Author: Craig J. Peariso File Type: epub From burning draft cards to staging nude protests, much left-wing political activism in 1960s America was distinguished by deliberate outrageousness. This theatrical activism, aimed at the mass media and practiced by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, the Black Panthers, and the Gay Activists Alliance, among others, is often dismissed as naive and out of touch, or criticized for tactics condemned as silly and off-putting to the general public. In Radical Theatrics, however, Craig Peariso argues that these over-the-top antics were far more than just the spontaneous actions of a self-indulgent radical impulse. Instead, he shows, they were well-considered aesthetic and political responses to a jaded cultural climate in which an unreflective tolerance masked an unwillingness to engage with challenging ideas. Through innovative analysis that links political protest to the art of contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Peariso reveals how the put-on the signature activist performance of the radical left ended up becoming a valuable American political practice, one that continues to influence contemporary radicals such as Occupy Wall Street. **Review Craig J. Pearisos work challenges traditional narratives regarding some of North Americas most significant political iconoclasts of the 1960s.--Max ShulmanTDR The Drama Review (01012016) Radical Theatrics is a thought-provoking book that should educate and trouble anyone desperate to change the world and confused about what to do when those efforts stall.--Jeremy VaronJournal of American History (01012016) Craig J. Pearisos work challenges traditional narratives regarding some of North Americas most significant political iconoclasts of the 1960s. --Max ShulmanTDR The Drama Review (01012016) Radical Theatrics is a thought-provoking book that should educate and trouble anyone desperate to change the world and confused about what to do when those efforts stall. --Jeremy VaronJournal of American History (01012016) This intriguing book presents a revisionist revaluation of the more problematic radical edges of political performance art in the United States of the mid-to-late 1960s.... Peariso has successfully shown that awkward decade was up for it in many compelling ways.... [Radical Theatrics] launches a sophisticatedly argued call for newly creating politico-aesthetic styles of anti-representational performance. --Baz KershawStudies in Theatre and Performance (01012016) Review Admirably lucid . . . a significant challenge to much scholarship on this crucial decade.T. V. Reed, author of The Art of Protest Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle An important piece of intellectual history, art history synthesis, or reinterpretation of aspects of 1960s politicized performance. Pearisos argument is fresh and original.Bradford Martin, author of Theater Is in the Street Politics and Performance in Sixties America

Author: Wendy Parkins File Type: pdf From a growing awareness of the depletion of energy resources and the perils of environmental degradation to the founding of self-sufficient communities and the establishment of the National Trust, the concept of sustainability began to take on a new importance in the Victorian period. An emerging sense of the fragility and instability of human and natural resources, and the deeply complex interweaving of the two, led many Victorians to consider how to preserve or protect what they valued, and how individuals, communities (or even nations) could survive and flourish in a world of finite resources. This collection explores not only nascent understandings of sustainability in ecological or environmental contexts but also encompasses consideration of the problem of psychological sustainability and emotional wellbeing in response to the upheavals of modernity. With chapters by scholars working in literary studies, history, cultural studies, and sustainability studies, the volume encompasses a wide diversity of topics, objects, and authors ranging from the 1850s to the early twentieth century. Victorian Sustainability offers new perspectives on debates about sustainability in the present by showing how our current concerns derive from an earlier historical context. **About the Author Wendy Parkins is Professor of Victorian Literature and the Director of the Centre for Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, UK. She has published widely on William Morris, Charles Dickens, gender, and Victorian modernity and is the author of Jane Morris The Burden of History (2013).