“The renowned Thoreau scholar Robert Sattelmeyer spotted an odd entry in the Boston Vigilance Committee’s accounting books and wondered: is that the Samuel Clemens, who grew up to be Mark Twain? The committee used most of its funds to help runaway slaves escape to freedom, in direct violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. But in an unusual expenditure in September 1854, the radical abolitionists sent $25.50 to a Samuel Clemens for ‘passage from Missouri Penitentiary to Boston — he having been imprisoned there two years for aiding Fugitives to escape.'”
Blog
Is Regional Theatre The New “Big Time”?
“Interestingly, I’m finding that more and more of my friends and colleagues from the theatre are operating their careers in reverse. Instead of starting in the regions and building up a resume to take to New York, they began in the city and are taking their talent and experience back out into the world.”
My Mother’s Brilliant Career As A Provincial Soviet Culture Worker
Anastasia Edel writes about her mother, a pianist and staffer at the Institute of Culture in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, where, for a time, she even had a local television show about classical music.
When You’re A Criminal Because You Write Poetry?
PEN International recently issued a statement demanding Dareen Tatour’s unconditional release. PEN’s President, Jennifer Clement, wrote the following: “Dareen Tatour is on trial because she wrote a poem. Dareen Tatour is critical of Israeli policies, but governments that declare themselves as democracies do not curb dissent. Words like those of Dareen Tatour have been used by other revolutionary poets, during the Vietnam war, during other liberation wars, and they can be found in the works of Sufiya Kamal of Bangladesh, of Ernesto Cardenal of Nicaragua, and so on.”
Should Theater Awards Stop Separating Acting Categories By Gender?
“Are ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Actress’ awards an insidious example of gender apartheid, or is it just a convenient excuse to give out more awards? You can decide after reading our latest Point-Counterpoint.” TheaterMania critics Zachary Stewart and Hayley Levitt debate.
Blackface In Miami Theatre Is Part Of A Bigger Problem…
Blackface, once popular in racist U.S. minstrel shows, is still performed in Spanish-language entertainment. Afro-Latinos in South Florida say the practice, and this latest incident in Miami, is a small window into the racism that persists in Latin American communities stateside and abroad.
The Challenges Arts Professionals Face Everywhere In The World
“How to respond to budget cuts in an unstable economic environment is perhaps the number one struggle. Managing cultural organisations in a sustainable way is not straightforward these days and perhaps it never has been. What has changed is that we are facing the vulnerability of public investment, in parallel with a significant shrinking of private investment. Add to that the extent to which digitisation has affected the creative value chain, from conception to creation, the arts sector is faced with quite a new panorama. And this requires new approaches to the way we work.”
Are We In A Global Ethics Crisis?
Social psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists would not be baffled by this apparent contradiction. Many have long believed that morality is essentially a system of social regulation. As such it is in no more need of a divine foundation or a philosophical justification than folk dancing or tribal loyalty. Indeed, if ethics is just the management of the social sphere, it should not be surprising that as we live in a more globalized world, ethics becomes enlarged to encompass not only how we treat kith and kin but our distant neighbours too.
How Koranic Chanting Morphed Into Sizzling Afropop
“Across working-class Muslim neighborhoods in Yorubaland, for nearly 50 years, a high-energy sound has been heard on busy street corners and at parties. Fuji, a raw and percussive musical style, was born out of these communities; a cultural cornerstone adapted by a number of players to a backdrop of a continually shifting Nigeria.”
Read Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s Lecture, ‘Staying Human: Poetry In The Age Of Technology’
“In April, to mark the beginning of her second term as poet laureate, Smith delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress about what she experienced during that tour and how poetry can defend us from the distractions and degradations of our technological culture. Her remarks are presented here in full with permission from the author and the Library of Congress.”