Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations ed. by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, and: Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew by Maurya Wickstrom (review)

The global purchase of neoliberalism extends at least from the Reagan/Thatcher years of the 1980s. But its tenacity, pervasiveness, and acute social, political, and cultural dangers have been starkly amplified in postmillennial conditions like the War on Terror and the financial crises of 2008 onward. In such contexts, these two books not only address neoliberalism’s relevance to theatre and performance studies, but helpfully draw readers’ attention to its effects and responses, well beyond Western Europe and the United States. Both books demonstrate vividly and often painfully how neoliberalism operates as a biopolitical technique of subjection; but both also explore how performance and its scholarship negotiate the “complicated terrains of neoliberal governmentality” (Nielsen and Ybarra 8), highlight its instability, and even, sometimes, confound it.

In Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew, Maurya Wickstrom defines neoliberalism as a doctrine committed to “either de-regulation or the full-scale evasion of regulatory structures by private and corporate interests intent on opening up global markets on an unprecedented scale” (3). She explores the literal and metaphorical “blockades” produced by neoliberalism and how they assault human rights, variously evicting and entrapping people, especially the world’s most disadvantaged, and consigning them to “situations of injustice and exposure” (1). In a bold move that some will find contentious, she explores how humanitarian activities, including theatre, although ostensibly committed to protecting human rights, can function in complicity with neoliberalism’s blockades by opening up new markets that enable neoliberalism’s global spread (3). Likewise problematic for her are the identitarian politics that underpin ideas of “the Other,” particularly a victimized Other, because they reinforce a hierarchical divide. Despite these dangers, Wickstrom argues that neoliberalism’s “blockades are not entirely successful” (1), and her book focuses on how and where theatre and performance help to imagine politics that resist and evade neoliberalism. The book explores examples from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America and draws extensively on contemporary philosophy, especially by Alain Badiou, in which Wickstrom finds “one of the most radical and innovative methods available today with which to pry open the world as it is and to imagine other possibilities” (14; emphasis in original).

By far the longest at fifty-six pages, chapter 2 explores theatre in Palestine with detailed analyses of the work of three companies: Al Rowwad in the Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem; Ramallah’s ASHTAR Theatre; and Beit Jala’s Inad Theatre. It argues that these companies resist development because its practices produce a “culture and an ideology of dependency, with those helped by development strategies expected to be grateful and obedient” (11) and required— if in receipt of US Aid for Development— to sign a “Code of Good Conduct” that includes “forswear[ing] any involvement with terrorists, any allegiance to political parties, and any political activity” (59). Drawing on Badiou, the chapter explores how the companies’ performances seek to create “new spaces” that “might become real” (87).

In chapter 3, Wickstrom explores Theatre for Development’s reliance upon set understandings of a “divide” between humanitarian do-gooders and needy others, arguing that “to enunciate and practice the divide at all is to enunciate and practice an inequality” (100). Through Jacques Rancière, she seeks ways of rearticulating Theatre for Development as for Theatre for Redistribution (127). The chapter engages with theories of humanitarianism and examines Theatre for Development company Winter/Summer Institute, which “works on HIV/ AIDS in Lesotho, Africa” (20), as well as The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City, a travelling installation created by Médicins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

The fourth chapter’s subjects are theatre by Irish Travellers, “self-described...