In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital from 1763 to 1960, went through significant changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the country abolished slavery in 1888 and transitioned from an empire to a republic in 1889. Tens of thousands of former slaves poured into the capital. Equal numbers of European immigrants sought out Rio as a site for new economic opportunities. The new federal government invested in both urban removal and urban renewal, pushing poor and working-class people out of the downtown area and into surrounding hillsides and distant suburbs in an effort to improve public health and remake the centre in the image of a European capital. Female prostitution was corralled into a specific zone, and the police closely monitored same-sex public sociability and sexuality. Annual Carnival celebrations became a unique moment in the city’s yearly calendar where residents could play with the rigid social restrictions placed on gender and sexuality. This chapter traces the changes that took place in gender performance and sexual behavior over the course of the twentieth century, as women and queer men expanded their access to public space and Rio’s Carnival became an international site for audacious expressions of licentiousness and eroticism.

To demonstrate the flexibility of moral positioning and the associated transference of energies, the concept of dominance reversal is introduced, illustrated by James’s description of “falling out of love” and Bakhtin’s exposé of carnival. The carnival ritual provides a basis for the conceptualization of a moral middle ground or grey area beween moral good and bad. The main practical implication of this chapter is the significance of recognizing that, via this middle ground, sharp distinctions between good and bad can be transcended as a buffer to toxic polarization.

The chapter looks backwards to Sterne's Tristram Shandy and forwards to Joyce's Ulysses to locate Byron's avant-garde forms of allusion. Byron's deployment of local little narratives against big inhuman systems in Mazeppa, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Don Juan is examined as a mode of political resistance and personal poetic integrity.

The court assembled around the prince consisted of his family and ministers, but also attracted all those who might need to seek royal authority for their own affairs. Molière was one of the King’s officers and was well acquainted with this milieu, which took form throughout the seventeenth century. During the first decades of his reign in particular, Louis XIV used entertainment to keep the members of his entourage in place by offering them opportunities to meet and experience his power in a pleasant way. The Parisian theatre troupes were regularly invited to appear before the King and Molière displayed a notable talent not only in presenting his own plays but also in combining within a single spectacle – the comedy-ballets, which were the highlights of these usually composite entertainments, and which were particularly well-suited to their context – spoken drama with music, meals, balls, and even fireworks. Devised to suit the individual circumstances, theatre could thereby offer a welcome moment of relaxation, particularly during the carnival period – a true breathing space in this environment where all was constrained according to the power relations in operation.

These articles represent a wide array of reporting in the Black press on social activities within the Black community.“Society” pages and local gossip columns provide an invaluable window into experiences of community life – including births, deaths, literary functions, and activities organized to support and sustain the papers themselves – that were, otherwise, rarely written into the historical record.For instance, readers sometimes turned to Black newspapers for help in locating missing family members. Contenders for leadership in Black organizations frequently criticized one another in the newspapers. Music and social dancing played a central role in coverage of community organizations. Dance parties could be celebrated as dignified and joyful or denounced as disreputable or unworthy. The interest that White compatriots took in Black dancing and music could be grounds for jubilation – signs that racial prejudice was eroding – for criticism of lax club leadership, for debates about whether to allow White men to attend dances in Black clubs, or for concern over performances of Carnival groups that reproduced harmful stereotypes.

Later stories about Raúl claimed that his sad destiny was the result of his situation as the only son of a father who died prematurely. In sync with broader racial narratives of Black disappearance, the stories used the trope of orphandom to cast Raúl’s father as the dying Afro-Argentine community and Raúl as its last straggling offshoot. My story, by contrast, zeroes in on Raúl’s father Estanislao, who did not die young; in fact, in the 1880s and 1890s he was at the helm of his own large family in the Grigeras’ ancestral home. Estanislao was a member of the elite or “high life” of the city’s Afrodescendant community. He was a trained pianist, church organist, and classical composer who carried on, but also transformed, his male ancestors’ involvement with candombe into something more refined and acceptable. Although he did not write for the Black press that surged in Buenos Aires in these decades, he appears constantly in its pages in the company of many other Afro-Argentines, famous and unknown. Against the grain of contemporaneous narratives of near complete Black disappearance and later stories about Raúl, “Community” tells a rich story of a Black community at its peak: its newspapers, social organizations, Carnival bands, constant dance parties, courtship and romantic intrigue, and anti-racist activism. Reconstructing Estanislao’s life within this energetic community allows me to imagine the kinds of lessons about politics, masculinity, comportment, fashion, music, and revelry the young Raúl would have absorbed in his parents’ home. I also narrate the strains on this family as they, like their predecessors, struggled with disease, infant mortality, and racism. The chapter’s main theme is the role of elite Black cultural producers and intellectuals, like Raúl’s father, in bringing about the “disappearance” or invisibility of Afro-Argentines through their attempts to conform to cultural norms and avoid racial stereotypes and stories about “buffoonish” or “barbaric” Black people. Estanislao’s generation is key to understanding how the lines of race were redrawn between 1880 and 1900 – at the height of an extremely conservative form of liberalism – to produce a seemingly homogeneous, yet internally stratified, White nation. It was their politics of Black respectability and assimilation, in concert with broader social transformations, that laid the groundwork for Raúl to appear in later stories as a forlorn anomaly. Raúl rejected these politics of respectability, leading to conflict with his father.

The defamatory posthumous stories about Raúl explained his celebrity as accidental, an extension of Afro-Argentines’ supposed servility, imitativeness, and minstrel-like buffoonery. He was, in their view, nothing but a “broken puppet” of the city’s elite, who kept him as their personal buffoon. “Celebrity” uncovers a completely different story: one in which Raúl made himself into a charismatic Black icon of the city’s popular culture and bohemian nightlife – a Black legend. This feat of self-making – his gamble that being boldly and unapologetically Black would allow his star to rise – is Raúl’s astonishing and unsung achievement. Shortly after his release from the reformatory, Raúl began to live a life that made celebrity possible. He did so largely by tapping into countercultural currents in the city’s rich popular culture: a flickering fascination with Blackness, and a partial re-claiming of Argentina’s maligned Black roots as an emblem of nativist pride or bohemian outcast glamour. Using contemporary texts and images, the chapter reconstructs Raúl’s scintillating persona as "el murciélago" (the bat) – a stylish and mysterious “creature of the night” who played a starring role in many of the city’s after-hour hotspots, especially in the bohemian world of the tango, Argentina’s emerging national dance. Indeed, by tracing Raúl’s presence in early tango dances to which he brought the candombe of his ancestors and neighbors, I am able to tell a new history of the impact of Afro-Argentine dance and music on Argentina’s national rhythm, to show that it did not disappear in the late nineteenth century, as is widely believed. The chapter pays special attention to images (photographs for which Raúl posed, cover art of tangos named for him, and others), as well as to semi-fictional texts read against the grain, in order to paint a portrait of Raúl’s successful efforts at self-fashioning as a Black dandy and Black celebrity.

Another one of brecht's masterpieces, the galileo explores the fall of one scientist and the ongoing rise of science.

Bakhtin's work continually develops, but on the basis of a few enduring concerns. The first of these is the belief that the fate of Europe depends on a new conception of historical life as an 'ethical reality', which is structured by the prospect of a messianic future. The second is the claim that this ethical reality depends on a crucial distinction between I and other. Finally, Bakhtin believes that this relationship is embodied in the form of literary works and their language, which transforms our everyday experience of the world into language and narrative that embodies 'historical becoming', the form history takes when it is ethical. Bakhtin's linguistic turn in the late 1920s focuses on how a new novelistic style infuses social language with this historical sense: double-voiced discourse recreates language as what Bakhtin calls 'social heteroglossia', which teems with historical becoming. But double-voiced discourse is always reliant on new kinds of narrative form, which probe and shape the'languages' of the novel. Bakhtin's work from the late 1930s onwards is a sustaned effort to describe and specify the narrative forms that convey historical becoming.

Chapter 1 considers the material and discursive factors which defined the representation of hunger and appetite in the Renaissance theatre. It explores the lived experience of hunger and appetite in early modern England, situating these issues in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It engages with early modern dietaries, religious texts and popular cultural forms such as ballads in order to define the precise nature of early modern attitudes to hunger and appetite. The chapter concludes by considering the practical and theoretical implications of staging hunger and appetite on the Renaissance stage. It focusses on the theatres as places devoted to the sale of both plays and food, and considers the complex and multifaceted relationships of the period’s various audiences with the lived experience of hunger and appetite.

Chapter 4 considers the intersection of appetite and desire in plays such as Middleton’s The Bloody Banquet and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. It argues that the elision of these two drives lends a gustatory logic to the theatre’s depiction of excessive desire. The chapter explores the extent to which this serves to associate desire with the excessive appetites unleashed by material excess and tyranny. But it also emphasises the vulnerability which the culinary logic instils in representations of desire, emphasising the period’s profound ambiguity regarding who, precisely, is being consumed in the context of a sexual relationship. Finally, the chapter emphasises the extent to which the imagery of appetite foregrounds the potentially debilitating consequences of sexual desire, at a time in which humoral theory asserted a model of the body as porous, and potentially vulnerable.

Brief epilogue summing up the major themes of the book through the analysis of an advertising campaign of the early 1930s.

The rise of modern carnival in Rio de Janeiro, over the early twentieth century, provided an outlet for defusing the enormous social and cultural tensions of the modernizing metropolis. The so-called Great Societies of carnival, which have been little researched, functioned as zones of contact between popular culture and fine art practitioners, some of whom developed pioneering careers as carnival scenographers (carnavalescos). Contrary to received wisdom, exchanges and encounters between the worlds of art and carnival were numerous and varied. The 1913 Salon of the National School of Fine Arts marks a watershed moment, in which the restricted milieu of fine art openly embraced the urban culture of carnival, particularly in the work of painters Rodolpho Chambelland and Arthur Timotheo da Costa. These and other artists laid the groundwork for challenges to the prevailing institutional order, especially after 1916. Even earlier, over the early 1900s, a rebellious milieu of artistic bohemianism, revolving around painter Helios Seelinger, graphic artists Raul and K. Lixto, among others, sought to modernize artistic production in Rio by forging connections with music, dance, theatre, performance and carnival. Previously overlooked, their combined efforts represent an early modernizing current attuned to the adversarial attitudes of German Secessionism, from which they drew inspiration.

The essay surveys a broad selection of literary responses to tourism, which plays a significant role in the Caribbean. While the tourism economy is not inconsequential, the authors in focus tend to portray the commercialization and commodification of the archipelago, often marketed through the fantasy of paradise islands, in a negative light. Targeting the ‘leisure imperialism’ of tourism ideology, they trace an unsettling legacy in which the violent past of sugar and slavery survives in the smiling servitude of industrialized tourism. The superficial discourse of love and peace, the hedonism imposed on the sunny tropics, the supposedly willing sycophancy of the locals eager to please wealthy tourists are all dismantled through humour and dark satire to reveal a bleak underside of drugs, sex, exploitation, antipathy and social rot. However, calls for responsible, ‘slow’ tourism more beneficial to the locals hope that the industry may be ethically operated.

This essay examines significant trends in Caribbean drama and performance since 1970. From Errol Hill’s vision of a Caribbean national theatre rooted in the traditions of carnival, to Derek Walcott’s engagement with the conditions of colonialism, syncretism is key. Folk and popular culture have assumed a prominent place within Caribbean theatre as part of the process of artistic decolonization. The essay examines plays by Patrick Chamoiseau and Patricia Cumper, which engage in ‘canonical counter-discourse’, before turning to works which explore Afrocentrism and an independent Caribbean identity (seen in the dramas of Hill and Walcott). Performances committed to the consideration of domestic political contexts, foregrounding issues of gender and class, are explored in the work of the Sistren Theatre Collective and Grupo Teatro Escambray, while their legacies are seen in the queer theatre work of Caribbean diaspora artists such as d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin.

Throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, enslaved people in the Caribbean and South, Central, and North America performed Jonkanoo, a masked parade of dance and song. This Christmas tradition was rooted in the memory of armed resistance to imperialism in the figure of‘John Cannu’, also known as ‘John Konny’, a West African tribal chief who rebelled against Dutch settlers in the 1720s. After being captured and sent as a slave to Jamaica, he became a folk hero featured in Jonkanoo performances. Merging African dance and masquerade traditions with English carnivalesque mummery, these performances were tolerated by slave owners as a ‘temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men’, as Mikhail Bakhtin posited. Jonkanoo was nonetheless a form of resistance against white oppression and persists today in Jamaica and the Bahamas as vernacular performances of resistance, freedom, and memory that represent a fluidity between formal theatre, music, and street performances.

Communal violence took many forms in early modern Europe, but much of it was shaped by an unprecedented level of inter-confessional conflict. The Reformation resulted in the rapid spread of minorities which, in the sixteenth century in particular, caused clashes with the majority confession and the authorities seeking to curb civil strife. Violence was often localised and small scale but could also be significant and widespread. As regimes sought to incorporate the new reality of confessional coexistence, so resentment and tensions grew within communities, often resulting in outbursts of both popular and official violence. Attacks on individuals and groups as well as objects, through acts of iconoclasm, were commonplace; massacres and other atrocities less so. This chapter explores these issues with respect to communities across both eastern and western Europe and argues that the similarities are more striking than the differences. It considers in what circumstances outbreaks of intercommunal violence were more likely, how successfully such tensions were accommodated, and to what extent there was a decline in their incidence as the period progressed. By 1800, it appears that political violence had displaced confessional violence within communities as the predominant form of repression and exclusion.