Overview

In New World Drama, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous scene of theatre in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world to explore the creation of new publics. Moving from England to the Caribbean to the early United States, she traces the theatrical emergence of a collective body in the colonized New World-one that included indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans, and diasporic Europeans. In the raucous space of the theatre, the contradictions of colonialism loomed large. Foremost among these was the central paradox of modernity: the coexistence of a massive slave economy and a nascent politics of freedom. Audiences in London eagerly watched the royal slave, Oroonoko, tortured on stage, while audiences in Charleston and Kingston were forbidden from watching the same scene. Audiences in Kingston and New York City exuberantly participated in the slaying of Richard III on stage, enacting the rise of the ""people,"" and Native American leaders were enjoined to watch actors in blackface ""jump Jim Crow."" Dillon argues that the theater served as a ""performative commons,"" staging debates over representation in a political world based on popular sovereignty. Her book is a capacious account of performance, aesthetics, and modernity in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

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9780822353249

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Reviews

Beginning with regicide and ending in riot, New World Drama re-visits key sites along the Atlantic rim to show how theatrical audiences, electing their representatives from a ballot of dramatic characters, expanded the print-world 'public sphere' into a dynamic 'performative commons'. In this innovative book, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has completely reframed the terms of discussion across the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, and performance studies. Substituting a performative commons for a nation-based public sphere, an Atlantic imaginary for an American one, across a period in which racial capitalism came raging into being, richly informed by a reconceptualized theater history, subtended by a colonial relation she has researched extensively, Elizabeth Dillon's New World Drama productively intervenes in several domains and debates at once. It won't be possible to disregard this very fine book.

Beginning with regicide and ending in riot, New World Drama re-visits key sites along the Atlantic rim to show how theatrical audiences, electing their representatives from a ballot of dramatic characters, expanded the print-world 'public sphere' into a dynamic 'performative commons.' In this innovative book, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has completely reframed the terms of discussion across the disciplines of literature, history, cultural studies, and performance studies. --Joseph Roach, author of It (03/17/2014)

Author Information

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Professor of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere.  

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