Editor's Note

Editor's Note Michelle Liu Carriger I'm writing this in November 2022 and the sense of ongoing, nigh-chronic crisis is palpable. 48,000 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are on strike across the entire University of California system, including my own TAs in my fall quarter class here at UCLA. The final results of the November 2022 US election are not yet certain, but both major parties ran on platforms dedicated to crisis, and I've just returned from two simultaneously held conferences – American Society for Theatre Research and American Studies Association – in a city no stranger to humanitarian and environmental crises: New Orleans. The two conferences' respective themes both referenced extremity too: "Catastrophe" and "The Roof is On Fire," respectively. Sometimes I can't tell whether the sense of consistent crisis is a result of living through particularly stressful times or simply what it feels like to be a member of the academic profession so that my sense of a growing crisis mentality is actually just maturation into the permanent crisis of adulthood and career. Whether new or perennial, a pervasive era of crisis requires resources addressed toward it. The multi-authored article "The Ethics of Care in Pedagogy and Performance: Intersections with Disability Justice, Intimacy Work, and Theatre of the Oppressed" by Kate Busselle, Erin Kaplan, and Samuel Yates speaks to some urgent modes of facing the sense of crisis within theatre classrooms and theatres by combining a set of engagement modes uniquely geared toward theatre and performance classrooms and settings. The remaining three articles comprise the special section Race & Fantasy. That the constructs of "race" have no identifiable biological bases has been widely accepted in academic circles, and yet obviously the revelation of race as phantasmatic does not undo race's real structuring effect on contemporary (and historical) society. Of course, theatre scholars and practitioners well know that the imaginary, the fantastical, and the feigned (that is, theatre and the theatrical) have always had the capacity for real effect and affect—commanding capital, attention, and political import. Ellen Samuels coined the phrase "fantasies of identification" in her eponymous book to describe the persistent irrational belief that various markers of ability, race, and gender can be medically or scientifically located on the body, even as these attempts are always eventually thwarted. Samuels demonstrates how 'fantasy' (the unreal, unrealizable wishful thinking) resides (seemingly paradoxically) in the quest for scientific, irrefutable empirical truth. In a much broader sense, however, we might argue that hegemonic western theatre's engagement with race has been fundamentally imbricated with a much more basic notion of fantasy for centuries: the act of fictionalizing and dramatizing imagined scenarios of racial and cultural otherness is foundational to the legacy of staged entertainment. Just a short list of staged race fantasies might include Shakespeare's Moors and [End Page ix] Marlowe's Tamerlane, the candy-themed world tour of The Nutcracker ballet, British pantomime and Blackface Minstrelsy, and their heirs: Broadway musicals like Porgy & Bess, The King & I, Flower Drum Song, and Miss Saigon. Theatres' racial fantasies have endured up and down fortunes over the years—hailed as fascinating, funny, alluring, or exotic entertainments; as important means of learning about and appreciating global "Others," or as fair representation of a multicultural society. The vast majority of recent critique (both on and beyond theatre) has rightly articulated manifold ways that fantasized representations of race are problematic. However, for an art form premised on the power and truth-value of falsity and fiction, theater must necessarily have a more nuanced relationship with the notion of "true representation" when it comes to race, especially since race itself consists of fantasies made performatively into concrete realities. The articles here deal with the complex associations between performance and race, across the 20th and 21st centuries. Mia Levenson opens the special section with "That's the Way Eugenicists Play," an article which demonstrates how early 20th century eugenicists distilled the racial fantasies of eugenics into camp fun and games. Campy, yes, but literally at camp! Levenson's work uncovers a fascinating example of race & fantasy that I never dreamed of when I formulated the call for papers. Next, Angela...

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