Performance Literature and the Written Word: Lost in Transcription?

This number contains the second group of articles on Performance Literature that form volume 20 of Oral Tradition, and that began life as papers for the workshops on Literature and Performance in the School of African and Asian Studies (SOAS), London University, part of the larger AHRB (Arts and Humanities Research Board) Centre for African and Asian Literature. As outlined in the Special Editor’s Column in volume 20, no.1, the workshops explored the phenomenon of literature in performance and performance literature defined as literature written, created, or composed to be experienced in performance. It involved a large group of specialists in literatures and cultures from African and Asian societies as well as European. Papers, discussants, questions, and successive workshops generated further research questions, and the selection of articles here, as in the previous number, is informed by those discussions, as well as reflecting the same spirit of interdisciplinary research. The core questions surround the relation of the various types of written text to the performance, or the performance to the various attempts to record or memorialize that performance, and the social or cultural context of that relationship. One of the most striking features that emerges in this collection of studies is the richness and variety of links and relations between a “text” and the performance, the different levels and types of textuality and of their relations to any performance. Studies examine how oral performance might generate written texts of several different registers (see especially Idema, Shirane, and Gerstle in this number), and the written texts themselves have a variety of roles in relation to the live performance (part memorial, “complete” articulation, deliberately partial rendition, edited and partial release, and more). These differences are not so much a function