What Space Is This Time? Historiography in the Space of History

In asking the question embedded in the title, this article explores the tension between inertia and change in cultural historical studies. Inertia in this context does not mean inactive or inert (i.e., without active properties), but the structural constraints that are revealed when codes, forms, practices, roles, etc., contest. What kinds and forms of socio-cultural knowledge, values, or structures are maintained, developed, or abandoned across geographies and throughout a system’s history? Rather than thinking in terms of core and margin and related binaries of difference and “othering,” inertia and change as historiographical strategies focus on the dynamics that affect social systems and structures, preserving some systems to conserve energy while introducing or forsaking others. In the process of exploring these spaces in historiographical time, this article draws historical examples from attempts among scholars and performers in the United States in the latter nineteenth century to stage “American” histories that stored, rejected, and created past and contemporaneous historical spaces at such sites as Lewis Henry Morgan’s view of Ancient Society (1877), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography

This essay uses the notion of necroepistemology to expose the killing of the other as executed by the neoliberal historiography in Ethiopia. Utilizing Fanonian negative dialectics, it critiques the ahistorical, immaterial, and reified object, as well as universal history, promoted by the official Ethiopian historiography’s absolute time, space, and matter. It does so to reveal the ways in which the enduring social questions and new imaginations are dismissed by this historiography as the work of the global-local left. To counterbalance this practice, I return to the 1974 Ethiopian socialist revolution and to the staging of Ethiopian socialism as a critical transnational rethinking of the human in the country. At the same time, attending to the everyday struggle of women performers in both the imperial and revolutionary spaces, the essay reminds us how the revolutionary practice, which had envisioned a new social human, ended up marking female performers’ bodies as dangerous for the socialist movement. Revealing the ways in which women performers collaborated with and fought against a male revolutionary figure, this essay ends with a call to respond to the current necroepistemic moment to draw attention to the historically vulnerable people who are dying in Ethiopia in the here and now.

Theater/Performance Historiography: A Preamble

The introduction to the issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny which gestures towards current work on theater/performance historiography published in the Anglo-American academe. Reflecting on insights about the complex nature and the mediality of historical knowledge, we would like to offer a collection of essays which, in their singularity, draw attention to internal contradictions prompted by tensions between 1) time, space, and matter, which are used to frame academic practices, and 2) events and objects, which are determined historically not only by past and present imaginations but also by how time, space, and matter function within the field of theater/performance historiography. We ask the following questions: How are we to think about the ways of housing the past (the archive, the event, the object) and the experience of the past (time, space, matter)? How are we to think about historiography in ways that are not only not dualistic (e.g., self and other, mainstream and margin), but that facilitate seeing historical subjects as unsettled by (rather than settled in) time, as riddled with contradictions (rather than reflective of a status quo), and as constructs of meaning (rather than as regulated thought)? And finally, how are we to negotiate the dynamics and the contradictions between multiple temporalities and spatialities housed in one and the same object or event?

Myśleć z troską: Teatr, archiwum, historiografia

Artykuł stanowi recenzję zbiorowego tomu The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography (2020). Recenzentka skupia się na założeniach ideologicznych i metodologicznych redaktorek ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem inspiracji zwrotami archiwalnym i afektywnym w humanistyce. Wydobywa z książki wątki akcentujące polityczno-ideologiczne aspekty pracy z archiwum teatru, przede wszystkim relacje władzy ukryte w historycznych dokumentach oraz wieloaspektowe związki badacza z przedmiotem badań. Zwraca uwagę na możliwości problematyzacji pozycji historyka i na znaczenie społeczno-politycznych kontekstów teatru w historiografii.

Unisono

Artykuł stanowi recenzję niedawno wydanego tomu The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography (2021). Przedstawiając zwięzłą historię powstania publikacji, jej układ i mozaikową koncepcję, główną problematykę i metodę, autorka przybliża niektóre teksty (szczególnie interesujące dla polskiego czytelnika). Tom, jak każde monumentalne przedsięwzięcie, budzi też zastrzeżenia; te dotyczą głównie realizacji postulatu polifonicznego i odnowicielskiego podejścia do historii widowisk oraz ograniczeń krytyki instytucjonalnej (jej optyka miewa również „ślepy punkt”).

«Lemma»: Jay Wright’s Idiorrhythmic American Theater

This essay presents Jay Wright’s play Lemma as a historiographical challenge and also as a piece of idiorrhythmic American theater. Consonant with his life’s work of poetry, dramatic literature, and philosophical writing, Lemma showcases Wright’s expansive intellectual framework with which he constructs vivid, dynamic, and complex visions of American life. The “America” conjured here is steeped in many traditions, traditions typically kept distinct by academic discourse, such as West African cosmology, Enlightenment philosophy, jazz music theory, Ancient Greek theater, neo-Baroque modifications of Christian theology, pre-Columbian indigenous ways of knowing, etymological connections between Spanish and Gaelic, the materiality of John Donne’s poetry, and the lives of enslaved Africans in the New World. What is the purpose of Wright’s theatrical conjuration? How do we approach a text with such a diverse body of intellectual and literary sources? The author answers these questions and ends with a call to treat Lemma as a much needed point of view that opens lines of sight into Black and American theater far outside the well-worn territory of the Black Arts Movement.

Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology: Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Historiography

The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.

Performance, Politics, and Historiography in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune

American echoes of the Paris Commune have been muffled by the nation’s obsession with freedom at the expense of solidarity, but performative responses to social upheaval, including drama, parades, and protests, have tested the boundaries of public space and multiple temporalities from 1871 to 2021. This article notes traces of the Commune in the writings and performances of nineteenth century American anarchists but analyzes this legacy primarily in the 2012 performance of Brecht’s The Days of the Commune (1949) at New York sites claimed by the Occupy Movement in 2011. It also uses the argument of Brecht’s contemporary Ernst Bloch for cultural action grounded in an understanding of historical disappointment to anticipates setbacks while maintaining hope for future revolution. The paper delineates five theses on the politics of time: 1) the dramatic appeal of the clean break hides the tension between gradual evolution and a sudden event that ruptures the long span of history (Badiou); 2) historiography, the narrative that turns data into evidence, challenges the illusion of objectivity and thus a simple split between timely intervention and untimely interference with the established order (Nietzsche); 3) ana-chronology, the logic of untimeliness reads contemporaneity as companionship between events and agents across different times and places (Barthes); 4) recollecting history requires acts of forgetting, which shatter the constraints of the past to meet demands of the present (Renan, Nietzsche); 5) the politics of time entails the politics of place and thus requires the analysis of multiple temporalitieslayered on one site as well as political acts and performance in distinct places.

Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.