The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization By Sean Metzger. Indiana University Press. Bloomington: Indiana, 2020; pp. vii + 262, 35 illustrations. $75 cloth, $25 paper, $12.99 e-book.

Abstract

scholarly study and training programs. Dumont’s chapter makes a historiographical point by mentioning the subsequent tension between the “intellectual” and the “popular” in contemporary circus arts (189), as if the two terms are anathema to one another. Thus, only when the circus was removed from its original context was it recognized as artistic. Last, Anna-Sophie Jürgens’s essay “Through the Looking Glass: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Circus Studies” (Chapter 16) performs a literary review of the imaginative scholarship taking place across various disciplines, including the sciences, literary studies, humor studies, and disability studies. Through her exploration, she demonstrates the vitality of the field of circus studies. For example, neuroscientists have investigated the “alteration of cerebral formations” through the complex motor exercises practiced in the circus (245). The editors acknowledge the recent emergence of the field; yet what is missing from the Introduction is a historiographical account of how the circus, its acts, and performers have been written about in the past. As Charles R. Batson and Karen Fricker note in Chapter 15, “circus studies is a field in formation, and as such so are the methods scholars apply in their circus research” (231). With that in mind, what has been circus’s place in the academy, historically speaking? What has constituted the nature, style, and concerns of circus scholarship prior to this entry? What are the lacunae that need to be redressed by the archive? These questions are answered, in part, by the last part of the book, but are left unattended in the Introduction, and might have provided useful context for the Companion’s intervention in the field. Nonetheless, the samplings of studies offered successfully draw the reader’s attention to the promise of circus studies by preparing students to pursue further research into the circus as a big top of manifold opportunities.