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Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American performances to reveal theater as a place for forms of judgment that are inadmissible in a courtroom but indispensable for public life. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful case for the importance of theaters as democratic institutions.
Minou Arjomand (PhD, Theater, Columbia) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the translator and co-editor (with Ramona Mosse) of The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies by Erika Fischer-Licthe (2013) and has published articles in Modern Drama (2016), Maska: The Performing Arts Journal (2014), The Brecht Yearbook (2013), n+1, and Theatre Survey (2010).Minou Arjomand is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University:Theatricality is pervasive in courtroom scenes. So is the question about the relationship between ethical judgment and the law. Political theater has always exploited this conjunction. The show trial exemplifies the ambivalence between law and theatricality, while the trial play offers a counterpoint. This is the constellation Minou Arjomand brilliantly explores, focusing on productions of trial plays, films, and TV courtroom series from Brecht and Piscator to Anna Deavere Smith, with Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy as a touchstone of the argument. A major intervention into the aesthetics of political theater.
Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley:This is a brilliant work that gives us both a social history and critical theory of postwar theatre. One thinks about the show trial as a terrible miscarriage of justice, but Arjomand gives trial theatre another function: public deliberation and judgment on responsibility and political justice. Whereas much attention has been given to the theatricality of legal trials, Arjomand asks us to value the public function of theatre in enacting debates on justice and establishing a public practice of considered judgment. The history of postwar German theatre offered here engaged in critical theory and aesthetics in a new and engaging argument about aesthetics and politics and the public functions of art in a democracy.
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