Reviewed by:

• Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism ed. by Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes
• Scott Magelssen

Professional wrestling might strike some readers as a sensational topic on the kitschy frontier of performance studies, and to these readers it will make sense that this edited collection found its home in Richard Schechner’s Enactment series with Seagull Books, the purview of which “encompasses performance in as many of its aspects and realities as there are authors able to write about them.” Those in the know, however, will find the twelve essays in Professional Wrestling: Politics and Populism to be a thoroughly serious investigation of wrestling’s relationship with populism—both on the right, as seen in Trumpism and Brexit, and on the left, as seen in, say, Indigenous and pro-worker movements in Bolivia (as described in Nell Haynes’s essay). And they will welcome it as only the latest entry in a rigorous scholarly conversation that goes back to Sharon Mazer’s foundational Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (1998), and that has enjoyed scholarly legitimacy since Roland Barthes took up the topic in his “World of Wrestling” essay in 1957.

Refreshingly, then, editors Sharon Mazer, Heather Levi, Eero Laine, and Nell Haynes get right to the heart of their assertions within the first sentences of the introduction, without feeling the need to trot out the conventional paragraphs justifying their subject as real scholarship. Professional wrestling is “intrinsically political,” they write. But, moreover, it “captures the currents of daily life, distils them into a set of basic, easily recognizable and repeatable figurations, and replays them in a kind of low-art parody for spectators who, in playing along, engage in an ongoing, performative debate about what it all means” (1). Indeed, by the end of the volume, readers will be equipped to use wrestling to understand everything from Donald Trump’s improbable rise to power (as treated in essays by Heather Levi, Shana Toor, and others), to the Occupy movement (Eric Kennedy), to why some academics succeed and others don’t (Larry DeGaris).

Hitting the ground running as it does, Professional Wrestling’s introduction also dispenses with the formalities of acclimating new readers to discourse concerning the squared circle, like providing definitions of its terms of art (putting over, heat, smarks) or important junctures in the history of wrestling entertainment (e.g., the fans’ disapprobation [End Page 257] of Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 34). Patient newbies (who haven’t already scrambled to read readily available primers on the internet) will find that the individual contributions do slow down to explicate and unpack some of wrestling’s specialized language. Levi and Mazer each take the time to explain “heel” and “face” in the volume’s first two essays, although they respectfully disagree on which term more accurately describes Trump in his 2016 campaign and the first years of his presidency. And Laine devotes his essay to an analysis of “kayfabe” and fans’ complicated acknowledgment of it, through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” to advance the concept as a critical tool for analyzing performance in everyday life (197).

As a scholarly intervention into current politics and global crises, the discussions of wrestling and populism are immediate and timely. At the same time, the editors wrote in January 2020, as Professional Wrestling went to press “three years into Donald Trump’s presidency,” that they “do not know what the world will look like when this book reaches its readers” (221, 22). They certainly could not have anticipated what would happen in the next twelve months as the book entered production. It seems remarkable now, on the one hand, that Bernie Sanders gets several mentions as Trump’s biggest foil after Hillary Clinton, but Joe Biden, who would beat Trump in the November 2020 election, doesn’t have a single appearance. On the other hand, chillingly, even though the editors could never have predicted the populist uprising of January 6, 2021, the book’s contention that “voters, like wrestling fans, find surprising ways of...

 审阅者：

• 
  职业摔跤：政治与民粹主义编辑。作者：莎朗·梅泽、希瑟·莱维、埃罗·莱恩和内尔·海恩斯
•  斯科特·麦格尔森

职业摔跤可能会让一些读者觉得这是表演研究中俗气前沿的一个耸人听闻的话题，对这些读者来说，这本编辑过的合集在理查德·谢赫纳 (Richard Schechner) 与海鸥图书公司 (Seagull Books) 合作的《表演》系列中找到了自己的家，该系列的范围“涵盖了表演中的表演”。有多少作者能够写出它的各个方面和现实。”然而，知情者会发现《职业摔跤：政治与民粹主义》中的十二篇文章是对摔跤与民粹主义关系的彻底严肃的调查——既有右翼的，如特朗普主义和英国脱欧，也有左翼的，如特朗普主义和英国脱欧所见。例如，玻利维亚的原住民和亲工人运动（如内尔·海恩斯的文章所述）。他们会欢迎它，因为它只是一场严谨的学术对话的最新条目，这场对话可以追溯到莎朗·梅泽的基础《职业摔跤：运动与景观》（1998），自从罗兰·巴特在他的《摔跤世界》中讨论这个话题以来，它就享有学术合法性。摔跤》1957年的文章。

令人耳目一新的是，编辑莎伦·梅泽 (Sharon Mazer)、希瑟·莱维 (Heather Levi)、埃罗·莱恩 (Eero Laine) 和内尔·海恩斯 (Nell Haynes) 在引言的第一句话中就直击了他们主张的核心，而不觉得需要用传统的段落来证明他们的主题是真正的学术。他们写道，职业摔跤“本质上是政治性的”。但是，此外，它“捕捉了日常生活的潮流，将它们提炼成一组基本的、易于识别和可重复的形象，并以一种低艺术模仿的方式重播它们，让观众在玩耍时参与到一种持续的过程中。” ，关于这一切意味着什么的表演性辩论”（1）。事实上，到本书结尾时，读者将能够使用摔跤来理解一切，从唐纳德·特朗普不可思议的崛起（正如希瑟·莱维、莎娜·图尔等人的文章中所论述的那样），到占领运动（埃里克·肯尼迪） ，为什么有些学者成功而另一些学者却没有（拉里·德加里斯）。

《职业摔跤》的介绍一脉相承，也省去了让新读者适应有关方圆的讨论的手续，比如提供其艺术术语的定义（摔倒、加热、标记）或职业摔跤历史上的重要时刻。摔角娱乐（例如，摔角狂热 34 上粉丝对罗曼·雷恩斯的不满[第 257 页]）。耐心的新手（还没有在互联网上阅读现成的入门读物）会发现，个人贡献确实会减慢解释和解开摔跤的一些专业语言的速度。莱维和梅泽在本书的前两篇文章中各自花时间解释了“脚跟”和“脸”，尽管他们对于哪个术语更准确地描述特朗普 2016 年竞选和总统任期的头几年存在不同意见。莱恩在他的文章中，通过劳伦·伯兰特“残酷的乐观主义”的视角，对“kayfabe”和粉丝对它的复杂认知进行了分析，以推动这一概念成为分析日常生活表现的关键工具（197）。

作为对当前政治和全球危机的学术干预，对摔跤和民粹主义的讨论是直接而及时的。与此同时，编辑们在 2020 年 1 月《职业摔跤》杂志“唐纳德·特朗普就任总统三年”付印时写道，他们“不知道当这本书到达读者手中时，世界会是什么样子”(221, 22 ）。他们当然无法预料到这本书投入制作后的十二个月内会发生什么。现在看来值得注意的是，一方面，伯尼·桑德斯多次被提及为继希拉里·克林顿之后特朗普最大的陪衬，但将在 2020 年 11 月大选中击败特朗普的乔·拜登却没有露面一次。另一方面，令人不寒而栗的是，尽管编辑们永远无法预测 2021 年 1 月 6 日的民粹主义起义，但书中的论点是“选民，就像摔跤迷一样，会找到令人惊讶的方式……