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Theatre Journal 53.1 (2001) 175-176



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Book Review

Of Borders And Thresholds:
Theatre History, Practice, And Theory


Of Borders And Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, And Theory. Edited by Michal Kobialka. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; pp. vii + 311. $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Theatre and performance scholarship has been invigorated by a number of developments over the past two decades. One has been the rise of cross-disciplinarity--the expansion, explosion, and redefinition of both objects of and frameworks for theatre and performance studies, radically opening up what had once been taken to be a relatively stable field. A corollary to this has been the emergence of critical anthologies organized not around subject matter defined by time or place (nineteenth century theatre, Russian theatre, etc.) but around methodology or theme (cultural studies, gender, etc.). Of Borders and Thresholds is an unusually audacious and ambitious foray into this terrain in that it stands directly at the crossroads of these two trends: a cross-disciplinary collection whose subject is, in effect, cross-disciplinarity itself. Drawing explicitly upon aspects of border theory developed in Chicano and literary studies, and dialoging implicitly with recent theatre books that foreground notions of spatiality, this anthology consists of nine essays that consider borders and border crossings in performance history and theory, which is applied to subjects as diverse as colonial-era representations of America to contemporary discourses of cyberspace.

Leading into these essays is Kobialka's lucid, elegant, and far-reaching introduction that frames the anthology's theoretical agenda, charting it historiographically from the development of Renaissance perspectivalism through Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal to multiculturalism, gender studies, contemporary theory, and performance art. The anthology, as Kobialka puts it, seeks "to determine the degree to which the current lexicon of border theory . . . can engage and be engaged by theatre historiography or performance theory in order to discuss a discipline in which the materiality of borders and border crossings is a physical, immanent threshold" (3-4). This project involves remapping old polarities to foreground the crossing of boundaries between constructs and identities, while at the same time demonstrating how theatre and performance produce and enforce these limits. In short, the anthology asks us to acknowledge the material power of borders and also to reflect on the implications of their porousness.

The nine essays unfold with a loose nod to chronology. It is a pleasure to note the wide-ranging and critically imaginative approaches through which the authors pursue the anthology's agenda. Rosemarie K. Bank journeys through the production of an "America" by reflecting on sixteenth and seventeenth century European iconography, nineteenth century Native American century touring troupes, and Edwin Forrest's Metamora. Mita S. Choudhury probes the foundation of the protoimperialist imagination of India through a canonical play by John Dryden, an unproduced script by Thomas Sheridan, and an obscure 1780s playbill. Joseph Roach invokes the rupture and exile of "territorial passage," reading Beggar's Opera, Threepeeny Opera, and Opera Wonyosi through Brecht, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Victor Turner. Janelle Reinelt looks at the persistence and pliancy of nationalist ideology through theatricalizations of the French revolution, journalistic discourse surrounding Václav Havel in the United States, and a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Finland. These four opening essays all foreground "border crossings" by (among other ways) provocatively juxtaposing seemingly disparate texts, geographies, and histories, highlighting the spaces where they interpenetrate.

If these four essays can broadly be conceived as reflecting the impact of cultural studies, the next five diverge more sharply, branching out in a number of directions, ranging from relatively traditional dramatic criticism to more experimental or personalized approaches. Jorge Huerta considers the negotiation of linguistic, culinary, and religious borders across Latino culture(s) by comparing Migdalia Cruz's Miriam's Flowers, Eduardo Machado's Broken Eggs and Cherríe Moraga's Shadow of a Man. David Román (in an essay that appeared in his Acts of Intervention) unpacks the false binary of HIV status, tracing the "unmarked" place of seronegativity in public discourse and plays from 1984 to...

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