The seven plays that comprise Chiori Miyagawa's "Thousand Years Waiting and Other Plays" explore themes of memory and identity. Her plays combine poetic language with harsh reality, and time and space are fluid in the worlds she creates – they conver...

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as many other communist totalitarian regimes around the world. But it would be naive to assume that this historic, symbolic event and its aftermath have com...

In "The Tale of the Talking Face", eminent Indian artist K. G. Subramanyan offers a stinging parable of democracy gone wrong by narrating and illustrating the story of a princess whose autocratic rule brought nothing but suffering to her people, desp...

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre's "Typhus" centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nig...

Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic here presents an unorthodox, imaginative take on the transition from Communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Three characters – a dog, an underdog, and a cat – offer the reader narratives that reflect on...

Though the recent election of American President Barack Obama and his signing of the executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay signals a considerable shift away from the policies of the Bush era, the lessons to be learned from the war on...

From plays to cartoons, books to Teddy Bears – interest groups, often using the language of human rights, are claiming that they are offended and attempting to ban, gag, even kill, those deemed to be the offenders. Intellectual heavyweights throughou...

After Independence, in 1947, in their efforts to create an "Indian" theatre that was different from the Westernized, colonial theatre, Indian theatre practitioners began returning to their "roots" in classical dance, religious ritual, martial arts, p...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...