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The body of the «Other» - exotic, unfamiliar, fascinating - is the topic of this collection of essays on nineteenth-century British theatre. Arranged chronologically, the volume traces visual representations of the Other across the nineteenth century as well as their legacy in contemporary theatrical culture. Essays explore the concept, politics and aesthetic features of the «exotic» body on stage, be it the actual body of the actor or actress, or the fictional, «picturesque» bodies brought on stage.
Far from focusing exclusively on the subaltern, colonial subject, this volume addresses the Other in its wider meaning, focusing on case studies as famous as Edwin Forrest and Ira Aldridge or as neglected as that of the Maori who appeared on the London stage in the 1860s. Written by an international group of scholars, this collection offers an informed, updated insight into the extensive and multifaceted presence of the non-British in both Georgian and Victorian drama, investigated through new lenses and materials to shed light on the complex engagement of nineteenth-century British culture with alterity.
Sommario
Contents: Toni Wein: «By a Nose» or «By a Hair»: Bearding the Jew on the Georgian Stage - Michael Bradshaw: The Jew on Stage and on the Page: Intertextual Exotic - Arthur W. Bloom: Edwin Forrest: The Exotic American Body on the Nineteenth-Century English Stage - Tiziana Morosetti: Constructing the Zulus: The «African» Body and Its Narratives - Marianne Schultz: «An Interest Must Be Strong Now-a days to Raise Much Enthusiasm in an Audience, but It May Be, at the Same Time, of an Unpleasant Nature»: Maori, New Zealand and Empire on Stage 1862-1864 - Peter Yeandle: Performing the Other on the Popular London Stage: Exotic People and Places in Victorian Pantomime - Sara Malton: Impressment, Exoticism and Enslavement: Revisiting the Theatre of War through Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet-Major (1880) - Zara Barlas: Transcultural Operatics: India on the British Stage in The Nautch Girl, or, The Rajah of Chutneypore - Serena Guarracino: Singing the Exotic Body across the Atlantic: From The Mikado to the Swing Mikado and Beyond - Sophie Duncan: A Progressive Othello: Modern Blackness in Chakrabarti's Red Velvet (2012).
Info autore
Tiziana Morosetti is based at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. She studied in Rome and Bologna before moving to Oxford on a Marie Curie Research Fellowship with a project on the representation of the «exotic» body in nineteenth-century British drama. Her publications have appeared in Research in African Literatures, West Africa Review, West African Theatre and Performing Arts Journal and the Oxford Dictionary of African Biography. She is deputy director of the journal Quaderni del ¿900, for which she edited numbers IV (Postcolonial Literature in Italian, 2005) and VII (Italy in Anglophone Literatures, 2008). Since 2014 she has been membership secretary of the African Theatre Association (AfTA).
Relazione
«[...] the volume as a whole provides an outstanding overview of the image of the Other in the nineteenth-century British culture.»
(Julia Nawrot, Recherche littéraire/Literary Research 33/2017)
