‘What I Came to Say’: Raymond Williams, the Sociology of Culture and the Politics of (Performance) Scholarship

Abstract

I approach Raymond Williams as a historical figure (d. 1988), and consider his ideas to be 'residual' in our field (to invoke one of his key concepts that I will discuss further). Even so, or perhaps equally so, the discipline of theatre and performance studies continues to draw on his work in productive ways. For example, a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review (2013) entitled Alphabet: A Lexicon of Theatre and Performance was conceived as a tribute to the memory of theatre scholar David Bradby, but it can also be seen as a 'Keywords' project, linked implicitly to Williams as well.2 In their editorial, Maria Delgado, Dominic Johnson, Aiofe Monks and Lara Shalson write that the aim of the issue is to examine how we function as theatre professionals and how we juggle the responsibilities of writing about culture across the page and stage. 'Stage' is not a singular entity here, but is rather the wider context in which our performative activities as human beings take place. Theatre is one of the many cultural manifestations that offer a way to consider how communities come together to investigate the social practices through which they operate. 3This was also the goal of Williams's cultural sociology, and indeed it is the objective of my own effort here to highlight and reaffirm his value for our field.Williams was part of a British intellectual legacy that has nourished me and many others for over fifty years. I encountered Williams during my graduate-school studies in the US in the early 1970s, and later followed his work and that of his colleagues and available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi