Editorial comment: theorizing globalization through theatre

Barely one month after 9/11, critic and scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak opened her keynote address (delivered at a conference on "globalicities"¹) by identifying four currently circulating models of globalization:

First, that there is nothing new about it: attempts to take in the available world in a system are as old as history. In other words, globalization is a repetition. Second, that globalization as such can be identified with the efforts at global governance . . ., remotely inaugurating a postcolonial and postnational world. Third, that the entire globe is now in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. And finally, that globalization is distinguished from world trade and world systems through the ascendancy of finance capital, helped by the silicon chip and the Fall of the Wall. In other words, that globalization is a rupture.²

Contemporary theatrical practices—from international theatre festivals to corporate-sponsored commercial spectaculars to the controversial category of a world-theatre aesthetic—can easily be seen as operating within and responding to these four categories. Social scientists David Held and Anthony McGrew's assertion that "globalization denotes the expanding scale, growing magnitude, speeding up and deepening impact of interregional flows and patterns of social interactions" corresponds to precisely such a globalist and homogenizing view of "McDonald's-ized" theatrical production.³ However, if—as Fredric Jameson provisionally defined it—globalization "is an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts,"⁴ then it is unsurprising that other theorists have incorporated such heterogenetic parts—national, regional, communitarian, grassroots—into their discussions of globalization. Within Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's imperial New World Order resides the "living alternative" of the "multitude."⁵ Nevertheless, and despite the enormous contributions of such projects as Hardt/Negri's, much globalization theory has been recently taken to task for failing to explore the complexities of those very real moments when individuals and communities—to cadge the clichéd phrase—"act locally" and "think globally." ⁶ Provocative albeit potentially reductive questions—is globalization a process? a condition? a synonym for the postmodern? for hegemonic capitalism? for grassroots mobilization?—are complicated by the fact that it is impossible to engage in any discussion of the global without invoking the local and acknowledging its resilient, resistant presence in our globalized world. Indigenous theatre groups rely on foreign spectators and international media to disseminate their very local plays. Mayan troupes such as Lo'il Maxil (Monkey Business Theatre) and FOMMA (Strength of the Mayan Woman) work with Mayan and non-Mayan artists to bring awareness to their community's sociocultural problems; both companies present their plays for Mayan, non-Mayan Mexican, and international audiences.⁷ Yet cultural production continues to be theoretically polarized as either dictated from above or percolating from below. The nature of performance is such that, for our own theoretical discussions, perhaps the most appropriate term we can draw from globalization's complex lexical network is "glocalized." Borrowed from Japanese business, glocalization underscores the relationship between the local and the global as neither oppositional nor exclusive but rather interactive and interpenetrative.⁸ Contemporary theatre's own glocalized condition reminds us that, as Bill Ashcroft notes, "[g]lobalization does not exist outside history, in a kind of universal postmodern space, but reveals itself as the site of practices and strategies which have been developed by local communities over many centuries."⁹

Globalization, in its myriad embattled facets, is on theatre scholars' minds today. Not only do we practice our own forms of global spectatorship; we've also become acutely self-aware of our practices and strategies within our own local communities. These concerns are in full evidence in a number of recent special issues dedicated to the topic of theatre's relationship to globalization, such as Contemporary Theatre Review's August 2005 issue and this issue of Theatre Journal. I wish, however, to draw the reader's particular attention to two recent first-person accounts of theatre's relationship to what must...