Professing Performance Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity

Contemporary academic discourse is filled with the word "perform." Nestled among a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of inquiries. This development is intriguing and complex for students, artists, and scholars of performance and theater. By examining the history of theater studies and related institutions and comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, this study offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context.

Today's academic discourse is filled with the word 'perform'. Nestled amongst a variety of prefixes and suffixes (re-, post-, -ance, -ivity?), the term functions as a vehicle for a host of contemporary inquiries. For students, artists, and scholars of performance and theatre, this development is intriguing and complex. By examining the history of theatre studies and related institutions and by comparing the very different disciplinary interpretations and developments that led to this engagement, Professing Performance offers ways of placing performance theory and performance studies in context. This 2004 book considers the connection amongst a range of performance forms such as oratory, theatre, dance, and performance art and explores performance as both a humanistic and technical field of education. Throughout, she explores the institutional history of performance in the US academy in order to revise current debates around the role of the arts and humanities in higher education.

1. Discipline and performance: genealogy and discontinuity; 2. Institutions and performance: professing performance in the early twentieth century; 3. Culture and Performance: structures of dramatic feeling; 4. Practice and performance: modernist paradoxes and literalist legacies; 5. History and performance: blurred genres and the particularising of the past; 6. Identity and performance: racial performativity and anti-racist theatre.

Professing Performance, first published in 2004, explores the institutional history of performance in the US academy in order to revise current debates around the role of the arts and humanities in higher education. Shannon Jackson analyses long-standing debates between the world of the scholar and the world of the artist.