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Book Reviews [7[ intersections of modernism and postmodernism, it will be a particularly rewarding read. SUSAN BENNETI', UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY ELIN DIAMOND, ed. Peiformance and Cultural Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x, 294, illustrated. $[8.95 (PB). PATRICE DAVIS, ed. The Intercultural Performance Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. viii, 267. $65; $[8.95 (PB). The coupling of these two books in a single review package is logical, given the common use of "performance" in their titles, given the fact that both are collections of essays on currently lively topics in theatre studies, and given the fact that both were published in [996 by Routledge, the currently liveliest of presses in the field. But they are very different books in subject matters, editorial methods, and politics. Elin Diamond's Performance and Cultural Politics is about performance and the performative as they have come to be understood in recent years in the wake of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and the renewed interest in the work of J.L. Austin - not to mention Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's Peiformativity and Peiformance and Marvin Carlson's Peiformance: A Critical Introduction. It is a carefully, but not obtrusively edited collection, with a lucid and extremely useful introduction followed by groupings of loosely related essays on "Re-Sexing Culture: Stereotype , Pose, and Dildo"; "Grave Performances: The Cultural Politics of Memory"; "Moving/Seeing: Bodies and Technologies"; "Identity Politics: Law and Performance"; and finally "PerformerlPerformance," this last an oral history/autobiography/memoir by performance artist Robbie McCauley. Its politics, as signalled by the title, is located primarily in that American left-ofcentre , post-Marxist camp that is associated with cultural materialism, materialist feminism, queer theory, and cultural studies. Patrice Pavis's The Intercultural Peiformance Reader, on the other hand, is primarily about theatre rather than "performance" as such, particularly the theatre of the classical European avant-garde, with a nod in a Schechneresque direction towards (theatre) anthropology. It is almost obsessively and quite intrusively edited, with a taxonomic introduction that is quite schematically helpful but that only a semiotician could love, and a narrative structure that groups the essays into four parts: "Historical contexts," "Intercultural'performance from the Western point of view," "Intercultural performance from another point of view," and "Interculturalism all the same..,". In addition to this, Pavis provides framing and containing editorial introductions to each of 172 Book Reviews the sections and to most of the individual contributions. The politics of the volume as a volume (though this cannot be said of all of the individual essays), venture no further left than liberal humanist pluralism. The Intercultural Peiformance Reader begins, ends, and devotes much of its bulk to the usual European (suspect) subjects -:- Brook, Mnouchkine, Wilson , Barba, and Grotowski - together with perhaps surprising diversions to the work of Dario Fo and his French translator, to that of French translator Antoine Vitez, and to that of the French "master" of physical theatre, Jacques Lecoq. Most of this work - which constitutes one-fifth of the book - functions as apologia for a kind of formalist, aesthetic - or, as Pavis wants to call it, professional - interculturalism that values European-based intercultural work, even though it may be seen to be appropriative, because it "transcends the array of petty categories set up by" "those killjoys who want every cultural affirmation to be authenticated by its only legitimate (and self-proclaimed) representatives" (to5-{). After all, according to Pavis, professional theatre artists such as Brook and Mnouchkine "are certainly not ethnologists consumed with guilt, or opportunistic politicians or Christian moralists" (79). The major contribution of these sections of the collection is the acknowledgment that the work of artists such as Brook, Mnouchkine, and Wilson is fundamentally modernist rather than postmodern, and as such participates in a timehonoured tradition of modernist intercultural appropriation. The Intercultural Performance Reader does include dissenting voices, notably that of Marvin Carlson in his critique of Brook and Mnouchkine, and most notably those of Biodun Jeyifo and Rustom Bharucha, who appear in a central section entitled, with no apparent self-cons,ciousness. "Interculturalism from another point of view" (my italics, and in contradistinction to the precediog section...

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