Is Performance Studies Imperialist?

Author(s): Jon McKenzie

Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 5-8
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4492707
Accessed: 01-03-2017 18:07 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TDR (1988-)

This content downloaded from 158.162.20.90 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Is Performance Studies
Imperialist?

Comment Jon McKenzie

Ed. note: The following is from a pre-

sentation at the "State of the Profession"
roundtable held at the 2005 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research, Toronto, Canada.

Is performance studies imperialist? I have been struggling with this question for some
time, especially in light of a collaborative project that I have undertaken with Heike Roms
of the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and Wan-ling Wee of the National University
of Singapore represented by the forthcoming anthology we are coediting, Contesting
Performance: Global Genealogies of Research, with contributors from 16 different countries and
offers surveys and reflections on localized cultural performance research. The project also
builds on workshops and seminars on performance research held at the 2002 Performance
Studies Preconference of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, held in New York
City; the 2004 meeting of Performance Studies international, held in Singapore; and the 2006
conference of the American Society for Theatre Research. The anthology will thus function
as a survey of different states of the profession, written from multiple sites around the world
where the wider research of cultural performance has developed or is now emerging.
From our workshops and discussions with researchers from South and North America,
Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand, Roms, Wee, and I have
gotten a good sense of the timeliness and value of exploring different genealogies of perfor-
mance research, different ways of defining and studying performance. As we learned from
our three-day workshop in Singapore, which included over 25 participants, many scholars feel
a strong desire to "tell their stories," to relate local histories of the events and people, as well
as the methodological tools and institutional challenges, that have informed and continue to
shape performance research. Further, many contributors feel that now is the time to undertake
such a project, that there is now a critical mass of work that can be described and analyzed.
There is also great interest in learning what others are doing elsewhere.
As we work with our contributors-face-to-face sometimes, but mostly online-we are
finding that their stories and histories not only offer different perspectives on how perfor-
mance is practiced and theorized at the level of object and field; they also reveal patterns of
obstacles and solutions that, while in no way universal, are sometimes shared between sites-
and which may very well resonate at others, either currently or in the future. For instance,
Marin Blazevic and Lada Cale-Feldman analyze the problem of translating research in post-
Communist Croatia; Diana Taylor writes about the transnational network of institutions that
compose the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics; and Khalid Amine explores
how postcolonial Moroccan performance research has fluctuated between Arabocentric and
Eurocentric emphases. While these cases are site specific, the issues they address have ana-
logues elsewhere. Thus, while one overarching goal of our project is simply to publish such
accounts in the hope of understanding the different ways in which researchers around the
world approach cultural performance, we also hope such understanding will suggest prag-
matic solutions to problems facing researchers in the 21st century.
Yet Roms, Wee, and I realized early on that our project was not without troubling risks.
In particular, as Wee stressed from the very beginning, there is the risk that our anthology

;i
Jon McKenzie is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Modern Studies at the University of
?

Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His current project, Performance Inc: Global Performativity and Mediated
Resistance, examines modes ofperformative power that operate on a global scale.

s-
TDR: The Drama Review 50:4 (T192) Winter 2006. 2006
5
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This content downloaded from 158.162.20.90 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 will reproduce what some perceive as the imperialism of performance studies. In my own
discussions with scholars on different continents, I have heard this imperialism described in
different ways by different people. Some comments were made to me in private conversations;
others were made in large, public settings by people I did not know. Below I have paraphrased
the comments and left them unattributed. I visualize this perceived "PS empire" as a nested
structure starting at the most localized site and working outward:
NYU PS or sometimes more specifically, the performance studies identified with Richard
Schechner's "broad spectrum approach." As someone who earned a doctorate at New York
University's Department of Performance Studies, I know that the faculty do not propagate an
imperialist agenda-quite the contrary. I also know that the NYU program is not reducible
to Schechner (whose work was formative for my own), as many other important scholars have
taught or are currently teaching there. But I also realize that the work of NYU graduates and
faculty, and of Schechner in particular, has been very influential both in the U.S. and around
the world. On several occasions, I have heard complaints that NYU has been too dominant
in the field-often followed immediately by praise for the excellent and innovative research
produced there. Similarly, I have listened to different individuals assail Schechner's work and
then, moments later, say that if it had not been for him, they would have never discovered
performance in the first place. Because he sketched out the field so broadly and so early, it
is difficult not to feel sometimes that Schechner wasn't somehow everywhere first. Further,
because he has taken an anthropological perspective, as have some other faculty who have
taught at NYU, the program has been global from the get-go, and the combined effect of
broadly defined object field and wide geographical horizon have helped produce the percep-
tion in some of an underlying colonizing project. While critical approaches within anthropol-
ogy have helped to counter its lingering ethnocentricism, this task is not as easy as one might
hope, for the resulting local and situated knowledges are precisely that-situated-and thus
always limited and potentially prone to generate their own local centrisms. Such a potential
is by no means limited to research associated with NYU, though the very reach and success
of the program can produce effects just the opposite of those intended.
U.S. PS Just as NYU PS is not reducible to Richard Schechner, U.S. PS is not reduc-
ible to New York University. Northwestern University, in particular, has produced many
important and influential researchers, and over the past 15 years, many other performance
studies programs have emerged in the United States. Some of these new performance studies
programs, it should be noted, are located at prestigious institutions such as Brown, Stanford,
UC-Berkeley, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and the University of Texas-
Austin. The very quality of U.S. performance research and the sheer quantity of publications
and presentations, while laudatory, nonetheless contributes to the sense of U.S. dominance of
performance studies. The political and social aspects of this dominance may surprise some
scholars in the U.S. where issues of identity, power, and resistance have long been central. But
that is the criticism: U.S. notions of identity, power, and resistance are nonetheless culturally
specific. For example, one British scholar told me that the American stress on identity seems
very odd in the U.K. Similarly, after a talk I gave in Slovenia, a scholar stated that, given his
country's recent history, he found my emphasis on politicizing art very dangerous. In short,
some of the most basic positions championed by U.S. scholars as culturally sensitive and/or
socially progressive strike scholars elsewhere as culturally biased and socially regressive.
U.S./U.K. PS Another characterization of what as been called the imperialism of
performance studies focuses on the combined American and British dominance of the
field. As in the U.S., performance studies programs have exploded in the U.K. in recent
years, with programs now in place at Aberystwyth, Bristol, Dartington, Leeds, Middlesex,
4a
S Northhampton, Roehampton, and Queen Mary College, London. These in addition to the
S
0
Centre for Performance Research and the associated journal Performance Research. Needless
6
to say, much important and influential research has emerged from the U.K. Often, British
H
U

This content downloaded from 158.162.20.90 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
scholars explicitly contrast their research and pedagogy to that found in the U.S., stressing
their emphasis on practice, in particular. However, for many scholars outside both the U.S.
and the U.K., such differences are less important than these countries' perceived dominance,
a kind of U.S./U.K. "axis." The three leading publishers of cultural performance scholar-
ship-Routledge, the University of Michigan Press, and now Palgrave Macmillan-are based
in these two countries, with both Routledge and Palgrave known for their international
distribution networks. Their books are sold around the globe, though marketed with an eye
to U.S. and U.K. readers. Further, of the 12 conferences held thus far by Performance Studies
international, only three have been hosted outside the U.K. and U.S. (two in the U.K., seven
in the U.S. with an eighth upcoming in 2007). The three other host countries have been
Germany, New Zealand, and Singapore. Like the U.S., New Zealand and Singapore are
former British colonies, so from another perspective, only one PSi conference has been held
outside the Anglo-American sphere. This point leads me to the last, but most vast, realm of
the "PS empire."
Anglophone PS English is the lingua franca of performance studies. To the anglophone
U.S. and U.K. performance studies programs, one must add the programs and research in
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and English-speaking Canada. Of course,
performance studies is in this regard following a more general pattern. English is the "world
language" in most fields of knowledge and the realms of international trade, finance, and
transportation. But given the critical function of much cultural performance research, the
global hegemony of English cannot be ignored, produced as it was by British and American
imperialisms. Issues of translation have arisen at several PSi conferences: both the Mainz
and Aberystwyth conferences provided multilingual translations, while one plenary of PSi
in Singapore was devoted to the power of English vis-ai-vis other languages, especially those
of Southeast Asia. I should note, however, that at both Mainz and Aberystwyth, only one
plenary was translated. The rest of the sessions were in English. The entire discussion on
language in Singapore occurred-no surprise-in English. On the one hand, these cases
reveal that English provides a way for people whose primary language is not English to
communicate with someone for whom it is (e.g., a Brazilian conversing with an Australian),
but also allows non-primary English speakers to communicate with one another (e.g.,
a Malaysian conversing with a Slovenian and a Moroccan). On the other hand, as was
discussed at Singapore, the dominance of English informs and deforms the very concept
of "performance" and, by extension, the very objects studied "as" performance. Several
questions arise: How is this "performance" translated? When and why is it sometimes left
untranslated? How do "performance" and its translations resonate with other terms and
usages? Further, the predominance of English also affects how-and many times if-one's
research is read by others. In my travels, I have heard scholars who do not write and publish
primarily (if at all) in English express some feelings of isolation, of being cut off from the
"main" conversations of performance studies.
Such, then, is the nested structure that I have derived from descriptions of the imperialism
of performance studies. Though I strongly believe that not one performance studies scholar
anywhere actively espouses any sort of imperialism-just the opposite: I believe performance
studies at large is vehemently anti-imperialist-I nonetheless recognize an imperialist effect
that affects performance researchers and practitioners.
As I have indicated, the linguistic imperialism of Anglophone PS is tied to the history of
British and American imperialisms. This imperialist history casts its shadow across the entire
structure I have just described, and this shadow has grown darker in recent years. In Perform
or Else [2001], I argue that performance (broadly conceived to include organizational, tech-
nological, and cultural paradigms, as well as historical formation) is "all-too-American"; and
though I also predicted at Mainz in early 2001 that this decade would produce many critiques
of the "Americaness" of performance studies, the events triggered by 9/11-most specifically,
a

This content downloaded from 158.162.20.90 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 the subsequent initiation of
erated critical responses to
to note that in this "global
war in Iraq-a war waged by
coalition nations-to the att
felt the blowback of this w
researchers have as well. At
plicity of U.S. imperialism
U.S. scholars, myself includ
military aggression.
Even as Roms, Wee, and I a
alogies of performance rese
them. Such risks are unavoi
performativity always enta
tangle. In terms of knowled
application of research met
all entail generalizations tha
thus risk increasing the heg
these generalizations create
sive transformation. With C
the risk that we might reins
displace them.

Call for Submissions to Theatre Journal

"New Paradigms"

TDR and Theatre Journal are collaborating on developing new paradigms for
the study of performance. A growing number of scholars in theatre and perfor-
mance studies, like those in other humanities disciplines, are becoming restless
or disenchanted with the critical and theoretical paradigms that have dominated
the field since the 1980s. The field appears to be at a crossroads, with no clear
consensus about what rigorous scholarship should look like. The editors of TJ
invite full-length case studies employing a diverse range of new or neglected
critical and theoretical approaches. Please send inquiries about this special issue
to David Z. Saltz, TJ Coeditor, at saltz@uga.edu.

82
o

This content downloaded from 158.162.20.90 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms