Since 2011, multiskilled “entreployees” have navigated the creative economy and forged employment for themselves in aquariums around the world. These mermaid performers plunge into tanks and portray chimerical “belonging” in the aquatic environment. While mermaid shows can easily be debunked as gimmicky commercial entertainment that exploits female sexuality, performers display exceptional skills and not only instill belief in mermaids in young visitors, but also raise awareness about ecological issues.

The US federal government spends over $80 billion a year on education, yet the electorate’s powers of reasoning are waning.

How are relocated witnesses in the US federal witness security program equipped to “hide in plain sight” and remain untraceable? Two models of social identity combine to account for this—social role play (Goffman) and performativity (Butler, Barad, Braidotti)—as an immanent process of “becoming-imperceptible.”

Christy's Minstrels set a new standard for minstrel performance in mid-Victorian Britain. Yet reception was far from monolithic: the cultural affiliations of audiences led to important regional differences in reception, including room for racialist perspectives complicated by religion, nationalism, class, and antislavery convictions.

Throughout its history, blackface minstrelsy has been at once potent and slippery, notoriously difficult to control as signification. When one race impersonates another and bills it as entertainment, reception becomes a barometer of ethnic hegemony, interracial politics, and power. The essays in this issue of TDR challenge and contribute to the historiography of blackface by examining previously untapped evidence, questioning current orthodoxies about the role of minstrelsy in US racial formations, and expanding the geographic scope of its performative genealogies.

In 2007, Routledge published Theory for Performance Studies as part of its Theory 4 series, listing Philip Auslander as author. When, in August, The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that much of the book was lifted word-for-word from the template for the series, Theory for Religious Studies by Timothy K. Beal and William E. Deal, TDR editor Richard Schechner convened via email and phone conversations a “ TDR Forum,” asking leaders in the field to respond to the book and the series. Schechner and other respondents address issues of plagiarism, corporate takeovers of academic publishing, and the dumbing down of performance studies, asking why a notable scholar such as Auslander would undertake such an egregious piece of “scholarship.” Deal and Beal answer some questions put to them by Schechner, and Routledge's Claire L'Enfant and Talia Rodgers offer their perspectives.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy authorized Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a plan for dealing with President Fidel Castro. The “Operation Northwoods” proposal is analyzed as a set of explicitly theatrical scenarios, scripting the pretext for invading a sovereign nation.

Performance historian Davis opens a window onto the civil defense movement that was a mainstay of Western governments from 1949 until the collapse of the Eastern Bloc from 1989 to 1991. Civil defense activities included playing out many “as if” scenarios wherein a “time out of time” reality was created, something that NATO members referred to as the “scope of play” (portée du jeu) and the “play of decisions” (jou des décisions). These activities, Davis argues, are inherently performative. But are they history?