Four Notes on Six Conversations

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• Four Notes on Six Conversations
• Carla Neuss (bio)

In June 2023, I had the unexpected privilege of being able to sit down, in person, with six scholars in our field for a series of open-ended and wide-ranging conversations. The occasion was, nominally, a chance to reflect on the seventy-five years of Theatre Journal’s contribution to theatre scholarship; but over the course of my conversations with Rustom Bharucha, Jean Graham-Jones, Joseph Roach, Karen Shimakawa, Patricia Ybarra, and Harvey Young, what emerged was a multi-valenced probing of the past, present, and future of what has come to be known as theatre and performance studies. As a recently minted PhD, I was conscious of proverbially sitting at the feet of intellectual giants in our field and had planned on dutifully asking a series of pre-prepared questions: What has your experience with Theatre Journal been? What do you see as the role of scholarly journals today? What are your hopes for the next seventy-five years of the journal? As in only but the richest of conversations, what resulted exceeded the narrow bounds of such questions and I found myself sharing ideas, concerns, and hopes with my interlocutors that ran the gamut from redefining diversity to the collapse of public universities, the sidelining of theatre history to the tensions between scholarship and practice.

My task since that June has been to distill the knowledges generated from these conversations in order to share them with TJ readers and the field at large. To that end, I have produced a series of short videos drawn from these interviews (which I had the good fortune to be able to record) as well as publishing the transcripts of our conversations in hopes of building an archive of reflections on the state of the field that can serve scholars in years to come. In this short essay, I cannot do justice to the richness of this archive. What I can do, though, is distill the threads of conversation into four key considerations, each of which continues to linger with me. I hope by sharing these notes with you we can collectively consider—and create—what the next seventy-five years of the discourse on theatre and performance will be and the form it will take.

1. 1. Dwindling, if not gone, are the days of receiving a journal like TJ in the mail, sitting down with a beverage of choice, and reading it cover to cover. Harvey Young suspects that perhaps only Ric Knowles still enacts that ritual of reading that was once dominant. For me, as a scholar raised in the keyword generation, reading a journal in its entirety has gone the way of listening to an entire album; instead, I usually just stream the hit single from Spotify (in this case, JSTOR or ProjectMuse.) A sense of loss surrounding this shift underpinned these conversations. What do we lose when we [End Page E-67] consume scholarship outside of its curatorial context? But in other ways, we have all benefited from the search-enginization of encountering scholarship, in no small part because we are now more likely, through algorithms and keywords, to encounter work from fields beyond our own; my own current book project’s central case studies were the results of erroneous hits on JSTOR that caught my eye and attracted my curiosity. My interlocutors also spoke to the need and desire for academic publishing to move to more open-access models. That shift, already underway with some publications (facilitated by moves like JSTOR’s free access to one hundred articles monthly for all registered users) holds the potential of lifting the paywall curtain that often keeps valuable work out of the hands of readers beyond the academy. Perhaps much more of the scholarship in our field would function as public-facing if the public could in fact access it.

2. 2. Many of the interviewees spoke to the question of diversity in unexpected ways. Yes, several praised the progress made by Theatre Journal and its peer journals in widening the range of voices and contributors to the journal; Patricia Ybarra wryly recalled a special issue on Women in Drama published in...