Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia, and: Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (review)

Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton’s new Palgrave series, “Studies in International Performance,” undertakes to publish work that is international “in the largest sense”: transnational and intercultural both between and within nations, crossing borders between genres, identities, and imaginations. This approach is not new in performance studies; however, a decade and a half after the publication of Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead or Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, those of us who teach the field from explicitly global perspectives are acutely aware of the scarcity of booklength works that fit such a remit. The two inaugural volumes are welcome contributions to this literature. In both, performance is revealed as the medium and mechanism of cultural traffic, tracing networks that are simultaneously geo-political, institutional, economic, and affective in character, local in their articulation and global in scope. Both also make significant methodological contributions to the study of intercultural performance, modeling more deeply contextualized, historicized, and richly theorized ways of engaging such practices, while attesting to the challenges of organizing and delimiting their inherently unruly global objects.

Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo’s volume meticulously remaps a national tradition from an international perspective, detailing the “cross-cultural transactions” between Asian, Aboriginal, and settler theatre in Australasia (by which they mean an Australia cognizant of its regional entanglements with Asia). Their comprehensive and detailed research will surely make this volume an indispensable resource in Australian theatre scholarship, and a valuable case study for scholars of other national theatres, but the methodological contribution the book makes to performance studies is doubly significant. Gilbert and Lo’s analysis tests the cosmopolitan claims made of and for intercultural theatre, querying its capacity to cultivate a reflexive “intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences” (11).¹ Cosmopolitan theory of the last two decades strived to describe the texture of social experience in an increasingly interconnected world, but also worked prescriptively to anchor projects for ethical globalization, often by arguing for the extension of liberal toleration to a global civil society. While remaining inspired by such ideals, Gilbert and Lo are acutely attuned to the “tension between the promise of cosmopolitanism as the enactment of universal communitas and its limits as a theory of embodied material praxis” (4). This, they suggest, is performance’s unique value to the study of globality: it lays bare the ways in which ideological positions of global compass “unravel at the point of embodiment—the point of performance,” where they are spatialized, temporalized, and interpreted (12). Their analyses hone in on such points, particularly those at which theatre’s ideals encounter on the one hand the realpolitik of culture markets (with their “thin”—exoticizing, consumerist—understandings of cosmopolitanism) and on the other colonial, national, and regional policy. It is an approach that lends a new texture and nuance to the literature on intercultural performance, which has rarely succeeded in bringing performance’s aesthetic praxis, ethical ambitions, and political-economic exigencies into the same analytic lens. And unlike much of this literature (which frequently relies on purely textual analyses of individual artists or productions) it reads performance texts against reviews and representation against reception. The proof of transcultural theatre’s cosmopolitan claims, they suggest, lies in the challenge it presents to its polity.

The volume opens with a revisionist survey of “the national tradition” from Chinese opera on the goldfields, to the blackface Aboriginals and stage Chinamen of early nationalist theatre. If “Australia” found its theatrical genesis in agonistic, often exploitative traffic between settler, Aboriginal, and Asian performance forms, persons, artists, and images, Performance and Cosmopolitics argues that this dynamic process plays out today in state policy’s programmatic efforts to symbolically break from its colonial past and figure the “cosmopolitan” confidence...