An anthology I'm most of the way through now that's helping me envision my seminar on contemporary dramatic canonicity is Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsay Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Schiller (Routledge, 2022). I think this book might form the backbone of my course. The contributors are diverse, thoughtful folk. Their contributions are intentionally conversational, mainly edited exchanges and interviews (with some bibliographic tags).
It's the kind of book ripe for use in a seminar; instructors can pick and choose which essays most resonate with their course. Everything is pretty self-contained, like a streaming series that consists of bottle episodes. As with many such series, some themes and academic tropes recur. Several entries revisit the etymology of canon (from the Greek term for a measuring reed or stick). Multiple authors nod to the term's Christian-Biblical connotations, and a few (such as Kuftinec and Rauch) even indulge in some dad-joke punning with the military homophone. (I adore dad jokes.)
Audre Lorde crops up many chapters. Well, what crops up is a piece of one quote from one essay by Lorde, that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (from the essay titled by that clause). Usually the quote gets used as a way to dismiss works within a traditional (i.e, white, male, cis-het, Euro/US-centric, non-disabled, well-off) canon--or canons altogether. That's not exactly what Lorde is talking about in that essay, but it's not not what she's talking about, either.
Most of the contributors seem to be writing in the wake of the "We See You, White American Theatre" manifesto/statement of 2020, which calls out professional and university theatres (and theatre-makers) for their failure to walk the walk of antiracist (and anti/decolonial) talk in terms of their seasons, audience outreach, and production practices. Says Bill Rauch (white cis artistic director of first Cornerstone, then Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center): "I took every single sentence of that letter personally. As I should have. That is the point."
For several contributors, the weariness with playing nice with/kowtowing to mainstream (white) expectations manifests as well-earned fed-up-ness with the canon(s) handed down to them. "The American Musical Theatre Canon," argues Brandon Webster in a chapter about the canon of musicals, "fails every non-white student who comes in contact with it, in spite of the fact that it's used as the primary took for training and education, both as musical history and pedagogy." Other authors dispute the need for the idea of a canon at all, pointing out that canons are by nature exclusionary, that their intended function is to distinguish the worthy/sainted from those who aren't. As such, they are necessarily operations of power. Not everyone can be canonized. Canons ensure most folk are left out.
Some contributors take a nuanced approach, asking (as Webster does) what a new canon might look like. A few scholars (like Carrie Sandahl) cop to liking parts of the canon they were taught in undergrad and grad school even as they now recognize its exclusionary functions. Finn Lefevre, writing about queer canons, echoes this sentiment, rejecting the notion of simply eradicating
And some selectivity is necessary given constraints of time/energy/resources. Lefevre references Umberto Eco's notion that we have to have some way to "make infinity comprehensible." It really isn't possible to include everything in a season (or a semester). We produce and teach some things rather than everything. Nor can we simply pretend that we can simply swap some other, non-white identity as the core of a new or better canon. Replacing a white canon with, say, a Black trans disabled canon might provide a valuable respite (especially but not exclusively for Black trans disabled folk), but the master's tools keep their potency. Adopting such tools, as Lorde says, "may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
Sukanya Chakrabarti moves deftly through such considerations, arriving at an idea drawn from Robert Dale Parker, who argues that any selection system (like a canon) should "not only represent what it systemizes but also advertise the limits of its own systematicity." "Any stable canonizing projects for queer theatre," writes Lefevre, "necessarily mark themselves in one specific moment of queerness. What was transgressive at that moment will someday, and possibly even through canonization itself, become naturalized. A queer canon today will be queer theatre history tomorrow, and a new canon--or several--will emerge."
We might have to earn to hold canons loosely, as we are learning to do with so many other linguistic and conceptual tools that help to make infinity (and ourselves) comprehensible.
I think I'm going to assign the whole anthology. It's a winner.
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