Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (review)

I have been anticipating the release of James Harding and John Rouse's anthology for some time. Although a number of superior book-length studies on the theatrical and performative avant-gardes have come out recently (notably those by Frantisek Deak, Arnold Aronson, Christopher Innes, Sarah Bay-Cheng, David Graver, Martin Puchner, Rebecca Schneider, and Henry Sayre), none of them reflects adequately on the historiographical assumptions of avant-garde studies itself. Certainly, such reflection is going on outside theatre and performance studies, as evidenced in work by Paul Mann, Walter Kalaidjian, Barrett Watten, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss. As is made clear in the two rigorously argued introductory essays to this collection, it is not only past time for vanguard theatre studies to catch up with the rest of the field; the fact is, the field is sorely in need of its theatre and performance scholars. As Harding and Rouse argue, the systemic antitheatrical and antiperformance bias of avant-garde studies is in fact hampering that field's critical and historiographical development. The essays in this anthology aim to change that, enabling what Harding and Rouse call "a decentered and nonlinear notion of the histories of the avant-garde(s)" in which theatre and performance histories play a significant, perhaps even central role (11). Three cheers!

The essays in this book explore this historical plurality with rigor and critical-theoretical aplomb. They are uniformly excellent, providing thick descriptions of the practice, theory, and "discursive environment" in which diverse theatrical vanguards have functioned in the twentieth century. Moreover, though seriously engaged in self-critical reflection, the essays never lose themselves in jargon or fail to situate theoretical issues in historical context. In other words, we see here a balance of the theoretical and the theatre-historical that, to my mind, embodies the very best possibilities of our discipline. The range of coverage here is admirable: essays address Africa (Joachim Fiebach surveying the sub-Saharan and John Conteh-Morgan the Francophone parts of the continent), African America (Harry Elam, Jr. on the Black Arts Movement), the Middle East (Marvin Carlson), Mexico (Adam Versényi), Argentina (Jean Graham-Jones), India (Sudipto Chatterjee), Japan (Peter Eckersall and David G. Goodman), and, in a welcome divergence from the regionalist / nationalist focus of the collection, there is Hannah Higgins's study of three kinds of transnationalisms in the Fluxus collective. Of course, one wishes for more regions and cross-regional studies, but the hope of the editors is that the necessary limits of the collection "will cultivate a critical reassessment of the place that studies of performance hold in enlarging our understanding of the histories of the avant-gardes in a global context" (16).

I do have a few friendly criticisms. For one, I hope that future reassessment of the transnational avant-garde Harding and Rouse call for will not be bound by their historiographical assumptions. In the introduction, they assert "that the first- and second-wave avant-gardes (pre– and post–World War II) were always already a transnational phenomenon; and that the performative gestures of these avant-gardes were culturally hybrid forms that emanated simultaneously from a wide diversity of sources rather than from a European center" (15). These are both important and critically solvent claims that indeed counter the antiperformance and historiographical biases of avant-garde studies. However, I find troubling the absence of essays exploring nineteenth-century vanguard theatre and performance—further evidence of the widespread bias in vanguard studies toward twentieth-century modernism and the critical methodologies canonized by Peter Bürger's foundational Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974; English translation, 1984). Ironically, Bürger's work is taken to task by Harding and Rouse for its Eurocentric assumptions and historiographical idealism, as it should be; however, no comment can be found about his claim that anything prior to the Italian Futurists, the French Surrealists, and the Berlin Dadas...