Project MUSE - Comparative Modernist Performance Studies: A Not So Modest Proposal (2024)

Notes

1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991) ix.

2. Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012) ix.

3. Given that aesthetic performances such as theatre and dance are included in the broad spectrum that is the purview of performance studies, we refer to the field as a whole by that term, abbreviating it as “PS” throughout the rest of this essay.

4. We are not the first to identify this trend. In 2005 Tracy C. Davis founded the “Performance in Historical Paradigms” initiative at Performance Studies International (PSi), adding two to three sessions per conference to cultivate research in historical performance and historicist approaches toward performance, more generally.

5. This figure is meant to be suggestive only. We recognize that many of the journals sampled were special issues, reflecting topics of contemporary scholarly interest, and have tried to distinguish between articles that drew their evidence primarily from contemporary performances and those that were either purely theoretical excursions and/or cited pre-1980s performances as evidentiary case studies. Also worth noting are several articles that historicize contemporary performance in the way [End Page 148] we advocate, even if they were not statistically representative of the articles on contemporary topics. The journals sampled were New Theatre Quarterly 32.1 (February 2016), Performance Research 21.1 (2016), TDR 59.4 (Winter 2015 [T228]), Theatre Journal 64.4 (December 2015), and Theatre Survey 57.1 (January 2016).

6. Andrew Gibb, James Beekman Bush, and Amanda Espinoza, eds., “Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts,” Theatre Journal 67.2 (May 2015): 383–89.

7. Rebecca Schneider, Theatre & History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) 49. Michal Kobialka, “Historiography,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 18.2 (Spring 2004): 122. See also his “Theater/Performance Historiography: Politics, Ethics and the Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 70.1 (March 2009): 29. The field has an important metacritical tradition of reflecting on the complicated relationship between theatre and history, beginning with Bruce A. McConachie and Thomas Postlewait’s landmark edited collection Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989), continuing with Postlewait and coeditor Charlotte Canning’s Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2010), and including, most recently, the collection coedited by Michal Kobialka and Rosemarie Bank, Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

8. Patricia Ybarra, “History Takes Time,” Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, ed. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010).

9. See Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Le Presses du Réel, 2002). For a critique, see Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79. For other uses of the term “relational” (to which we are largely sympathetic), see Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), in which he seeks to redirect object-oriented thinking toward a greater emphasis on process, or what he calls “interaction-in-the-making” (9), and Shu-Mei Shih’s “World Studies and Relational Comparison,” PMLA 130.2 (March 2015): 430–38, in which she calls for the study of an integrated world literature that compares works in relation to the vectors of both time (history) and space (the field of power relations).

10. d">Nealon xi (our italics).>

11. See Richard Schechner with media editor Sara Brady, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013) 129. This is the first sentence under the header “Postmodernism,” following brief discussions of speech-act theory (Austin, Searle, and Derrida), and reality TV in Schechner’s chapter on “Performativity.” There is no mention of Herbert Marcuse, whose phrase “performance principle” he borrows even as he eviscerates it of its sting.

12. Marvin Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996; New York: Routledge, 2004) 137.

13. Our choice to call the field “comparative studies” as opposed to “comparative literature” reflects the field’s recent move to broaden its disciplinary purview to include other kinds of cultural production, shifting its unifying focus from literature per se to comparative theory more generally. In this instance “comparative” serves as an umbrella term for comparativity (the comparison of comparative techniques), the transindigeneity movement (which seeks to promote a nonuniversalizing method of comparison), and other emergent relational practices. These approaches are explicitly different from one another, and this difference puts them in conversation as contrasting elements of one field.

14. For a summary of terminological debates within MS, see Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8.3 (Sept. 2001): 493–513. For a more comprehensive history of modernism as a critical concept, see Ástrádur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990); and Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Within CS, see Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).

15. This is in keeping with Friedman’s call for a “transformational planetary epistemology.” See “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 17.3 (September 2010): 471–99.

16. See, for example, Günter Berghaus, Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-Garde (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009). These and the following citations are meant simply to illustrate the trends we have identified and are offered as suggested reading for scholars wishing to extend their research beyond their home fields.

17. See, for example, Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004); Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006); Juliet Koss, Modernism [End Page 149] after Wagner (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010); and Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford UP, 2011).

18. See, for example, Rebecca Rovit with Alvin Goldfarb, eds., Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust: Texts, Documents, Memoirs (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999) and The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2012); Arnold Aronson, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); Meta DuEwa Jones, The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2011); Soyica Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011); Iris Smith Fischer, Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theatre in the 1970s (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011); Koritha Mitchell, Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012); Juliet Bellow, Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); and Paige A. McGinley, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014).

19. See, for example, David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003); David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009); Kimberly Jannarone, Artaud and His Doubles (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010); and Matthew Yde, Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

20. See, for example, Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005); James Harding and John Rouse, eds., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006); James Harding, Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010) and The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2013); Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005) and The Avant-Garde: Race, Religion, War (New York: Seagull, 2011); and Claire Warden, Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015).

21. See, for example, Christopher Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-Colonial Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo, Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Alexander C. Y. Huang, Chinese Shakespeare: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), Ric Knowles, Theatre and Interculturalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

22. See, for example, Patricia Ybarra, Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009); Laura Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Jain, eds., The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2014); Sharon Marcus and Katherine Biers, eds., “World Literature and Global Performance,” special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41.2 (Winter 2014); and see Christopher Balme, Catherine Cole, and Tracy C. Davis, eds., Transnational Theatre Histories series with Palgrave Macmillan, beginning with Marlis Schweitzer’s Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (2015).

23. See, for example, Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011); Siyuan Liu, Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Denise Varney et al., eds., Theatre and Performance in the Asia-Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Diana Looser, Remaking Pacific Pasts: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Theater from Oceania (Manoa: U of Hawai’i P, 2014); Glenn Odom, Yorùbá Performance, Theatre and Politics: Staging Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

24. See, for example, Phillip Zarrilli, Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski (New York: Routledge, 2008); Min Tian, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2008) and Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth-Century International Stage: Chinese Theatre Placed and Displaced (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, and C. J. Wan-ling Wee, Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Suk-Young Kim, Illusive Utopia: Theatre, Film, and Everyday Performance in North Korea (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010), and DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border (New York: Columbia UP, 2014). [End Page 150]

25. See, for example, Gao Xingjian, Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation, trans. Mabel Lee (New York: Cambria Press, 2012); Suzuki Tadashi, Culture is the Body: The Theatre Writings of Tadashi Suzuki (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2015).

26. Phillip Zarrilli et al., eds. Theatre Histories: An Introduction (2006; New York: Routledge, 2010). It is worth noting that Zarrilli et al. enlarge their historical purview to include prehistoric cultures, and our model is focused specifically on the world historical epoch of modernity. While we have learned much from the comparative studies of colleagues working on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance/early modern cultures, we believe that the animating energies of those periods differ in intensity if not necessarily in kind from those that have propelled the experience of change that has marked the modern period.

27. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (May 2008): 737–48.

29. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford UP, 2012), 7.

30. As Hayot eloquently concludes, his method leads “not to a complacency about the inevitable limitations (and falsehoods) of the transhistorical, but to a heightened awareness of the choice of operative historical concepts as a fundamental decision in the practice of criticism” (194). Hayot’s work also resonates strongly with work by scholars of the global South. Notably, Roberto Schwarz offers a variation of Marxist literary critical methods as a means of resituating literary history in the Brazilian context in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture (New York: Verso, 1992).

31. Knowles 61.

32. Cf. Gail Finney, “Elitism or Eclecticism?: Some Thoughts about the Future of Comparative Literature,” Symplokē 16.1–2 (2008): 215–25.

33. McKenzie, Roms, and Wee 6.

34. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa (New York: Routledge, 2012). Specifically, they claim that the global South is in a privileged position to offer theoretical insights beyond those posited by a closed Western system, given that philosophies in Africa and elsewhere have developed in their own distinct ways and often provide solutions to otherwise intractable problems within Enlightenment thought.

35. For example, case studies from Germany (the Saxe-Meiningen Players), Russia (the Moscow Art Theatre), and China by way of Japan (the Spring Willow Society) can be compared to illuminate how late nineteenth-century theatre artists responded to the modernizing force of the railroad. With important differences, all three groups developed a “realistic” performance technique that leveled the vertical hierarchy of traditional social relations by metaphorizing the horizontal relations mapped by the railroad. See Julia A. Walker, Modernity and Performance: Enacting Change on the Modernizing Stage, manuscript in process.

36. >For example, intercultural theatre highlights interactions between cultures as it creates new theatrical worlds. Western academic and theatrical debates over interculturalism have taken specific forms—forms that are substantially different from those that emerge when examining intercultural theatre, the worlds created by intercultural theatrical practice, and related debates in Africa and Asia. A model that emphasizes the contrast between and overlap among global cultures generates a multiplicity of interculturalisms that provides a groundwork for a synergistic (as opposed to alternative) definition of modernity and a more truly global understanding of globalization. See Glenn A. Odom, Theatre, Globalizations and Intercultural Worlds, manuscript in process.

37. Arguments about a unifying modernist sensibility have appeared in response to Jameson’s study of postmodernism, which famously identifies that period’s characteristic sensibility as “the waning of affect.” See Jameson, Postmodernism 10.

38. Indeed, as is true of European modernity and the ubiquitous deployment of the term “early modern,” there are many earlier moments that scholars have identified as modern in the global East and South—most notably in the Arab world and in China. For a summary of this argument, see Shu-Mei Shih, “World Studies” 432.

39. Puchner 253. Associated with Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Situationism was an avant-garde movement that used Brechtian techniques to stage street protests against a capitalist society that turned active citizens into passive consumers of a “culinary” spectacle.

40. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1974; U of Minnesota P, 1984).

41. Harding and Rouse accuse traditional critical narratives of the avant-garde of an “antiperformative bias” (1).

42. Ástrádur Eysteinsson, “‘What’s the Difference?’ Revisiting the Concepts of Modernism and the Avant-Garde,” in Sascha Bru et al., eds. Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009) 21–35. [End Page 151]

43. Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 58–83. As she demonstrates, T. S. Eliot, along with Harvard mentor George Santayana, explicitly rejected the aesthetic theories of François Delsarte and his followers in the expressive culture movement by locating meaning exclusively within the verbal register of a poem, rather than across the verbal, vocal, and pantomimic registers of its realization in performance. Eliot’s theory of “impersonality” is a direct (if also tacit) refutation of the Delsartean “law of personality.”

44. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002).

46. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), 172–96. For an example of recent work, see Odom, Yorùbá Performance, which discusses the Yorùbá concept of “Ìfægbôntáayé«e” in relation to both the indigenous worldview from which it derives and as an active process of cultural resistance and adaptation in the face of the forces of modernization that are transforming contemporary Nigeria.

47. S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Patterns of Modernity (Washington Square: New York UP, 1987) 4.

48. See also S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002).

49. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford UP, 2012) 196.

50. Elin Diamond, “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama,” Modern Drama 44.1 (Spring 2001): 3–15; repr. in Modern Drama: Defining the Field, eds. Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen, (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003).

51. Djelal Kadir, “What Does the Comparative Do for Literary History?,” PMLA 128.3 (May 2013): 644–51.

52. See, for example, Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1800–1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005); Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (New York: Oxford UP, 2006); Leonardo Lisi, Marginal Modernity: The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (New York: Fordham UP, 2013).

53. David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2007).

54. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983; rev. 1991).

55. For universalizing approaches to intercultural performance, see Peter Brook, The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration: 1946–1987 (London: Methuen Drama, 1989), and Eugenio Barba, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer (New York: Routledge, 1991); for postcolonial approaches, see Diana Taylor, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1991), Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), and Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 2000).

56. Dilip Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005).

57. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003).

59. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition,” in Gaonkar 24–57.

60. Didier Coste, “Is a Non-Global Universe Possible?: What Universals in the Theory of Comparative Literature (1952–2002) Have to Say about It,” Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004): 37–48.

61. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).

62. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 192.

64. Kōjin Karatani, History and Repetition, ed. Seiji M. Lippit (New York: Columbia UP, 2012) 56.

65. Aparna Dharwadker, “Modernism, ‘Tradition,’ and History in the Postcolony: Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram kotwal (1972),” Theatre Journal 65.4 (December 2013): 467–87.

66. Elizabeth Harney, “Postcolonial Agitations: Avant-Gardism in Dakar and London,” New Literary History 41.4 (Autumn 2010): 731–51.

67. Dharwadker 486.

70. Ignacio Infante, After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (New York: Fordham UP, 2013).

71. David Chinitz, T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003).

72. Shu-Mei Shih, “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119.1 (January 2004): 16–30. Shih actually outlines five modes of recognition: the return of the systematic, the time lag of allegory, global multiculturalism, and the exceptional particular as four modes with enduring blind spots, and a fifth—postdifference—as one she recommends. It affirms difference within a unified field of global literature “that critically examines its own construction by suspiciously interrogating all claims to universalisms, while acknowledging that any criteria emerging from these interrogations will be open to new questioning” (29). We regard our proposal as heeding her call for an ethics of postdifference.

73. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 32–33.

74. John Roberts, “Revolutionary Pathos, Negation, and the Suspensive Avant-Garde,” New Literary History 41.4 (Autumn 2010): 725.

75. Peggy Phelan, “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows,” Theatre Journal 56.4 (December 2004): 569–77.

76. Jackson 60–61; see also Bishop 79.

77. Tracy C. Davis, “What is Activism?,” paper presented at Ibsen and the Play of Politics, a conference held at Johns Hopkins University, May 2, 2014.

78. Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015).

79. See, for example, Ted Wendt, “Issues: A TPQ Forum,” Text and Performance Quarterly 10.3 (1990): 248–56. In his contribution to this TPQ forum, an essay titled “The Displacement of the Aesthetic: Problems of Performance Studies,” Wendt laments the loss of a specifically aesthetic set of questions and values in the shift to a cultural focus on performance.

80. Within literary studies, scholars of proletarian fiction have long been challenging the canon, if not always the definition, of classic high modernism. See, for example, Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993); Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998); Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000); Alan Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002).

81. Roberts 729. [End Page 153]