Editors: Raúl Rubio, Lei Ping, Stephanie Szitanyi
Manuscript in progress
Book Description:
Stand-up comedy has become a global medium of entertainment, with networks such as Comedy Central and Netflix evolving into multinational fixtures that not only feature US comedy but also commission an international line-up of humor programming. The book’s premise is that stand-up comedy itself is a vehicle for communication, dialogue, disruption, and even for expressing unpopular or inappropriate ideas. It comprises research that proposes that stand-up comedy is a vehicle of catharsis and as a means to mediate difference. Both performers and their performances are catalysts of change. The volume features innovative perspectives involving a wide range of global considerations that span the late-twentieth century to contemporary times. Each chapter broaches either national, regional or global contexts which serve as a means to touch upon cross-cultural considerations, including social movement platforms, long-standing stereotyping, and global issues related to racial/ethnic and religious identities, class, gender, and sexualities. Stand-up comedy, whether it is experienced ‘live’ or via mediated means (TV, YouTube, or social media) has been found to impact communities and foster change. The volume includes chapters on a wide-range of international topics, including comedy and social justice, biculturalism and bilingualism, global city cultures, stand-up comedy in the military and veteran communities, and humor in higher education.
Editors: Raúl Rubio, Thomas Taylor
Manuscript in progress
Book Description:
Collecting and curating are practices not only reserved for museums and cultural institutions. Individuals tend to curate their own lives, careers, work and creative spaces, in order to fashion their identity. Material ‘things’ are often appropriated—collected—in order to substantiate identity, not only for oneself but also for others. Cuban material cultures, as Raúl Rubio has argued in prior publications (see bibliography), is the practice of studying objects, from art to artifacts, from ephemeral memorabilia, such as postcards and mementos, to cultural commodities, which include coffee table books, posters, and nostalgic items of all sorts. More recently, Cuban heritage archives, museum (and individual) collections, and curatorial endeavors of all sorts have emerged as formats that intend to define and represent ‘Cuban’ national identity amidst its ever-present, complicated and sometimes elusive nature. It is the Editor’s estimation that the thriving popularity of “things Cuban” exists because of a variety of reasons, including an ever-growing addiction to representing and consuming Cuban identity given the historical and current positionality of the island. Amidst new and upcoming changes within and beyond Cuba, connected to Cuban-American and Cuban exilic cultures and Cuban communities around the world (particularly in Spain and Mexico) this project hopes to broach the proliferation of Cuban art, Cuban-oriented collections and archival projects, Cuban-oriented curatorial endeavors and catalog publications, and Cuban ‘materials” within and beyond the museum archive, where collectors, curators, and institutions intend to preserve, memorialize, and exhibit Cuban heritage in its complexity while newfound initiatives are focusing on re-membering, reconciliation and reintegration.
raulrubio.com