Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note Michelle Liu Carriger, PhD This issue is late. It’s late because a journal like Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism relies on the time and labor of innumerable people, none of whom have the journal as their first and only priority. A peer-reviewed journal in the academic arts and humanities is a labor, if not exactly of love, then certainly of some other ill-defined at-least-partially-emotional impetus. And it seems to me that late-late capitalist society is in the midst of a reckoning of that affective relation between occupation and avocation. This reckoning is hitting hard at the places where Arts and Entertainment overlap with commerce overlap with education. Which is to say, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism’s primary field of study and its own site of publication. This journal issue started during a media blitz about burnout, “Quiet Quitting,” and “Working to Contract” (in the aftermath of, at my institution, the largest strike of graduate student and postdoc labor in U.S. history), then spread over “Hot Labor Summer” 2023.1 First we struggled to find enough articles, then we struggled mightily to find enough peer reviewers, then many of our authors struggled to find time to complete revisions. Meanwhile, I and my managing editor(s) continued our own full time jobs of researching, writing, publishing, job marketing, teaching and keeping departments at two land grant R1 universities afloat. Indeed, a vast ill-defined proportion of the work and atmosphere of academia (and theatre/performance) exists between the distant shores of clearly defined paid duties, volunteer “service to the field” said to enhance the doer’s profile in vague-but-important ways, and the complexities of “labors of love.” Today, the CV-line appeal for free labor has worn thin, the love within the labor of both theatre and academic research, and spare bandwidth beyond the rigors of the job all seem to be running out. I haven’t been long enough in academia to feel confident this isn’t just how it always feels to reach “mid-career,” but certainly the stridency of the calls to “self-care” by saying no, the proportion of colleagues citing burnout, and the aforementioned struggle to get anything done at this volunteer-run journal seem to constitute a specific moment of crisis for the volunteer model that Theatre and Performance Studies academia runs on. And I haven’t even broached the hand-wringing ink spilled over the 2023 state of theatre production, in academia, community, and professional capacities. This long preamble to introducing the actual contents of the issue is meant to also point out that the three articles and nine book reviews we see here were completed in heroic conditions. They also represent authors across the globe with longer and shorter periods of editorial gestation. Marlon Ariyasinghe’s article provides the beginning of new discussions regarding blackface performance by presenting a case study and some historical background from Sri Lanka. The article grapples with the thorny question of how to apply the specifics of the historical [End Page 1] legacy of United States-founded, but globally traveled, blackface minstrelsy in the face of many more political and social factors. Ira Avneri’s article “A Philosopher at the Door” uses three instances of dramatized philosophical threshold-crossing to illustrate “philosophy’s unavoidable affinity with theatre.” And finally in the issue, William Woodard Lewis goes “undercover” to uncover the power of algorithmically influenced political attitudes in Blast Theory’s participatory performance piece “Operation Black Antler.” Added to the nine book reviews that have been patiently waiting for enough articles for this issue to go to print, I hope you will feel that some things are worth waiting for. And meanwhile, I invite your active participation in not just the many volunteer labors that keep the profession afloat but also in the challenge to remake the discipline in more vibrant, equitable, and sustainable ways. [End Page 2] Michelle Liu Carriger Chair and Associate Professor Department of Theater UCLA Footnotes 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/what-is-quiet-quitting-burnout-at-work/671413/ Copyright © 2023 Michelle Liu Carriger