Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre History: A Work in Progress

For this issue on hemispheric theatre history I ask the following question: How does one teach a theatre and performance history survey course from a hemispheric perspective? For me, this investigation has a long history. It is an ongoing practice responsive to methodological and theoretical changes in the field and to the political conditions within which I teach. The recent incorporation of Latin American theatre forms into canonical theatre history texts attests to the fact that these performances are now a part of a global theatre history.¹ This is not merely an additive operation but an epistemological one that questions the definition of performance. That is, survey classes can frame performance in the way advocated by Diana Taylor and others: as a mode of knowledge production including indigenous forms of cosmology that are not contained by Western European definitions of theatre.² I have been an advocate of this shift in focus—a commitment I share with many scholars whose work in this area preceded my own: Taylor, Adam Versényi, Jean Graham-Jones, Jill Lane, and Tamara Underiner, among others.³

The recent revisions to my syllabus, however, signal a move from teaching theatre history as a Latin Americanist to teaching theatre history from an Americas or hemispheric perspective. This move overtly links global theatre history to Aníbal Quijano’s conception of the coloniality of power and to Gerald Vizenor’s theorization of indigenous survivance. Quijano’s theory maintains that the creation of race and the emergence of modern capitalism are coincident with an idea of America created during the Spanish Conquest, during which European invaders labeled non-European people as inferior so as to dominate them.⁴ Gerald Vizenor’s term “indigenous survivance” frames creative practice by indigenous people as an active presence outside of the tragedies of colonialism and disappearance that occurred subsequent to the events Quijano describes. Vizenor’s theorization, it should be said, emerges from forms of settler colonialism that utilize reservation and boarding school systems, which were largely with the US and Canada, rather than forms that attempted to destroy indigenous culture through other means.⁵ Ironically, then, making my syllabus truly hemispheric meant paying more attention to the US and Canada. This shift in thinking was made possible by two people: my student Lilian Mengesha, whose dissertation brings together Canadian, US, and Mexican/Central American thinking about land, gender, and vulnerability, and Monique Mojica, with whom I taught a course on indigenous performance in fall 2016.⁶ In this essay, I will narrate my development of a theatre history course that meets the demands of the move to decolonize one’s syllabus while teaching the fundamental methods of performance historiography.

A History of My Theatre History

When I arrived at Brown in 2004, I began teaching a theatre history course, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS) 1240, which covers theatre and performance history from 1500 to 1850. I have taught it most years from then until now. TAPS 1240 is a required course for most tracks in our theatre arts and performance studies concentration (our term for a major). The course is one of a three-course sequence on theatre and performance history. The course is part lecture and part discussion and usually enrolls between twenty and thirty students, most, but not all, of them concentrators. Presently, I combine a textbook (Theatre Histories, Tobin Nellhaus, General Editor) with plays, performance scripts, and theoretical essays as readings for the course. The course has a midterm, a presentation, a final exam, and a final paper that requires archival research.

When I began teaching, the faculty wanted to change the curriculum so that TAPS 1240 would be global rather than simply Western in focus.⁷ The political and social movements during these 350 years necessitated that this course not simply be one about theatre and performance during a particular period but an historiographical investigation into how theatre and performance participate in, embody, and defy the emergence and development of colonialism (the policy of acquiring full or partial control over another country or area, exploiting it...