Post-Imperial Brecht
Post-Imperial Brecht
$66.00
USDPost-Imperial Brecht challenges prevailing views of Brecht's theatre and politics. Most political theatre critics place Brecht between West and East in the Cold War, and a few have recently explored Brecht's impact as a Northern writer on the global South. Loren Kruger is the first to argue that Brecht's impact as a political dramatist, director and theoretical writer makes full sense only when seen in a post-imperial framework that links the East/West axis between US capitalism and Soviet communism with the North/South axis of postcolonial resistance to imperialism. This framework highlights Brecht's arguments with theorists like Benjamin, Bloch, and Lukacs. It also shows surprising connections between socialist East Germany, where Brecht's 1950s projects impressed the emerging Heiner Müller, and apartheid-era South Africa, where his work appeared on the apartheid as well as anti-apartheid stage.
- Provides translations of key Brechtian terms and Brecht's critical revision of Adorno
- An alternative post-imperial orientation of theatre and cultural history to highlight the Eastern and Southern poles of the usual East/West (Cold War), North/South (post-colonial) oppositions
- Examines Brecht in South Africa and Athol Fugard in Germany
Reviews & endorsements
"Of particular worth in Kruger's work is that her assertions, with regard to performance in general, are all thoroughly grounded...Krueger's analysis of Brecht's and Fugard's dramatic works highlights their syncretic and dialectical nature...It should be read by all who are interested in Brecht's theater and theater arts and history, by arts administrators, actors, and directors, as well as by academics."
Paula Hanssen, German Studies Review
"...an important contribution to Brecht scholarship, and to the scholrship of progressive political theater in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It uncovers worlds that are frequently ignored or glossed over in the United States and English- language scholarship, and it provides clear account of key terms and developments in Brecht's theories that are not easily available elsewhere..."
--Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University, Comparative Drama
Product details
May 2007Paperback
9780521036573
416 pages
228 × 153 × 19 mm
0.628kg
20 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1. The political history of theatre and theory: Brecht and his contemporaries
- 2. Realism, socialism and modernism in the production play
- 3. Broadcasting (a)socialism: Brecht, Müller and Radio Fatzer
- 4. Spectres and speculation: Brechtian futures on the global market
- 5. The dis-illusion of apartheid: Brecht and South Africa
- 6. 'Realistic Engagement' and the limits of solidarity: Athol Fugard in (East) Germany
- 7. Truth, reconciliation and the ends of political performance
- Coda
- Index.
