Performing Religion in Public PDF
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Performing Religion in Public Performing Religion in Public Edited by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit and Joshua Edelman Palgrave macmillan Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit and Joshua Edelman 2013 Remaining chapters © Contributors 2013 Cover photograph © Christopher Schwalm 2005 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edtion 2013 978-1-137-33862-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-46406-7 ISBN 978-1-137-33863-1 ( eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137338631 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements viii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: The Public Problem of Religious Doings 1 Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman Part I Publics and the Non-Democratic State 1 The Market for Argument 27 Simon W. du Toit 2 Public Acts of Private Devotion: From Silent Prayer to Ceremonies in France’s Early Seminaries 49 Joy Palacios 3 The Durban Passion Play: Religious Performance, Power and Difference 71 Michael Lambert and Tamantha Hammerschlag Part I Discussion 87 Part II Visceral Publics 4 Church on/as Stage: Stewart Headlam’s Rhetorical Theology 97 Tom Grimwood and Peter Yeandle 5 The Intolerable, Intimate Public of Contemporary American Street Preaching 117 Joshua Edelman 6 Faith, Fright, and Excessive Feeling 134 Kris Messer Part II Discussion 153 Part III Publics and Commodification 7 Congregations, Audiences, Actors: Religious Performance and the Individual in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nottingham 163 Jo Robinson and Lucie Sutherland 8 Sufi Ceremonies in Private and Public 179 Esra Çizmeci v vi Contents 9 From Religion to Culture: The Performative Puˉjaˉ and Spectacular Religion in India 194 Saayan Chattopadhyay Part III Discussion 209 Part IV Ephemeral Publics 10 Coming Out of the (Confessional) Closet: Christian Performatives, Queer Performativities 219 Stephen D. Seely 11 Performing Jewish Sexuality: Mikveh Spaces in Orthodox Jewish Publics 237 Shira Schwartz 12 Busking and the Performance of Generosity: A Political Economy of the Spiritual Gift 256 Claire Maria Chambers Part IV Discussion 278 Index 286 List of Figures 1.1 Paul’s Cross Churchyard in 1600 34 7.1 Nottingham Journal, 17 July 1865 171 9.1 Durga Puja street scene 198 9.2 Durga Puja – tourist consumers inside a pandal 200 12.1 One of the numbered music notes painted on the Market sidewalk to indicate an official busking spot, December 2010 270 12.2 Blues musician Reggie Miles plays his saw and sings for an audience of one, December 2010 273 vii Acknowledgements Work for this project has been aided and supported by a great number of people as well as some institutions. In particular, we would like to thank members of the Performance and Religion Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research; members of the Religion and Theatre Focus Group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; the Sogang University Office of Faculty Research for its 2012 Research Support grant; T.H.P. Haynes and B. Matthews of the Tonbridge School in Tonbridge, Kent, UK; Amy Champ; Sacha Lake; Edmund B. Lingan; Lea Mühlstein; Kate Newey; Jeffrey Richards; Carolyn Roark; Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen; Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers; and Paula Kennedy. Permission to reprint images has come from Peter Blayney and the Nottingham Local Studies Library, Nottingham City Council. Our cover image is by Chris Schwalm, whose website is www.cjschwalm.com. As editors, we are very grateful to our contributors for their scholarship, wisdom, work and insights. We acknowledge how much this project has benefited from our collaborators, partners and interlocutors. Responsibility for mistakes, however, remains our own. viii Notes on Contributors Claire Maria Chambers is Assistant Professor of Drama in the Department of English and Linguistics at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, where she teaches modern American and British drama. Her research investigates the influence of apophatic spiritualities (for example, negative theology, Christian mysticism and Orthodox iconography) on theories of presence and representation, but she is interested in how these practices refute transcendence. She analyses the performance of religion in contemporary culture and politics through the enacted rhetorics of liturgy and ritual, and approaches the playwright as performance theorist. Her articles can be found in Performance Research, Performance and Spirituality, Liturgy and Ecumenica. Saayan Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at Baruipur College, Calcutta University, India. After a stint as a journalist, he is currently engaged in research in media, ethnicity and gender. He has published articles and book chapters in Studies in South Asian Film and Media, The Journal of Contemporary Literature, Sarai Reader, Senses of Cinema, Proteus: A Journal of Ideas, and chapters for books published by IGI 11 Global, Sussex Academic Press, and VDM Publishing, among others. His research interests include postcolonial journalism, popular culture, performative theory, and masculinity studies. Esra Çizmeci, holder of the Sacred Heart Scholarship, pursues her research on Sufi ritual performance as a PhD student at Roehampton University, UK. She holds an MFA in Acting and an MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College. Esra also received a Buchwald Fellowship from CUNY to research Tiyatro Boyali Kus, a Turkish theatre company, focusing on their use of Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. She worked with LOTOS Collective of UK to collaborate on Triangulated City, a Live Art performance project in Beirut with Zoukak Theatre Company & Cultural Association of Lebanon. Currently, Esra works as a lecturer at Istanbul Aydın University. Simon W. du Toit works in theatre as an actor, director, teacher and scholar. Currently he is an Outstanding Scholars Advisor and also a Sessional Instructor in the School of Dramatic Art at the University of Windsor, Canada. His research interests focus on the intersections between cultural performance, religion and the theatre; and he is also a member of the peer review board of Ecumenica. His work has been published in Ecumenica, Liturgy, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. ix x Notes on Contributors Joshua Edelman is Fellow in Research and Enterprise at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK. His research focuses on the functions of theatre and performance in the reli- gious and political systems of the contemporary West. He is a member of the Project on European Theatre Systems, works with the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews, and currently serves as co-convenor of the Performance and Religion Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His research has appeared in a range of journals from Nordic Theatre Studies to Liturgy. Tom Grimwood is a Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Cultural Theory at the University of Cumbria, UK. His research focuses on cultural hermeneutics and, in particular, the formative role of ambiguity within acts of interpre- tation. He has applied this to a range of subjects, from the work of irony in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to the paradoxes of embodiment in Simone de Beauvoir and Catherine of Siena. His work has appeared in journals such as Angelaki, The Journal for Cultural Research, Feminist Theology and The British Journal for the History of Philosophy. His book Irony, Misogyny and Interpretation was published in 2012. Tamantha Hammerschlag is a lecturer in the School of The Arts (Drama and Performance Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. She has written articles on the body and performance and theatre aesthetics. In addition to her academic work, she is a playwright, theatre director and designer. Michael Lambert was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Religious Studies, Philosophy and Classics (Classics) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He is presently lecturing at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of The Classics and South African Identities (2011) and of book chapters and articles on comparative ancient Greek and traditional Zulu religion. Other research interests include gender and sexual- ity in antiquity, and Greek and Roman literature. General interests include music, languages and travel: he is director of the University Madrigal Singers, teaches Spanish and has led many overseas Classics tours to coun- tries such as Greece, Italy and Turkey. Kris Messer holds an MFA in playwriting from Brown University and a PhD in Theatre History and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is an Instructor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art, USA and a Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. She has done research on Christian Community-based performance in North
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