Intimate Spaces Research Articles

Privacy matters: updating human rights for the digital society

Privacy matters because everyone needs some portion of their intimate space - whether it is their bodies, their families and relationships, their property or information about them - to remain hidden and secure from unwanted or unexpected external interferences. Privacy is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of other hard-fought freedoms like free speech and non-discrimination on grounds of sex, race, sexual orientation and political and religious beliefs. This universal truism is being questioned in an age where humans are submitting large quantities of traces of themselves, increasingly unwittingly, and as a by-product or condition of their participation in digital life. However, as participation in digital society and the economy becomes all-pervasive, and in effect compulsory, privacy cannot become the preserve of those who can afford it. As memories of the man-made cataclysms of the twentieth century recede, there has never been a greater need for safeguards against unjustified intrusions into people’s personal space by powerful state actors and corporations. Convergence between political malevolence and technological omnipotence is a ‘real and present‘ danger. This article summarises the case for privacy and emerging legal principles such as accountability and individual control over data about them. It argues for a Global Friends of Privacy comprising willing regulators, academics and civil society to patrol more vigilantly and to contest more forcefully attempts to ‘salami-slice’ away precious liberties of populations.

‘Before she ends up in a brothel’

This essay explores the first appearance of actresses on the public stage in England and the Dutch Republic. It considers the cultural climate, the theaters, and the plays selected for these early performances, particularly from the perspective of public femininity. In both countries antitheatricalists denounced female acting as a form of prostitution and evidence of inner corruption. In England, theaters were commercial institutions with intimate spaces that capitalized on the staging of privacy as theatrical. By contrast, the Schouwburg, the only public playhouse in Amsterdam, was an institution with a more civic character, in which the actress could be treated as unequivocally a public figure. I explain these differences in the light of changing conceptions of public and private and suggest that the treatment of the actress shows a stronger public-private division in the Dutch Republic than in England.

Melodies of God: the significance of the soundscape in conserving the Great Zimbabwe landscape

ABSTRACTSacred landscapes require a holistic approach for conservation. They are intimate spaces, susceptible to cultural erosion if the focus is on material culture only. Mainstream conservation theories and processes, developed from western heritage traditions, emphasize monumentality. However, there are unquantifiable connections between people and place, which if eroded, can result in memory erasure and, ultimately, the un-inheriting of the heritage place. Soundscape, the relationship between people and the sounds around them, is an innovative way to understand these intimate connections. Using Great Zimbabwe, I examine how local communities connect and sustain place memory through preservation of intangible heritage. Several events at Great Zimbabwe have shown that soundscape is one way to represent these connections and that preserving the soundscape can also enhance tangible heritage conservation. I examine how the Great Zimbabwe cultural landscape’s soundscape is used to preserve memory and sustain connections between the people and the landscape.

Flagging White Nationalism ‘After Cronulla’: From the Beach to the Net

ABSTRACTIn this article, I use a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots. Social media affordances present a set of conditions that were absent during the 2005 riot, and yet, are today mobilising distinct variants of white nationalism online. Rather than these expressions being locally situated, social media allows these performances to be connected up virtually, extending the white nationalists’ capacity to occupy and terrorise a range of networked public and intimate spaces and influence mainstream political culture. Nonetheless social media affordances, which situate these movements in a virtual ‘ecology of subcultures’ also contributes to their instability and ambivalence, with the uncivil ‘trolling’ practices of online movements undermining broader social goals and contributing to even more extreme and unstable expressions online.

Review: Angela Grauerholz: Écrins écrans and Regarder

CENTRE CULTUREL CANADIEN PARIS NOVEMBER 9,2016-MARCH 24,2017 MUSEE D'ORSAY PARIS NOVEMBER 9,2016-FEBRUARY 5,2017 It's often stated that with modernity came an increased visuality--our sense of vision now dominates all other perceptual modes. And we now look from a further remove: our rationalizing gaze extends across greater distances to anonymous urban others; we see more representations of things than things themselves. But that intimacy, drained from our personal exchanges, slips into other spaces. Desire is endless and mobile. Looking deeply into our images, we can trace the surfeit of displaced desire circulating through them. All pictures are about looking, of course, but two recent photographic exhibitions--presented in a city that itself privileges modern looking, with its open boulevards designed for both authoritarian and bourgeois surveillance--gave special focus to the circulation of desire within images. The most pointed address to this theme came from a recent photographic display at the Musee d'Orsay. Regarder (Looking) brought together images from the museum's collection made with nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century processes, including daguerreotypes, albumen prints, cyano-types, and gelatin silver prints. In each image, human subjects elude the gaze, direct it onto other, or return it back to their mirrored selves. In two of Paul Burty Haviland's seductively elegant portraits (c. 1910), women's faces are shielded from view, submerged in long curves of shadow produced by hats or hands. Four albumen prints c. 1865, produced collaboratively by photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson and the Countess of Castiglione, show the Italian diplomat who was also Napoleon Ill's provocative mistress playfully seducing and subverting the viewer's gaze by sending her own through cut-out frames, masks, and hand mirrors. In an anonymous postmortem daguerreotype from 1850, three figures-two of them standing behind a beautiful deceased young woman--all stare into the camera. In a stunning pair of hand-tinted stereographic daguerreotypes made by soft-porn artist cum producer of academies Felix-Jacques Moulin, a naked woman, body pressed voluptuously against the mirror she lies upon, stares deeply into the pool of her own flesh (Nu, reflet au miroir, Narcisse, 1850). In a salt print, the reflection of a tripod-mounted camera repeats itself again and again in mise en abyme in a large mirror above a salon's mantel. Less explicit, but no less present, was the play of the gaze in images presented at the Centre Culturel Canadien. Close to forty photographs drawn from two bodies of work by German-born Quebec artist Angela Grauerholz invited pleasurable looking through a series of large color inkjet prints of open yet intimate interior spaces and, in dialogue on separate walls, pieces from the artist's series Privation (2001). The most striking feature of the exhibit was its beauty, and this was particularly evident in the first group. Though aesthetic beauty still appears in contemporary art, it is not required and is perhaps even rare. Serial attacks by twentieth-century avant-garde movements--particularly Dada and conceptualism--chipped away and diminished its value. These avant-garde movements bracketed midcentury formalism, an approach that did invoke the beautiful through painting and photography. Grauerholz's images seem to hover close to these two histories: her pictures refer to the real world and invite conceptual contemplation, but their slightly soft focus, reduced detail, and mesmerizing colors--from soft pinks, beiges, and violets to dramatic reds and vivid blues--make them more abstract. Standing before these large, frameless images, I got lost in their compelling beauty. …

Exclusionary intimacies: Racialized language in Veneto, Northern Italy

While Italy has been a country of emigrants, since the 1970s, it has become a receiver of migrants. These recent, reverse direction migratory flows have triggered strong reactions, such as nativist discourses about national culture and identity and the aggressive anti-immigration politics of the Lega Nord (‘Northern League’). This article examines how racialized language in the Northern Italian region of Veneto is at times performed in ways that totally or partially exclude certain migrant groups, while at the same time creating intimate spaces of inclusion for Italians. By codeswitching from Standard Italian to Venetan, speech participants address audiences who are presumed to “share” this code, but when the topics of their conversations are migrants, such shifts can also enact exclusionary stances vis-a-vis the latter. This article demonstrates that familiar analytic dichotomies such as exclusion/inclusion and insider/outsider are inadequate, and it proposes more processual and gradient approaches to participation.

Between two Beneditos: enslaved wet-nurses amid slavery’s decline in southeast Brazil

ABSTRACTThis article discusses a series of questions related to the presence of enslaved women, female slaves working toward contractual or bequeathed freedom, and freedwomen in the domestic sphere in the final years of slavery in Brazil, with an initial emphasis on the contradictions between medical and sanitarian discourses that promoted a new, bourgeois vision of the home and the continued existence of the master-slave relationship and tutelary relations derived therefrom in the most intimate spaces of wealthy households in the cities and towns of the country’s coffee-growing southeast. The article also seeks to reconstruct the perspective of these captive and servant-class women at the moment of slavery’s extinction, thus providing a new perspective on the latter process by noting how the abolition of slavery was conditioned by the gendering of household work. A reconstruction of the life of Ambrosina, a slave woman rented out by her owner to serve another family as a wet nurse, then accused of murder after the death of her young charge, is the means by which these contributions are made.

Edward Hopper y su casa-estudio en Cape Cod. Dibujos y pinturas entre recuerdos y experiencias

En 1934 Edward Hopper diseñó y construyó su casa de verano junto al mar en Cape Cod a partir de las experiencias vividas en las casas que habitó y en las arquitecturas de sus cuadros (Figs. 1 a 4). Tomando como base el modelo de casa Cape Cod Cottage, adaptó esta tipología para su nueva residencia tras el conocimiento que de esta construcción había adquirido al pintarla frecuentemente en sus cuadros durante los veranos. El agua de su casa natal de Nyack, la luminosidad del estudio en Nueva York y la posición elevada de los faros de sus lienzos, serán elementos con los que construirá este íntimo espacio para vivir, pensar y pintar. La forma en que Hopper ideó y materializó sus cuadros era similar al proceso de elaboración del proyecto arquitectónico y nos revela un arquitecto que utilizó su experiencia artística para el diseño y construcción de su casa-estudio.

‘My private kingdom and sometimes my private jail’ The meaning of home in the lives of Bedouin women: changes in the home and social spaces and their implications for Bedouin women

Home has always been significant in the lives of Bedouin women. At times it has been considered a ‘private kingdom’ – an intimate space, a jurisdiction, a sphere of influence and a space of creativity and well-being. In other periods it has been perceived as a ‘private jail’ – suffocating and limiting. The Bedouin communities in southern Israel, which are part of the country’s Arab-Palestinian population, are undergoing major changes – cultural and social, as well as in the form of settlement – imposed largely by the state. The external form of the Bedouin home has changed too, from a tent to a cement-block house, from an open structure to a closed one, from being part of the open space of the desert to being a limited space in a neighbourhood. To understand the changing meaning of home for Bedouin women during this transition, I conducted a narrative study with 30 women who live today in permanent settlements, but who represent three generations that correspond to three periods of settlement and three housing types. I found that each generation ascribes different meanings to the home.

Navigating and negotiating ethnographies of urban hustle in Nairobi slums

This paper reflects on doing and writing ethnography on the urban margins, where uncertainty and provisionality mark the everyday city. The discussion is situated within a postcolonial approach to ethnographies of ‘hustle’ in Nairobi slums, critically reflecting on methodological choices made to facilitate the licence to linger in intimate and interstitial spaces of neighbourhoods often closed off to visitors. The paper argues that while urban ethnography is foundational to postcolonial scholarship on African cities, it is also vexed with tensions between ethnographic experience of the provisional and uncertain lived reality in which ethnographers seek to embed themselves for periods of time, and the ethnographic representation that emerges in the form of ethnographic authorship. The paper engages with the methodological tactic of engaging in waste work as an ‘apprentice researcher’; and with the theoretical choice of deploying the very vocabularies and expressions of struggle of interlocutors living and working in the ‘slums’ of Nairobi.

“A scrapbook of you + me”

This article reads J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. (2013) as a reflection of the changing status and function of the printed novel in the digital age. As an experimental novel with yellowing pages and handwriting in the margins, S. appears to reflect a “material turn” in literature. It celebrates the book as a space of intimacy and memory, positioned in opposition to new digital media. However, the article argues that S. is also fundamentally and paradoxically grounded in digital culture. Drawing on the work of, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, Bill Brown, and Henry Jenkins, I point to a tension in S. It does at once (1) nostalgically celebrate the “aesthetics of bookishness” and (2) embrace a modern media culture where literature takes place beyond the book and between media.

Intimate strangers: perspectives on female converts to Islam in Britain

This article explores the relationships between female converts to Islam in Britain and their close friends and family. It pays attention to the perspectives of converts but focuses on the reactions of their intimates to the conversion. We argue that converts become ‘intimate strangers’ through conversion—estranged on the level of understanding and belief but intimate on the emotional plane. This strangeness is symbolised by the Orientalist stereotypes associated with the converts. At the same time, friends and family shun engagement with the conversion itself, thus keeping alive the stereotypes and precluding understanding. In refusing to engage with matters of belief even within the intimate space of the family, secularism’s orthodox private/public divide gets busted where religiosity, instead, becomes an issue between the (individual) private and the (family) public. Lacking reciprocity and with no access to the inner depths of the people they are closest to, the liberal rhetoric of friends and family about personal choice and equal acceptance of all paths amounts to bigotry and turns out to be painful for both the converts and their intimates.

Cuban Kitchens: Spaces of Food and Life in Cuba

In this photo essay I present eleven portraits of Cubans, mostly women but some men, in their kitchens. After all, kitchens are intimate spaces; they are the home’s place of sustenance, of life. But kitchens are also the physical spaces where each of us, through the act of preparing and eating food, is enmeshed in a web of much broader social, economic, and political forces. Through the daily routine of buying groceries, preparing and cooking food, and sitting down to eat, we consume and metabolize the end result of all kinds of political, economic, cultural, and environmental processes far beyond our immediate reach. The photographs are preceded by a short essay in which I frame the images in terms of gender and kitchen spaces, food security, and the very specific rural–urban dynamics present in contemporary Cuba, and the intersection of race and food.

Rewriting the SLTRC: Masculinities, the Arts of Forgetting, and Intimate Space in Delia Jarrett-Macauley's <em>Moses, Citizen and Me</em> and Aminatta Forna's <em>The Memory of Love</em>

This article analyzes two novels that grapple with the politics of memory, reconciliation, and forgiveness in the setting of post-civil war Sierra Leone—Delia Jarrett-Macauley's Moses, Citizen and Me (2006) and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love (2011). I argue that Jarrett-Macauley and Forna write against the public testimony model of memory proliferated by international Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in post-conflict societies. I suggest that Jarrett-Macauley and Forna center their novels on male protagonists who find that intimate spaces are the more appropriate venue to struggle with the efficacy of silence and truth-telling in the harrowing aftermath of violence and, as such, put forward new and nuanced representations of African masculinities and spatialities.

Practices of Freedom: Lorraine Hansberry, Freedom Writer

Practices of FreedomLorraine Hansberry, Freedom Writer Soyica Colbert (bio) In the summer of 1950, after struggling through four semesters at the University of Wisconsin, Lorraine Hansberry moved to New York City to pursue a career as a writer.1 Before arriving in NY, Hansberry had learned from her parents that freedom is a practice rather than a state of being. In 1940, Hansberry's father Carl Augustus Hansberry, an attorney and real estate investor, successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to find racially restrictive housing covenants in Chicago illegal. Carl Hansberry waged his battle for civil rights in the courts. Unfortunately, he won the battle but did not win the war. Chicago remains one of the most deeply segregated large cities in the United States due to housing and mortgage policies that work to reinforce segregation.2 Lorraine's mother, Nannie Hansberry, protected her household with a luger pistol while her husband fought for civil rights in Washington, DC. As Shatema Threadcraft argues the focus on civic rather than intimate spaces in Afro-Modern thought privileges individual masculine action as definitive of black freedom. Early on Hansberry learned, however, that freedom practices required rethinking "conceptions of black liberation from constraint and conceptions of racial equality that are most focused on black action in civic space" (Threadcraft 27). Although Hansberry participated in public activism she also pursued freedom through the private act of writing. Her writing often detailed the effect racial violence and freedom struggles have on women. Through writing, Hansberry crafted a freedom practice more expansive in nature than the legal pursuit of freedom and one that accounts for gender and racial violence. Hansberry's practices included participating in conferences and protests, giving speeches, and writing for periodicals, including the Marxist monthlies Masses and Mainstream and New Challenge, the black leftist newspaper Freedom, the lesbian magazine The Ladder, and the gay magazine One. In this essay, I theorize Hansberry's 1950s short form writing—periodicals, poems, short stories—as a black freedom "practice." By definition, practice entails routine, seeks to improve, and applies an idea and/or method. Practice enables the innovation of new political and racial roles because it enacts a vision. Hansberry's writerly practice informed how and what kind of artist-activist she became. Her daily activity of writing defines her politics and offers insight into the investments, allegiances, and desires that emerge in her later work. Hansberry's practice also elaborates a non-identitarian model of blackness produced through citations on and theorizations of black activists. The content and [End Page 157] process, or what I am calling "practice," of her early writing has been overlooked by scholars because, in the case of Hansberry, scholarship follows popular attention. Such an oversight misapprehends the critical contribution she makes to black feminism as a theory and practice and to Afro-Modern political thought. It also reveals that the difficulty in identifying her is a conceptual problem for theories of blackness that do not allow for the innovation at the heart of practice and rather seeks the consolidation central to the categories that install racial hierarchies. Repeated behaviors over time produce the appearance of gender and race as coherent categories. Deemphasizing the dissimilarities among the actors and highlighting their continuity, what performance theorist Richard Schechner calls "twice-behaved behavior" serves as the evidentiary basis for race and gender as performatives (36). As I write elsewhere, [Judith] Butler highlights two key factors in the understanding of gender as performative: anticipation and repetition. Anticipation regularizes gender (one acts in accordance with certain norms in order to disclose an anticipated gender that is conceived as essential), while repetition, or what some theorists term the performance of gender, secures the norms in accordance with which one acts. The reality of gender emerges through repeated and anticipated performances of rules and norms (embodied actions): gender is thus a question of doing rather than being. (224) Although performatives serve to categorize gender and race, they differ from mere categories because by definition they deploy and harness the power to name. Similar to performatives, practices participate in the ebb and flow of power. But unlike performatives, practices reveal the ways daily actions help to consolidate power...

Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan by Sarah A. Tobin

Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan Sarah A. Tobin, Everyday Piety: Islam and Economy in Jordan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016. 248 pp.Everyday Piety explores the lives of middle-class, pious Muslims in Jordan's cosmopolitan capital of Amman. It comes at a time when Muslim lifeways continue to be discussed in popular media through a narrow security discourse that is often oblivious to the far more mundane practices that define the faith for the vast majority of its one billion-plus adherents. With its stated commitment to the everyday, the book is well positioned to do the interesting work that so many of the more sensationalistic titles cluttering the Eastern section of a typical bookstore cannot. While it does engage (particularly in the conclusion) with broader political upheavals in the region like the Arab Spring, its primary concern is with an increasingly popular kind of Islamic piety that we might call lifestyle Islam or, to borrow a term from Asif Bayat (2007), post-Islamism. Grounded as much in liberal rights discourses and consumer culture as it is in the foundational Islamic texts of the 7th to 10th centuries, this sort of spirituality is well-suited to the 21st century metropolis and will likely be with us well into the future. Sarah Tobin argues that economizing, neoliberalizing practices are increasingly merging with pietistic Islamic practices in places like Jordan, producing new forms of religiosity in the process. In doing so, Tobin contributes to the scholarly literature on both neoliberalism and Islam. The book is written in a lucid and engaging style that will make it a useful teaching tool in courses on Islam, the Middle East, and especially Jordan.As an ethnographer, Tobin is to be commended for having captured a very particular world-one which will be immediately recognizable to those who have spent significant time with urban Jordan's pious Muslim class. This reviewer repeatedly found himself reliving experiences from his own time in Jordan in vivid detail as he read the book-a sure sign of Tobin's skill as an observer and storyteller. Given the degree to which much of the region remains off limits to researchers and Arabic language students alike, the book's deep ethnographic engagement with Amman will likely make it an important read for the increasing number of westerners who avail themselves of the city's relative security and welcoming attitude towards foreigners. The level of access that Tobin has been able to negotiate through her ethnography, however, is far beyond that of the typical visitor to Amman. Aside from her impressive ability to move in intimate (and often off-limits) domestic spaces, she was able to arrange an internship with one of Jordan's major Islamic banks. One of the book's strongest points is this subtle, multi-sited research structure, which moves from the workplace to homes and other spaces of consumption. Yet it should be emphasized that this is still a holistic ethnographic engagement with one particular kind of urban, middle-class world-even if it is a world defined by a network of particular places distributed across the metropolitan landscape.Middle here should be understood not as an economic category, but rather as a moral and political one. Believing that one is class in this context has less to do with the balance in one's bank account and more to do with a certain kind of belief about one's citizenship. To note an oft remarked-upon shibboleth, if seeing a police officer makes you feel more safe, then you are probably middle in this sense. This is what allows the category to encompass masses of people who make the equivalent of a few hundred dollars per month with the kind of people who belong to a gym that offers a rooftop swimming pool...hairdressing, manicures and pedicures, even full waxing and massages (16). These are people who emphasize inclusiveness rather than 'internecine conflict, resurgent nationalism, and all sorts of bloody othering' (Schwedler 2010:555 as quoted in Tobin), particularly through practices of elite and exclusive consumerism (38). …

"Intimacy" at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

"Intimacy" at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Sarah Dustagheer The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (SWP) opened next to Shakespeare's Globe on London's South Bank in January 2014. The new theater is described, by the Globe, as an "archetype" of a Jacobean indoor playhouse and is based on the Worcester College plans for an unknown seventeenth-century indoor playhouse. Following these designs, the SWP is a U-shaped theater, with galleries surrounding a pit of seating and a small platform stage; it is a candlelit space and holds approximately 340 people. One word has reoccurred in reviews and responses to this new theater and the Jacobean repertory performed in it: "intimate." This is an "intimate venue," declared Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard; the theater has a "smallness and intimacy" (Paul Taylor, The Independent), or an "intimacy and delicacy" (Natasha Tripney, The Stage). Similarly, actors working in the space describe it as "so intimate" (Emily Barber and Fiona Button) and "much more intimate" than the Globe (Dickon Tyrrell). Before the SWP's opening, theater historians writing on indoor Jacobean theaters were similarly drawn to that word to describe such venues: "smaller, more intimate performance spaces" (White 145); indoor playhouses had a "greater intimacy" than outdoor ones (Sanders 74); the Blackfriars "institutionaliz[ed] intimacy" (Menzer 169). Moving Shakespeare Indoors is an edited collection that marked the opening of the SWP and includes several academics who had contributed to the research for the playhouse's design; in it Penelope Woods suggests that "intimacy is overdue attention and exposition, particularly from historians," particularly as we experience the first performances in the SWP (159). Although in this publication Woods and Paul Menzer offer some consideration of intimacy, I want to take up the challenge by examining at length a very complex term that is predominantly deployed by reviewers and historians with too little or no exposition at all. Analyzing what [End Page 227] intimacy means at the SWP over the first two years of its use reveals much about the unique environment of the playhouse, its actor/audience dynamic and modern interpretations of the Jacobean indoor repertory. Moreover, as work on intimacy in performance has arisen from analysis of very recent theatrical trends—immersive theater experiences, site-specific productions, and one-on-one performance—considering intimacy at the SWP demonstrates the distinctive place of this Jacobean archetype in the contemporary theaterscape. Theatrical Intimacy "A good working definition of intimacy recognizes that the ultimate definition is unobtainable," writes psychologist Karen J. Prager (13). Intimacy is a slippery term and one that shifts meaning across space, time, cultural frames, and disciplines. Intimacy has been examined in myriad ways in psychology (Prager; Meares; Mashek and Aron), sociology/philosophy (Giddens; Innes; and Zeldin) and in contemporary cultural studies (Rojek; Illouz). While drawing on these bodies of work, it is important to narrow focus on intimacy in the theater, a comparatively under-examined idea, in order to understand what occurs at the SWP. An intimate "theatrical performance" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as one that "aims at establishing familiar and friendly relations with the audience" ("intimate," adj. 3.e.); and the entry appears under the meaning of "intimate" as "Close in acquaintance or association; closely connected by friendship or personal knowledge; characterized by familiarity (with a person or thing)" ("intimate," adj. 3). The centrality of "closeness" in this definition reminds us of the original etymology of the word from the Latin intimus, meaning "inmost." Thus intimate theater appears to denote a relationship between actors and audience members within a given space, one that fosters a closeness between these two agents; a closeness that results in a form of "intimacy" as in "closeness of observation, knowledge or the like" (OED, "intimacy," n. 1.c). Such a definition parallels those in psychology where an "intimate interaction" is defined by the type of close communication it produces; for Prager and Linda J. Roberts these interactions are marked by self-revealing behavior, positive involvement with the other and shared understandings where "both partners experience a sense of knowing or understanding some aspect of the other's inner experience" (45). "Intimate" as a verb means "to make known," deriving from the Latin...

La comedia nueva. El sí de las niñas by Leandro Fernández de Moratín

Reviewed by: La comedia nueva. El sí de las niñas by Leandro Fernández de Moratín Tatevik Gyulamiryan Moratín, Leandro Fernández de. La comedia nueva. El sí de las niñas. Ed. Jesús Pérez Magallón. Madrid: RAE, 2015. Pp. 408. ISBN 978-8-46704-624-3. Jesús Pérez Magallón’s fine edition of La comedia nueva and El sí de las niñas presents the famous works of the early nineteenth-century dramatist Leandro Fernández de Moratín in a new light. Magallón first presents La comedia nueva and El sí de las niñas in their entirety with expansive commentary in notes, then furnishes a critical review of Moratín’s work. Anyone seeking a thorough interpretation of La comedia nueva and El sí de las niñas will find valuable material in Magallón’s edition. This edition would be an ideal textbook for first-time Moratín readers, as well as a useful resource for scholars researching the Spanish dramaturge’s work. Magallón believes in the innovative and timeless nature of Moratín’s work and calls the playwright a true classic of Spanish theatre (xii, 277). He offers commentaries from renowned Spanish writers and critics—among them José Martínez Ruíz (Azorín), Mariano José de Larra, and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo—that echo this acclaim, as well as compares Moratín’s work to that of his contemporaries. Magallón’s discussion of the plays highlights their reception in Spain, controversies that they created among scholars, and varied thematic interpretations the plays offer. He argues that the title of Moratín’s La comedia nueva is a well-contemplated product of long reflections on the current state of Spanish theatre. Although the play appears alternatively entitled El café in various editions, according to Magallón, we have no written proof to assume that this title was anything Moratín considered while writing, publishing, and presenting his work (4). La comedia nueva presents a number of commentaries and observations on literature through two characters with distinct views on literature who enter into conversation. According to various critics, La comedia nueva is all about the new drama that emerges from the lamentable decadence of Spanish theatre of the eighteenth century (206). Similarly, El sí de las niñas exhibits new approaches to theatrical performances. For example, Moratín puts intimate spaces like living rooms on display, exposing the privacy of the characters. Throughout his work, Moratín presents the juxtaposition of reason and sentiments, thus following the convictions of the European movement called Illustration. El sí de las niñas is a great example of works in which reason and sentiments come together. Reason is personified by authority—whether it be familiar (Don Diego or Doña Irene), monarchical (The King), or divine (God)—while sentiments are presented in the light of love and family. For Moratín, it is important that reason and sentiment amalgamate in the form of happiness and prove that happiness is achievable (273). Moratín allows the spectators and readers to penetrate into the intimate consciousness of each protagonist of El sí de las niñas (Don Diego, Doña Francisca, and Don Carlos) by presenting them at certain scenes vocalizing certain thoughts, and by exposing their private conversations. El sí de las niñas is perhaps Moratín’s last work that observes the essence of Neoclassicism and Illustration, while opening doors for Romanticism. Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s works of theater are original yet didactic. Moratín strongly believed that theater, aside from being entertaining, exerts an essential influence on social life, culture, and traditions. Therefore, Moratín’s convictions about the importance of educating society are prominently present in his works, for example in his criticism of contemporary [End Page 161] literature in La comedia nueva, and of family relations in El sí de las niñas. Like Anton Chekhov, Moratín believed that every word played a crucial role in the formation of his work, and he carefully picked every setting, sentence, or exclamation to contribute to the progress of his plays...

Da gaveta à ação educativa: uma experiência a refletir

A concepção de gavetas de Gaston Bachelard, presente em seu texto “A poética do espaço”, em que os móveis figuram como metáfora de memória e de espaço íntimo, é o ponto de partida das ações relatadas neste texto. O conceito “Gaveta” é aqui estendido aos artefatos culturais, como repositório e continente de valores sentimentais, culturais, individuais, coletivos, e aos museus, por serem eles, grandes repositórios de memória, sobretudo da guarda dos valores de uma elite. Devido ao valor hegemônico do que se expõe nos museus, o texto apresenta breve histórico do processo de surgimento das ações educativas como uma tentativa de democratizar o acesso a esses bens culturais. A memória individual e coletiva também é apresentada como categoria temática da criação artística contemporânea e como fio o condutor da produção plástica dos estudantes na disciplina Ação Educativa em Espaços Culturais (UDESC, 2016).

From the Goddess Guanyin to Señor Santo Niño

“Restaurant religion” describes the practice whereby Asian migrants throughout the diaspora display religious objects in their places of business. Many first generation migrants to Canada use the restaurant as a site to display their sense of belonging and religious freedom. Among the Chinese, religious displays were hidden from customers until after the repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act in 1947. For Filipinos, by contrast, religious displays from the beginning were out in the open. From the statues of the Goddess Guanyin to those of green and redrobed Señor Santo Niño restaurant religion tells of favoured deities, devotional practices and family connections. Restaurants provide homes away from home, recreating intimate dining spaces, offering familiar tastes and religious cultures. They became the focal points of Chinatowns and Manila towns throughout Canada. And while restaurant religion is only one aspect of a migrant’s spiritual life it signals the hunger for both faith and familial sustenance.