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" The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror "
Jones, Matt
Freeman, Barry
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1053863
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TL52980
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| Main Entry
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Jones, Matt
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| Title & Author
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The Shock and Awe of the Real: Political Performance and the War on Terror\ Jones, MattFreeman, Barry
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| College
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University of Toronto (Canada)
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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297 p.
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| Abstract
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This dissertation offers a transnational study of theatre and performance that responded to the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond. Looking at work by artists primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern diasporas working in the US, UK, Canada, and Europe, the study examines how modes of performance in live art, documentary theatre, and participatory performance respond to and comment on the power imbalances, racial formations, and political injustices of these conflicts. Many of these performances are characterized by a deliberate blurring of the distinctions between performance and reality. This has meant that playwrights crafted scripts from the real words of soldiers instead of writing plays; performance artists harmed their real bodies, replicating the violence of war; actors performed in public space; and media artists used new technology to connect audiences to real warzones. This embrace of the real contrasts with postmodern suspicion of hyper-reality—which characterized much political performance in the 1990s—and marks a shift in understandings of the relationship between performance and the real. These strategies allowed artists to contend with the way that war today is also a multimedia attack on the way that reality is constructed and perceived. The dissertation traces the historical antecedents of these aesthetics in postmodern criticism of prior generations of political performance and shows how these artists struggled to discover new aesthetic strategies to criticize war, racism, and violence.
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| Descriptor
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Performing arts
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Political science
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Theater
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Freeman, Barry
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University of Toronto (Canada)
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