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Bamako Soundstells the story of an African city, its people, their values, and their music. Centered on the music and musicians of Bamako, Mali's booming capital city, this book reveals a community of artists whose lives and works evince a complex world shaped by urban culture, postcolonialism, musical expression, religious identity, and intellectual property. Drawing on years of ethnographic research with classically trained players of the kora (a twenty-one-string West African harp) as well as more contemporary, hip-hop influenced musicians and producers, Ryan Thomas Skinner analyzes how Bamako artists balance social imperatives with personal interests and global imaginations. Whether performed live on stage, broadcast on the radio, or shared over the Internet, music is a privileged mode of expression that suffuses Bamako's urban soundscape. It animates professional projects, communicates cultural values, pronounces public piety, resounds in the marketplace, and quite literally performs the nation. Music, the artists who make it, and the audiences who interpret it thus represent a crucial means of articulating and disseminating the ethics and aesthetics of a varied and vital Afropolitanism, in Bamako and beyond.

The theatrical use of irony can be a powerful vehicle for representing aspects of cultural identity. Drawing on performance analysis, this article considers how the use of everyday irony in the selected works may represent Pakeha cultural identity on the stage.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Jerusalem with a dance school and the playwright and cast of a Haredi musical, this article explores the formation of religious ethical personhood, Haredi women's forms of agency and critique, and the integration of secular and religious knowledge in the Haredi world in Israel today. The by-women-for-women arts space, created by increasingly stringent interpretations of modesty and gender separation norms, and influenced by returnees to the faith, has become a site of critique and agency for Haredi women. In the dance school, because the teachers have invested in maintaining extremely modest standards of dress, they are able to critique the broader impact of stringent modesty standards on mental and physical health, incorporating secular and religious values into their ideal for religious ethical womanhood. The play, which seeks to address the topics of domestic violence, infertility, and poverty, critiques aspects of religious life which place undue pressure on women, while establishing a purely Haredi ideal of religious womanhood, manhood, and marriage, which integrates aspects of secular knowledge that complement religious ethics. This article, through a focus on Haredi women in Israel, contributes to broader scholarly understandings of non-liberal religious women.

To what extent did mythological figures such as Circe and Medea influence the representation of the powerful ‘oriental’ enchantress in modern Western art? What role did the ancient gods and heroes play in the construction of the imaginary worlds of the modern fantasy genre? What is the role of undead creatures like zombies and vampires in mythological films? Looking across the millennia, from the distrust of ancient magic and oriental cults, which threatened the new-born Christian religion, to the revival and adaptation of ancient myths and religion in the arts centuries later, this book offers an original analysis of the reception of ancient magic and the supernatural, across a wide variety of different media – from comics to film, from painting to opera. Working in a variety of fields across the globe, the authors of these essays deconstruct certain scholarly traditions by proposing original interdisciplinary approaches and collaborations, showing to what extent the visual and performing arts of different periods interlink and shape cultural and social identities.

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance.Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.

Black Cultural Traffic traces how blackness travels globally in performance, engaging the work of an international and interdisciplinary mix of scholars, critics, and practicing artists. The book's essays provide nuanced and complex perspectives on black culture—not as a static set of shared beliefs and customs but as something that is contingent and dynamic. The essays engage with critical issues such as circulation, cultural appropriation, commodification, commercialization, and hybridity as they take up subjects that include television, hip-hop, R&B, gospel, film, theater, fashion, and pop music celebrities in Africa, Europe, and the United States. The book's engaging combination of scholarship with artists' statements will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the circulation and multidirectional movements of black culture.

Winner of the 2012 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies, Association for Asian American Studies Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means \"pure art.\" In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors inMiss Saigon. Using this varied archive, Puro Arte turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.

Explores the significance of postwar German representations of violence in other places and times. Germany's twentieth-century history has made imagining and representing violence in German culture challenging, meaning that it can be difficult to locate and explore critically the significance of violence in and for the postwar German states. This volume approaches that challenge through critical analysis of \"violence elsewhere,\" that is, constructions of violence in distant, imagined, or temporally distinct times and places. Such representations have offered a stage on which to imagine violence. Moreover, German representations of \"violence elsewhere\" are simultaneously images of Germany itself, revealing something about otherwise submerged meanings and functions of violence in German culture. The essays in this volume explore selected, emblematic works from East, West, and, later, unified Germany, which imagine violence in, for example, Latin America, Vietnam, Cambodia, the USA, and the Middle East, as well as in the respective \"other\" German state and in the German past. Drawing on fields including cultural, literary, film, visual, and gender studies, it introduces multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to the topic of violence elsewhere that may be transferable beyond German studies too. As such, the volume allows us to reflect more broadly on relationships between violence, culture, community, and the creation of identities, and to look beyond binary notions of \"here\" and \"elsewhere,\" \"self\" and \"other.\" It thus expands our understanding of what German culture is and could be. Edited by Clare Bielby and Mererid Puw Davies. Contributors: Seán Allan, Martin Brady, Evelien Geerts, Katharina Karcher, J.J. Long, Ernest Schonfield, and Katherine Stone. Chapter 8, \"Problematizing Political Violence in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Hauntological Analysis of the NSU Terror and a Hyper-Exceptionalized \"9/11\" is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. The open access version of this publication was funded by the European Research Council. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Adolescence is a formative period marked by exploration, identity formation, and a growing need for belonging. Co-creative performing arts practices may support learning and relationship-building across diverse groups of young people. This study explored how adolescents without disabilities, enrolled in mainstream educational programmes, experienced and reflected on their participation in a long-term, inclusive, co-creative performing arts project ( ). A qualitative inductive design with three focus groups was used, grounded in phenomenological, hermeneutic, and existential traditions. A meaning-oriented approach rooted in reflective lifeworld research ensured methodological coherence, and reflexive thematic analysis facilitated a systematic yet adaptable exploration of participants' lived experience. The analysis yielded two themes: and . The latter comprised three interrelated subthemes: , , and . Participants described emotional growth, mutual recognition, and a sense of belonging and mattering arising from collaborative artistic engagement with peers with disabilities. The findings suggest that inclusive co-creative performing arts can promote adolescents' psychosocial development and well-being, while highlighting the need for supportive structures that sustain and extend such experiences into everyday life.

This article examines the processes of professional heritage and socialization among Lăutari, traditional Roma musicians in Romania. Drawing on autoethnographic data and thematic content analysis of interviews published in Formula AS magazine, the study explores how musical skills, cultural knowledge, and professional identities are transmitted across generations. The research confirms the predominantly patrilineal nature of occupational inheritance in this community, but reveals a more complex picture of professional socialization. It highlights the crucial role of immersion in a musical environment from an early age, the importance of family and community networks in facilitating learning, and the often overlooked contributions of women in sustaining these traditions. The study also examines the tensions between traditional modes of transmission and modern educational pathways, reflecting broader social changes affecting the Lăutari community. By focusing on this specific group, the article contributes to sociological discussions on occupational inheritance, cultural capital transmission, and the negotiation of traditional identities in modernizing societies, while also shedding light on the adaptations of a marginalized ethnic minority maintaining their professional traditions in contemporary Romania.