Virality, Plurality, and the Future of Discourse

Virality, Plurality, and the Future of Discourse: A Conversation with Rustom Bharucha Rustom Bharucha (bio) and Carla Neuss (bio) This interview was conducted in June 2023 at Yale University through the support and generosity of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, UCLA, and ATHE; it has been edited for clarity and length. Carla Neuss (CN): So, the first thing I would love to talk about is your Theatre Journal article on Shakespeare. It was published all the way back in 2004, but it was really exciting for us as the editors to get the data on the most cited pieces in the history of the journal and see that yours was one of them. And I think in your email you said that was news to you, how influential it has been. So, I'd love to talk about that essay and if you feel that we are still having those same struggles with intercultural theatre today? Have we moved the needle at all? I would also love to hear you speak about your latest book, The Second Wave [Seagull Books, 2022], and how you see the pandemic affecting the discourse in our field. Then I want to pick up on something that came up when we spoke previously, about the term "diversity." And, finally, I am thinking about the role of scholarship in terms of publications and articles over the course of your career and would love to hear your thoughts on that as well as the new media approaches you've been using. Rustom Bharucha (RB): Thank you very much for this opportunity to have a conversation with you. I'd like to begin by congratulating Theatre Journal. You're celebrating your 75th anniversary, and I think that's quite a record. Theatre Journal has been a solid resource for theater academic research over the years. I mean, one always turns to Theatre Journal as a point of reference, and it's been sustained through any number of editors. I like the feeling that it has not been stuck with one editor. I think that the "one editor syndrome" can go terribly wrong because that one editor more often than not calls the shots. Instead, I respond more positively to a systematized turnover of editors. This seems to be more organic, more democratic. And so, congratulations to Theatre Journal for sustaining itself over the years with several editorial visions. [End Page E-71] I'd like to reflect a little bit on journals. So, in my youth, I used to read journals like Theatre Quarterly, before it became New Theatre Quarterly, and other journals as well. And there was something very topical about these journals; you felt that it was of the here and now. Unfortunately, because of the mechanisms of the publishing industry today, things have changed a great deal. So, all the copy of any issue has to come in much earlier and it takes a long time before articles get published, which means it's very difficult for journals now to retain that earlier kind of immediacy and topicality, because there are new pressures in terms of publishing and marketing. In effect, a lot of journals today are like books. They're no different. When I write for a journal, I sometimes feel, "I'm putting in as much work in this article as I would if I had been writing a chapter in my own book." There are too many editorial demands, contracts to be signed, permissions for copyright, back-and-forth correspondence, and so on. I think it is a sign of our times that journals, in a sense, are in jeopardy. They're under duress as there are new kinds of demands in the publishing world for a quick turnover of issues. Having acknowledged this, I must say that Theatre Journal has retained some of its vibrant identity as a journal. It continues to provide a mix of things: there are scholarly articles, book and performance reviews, which are really important. Looking back, my first review [for Theatre Journal] was on a production of The Inspector General. Although I haven't written much for Theatre Journal, I've consulted it for my

Conversation · Linguistics · Sociology · Communication · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · Political theory and Gramsci · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies