New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (review)

In the last two decades, a host of eighteenth-century studies—from Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics (1993) to Jason Shaffer’s Performing Patriotism (2007) and Daniel O’Quinn’s Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (2011)—have energetically made clear the vital role played by theatre and performance in forging the political modernity of the Anglo-Atlantic world. What modes of political power or possibilities for political subjectivity, such studies ask, are fashioned through dramatic performance, whether it is produced within the institutional venue of the theatre itself or exported to other public spaces such as Parliament, Pall Mall, or the plantation? How does theatre, thus broadly defined, enact or contest the problems of liberty, public opinion, sovereignty, or governmentality? With this compelling account of drama along the Atlantic rim, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon intervenes in these debates, offering an impressive revision of theatrical history in the period based on the staging of political representation in the contexts of an expanding colonial empire.

The answers that New World Drama offers to questions of political representation depend largely on the paradox of what Dillon describes as the “colonial relation”: an assemblage of associations between the metropole and its colonial outposts in which “the growth of doctrines of political liberty and popular sovereignty” coincides with “the advent of systems of enforced labour, enclosure, and violent dehumanization in the form of race slavery” (31–32). As the ideals of post-revolutionary British liberty and popular sovereignty were being manufactured at home and disseminated abroad, a massive subset of the empire’s population—“slaves, free blacks, women of all classes and colors, Native Americans, and the unpropertied”—was denied not only the participatory rights of citizen-subjects, but also the basic right to life by the operations of a racializing colonial capitalist power inextricable from the principles of freedom themselves (13).

All of this may seem like familiar terrain for a post-modern or post-colonial take on our Enlightenment political heritage, yet another addition to an endless line of critiques of the contradictions and inadequacies of the Habermasian public sphere. But Dillon’s innovative leap resides in her claim that while the effects of the colonial relation have remained something of a blind spot for political theorists of the Enlightenment, it is specifically the circum-Atlantic theatre of the period that both illuminates this aporia and fashions revolutionary possibilities of political representation for a dispossessed public. Elaborating a “phenomenology” of theatre that reads performance as the interplay of “embodiment and representation,” erasure and appearance, Dillon reimagines the material and mimetic conditions of the theatre in London, Jamaica, and early America as making possible a “performative commons” (50). In this site (at once physical and virtual), “the people” are formed and represent themselves in relation to what appears and, importantly, what is occluded on the stage before them. It is not through literate print culture and rational discussion, but through the play of disorderly, often dissenting bodies and a sensory aesthetics of song, dance, noise, riot, and role-playing in the boisterous space of the stage that a nonetheless organized debate about political belonging and exclusion is brought into being. Written out of the script of Enlightenment political history, the capitalist colonial relation that forecloses the possibilities of political freedom and the alternative public-making forces that contest it are both made visible in the embodied practices conducive to theatre.

Arranged geographically, the New World Drama chapters map a terrain from London to Charleston, Kingston, and New York and trace “the promiscuous circulation of scripts and the improvisational local revisions of these scripts” across these locales (21). With plays such as William D’Avenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658) and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), for instance, Dillon reveals how the popular scenario of the tortured Native American or African prince performs the...