Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance

by James M. Harding (Editor), John Rouse (Editor)

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 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.

312 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

James M. Harding is the author of The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theatre and Performance (Michigan, 2013), Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (Michigan, 2010), and Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture (SUNY, 1997). He is an internationally known scholar whose work focuses on the history of experimental theatre, on post 9/11 theatre and performance, on the intersection of surveillance and performance, and on performance studies more generally. His articles have appeared in TDR, Performance International, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PMLA. He is currently finishing a new monograph tentatively entitled Performance, Transparency and the Cultures of Surveillance and a co-edited anthology entitled Center-Staging the Sixties: Mainstream and Popular Performance in a Turbulent Decade.

Harding is proud to be a Maryland alumnus, having completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991 at College Park. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, he was Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, was twice a Visiting Professor at the Insitut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and was Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction and first chapters, written by Harding, are an effective call to reconsider and challenge the idea of an avant garde. The collection itself, however, is variously successful and poorly conceived. It's likely that this challenge to the concept was written after most of the anthology's collection. Even the best contributions are mired in methodological problems, and there are many that are just bad. If the purpose is to give individual attention to these movements and not artificially link them together, why, for instance, include Fiebach's essay examining avant garde tendencies in the varied theatrical traditions of an entire continent (besides the need for Fiebach to justify the obvious pan-African guided tour he went on)? Why use Carlson's adequate retelling of the introduction to Modern Arabic Drama and not just use Badawi's essay itself?

It's telling that, since this call to arms of Harding's, no significant advances in the study have taken place. The challenge to redefine our conceptions of an avant garde might signal the death of the term itself. Given the sufficiency of other fields to better handle these disruptive movements without lumping them together, that might be a good thing.

[Colinmself]

this is one that was really inspirational for me.. it felt like an ancient guiding light to being a weirdo and making weird things happen. i love it.