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Motivation: Local government can develop democracy and community participation if institutions support it. But when a military regime takes over following a coup d'état, it may use familiar methods of patronage, corruption, and exploitation of kinship ties to render decentralization a spectacle—that is, done for show, but without substantial change. Local elites may then capture local administration and extract public resources. Purpose: Does decentralization as spectacle bring positive change — when the military hold power and the state is laden with corruption, patronage, and kinship ties? Methods and approaches: We analyse how respondents experienced two periods of local government, including post‐election public interactions between representatives and their constituents. Data comes from responses to qualitative interviews with 70 key informants from the Qambar Shahdadkot and Larkana districts of Sindh, Pakistan. We analysed the themes generated by responses to questions. Findings: Some 40% of respondents reported those who came into local government power aimed first and foremost to promote the interests of their own class. Some 29% of respondents reported local government made empty promises to provide services with public participation. Pakistan's decentralization has been a spectacle, to serve powerful elites. Local government has been captured by local elites. Policy implications: Decentralization, muzzled by the military, is mere spectacle, and predatory to boot. Donor agencies should explore possibilities for change at the local level; for example, where local networks and informal governmentality can build up trust amongst hyper‐local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible not to be affected at some level when watching, even just the highlights, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. The endorphin-pumping procession enrolled multiple music cultures, spectacular and theatrical light shows, and played to Paris's sardonic historical relations and geographical strengths while generating a 'spectacle' that would be hard to match or forget (even if we wanted to). This truly was a city that gave itself up and delivered a spicy 'full-court press' for the Olympic imagination. However, closer to home, in the wake of the emerging controversies with the development cycle for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics and Paralympics and the cancellation of the 2026 Summer Commonwealth Games by the Victorian government due to projected cost overruns, we feel that more conversation should be occurring around what the Olympic model should be into the future. We offer four propositions or thinking points that are not necessarily new, but collectively suggest, a re-visioning in light of the realities of the poly crisis that looms. The propositions circle around a shift towards a fixed site for the Games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I study Guy Debord's critical discourse, particularly his landmark essay The Society of the Spectacle. He underlines here the symbolic desert produced by modern societies. I stress the uniqueness of his perspective, to the extent that such desert stems from a situation of overabundance and excess, and not from a specific void or absence. This desert constitutes a space saturated with images and signs: it asserts the rule of the superfluous and the inconsequential. Moreover, this discourse was rooted in the Glorious Thirties, which were characterized by a strong economic growth. It must therefore be placed within a historical and social context that is quite different from twenty first Century French society. Contemporary France is marred by contrast by unemployment and precariousness as well as by huge socio-economic inequalities. The endless production of media images contradicts therefore the deep shortcomings of social reality. Finally, the concept of the Spectacle, for Debord, did not include yet the overwhelming power of new technologies. These technologies have greatly expanded the influence of images within the social and cultural sphere by making them instantaneous and readily available. The same process has also increased significantly the potential alienation and isolation of man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intent of this article is to analyse the interconnectedness between urban transformation and eco-heritage value over time in Tianjin from a river-city perspective. The focus is on the Hai River's (海河) contribution to the mechanisms of space and power in imperial, hyper-colonial, and globalising Tianjin. After an analytical excursus of the Haihe's historical-political-economic roles, attention is given to the Haihe as the fulcrum of Tianjin's creation as a spectacle city in present times. The objectives are to elucidate the Tianjin Municipal Government-led urban 'beautification' strategy and analyse the aims and objectives of the 2002 'Comprehensive Reconstruction and Redevelopment Plan of the Haihe's Riversides' while also considering the actual experience of this transformation. The premise of this article is that the Haihe River has helped determine Tianjin's politics of design via heritagisation: the historical processes through which cultural heritage is adapted to strategically promote favourable imagery of the river-city for political management purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Latvian Song and Dance Celebration's 150th Anniversary (2023) offers a unique case study of community performance's capacity to express solidarity on a spectacular scale. This article argues that the choral concerts may be viewed as applied theatre given their historical and continuing expressions of political resistance, cultural resilience and community renewal. In 2023, the UNESCO listed Celebration incorporated 40,560 performers, around 500,000 in-person spectators and the world's largest choir of 16,500 singers. The mega-event invokes solidarity and spectacle's nested paradoxes amidst historic and continuing socio-political tensions and the Russo-Ukraine War (2014-) while simultaneously highlighting their powerfully affective impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to analyse the visual component in the musical genre (songs) and musical-theatrical genre (ballet), which is an element for the formation of spectacle. The work methodology includes analytical, structural-functional, generalising scientific methods; techniques of comparative analysis to reveal the specifics of modern artistic practices in revealing the specifics of the visual as a component of spectacle. The scientific novelty of the work consists in the analysis of the song ―Smerekova Khata‖, the musical and stage performance of the ―Gerdan‖ theatre, the ballet ―Signs‖ with the determination of the visualisation of the images laid down by the authors to form the spectacle. Conclusions. Based on the analysis of M. Bakay and P. Dvorskyi's song ―Smerekova Khata‖, the dependence of visualisation in musical-poetic composition and music, metaphoricity in musical-poetic images in various performing interpretations with a certain amount of spectacularity according to the definition of ―spectacularity‖ in the dictionary of Efron and Brockhaus is determined as a concert, performance. The analysis of the concert performance of the Chernivtsi City Folklore Theatre-Studio ―Gherdan‖ based on the musical and textual material, stage design and costumes of the performers made it possible to reveal the degree of visualisation of musical and stage images that contribute to spectacle in art according to K. Stanislavska's concept as a spectacle with an artistic structure, which is a system of means of expression with external manifestations. The French-American dancer-choreographer Carolyn Carlson's ballet ―Signes‖ (1997, Paris Opera) with scenery by the French artist Olivier Debre and electronic music by the French composer René Aubry fully meets all the parameters of spectacle: a) unusual events that appeal to history with famous heroes Leonardo da Vinci and Gioconda with her outstanding smile; b) entertainment in the presentation of material with the use of three-dimensional pictures that are constantly moving; c) seven different locations; d) lack of verbal text (words), which are compensated by electronic music and choreographic movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps the surveillance imaginary of a unique public awareness initiative by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union and Godfrey Reggio's Institute for Regional Education in 1974 that consisted of two parts: a situationist-inspired campaign using and surrealistically subverting popular media to raise awareness of surveillance, paired with a newspaper supplement documenting detailed intrusions on the privacy and liberty of citizens on a number of fronts, representing an encroaching society of social control. Taken as a whole, the surveillance imaginary of the campaign combined images of eyes, computers, and rats in mazes with detailed discussions of databases, militarized policing, and direct behavioral control justified by stories of rising violence in society to critique both state surveillance and the growing corporatization of the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese cities are making a name for themselves through what Guthman calls an 'accumulation by spectacle'. Studies elucidate the fast change of the urban fabric and the interconnection of commercial profits with pro-state propaganda during mega-events. The spectacle appears as a once-in-lifetime chance for a city, orchestrated during a specific time and in purpose-built venues. This article, however, argues that efforts of spectacularisation expand to everyday life. I take the marginalisation of the urban poor in Guangzhou, that is, street vendors and beggars, as a starting point to understand governmental ideals, strategies and patterns of controlling public space. The data is based on fieldwork, government documents, yearbooks and newspapers. Engaging in the discussion on what Debord termed the 'society of the spectacle', I explain how urban management concentrates on areas serving (1) tourism and commerce, (2) memorial politics, (3) government relations and (4) transport and traffic; and follows the pulse of (1) annual events and seasonal holidays, (2) recurring political dates, (3) exceptional mega-events and (4) regular urban development campaigns. These zones and periods of increased control intertwine and culminate in an 'ideal' public space excluding poverty and other elements contesting the city's success images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing popularity of fusing adventure, humanitarianism, and travel has received attention from scholars within the fields of leisure and tourism studies, particularly regarding widespread activities such as volunteer tourism. Fewer have examined the phenomenon that we refer to as endurance philanthropy, in which participants journey long distances under challenging conditions to increase awareness and raise funds for specific causes. As more and more people become attuned to the idea, it is essential to interrogate the power dynamics and development discourses that frame such campaigns. To begin this necessary conversation, this paper investigates one subset of the endurance philanthropy movement: participants who have journeyed from North America to Central America to raise money and awareness for causes situated within the destination region. Using the lenses of spectacle and critical development, we analyze online media produced both by and about these journeyers. Our findings highlight key themes that weave across and through these events: actions not words, expedition completed, grit and determination, and donor commitment. We argue that these events – while emphasizing solidarity and advocating for social change – ultimately undermine the potential for such transformation due to the spectacular, individualizing, and apolitical characteristics of the campaigns. This results in the reproduction of neoliberal self-help models of progress, which reinforce the status quo and downplay larger structural issues that keep poverty and inequality in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the work is to investigate the development of mass entertainment culture in the paradigm of its visualization and the spread of screen forms. The methodological basis of the research was made up of the following methods: systemic, cultural, semantic, analytical, which fully allowed to consider the defined perspective of the research issues and obtain substantiated results and conclusions. The scientific novelty of the research is revealed in the consideration of spectacular culture as a subsystem of mass culture, which is formed by its semantics and the identification of trends in its visualization in further development, in particular, screen forms mediated by digital information technologies. Conclusions. Mass spectacles in the paradigm of visualization and screen forms are an integral part of modern culture. They not only reflect technological progress, but also influence the way we perceive and interact with the world. At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, it became obvious that audiovisual communication had significantly supplanted other types, and screen forms of creativity gradually changed traditional arts and began to serve as new means of their distribution. In the conditions of the information society, mass culture becomes a priority form of living cultural phenomena. Spectacle culture in the conditions of visualization and digital technologies is a powerful force that shapes our ideas about the world, influences social processes and determines new directions for the development of the entertainment industry, it constantly evolves, responding to technological innovations and changes in society. Spectacularity is one of the important constituent technologies of creating a modern cultural product, one of the properties of expressiveness, which is achieved through the synthesis of various artistic means. It should also be noted that modern challenges related to ethics, privacy and ecology require us to take a deliberate approach to the consumption and creation of content that becomes part of the entertainment culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical scholarly attention to vertical urbanism has expanded greatly in recent years but has seldom engaged with the variety of high-rise urban forms developed in mainland Chinese cities following the demise of socialist urban political economy. This paper introduces the case study of Chongqing as a critical example of the cultural significance of vertical urbanism in the post-socialist Chinese city, examining how supposedly 'weird' spaces of vertical density are materially and discursively constructed. Chongqing has undergone rapid urban expansion since the 1990s within a narrow and mountainous terrain, resulting in a number of extraordinary instances of extreme vertical density in the city. These sites have subsequently become 'spectacles' in themselves, widely photographed and discussed on social media. This paper surveys online discourse and imaging of these sites to categorise them as examples of connection, compression and luxification. Verticality is used to construct imaginaries of urban futures, and designations of 'weird' verticality differ between outsiders and locals. Such imaginaries may also obscure the history of urban restructuring which gave rise to these spaces in the first instance, and the conflicts between public and private space which emerge from this restructuring. The example of Chongqing provides an important demonstration of verticality as an everyday, historically grounded and contested environment within the city, rather than a recent imposition on a residual horizontal way of life. This paper concludes with a call for greater ethnographic attention to the weird qualities of such vertical spaces in the production of new urban theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores themes of precarity, community, and treatment in the novel Homebound (2021) by Puja Changoiwala. The text foregrounds the experiences of migrant workers in India during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 as they walked home during a nationwide lockdown. The paper locates itself within discourses on health, differential treatment, and intersectional vulnerabilities which are compounded by factors including gender and poverty. It particularly highlights the concepts of precariousness and precarity as opening up multiple avenues for exploration of the migrants' experience within the neoliberal political economy. The paper argues that it is the pre-existing precarities that are systemic, epistemic, and gendered, which aggravate the vulnerability of communities in a medical crisis. Furthermore, it looks at how social and medical treatment of the workers facilitates violence at the hands of those who perceive them as the ill-other – the police forces, the public, the healthcare workers, and the media. It also questions the logic that underlines spaces such as pandemic camps, which become sites of control more than care, and where medical treatment is inhered in socio-political biases and constructs. The paper argues that apprehending these experiences of socioeconomic and gendered precarities through literature can aid in developing a complex and sustained engagement with unequal socio-political systems that perpetuate violence and vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Spectacles are one of the corrective measures for different errors of refraction. A great proportion of people worldwide are blind due to having a high-refractive error while they neglect using the appropriate corrective measures. The aim is to study the prevalence of noncompliance to spectacle wear and its predisposing factors among adults with refractive errors in Menoufia and Gharbeya Governorates. Patients and methods A cross-sectional study performed in Menoufia and Gharbeya Governorates included 290 adults recruited from government and private ophthalmological centers. Data were collected through a predesigned questionnaire asking about personal data, ophthalmological data, measures of compliance, and predisposing factors to noncompliance. Results About 38% of the participants were noncompliant to eyeglasses wearing. Among noncompliant, personal causes represented 63.1%, followed by spectacle-related causes (22.5%) and financial causes (14.4%). Rural residence and illiteracy were significantly higher among noncompliant participants. Multivariate analysis revealed that secondary and higher education were independent protective factors against noncompliance. Conclusion Noncompliance to spectacle wear was high and was significantly related to rural residence and higher levels of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tortures and executions have been publicly displayed to deter crime, but their staging has also been characterized as spectacle. Public spectacle, and associated technologies, were foundational to the aggregated graphic depiction of Damiens the Regicide sentenced to death by torture. Pain was not considered as the sole purpose, but rather to inflict trauma and cause shame. We see that the sovereign holds power over the body, often considered a vessel to be regulated and managed. In this article, the author explores the events surrounding the walk of atonement conducted by Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones. This article analyzes how power structures use brutality to cause trauma. The queen is confined to a prison cell where she is psychologically and spiritually tortured by religious fanatics using technologies of private disciplinary power. She is then forced to walk naked through the streets of King's Landing. As she progresses, her body is pelted with fruit, manure, and bodily fluids, and she endures jeers and curses from the public. A septa (nun) follows her, repeating the word shame eighty-eight times. Her body becomes degraded and objectified. The author's argument is grounded in a unique reading of disciplinary power, which he has conceptualized as traumapower, defined as the use of public (spectacle) and private (confinement) disciplinary power to inflict physical, psychological, and spiritual harm. In Cersei's confinement and walk, we see the manifestation of traumapower. This article explores how external power structures are operationalized to assert body control through trauma, thus rendering it docile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human societies are going through a historical process whereby the politics and economy of the diverse local territories are being increasingly integrated into the global system through transnational media and information technologies. Based on either sheer opportunism or compulsion, the global and local cultural systems have long been going through a process of co-modification and co-adaptation called "glocalization." Focused on the period 1990-2023, this study aims to divulge the multiple facets of glocalization as a market-led cultural phenomenon in India and the key questions and dialogues related to them. A review of literature on media, consumerism, Indian culture, and business adaptations in India is undertaken in seven segments. Considering glocalization as a dynamic cultural-economic force, this paper offers a critical understanding of the television, marketing, and advertising practices in post-global India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though written in 1957, Roland Barthes’ ‘The World of Wrestling’ from Mythologies resonates with sports even today. As a choreographed fight between a pre-assigned hero and villain, wrestling plays out the archetypal moral narrative using the bodies of the participants. With exaggerated gestures and expressions, these bodies send clear messages to the surrounding audience, who aggressively cheer them on even as they know the fabricated nature of the entire event. This paper seeks to identify the semiotic structures underlying these performances using Barthes’ views on signification, denotation/connotation and ‘myth’. This framework is juxtaposed with contemporary cricket to illustrate how cricket adapts similar semiotic structures into its spatiotemporal setup, players, body politics, media representation, appearance, choreography and spectatorship. It also examines the moral ideologies governing cricket, especially notions of heroism, justice and the spectacle that can be traced back to ancient theatre. It ends with an understanding of how Barthesian wrestling can be used to analyse other contemporary sports too, suggesting directions for further research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the reasons behind the dominance of governance in contemporary societies. The techniques of government cannot be understood apart from a critical genealogy of governmentality. This article references Michel Foucault's analysis of governmentality to analyze the role of governance in arts and cultural management. It argues that, following the governmental state described by Foucault, the contemporary governance state is defined by a new spectacle governmentality. The globalized context of this governmentality produces a simulacrum of governance that tends to substitute for actual outcomes. The South Korean case is used to illustrate this new form of ubiquitous cultural governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages the dismissal of presentism and identity politics by the former president of the American Historical Association. In doing so, the essay argues that his essay shares a rhetorical style with other intellectuals and politicians that can aptly be called the spectacle of transgression. The essay argues that this spectacle works to obscure the material conditions of higher education in general and of history in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing how British women and men in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial South Asia made 'theatre' or 'spectacles' of everyday life in personal correspondence, this article examines the foundations of a particular kind of imagery of empire which often survived beyond decolonisation. It examines constructions of the quotidian in different arenas of the colonial experience – the ship, the environment and climate, and the household – to consider the textual, epistolary and discursive tools that writers used to feed seemingly innocuous details about daily life into the broader coercive work of the British Empire. The British in India reconfigured the everyday into a 'spectacle', framing experiences as imperial burden and sacrifice. The article uses a selection of personal, unpublished letters written by British women and men in India, to show how they rendered themselves as spectacles, staging everyday life as a theatre in which to construct identity and convey racial and cultural difference, and from which to be 'seen' educating and 'civilising' and struggling against domestic servants. In particular, this article uses the revealing, and hitherto unexamined, correspondence of missionary wife Agnes May Johnston between 1915 and 1926 from Calcutta, written to her family in Wolverhampton, England. The upkeep of regular communications about the discomfort and dangers of travel, the oppressive climate, and the maintenance of order within the household, allowed correspondents to fashion themselves as 'out of place' and incongruous with the colonial environment, thereby affirming their Britishness and stabilising imperial identity. The article conceptualises everyday life as an imperial construction in these terms, and foregrounds 'the familiar' in historical, literary and postcolonial analytical frameworks. In doing so it demonstrates how imperial conceptions of power operated through the language, gestures, and behaviours that texture day-to-day experiences, and which shape, in the process, a specific imperial gaze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2020, Turkey announced that the country would no longer prevent refugees and migrants from crossing into the European Union. The announcement resulted in mass human mobility heading to the Turkish border city of Edirne. Relying on freshly collected data through interviews and field visits, this article argues that the 2020 events were part of a state-led execution of 'engineered migration' through a constellation of actors, technologies and practices. Turkey's performative act of engineered migration created a spectacle in ways that differ from the spectacle's usual materialization at the EU's external borders. By breaking from its earlier role as a partner, the Turkish state engaged in a countermove fundamentally altering the dyadic process through which the spectacle routinely materializes at EU external borders around the hypervisibilization of migrant illegality. Reconceptualizing the spectacle through engineered migration, the article identifies two complementary acts by Turkish actors: the spectacularization of European (Greek) violence and the creation of a humanitarian space to showcase Turkey as the 'benevolent' actor. The article also discusses how the sort of hypervisibility achieved through the spectacle has displaced violence from its points of emergence and creation and becomes the routinized form of border security in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin to Claudia Rankine and Tina Campt, provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle's temporal successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone Browne argues, Foucault's separation between spectacle and surveillance is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media contributes to a "postvisual" image world in which algorithmic, machine-machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the appeal of immersive recreations of old London for nineteenth-century audiences. When discussed by scholars now, they are most often presented as conduits of official ideology engaged in promoting a triumphalist narrative of bourgeois ascendance. Here, I explore their appeal to popular audiences, arguing that they presented a more ambivalent set of meanings than is generally recognised and highlighting instances in which the beholders' experience departed from the stated intentions of the makers or organisers. The article draws out the pervasiveness of the riverside motif, which I argue carried a subtext of yearning for a lost harmony between urban and natural environments in the modern metropolis. The immersive illusionism of these reconstructions has been associated with the idea of "passive" spectatorship in which the viewer is enthralled and their critical faculties dulled or immobilised. I argue against this that the immediacy of old London attractions allowed them to become part of the dream geography of modern spectators severed from their own past. As "mind's eye" images, they functioned as phantasmagoric interstitial spaces that could be called upon to inform and transform the real urban environment, and in which emotions such as loss, trauma and desire could be worked out through the free play of the imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa's portrayal in the hegemonic imagination has been subjected to critical analysis for many decades. Three features stand out in my analysis. First, I focus on how that hegemonic imagination produces and correlates whiteness to progress through cigarette marketing. Second, I am concerned with the specifically neoliberal leveraging of the imaginary repertoire of classic European colonialism. Neoliberal colonialism repurposes old phantasmagoria according to its own modes of dominance and exploitation, engaging in a form of racialisation that is much more subtle but equally effective. Third, I use my own situated reading from elsewhere in the periphery to triangulate and break open the classic dichotomic opposition between Africa and the West. In supplanting the Africa/West dichotomy with a tripartite division of the world as analytical category, new ways in which the hegemonic idea of Africa benefits neoliberal colonialism surface. Working classes globally are driven to read their exploitation as a comparative privilege, while comprador elites are disciplined into cooperation and compliance. These ideas are investigated by means of visual analyses of tobacco ads in Africa. I focus on how youths are lured into global economic and semiotic value circuits to produce the spectacular and spectral normativity of a whitened global bourgeoisie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Heller, a virtually unknown figure in music-historical accounts, trained in the 1840s at the Royal Academy of Music in London and gavethe American premieres of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos with the Germania Musical Society. But he also pursued a parallel career in theatrical magic, using his musical virtuosity to elevate his social and artistic stature as a conjurer. Between 1852 and 1878, his magic act was seen by millions in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, including states and territories in the American West never visited by contemporary piano virtuosos like Thalberg and De Meyer. While magicians routinely incorporated music in their acts, Heller’s virtuosity set him apart from his conjuring peers, including those who were themselves musicians. Using his musical expertise, he blended the magic show with other popular forms of spectacle, including minstrelsy, burlesque, and the piano recital, framing the latter as an extraordinary attraction. Advertisements and accounts of his performances reveal the marketing strategies Heller employed to negotiate the crowded landscape of consumer culture and American popular entertainment, especially during the tumultuous years of the Civil War. These strategies included co-branding, altering the titles and descriptions of musical compositions (particularly “Dixie”), and joining forces with “Blind Tom” (Thomas Greene) Wiggins, the Black, enslaved musical prodigy whom Heller had briefly tutored; they performed together in Louisville during one of the magician’s last appearances in the South. Throughout the 1860s, Heller was influenced by gendered musical practices and regional attitudes toward race and politics, leading him to market his act specifically toward middle-class women, music lovers, Unionists, and those seeking postwar reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability projects are being promoted around the world with a large dose of spectacle, including those in the Arabian Peninsula where governments have invested heavily in large greening projects and events. This article examines these spectacular projects in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are typically dismissed by Western observers as mere PR and 'greenwashing.' Moving past this simplistic critique, I contextualize 'sustainability spectacle' as a broad cultural phenomenon, with deep roots in Western countries. Based on ethnographic research on sustainability events, sites, and initiatives in the UAE, I show how 'post-oil' greening initiatives use sustainability spectacle to promote a positive narrative about the 'modern' national self, and reflect the growing international imperative to be green. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses accounts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Anglophone travellers to Rome who encountered and described Catholic rituals of walking. These visitors observed Catholic rituals such as pilgrimages and processions so closely that they came to understand the act of walking and ways of walking as expressions of religious identity. They also used the language of walking to interpret such moments of encounter in their narratives. Taken together, this evidence demonstrates the centrality of walking to their understanding of a religiously diverse Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professional wrestling is a popular, global, performance phenomenon that is in many respects sport-like, but tends to be shunned by serious sports fans for its alleged 'fakeness'. Yet its own fans often behave exactly like regular sports fans: getting caught up in the action, responding emotionally to the performances, and engaging in critical analysis of the competitive strategies and the turns of events. How does this alleged 'fake sport' engender such complex and deeply emotional appreciation? Here I provide an analysis of pro-wrestling that explains and emphasises its narrative, dramatic and fictional aspects, showing it to be a complex representational work that can be appreciated aesthetically and emotionally on a number of levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Various snake and lizard species have transparent and fused eyelids that make up a spectacle. From an evolutionary point of view, it is assumed that ancestral snakes developed this structure to protect the eye as an adaptation to their burrowing, underground existence. Between the spectacle and the eye lies a narrow subspectacular space that is filled with a tear-like fluid that drains to the roof of the mouth via the lacrimal duct. Although disorders of the eye are relatively uncommon in squamates with a spectacle, disorders of the spectacle, the subspectacular space, and its drainage system are frequently encountered in veterinary practice. As the spectacle is an integral part of the skin it is renewed with each shedding cycle. Retention of the old layers of the spectacle may occur because of infectious as well as non-infectious causes. Besides inflammation and trauma of the spectacle, overfilling due to blockage of the drainage system (pseudobuphthalmos) as well as bacterial and parasitic infection of the subspectacular space (subspectacular infection) are undoubtedly the most frequently observed disorders in snakes and spectacled lizards. An adequate diagnostic approach often allows the establishment of a successful treatment for these conditions. Various squamate species have completely fused eyelids that make up a transparent spectacle. The spectacle is a continuation of the integument that is renewed with each shedding cycle and creates a narrow subspectacular or corneospectacular space that is filled with lacrimal fluid. The latter is considered as the analogue of the conjunctival sac in other vertebrates. Almost all reptiles that have a spectacle lack a nictitating membrane, bursalis muscle, and lacrimal glands. The lacrimal fluid in the subspectacular space is secreted by the Harderian gland. The features of the spectacle and its lacrimal drainage system are an illustration of the enormous variation of the morphological adaptations that are seen in reptiles and one of the most distinguishable traits of snakes and most gecko species. Whereas ocular disease in squamates with a spectacle is infrequently seen in practice, disorders of the spectacle and the subspectacular space are commonly encountered. In order to apply an adequate diagnostic and therapeutic approach for these conditions, a sound knowledge and understanding of the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of the spectacle, subspectacular space, and lacrimal drainage system are fundamental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two major rituals of contemporary national life in the UK: association football and military commemoration. It explores the ways in which remembering is enacted and performed within UK football and how these processes are related to issues of power, agency and identity in Britain today. Employing the concepts of collective memory and spectacle, this article argues that 'memory entrepreneurs' have sought to embed football as 'site of memory' in the performance of military commemoration. It concludes that this has contributed to the transformation of military commemoration, from a ritual that is observed to a spectacle that is consumed. This paper thus contributes to emergent debates on the militarization of civilian space, the shifting nature of civil–military relations in the twenty-first century, and the role of military remembrance in the reproduction of Britishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, London staged the Olympic Games and the associated Cultural Olympiad, which produced the 'London 2012' Festival, funding a wide series of events including many productions by the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). A decade on, this article considers the impact of these overlapping events during a period of unprecedented austerity in the United Kingdom, and how arts events might be considered as having colluded with the government's own agenda. The connection between neoliberal governance, with its programme of increased privatization, rapid gentrification, and the opportunistic marketing of diversity is examined with reference to increasing nationalism through Olympiad displays, together with the increasing influence of the 'experience economy' as defined by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is a Lecturer in Theatre and Social Change at Rose Bruford College. This article, derived from their PhD on LIFT in its social, cultural, and political context, follows 'LIFT and the GLC versus Thatcher: London's Cultural Battleground in 1981' (NTQ 141) and, in the same issue, Patey-Ferguson's interview with LIFT's founding Artistic Directors, Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounting for nature as capital is touted as a promising way of aligning environmental conservation with global capitalism by valuing nature like economic assets. Both its proponents and detractors speculate on what its promises might achieve if they were fully realized, i.e., if nature were actually accounted for, capitalized or commodified. There is, however, an enduring disjunction between vision and execution in this field: the promises simply do not materialize. Economizing nature proves to be extremely complex, raising not only technical hurdles but also intractable conceptual and ontological issues. We suggest taking a critical realist approach to natural capital accounting, acknowledging the inherent resistance of nature to being treated as capital. We consider the arenas dedicated to natural capital accounting as the sites of singular dramaturgical performances, whose effects extend beyond the integration of nature into economic decision making. Drawing on documents, interviews and observations at events dedicated to natural capital accounting, we highlight their theatrical character and reveal the effects they produce. This article aims to contribute to the investigation of environmental governance arenas by emphasizing their significance as venues for symbolic performance and achievement, extending beyond the traditional emphasis on regulatory and hoped-for environmental transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study discusses the production of framings about the changes and impacts on the professional practice of esports during the period of social distancing imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. The considerations are based on a set of consultants' reports and articles published by the specialized press in Brazil and abroad. From a hermeneutic framing analysis, we identify the occurrence of four discursive orientations, thus named: suspension, immunity, immateriality, and reconfiguration. In addition to the importance of materiality and physical space for the practice of esports, already mentioned in the previous literature, the analysis highlighted the centrality of the spectacularization of the media for the viability of professional sport in a capitalist context. The restrictions imposed by the pandemic also underlined that, although widely mediated, this spectacularization relies heavily on the convergence of people to a single physical location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ruben van Wingerden's articles on carrying a patibulum and σταυρός are admirably precise. However, his analyses of two texts of Plautus and a fragment of Clodius Licinus are problematic. In contrast to van Wingerden's rather minimalistic conclusions regarding carrying a patibulum or σταυρός, it seems likely that carrying a patibulum was a general element in Roman practice in accounts in which patibula are mentioned in conjunction with crucifixions – even when there is no explicit reference to carrying the patibulum through the streets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a dialogue among the first Westworld season - showed by the HBO GO (2016) streaming channel and created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy - and media and daily life theories impacted by the capitalism flux and reflux, which in each recent history period presents a more unequal and cruel new facet, in which the labourer, as a serial robot, suffers the world violence, dominated by billionaires, corporations, oligarchies that objectify the robot/labourerinto "something" disposable and programmed to certain tasks. The capitalism allegory on the series is represented by the consum relation in the park as fun/experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the recent economic-political transformations in the organization of football over the last 20 or 30 years: the former non-profit sports "clubs" have been transformed into profit-oriented companies, commanded by mediatic-financial capital. The article suggests a theoretical approach relating the category "spectacle" in Debord's terms to categories of the Political Economy of Information and Communication. It concludes by considering football today as an industry that still mobilizes the emotions of millions of people but needs to be understood and regulated as it has become an important economic sector in the process of capital accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lynching became a popular part of the lexicon in India during the last decade, and the word is used to communicate incidents where a group of people takes justice into their own hands. Considering the violent nature of lynching, it became a topic of intense debate. Yet, there is a lack of definitional clarity, and the ambit of lynching has been stretched to signify various forms of violence. Even the modest number of scholarly research projects takes the term “lynching” for granted. Considering the ambiguity surrounding it, this study analyzes and articulates the phenomena of lynchings in India, particularly during the period 2000–2021 while undertaking a genealogical study to illustrate the history, and the meaning of the word and how it has evolved over the years alongside the associated phenomena. To do so is to take away the misleading objectivity the word can sometimes generate. Following the conceptualization of lynchings and its changing expression in different societies, particularly the United States of America, the article highlights in what ways the definition and content of lynching have become more symbolically charged and the reasons for the change as well as what made lynching an extraordinary form of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its "first" settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize--traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover's pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration politics in Finland are centered around "social integration" and "multiculturalism." While the stated aims of such politics are equality and social mobility, the results are often contradictory, perpetuating the hierarchies and inequalities they propose to overcome. Utilizing Guy Debord's notion of the "society of the spectacle," I argue that there is a neoliberal Integration Spectacle that projects the appearance of societal change but is, in reality, an immobilizing force that works to obscure a particular racialized social order. I draw on my fieldwork in and around Varissuo, an international working-class suburb on the edge of Turku, western Finland, to analyze how both migrant residents of the area and the professionals within the so-called integration economy engage with, reproduce, and deal with this discrepancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how qualities of expertise are constructed and sustained within the televisual world of craft reality competition television. We suggest that part of the appeal of this relatively recent media typology beyond any didactic or instructional interest, is a desire to observe expertise and thus gain perceived but highly circumscribed access to the community of practice that is presented by these television shows. We identify three principal expertise positions as common to the contemporary mediation of expertise presented by craft reality competition television: 'keystone', 'relative' and 'vicarious' expertise. It is argued that these different forms of expertise are mobilized as roles across a variety of craft reality competition television programs to enable entertaining access to craft practice-specific expertise which enables the audience to become experts of spectating expertise, masking the real time, effort, and access to hands-on training involved in becoming proficient in crafts practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a week in September of 2016, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) held its tenth guerrilla conference, the Décima, in the plains of Yarí in southern Colombia. The guerrilla group blew the event open to the media, orchestrating a festival cum eco-conflict-tourism extravaganza to mark its transition to legal politics. This photo/ethnographic analysis of the Décima illuminates the FARC's symbolic and discursive formation at a pivotal transitional moment and how the group imagined its political possibilities at the cusp of its demobilisation. By engaging with Guy Debord's concept of 'integrated spectacle', I argue that the FARC's vanguardist structure led it to brand itself as the leader of a broad political mobilisation, even as it struggled to retain the allegiance of its former combatants. The article considers the ongoing relevance of the integrated spectacle for scholars and activists and opens a path for further research into politics of spectacle in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Putting research on the socio-political effects of Kenya's new Standard Gauge Railway in conversation with geographically and anthropologically grounded scholarship on infrastructure, the article analyses how megaprojects, in spite of state spectacles of infrastructure-qua-development, are embroiled in multiple modalities of ruination. It specifically highlights how mega-infrastructures disrupt ecologies of social reproduction: the new railway disorders people's mobility patterns and their access to essential infrastructures, as well as decouples their labour from transport systems and informal road economies central to self-sustainment. The article conceptualises these intersections between infrastructure's spectacle and ruination as disquieting ambivalence of infrastructure. Shifting from spectacle to ruination – rather than oscillating between the two – this ambivalence is not one of uncertainty, malleability, or open-ended futures that are analysed in recent strands of critical scholarship on infrastructure, in which material devastation is often bracketed due to this literature's predominant focus on multiple temporalities of infrastructure as heterogeneous possibilities of reconfiguration. The article, instead, shows that this ambivalence of infrastructure is disquieting – fraught with precarity, struggle, and despair, as the lives of those in shadows of mega-infrastructures need to be rebuilt within the ruins of the here and now, and of infrastructure's spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this essay is to explore the complementarities that obtain between Nietzsche's account (or teaching) of the "death of God" and J. M. Coetzee's characterization of David Lurie in his 1999 novel Disgrace. I am particularly concerned to investigate the responses of Nietzsche's Madman and Coetzee's protagonist to their respective insights into (or experiences of) the "death of God." Both respondents, I offer, may be seen and understood to create public spectacles in which they acquire (what they take to be) permanent, meaning-conferring identities that are meant, if not destined, to withstand the dislocations and calamities to come. In both cases, moreover, the point of the spectacle is to secure the conditions under which its architect may escape any responsibility for navigating the uncertainties that are bound to arise in the aftermath of the "death of God." Whereas Nietzsche is primarily concerned to anticipate (and diagnose) the distress that leads to the creation of responsibility-deferring spectacles, Coetzee provides an instructive treatment of life after the death of God, as David Lurie is compelled to confront the emerging post-theistic order he had hoped to avoid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a case study conducted in Geylang, Singapore, this article explores the role of urban policing, surveillance and crime control as mechanisms of social ordering that contribute to the marginalisation of excluded groups, including low-income migrant workers and sex workers. Adopting a statecraft approach that emphasises the significance of 'governing through crime' for the upholding of urban political-economic projects, we examine the entanglement of political discourses and crime and social control practices as co-constructive of class- and race-based inequality in Singapore. Drawing from qualitative interviews with NGO workers and sex workers, augmented by extensive non-participant observations, we identify three processes through which state power is vectored in Geylang: the stigmatisation of the neighbourhood through association with marginalised groups, legitimising intense spatialised intervention; the enacting of performative zero-tolerance policing ; and the containment and surveillance of illicit activities within the neighbourhood. Contributing to discussions that advance the statecraft approach to researching urban crime control, the article shows that seemingly contradictory practices of tolerance and intervention constitute strategies of governance. The article argues that spatially specific crime control practices in Geylang generated an exclusionary 'spectacle' which symbolically connects low-income migrant workers with deviance, in turn supporting citizenship exclusion, racialised marginality and a wider politics of capital accumulation resting on disempowered labour. As we argue, crime control policies are an important form of statecraft legitimising an urban political economy that is heavily reliant on low-cost labour provided by migrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Second Thoughts: Pseudo-Reality Between Hypnosis and Spectacle" expands the discussion of Endre Koritar's and Robert Prince's presentations in the 2021 International Sándor Ferenczi Network webinar series, Listening with Ferenczi (Koritar, 2022a; Prince, 2022). Beginning with a segue from Prince's reference to Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician," the present paper expands focus from the dynamics of leadership to the grooming of followership along the pathway of image as the American national addiction to pseudo-reality, a fascinating and omnipotently expected, always disappointing entitlement (Boorstin, 1961). Political spectacle, ascendant in American executive, legislative, and judicial performance since 2016, functions as image—supercharged, with its guarantee of gratification powerfully overcoming disappointment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chevrolet-General Motors–sponsored film American Look (1958) harnessed technologies of Hollywood spectacle to make their production bigger and bolder than many previous sponsored films. Beyond merely selling a car, the film engaged its viewers with an exhibition of General Motors’ corporate persona, aligning its products with the prestige of good design on a grand scale in a Technicolor, widescreen, sponsored epic. Locating my analysis within the cultural and geopolitical context of the Cold War era, this paper argues that American Look expands current rubrics for understanding sponsored and industrial films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Reliable data on eye health among Indian truckers are scanty. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of refractive errors and the subsequent long-term spectacle compliance and suggest appropriate strategies to improve these in this population. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted between October 2017 and March 2018 among truckers. Gross ophthalmologic examination was performed, including visual acuity and refraction. Six months to one-year post provision of spectacles, follow-up with truckers was undertaken to understand the spectacle usage patterns and its compliance. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were conducted to assess the association between the type of refractive errors, spectacle compliance, and select sociodemographic and clinical variables. Results: A total of 709 (78.8%) truckers completed interviews and gross eye examination. The prevalence of any refractive errors in the worst eye was 45.8% (95% CI 42.1%-49.6%). The prevalence of presbyopia with or without distance vision was 33% (95% CI 29.6%-36.6%) and myopia with or without astigmatism was 10% (95% CI 7.9%-12.5%). Among those who were prescribed spectacles, 27.1% needed distance correction, 33.8% needed near correction, and 39.1% needed both, at least in one eye. Long-term spectacle compliance was at 54.7%. The predominant barriers for spectacle compliance were "did not collect" (63.9%), followed by "discomfort" (20.8%). Conclusion: The prevalence of uncorrected refractive errors was high among truckers. Long-term spectacles compliance was moderate. There is an urgent need for tailor-made targeted interventions to address the eye health needs of truckers in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To assess the prevalence of refractive error (RE) and its association with road traffic accidents (RTAs) and the subsequent long-term spectacle compliance and adherence to suggested appropriate strategies In Shillong, India.Methods: This: prospective study was conducted between July and October 2019 among commercial taxi drivers (CTDs), with follow-up interviews conducted with a subset of respondents to assess long-term spectacle compliance after a year. Gross ophthalmologic examination was performed, including visual acuity and refraction. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were conducted to assess the association between the type of REs, spectacle compliance, and selected sociodemographic and clinical variables. Multiple logistic regression was performed for analysis of the association between RTAs and sociodemographic, clinical, and work characteristics variables.Results: A total of 382 (95.5%) CTDs completed interviews and gross eye examination. The prevalence of any RE in the worst eye was 28.8% (95% CI: 24.3-33.6). Presbyopia with or without distance vision was the commonest type of RE with 21.7% (95% CI: 17.7%-26.2). Among those who were prescribed spectacles, 70.5% needed near correction. Drivers with RE were nearly two times (OR: 2.6; 95% CI: 1.4-5.1) more likely to be involved in RTAs compared to those without any RE. Long-term spectacle compliance was at 40.9%. The predominant barrier reported for spectacle compliance was "can manage well without spectacles."Conclusion: This survey has demonstrated a significant relationship between poor vision and occurrence of RTAs. There is an urgent need for tailor-made targeted interventions to address the eye health needs of CTDs in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary festivals play a substantial role in the construction of the value of Latin American literature in the 21st century, although they have hardly been adressed in the field of Latin American Studies. Since the impact of globalization and neoliberal development on the creative industry, literary festivals have not only been proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic but are also carrying out a process of gatekeeping and public legitimation of certain figures, genres, themes and aesthetics that have an effect on the shaping of taste and on the new world agenda of literary, social and economic values. The case study presented here is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the programming of the local festival Filba Internacional in Buenos Aires, from 2008 to 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India's Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country's devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed to detail how India as a lockdown nation witnessed forms of social suffering and political repression that can only be truly understood in light of how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two preexisting crises in India's economy and polity. In conclusion, I reflect on the likely political outcomes of the pandemic, considering both the impact of its second wave, and the emergence of oppositional sociopolitical forces in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I describe Andil Gosine's artistic archives as 'watery' to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice. I argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections. To that end, I examine the representation of water and waterways in Gosine's Our Holy Waters, and Mine (2014) to illustrate how relations with water provides a heuristic and representative practice for critiquing afterlives of colonialism and indentureship. I bring together Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, scholarship on feminist and queer archival practices and ocean studies to read Gosine's experimental artistic practice as offering ways to rethink oceanic materiality in the context of historical and archival knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]