Editorial Comment

As the preparations for this issue are reaching completion, the United States is experiencing an unprecedented political shift. During the week I wrote this people were debating whether to watch or boycott the presidential inauguration, and millions more were preparing to take to the streets the day after the inauguration in peaceful protest. By the time this issue is published the country will have a new president, but one who has divided and stirred up more controversy than any global leader in recent memory. As I have engaged with these essays, all of which point to important and/or overlooked historical data, figures, and performances or recall critical moments that foreshadow our neoliberal times, it has been difficult to accept this "post-fact" climate. While information is interpretable and history is in need of expansion to become more inclusive, the notion of "alternative facts" is anathema to all we do as academic researchers and scholars. The new administration's attempt to claim these alternative facts is just another way of framing lies, and this new order emanating from the United States needs a great deal of fact-checking. This election has caused (or made too clear) a schism that will take a long time to heal, and this moment is just the beginning.

It is then necessary to return to moments in history to show how crucial it is to unearth the forgotten and set records straight. The authors in this issue have done just this: they reach back to moments forgotten and people overlooked; they turn to data analysis and to a life cut too short to fulfill an extraordinary vision; they have in some cases sought alternative lines of narrative, but ones that complicate, correct, or augment the record.

Now, days after the historic women's street marches that galvanized people across the globe, it is fitting to open the issue with an analysis of street theatre in David Calder's essay "2CV Théâtre: Transgression, Nostalgia, and the Negative Space of French Street Theatre." This essay returns us to post-1968 France to describe the theatre company Théâtre de l'Unité's touring production of 2CV Théâtre—a tiny theatre within a Citroën automobile that was seen in twenty countries during the years 1977 to 1997. Calder's retracing of the origin stories of French street theatre to both the student protests of May 1968 and a premodern carnivalesque argues that 2CV Théâtre resists and complicates the populist (street) versus elite (indoor) origin stories. This theatre, according to the essay, works almost homeopathically by playing up the elitism, but also theatrically, as it ironically comments on the boundaries between, for example, actor and spectator. I was struck by a quote in the essay, that the company's performers "have not taken to the streets to escape theatricality so much as they have taken theatricality to the streets," and find it a potent strategy to challenge divisions in the contemporary moment. Calder pushes historiographic assumptions about street theatre through this historically under-examined example, and suggests a more complex narrative emerging from industrial modernity to trouble the populist versus elitist divide through performance interwoven with the automobile industry.

Katie Johnson's "An Algerian in Paris: Habib Benglia's The Emperor Jones" brings to historical attention the largely overlooked work of Algerian-French actor Habib Benglia, specifically in his portrayal of Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1923, reprised in 1950). As Johnson notes, Benglia, "the first African actor to appear on a French national stage," was well-documented in the international press for this performance, but has not been significantly covered in theatre scholarship. Her essay analyzes aspects of Benglia's "remains," such as a misfiled press photograph, commentary, reviews (often incorrect or full of assumptions), and Benglia's legacy as a nightclub owner and dancer in Paris, to subvert notions of colonial subjectivity and narratives of empire. Her exacting research not only introduces Benglia as a key actor in this role and contributes to the performance history of O'Neill's play, but also importantly argues how these performative remains can...