仪式与剧场的互移：对现代中国大众政治行为的解读

本文运用政治仪式和剧场理论对现代中国大众政治行为进行了模式分析和意义解读。认为:以学生为主体的大众政治行为在仪式和剧场中展开并互移;失控的仪式和自发性的大众行为通常演化为政治剧场;政治剧场富含象征意义,根本诉求是政治参与、公开性和民主;官方对政治剧场的态度在鼓励与弹压之间摆动;作为公众表达途径的政治剧场是中国政治过程的一种动力因素。     

全球化与后现代价值观

在全球化进程中,经济、科技、世界格局等因素从正面促进了全球关联和共同利益的形成,而全球性问题则从反面促成了全球性的相互依存。人与人、人与自然以及人与自我这三重关系的内在矛盾表明,可持续发展问题在实质上与全球性问题具有内在一致性。强调人类相互依存与共同利益的后现代价值观,在一定程度上为解决上述问题提供了价值导向。     

后现代思潮对现代道德教育的启示

后现代思潮是20世纪后半叶西方社会广为流行的一种哲学，文化思潮，而今，后现代思潮已经渗透到了社会科学和人文科学的诸多领域，产生了广泛的影响，现代道德教育也从中得到了积极而深刻的启示，其对理性主义的批判，对一元主义的解构，反对权威主义，主张民主对话等思想，必然引发现代道德教育理论与实践领域的广泛变革。     

游走在真实与虚幻之间的合情合理--基于后现代解构主义视角解读巴塞尔姆的《白雪公主》

巴塞尔姆是美国著名的后现代主义作家。在其代表作《白雪公主》中,作者表达了强烈的后现代主义创作风格,通过对经典童话《白雪公主》的颠覆重构,表达了作者对现实社会的批判以及强调在现实生活中不存在童话故事和童话式人物的个性观点。对巴塞尔姆的《白雪公主》的文字解读和创作手法的拆解等,基于后现代解构主义视角对巴塞尔姆的《白雪公主》进行了解读和反思。     

后现代法学方法论的理论光谱

后现代法学方法论发展了哲学诠释学的相对主义观点,与科学主义法学形成了尖锐的对立,动摇了法治主义的认识论基础。在后现代法学方法论中,存在着反基础主义、解构主义、新实用主义等几种主要的法律思维形式,它们对法律知识的客观有效性持怀疑的态度,否认法律体系中存在着一以贯之的普遍性标准,也不承认法律可以从某些超越性的道德价值中推导出来,而将法律看作是政治权力角力后的结果,法律的阐释者正是政治权力的体现者。     

Racial appropriation in white expatriate South African discourses: Reading race on social club websites

Abstract

In South Africa the African moral philosophy ubuntuism is periodically raised as a framework for African normative media theory. At this stage, the ubuntu discourse cannot be described as a focused effort to develop a comprehensive theory on the basis of which media performance could be measured from ‘an African perspective’. It should rather be seen as an intellectual quest to rediscover and re-establish idealised values of traditional African culture(s) and traditional African communities. Yet, given South Africa's history of apartheid in which Christian nationalism was misused as a moral philosophy to mobilise a patriotic media in the service of volk (nationhood) and vaderland (fatherland), it is not too early to ask critical questions about ubuntuism as a possible framework for normative media theory. Such questioning is the purpose of this article. Against the background of postmodern and postcolonial perspectives on normative theory, questions related to the following are raised: the expediency of ubuntuism in the context of changed African cultural values, the distinctiveness of ubuntuism as an African moral philosophy, the vulnerability of moral philosophy to political misuse, ubuntuism in the context of the future of normative theory in a globalised world and changed media environment, and the implications of ubuntuism for journalism practice. It is concluded that ubuntuism may pose a threat to freedom of expression. Given the nature of contemporary South African society and its media system, the postmodern emphasis on diversity and pluralism as the cornerstone of future normative theory, is supported.     

The presence of absence: Beyond the “great goddess” in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series

Ann Liv Young's The Bagwell in Me, which premiered at The Kitchen in NYC, 2008, continues this experimental dance-theater artist's characteristically brutal, anatomizing exposure of the performers’ bodies through both sexual and violent narratives. This analysis examines how Young's construction of a certain type of subject on the stage challenges the subjectivities of her audience members, provoking moments of potential eruption. By setting up the possibility of abjection through the ambivalent dynamic of attraction and repulsion, and bombarding the audience with tropes that engender a push toward Georges Bataille's concept of “radical formlessness,” I argue, Ann Liv Young's performance places notions of the stable subject – composed of a “whole” body that is coherently organized and intelligibly coded in terms of sex, gender, sexuality and race – into question. Not only will this analysis explore how viewing oral sex as choreography speaks to Bataille's discussion of radical formlessness through decontextualization and the maddening effects of staring at the sun, but it will also interrogate how the same strategy of radical formlessness could have entirely different performative effects regarding the threat of bodily coherence and taxonomy within the narrative of historical racial violence.     

Negotiating hybridity: Native women's performance as cultural persistence

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.     

Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.