Representing the past : an introduction on five themes / THOMAS POSTLEWAIT AND CHARLOTTE CANNING -- ARCHIVE. Playbills and the theatrical public sphere / CHRISTOPHER B. BALME -- The making of theatre history / SUSAN BENNETT -- Writing the unwritten : Morris dance and theatre history / CLAIRE SPONSLER -- TIME. Cyclic perseverance and linear mobility of theatrical events / WILLMAR SAUTER -- Performative time / TRACY C. DAVIS -- Representing India's pasts : time, culture, and the problems of performance historiography / APARNA DHARWADKER -- SPACE. Space and theatre history / MARVIN CARLSON -- Seeing is believing : the historian's use of images / DAVID WILES -- When "everything counts" : experimental performance and performance historiography / SHANNON JACKSON -- IDENTITY. History's thresholds : stories from Africa / CATHERINE M. COLE -- The high stakes of identity : Lorraine Hansberry's Follow the drinking gourd and Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus / HARRY J. ELAM, JR. -- Fifty years of staging a founding father : political theatre, dramatic history, and the question of representation in modern China / XIAOMEI CHEN -- NARRATIVE. Textual evidances / SUSAN L. FOSTER -- Narratives of nostalgia : Oriental evasions about the London stage / BRIAN SINGLETON -- Reenacting events to narrate theatre history / BRUCE McCONACHIE.
How do historians represent the past? How do theatre historians represent performance events? The fifteen challenging essays in Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography focus on the fundamental epistemological conditions and procedures that serve as the foundational ideas that guide all historians in their endeavors. Unified by their investigations into how best to understand and then represent the past, this diverse group of scholars in the field of theatre history and performance studies offers insights into the abiding issues that all historians face in the task of repres
