Les moeurs, a Mittau, offrent un mélange original de l’allemande et de la vivacité polonaise…

Étienne Léon baron de Lamothe-Langonbonhomie (ed.), Memoires

de Louis XVIII

Louis XVIII (1755–1824) spent some years of his long exile in Mitau, the seat of Peter von Biron (1724–1800). Biron was the last Duke of Courland, who ruled from 1769 until the Duchy of Courland was annexed by Russia in 1795. Louis’ praise of Mitau as culturally diverse gestured towards its political past rather than the actual diverse ethnic mix of Mitau and Courland. Since 1726, the duchy of Courland and Semigallia had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with its own legislative and judicial powers, a strong presence of the old German Noble Corporations [Ritterschaften], and recently immigrated German scholars, ministers, and tradesmen. Hofman reminds us that Courland itself was not only settled by the German knights but also by Lithuanians and Latvians. The duchy was also geographically and politically connected to Russia. Duchess Anna Ivanovna was the reigning duchess of Courland between 1711 to 1730 and became Empress Anna I of Russia in 1730.

Mitau was a small but vibrant merchant city with a rich cultural and intellectual life, positioned strategically between Königsberg, Riga, and St Petersburg. Whilst Herder deplored it, calling it a ‘moral and literary desert’ in 1769, the writer and lawyer Johann Heinrich Liebeskind (1768–1847) praised Mitau on his journey in 1794 – thus at the height of the conflicts within Courland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – as a relaxed city where one could live freely despite the presence of the Russian Minister:

On 26 April 1859, after a long period of silence, the pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth addressed a letter from Paris to her friend Ferdinand Hiller and sought his help. She wrote:

I believe and hope that the time is not too distant when I will have the pleasure of seeing you again, and at this moment I have a double reason for addressing these lines to you! It is the following: I have made the decision (called upon by many kind and well-meaning parties) to make use of my talent – I find the courage to do so, in that, firstly, I regard the life of an artist with pride; secondly, experts here [in Paris] maintain that there is no female pianist above me! (probably too indulgent).

In 1859, Schauroth was no ingenue: she was forty-six years old, and she had not performed in public for the previous eighteen years. Even in the late 1830s and early 1840s, her appearances had been rare and limited to charity and memorial concerts. An 1839 article about contemporary piano playing and composition in the Wiener Zeitung, for instance, speaks of her as having ‘unfortunately made her exit from the public arena a while ago’, even as it lists her among the exceptional pianists, including Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, and Adolf Henselt, who ‘emblazon this horizon as stars of the first magnitude’.

For South African liberation activists, the Chinese, Cuban and Algerian revolutions demonstrated the real possibility of overthrowing repressive regimes. But the immediate catalysts for armed struggle were closer to home: the December 1959 Windhoek massacre and the March 1960 Sharpeville-Langa massacres. Those massacres set the scenes for the sabotage campaigns that began the next year in South Africa and provided the backdrop for the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC)'s and National Liberation Front (NLF)'s formation and concern with South West Africa. This chapter explores how South West African politics, carried to Cape Town by Namibian students and workers, was central to the formation of both groups. The NLF had two main aims: to build a united front of like-minded anti-apartheid groups and ‘introduce the idea and techniques of armed insurrection into the national liberatory struggle.’ The group hoped to have members in and to work with all organizations that supported those aims. Their publications indicated the importance of South West African events to their thinking and analysis – which the state could hardly miss, once discovered. South West Africa's anti-colonial struggle would give them an opportunity for the popular activism they needed if they were to grow. They had some influence in the Cape Town branch of the early South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) which, they thought, offered ‘ready soil’ for their political approach based on Namibian agency, the need for a united front and the primacy of the internal guerrilla struggle. However, their practical work in South West Africa was extremely brief due to arrest and exile.

The year 1930 turned out to be one of the most productive years that Holst ever had. In January, he was finishing up work on his chamber opera The Tale of the Wandering Scholar, Op. 50 [H175]. Its libretto was written by Clifford Bax. The action is based on a vignette from the novel The Wandering Scholars by the Irish poet and playwright Helen Waddell (1889–1965). This underperformed twenty-five-minute opera, Holst's last and shortest, features four vocalists and chamber orchestra forces that can be characteristically reduced to a woodwind quintet, a string quartet, and string bass.

After touring the Netherlands during St. Paul's Girls’ School's Easter break, Holst settled into composing A Choral Fantasia, Op. 51 [H177] for soprano, SATB chorus, organ, strings, and brass. Although panned by the critics at the time, the work is seen today as one of the two crowning achievements of Holst's choral output, the other being the First Choral Symphony from six years earlier.

There were two particularly noteworthy orchestra concerts during the early part of the year. The first, on February 24, featured Holst conducting the orchestral version of Bach's Fugue à la Gigue in Cheltenham. The second, a Royal Philharmonic Society concert on April 3 at Queen's Hall, featured the premiere of his Double Concerto, Op. 49 [H175] for two violins, played by sister Hungarian violinists Adila Fachiri and Jelly D’Aranyi. The first and last movements each quote a passage from his Terzetto.

In a much-quoted passage from A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser considers the nature of Irish bardic poetry. Eudoxus asks ‘have [the poems] any arte in their composicons’ or ‘bee they any thinge wyttye or well favored, as poems shoulde bee?’. Irenius replies that, although ‘sprinckled with some prettye flowers of theire owne naturall devise’, they are ‘skilled not of the goodly ornamentes of Poetrie’, and, furthermore, are ‘abused, to the gracinge of wickednes and vice’. That Spenser would have been vaguely familiar with bardic poetry and have ‘caused diuers of them to be translated’ is not altogether surprising. His castle at Kilcolman was surrounded by a host of hereditary bardic poets who were constantly engaging in vibrant literary activity and exchange. This included different branches of the Uí Dhálaigh, who served lords like the de Barra and de Róiste. Beyond Mallow lies Cluain Mín Castle, where the poet Aonghus Ó Dálaigh Fionn, ollamh (chief-poet) to the Mac Carthaigh Mór, penned devotional poetry that uncannily echoes motifs in The Faerie Queene. There were also the Ó Dálaigh poets of Kilsarkan, hereditary ollamhs to the Earls of Desmond, who adapted – as well as commemorated in elegy – the beheading of three Fitzgerald (or Mac Gearailt) patrons. To the north lay the territory of the Fitzmaurices (or the MacMorrises), Lords of Kerry and bountiful patrons to a slew of poets. It is these poets – Spenser's Irish contemporaries – that are the focus of the present collection.

The African writer in the 21st century should forget the complexes of the past and be more imaginatively aggressive and expansive, invading other continents and even the skies as new settings, striving to have a global outlook in his creative output, mounting a new international phase and not limiting his canvas to the African soil. He should break away from the retoux aux sources fixation that informed the Negritude aesthetic of the last century. (Nnolim 4)

The Nigerian-American Africanfuturist and Africanjujuist, Nnedi Okorafor, has since met the above-quoted forward-looking challenge. With her African-based science fiction, magical realism and futuristic intuition, she has transcended the margins by being ‘more imaginatively aggressive and expansive, invading other continents and even the skies as new settings … and not limiting [her] canvas to the African soil’ (Nnolim 4). Her narratives demonstrate so much of her vast cerebral mind with an unlimited amplitude of imaginative ingenuity that astounds her readers. Okorafor skillfully blends African sensibilities with science-based mathematical equations to espouse the futures of African intellectual and scientific relationship and relevance.

Africanfuturism is the brain-child of Okorafor. It is a burgeoning genre/theory that is reshaping the margins of African literature; and Okorafor has been and is still at the forefront of its development and evolution through her creative as well as critical output. This assertion does not overlook the significant contributions of speculative works by earlier African writers, such as Amos Tutuola and Kojo Laing as well as Ben Okri. Rather, it recognizes the pioneering place of these writers in the literary tradition, yet, it must be stated that Okorafor has extended the frontiers in the broader literary tradition.

Described by Rowohlt Theater-Verlag as being “without doubt one of Elfriede Jelinek's darkest” texts to date, WUT was written in response to the 2015 terrorist attacks on the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and the kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher in Paris. As the title in all capital letters suggests, the text is a tirade, a streamof- consciousness treatise that has been brought to the stage in various postdramatic manifestations since 2016. Nobel Prize recipient Jelinek's words read as the author's own fury over the deep injustices committed against and suffered by humanity, past and present. On the stage, this rage is embodied by men and women alike, representing a wide spectrum of furious individuals: from religious extremists to Wutbürger (enraged citizens), from those who kill out of wrath to those who avenge such murders. In Martin Laberenz's 2017 production in the Kammerspielen of Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the expression of unharnessed anger at the world and a complete disillusionment with religion of all forms culminated in the exasperation of the performer Linn Reusse, as she screamed at the audience: “Wollt ihr ewig leben? Was rettet euch noch?” (Do you [all] want to live forever? What is going to save you [all] now?).

This essay considers how a postdramatic text, and performances based on that text, can be productive if challenging artistic forms for expressing feminist rage, as well as for giving voice to—and in this case, thematizing—the raw emotions common to human experience.