Cities of the Dead
The author's thesis defies reduction. However we might say that it involves the performance of memory and forgetting, culture, and performance events from carnivals to stage plays to everyday ritual. He investigates history, memory, and performance as it is acted out in London and New Orleans by the matrix of African, Caribbean, European, and American cultures. A sampling of chapter titles will set the tone for this fascinating and complex volume: Canonical memory and theatrical nationhood, The Mohawk Macbeth, The demon actors in Milton's Paradise Lost, and Mystic chords of memory – or, Stevie Wonder Square.Book News, Inc.
Corpus Delecti
A collection of historical and critical studies of contemporary Latin performance. Drawing on live art from the 1960s to the present day, these essays explore the impact of Latin American politics, popular culture and syncretic religions on Latin performance. Including contributions by artists as well as scholars, Coco Fusco's collection bridges the theory/practice divide and discusses a wide variety of genres. Among them are: body art, "carpa", vaudeville, staged political protest, tropicalist musical comedies, contemporary Venezuelan performance art, the Chicano Art movement and queer Latino performance.
The Guide to Ecstacity
Monograph, manifesto, travelog, history, autobiography, novel--A Guide to Ecstacity is a bit of all of these things. The brainchild of British architectural visionary Nigel Coates, it asks us to reimagine the city as a dynamic hybrid of inventive design and cross-cultural political empowerment. Produced in the spirit of Rem Koolhaas's S,M,L,XL, it is a palimpsest of the real and the hypothetical, with fragments of seven cities from around the world--Cairo, London, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rome, and Tokyo--woven together into one multifaceted urban fabric.
Roissy Express
Anyone who has ever attempted to create something positive from nothing or write something about nothingness will understand and appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into this tedious undertaking. In 1989, two Parisians decided to take the Roissy Express, a commuter train, to the Paris suburbs and explore life along each stop. This is their narrative-a documentary written in diary format. They write of towns without pasts, places without futures, relics without people, ghost towns, a concentration camp way station, people, farms, desolation, poverty, hopelessness. This is not a travel guide for Americans or other foreign tourists but a sociological history and commentary of and for Parisians and French suburbanites. Not recommended for popular collections in this country. Library Journal
...Thanks to all who advised me. Does anyone have anything else to add?