Theatre and Democracy

Contents: Foreword. Preface. 1. Trans-national theatre and gender: the implicit and the explicit/Asha Pande. 2. Jatra and the marginalization of mythological themes/Bishnupriya Dutt. 3. From staging gender to "Rehearsing Sex": a space of freedom among theory and the dead meandering to assist with resistance/Christiana Lambrinidis. 4. The irony and paradox of the effects of democratic governance on the development of Indic Theatre in South Africa/D. Schauffer. 5. Characteristics of Korean traditional plays/Han Ok-Geun. 6. Cultural hybridity: a study of the Christian performance tradition of Kerala/Joly Puthussery. 7. Performing history of Han in Korean Theatre: Park, Joh-Yeol's Play Toenails of General Oh/Jung-Soon Shim. 8. Democracy, social change and theatre/Minoti Chatterjee. 9. Understanding and misunderstanding Japanese Theatre/Mitsuya Mori. 10. The politics of reading folk theatre traditions/Poonam Trivedi. 11. The Indian women: transformation into a real self/Preeti S. Kurup. 12. Performing Dalit: echoing multi-layered political undertones in M. Mukundan's Oru Dalit Yuvtiyute Kadana Katha/Ravi Chaturvedi. 13. Stage for humankind : contestation of native knowledge and global knowledge on the Malay Theatre Scene/Solehah Ishak. 14. The politics of working class racism: Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads - by Roy Williams, Royal National Theatre, London/Svetlana Dimcovic. 15. History in performance: cultural activism in the plays of Girish Karnad/Vanashree. 16. Puppeting a Joruri: is it really needed to be a theatre?/Yasushi Nagata. Contributors.

"This collection of essays on democracy in performance is timely. It comes at a time when the very basis of the notion of democracy has been evacuated of its original premise on the will of the individual by many political systems and transnational enterprises. In twenty-first century political theory and world politics in practice, democracy has become both an excuse for and an aim of a neo-liberal agenda for the free flow of global capital. Nations act as businesses in competition with one another and those who refuse to compete in that market are subject to enforcement. The enforcement of democracy through invasion, the dismantling and the reorganization of political systems and economies, ensures that a notion of 'democracy' obtains for the perpetuation of that global capital. Democracy in our age, though predicated on the agency of the individual, actually means the subjection of the individual to the simulation of democracy. 'Pure' democracy is reformulated into an 'organized' one and on the world stage that transforms into a project of universalism. That universalism was once the project of empire, and is now the project of global capitalism. Democracy, thus, could be said to be the greatest of contemporary political performances." (jacket)