‘In the humanities, journal decisions usually arrive by post.’ So wrote Wendy Laura Belcher in Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, a guide otherwise full of good sense, and published as recently as 2009. It is easy to scoff at such anachronistic information. But to do so would be to overlook all the seemingly outdated practices and conventions involved in publishing an academic journal, not the least of which is the inclusion of an editorial such as the one you are reading. The majority of TRI articles are accessed online, a process that almost inevitably involves bypassing the editor's introduction, let alone appreciating the order of the articles’ appearance within the print copy, or allowing their ostensibly diverse concerns to resonate with and inflect each other. Just before I took over the senior editorship of this journal, I discussed the viability of the editorial with my predecessor, Charlotte Canning, questioning its relevance and necessity. Charlotte rightly pointed out that to give up the editorial would be to relinquish the opportunity to introduce each of the articles in their own right, as well as a platform from which the editor can frame the issue and provide a rationale for decisions made along the way.

World literature has recently been critiqued for its normative, world-making force and, not unrelatedly, for its genealogical ties to orientalism. This article shifts the focus in world literature from the ‘world’ to the ‘literature’ by suggesting that within a nexus of politics, religion and knowledge production, the stylistic requirements of literature were fundamental to the reification of numerous performative modes that were not predicated exclusively on language's semantic dimensions. Literature, as a ‘vanishing mediator’, thus enabled not only translations but also comparative valuations – philological, mythological and racial – of entire cultures in an unethical epistemological encounter. Through the examination of the circuitous route of the Sāvitrī myth, which was translated from Sanskrit into Italian, English, French and German as ‘dramatic literature’, and finally to Gujarati as a play for theatrical production, this article uncovers performance's potential to problematize the figuring of text as world-encompassing entity.

This article explores the history and contemporary revival of male belly dancers – zenne or köçek – in Turkey and in cities with large Turkish populations, such as Berlin. What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender and narratives of modernity as they have taken shape in Turkey? The zenne dancer embodies the contradictions of contemporary Turkish culture, which includes a variety of same-sex practices, along with sexual taxonomies that have developed in collusion with discourses of modernity. The revival of zenne dancing can be seen as part of a series of global transformations in the visibility of gay, lesbian, and trans people in popular culture and public discourse. However, it is also an unpredicted consequence of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) purposeful revival and romanticization of Turkey's Ottoman past, which has been ahistorically remembered as more pious than the present. Re-emerging in the twenty-first century as an embodiment of competing definitions of sexuality and modernity in contemporary Turkey, precisely at a moment when Turkish national identity is a hotly contested issue, the zenne dancer is queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present.

National Collection was a participatory tour performance presented at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2015 by Public Movement, a group that investigates public choreographies and forms of social order. This article discusses the work's examination of the interdependency between the state and its cultural institutions, both as a paradigmatic form and as historical narrative. By following the different stages of the performance score – the group's arrival at the museum's original building where Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence ceremony took place, a march in public space to the current museum and the tour held inside – the article explores the ways in which National Collection ‘restates’ the aesthetic political scene of foundation and the museum's central role. Along with the embodiment of institutional authority, the performance formulates a significant critical dimension, conveying doubt and a constant sense of crisis embedded in establishing a state and prominent by displaying or reforming museum order.

In 1984, Duma Kumalo was sentenced to death under the apartheid law of common purpose. He was only spared by the transitional negotiations that led to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. However, his suffering did not end with his release. Nor did his appearance alongside many other victims of human rights abuse at the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission provide any measure of therapeutic relief. Instead, he continued to confess, as part of his performance in Yaël Farber's He Left Quietly (2002), to a trauma so overwhelming as to undo, it seems, any such a claim to healing. It has now been ten years since Kumalo passed away and this article returns to Farber's play in order to examine the theatrical form this melancholy takes, the challenge it poses to confessional orthodoxy and the ethical ends towards which such a melancholy performance might potentially drive, even still.

I sketch those characteristics of the mise en scène at the Ring of Brodgar stone circle and associated sites that might solicit within the visitor something like a dynamic performance. Drawing on surrealism, Robert Smithson and archaeology, I argue that the mise en scène at Brodgar – and the visitor's response to it – is characterized by a sense of presence which exists in a dialectical tension with the perception of that which is absent. Brodgar is indexical (like a photograph) and hauntological, in semiotic terms. The Neolithic site is, at some level, unknowable. The visitor becomes aware of coincident yet incompatible manifestations of time and space (heterochronia) and imagines the potential return of unknown, cryptic ritual performances (metatheatre). This solicits within the viewer something akin to Max Ernst's model of frottage. As Breton put it, ‘The imaginary . . . tends to become real’.