Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi / edited by Irina Dumitrescu.

• TeilnehmendeR: Dumitrescu, Irina,
• Place / Publishing House: Baltimore, Maryland : : Project Muse,, 2020; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2016; 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xxiii, 240 pages) :; illustrations; PDF, digital file(s).

A professor of poetry uses a deck of playing cards to measure the time until her lover returns from Afghanistan. Congolese soldiers find their loneliness reflected in the lyrics of rumba songs. Survivors of the siege of Sarajevo discuss which book they would have never burned for fuel. A Romanian political prisoner writes her memoir in her head, a book no one will ever read. These are the arts of survival in times of crisis.Rumba Under Fire proposes we think differently about what it means for the arts and liberal arts to be "in crisis." In prose and poetry, the contributors to Rumba Under Fire explore what it means to do art in hard times. How do people teach, create, study, and rehearse in situations of political crisis? Can art and intellectual work really function as resistance to power? What relationship do scholars, journalists, or even memoirists have to the crises they describe and explain? How do works created in crisis, especially at the extremes of human endurance, fit into our theories of knowledge and creativity?The contributors are literary scholars, anthropologists, and poets, covering a broad geographic range -- from Turkey to the United States, from Bosnia to the Congo. Rumba Under Fire includes essays, poetry and interviews by Tim Albrecht, Carla Baricz, Greg Brownderville, William Coker, Andrew Crabtree, Cara De Silva, Irina Dumitrescu, Denis Ferhatovic, Susannah Hollister, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Sharon Portnoff, Anand Taneja, and Judith Verweijen.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Irina Dumitrescu -- Triptych (the library) / Andrew Crabtree -- What book would you never burn (for fuel)? / Denis Ferhatović -- Poems in prison : the survival strategies of Romanian political prisoners / Irina Dumitrescu -- Writing resistance : Lena Constante's The silent escape and the journal as genre in Romania's (post)communist literary field / Carla Baricz -- War and the food of dreams : an interview with Cara de Silva / Cara de Silva with Irina Dumitrescu -- Atempause and Atemschaukel : the post-war periods of Primo Levi and Herta Müller / Tim Albrecht -- Theater in wartime / Greg Alan Brownderville -- Counting cards : a poetics for deployment / Susannah Hollister -- Ace of hearts / Susannah Hollister -- Civilization and its malcontents : on teaching western humanities in "the new Turkey" / William Coker -- Departure entrance / Denis Ferhatović -- Profanations : the public, the political and the humanities in India / Prashant Keshavmurthy -- Village cosmopolitanisms : or, I see Kabul from Lado Sarai / Anand Vivek Taneja -- Terpsichore / Irina Dumitrescu -- Rumba under fire : music as morale and morality in music at the frontlines of the Congo / Judith Verweijen -- Ulysses / Sharon Portnoff.