The National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown – now Makhanda – is South Africa’s largest, longest-lasting, and most prestigious festival. Although other post-apartheid festivals have launched new work, only NAF hosts African, European, and American work alongside local fare mostly in English and in national languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. It has also developed training and employment to offset inequality in the Eastern Cape. While these endeavours to enrich artistic practice, please audiences, and ensure the well-being of ordinary citizens are praiseworthy, NAF sponsors do not fully acknowledge the history of this inequity, which dates from Grahamstown’s founding in 1812 and extends through Anglophile pageants challenging Afrikaner cultural dominance but not the political economy of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century to initially cautious genteel efforts to diversify the festival in the 1980s, which provoked anti-apartheid boycotts. Despite advances since the 1990s, systematic representation of South Africa’s many cultural forms – from African variety through testimonial theatre and township musicals to performance art – was achieved only in the twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses the role of city festivals in shaping and re-imagining urban space. There has been increased interest in festivals among decision-makers and marketers as vehicles for cultural profiling, regeneration, and social inclusion. The chapter views space as inseparable from economic and social structures and practices which govern urban life. It draws attention to the political aspect of city festivals as being mobilized for economic, social, and cultural purposes. It draws on Lefebvre’s and Massey’s conceptualizations of space as socially produced to discuss examples of theatre festivals based in Northern Europe. It shows how, more than simply putting on a show, these festivals aim to infuse the cityscape with new meanings. In doing so, the festivals become implied in (re)configurations of social patterns of representation and marginalization, for example regarding how they open or close urban space to different audiences. The chapter argues that a spatial perspective provides a critical means for examining how festivals organize bodies, social hierarchies, and relations of inclusion and exclusion in the city.

Narrative theory has been used extensively by queer theorists to reconceptualize the cultural workings of sex, gender, and sexuality, not to mention race, nation, indigeneity, and class, among other key categories. This chapter provides an overview of some queer renderings of narrative. The chapter focuses on the interconnections between narrative, sexuality, modernity, and colonialism before considering some dominant narrative genres and queer critical engagements with these: the transition autobiography, the coming out narrative, and the “progress” narrative, explored at the level of the individual and of the collective and historical. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the uses of some of these narrative forms in the 2015 same-sex marriage referendum in the Republic of Ireland.

This chapter’s analysis of Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS and CAMINOS festivals in Toronto, Canada, examines the ways in which these grassroots festivals harness the power of an interactional, mass gathering to generate a ‘theatrical commons’ grounded in a heterogeneous, intercultural Americas. Since their inauguration in 2012, the festivals feature and foster co-productions with Latin American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbean artists from across the Americas as a way of generating alternative producing structures to foster hemispheric work and, in turn, alternative genealogies of Canadian performance history. The ‘theatrical commons’ generated by the alternating biennials of RUTAS and CAMINOS produces new social relations grounded in interculturalization rather than internationalization, offering a model of how festivals might advance forms of interculturalization as an ‘inter-epistemology’ with the potential to unravel colonial thinking and domination. These festivals play a critical role in reshaping the Canadian performance landscape and demonstrating how festivals can redirect transnational flows of knowledge and artistic production towards more inclusive practices.

This chapter introduces the proliferation of festivals and ‘festivalization’ internationally in the twenty-first century, offers definitions and exclusions, and outlines a typology of theatre and performance festivals that now exist globally (elite festivals, alternative and fringe festivals, ‘second-wave’ festivals, and festivals that focus on a single culture or region). It briefly summarizes the book’s chapters on theorizing festivals, research methodology, festival cities, Indigenous festivals, European festivals, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Under the Radar, Australian festivals, Arab festivals, the Kampala International Theatre Festival, the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, Asian Festivals, francophone festivals, festivals in Latin America, and the RUTAS festival.

This chapter closely examines the Kampala International Theatre Festival, an annual event since 2014, as an example of a new generation of small international theatre festivals in twenty-first-century African urban centres. It asks how such festivals differ from their counterparts in other parts of the world and what they can do to shape and define contemporary local African theatre practices and their relationships to global stages. Drawing on participant observation, interviews with artists, and historical and political contextualization, it analyses this Uganda-based festival as a performative event that cultivates national and transnational affectively experienced communities, alternately along the lines of Ugandan, regional East African, and global alliances. It argues that the festival’s artistic and social activity, driven by strategic local administrators and artists, cultivates a next generation of Ugandan theatre artists and audiences, affirms regional connections that economic and political circumstances of post-colonial Africa have sometimes obscured, strengthens cultural and artistic flows that defy hegemonic trends of North–South collaboration, and asserts agency over Uganda’s ongoing process of cultural globalization.

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies, a wide-ranging and porous area of study that has been especially generative for the larger interdisciplinary field of queer studies over the last three decades. The essays gathered here represent work in queer literary and cultural studies in the vital present, generated with an impulse to suggest new and emerging areas of inquiry, including trans studies as it is entangled with and adjacent to queer studies. All of the essays are original, written expressly for this publication by both established and newer voices in the field. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this Companion foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media including print, tv/film/video, digital media, and performance.

The chapter addresses the procedural aspects of the Second Vatican Council with a comparison to the preceding councils (Trent and Vatican I), and through an analysis of the different kinds of membership of the council: the council fathers, the periti, the commissions, and the informal groups. The final part explains the rules for drafting, voting, and approving documents, and examines the fundamental differences between the Second Vatican Council and other legislative, parliamentary assemblies.

The council’s teaching on professed religious life wished to preserve the distinctive role of professed religious men and women in the church while moving beyond a pre-conciliar emphasis on the “states of evangelical perfection.” This chapter will consider in particular the council’s treatment of this topic in Lumen Gentium and Perfectae Caritatis.

After a long debate, Vatican II affirmed the doctrine of episcopal collegiality with virtual unanimity, marking a significant step toward renewing governance in the Catholic Church. In doing so, Lumen Gentium resolved the old question concerning the difference between the presbyteral and episcopal orders, reinterpreted the doctrine of infallibility, and took steps toward developing the theology of communion that would prove to be so important in the postconciliar church.