Editorial: Casting and identity

This special issue brings together scholars, artists, and activists who are concerned with casting and identity in theatre, on screen, and in ritual performances. Its essays, interview, artwork and roundtable attend to the process, resulting representations, and reception of casting, framing it as “inherently a political act” (Syler Citation2019, 4). Precisely how the selection of actors for roles is political is a live question throughout the issue, in which casting is critiqued as work, representation, ideology, and ritual surrogation: casting intersects these planes of experience without reconciling their contradictions.