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Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (review)

The next two chapters, on the French Enlightenment and Revolution, respectively, focus on the book’s central question: Are communities composed of individuals briefly united to action, or are humans inherently social? “Geneva: Rousseau versus Voltaire” (chapter 5) analyzes the life, works, and rivalries of these two esteemed philosophers and dramatists of the late eighteenth century. As Wiles points out, both Voltaire and Rousseau valued citizenship, but approached the concept from opposite directions. Voltaire, a champion of public theatre, stressed individual liberty as the key to political freedom, while Rousseau came to favor dancing in public festivals, thinking of theatre as too politically volatile, capable of dissolving social bonds. Here, their conflict, emblematic of the troubled end of the ancien regime, is played out against the backdrop of a heavily bifurcated Geneva. In the sixth chapter, “Paris and the French Revolution,” Wiles charts the reconfigurations of the term “citizenship” through the shifting cultural and political fortunes of postrevolutionary France—a period when being a citizen was a high-stakes affair. Here, Wiles’s linkage between spectatorship and politics pays off: reading theatregoing alongside the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, he discusses how revolutionaries likened being an active audience member to being an active citizen. Both were visible performances constructing a new body politic.