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Shannon Jacksons Professing Performance is a timely book. The generic

literary subdiscipline of drama has only recently yielded its place

to the more charged, interdisciplinary, and ambiguous term perfor-

mance. This shift opens the way for a wider methodological scope

and troubles the taxonomies that once dominated literature and the-

ater departments. Indeed, as any performance scholar knows all too

well, the concept of performance has become a very large and shaky

common ground for a variety of disciplines and practices, including

music, art history, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and, of course,

theater. To this contested terrain, Professing Performance aspires to serve

as a much-needed Weld guide.

What makes this text unique from other guidebooks is that rather

than modeling a number of interdisciplinary approaches to perfor-

mance studies, Professing Performance examines the discursive emer-

gence of the Weld, mapping its interdisciplinary fault lines (what

Jackson refers to as the axes of sameness and difference around

which disciplinary identities collect), explaining the nature of its in-

stabilities, and working towards more Xexible alliances within and

around the Weld itself. Grounded Wrst and foremost in the history of

the university, the book examines the variety of personal, theoretical,

and institutional concerns, from practicality to professionalism

and from generic purity to national identity, that has led some to

champion and others to disavow the signiWcance of performance. Jack-

son draws on her expertise in rhetorical analysis and theater studies

to demonstrate the ways in which the discursive switchbacks and

PROFESSING PERFORMANCE

THEATRE IN THE ACADEMY FROM PHILOLOGY TO PERFORMATIVITY

BY SHANNON JACKSON

Cambridge University Press, 2004

Heidi R. Bean

Cultural Critique 71Winter 2009Copyright 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota

7/29/2019 Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity Shannon Jackson Review Heide Bean

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interdisciplinary contradictions found in the evolution of performance

studies contribute to its currently contested status. The competing

genealogies of performance studies that Jackson illuminates expose

the mistake inherent in assuming a close relationship between what

she refers to as the p-wordsperformance studies, performance

art, performativity, the performativesimply because they look

alike. Butlerian performativity, for example, which develops out

of linguistics, literary theory, and psychoanalysis and which exam-

ines the ways in which social identities cohere in the reiteration of

normative conventions, has little directly to do with stage perfor-

mance. One of Jacksons goals here is, therefore, to identify potential

spaces for dialogue between performativity theory and theater stud-

ies, which will both allow for better communication between artistic

and academic professionals and offer new ways of understanding

the power employed and created in and by theatrical acts. Her ulti-

mate goal is to interrogate the assumptions that link performance

studies with transgression and resistance and reduce drama to literary

professionalization, institutionalization, and bourgeois complacency.

Complicating these stale descriptors enables a signiWcant rethinking

of the methodological approaches to all varieties of performance.

Each of the books six chapters can stand alone as a signiWcant

and thought-provoking essay in its own right, but together the chap-

ters work to expose and destabilize the disciplinary oppositions and

assumptions that currently afXict the Weld of performance studies.

Chapter one serves as the books introduction, in which Jackson argues

for the importance of genealogical analysis, la Foucault, and begins to

point to some of the challenges in present-day performance studies,including performances Xexible essentialism, or its tendency to in-

habit the essentialist as well as anti-essentialist side of any conceptual

binary (37), and the difWculty of performances hypercontextual-

ity, which may at times be considered at odds with the decontextu-

alizing goals of scholarly analysis. Chapter two examines the early

twentieth-century institutionalization of the opposition between aca-demia and practice, contrasting the struggle to include drama and

stage performance in academic curricula (for example, at Harvard),

on the one hand, and the resistance to dramatic literature rather than

to performance practice in practical curricula (for example, at Car-

negie Tech), on the other. In chapter three, Jackson examines the

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emergence of cultural studies, which helps to enable the opposition

between text and culture, arguing that although this relatively recent

Weld claims to have supplanted formalist literary analysis, it may from

some perspectives be shown to perpetuate and even reafW

rm the lit-erary studies it disavows. Chapter four reconsiders the basis for the

twentieth centurys antitheatrical prejudice. In chapter Wve, Jackson

analyzes the speciWcally gendered effects of applying New Historical

paradigms to theater and performance. Finally, chapter six looks at

the work of Adrian Piper and Anna Deavere Smith to examine how

performance responds to issues of racial identity.As is customary with such historical examinations, the chapters

are arranged more or less chronologically, beginning with the creation

of early twentieth-century theater departments and ending with a

look at the work of several contemporary artists. Unfortunately, this

arrangement interrupts and obfuscates what I consider to be Jacksons

most useful contribution to contemporary performance scholarship:the possibility for putting theatrical performance and social perfor-

mativity into a productive analytical relationship with each other that

is theorized in chapter four and demonstrated in chapter six. Chap-

ter four begins with Jacksons analysis of the discourses of Wgural-

ity and literalism that have inXected performance scholarship at

different times in different ways. Her trenchant argument Wnds con-tinuity between the postmodernist disavowal of authenticity in Der-

ridas notion of deconstructionism and the modernist critique of

theatricality in Michael Frieds classic essay on Minimalist art, Art

and Objecthood. Jacksons key term here is hypercontextuality

that is, a sense of the situation that includes embodiment itself. For

Fried, such hypercontextuality compromises art, confusing the objectitself with its receptive situation. In identifying an alliance between

Frieds objection to artists concern with the actuality of a work

and Derridas deconstructionist critique of the very idea of actuality,

developed out of the recognition that all things contain within them

the means of their own disavowal, Jackson both exposes the mistake

of too-easy oppositions and sets up the terms for her Wnal chapter, inwhich she examines the connections between performativity in its

deconstructive mode and theatrical performance. Through the work

of Adrian Piper, Anna Deavere Smith, Ntozake Shange, and others,

Jackson examines the ways in which performance responds to issues

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of racial identity, ultimately concluding that one of the signiWcant val-

ues of theater is its ability to bring performance and performativity

together by foregrounding the contingency of the subject that is the

focus of performativity analysis. When, for example, Smith faithfully

performs the conversational hesitations and vacillations that mark

her white subjects speech in Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, she is, Jackson

argues, exposing the unregistered citationality of white privilege

through highly dramatized specularity of theatrical staging (214).

By revealing otherwise hidden social conventions and then raising

incisive questions about the force and receptive effects of these con-

ventions, the cooperation of social performativity and theatrical per-

formance can, she asserts, shed new light on the often-internalized

processes and varied experiences of racism. For Jackson, this must be

the agenda for drama and performance in the contemporary era, and,

given recent critiques of the relief response to Hurricane Katrina, the

rest of us may increasingly agree.

Professing Performance is not, of course, the only book that attempts

to map the unruly Weld of performance studies. But what makes this

book worth reading is Jacksons own extreme interdisciplinarity,

which unsettles many of the instinctive alliances and blind spots she

might otherwise have. Her ambitious project examines key Wgures in

the development of the Weld and contextualizes the debates within

larger struggles over the role of the university and its relationship to

social structures of gender and power, all the while self-reXexively

interrogating the interests and assumptions of the genealogies she

constructs. For students and scholars hoping to understand how per-

formance came to be such a contested term, Professing Performance isa thorough and readable guide to this unsettled but rich terrain. And

those looking for ways of putting that same contestation to produc-

tive use will be hard-pressed to Wnd better examples than the brief but

thought-provoking discussions that comprise the books Wnal chapter.

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