Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations.International in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces 'culture' which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats 'performance' as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations.
“Young Jean Lee’s Cruel Optimism” argues that the Brown University production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men stages the tensions inherent in performing white masculinity under U.S. neo-liberal capitalism. The article performs a dramaturgical analysis of the production in relationship to Raymond Williams’s conception of liberal tragedy from Modern Tragedy (1966) and Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the impasse in Cruel Optimism (2011). This analysis reveals how the reconceptualization of liberal tragedy in the neo-liberal age asks that we reconsider the relationship between debt and aspiration so crucial to Williams’s conception of Ibsen’s dramaturgy. The theatricality of the play offers a new way to understand the affect and effects of living with the spectre of labour precarity and debt in the contemporary United States.
This essay suggests that the erasure of such nineteenth-century works as Alfredo Chavero's Quetzalcóatl from mainstream Mexican theater histories has diminished the importance of theater as a mode of nation-building historiography even as national textbooks and archaeological developments have come to the fore. It also claims that reimagining theater as a form of performance pedagogy is an important step for scholars in the field to take. Ultimately, this essay reveals not merely that Mexican politics are theatrical, or that the theater has served the Mexican state, but that the architects of the Mexican nation thought theatrically from the start.
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