Theatre of Anger: Radical Transnational Performance in Contemporary Berlin
© 2020
In Theatre of Anger, Olivia Landry offers a provocative new vision of anger as more than just hate and violence. Studying the work of a new generation of transnational theatre practitioners in Berlin, she illuminates how anger can be an affirmative and critical tool in the project of social justice and resistance. To develop her theory of anger, Landry delves into philosophical texts, theatre history, and Black feminist theory from Aristotle, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Bertolt Brecht to Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sara Ahmed.
Landry focuses not only on the social and political significance of the theatre of anger and the ways in which it rages against racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia, but also on its aesthetic and theoretical innovation. Through readings of key works, Theatre of Anger asks what it means in our present world to construct political theatre.
Product Details
- Series: German and European Studies
- World Rights
- Page Count: 256 pages
- Dimensions: 6.1in x 1.1in x 9.1in
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Reviews
"From Aristotle and Lessing to the Maxim Gorki Theatre and Black Lives Matter, Olivia Landry situates the twenty-first-century phenomenon of Berlin’s ‘theatre of anger’ in incisive relation to affect studies, theatre history, and social justice movements today. Writing with intersectional verve and multidirectional erudition, she dramatically sharpens critical appreciation of German performance cultures and diverse aesthetic forms with which minoritarian subjects speak back to discrimination with transformative effect. Beyond twentieth-century predecessors in political theatre, and beyond postdramatic and postmigrant theatre too, the embodied outrage of live performance culture in contemporary Berlin is not merely representational but emphatically future-building."
Leslie A. Adelson, Cornell University, Author of The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration"Theatre of Anger adds postmigrant Berliners to the rich, transnational history of radical movements that have used the stage to transubstantiate righteous, revelatory rage into resistance against social injustices and care for the vulnerable. Plays and performances hum with infectious energy, and Landry expertly plumbs the deep philosophical and political wells they tap."
Katrin Sieg, BMW Center for German and European Studies, Georgetown University -
Author Information
Olivia Landry is an assistant professor of German at Lehigh University. -
Table of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Glossary of PlaysIntroduction: Theatre of Anger as Theatre of Desintegration
1. In Defence of Anger: From a History of Social Justice to the Theatre
2. Get Deutsch or Die Tryin’; or, Confronting a History of Exclusion and Violence
3. Staging “Muslim Rage”
4. Documentaries of Outrage
5. Salzmann’s Angry Youths
6. “Theatre of the Twenty-First Century”: An Interview with Sasha Marianna SalzmannConclusion: Anger in the Future Sense
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Subjects and Courses