In Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics, Lisa E. Bloom considers the ways artists, filmmakers, and activists engaged with the Arctic and Antarctic to represent our current environmental crises and reconstruct public understandings of them. Bloom engages feminist, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western perspectives to address the exigencies of the experience of the Anthropocene and its attendant ecosystem failures, rising sea levels, and climate-led migrations. As opposed to mainstream media depictions of climate change that feature apocalyptic spectacles of distant melting ice and desperate polar bears, artists such as Katja Aglert, Subhankar Banerjee, Joyce Campbell, Judit Hersko, Roni Horn, Isaac Julien, Zacharias Kunuk, Connie Samaras, and activist art collectives take a more complex poetic and political approach. In their films and visual and conceptual art, these artists link climate change to its social roots in colonialism and capitalism while challenging the suppression of information about environmental destruction and critiquing Western art institutions for their complicity. Bloom’s examination and contextualization of new polar aesthetics makes environmental degradation more legible while demonstrating that our own political agency is central to imagining and constructing a better world.

This book argues that dramaturgy makes things visible and does so in two distinct and interrelating ways: creative processes and formal elements of performance are rendered visible and readable; and performance dramaturgy becomes an expanded practice in which performance is a locus for creating wide-ranging events and activities. This exploration defines dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation and reception of contemporary performance; and it shows how contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect whose proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a far-reaching reinvention of what contemporary theatre is. In doing so, this book deals with a careful selection of performance practices, including theatrical adaptations, new media dramaturgy, contemporary dance, installation-performance, postdramatic theatre, visionary works by auteurs, and revivals of well-known stage shows. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater studies, performance studies, cultural studies, curating, and dance scholarship.

For centuries, the Arctic was visualized as an unchanging, stable, and rigidly alien landscape, existing outside twenty-first-century globalization. It is now impossible to ignore the ways the climate crisis, expanding resource extraction, and Indigenous political mobilization in the circumpolar North are constituent parts of the global present. New Arctic Cinemas presents an original, comparative, and interventionist historiography of film and media in twenty-first-century Scandinavia, Greenland, Russia, Canada, and the United States to situate Arctic media in the place it rightfully deserves to occupy: as central to global environmental concerns and Indigenous media sovereignty and self-determination movements. The works of contemporary Arctic filmmakers, from Zacharias Kunuk and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril to Amanda Kernell and Inuk Silis Høegh, reach worldwide audiences. In examining the reach and influence of these artists and their work, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport reveal a global media system of intertwined production contexts, circulation opportunities, and imaginaries—all centering the Arctic North.

A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art’ is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions. Organized into three sections, this work first reviews the history and theory of the visual arts since 1980 and introduces readers to the emerging area of scholarship that seeks to place contemporary art in a global framework. The second section traces the progression of recent developments in the art world, focusing on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding efforts to globalize the art world and the visual arts in particular global and transnational frameworks. The final section addresses a wide range of key themes in contemporary art, such as the fundamental institutions and ontologies of art practice, and the interactions among art, politics, and the public sphere. A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, researchers, and general readers interested in exploring global art beyond the traditional Euro-American context.

The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century brings together a wide range of geographical, cultural, historical, and conceptual perspectives in a single volume of new essays that facilitate a deeper understanding of the field of art activism as it stands today and as it looks towards the future. The book is a resource for multiple fields, including art activism, socially engaged art, and contemporary art, that represent the depth and breadth of contemporary activist art worldwide. Contributors highlight predominant lines of inquiry, uncover challenges faced by scholars and practitioners of activist art, and facilitate dialogue that might lead to new directions for research and practice. The editors hope that the volume will incite further conversation and collaboration among the various participants, practitioners, and researchers concerned with the relationship between art and activism. The audience includes scholars and professors of modern and contemporary art, students in both graduate and upper-level undergraduate programs, as well as artists, curators, and museum professionals. Each chapter can stand on its own, making the companion a flexible resource for students and educators working in art history, museum studies, community practice/socially engaged art, political science, sociology, and ethnic and cultural studies.

This book is an anthology of key essays that foregrounds coasts, islands, and shorelines as central to the scholarship on the oceanic environment and climate across South Asia. The volume is a collaborative effort amongst historians, anthropologists, and environmentalists to further understand the lifeworlds of the South Asian littoral that are neither fully aquatic or terrestrial, and inescapably both. Terra Aqua invokes a ‘third surface’ located in the interstice of land and water—deltas, estuaries, tidelands, beaches, swamps, sandbanks, and mudflats—and engages in a radical reconceptualization of coastal and shoreline terrains. The book explores uniquely endangered habitats and emergent templates of survival against rising seas and climatic disturbances with particular focus on the Bengal and Malabar coastlines. A critical, transdisciplinary contribution to the study of climate change in South Asia, Terra Aqua examines salinity and submergence, coastal erosion, subterranean degradation, and the depletion of littoral lifeways impacting marine communities and biospheres. It will be of particular interest to scholars of environment studies, ecology and climate change in the Global South, hydrology, geography, ocean and island studies, environmental justice, colonialism, and imperial and maritime history.

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.

A sparkling exploration of direction, by the acclaimed author of A History of the World in 12 Maps North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. For millennia, these four directions have been foundational to our travel, navigation and exploration and are central to the imaginative, moral and political geography of virtually every culture in the world. Yet they are far more subjective and various – sometimes contradictory – than we might realize. The Four Points of the Compass takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. Jerry Brotton reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why the early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.

This volume of essays fills a lacunae in the current climate change debate by bringing new perspectives on the role of humanities scholars within this debate. The humanities have historically played an important role in the various debates on environment, climate and society. The past two decades especially have seen a resurfacing of these environmental concerns across humanities disciplines in the wake of what has been termed climate change. This book argues that these disciplines should be more confident and vocal in responding to climate change while questioning the way in which the climate change debate is currently being conducted in academic, political and social arenas. Addressing climate change through the varied approaches of the humanities means re-thinking and re-evaluating its fundamental assumptions and responses to perceived crisis through the lens of history, philosophy and literature. The volume aims thus to be a catalyst for emerging scholarship in this field and to appeal to an academic and popular readership.