Christina S. McMahon's Recasting Transnationalism through Performance: Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique and Brazil is an ambitious project that aims to reclaim the agency of performers to facilitate cultural dialogue even within the globalized and decontextualized framework of the international theatre festival. Adopting a comparative approach that is fitting with the imperatives of the “Studies in International Performance” series, this book focuses on a specific transnational community—that of the Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, group of nations—in order to bring a new, transnational dimension to the discussions of global flows and local epistemologies that dominate festival scholarship.
Portuguese-language productions have tended to be marginalized on the global international arts festival circuit and subsequently within existing festival scholarship. In critically analyzing Lusophone performances and mapping a previously neglected network of festivals across three diverse cultures and two continents, this study addresses a gap in festival research. McMahon contends that the shared language, colonial histories, and postcolonial alliances of the three nations represented by the festivals under examination—the Mindelact Festival in Cape Verde, the Festival de Teatro da Língua Portuguesa (FESTLIP; Theatre Festival of the Portuguese Language) in Brazil, and the Festival d'Agosto in Mozambique—provide performers and spectators with a shared basis for productive intercultural exchange. She argues that within festival productions, theatre artists from Portuguese-speaking African nations are able to disrupt master narratives and dispel stereotypes in a process she calls “recasting” in order to contribute to the “collective construction of a Lusophone transnation” (or lusofonia) on their own terms despite the inherent power imbalances and neocolonial risks that such a project invokes (7).
Recasting Transnationalism is ambitious considering the vast geographical, historical, economic, and cultural scope that these three festival sites encompass. McMahon is diligent and rigorous in her approach, undertaking sustained ethnographical fieldwork and archival research in order to situate her performance analyses within their local, national, and transnational settings. Methodologically, this is achieved by combining two major theatre and performance studies approaches to festivals: Ric Knowles's materialist semiotics with Willmar Sauter's and the Festivalising! contributors' theorization of the festival frame and the need to historicize such events. McMahon calls for the further extension of this frame, however, when she argues that the transformative potential of festivals lies in the “actions and objectives of the performers” and the “audience's reflexive responses to them” that can extend beyond the temporal and spatial bounds of these events into what she terms the “festival aftermath” (7). This book proposes that festival performances should therefore be understood in relation to these festival aftermaths, which McMahon defines as “dialogic spaces that arise parallel to or even outside the defined performance settings of a festival” (166).
Existing approaches to festival scholarship and key arguments are outlined within the extensive introductory first chapter, leaving Chapter 2 to chart the various flows of political and economic power and cultural capital that circulate on the Lusophone festival circuit. This well-researched chapter represents a significant contribution to understandings of the operations of these specific festivals and to the institutional structures, pressures, and rhetoric of international theatre festivals in general. A potentially overwhelming amount of information on the three diverse festival sites and contexts is distilled for the reader through the lens of the transnational lusofonia project. McMahon begins by problematizing this transnational identity by charting its relationship with its colonial “lusotropicalist” antecedent before providing a detailed snapshot of the current balance of power on this circuit, which is informed by colonial legacies and economic globalization. The remainder of the chapter provides an introduction to the histories, agendas, and institutional structures of the three specific festivals under examination. Having layered the evolving geopolitical and socioeconomic realities of the festivals within the context of the lusofonia project, McMahon brings all of this critical insight to bear upon the performance analysis case studies that are discussed within the subsequent three chapters and the book's conclusion.
The remainder of the book takes a traditional format and familiar disciplinary approach of organizing discussion of performance case studies around common themes. McMahon selected her case studies by “focusing on theatre productions that seem to have retained their interventionist potential even in the context of the festival framework” (4). As such, the productions under discussion were chosen for the contributions that they make to reformulating and ultimately “recasting” the themes of race and colonial histories, gender inequality, and institutional imbalances of power that are at the book's center. Across these chapters McMahon provides detailed semiotic analyses—informed by artist interviews, participant observation, and local cultural contextualization—that succeed in opening up interpretative possibilities available to diverse festival audiences. There is a risk, however, that these case studies were selected to fit the author's argument, and it is difficult for a reader unfamiliar with these performances, festivals, and contexts to judge the extent to which these performances, and McMahon's reading of them, go against the grain of festival programming on this circuit.
There is a lot of information for the reader to take on board here, which is testament to the ambition of the book's scope and aims. McMahon manages to navigate the reader across the terrain while paying attention to her own positionality and to the various imbalances of power between artists and administrators, among artists, and between performers and audience members of different target cultures—a requirement for any intercultural study. In concentrating on one geographical gap in festival research, McMahon has indirectly highlighted many more, opening up other transnational affiliations and extending the reach beyond the postwar European modernist festivals that have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention thus far. Recasting Transnationalism, then, highlights important new directions for extending the field of festival scholarship.
