Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography ed. by Charlotte M. Canning and Thomas Postlewait, and: Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions ed. by Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (review)

Theatre historians have been transforming their field over the past thirty years, and as Jimmy Durante often observed during his performances, in one of the most profound performative analyses and historiographical truths of all times, "Everybody wants to be in on the act." As in any maturation process, the developments in theatre history have brought opportunities, issues, and identity crises.

Our research and our classrooms, like those of most of our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences, have been reshaped by—to list only the more salient forces—postmodern insights into language and narrative, cultural studies, performance studies, pressing ethical and social justice issues, and satellite-spun webs of global communication. Among the early works in our field that spurred changes were landmark anthologies of essays representing new historiographical issues and methods. These included Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie's Representing the Theatrical Past (1989), Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt's Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics (1991), and Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach's Critical Theory and Performance (1992). Important essays on historiography in Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey—including those by Postlewait, recast and offered with new work in his recent Cambridge Introduction to Historiography (2009)—also marked the journey. An anxious critique of some new works came in Robert D. Hume's monograph Reconstructing Contexts: The Aims and Principles of Archeo-Historicism (1999). Today, we and our students approach performance history aware of a variety of interpretive models and the performances of a variety of neglected peoples and cultures, historical and contemporary. We quarry the archive and also query its construction. We cross epistemological boundaries. We are also still in need of continuing conversations about theatre historiography. The two new anthologies of essays under review address the need in complementary ways.

In their introduction, Canning and Postlewait mark out five "modes of thinking" to use as we represent performances of the past: archive, time, space, narrative, and identity (16-26). In essays of exceptional quality, fifteen senior scholars engage with these in diverse ways as they work through their subjects. Each mode is illustrated by three essays—although more than one concept is sometimes in play in a given essay. The terms describe large conceptual framings, not particular interpretive strategies or subject areas, such as we find in feminist, postcolonial, or national identity studies. Those could be pursued under any one of the five rubrics and indeed are in the essays. One can find such modes in play in works in our field, emerging naturally as theatre historians ply the waters of their subjects. The careful articulation of them by Canning and Postlewait is helpful, especially today when we need to make all kinds of choices consciously from arrays of options. The five proposed are offered as especially germane to performance history, with borrowings from Louis O. Mink's Historical Understanding (1987). Among other modern touchstones were Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft (1953) and George G. Iggers's Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (1997). Of course, such fundamentals as the scrupulous weighing of evidence (or its absence) and recognizing common fallacies in reasoning will still be priorities, as should be the hard work of writing well. The volume's introduction, while prolix, instructively explains the editors' and contributors' collaborative development of the modes.

Catherine M. Cole, working with the idea of identity, reflects on hers as a researcher in Ghana and South Africa. Amid the shifting sands of global and national politics across two decades, her negotiations for access to documents or key people in these...