Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

"Where myth becomes history" : the politics of mythical time in Heiner Muller's Medea

Heiner Müller in the 1980s produced a sequence of plays featuring Euripides’ heroine Medea using his distinctive, poetic modality of “the theatre of images”. These ostensibly postmodern narratives take the form of disjointed, visual and textual representations that are also fragmentations of historical and mythical times and spaces. Müller’s Medea plays are thus suggestive of the intersection between the discourses of history and myth — and the blending of historical time with ahistorical, supposedly “timeless” mythical narratives. Further, the postmodern possibility of history’s textuality to liquidate it into a type of (modern) mythology seeks expression in the plays’ representation of a converse equation: the moment signaled in the text as that “where myth becomes history”. This paper examines the problematisation of the myth-history dichotomy in Müller’s Medea plays, outlining the ways in which the “timeless” myth of the classical, infanticidal figure of Medea is strategically deployed to politicise evolutionist teleology, Western colonialism and the technologies of war in twentieth century Europe.

History, memory, and the politics of programming : the video work of Richard Fung

Richard Fung, a Toronto-based video artist and cultural critic, was born in Trinidad in 1954, and attended school in Ireland before immigrating to Canada to study at the University of Toronto. Richard Fung has taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He is currently the coordinator of the Centre for Media and Culture in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

Korea's developmental alliance : state, capital and the politics of rapid development

South Korea is often cited as a case of miraculous transformation from poverty to prosperity. Korea’s achievement of moving from one of the world’s poorest countries as recently as the early 1960s to the ranks of the ten biggest economies only four decades later has rightly attracted interest from policymakers and scholars alike.

This book identifies the factors that shaped relations between the state and big business in Korea, the ‘developmental alliance’. These factors offer a cogent framework in which to identify and predict changes in power relations between government and business. Rather than merely offering a means of explaining the rapid-growth phase of Korean development, the politics of the developmental alliance also help us understand how and why the Korean miracle turned to crisis in 1997 and why the subsequent recovery has been so uneven. In this way, the book highlights the political power of business, which is often underplayed in discussions of the development of Korea. It also sheds light on the constraints on policymakers during modernisation, and how power is shared among a small number of powerful parties.

Illustrating the tumultuous politics of the ‘developmental alliance’ between business and government during the rise and decline of South Korea’s economic miracle, this book is an essential read for anyone interested in Korean politcs, economics and development,