Lost Past Research Articles

Insurgent Practices of Restoring the Commons: Cases from Bolivia

This article offers a problematisation of the concept of the commons through an analysis of Indigenous ways of theoretically and practically expressing a communal way of relating to the environment. The article focuses on the political and social implications of conceptualising a pluralised idea of the commons through practices of restoration. It contends that, to go beyond singularised and romanticised definitions, the commons are better understood as a clash of different temporalities which ends up displaying plural forms of alternative communal ownership. It does so by proposing a de-romanticised notion of restoration through the analysis of two events that occurred in Bolivia between 1999 and 2010. It maintains that claims to restore harmony with Mother Earth, far from turning to a romanticised lost past, display the possibility to reconfigure traditional forms of communal ownership within the contingency of the present struggles. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

Longing for a Lost Past

Kula 930 is a play written, produced, directed, and performed exclusively by members of the Istanbul Jewish community. It was first staged in 1978 and is considered to be the first play in Türkiye since 1947 that was predominantly performed in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). This study examines the reasons behind the success of the play, from its first rendition in 1978 to its fourth rendition in 2017. The paper analyses the circumstances and the meaning of the play’s language and its characteristics while highlighting the evolution of the play within the socio-historical context of Jews in Türkiye. 

Understanding Diaspora: Home and Overlapping Hyphenation in The Shadow Lines

The idea of an imaginary homeland and the adopted country is at the heart of diasporic discourse. There is a continuous struggle on the part of the diasporas about the donor culture and the recipient culture which creates an ambivalence, separation anxiety over dislocation, as well as, an existential crisis. The apparent solution to this problem seems to lie either in shading off one’s individuality as an ex-colonized and eventually becoming westernized or retaining the “desh” in him/her while appropriating the diasporic state. However, the more they try to assimilate or acculturate themselves, the more they feel alienated from the recipient culture. Thus, they posit a “Trishanku” position and because of their peculiar positionality, they try to transcend time and space with the wings of memory to experience the lost past which they call ‘home’. This paper takes Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines into consideration and explores how different characters in this novel harbor different notions of home and how they come to terms with their hyphenated position in a transcultural space. This will be achieved through the trajectories of two of its main characters: Tha’mma and Ila. For them, the diaspora home becomes a problematic site, and there is a silent clash in their ideologies. This paper shows that it is more so because the sense of self/existence is shaped by the social relations determined by the collective history, class, race, gender and, most importantly, by culture. Thereby, the characters’ concept of a home remains a prolonged paradox. Spectrum, Volume 17, June 2022: 66-74

Martin-Jones, David. Cinema Against Doublethink. Ethical Encounters with the Lost Past of World History. Remapping World Cinema Series. Routledge, 2019. 242 pp.

Martin-Jones, David. Cinema Against Doublethink. Ethical Encounters with the Lost Past of World History. Remapping World Cinema Series. Routledge, 2019. 242 pp.

A Lost Past? The Production of Affective Archives in Malayalam Cinema

This article studies Malayalam cinema’s engagement with its own history through the medium and the production of affective archives. endeavours to understand the use of archival materials in cinema and explores the affective potential of films in the creation of generative archives. Thus, the article studies select Malayalam films of the post-2000s that employed ‘cinema within cinema’ and argues that through the tropes of the lost heroine ( Thirakkatha and Nayika), lost time ( Vellaripravinte Changathi) and lost history ( Celluloid), these films explore the past through affective archiving. Further, it discusses the archival recuperation of P. K. Rosy, the first heroine of Malayalam cinema, and how the oppressed communities engage with archives in the present as a political and aesthetic act for an emancipatory future. In short, the article examines the possibilities of affective archiving within and outside cinema in interrogating dominant historical narratives.

Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback

Reviewed by: Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Jason M. Wirth SCHUBACK, Marcia Sá Cavalcante. Time in Exile: In Conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot, and Lispector. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020. x + 172 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $31.95 Although there has been a profusion of studies on exile, of the loss of home and the hunger for return, this beautiful and highly original work investigates the experience of exile from within. How does exile as such reorient our experience of time? Exile is typically construed as exile from a place, from one’s proper home. The exile is consequently nostalgic, longing for the nostos or journey back home. We seek to return to a lost past. But the internal constitution of exile suspends this scheme. Exile is no longer ecstatic, no longer the loss of what one was and consequently standing out, exposed to the future. Rather, the ecstatic constitution of time itself comes to a standstill and becomes static, “a movement without where-from and where-to, the movement of a meanwhile.” It is now the disclosure that there is no home to which to return, that time itself is not on the way from an origin to something new. Exile consequently “is not conceived from the ecstatic scheme of movement as change from-to” but, rather, the “suspended existence in the between and in the meanwhile.” It is no longer movement “as change from one place to another, from one time to another, from one state to another.” Schuback calls the time within exile “gerundive,” that is, neither a “tense” or “voice” but, rather, “a verbal tension,” which expresses “the on-going and whiling in the between.” It is an ongoing home in homelessness. “Existence in exile is, above all, existence exposed to the uncanny is-being, to the bare ‘is-existing.’” The “uncanny” translates unheimlich, which Heidegger so memorably analyzed in Being and Time. This term speaks to the loss of familiarity and the disclosure of strangeness as being no longer at home (Heim). This was not a temporary loss of one’s own but, rather, the disclosure that one has no home, that one is at home in such homelessness. “In exile homelessness without end.” This is the critical but difficult thought: “The uncanniness of home, of the homeland, of the homely came to light and in which home became homeless.” Schuback seeks to articulate this unending exile, that is, “to unfold the experience of gerundive time, of being while being, existing while existing, insofar as this gerundive experience of time corresponds most intimately and intensively to the experience of time within exilic existence.” She does so by engaging three interlocutors, one struggling with the limits of philosophy, another with the limits of writing as such, and the third with a new form of writing that directly confronts gerundive exile. Her first interlocutor is Heidegger, the master of the phenomenological analysis of ecstatic time. In Being and Time, Dasein is disclosed as ecstatic, but as Heidegger’s thought developed, it releases this anthropocentric starting point of an “experience of outsideness” and becomes increasingly aware “of nearness, of presencing, that grows from the insight into the whiling and abiding of being.” Heidegger realized that [End Page 154] “within exile time does not really pass, time remains in the meanwhile, moving without moving the whole past and the whole future.” Schuback’s second interlocutor, Maurice Blanchot, is the thinker par excellence of exile and withdrawal. Blanchot’s writing attempts to write without writing, expansively reiterating the X without X structure, as in to “live without living” or “to die without dying” or a “name without name.” Writing is a “continuous entrance into where one already is.” His fragmentary writing guards the absence of meaning neither because an original meaning has come and gone nor as a placeholder for a meaning still to come. Rather, “this meaning is the withdrawing itself,” an “immobile becoming.” As Michel Foucault presciently realized, Blanchot’s practice of writing finally severs time from the stranglehold of subjectivity, beyond either absence or presence but, rather, in the neutral time, the neither-nor...

CoronaGothic: a Post‐Mortem

In this article author talks about the spread of Coronaviruses around the world Topics include reports that as the virus spread, the voices of panic created a cacophony of stories across the digital sky, a dark cloud of fear and all these stories involved themes taking us beyond the human realm;and display the fruitfulness of the Gothic as a medium of interdisciplinary explication, especially fitting for new and difficult topics such as those arising from crisis faced by the world community

Normalcy, Race, and Biomedical Technology in Brazil: The Case of Low White Blood Cell Count.

This article explores the intersection between low-complexity biomedical technologies and ideas about race in Brazil. Using ethnographic material collected in the northeastern city of Salvador on the clinical management of low white blood cell count (leukopenia), and debates involving doctors, biomedical scientists, and social movement activists on establishing racialized parameters in complete blood count tests, I explore how the notion of normalcy is connected to ideas about racial difference. Taken both at a population and individual bodily level, normalcy serves to contrast local history, portrayed as the result of widespread admixture between groups, with other national contexts, such as that of the United States. While a material body that cannot be classified as racially pure is seen as normal in the contemporary Brazilian context, nevertheless these pure racial types feature discursively as existing in a long lost past of Brazil's history. At the same time, normalcy can also be locally challenged by certain actors, such as social movement activists, who underline the specific experience of certain racialized bodies, questioning the overarching national narratives of admixture and arguing for the need to recognize these bodies as normal as well, particularly in the context of political struggle for the reduction of social inequalities. These two ways in which normalcy appears articulated with local meanings of race gives way to seemingly contradictory and confronting discourses. Thus, racial categories that are explicitly not identified with admixture are seen as a thing of the past (the history of the Nation) and a thing of the future (a more racially equal country). This can be better comprehended by the process through which different historical discourses on racial difference in Brazil appear in connection with, or as a proxy for, ideas such as nation, population or gender, originating from different places and moments in history.

May '68 on film: The renaissance of a political past

Abstract Simone Weil's view that 'there is more of eternity in the past than in the present' may appear unexpected from a writer who is mostly known for her revolutionary and progressive texts, for she seems to defend a regression to a lost past; at least at first reading and if one solely reads it from a historicist perspective. On closer look, her reflections on time, originally written in French in the mid-1950s, are strangely relevant to our present time and its tendency to patronize the past. The 1968 events, and how we tend to perceive them in the now, are a case in point. Exploring the legacy of this collective protest as recorded on documentary films provides us with the opportunity to rediscover a particular kind of political activism that seems to be absent today, either absorbed into a broader mainstream culture, discredited as utopian or reduced to mere anachronism. Why should these artefacts still be viewed as evidence of the real world? And how do they materialize and sustain protest memory?

MEMORY AND FORGETFULNESS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NOVEL THE BURIED GIANT

The article is devoted to the analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant (2015 р.). The topic of memory is the central one for the work. It is pointed out that the author of the book concentrates his attention on the nature of memory, its role in the lives of ordinary people and of the whole society. The trip to the nearby village started by the main characters of the book turned out to be a quest in search of their own lost past, memory and identities. At the same time, this is a quest towards Great Britain’s past with all its victories and tragedies. The novel is based upon the real historical events, which infl uenced the formation of the cultural myths important for British national identity. The most salient ones are the myth about King Arthur and his knights, the myth about the dragon and the knight, the myth about wizard Merlin and about Sir Gawain. The novel is full of intertextual connections with infl uential texts of English literature (such as La Morte de Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf), with Celtic and Roman mythology (Charon). The research has shown that using multiple metaphors and symbols the author offers an unusual approach to the identifi cation constructs used for the formation of memory, both collective and individual. The most important symbols are the she-dragon, the mist of forgetfulness, the chosen child, the monks touched by ravens, the women in black rags, water in all its manifestations (river, stream, sea, rain, fog, mist), boatmen and so on. The story is narrated from different points of view to stress the author’s position toward the way any cultural memory is shaped. Still, not all main characters get an opportunity to present their point of view. Therefore, it proves that the same is true about cultural memory, which in fact keeps only the position of the majority. The memory of the minority may be quite different. Besides that, a lot of attention is given to the role of trauma in the process of memory formation. Moreover, the article emphasizes that the mechanisms of forgetting are of equal importance for the memory from the position of the author because the ability to forgive is crucial for the future of the nation and of ordinary people. Though at the beginning all the characters are appalled because of the fact that they were forced to forget their past, at the end of the story some of them come to understanding that to forgive means to forget. Keywords: Kazuo Ishiguro, memory, intertextuality, forgetfulness, quest.

Gertrude Stein’s “Historic Drama” (1930)

This paper is an analysis of Gertrude Stein’s staging of the dialectic between the past and the present in her 1930 “Historic drama” trilogy published in Last Operas and Plays. A writer of the “continuous present,” Gertrude Stein presentifies the past which she renews by playing with the old traditions to invent new dramatic forms. The playwright’s style is emblematic of her quest to revive a lost past in the “now” of the action from which absent/present voices emerge. This paradoxical incarnation of “pure voices” in Gertrude Stein’s “memory plays” opens the way to an ontological reflection on the meaning of “being” in the present.

Liquidity

Liquidity

No Happy Loves: Desire, Nostalgia, and Failure in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

In Love in Western World, Denis de Rougemont claims love has no (15). This essay seeks to explore converse: why do fictional portrayals of history seem to include no happy loves? Writing about past and seeking to retrieve it through mode of historical fiction is essentially always an act of desire, reflective of longing to take emptiness created by of a time and place and fill it with an imaginative reconstruction. In reconstruction, for past often becomes emblematized as for another individual. Affection for a lost world becomes true object of textual desire, a lover figure for whom actual lovers stand as shadowy substitutes. As such, intersubjective becomes marked by ambivalence and, ultimately, futility, with impossibility of reclaiming past forestalling hope of any satisfying resolution. Fiction is always invoking desire. Peter Brooks notes narratives both tell of desire--typically present story of desire--and arouse and make use of as a dynamic of signification (37). The desires inscribed in texts an extend to any number of objects: they need [about] sexual desire; Odysseus wanted to get home; Captain Ahab wanted whale (Belsey 208). In historical fiction, chief object of is lost past. Always irretrievable, it remains generative of longing: both in direct form of nostalgia and in representations of desires experienced by characters. In fact, status of past as that which is not or that which has ceased to be only strengthens its facility for producing desire. Catherine Belsey suggests desire is predicated on lack, and even its apparent fulfilment is also a moment of loss (38-39) while Deborah Lutz notes lives in emptiness at back of being: it points to essential openness at heart of (ix). Susan Stewart argues is, in fact, generative mechanism of desire, such the place of origin must remain unavailable in order for to generated (151). Roland Barthes links and specific to its use in fiction, noting when absence becomes an active practice ... there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies) (16). Historical fiction, born out a to recreate a lost past, tends toward multiple, and multiplying, representations of in an effort to accommodate these roles. This shadowy presence of hovers around all historical fiction operates with a particular poignancy in cases where yearning is more than for a specific fragment of time, but, rather, an entire world and system of meaning now seems irrevocably lost. The clan-ruled Highlands of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, antebellum American South of Margaret Mitchells Gone with Wind, and Old New York haunts novels of Edith Wharton--all embody entire orders of existence transcend specific geographic and temporal boundaries defined them, so that, in these fictions, the home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place, but rather a state of mind (Chase and Shaw 1). At least sixty years removed from Scott's foundational text, (1) these novels recall, desire, and mourn times, places, and, more importantly, practices of living. Mitchell succinctly elegizes a lost worldview of planter aristocracy when she writes that, in South, prior to Civil War, raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were things mattered (26). The impulse to document this problematic and intricately ordered system of existence has been seen as giving rise to some of best historical fiction South has produced ... rich in evocation of quality of a way of life (Holman 45). In its status as an irrevocably absent object, past generates longing, and depth of this nostalgia in which nothing is forgotten or abandoned requires a suitable vehicle by which it can conveyed. …

The Bewitching Maze of the Past: The Study of Nostalgia in Goli Taraghi’s Short Fiction

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for a desired lost past, forms a considerable part of the literary works produced by authors during their migration experience. By recounting the desirable memories of their past, the characters of these stories find redemption despite the loneliness and depression that surround them as strangers in the new environment. The present study deals with the analysis of the nostalgic aspect of the short stories written by Goli Taraghi, the contemporary Persian migrant writer. The result indicates that Taraghi’s characters still live in a homogenized universe and define their identities by clinging into their past life. Consequently, nostalgia becomes the central theme of Taraghi's fiction.

Melancholic Patriotism and The Waves

Research Article| March 01 2010 Melancholic Patriotism and The Waves Christie Purifoy Christie Purifoy Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2010) 56 (1): 25–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-2003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christie Purifoy; Melancholic Patriotism and The Waves. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2010; 56 (1): 25–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-2003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Lost Greatness and Past Oppression in East Central Europe: Representations of the Imperial Experience in Historiography since 1918

Lost Greatness and Past Oppression in East Central Europe: Representations of the Imperial Experience in Historiography since 1918

Natural Rights and the Rise of Romanticism in the 1790s by R. S. White

MLR, 103.3, 2oo8 83I In this reading theborder poet becomes a 'deceitful scavenger, feeding on the after math of others' actions' (p. 2 I). It isone of several essays inwhich Romantic writing ismade to seem disconcertingly modern. Another isDiego Saglia's study of three dramas inwhich Christians are pitted against Moors: Joanna Baillie's Constantine Paleologus, Richard Sheil's Bellamira, and Felicia Hemans's The Siege of Valencia. These are dramas inwhich Christianity and Islam come intoviolent neighbourhood one with another, and yet each ends by reinstating thedifferencebetween the twocul tures.As late as theearlynineteenth century,Saglia shows, Europe defined itscultural identity inopposition to Islam: it isa habit thathas proved surprisingly hard tobreak. The debatable lands investigated in this volume are delightfully various. Nigel Leask explores the debate over thebody of Scotland's national bard. Burns's corpse was offered by one group of commentators as a warning of the consequences of a failure to curb the appetites, by another as evidence of the failure of the nation to nurture itsartists.Alex Benchimol traces Wordsworth's and Cobbett's rival readings of theEnglish landscape. Janet Sorensen excavates the debate between English and Scottish collectors as towhether therewas a living tradition of ballad production, or whether ballads might comfortably be consigned to a lost past. Carol Bolton shows how the contrast between the narrative and the notes inSouthey's The Curse ofKe hama exposes theprocess bywhich the 'Romantic' India of Warren Hastings and Sir William Joneswas ousted by theutilitarian view of India of JamesMill andMacaulay. This is a richlyvarious collection of essays. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW RICHARD CRONIN NaturalRights and the Rise ofRomanticismin theI79os. By R. S.WHITE. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan. 2005. 277 pp. C52. ISBN 978-I-4039-9478-3. The 'natural rights' in the titleof this interestingnew book byR. S.White refersto the set ofinalienablehuman rights (primarily life andliberty) theorized by Enlightenment philosophers and concretized in theAmerican and French Revolutionary constitu tions. White asks thequestion: how did thisdiscourse about natural rights impact on British literature in the turbulent I790s? By way of response, thebook not only traces thepresence of 'natural rights' language innovels and poems of thatdecade, but also constructs a category intowhich these literaryworks can be said to fit. White calls this 'the literatureof natural rights'. Examples, picked fromdifferentchapters in the book, include Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Godwin's Caleb Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature andArt, Henry Mackenzie's TheMan ofFeeling, Hazlitt's Essay on thePrinciples ofHuman Action, Thelwall's The Peripatetic, Helen Maria Williams's Poems, Robert Bage's Hermsprong, Erasmus Darwin's The Temple ofNature, Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs ofExperience, andWordsworth's 'We are Seven'. There are fewobvious historical reasons togroup suchworks together,so White's claim that they form a loosely connected but none the less cohesive 'literature' isbold. What is attractive about this claim isnot itshistorical validity,which would be hard toprove (people in the 1790s wrote and readGothic novels, sentimental novels, lyricpoetry, and so on, but no one knowingly wrote or read a 'novel of natural rights'), but rather itsusefulness as a heuristic device for the critical reader today. In retrospect,we can see that such texts as those I justmentioned not only display an awareness of 'natural rights',but also, indifferent ways tobe sure,ground theirclaims forsocial and political change on such rights.These texts, White claims,manipulate forliterarypurposes and for literaryreaders a hugely important, and historically highly influential,contempo rarysocio-political discourse. The book does not connect this to the 'riseofRomanti cism' except in a cursory way, so thisphrase in the title must have been thepublisher's 832 Reviews contribution. Most of the book focuses on the specific texts already mentioned, of feringdelicate close readings thatwill enliven our appreciation of their radical political subtext.White, in this respect, nicely extends a tradition initiated by E. P.Thompson. The readings are sometimes prefaced bywell-known biographical and literaryhistori cal descriptions that really have little relevance toeither the textual interpretation or theoverall argument, though undergraduate readerswill find this information useful. The one aspect of thebook that I found disconcerting was itsuncritical embracing of an Enlightenment narrative about the rise of 'natural rights' theory out of the discredited remains of ancient...

Poetry and Architecture: A Double Imitation in the Sīniyyah of Ahmad Shawqī

This study explores the Sīniyyah of Ahmad Shawqī (1868-1932) in relation to that of al-Buhturī, focusing on the meaning of architecture. His Sīniyyah poem, entitled The Journey to al-Andalus, is well-known as a mu˛āradah (imitation) of the Sīniyyah by an eminent ˛Abbāsid poet, al-Buhturī (821-897 C.E.). Shawqī's Sīniyyah can be seen as a double imitation of poem and architecture. On the one hand, Shawqī's work is a literary imitation of a neo-classical poet imitating a classical poet. On the other hand, it is a description/imitation of Andalusian architecture. His act attempts to reconstruct a lost past, one through the verbal imitation/emulation of a verbal art work/monument, the other through the verbal description of plastic/architectural monuments.

Regaining the Lost Past

People with Alzheimer’s disease or related neurodegenerative disorders may progress from absentmindedness and difficulty learning new things to a heartbreaking state in which they forget their own past and no longer recognize the faces of people they love. Expression of p25 (a truncated form of the p35 regulatory subunit of cyclin-dependent kinase 5) is associated with various neurodegenerative disorders, and the CK-p25 Tg mouse, in which p25 expression--and thereby neuronal loss--can be conditionally regulated, is a model for these disorders. Fischer et al . found that exposing CK-p25 Tg mice to an enriched environment (after neuronal loss had occurred and learning was impaired) improved their associative and spatial learning. Moreover, environmental enrichment led to the recovery of long-term memories that had apparently been lost. Experiments in wild-type mice revealed that exposure to an enriched environment stimulated histone acetylation in the hippocampus and cortex. The histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor sodium butyrate (SB) improved associative and spatial learning in wild-type and CK-p25 Tg mice (after p25 induction) and, like environmental enrichment, enhanced dendritic and synaptic growth in CK-p25 Tg mice without affecting brain atrophy or neuronal loss. Furthermore, SB enabled the recovery of lost memories. The authors conclude that their data raise the possibility that HDAC inhibitors may provide a means to enable people with neurodegenerative disorders associated with memory loss to recover lost memories. Sweatt provides thoughtful commentary, noting (as do the authors) that HDAC inhibitors may affect the acetylation status of proteins other than histones. A. Fischer, F. Sananbenesi, X. Wang, M. Dobbin, L. H. Tsai, Recovery of learning and memory is associated with chromatin remodelling. Nature 447 , 178-182 (2007). [PubMed] J. D. Sweatt, Down memory lane. Nature 447 , 151-152 (2007). [PubMed]

The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields (review)

THE CONTINUUM: BEYOND THE KILLING FIELDS. By Theatre-Works. Conceived and directed by Ong Keng Sen. International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut. June 30, 2001. The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, a project produced by the Singapore company TheatreWorks and directed by Ong Keng Sen, had its world premiere at the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2001. The piece is a moving exploration of the ability of traditional art forms to speak to new realities. Continuum is part documentary and part experimental performance about Cambodia's recent past and the process of four Cambodians using their art to come to terms with that past today. Between one and two million Cambodians died from execution, torture, illness, or starvation during Pol Pot's three-and-a-half-year rule (1975-1979). The regime targeted performing artists in particular because of their association with the court, and only 10 percent of them survived. These few survivors have spent the last two decades piecing together the remnants of their performance traditions and passing them on to the next generation. The Continuum weaves together stories of life and death under Pol Pot as told by three classical dancers and one shadow puppeteer with excerpts from the classical Cambodian dance repertoire, dance training exercises, shadow puppetry, evocative music by Japanese musician and composer Yen Chang, and documentary video by Noorlinah Mohd. The performance features the extraordinary artistry of master dancer Em Theay, her daughter Thong Kim Ann, principal dancer for the Royal Government of Cambodia Kim Bun Thorn, and shadow puppeteer Mann Kosal. The piece centers on the performer and teacher Em Theay, who at age sixty-nine dances with the grace of a twenty-year-old and the pure joy of a child as she reprises the classical dances she performed in the palace as a young woman, as well as songs she sang for children at a children's community during the Pol Pot regime. These dances and songs punctuate the emotional stories she tells about her past-the death of two of her children and the loss of three hundred friends from the world of performance to the Cambodian genocide. Her gentle movements and lively spirit evoke the lost courtly world in which she grew up. Continuum opens with a video of Em Theay and her students performing a sampeah kru, a ritual honoring deities, spirits, and teachers that is often enacted by dancers before they undertake a new project or learn a new role. Em Theay insisted on having this ceremony before beginning her work on the piece, and the video introduces us to her in her home environment where she is a gentle, wise matriarch surrounded by devoted students. She seems to be ubiquitous: correcting dance postures, keeping time by clapping her hands, and preparing religious offerings. Her students rely on her as their link to a lost past, and she is a role model for them in her dancing, her adherence to traditional practices, and her love of dance. At the end of Continuum she tells the audience that, although she is retired, she continues to teach because she loves her culture and her art, which, she says, is the spirit of her nation. The video sequences project images of Cambodia today and teach about the art forms demonstrated in the production and the political past. They also interrelate effectively with the stage action. At one point, video images of a young Cambodian slaughtering and skinning a cow follow some of the onstage accounts of the performers' harsh experiences under Pol Pot. The audience inevitably links the flesh being torn apart on screen to Pol Pot's genocide. …