Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations

<p><em>A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations</em> investigates contemporary protest self-burnings and their echoes across culture.</p><p>The book provides a conceptual frame for the phenomenon and an annotated comprehensive timeline of suicide protests by fire supplemented with notes on artworks inspired by or devoted to individual cases. The core of the publication consists of six case studies of these ultimate acts augmented with analyses and interpretations hailing from the visual arts film theatre architecture and literature. By examining responses to these events within an interdisciplinary frame Ziólkowski highlights the phenomenon’s global reach and creates a broad yet in-depth exploration of the problems that most often prompt these self-burnings such as religious discrimination and harassment war and its horrors the brutality and indoctrination of authoritarian regimes and the apathy they produce as well as the exploitation of the so-called subalterns and their exclusion from mainstream economic systems.</p><p>Of interest to scholars from an array of fields from theatre and performance to visual art to religion and politics <i>A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations</i> offers a unique look at voluntary demonstrative and radical performances of shock and subversion.</p>