No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Acknowledgements v
3. Contents vii
4. Introduction 1
5. I. Literary negotiations
6. A Culture of Fear: Panic, Mourning, Testimony, and the Question of Representation 27
7. Mourning, Melancholia and Morality: W. G. Sebald’s German-Jewish Narratives 37
8. Nostalgias and Mourning: The Nation in the Serbian Journal The Spring (1992–1996) 49
9. Negotiating Loss and Betrayal: Melancholic Ethics and Narrative Agency in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone and Steer Toward Rock 69
10. Melancholic Violence and the Spectre of Failed Ideals in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Yasmina Khadra’s Wolf Dreams 85
11. II. Visual resonances
12. Odysseus, Rowing 103
13. (Un-)Framing Triumph and Trauma: Visibility, Gender and Liberation through the Soviet Gaze 121
14. The Banality of Trauma: Globalisation, Migrant Labor, and Nostalgia in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian 145
15. Evocations of the Unspeakable: Trauma, Silence and Mourning in Contemporary Chinese Art 161
16. “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought”: Ritualistic Artefacts and Mourning Mediation in Imperial China 181
17. III. (Re-)mediated affects and performances
18. Affective Spaces 195
19. Catastrophes in Sight and Sound 211
20. From Panic to Mourning: 9/11 and the Need for Spectacle 233
21. Stage, Performance, Media Event: the National Commemoration of the Second World War in the Netherlands 247
22. No Fun: Mourning the Loss of Tragedy in Contemporary Performance Art 263
23. Notes on the Editors 279
24. Notes on Contributors 281