The Search for a Cultural Identity: A Personal View of South African "Indian" Theatre
Because it is a tiny community, it is often seen from without to be a homogenous group. Outsiders are often unaware of the differences between religions, languages, customs, class, and political affiliations that exacerbate internal tensions within the community. Very conscious of their minority position in the country, Indians in South Africa have also been subject to a great deal of external pressure. In the apartheid era, they were required to live in segregated areas and attend segregated schools and were also subjected to threats of repatriation to India (although these threats never materialized). At the same time, the relative affluence of some of their members and their social position caught between the haves (mostly white) and the have-nots (mostly black) made them targets of African resentment.2 As a result, there are two
Designs of Living in the Contemporary Theatre of Bangladesh
Victor Turner argues that social life is continually being rewritten as a consequence of an ongoing struggle between ‘indeterminacy ‘(i.e., the wish, the possibility, that which ‘could be ‘or ‘should be’) and ‘all modes of determination ‘(i.e., the normative structure which attempts to bind society or parts of it into a harmonious whole).1 In the struggle, theatre as an ‘explanation and explication of life itself’2 functions as a reflexive tool that serves as ‘the drawing board ‘to sketch out ‘more apt or interesting “designs for living”.’3 Informed by Turner ‘approach to theatre, this essay discusses contemporary theatre in Bangladesh with the following objectives: (i) to examine the terrain as a representation of performance in non-theatrical contexts that are ‘designed to maintain, modify, or overturn the existing social order;’4 and (ii) to scrutinize it as an insidious and invisible politico-aesthetic tool, which operates in the liminality of theatrical contexts ‘outside or on the periphery of everyday life’5 and seeks to reinstate or resist the performances in non- theatrical contexts by deploying the ‘imaginary ‘as a metacommentary on the ‘real. ‘The essay limits itself to the time-frame of the ‘contemporary’, an indicator that will bracket within itself the tumultuous years immediately preceding the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 at one end, and the immediate past or the first decade of the current century, at the other. It proceeds in three parts, each of which focuses on one of the following nodes: (i) narration of the nation entangled in contesting identities inscribed by language, religion, and ethnicity; (ii) mobilization of subaltern resistance against hegemony of the state and its elite patrons; and (iii) replications and transgressions in the performativity of gender.
History of Amateurism in Men's Intercollegiate Athletics: The Continuance of a 19th-Century Anachronism in America
Claiming that American intercollegiate athletics are amateur at the end of the 20th century is an anachronism, for colleges in the 19th century took on professional characteristics. The upper-class British concept of amateurism did not work effectively in a more egalitarian and achievement-oriented American society. Hypocrisy resulted when colleges claimed amateurism while accepting such professional practices as hiring professional coaches, allowing athletes to play summer baseball for money, and paying athletes through grants-in-aid. Attempts to preserve amateurism, such as the Graham Plan in the 1930s and the Sanity Code in the 1940s and 1950s, yielded to the professional spirit. Thus, while Americans had generally rejected the upper-class British social hierarchy that fostered amateurism, they retained the name amateur, continuing the hypocrisy that had begun in the previous century.