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american studies
New World Drama
The Performative Commons
in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849
elizabeth maddock dillon
“Beginning with regicide and ending in riot, New World Drama revisits key
sites along the Atlantic rim to show how theatrical audiences, electing their
representatives from a ballot of dramatic characters, expanded the ‘public
sphere’ of the print world into a dynamic ‘performative commons.’ In this
innovative book, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon reframes discussion across
literature, history, cultural studies, and performance studies.”—JOSEPH
ROACH, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance
In New World Drama, Elizabeth
Maddock Dillon turns to the riotous
E lizabeth
M addock
scene of theatre in the eighteenth-
DILLON
N EW
century Atlantic world to explore the
W ORLD
creation of new publics. Moving from
D RAMA
England to the Caribbean to the early
the
PERFORMATIVE
COMMONS
United States, she traces the theatri-
in the
ATLANTIC
cal emergence of a collective body
WORLD
1649–1849
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.
Formations of United States Colonialism
alyosha goldstein, editor
“This indispensable anthology makes a significant intervention in multiple
fields by bridging what has often been seen as two separate processes,
the consolidation of U.S. control over the continent and the rise of formal
overseas interests at the end of the nineteenth century. The collected
essays offer rich and substantive directions for future investigations to
scholars interested in what American Indian and Indigenous studies bring
to American studies and U.S. imperial studies.”—JODI A. BYRD, author
of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Bridging the multiple histories and present-day iterations of U.S.
settler colonialism in North America and its overseas imperialism
in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the essays in this groundbreaking
volume underscore the United States as a fluctuating constellation
of geopolitical entities marked by overlapping and variable practices
of colonization. By rethinking the intertwined experiences of Native
Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chamorros, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Samoans,
and others subjected to U.S. imperial rule, the contributors consider
how the diversity of settler claims, territorial annexations, overseas
occupations, and circuits of slavery and labor—along with their attendant
forms of jurisprudence, racialization, and militarism—both facilitate
and delimit the conditions of colonial dispossession. Drawing on the
insights of critical indigenous and ethnic studies, postcolonial theory,
critical geography, ethnography, and social history, this volume emphasizes
the significance of U.S. colonialisms as a vital analytic framework
for understanding how and why the United States is what it is today.
Contributors
Julian Aguon, Joanne Barker, Berenika Byszewski, Jennifer Denetdale, Augusto Espiritu,
Alyosha Goldstein, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Barbara Krauthamer, Lorena Oropeza, Vicente
L. Rafael, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Lanny Thompson, Fa’anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa, Manu
Vimalassery
Alyosha Goldstein is Associate Professor of American Studies at the
University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The
Politics of Community Action during the American Century, also published
by Duke University Press.
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.
NEW AMERICANISTS
A Series Edited by Donald A. Pease
30
AMERICAN STUDIES/THEATER
August 360 pages, 17 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5341–6, $26.95/£17.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5324–9, $94.95/£62.00
AMERICAN STUDIES
October 424 pages, 14 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5810–7, $27.95/£17.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5796–4, $99.95/£65.00