Is Performance Studies Imperialist? Part 3: A Forum

• Performance Studies without End?
• Richard Schechner (bio)

Mostly, I agree with Jon McKenzie’s and Janelle Reinelt’s TDR Comments [TDR 50:4 (T192): 5–8; 51:3 (T195):7–14, respectively]. With one giant exception: the term “imperialist” (and its close derivatives). Imperialist means expanding an empire, enforcing its codes and values against and over the will and desire of subjugated peoples; it means paying homage and taxes—direct or indirect—to the imperial center; it means permanent economic, political, and social inequality enforced by armies “stationed” wherever. Imperialism is cognate with racism, both personal and institutional. To call performance studies imperialist is to disregard the discipline’s instrumentality in engaging and including performance practices, scholars, and theories from all over the world. Clearly, problems and challenges exist—but dealing with these, as in this series of Comments, is what PS does. To dub PS imperialist is to engage in a hyperbole of metaphor.

But what of the metaphor? Do those who practice and theorize performance studies intend to impose (by force of academic privilege, if not armed might) a set of “alien” or “outside” values on everyone else? What are these enforcers destroying with their “imperialist” agenda? Many different scholars practice many different kinds of PS in many different locations. As with art movements, what is “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong” varies with place, time, and the reputations of those putting forth the ideas. The approaches I discuss in Performance Studies: An Introduction (second edition, 2006) need to be read alongside what Shannon Jackson writes in Professing Performance (2004), what Dwight Conquergood (1995) advocated as the “caravan” what Diana Taylor (2003) investigates as the tension between the “archive and the repertoire,” and so on. The many varieties of PS developed by scholars and artists shape the field, inflecting a broad spectrum of interests and methods. Many of those defining/redefining PS are TDR contributing editors and authors. TDR for more than 20 years has been the venue for the multiple opinions, theories, and art practices of PS. Performance studies seeks adherents, coherence, and dissenting debate. As PS-ers propose methods and theories, others revise and refute them. PS is not centralized, but a discipline-in-process. The field is diverse and always changing as a consequence of the debates, histories, and methodologies it engages. Objective standards are neither entirely possible nor, if they were, advisable to follow in all cases.

Both McKenzie and Reinelt worry that English is the lingua franca of PS. This is a big problem, but not one invented by or solvable by performance studies. Ironically, because the sun never set on the British Empire, and because the USA is the current Colossus astride the globe, English still rules. Granted, as McKenzie notes, “English informs and deforms the very concept of ‘performance’ and, by extension, the very objects studied ‘as’ performance” (2006:7). But English is as useful as it is deforming. The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a trilingual (Spanish, English, and Portuguese) endeavor. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s International Center for Writing and Translation is an English plus other languages operation. PS and many other disciplines use English at their international conferences and, as Reinelt notes, English is the leading scholarly publishing language. Scholars from countries where English is a second language want their work published in English for greater circulation and interaction. When a Mandarin speaker, a Swahili speaker, and a German speaker talk to each other in the absence of translators, they are likely to converse in English, which even more than being the tongue of a particular set of nations has become the world’s “bridge language.”

English by now is both a local and global language. Indian, Trinidadian, Irish, Kenyan, American, Nigerian, Australian, Singaporean—artists and scholars of these and many other nationalities and cultures have transformed English into their own idioms while gaining from English’s global reach. This is an ongoing, creative, and positive development.

For several centuries, French was the language of diplomacy and still retains some of that luster—French...