John Ruskin's Political Economy Book

The distinction between the archive and the repertoire as different modes of conveying knowledge and culture is a useful one, though I am not convinced it is as distinct from the written/oral language divide as Taylor would like to believe. She distinguishes between the archive as the set of physical artifacts--including written texts, relics, recordings, etc.--and the repertoire of scenarios and performed behaviors passed down through cultures that make communication and meaning-making practices intelligible. Picking up from postcolonialism, Taylor emphasizes how the repertoire has been largely ignored as a mode of legitimate cultural, historical, and embodied knowledge in a logocentric Western culture, and how utilizing the repertoire as a means of viscerally shared experience can bind colonized or oppressed peoples in a shared community. But she also argues that one of the chief functions of performance studies is to reintroduce the repertoire as a crucial and legitimate supplemental resource alongside the archive.

The main reason I rated this book a three rather than higher is that the other stated goal of this book is to intervene in Latin American studies, particularly as regards performance. I don't work on Latin American literature, and there are problems with paralleling Latin American lit/drama/performance with the works I do study. For instance, because of the sophisticated degree of racial distinction introduced by the Spanish caste system in Latin America, the postcolonial concerns of Latin America will generally be very different than those of Africa or Ireland, where such systems didn't really exist (apartheid South Africa might be the exception, but even then I think the classification system served a different political purpose in a different context than the Spanish caste system).