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Oral Tradition 20.1 (2005) 1-6



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Performance Literature and the Written Word:

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Balliol College
University of Oxford

This volume examines performance and the phenomenon of performance literature in a highly comparative framework. Literatures around the world, both in the past and in contemporary times, were and are experienced through live performance. This is true in the West, but even more so in non-Western societies. Performance involves engagement, audience, emotion; and performance literature therefore cannot be understood without its audience and social or religious context. This remains the case even when there are written texts that represent some or all of the words. In the modern Western world we are now used to experiencing literature primarily from reading silently, and despite theater and poetry readings, the dominant idea of proper literature in academic circles is of something preserved permanently upon the written page (and scholars therefore start with the written text). This is not the case in most literatures of the non-Western world, or of the pre-nineteenth century in the West; nor is it the case for contemporary popular youth culture, the world over, where song and the iPod are now constant companions. "Performance literature," literature meant primarily to be experienced in performance, is the subject of this volume of Oral Tradition.

Performance literature was the theme of a series of four intense and intensely exciting two- and three-day workshops held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, between July 2001 and May 2003. They were part of a still more ambitious enterprise with its focus firmly on Oriental and African literatures, the eight workshops of the AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) Centre for Asian and African Literatures based in the School of Oriental and African Studies and University College London. For two years the Literature and Performance Workshop, whose project leaders were Drew Gerstle and myself, had a regular core of participants, many of whom were based in London or were leading scholars in their fields from outside London and outside the United Kingdom: most were specialists in one or another African or Asian [End Page 1] literature—historians, anthropologists, and literary specialists—or historians and literary scholars of a pre-modern European society with comparable interests. Of the former group, all were "hands-on" specialists with direct experience in the field. Themes and questions were formulated for each workshop, and ideas and research developed from one to the other. As entirely appropriate for workshops on performance literature, many papers played videos or tapes of performances; many papers were performances themselves—performances of words, but also in some cases of dance—and the sessions were far more visually or aurally engaging than most seminars on literature.1 There was a palpable sense of excitement over the coming together in one room of specialists in so many different literatures and over the suggestive similarities and equally provocative differences between them. Papers, questions, and discussions sparked further questions. The articles in this and the next issue of Oral Tradition represent many—though by no means all—of the literatures discussed in the workshops, and while we cannot include the interventions of "discussants" and the spirit of the general discussion, the articles here have all been informed by them.

From Japan to Somalia, from Indian to Xhosa society, there are rich traditions of performance art and performance literature that often challenge Western categories and the assumptions of literary theory based on the European paradigm. Even in so literate and book-oriented a society as that of Japan, performance remained—and remains—central. While it is generally recognized that "oral" and "written" are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories, those scholars most interested in the performance of literature outside drama are often studying oral literature.2 As the performance literatures discussed in this issue indicate, it is inappropriate to approach performance literature in terms of a relatively simple division between written text and oral performance (though that has been productive in recent studies) or of any straight division between literacy and orality. As...

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