Is Performance Studies Imperialist?

Ed. note: The following is from a presentation 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 performance 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 performance 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 analogues 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 pragmatic 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 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...