What Space Is This Time? Historiography in the Space of History
Abstract
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.
Keywords:
historiography, Lewis Henry Morgan, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, inertia and change, Henri Lefebvre, catastrophe, Columbian Exposition, earthquakeReferences
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Authors
Rosemarie K. Bankrbank@kent.edu
Kent State University United States
Rosemarie K. Bank is Professor Emerita of Theatre at Kent State University in the United States. She is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, she was Editor of Theatre Survey from 2000 to 2003 and currently serves on several editorial boards of scholarly journals and series in theatre. She has published widely in academic journals: Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Essays in Theatre, Theatre Research International, Modern Drama, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, New England Theatre Journal, The American Stage, as well as in the edited volumes: Feminist Rereadings of Modern American Drama (1989), Critical Theory and Performance (both editions), Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory (1999), Women in American Theatre (2005), Performing America (2001), Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (2007), To Have or Have Not: Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre (2011), Public Theatres and Theatre Publics (2012), Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor (2015), Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth (2015), and The Methuen Drama Handbook Of Theatre History And Historiography (2020). She is the author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (1997), co-editor (with Michal Kobialka) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (2015), and is currently preparing Staging the Native, 1792–1892.
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