature from both a research and practitioner perspective, much about this organizational culture concept remains under-specified. With the intention of joining, provoking, and ultimately contributing to the contemporary conversation on entrepreneurial culture, we adopt a theoretical construct development framework to address the equivocal treatment of this concept's definitions, characteristics, attributes, and structure. We present a multi- dimensional model of entrepreneurial culture that integrates key social, cognitive, and behavioural elements from the broader entrepreneurship field. Our paper concludes with an examination of relevant future research endeavours exploring this conceptualization, developing multi-level scales and models, and building out the nomological network. Collectively, this work explores and develops this important yet largely descriptive concept into a theoretical construct suitable for incorporation into research models.

Contemporary Conversations between Ayurveda and Biomedicine

In the context of colonial and post-colonial India, social scientific inquiry about the advent of Ayurveda into modernity has been documented and analysed as an encounter between Ayurveda and biomedicine. These studies have shown how Ayurveda as a medical knowledge system offered continuous contestation to the existing power structures at the level of market, state, and epistemology, challenging and creatively positing alternatives to biomedical pharmaceuticals. These alternatives represent a fascinating spectrum of ayurvedic products introduced to the market, ranging from tonics and digestives, cosmetics and beauty products, to new formulations aimed at common conditions, such as hepatitis and diabetes, the weak points of biomedical treatments. In this paper, I will analyse from a historical and epistemological perspective, an interesting trajectory that has led research by scholars and physicians from mainly looking at reformulating drugs in the beginning to reconciling basic ayurvedic parameters with biomedicine towards emphasising the processes and parameters of the ayurvedic system as a whole.

“The Worst Part of the Dead Past”: Language Attitudes, Policies, and Pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1902

To underline the value of composition’s international and multilingual history, this article presents an account of language attitudes, policies, and pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) between 1866 and 1902, which also provides a historical dimension to contemporary conversations about international and translingual approaches to writing research and pedagogy.

Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination

This article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate Occupy sites—the Alternative Banking working group of Occupy Wall Street, the daily life of lists in Liberty Square, née Zuccotti Park, and the work of Strike Debt. In particular, I focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. Where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism’s otherwises for inspiration and potential, the expansion of the economic imagination I trace here suggests that the centers constitute zones of possibility as well. I aim to show not only the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of imaginative work in the dense and seemingly definitive spaces of financial expertise but also a remarkable, and largely unrecognized, contemporary conversation around the future of banking, foreclosures, and democratized finance.