Table Of ContentPerforming 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
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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
