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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Other public performances & spectacles > Circus
In this study of the relationship between men and their horses in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, Monica Mattfeld
explores the experience of horsemanship and how it defined one's
gendered and political positions within society. Men of the period
used horses to transform themselves, via the image of the centaur,
into something other-something powerful, awe-inspiring, and
mythical. Focusing on the manuals, memoirs, satires, images, and
ephemera produced by some of the period's most influential
equestrians, Mattfeld examines how the concepts and practices of
horse husbandry evolved in relation to social, cultural, and
political life. She looks closely at the role of horses in the
world of Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish; the changes in human
social behavior and horse handling ushered in by elite riding
houses such as Angelo's Academy and Mr. Carter's; and the public
perception of equestrian endeavors, from performances at places
such as Astley's Amphitheatre to the satire of Henry William
Bunbury. Throughout, Mattfeld shows how horses aided the
performance of idealized masculinity among communities of riders,
in turn influencing how men were perceived in regard to status,
reputation, and gender. Drawing on human-animal studies, gender
studies, and historical studies, Becoming Centaur offers a new
account of masculinity that reaches beyond anthropocentrism to
consider the role of animals in shaping man.
Contemporary Clowning as Social Performance in Colombia brings to
light the emergence of new kinds of clowning in everyday life in
Colombia, focusing particularly on the pervasive presence of clowns
in the urban landscape of Bogota. In doing so it brings a fresh and
updated perspective on what clowning is as well as what it does in
the 21st century. Featuring descriptions of more than 24 distinct
clown performers, Barnaby King provides an engaging and lively
account of the performative moment in which clowning transpires,
analyzing the techniques and processes at work in producing what is
commonly named as "clowning". In contrast with their North American
and European counterparts, clowns in Latin America are seen every
day in public settings, are popular cultural figures and sometimes
claim to exercise real political influence. Drawing on five years
of co-performative ethnography, the book argues that clown artists
have thrived by adapting their craft to changing social and
economic conditions, in some cases by allying themselves with
authority and power, and in others by generating spaces for
creativity and resistance in adverse circumstances. By applying
performance theory to clowning in a specific cultural context this
is the first work to propose an appropriate scholarly response to
the diversity and ingenuity of clowning beyond Europe and North
America.
In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British
periodical Punch bemoaned the public's 'prevailing taste for
deformity'. This vividly detailed work argues that far from being
purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper
social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates
over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach
examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant
Man; 'Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy', a set of conjoined
twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old
hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's 'missing link'; the
'Last of the Mysterious Aztecs' and African 'Cannibal Kings', who
were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to
read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the
bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these
spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in
otherness - and thus clarified what it meant to be British - at a
key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and
identities.
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