元杂剧与南戏中人物上下场的表演按语

元杂剧中有所谓“开呵”,是人物上场时自我表白的按语,这种按语主要为自我介绍,但也伴有叙说剧本梗概、交代情节、请求赏赐等功能。“开呵”本是古代伎艺人开场时的熟例,元杂剧和南戏继承这一表演传统,并在表演形态上加以改造,由原来单一的散说转变成诗词韵语,唱念结合,甚至杂有所谓“焰爨”,即舞蹈形式。此外,元杂剧和南戏还在“开呵”的基础上发展出剧中的“按呵”和剧末的“收呵”,二者皆是以剧外人身份所作的断语,“按呵”是对剧情的发展所作的提示、评价,“收呵”则是对剧中人物的结局进行评说。     

Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact and Fiction

The contested field of lesbian history exists along a continuum, with undisputed evidence on one end and informed speculation on the other. Lesbian historical fiction extends the spectrum, envisioning the lives of lesbian pirates, war heroes, pioneers, bandits, and stock romantic characters, as well as the handful of protagonists examined here whose quests specifically highlight the difficulty and importance of researching the lesbian past. The genre blossomed in the 1980s, just as the Foucauldian insistence that homosexual identity did not exist before the late nineteenth century gained sway in the academy. The proliferation of lesbian historical fictions signals the growing desire for more thorough (if not completely factual) historical underpinnings of the burgeoning lesbian identities, communities, and politics set in motion in the 1970s.     

ANA MENDIETA AND THE POLITICS OF THE VENUS NEGRA

The theorizations by some early feminists of the affiliation between Earth and woman, the ‘archetype of the Great Goddess’, and the ‘universal female’, are today regarded with embarrassment as essentializing, ultimately disempowering gestures. This article examines a 1981 project by Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta for the feminist art journal Heresies. In this project she combines a photograph of one of her own earthworks with her translation of the nineteenth-century Cuban legend The Venus Negra. By investigating this legend in the context of nineteenth-century Cuban nationalism, and this earthwork in terms of twentieth-century US/Latino politics, this article argues that the Earth is not necessarily the essential category it appears to be. It claims that the discursive deployment of the Earth - the nation's primitive Other - subverts ideologies of the nation and contributes to its performative renegotiation. Further, it suggests that, in using this legend to disrupt the hegemonic construction of nation, both the legend's authors and its contemporary translator play with the performativity of both gender and race.