Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity . Shannon Jackson .

Abstract

In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson provides a genealogy of performance as a disciplinary formation—beginning with George Pierce Baker’s introduction of drama and theatre studies at Harvard 100 years ago. Yet the narrative she weaves is by no means continuous or univocal. On the contrary, she carefully analyzes the many and contradictory epistemologies and institutions that have produced (and been produced by) the capacious field known as performance studies. For Jackson, crucially, performance and performance studies are not set in opposition to theatre, because she sees the latter as an instance of performance (comparable, for example, to the status of linguistics within the more comprehensive field of semiotics). In her view, performance studies and theatre must be understood within “a shared, if internally discontinuous, institutional history” (11). Although Jackson cites Foucault to theorize her genealogical approach, she is, to her credit, an unfaithful disciple. More willing than Foucault to recognize the deterministic force of institutions in the construction of epistemological formations, Jackson rigorously attends to and analyzes the material conditions that produce performance paradigms and practices.