Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. By Shannon Jackson. London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. xi + 254. $27.99 paper.

Extract

Shannon Jackson's bracing, intelligent new book historicizes the study of performance in American colleges and universities from the advent of the theatre major about a century ago to the present. Using Foucault's notion of genealogy, Jackson is ever mindful that concepts such as theatre, theatre studies, performance, discipline, and so on, cannot be understood outside of their “enabling enunciative conditions” (30)—the contexts and institutions in which they are constituted. Is performance “a vehicle of community formation . . . [or] a site of social transgression”? Is it “an intentional realm of purposive action [or] an unintentional realm of spontaneous or habitual enactment” (14)? Saying “both” is probably correct, but to read Jackson's investigation of the “vagaries of the term ‘performance'” (11) is to appreciate how limited such a facile answer is, absent a nuanced grasp of the territorial battles that defined the terms at key points in our collective past.