Theatre History Studies General Section and Special Section on Hemispheric Historiography
In 2006, American Studies Scholar Wai Chee Dimock challenged her field to rethink the hemispheric as a multi-dimensional vector, pulling south and east, as well as north and west. In what ways does such a (re)orientation of the hemispheric offer our field the opportunity to build upon, re-visit, and develop our methodologies of theatre and performance history? Submissions might engage hemispheric historiography in relation to:
- the reorientation of well known sites of theatre history
- writing theatre history and/or conceptualizing the hemispheric in “deep time” (Jill Lane 2010)
- the potential for foregrounding lesser known sites, forms and practices
- pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, and decolonial sites, as well as discourses of coloniality
- our understanding of borders, inclusive of nation-state territories, as well as aqueous, geologic, and imaginative borders
- archival research in post-colonial contexts where collections may be compromised, made vulnerable, or inaccessible due to lack of funding or natural disasters
- oral histories and performance ethnography as methods that value oral and embodied transmission
- historiographical methods informed by non-Western epistemologies and ontologies
The co-editors are particularly interested in submissions that seek to employ a hemispheric historiography in relation to embodied practices and theatres of the recent and distant past, as well as the present. Submissions may take the form of articles, provocations, reflections, and/or methodological explorations.