A Note from the “Books” Section Editor

The book review section first appeared in TDR as this journal was itself becoming something like a book series, or more precisely, a series of edited volumes on specific topics. It was the spring of 1972 (16:1 [T54]), the second year of Michael Kirby’s editorship at TDR. In accordance with his stated editorial policy of “documentation rather than opinion, analysis rather than criticism,” the book review section appeared without much fanfare as a couple of pages of short articles that offered little more than basic information about the books under review. There was no “TDR Comment” to announce the new section. Instead, the issue opened with Kirby’s seminal article: “On Acting and Not Acting.” It was texts such as this one that shaped the field of performance studies, which in turn transformed TDR. The emergence in the early ’90s of the “Books” section in its present form can be seen as one of the signs of that transformation.

As I join TDR as the new book review editor, I want to preserve the high level of scholarly rigor and creativity that my predecessors established. Also, I want to make the Books section reflect the changes that have taken place over the past decade and a half. For the first time since the Renaissance we are facing a radical change in the very notion of “publication.” If in Shakespearean times to “publish” a play meant to not only put it into print but also perform it, now again printing has become only one of the ways to make a work both public and permanently recorded. The revolution in digital video technology has made accessible to the wide public the documentation of early happenings, performance art, and body art. Many of these works, such as Robert Whitman’s happenings and a recording of Robert Rauschenberg’s performance Open Score, have recently been released on DVD. Also, websites such as YouTube. com are becoming important repositories of performance documentation.

I don’t just want the TDR Books section to passively reflect developments in technology; I want it to push the boundaries of our received thinking about the relevance and the accessibility of published works. Recently, TDR published a vigorous debate about performance studies as an imperialist discipline (51:4 [T196]). As can be witnessed at performance studies conferences taking place outside of English-speaking countries, this imperialism is most evident in its linguistic form; the field is still locked into the language of its origin. My hope is that the book review section can open up the dialogue and introduce English-speaking readers to performance studies-related scholarship produced in other languages. One such example is Uvod u studije performansa [Introduction to Performance Studies] by Serbian authors Alksandra Jovićević and Ana Vujanović.

So, consider this note an open call for review essays on publications about performance in formats other than the standard book, and of books in languages other than English.