Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History / Edition 1

by Della Pollock

Overview

Taking interdisciplinary and diverse approaches, these thirteen essays explore the multifaceted relationship between performance and history. By considering performance as both a useful frame for understanding historical practices and a mode of historical production itself—performance in history and performance as history—the contributors chart new directions in such fields as cultural studies, contemporary historiography, museum studies, and life narrative research. Geographically and chronologically, the collection's sweep is broad—ranging from the nineteenth century to the present, from Victorian theater to commissions of inquiry in Kenya, from dissent in post-Soviet Lithuania to plantation tours in the American South. Together, the essays make up a work that is truly interdisciplinary in breadth and focus. By combining the methodologies of history and performance studies, the contributors illuminate the structure and function of cultural production in all its forms. The contributors are Michael S. Bowman, Ruth Laurion Bowman, Elizabeth Gray Buck, Kay Ellen Capo, David William Cohen, Tracy Davis, Kirk W. Fuoss, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Carol Mavor, E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Della Pollock, Jeffrey H. Richards, and Joseph R. Roach.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807846841
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/09/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Della Pollock is associate professor of communication studies and director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Making History Go / Della Pollock

PART I. Spectacular Histories
Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance / Joseph R. Roach
Reading the Minister's Remains: Investigations into the Death of the Honourable Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, February 1990 / David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo
Performance as Contestation: An Agonistic Perspective on the Insurgent Assembly / Kirk W. Fuoss

PART II. (Dis)Playing History
Performing Social Rubbish: Humbug and Romance in the American Marketplace / Ruth Laurion Bowman
Performing Southern History for the Tourist Gaze: Antebellum Home Tour Guide Performances / Michael S. Bowman

PART III. Histories of Desire: Performing Sex and Class
Filthy—Nay—Pestilential: Sanitation and Victorian Theaters / Tracy C. Davis
Touching Netherplaces: Invisibility in the Photographs of Hannah Cullwick / Carol Mavor
The Politics of Seduction: Theater, Sexuality, and National Virtue in the Novels of Hannah Foster / Jeffrey H. Richards

PART IV. The Museum in/as Performance: Raids and Reifications
Performance at Hull-House: Museum, Microfiche, and Historiography / Shannon Jackson
Museum Author-ity and Performance: The Mus233e Gustave Moreau / Elizabeth Gray Buck

PART V. Producing History
That Was My Occupation: Oral Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought / D. Soyini Madison
Performing History in the Light of History / Kay Ellen Capo

Notes on the Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Empirically grounded and theoretically rich, Exceptional Spaces brings a lively intellectual imagination to bear on a wide range of events and situations. Whether analyzing museums or tourist productions, slave auctions or murder, photographs or hygiene, orature or literature, law court or theater, the authors demonstrate the power of thinking performatively about history and historically about performance. This is performance studies at its best.—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Editorial Reviews

This is performance studies at its best.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

From the Publisher