Between “Glocal-locality” and “Subversive Affirmation” Introduction to a Special Section on Glocal Dramatic Theories

Abstract

Spring 2009 41 Between “Glocal-locality” and “Subversive Affirmation” Introduction to a Special Section on Glocal Dramatic Theories Evan Darwin Winet The currency of globalization as a framework for cultural research promises a reduction in the parochialism of American theatre studies. Myths of cultural purity, however, still obscure the complexities of theatrical interculturalism. The core difficulty is no longer simply a lack of interest in other cultures. The American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) has signalled a concern with the transnational through recent conference themes emphasizing “borders,” “diaspora,” and “migrancy.” Performance Studies international (PSi) pointedly withholds the capital letter from the third word in the organization’s name to call attention to the work yet to be done. Paralleling the economic mandate within university administrations to provide “global” educations, American theatre departments increasingly seek to add non-Western content to their history and performance curricula, while it has become more common for departmental seasons to feature works from non-traditional repertoires. Recent special issues of Modern Drama and Contemporary Theatre Review have addressed aspects of theatre and global culture. Nevertheless, conversations in the classroom, the theatre, and even the conference hall frequently remain informed by self-perpetuating presumptions of cultural (and frequently national) coherence. The legacy of Emmanuel Levinas to post-structuralist epistemology (that is, the claim of the Other to irreducible alterity) has inspired an ironic indifference to specific practices that dismantle cultures.1 Such biases challenge our capacities to attend to how societies and their theatre practitioners synthesize “native” and “exogenous” traditions. Aparna Dharwadker has usefully discussed how the prevailing explanatory frameworks of “interculturalism” and “postcolonialism” have each in its own way obscured the development of modern urban theatre in much of the world. The discourse of performance studies has echoed the concerns of many Western scholars of Asian theatre by emphasizing indigenous performance traditions whose formal and technical continuities survived relatively unscathed their interactions with Evan Darwin Winet is an independent scholar affiliated with the University of California Hastings College of Law. His book Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre: Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces (2009) is a critical history of that nation’s modern theatre and drama, tracing continuities from colonial pasts through perceived postcolonial ruptures. His English translations of several modern Indonesian plays will appear in the forthcoming Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama (2009). He is also a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of Drama (2009), and a major contributor to the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (2007). 42 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism exogenous influence. In the 1970s, as complex postcolonial theatres emerged in the booming megacities of the global South, “world” theatre scholarship remained fixated on these predominantly rural traditions.2 Performance studies thereby reinforced what Benedict Anderson (following José Rizal) called “the spectre of comparison” between such traditions and Western avant-garde theatres.3 Few alternative frameworks gained currency in Western scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1980s, Patrice Pavis introduced his “hourglass model,” which depicts intercultural reception as involving a fragmentation of practices in order to pass through a narrow aperture separating source and target cultures. Twenty years later, this model remains a prevailing semiotic description of the transfer of culture between theatrical traditions.4 However, Pavis’s model likewise presumes a coherence of “source” and “target” cultures that does not adequately account for postcolonial artists trained in Western techniques who re-acquaint themselves with traditions of their home cultures with which they are less familiar, or those whose societies have been saturated with an imperial culture but who seek ways to clear local spaces for articulating alternative expressions. Dharwadker finds little remedy in a highly text-oriented postcolonial theory, which furthermore shifts attention from the indigenous to the diasporic. The work of theatre practitioners and dramatists deeply literate in Euro-American traditions yet operating within the local communities of third and second world cities seems to slip through the cracks of both intercultural and postcolonial analyses. This special section on “global and local dramatic theories” draws on work that has emerged within the context of the National Identities/National Cultures working group of the American Society for Theatre Research. This group first convened in 2004 with a mandate to...