Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha. New York: Routledge, 2014; 236 pp. $125.00 cloth, $44.95 paper, e-book available
Rustom Bharucha dedicates the first chapter of Terror and Performance to Jean Genet and the last to Mahatma Gandhi. In this way, his rich series of reflections is bookended by a literary criminal and political saint, a (former) small-time crook and a (former) lawyer, a champion of stateless nations and a nation-builder, a traitor and a martyr... It seems that oppositions between them could go on forever. Even when Bharucha finally mentions them in the same sentence towards the end of the book, it is to illustrate their opposition, not similarity: here, one G stands for theatrical irony, and the other for sacrificial Truth (165). What brings Genet and Gandhi together is their queerness in relation to the world of letters and the world of politics, respectively. Their simultaneous position of marginality and excess in relation to their own historical and institutional situations came from their unique capacities for self-renunciation, so rare and precious in the contemporary world of literature, politics, and especially theatre. In Bharucha’s book, the route from Genet to Gandhi winds through the treacherous world of contemporary international politics and performance. This itinerary takes the reader away from the beaten paths of scholarly discourse on the two key terms indicated in the book’s title.