Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (review)

I will begin with an admission: I am not a scholar of the avant-garde. As a teacher of modern drama, I have a pedagogical interest in and knowledge of the topic, but I am not intimately acquainted with the nuances of recent debates. That said, I found Not the Other Avant-Garde not only eminently readable, and not only an excellent introductory survey of the transnational vicissitudes of the phenomenon we call the avant-garde, but also a theoretically smart intervention into timeworn beliefs about how we locate the avant-garde in space, time, and culture (namely, in Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). As it moves its readers away from this specific cultural moment and fans us out across the globe, exploring both historical and contemporary incarnations of avant-garde performance in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Japan, India, Black America, and elsewhere, Not the Other Avant-Garde becomes profoundly, provocatively unsettling.

Harding and Rouse's introduction sets their collection within the larger body of literature on the avant-garde and, in so doing, makes a case for the importance of recognizing performance practice as fundamental to our definitions and conceptions of the term. Harding and Rouse do not seek simply to invert existing hierarchies that tend to privilege literature over performance; rather, they seek, on every level, to trouble the binaries (text/performance; Europe/everywhere else; then/now) through which we have tended so far to understand the avant-garde. For anyone (and here I happily include myself) who is thoroughly tired of hearing of the "death" of the avant-garde, this is a welcome and thoughtful response to that pronouncement.

While the editors' introduction is a helpful primer for the non-specialist, I found Harding's anchor essay, placed immediately after the introduction to serve as a kind of theoretical framework for the papers that follow, to be a more thorough and satisfying read. Here Harding lays out the most exciting elements of the collection's agenda: "[a]t a time when we hear calls for a radical reassessment of the very concept 'avant-garde' and its concomitant histories, a return to the avant-garde's subtle entanglement in the politics of colonialism offers the possibility not only of fundamentally retheorizing the avant-garde but of shifting its basic terrain" (19). This call not only to "retheoriz[e] the avant-garde" but to rethink its very spatio-temporal landmarks lies at the core of the book's argument and is what makes it an especially valuable contribution both to performance theory and to cultural studies (not to mention to modernist studies). Harding's theoretical outline here is nicely nuanced, exactly the sort of text I would assign in an upper-year undergraduate or graduate seminar on modernism. Invoking contemporary debates in border theory and bringing both Paul de Man and Homi Bhabha to bear on his thinking, Harding advocates a shift away from the "cutting edge" (20-23) metaphor that typically guides our understanding of the avant-garde as a European affair with conceptual roots in other cultures and toward a conceptualization of the avant-garde as a hybrid phenomenon that develops (and continues to redevelop) in an ongoing process of "contested exchange" between European and non-European cultures (24).

The remaining ten chapters offer a good mix of general survey articles that provide a bird's-eye view of avant-garde work around the globe (including contributions from Marvin Carlson, Joachim Fiebach, and Adam Versényi) and articles more specifically focused on individual places, moments, or artists. Some of the best work in the collection falls into this latter category. John Conteh Morgan grounds his "The Other Avant-Garde: The Theater of Radical Aesthetics and the Poetics and Politics of Performance in Contemporary Africa" in an exploration of recent work by...