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2 books match the query 'Performance Historiography'

cover of Repealing Mary: A Performance Historiography of Ireland's Campaign for Abortion Rights

Repealing Mary

A Performance Historiography of Ireland's Campaign for Abortion Rights

Jaime Leigh Gray

Vanderbilt University Press, 2027

Repealing Mary claims that the fight for reproductive justice disturbs the spatial limits of the national imaginary. In the Irish context, public space is haunted by iconography of the Virgin Mary—the Queen of Ireland who is the epitome of motherhood. From roadside shrines to the daily national television broadcast of the Angelus prayer, Marian imagery is woven into topographical and media landscapes, marking the thresholds of womanhood and national belonging. In this postcolonial society, how does one reconcile the persistent performative presence of the Catholic past amid a rapidly changing population that is increasingly progressive, multicultural, and secular? Moreover, how do the discourse and political ephemera of the abortion debate complicate evolving definitions of womanhood and motherhood as the nation’s homogeneity wanes?

Gray scrutinizes how activists and artists utilize intermedial performances—objects and events that depend upon the interconnectedness among bodies, media forms, and technology—to reimage and reimagine the visual and material culture of public space. Using the Repeal the Eighth campaign as a frame, she interrogates the margins of feminist representation at the messy intersection of neoliberal body politics and the durability of the sacred in public spaces.
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cover of Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography

Representing the Past

Essays in Performance Historiography

Charlotte M. Canning

University of Iowa Press, 2010

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 representing human events and actions.

      Five primary ideas provide the topics as well as the intellectual parameters for this book: archive, time, space, identity, and narrative. Taking these as the conceptual framework for historical research and analysis, the essayists cover an expansive range of case studies and problems in the historical study of performance from the Americas to Africa and from Europe to India and China. Considering not only how historians think about these concepts in their research and writing but more pointedly—and historiographically—how they think with them, the essayists demonstrate the power and centrality of each of these five ideas in historical scholarship from initial research to the writing of essays and books.

      Performance history has a diversity of identities, locations, sources, and narratives. This compelling engagement with the concepts essential to historical understanding is a valuable contribution to the historiography of performance—for students, teachers, and the future of the discipline itself. Expanding upon its classic predecessor, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, this exciting new collection illustrates the contemporary richness of historical thinking and writing in the field of performance history.

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