James M. Harding, John Rouse (eds.): Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006)

“Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first—and second—wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics—including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi—suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms.

Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.”

Publisher University of Michigan Press, 2006
Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series
ISBN 0472069314, 9780472099313
312 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-7-11)

Hamid Dabashi: The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012)

This pioneering explanation of the Arab Spring will define a new era of thinking about the Middle East.

In this landmark book, Hamid Dabashi argues that the revolutionary uprisings that have engulfed multiple countries and political climes from Morocco to Iran and from Syria to Yemen, were driven by a ‘Delayed Defiance’ – a point of rebellion against domestic tyranny and globalized disempowerment alike – that signifies no less than the end of postcolonialism. Sketching a new geography of liberation, Dabashi shows how the Arab Spring has altered the geopolitics of the region so radically that we must begin re-imagining the ‘the Middle East’.

Ultimately, the ‘permanent revolutionary mood’ Dabashi brilliantly explains has the potential to liberate not only those societies already ignited, but many others through a universal geopolitics of hope.

Publisher Zed Books, 2012
ISBN 1780322232, 9781780322230
150 pages

review (Jack Farmer, Socialist Review)
interview with the author (JP O’Malley, OpenDemocracy)

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB)
PDF (MOBI)

Raja Shehadeh: Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (2002/2009)

“Raja Shehadeh was born into a successful Palestinian family with a beautiful house overlooking the Mediterranean. When the state of Israel was formed in 1948 the family were driven out to the provincial town of Ramallah. There Shehadeh grew up in the shadow of his father, a leading civil rights lawyer. He vowed not to become involved in politics or law but inevitably did so and became an important activist himself.In 1985 his father was stabbed to death. The Israeli police failed to investigate the murder properly and Shehadeh, by then a lawyer, set about solving the crime that destroyed his family. InStrangers in the House, Shehadeh recounts his troubled and complex relationship with his father and his experience of exile – of being a stranger in his own land. It is a remarkable memoir that combines the personal and political to devastating effect.”

Originally published in 2002

English edition
Publisher Profile Books, London, 2009
ISBN 1846682509, 9781846682506
238 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-9-27)