Lively Scenes of Love and Combat : il teatro Arab e Muslim-American nel ventunesimo secolo

The essay explores of how Arab-American and Arab-Muslim playwrights have reacted to the growth of Islamophobia, surveillance and discrimination within the US after 9/11. It also explores the pluralities of cultural, religious and political fractures that have characterized both the national and the international arena in the last two decades. Together with the criticism to the \u201cstate of Exception\u201d in the work of playwrights like Youssef El Guindi and Rania Khalil, Arab-American and Muslim-American theatre engages with the Us/Them dichotomy Islamophobia relies on, and deconstructs this binary opposition by showing how, as shown in Betty Shamieh\u2019s Roar, Jamil Khoury\u2019s Precious Stones and in particular in Ayad Akhtar\u2019s Disgraced, cultural preconceptions and distorted representations form a blurred continuum in the history of minority culture

Dal PC al CP : political correctness, genere, disabilità e arabofobia nella stand up comedy di Maysoon Zayid

The essay investigates the interrelationships between Political Correcteness, stand-up comedy, and minority groups, by concentrating on the performances of an Arab-American disabled comedian, the \u201cPalestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy\u201d Maysoon Zayid. Focusing on PC as a set of linguistic practices whose effect is the sanitarization of public discourse (especially when minorities are concerned), and stand-up comedy as a set of speech acts aiming at both the affirmation and/or the transgression of identity boundaries, the essay investigates the relationship between PC and comedy, and the way they interact within the three \u201cspaces of minority\u201d Zayid embodies: ethnicity (Arab-Americaness in the wake of 9/11), gender (womanhood and its relation to both Arab and American cultures), and disability, under-represented in American culture and the media

Teatri di guerra domestica : l’Iraq, il Terrore, l’Arte e la Rete nelle performance e installazioni di Wafaa Bilal

The essay focuses on the Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal and his performances recreating war scenarios, from the Gulf Wars to the War on Terror, in art galleries in the US and other comfort zones. Starting from Iraqi House (2007), where war breaks into the domestic environment, to his most famous performances, like Domestic Tension (2007), with the artist as target for remote-control audience/ players, \u2026and Counting (2010), in which the artist\u2019s body is turned into a canvas dotted with visible and invisible victims, and 3rdi (2011), where a camera implanted on the artist\u2019s head becomes the symbol of a forgotten past that could not be recorded a documented, Bilal explores issues like the shifty thresholds dividing war and safe spaces; the use and abuse of technology and the media, the overrepresentation and subsequent invisibility of war, its materiality and abstractness, and the role war has gained in the practices of everyday, consumers\u2019 lives