Secular Communion in the Coalfields: The Populist Aesthetic and Practice of Roadside Theater

Roadside Theater is a populist theatre company. Refusing liberal elitism, activist vanguardism, and the authoritarian pseudo-populism of Donald Trump, Roadside works in grassroots partnerships that cross racial, political, and rural-urban lines. Combining theatre production, community organizing, and economic development, this work creates the conditions for residents of the Appalachian coalfields and neighbors nationwide to confront exploitative power structures and divisive culture wars, tell their own stories, build shared power and wealth, and create a future where “We Own What We Make.”

The Emergence of the Parthian State

This chapter introduces the establishment of the Parthian state on the Iranian plateau in the middle third century. The unexpected decline of the power of the Seleucid Empire in the 240s because of dynastic turmoil caused a crisis in the Hellenistic Middle East. This crisis encouraged eastern satraps to rebel and the nomadic Parni tribe (known afterward as the Parthians) to invade northeastern Iran. The successful invasion of the Parni to seize Parthia and establish a new kingdom, paired with the sudden rise of their regional power and the failure of the Seleucids to eliminate this new threat, helped create a new interstate system in which the Seleucids, Parthians, and the newly independent Bactrians shared power. The sweeping success of the first Parthian king, Arsaces I, established Parthia as a limited regional power; however, its existence for several decades remained precarious.

Hearing Global Modernity: The Case of the Travelling Oud

Musical instruments are integrated into the fabric of societies throughout the world and, like any number of objects, are adapted as they travel. In this article I place the oud (the eastern lute) in the context of a transformation that the late Arif Dirlik identified as ‘global modernity’, and analyze the career of the remarkable and hugely influential Iraqi musician Munir Bashir (1930–1997). I also use Bashir and his oud to nuance and extend aspects of the model set out by Dirlik which, for all its strengths, is geographically partial, and focuses strongly on the productive side of global competition and diversification. As I will demonstrate, Bashir’s oud was a part of the global modernity being negotiated by actors in the Iraqi, European and American culture-political spheres. But its success reveals the partiality of those negotiations, the precariousness of globally shared power, and the divisions between cultural, political and socio-economic spheres of ‘hearing’.