Editorial

Given the social and cultural foundations of popular entertainments it’s not surprising to find instances of popular entertainments entering the lists of political conflict or to find the protagonists of political debate employing the devices and performative strategies of the entertainments to advance their causes. They provided the most direct access to cross-sections of potential supporters speaking a lingua franca that depended less on verbal persuasiveness than the visceral immediacy of display, physical dexterity and direct emotional manipulation. Our journal has repeatedly signalled occasions when popular entertainments have given a voice to political protest, to regeneration after periods of political destabilisation and to the provision of palliative care during armed wartime conflict: after all, to borrow Carl von Clausewitz’s celebrated dictum “war is the continuation of politics using other means.” Thus we have documented the resurgence of circus in Buenos Aires in the post-dictatorship period, the investigation of the transformative power of Argentinian pop music, the position of South African theatre in the post-apartheid context and, most recently, the stage representations of the German West Africa genocide in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. This issue maintains the strong strand of political engagement coloured this time by ethnic polarisation, by developments in the nineteenth century labour market and its relationship to the formal creation of a work/leisure-time binary.