More Books

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Nine Plays of Early America, 1765–1818. Edited by Sarah E. Chinn and Richard S. Pressman. San Antonio, TX: Early American Reprints, 2017; 467 pp. $14.00 paper.

In Nine Plays of Early America, 1765–1818, Sarah E. Chinn and Richard S. Pressman revitalize the stagnated perspective on American pre-antebellum theatre. Intended as a critical text to teaching early US history, this anthology surveys the dramatic field to include both well-known and unpublished plays in the years surrounding the American Revolution and War of 1812. Chinn’s meticulously researched introduction details the history of US-American theatre, in particular its many parallels to political debates of early American society. Pressman modernizes the grammar of the texts for ease of the 21st-century reader, yet remains faithful to the original vernacular. The carefully selected plays, two of which are authored by female playwrights, collectively stage themes central to US society and politics, including US masculinity and the rising voice of the working class, as negotiated both onstage by actors and in the theatre by the attending public. Consequently, Chinn and Pressman challenge the tendency of literary studies to privilege the US-American novel, and finally pay tribute to the significance of theatre in the early republic.

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Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times. Edited by Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; 315 pp. $99.99 cloth, $99.99 paper, e-book available.

This feminist anthology presents 22 brilliantly diverse essays interlocked by their critique of the neoliberal patriarchy that (in)visibly structures today’s global society. In the introduction, Elin Diamond, Denise Varney, and Candice Amich humbly justify that “the scholarship printed here helps sustain and publicize” the labor of feminist performance artists, but the collective text goes beyond this modest claim to effectively insist that resistance to the neoliberal marketplace is made available through the affectation of the feminist-activist, as evidenced by a broad spectrum of performance. To make this ambitious argument, the book is organized into five chapters, allowing the sections to (re)configure — through at times conflicting but always simultaneous modes — the relationships between performance, feminism, affect, and neoliberalism. The breadth of the essays challenges the reader to coalesce the various case studies; while the examples are united by the four main themes of the book, they remain intentionally more different than akin, ranging from localized to cross-cultural, individual to collective, recorded to performative. Ultimately, this potent collection allows precarious plurality and nonconformity to become its greatest asset as it surveys the complex network of feminist activism across the globe. Building upon traditions of affect theory and second-wave feminism, this book radically advances performance scholarship as it tackles the implications of our neoliberal times.

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Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice. Edited by Hetty Blades and Emma Meehan. Bristol: Intellect, 2018; 294 pp. $96.00 cloth, e-book available.

Performing Process, composed of 13 essays in four parts, attends to the understudied element of process and practice as/against performance. This discourse on choreographic culture investigates the sharing of process versus the practice...