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Post-Imperial Brecht

Post-Imperial Brecht

Post-Imperial Brecht

Politics and Performance, East and South
Loren Kruger, University of Chicago
May 2007
Available
Paperback
9780521036573
$66.00
USD
Paperback
USD
Hardback

    Post-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

    See more reviews

    Product details

    May 2007
    Paperback
    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.
      Author
    • Loren Kruger , University of Chicago

      Loren Kruger is a graduate of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cornell University, and teaches the history and theory of drama and other cultural forms at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The National Stage (1992) and The Drama of South Africa (1999), and the editor of Lights and Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan (1996), and of South African special issues of Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International.