Table Of ContentRevised Pages
ImmersIons In Cultural DIfferenCe
Revised Pages
THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE
Series Editors: David Krasner, Rebecca Schneider, and Harvey Young
Founding Editor: Enoch Brater
Recent Titles:
Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance
by Natalie Alvarez
Performing the Intercultural City by Ric Knowles
Microdramas: Crucibles for a Theater and Time by John H. Muse
Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia
by Christian DuComb
Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness
by Karen Gonzalez Rice
Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91
by Branislav Jakovljević
After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance
by Daniel Sack
Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance
by Faedra Chatard Carpenter
The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North
by Douglas A. Jones, Jr.
Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self
by Tzachi Zamir
Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning
by Scott Magelssen
Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance
by Andrew Sofer
Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love
by Nicholas Ridout
Paul Robeson and the Cold War Performance Complex: Race, Madness, Activism
by Tony Perucci
The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice
by Judith Pascoe
The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of
Black Performance by Brandi Wilkins Catanese
Artaud and His Doubles by Kimberly Jannarone
No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater
by Angela C. Pao
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Immersions in
Cultural Difference
Tourism, War, Performance
Natalie Alvarez
unIversIty of mIChIgan Press
Ann Arbor
Revised Pages
Copyright © 2018 by Natalie Alvarez
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by the
University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
c Printed on acid- free paper
2021 2020 2019 2018 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 07375- 7 (Hardcover: alk paper)
ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 05375- 9 (Paperback : alk paper)
ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 12354- 4 (ebook)
For Rajiv
•
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Acknowledgments
If there is not yet a tradition of acknowledgments that begins with apolo-
gies, I initiate one here. I’d like to express my sincere apologies to Rajiv
Kaushik for sending mixed messages shortly after we were married when
I departed for the mock insurgent training camp in Utah. In retrospect, I
can see how this might have been perceived as an effort to sabotage our
marriage. He then had to suffer through years of conversation that rarely
strayed from the subject of this book. He has been the most constant and
inspiring interlocutor for this book and for that I am both profoundly grate-
ful and sorry.
I am also profoundly grateful (and sorry) to my children, Violeta and
Zubin—Violeta, in particular, who had no choice but to tag along on some
of the journeys for this book while she was in utero. My deepest thanks and
love to my parents, especially my mom, Rosario Alvarez, who travelled to
Toronto often to visit the grandkids and created windows of writing time
in turn, and to my siblings Maria, Anita, and Eduardo. I am also grateful
for the love and support of my in-laws, Narinder and Swarsha Kaushik. I’d
like to thank my dearest friend and confidant, Natalie Harrower, who also
assisted me with some of the research for this book: her wisdom, fierce in-
tellect, and perfect comic timing have been an anchor point these past
twenty years and have helped me maintain a healthy perspective, espe-
cially during difficult times.
My warmest thanks as well to Keren Zaiontz, a fellow traveler to Shoal
Lake 40, friend, and research collaborator. Her courageous scholarship has
informed so much of my thinking in this book and her generous engage-
ments with many of the chapters at the draft-writing stage were invaluable.
I am also indebted to my colleagues and dear friends who also happen to
be the most brilliant and formidable research group one could ask for:
Laura Levin, Marlis Schweitzer, Kim Solga, and Jenn Stephenson. They
have seen this book through from its incipience. Their sharp insights, un-
wavering support and encouragement have not only made the book better
but have made me better as a scholar. Thanks especially to Laura and Mar-
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vi acknowledgments
lis who have given me opportunities to test and extend this research, first
in their Performance Studies Methodologies workshop at the University of
Toronto’s Massey College in 2012 and in their 2017 edited collection Perfor-
mance Studies in Canada (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017), which features excerpts
from chapter 1. Their keen editorial eye pushed my arguments and helped
my work reach its fullest potential. A heartfelt thanks to Erin Hurley, as
well, for her rich feedback and incisive editorial suggestions on the excerpts
from chapter 1, which she included in her edited book Theatres of Affect
(Playwrights Canada Press, 2014). Sections of chapter 3 were published in
the J0urnal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25.2 (Spring 2011) and I am
grateful to Scott Magelssen, former editor, as well as to the external review-
ers for their helpful comments, which greatly improved the analysis.
Other friends, colleagues, and fellow conference panellists have offered
sage counsel, invaluable insights, and enthusiastic support for the project
along the way: Susan Bennett, Sara Brady, Athena Colman, Barry Freeman,
Lindsay Adamson Livingston, Russ Kilbourne, Scott Magelssen, Paige Mc-
Ginley, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Gyllian Raby, and Diana Taylor. Thanks
especially to Dylan Robinson, whose careful reading of chapter 4 and invi-
tation to present some of this work at Queen’s University helped immea-
surably in strengthening its claims. I am also grateful to the members of the
Canadian Association for Theatre Research, the American Society for The-
atre Research, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education who
have supported this research at various stages of its development.
The very existence of this book owes a profound debt to Ric Knowles.
Were it not for his encouraging feedback at conferences when I was a fledg-
ling graduate student, which helped me identify a persistent interest that
held the makings of a future monograph, I don’t know that I would have
had the gumption to pursue it. I also want to express my deepest apprecia-
tion to Tamara Underiner with whom I undertook my second journey to El
Alberto. I learned so much from Tamara on that trip—not merely about the
border crossing event, about which she has written so brilliantly. Her gen-
erosity and honesty, and her good-humour about the peculiar pressures of
academia modeled how to be in this profession at the early stages of my
career.
My thanks as well to Rich Maxwell and the New York City Players
whose rehearsals were a spur to my thinking about the ethics of engage-
ment between self and other. Rich, in particular, read early drafts of this
work and asked tough questions that made the writing stronger. The invi-
tation to the New York City Players’ TheatreCon 13 at the Abron Arts Cen-
tre allowed me to test some of this material with a theatre audience in the
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acknowledgments vii
unusual (and slightly terrifying) context of a performance-conference. I
also wish to acknowledge the impact Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt has had on
this work. Our fortuitous meeting at Toronto’s Summerworks Theatre Fes-
tival in 2012 revealed shared research interests and her generous invitation
to present work in progress at her 2013 symposium “Modelling Wars of
Tomorrow: the (mis)uses of creative strategies in waging war,” hosted by
Skogen Theatre in Göteborg, Sweden, was critical to the development of
chapters 1 and 2. The roundtable discussions with Cecilie, Eva Meyer-
Keller, Rabih Mroué, Eyal Weizman, and Edda Manga challenged my
thinking on the intersections of performance and war and made a lasting
imprint on the writing in these pages.
Adriana Disman, Kitti Laki, and Hannah Rackow, research assistants
from York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance
Studies, have been critical to the development of this book. Adriana’s
strengths in queer and critical race feminism helped push the ethical stakes
of this work further and Hannah’s interdisciplinary specializations in po-
litical theory, performance in the Americas, and social justice allowed her
to jump into this project at its later stages as though she were with it from
the beginning. Hannah, in particular, helped ground what, for me, felt like
riskier intellectual territory by finding companion thinkers where I least
expected them. Kasey Dunn, a brilliant alumnus from my home depart-
ment at Brock University, served as the first intrepid researcher for this
book and helped establish critical foundations, which made the work that
followed possible.
Finally, I am most thankful to LeAnn Fields for her unwavering support
and faith in this project since its initial sketches as an ASTR plenary presen-
tation in 2009. I’m grateful for her patience and willingness to stand by it
when I tried to juggle competing research commitments and difficult fam-
ily circumstances. My thanks as well to the book’s external reviewers for
their perceptive and wise feedback; to the copyeditors and, in particular,
production editor Mary Hashman for their detailed and careful work
bringing this book to press; and to the series editors, David Krasnor, Re-
becca Schneider, and Harvey Young, for their belief in its potential.
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Contents
Introduction 1
one
Managing Affect in Mock Afghan Villages 21
two
Insurgent Empathy 66
three
Crossing Imaginary Borders 106
four
Unsettling Immersions for Settlers 130
ConClusIon
On Not Knowing 163
Notes 171
Works Cited 197
Index 209
