In this historically grounded, richly empirical study of social and economic transformation in North Korea, Hazel Smith evaluates the 'marketization from below' that followed the devastating famine of the early 1990s, estimated to be the cause of nearly one million fatalities. Smith shows how the end of the Cold War in Europe and the famine brought radical social change to all of North Korean society. This major new study analyses how marketization transformed the interests, expectations a...

This ambitious book is constructed to provide the reader with unusually broad and deep insight into North Korea, illustrating how the Kim Jong-un regime calculates, balances, and addresses the various key policy challenges it faces. This will be accomplished through the extensive experience of the authors—Korean, European, and American—in North Korea and with North Koreans. There is no substitute for such direct experience in order to address the numerous myths and misconceptions that have...

'A systematic and engaging approach to creative writing' - Carla Harryman, Wayne State UniversityBy suggesting that students who are not born poets can yet learn to become good ones, Smith performs a very important service.' - Professor Susan M. Schultz, University of HawaiiThis is an impressive book, because it covers areas of creative writing practice and theory that have not been covered in published form It links radical practice with radical (but bett...

First Published in 1997. The authors’ purpose in this book is to dissect developments in improvisation in the arts since 1945, with a particular emphasis on process and technique. The approach is analytical and theoretical but is also relevant to practitioners and their audience. Their key argument is that improvisation has been of great importance and value in the contemporary arts, particularly because of its potential to develop new forms (often by breaking definitions).

This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories to the area of musico-literary studies, drawing from the fields of semiotics, disability studies, musicology, psychoanalysis, music psychology, emotion and affect theory, new media, cosmopolitanism, globalization, ethnicity and biraciality...

Now that Soviet style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life on a worldwide scale, this book insists that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed, and perhaps reconstructed, historical materialism are more relevant in today's world than ever before. Rather than viewing global capitalism as an eluctable natural force, these essays seek to show how a dialectic of power and resi...

A lavish wedding, a guest list full of secrets, and a bride plunged to her death.Ivy Stone is excited to spend a weekend helping her friend manage a gorgeous wedding on a private Scottish isle. Before the couple can say, 'I do', the bride falls to her death, and speculations abound. Is it an accident? Suicide? Or murder?***Trapped together***while the investigation is underway, Ivy finds herself in a thickening plot of int...

Electronic music since 1980 has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic popular and avant-garde electronic musicians is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture? This book explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music from glitch to drone music and from dub to drones and m...

Archaeologies of Presence is a brilliant exploration of how the performance of presence can be understood through the relationships between performance theory and archaeological thinking. Drawing together carefully commissioned contributions by leading international scholars and artists, this radical new work poses a number of essential questions:What are the principle signifiers of theatrical presence?How is presence achieved through th...

Winner of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics (2014)For twenty-five years, Ann Cooper Albright has been exploring the intersection of cultural representation and somatic identity in dance. For Albright, dancing is a physical inquiry, a way of experiencing and participating in the world, and her writing reflects an interdisciplinary approach to seeing and thinking about dance. In her engagement as both a dancer and a scholar, Albright draws on her kines...

Perspectives on the voice and technology, from discussions of voice mail and podcasts to reflections on dance and sound poetry.Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural for...

Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance offers new, cutting-edge essays focusing on song and dance as performative gestures that not only entertain but also act on audiences and performers. The chapters range across musical theater, opera, theater, and other artistic practices, from Glee to Gardzienice, Beckett to Disney, Broadway to Turner-Prize-winning sound installation. The chapters draw together these diverse examples of vocality and physicali...