Not the Other Avant-garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472099310 ISBN 13: 9780472099313

Verlag: University of Michigan Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Almost without exception, studies of the avant-garde take for granted the premise that the influential experimental practices associated with the avant-garde began primarily as a European phenomenon that in turn spread around the world. These ten original essays, especially commissioned for Not the Other Avant-Garde, forge a radically new conception of the avant-garde by demonstrating the many ways in which the first- and second-wave avant-gardes were always already a transnational phenomenon, an amalgam of often contradictory performance traditions and practices developed in various cultural locations around the world, including Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, Argentina, India, and Japan. Essays from leading scholars and critics-including Marvin Carlson, Sudipto Chatterjee, John Conteh-Morgan, Peter Eckersall, Harry J. Elam Jr., Joachim Fiebach, David G. Goodman, Jean Graham-Jones, Hannah Higgins, and Adam Versényi-suggest collectively that the very concept of the avant-garde is possible only if conceptualized beyond the limitations of Eurocentric paradigms.

Not the Other Avant-Garde is groundbreaking in both avant-garde studies and performance studies and will be a valuable contribution to the fields of theater studies, modernist studies, art history, literature, and music history.

"Joins the growing field of critical and transnational theories on the arts. . . its grounding in live performance and its foregrounding of the performative human body presents a new theoretical paradigm that is pathbreaking."
--Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles


James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.

John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. He is author of Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture and editor of Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality.

John Rouse is Associate Professor of Theater at the University of California, San Diego. He is author of Brecht and the West German Theatre.

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NOT THE OTHER AVANT-GARDE

The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2006University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-09931-3

Contents

James M. Harding and John Rouse Introduction.......................................................................................................................1James M. Harding From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance.....................................................18Harry J. Elam, Jr. The TDR Black Theatre Issue: Refiguring the Avant-Garde.........................................................................................41Joachim Fiebach Avant-Garde and Performance Cultures in Africa.....................................................................................................67John Conteh-Morgan The Other Avant-Garde: The Theater of Radical Aesthetics and the Poetics and Politics of Performance in Contemporary Africa.....................92Marvin Carlson Avant-Garde Drama in the Middle East................................................................................................................125Adam Versnyi Made in Mexico: The Theatrical Avant-Garde and the Formation of a Nation.............................................................................145Jean Graham-Jones Aesthetics, Politics, and Vanguardias in Twentieth-Century Argentinean Theater...................................................................168Sudipto Chatterjee From "Vanguard" to "Avant-Garde"? Questioning the Progressive Bengali Theater of Kolkata........................................................192Peter Eckersall From Liminality to Ideology: The Politics of Embodiment in Prewar Avant-garde Theater in Japan.....................................................225David G. Goodman Angura: Japan's Nostalgic Avant-Garde.............................................................................................................250Hannah Higgins Border Crossings: Three Transnationalisms of Fluxus.................................................................................................265Contributors........................................................................................................................................................286Index...............................................................................................................................................................289

Chapter One

From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance

James M. Harding

Assume therefore that, as a result of specific historical circumstances, a theory or idea pertaining to those circumstances arises. What happens to it when, in different circumstances and for new reasons, it is used again and, in still more different circumstances again? What can this tell us about theory itself, its limits, its possibilities, its inherent problems and what can it suggest to us about the relationship between theory and criticism, on the one hand, and society and culture on the other? -Edward Said, "Traveling Theory"

"In Advance Of": An Introduction

From its very inception the Western theatrical avant-garde has found itself entangled in the cultural politics of colonialism. Examples of this entanglement are not difficult to find since they are often scantly masked beneath aesthetic categories like primitivism or negritude, to name only the most obvious, or even beneath a patronizing embrace of Asian performance traditions, as occurred in Russia, Germany, and France. In Ubu Roi, for example, Alfred Jarry provocatively embraced a fashioned savage primitivism that not only shocked William Butler Yeats but that theater historians have also consistently cited as "the beginning of the performative avant-garde." In Zurich, the Dadaists displayed similar proclivities. Hugo Ball costumed himself in a facsimile of a witch doctor's headdress before reciting his Lautegedichte at the Cabaret Voltaire. His friend and cofounder of the cabaret, Richard Huelsenbeck, followed the reading of his own fabricated "Negro poems" with a debate on their authenticity, and when Jan Ephriam, the owner of the cabaret, gave Huelsenbeck examples of genuine African poems that he had collected as a sailor, Huelsenbeck recited them at the cabaret but decided that they would be better (perhaps even more authentic) if, as in his fabricated poems, he added the sound "Umba" to the end of each line. Even Antonin Artaud's intense fascination with Balinese dance theater was mediated, as is well known, by the colonial fair where he first encountered Balinese dancers. While these and similar moments in the history of avant-garde performance indicate the extent to which experimental artists were anxious to find alternatives to bourgeois cultural expression, they also remind us that the Western avant-garde sustained European cultural prerogatives even amid its most vociferous assaults on bourgeois culture. The legacies of such entanglement have left historians of the avant-garde confronting a grossly underplayed dilemma. Either we argue that the whole of the avant-garde is not contained within the particulars of its colonialist attitudes and thus circumvent the entanglement, or we cite it as an example of the pervasive ideological corruption wrought by Western imperialism and begin the hard search for models of artistic expression uncontaminated by colonialist presumptions.

Granted, my construction of this dilemma is polemical, but the stakes are higher than they might first appear. For the choice one makes here has a major impact on how we understand the legacies of the avant-garde, especially with regard to its influence (beyond the borders of Europe and) on the world stage. A profoundly neglected uncertainty looms over the question of whether the expanding influence of the avant-garde indicates an escape from its colonialist birthing or is another example of imported Western cultural hegemony. With this latter concern in mind, the limits of our current theories of the avant-garde and the need to revisit the colonialist underpinnings of avant-garde performance become evident. Indeed, there is a special appropriateness to this return now. At a time when we hear calls for a radical reassessment of the very concept "avant-garde" and its concomitant histories, a return to the avant-garde's subtle entanglement in the politics of colonialism offers the possibility not only of fundamentally retheorizing the avant-garde but of shifting its basic terrain. The argument here is very simple: if we turn a blind apologetic eye to that entanglement or if we see only it and dismiss the idea of the avant-garde as another ideological conduit for European cultural hegemony, then we have failed to recognize that the colonialist underpinnings of avant-garde performance mark it not as a European but as a fundamentally global cultural phenomenon.

The arguments that follow do not downplay the contested intercultural exchanges and vexed negotiations that have shaped this phenomenon. Indeed, the shortest summary of this essay's main assertion is that nothing more aptly characterizes the avant-garde than the moments of contested intercultural exchange at its colonialist birthing. Those exchanges mark not only the avant-garde, but culture itself, and in an effort to maintain the critical integrity of those contested moments, I have chosen to characterize the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Michigan Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0472099310
• ISBN 13: 9780472099313
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Herausgeber: Harding James Martin, Rouse John
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar