Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change. Edited by Janelle Reinelt. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series, no. 28. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996; pp. vi + 250. $18.95 paper. Janelle Reinelt opens her introduction to this collection of diverse essays by asking, “What is the relationship of politics to culture?” (1). Her introduction asks how political and social change manifest themselves through performance, how art can affect society, hegemony, and ideology (and vice versa), and how the relationship between performance and social change has developed during the [End Page 539] twentieth century. Through investigations of political and social arenas ranging from turn-of-the-century Ireland to contemporary South Africa, the eleven essays in Crucibles of Crisis attempt to answer these questions and to champion theatre’s (and, to a very minor extent, dance’s) function as a tool for engendering social change. In her introduction, Reinelt drafts a theoretical map which serves as a guide through the anthology’s varied, sometimes treacherous, and certainly challenging terrain of postcolonial, postmodern, feminist, Marxist, and gendered discourse. She uses the term “retroactive opposition” (6) as the central thoroughfare to gain access to the collection’s multiple ideological sites; this is the process of using specific historical investigations as analytical tools to determine the ways in which power is constructed, maintained, or subverted. The concept of retroactive opposition provides a unifying theoretical construct for the book, and also addresses the text’s main question concerning the ways in which art and society interact. For while ideology dictates praxis, praxis can also dictate ideology; as Reinelt, drawing from Raymond Williams and Gramsci, observes, hegemony routinely neglects or excludes certain “social practices”—voices, ideas, events, individuals that in some way stand in opposition to the dominant culture or mode. “However, not only is the dominant formation itself changed by what it absorbs, but also these disparate social practices may sometimes coalesce to challenge its dominance” (3). The eleven essays in Crucibles of Crisis reflect, to different degrees, this theory. Harry Elam, Jr. discusses the Free Southern Theatre’s 1970 touring production of Baraka’s Slave Ship and argues that this production became a symbolic act of rebellion against oppression; southern black communities were galvanized to reaffirm their commitment to Black Nationalism during the Civil Rights Movement through their participation in the theatrical event. Mary Trotter’s article on the significance of the “Daughters of Erin” (Inghinidhe na hEireann) in the Irish nationalist dramatic movement demonstrates how historical narratives serve to admonish contemporary artists against sexism, marginalization, and gendered representations within any nationalist effort. Similarly, while Patricia R. Schroeder suggests that Harlem Renaissance playwrights Angelina Weld Grimké and Shirley Graham have [End Page 540] become progenitors for a new generation of African American playwrights concerned with social change, her essay also demonstrates how retroactive opposition can be used as a material feminist tool, to show the ways in which hegemony is still operating in these texts, which created sympathetic white—particularly female—audiences (whose class differences Schroeder does not consider closely enough). Several of the articles are concerned with South Africa. Loren Kruger charts the emergence of national representation within South African theatre through the drama and theory of Herbert Dhlomo, whose plays combine an interest in social protest drama in addition to more aesthetic and philosophic concerns. Anthony O’Brien also focuses on the drama of a specific South African playwright, Maishe Maponya, and positions his drama in relation to specific plays by Beckett and Havel. Through a postcolonial and gendered analysis of three plays, O’Brien exposes the “snow blindness” or “white solipsism” in Beckett and Havel’s work and argues that Maponya’s Gangsters is a postcolonial rereading of the other two plays. W. B. Worthen also discusses South African drama and theatre in his study of Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s collaborative piece, The Island. Worthen theorizes the “hybrid text” and argues that The Island is a good example of such a text because it combines dominant cultural forms or modernist tropes (theatre of the absurd and poor theatre) with topical South African politics. Worthen’s article...