Philip Auslander Responds to "Concerning Theory for Performance Studies"

To the Editor,

I am writing in regard to the Forum on Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide that appeared in the March 2009 issue of TDR. I wish to provide some background to this publishing project and my involvement in it. Above all, I wish to express remorse to the scholarly community—my colleagues, students, and mentors—for my part in the debacle this project sadly became.

In the summer of 2004, I received an email from Bill Germano, then Vice-President and Publishing Director of the New York branch of the Routledge publishing house. The email outlined a new series Routledge was undertaking:

It's called theory4. The first title—Theory for Religious Studies (T4RS), by William Deal and Timothy Beal of Case Western Reserve University—will be out shortly. Like the volumes we are now commissioning, this first book provides brief overviews of the major 20C theorists (about 30 of them), as well as a couple of foundational figures (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche). It's a list that is explicitly not discipline-specific—e.g. Foucault, Althusser, Levinas, Gayatri Spivak—and then [the book] presents each of them in a way that becomes a bit more discipline specific. . . . our idea is to particularize the major theorists just a little so as to show the utility of major thinkers' ideas for majors, graduates students, and scholars in a given field.

The religion volume is more than the first in the series. It's even more than a template. We are looking for an author to rewrite the book so that it becomes Theory for Performance Studies. . . . Royalties for Theory for Performance Studies (T4PF) would be divided between the author of T4PF and the authors of T4RS, who will be acknowledged on the copyright page. The author of T4PF would be identified on the cover, title page, and bibliography as sole author.

(Germano 2004)

I was intrigued by this project. I thought the resulting text would be useful. I liked the idea of a series of books that would look at the same body of theory from different disciplinary perspectives. And I found it interesting that the series was conceived around the idea of redacting an existing text.

Ultimately, four titles appeared in the series between 2005 and 2008, including Theory for Art History by Prof. Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Theory for Education by Professors Greg Dimitriadis and George Kamberelis of SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Albany, respectively; and Theory for Classics: A Student's Guide by Prof. Louise A. Hitchcock, University of Melbourne.

Shortly after I agreed to undertake the project, Dr. Germano left Routledge and Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide eventually was reassigned to Talia Rodgers, an editor at Routledge-UK with whom I had worked on several previous projects. I completed work on the book and submitted the manuscript in July of 2006. The book appeared a bit more than a year later. In late July of 2008, a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me. It was only then that I learned that Theory for Performance Studies had become an object of controversy and that I was being accused of plagiarism. Routledge failed to credit Professors Deal and Beal on the copyright page as agreed, with the result that there was no indication that the book was not of my sole authorship. In an attempt to acknowledge and rectify this error, Routledge began shipping the book with an addendum slip correcting and taking full responsibility for the misattribution.

I never intended for Professors Deal and Beal to be deprived of the acknowledgment and credit they clearly should have received. But I made a serious mistake, which I deeply regret. I believed that the contractual arrangements surrounding this experiment in publishing would result in sufficient acknowledgment of their work. I should have seen that this project demanded the same level of attention to citation and acknowledgment of sources as any other, despite its unconventional genesis, and I should have been completely explicit in my redaction about its relationship to the...