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The contributors to Race and Performance after Repetition explore how theater and performance studies account for the complex relationship between race and time. Pointing out that repetition has been the primary point of reference for understanding both the complex temporality of theater and the historical persistence of race, they identify and pursue critical alternatives to the conceptualization, organization, measurement, and politics of race in performance. The contributors examine theater, performance art, music, sports, dance, photography, and other forms of performance in topics that range from the movement of boxer Joe Louis to George C. Wolfe's 2016 reimagining of the 1921 all-black musical comedy Shuffle Along to the relationship between dance, mourning, and black adolescence in Flying Lotus's music video “Never Catch Me.” Proposing a spectrum of coexisting racial temporalities that are not tethered to repetition, this collection reconsiders central theories in performance studies in order to find new understandings of race.

Contributors. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Nicholas Fesette, Patricia Herrera, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Mario LaMothe, Daphne P. Lei, Jisha Menon, Tavia Nyong’o, Tina Post, Elizabeth W. Son,  Shane Vogel, Catherine M. Young, Katherine Zien

An examination of neoliberal ideology’s ascendance in 1990s and 2000s British politics and society through its effect on state-supported performance practices

Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government’s use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this political moment, Owen guides readers through a wide range of performance works crossing multiple forms, genres, and spaces—from European dance tours, to Brazilian favelas, to the streets of Liverpool—attending to their distinct implications for the reenvisioned future in whose wake we now live.

Analyzing this array of participatory dance, film, music, public art, and theater projects, Owen uncovers unexpected affinities between community-based, experimental, and avant-garde movements. Restaging the Future provides key historical context for these performances, their negotiations of their political moment, and their themes of insecurity, identity, and inequality, created in a period of profound ideological and socioeconomic change.

In Sam Shepard's play Action a character asks, "What's a community?" only to find that no one really knows. Rooms with a View attempts to chart the development of communal concepts through the discourse of dramatic modernism, defining a coherent pattern that illustrates and anticipates innovations in modern and postmodern social theory. To clarify the commonplace notion that audiences actively participate in dramatic art, the intro-ductory chapter theorizes a performance community, which audience, actors, and other backstage actants (such as playwrights and directors) provisionally form in the theater. Connecting psychological, sociological, and aesthetic insights ranging from Freud to Kohut, from Simmel to Nancy, and from Artaud and Brecht to Arnheim and Jellicoe, Richard Barr shows how modernist thinkers are repeatedly drawn to the ideal of communion. The distinctive structure of this collective inquiry helps untangle the roots and routes of modern drama and social thought. Barr analyzes the social and aesthetic theory of four in-fluential dramatists. Ibsen and Strindberg, he claims, explore ways of acknowledging the integrity of individual viewpoints while maintaining collective coherence. Pirandello and, in more radical ways, Beckett, conclude that conflict and division are not simply inevitable but invaluable in organizing alternative perspectives. By analyzing the ways playwrights variously conceive and achieve the complicated unity called community, Rooms with a View produces the rich paradox that difference may make the most difference in creative communal consensus. Richard L. Barr holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and has taught English at Rutgers University. He is currently a specialist in intersubjective relations, practicing in New Jersey and Switzerland.

Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. Theatrical representations of the Bowery Boy emphasized the privileges of whiteness against nonwhite workers including enslaved and free African Americans during the Antebellum Period, an articulation of white superiority that continued through the early twentieth century with Jewish, Italian, and Chinese immigrants.

The book’s examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy. J. Chris Westgate further explores links between the Bowery Boy’s rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.