The trouble with The Trouble With Community

Abstract

In his Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization, the Calcutta-based critic and dramaturg Rustom Bharucha makes minced meat of the global culture industry, including the academic post-colonialism machinery and the seemingly 'untouchable' super star scholars that lubricate and legitimate it (Bharucha 2001). Inspired by his challenging thoughts and by Graham Huggan (2001), I take the liberty to lock horns with Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport on the concept of 'community' in a provisional attempt to carve out some sorely needed theoretical space for what we in Holland for lack of a better term still continue to call community- or neighborhood theatre.