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.

Bishops were not the only actors at the Council. This chapter introduces the role of the theological experts – with special attention to Philips, Congar, Rahner, Ratzinger, Küng, and Schillebeeckx – observers from other churches and ecclesial communities, male and female lay and religious auditors, and the press.

This chapter provides an interpretative framework for understanding the remarkable regeneration in Catholic thought in the first half of the twentieth century that inspired a renaissance in theology and liturgy, patristics and biblical studies, and contributed decisively to the pivotal reforms of Vatican II. The chapter is in three parts and considers, first, the emergence and development of a threefold stream of renewal at the center of ressourcement; second, the distinctive contribution of the leading Jesuit and Dominican pioneers of ressourcement to theological renewal, the churches, and society; and third, the transformation of Nouvelle Théologie into a universal program of reform.

Modeled on the three elements of communication at work, for example, in a literary work (the writer, the written word, the reader), this chapter proposes that an integral interpretation of Vatican II needs to give attention to three elements: the debates and drafting process before and during the council; the final texts that these debates produced; and the new questions and perspectives of receivers of the conciliar vision living in diverse contexts throughout the world after the council.

This chapter offers a basic survey of the role of the popes and their administrations in the early twentieth century. We start by outlining the pontificate of Pius X; next we consider the evolution of the papacy in an era marked by the two World Wars, the global economic recession, the rise of secularism, and the threat of totalitarian regimes in the decades before Vatican II. Our emphasis throughout is on the central and universal leadership of Catholicism in its capacity as the doctrinal, pastoral, juridical, and diplomatic center of the Roman church.

This chapter considers the council’s development of the theme of revelation in its documents, with particular attention to The Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum. At the heart of the council’s teaching is an account of a God who comes to us in Christ as vulnerable, redeeming love and through the Spirit makes possible friendship with God. It is this saving offer that God reveals through the mediation of Scripture and tradition.