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  • Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity
  • David Krasner
Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. By Shannon Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. xi + 254. $55.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Among the more important of the many issues raised by Professing Performance are the history of theatre and drama education and the rise of performance studies as a discipline. Building on Foucault's concept of "genealogy"—history as subjective narratives encased in language, much like a novel—Shannon Jackson considers the evolution of performance studies' "radical contextuality that makes it difficult to locate as a research object" (6). One of the book's starting points is Richard Schechner's 1992 speech in which he boldly and somewhat arrogantly sought to jettison theatre studies entirely. In its place he called for "performance studies," an interdisciplinary field of anthropology, ethnology, and oral history that placed dramatic literature and theatrical performance as a mere subdomain under this rubric. Reviewing the literature of this new field built on old disciplines, Jackson roots the term "performance" in J. L. Austin's speech-act theory. She admits, however, that performance's "many connotations and its varied intellectual kinship ensure that an interdisciplinary conversation around this interdisciplinary site rarely will be neat and straightforward" (15).

The evolution of performance studies arises from what Jackson repeatedly calls "enmeshments," which is said to result in part from the nineteenth-century German university's influence on the United States academy. The German system evolved "disciplinarily" through research "fields," and created the uncompromising division of Bildung (the cultivation of the liberal arts) and Brotstudium ("bread studies," or vocational training). In an attempt to keep pace as a respected liberal arts discipline and avoid association with "a debased and feminized form of culture" (21), theatre studies has developed Theaterwissenschaft ("theatre science"). Already lagging behind by virtue of its nadir status, theatre studies further undermined itself by separating drama, aligned with literary-canonical studies, from performance studies, linked "with the marginal, with the anti-canonical, and with disciplinary multiplicity" (24). Jackson traces the history of this development in theatre/performance studies by unpacking its intricacies and exposing its contradictions. [End Page 152]

Chapter 2 is concerned with two principal early figures of theatre pedagogy: Harvard (and later Yale) playwriting instructor George Pierce Baker, and Columbia drama teacher Brander Matthews. Their attempts at establishing drama studies met with considerable academic opposition, which alleged that theatre was "feminine" (falling short of rigorous "masculine" sciences), and that "queerness" pervaded the study of theatre. In the midst of this misogyny and homophobia, theatre not only allegedly "risked distracting students from the new rigor," it also exposed "the latently unrigorous in literature's new quest for legitimacy" (66). To bolster its academic ranking, Baker adopted a technical language—"dramatic lab," "technique," and other artisan rubrics—in order to provide theatre with a masculine-heterosexual imprimatur as was perceived to exist in technology and the sciences.

In chapter 3, Jackson sharply observes two developments taking place during the mid-twentieth century: New Criticism's influence on dramatic literature (led by Eric Bentley and John Gassner), and cultural studies' relation to theatre (led by Francis Fergusson and Raymond Williams). Both strands remained fixed within a "national" literary scheme. In neither case, according to Jackson, "did the cultural move beyond the 'literary' or the 'textual' actually question the racialized sphere of the national" (103). In order to illuminate the role of race, Jackson turns her attention to Paul Gilroy's theme of the "Black Atlantic." While conceding the importance of music, Jackson contends that Gilroy's examination of cultural performance "is 'nothing new' (or at least not as new) to those who had already spent a lifetime teaching African-American performance" (105). Theatre researchers have grappled with similar issues of music, performance, and representation, but because the field is marginalized, their work carries less cachet.

In chapter 4, Jackson compares the vexing relationship of theory and practice to the theories of modern art. The concept of the literal, which is taken as art's practice, and the figural, which surfaces as the critic's vocabulary, is examined through the works...

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