"Cultivating a Small Field": On the Work of Citation in Theatre and Performance Studies Scholarship

The most famous haiku poet, Matsuo Bashō, wrote these lines somewhere in Japan, sometime in the seventeenth century. Three hundred years later, in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes declares that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). We understand we are in the field of theatre and performance studies (or fields of theatre and performance studies, perhaps) that is shaped and stretched and delineated by its texts. The field/text here is both material and conceptual—in particular, books and journals and the ideas they convey. And those texts rely on other texts, some from the “centers of culture,” some from our “to and fro” journeys about the world and through other areas of study. So when we asked what is the import of citation to our field(s), and what specific view do we have of citational practice and citationality from our vantage as editors of scholarly journals that attempt to contribute to this work, we were struck by the very first question . . .