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Making History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Harry J. Elam Jr.
Harry J. Elam Jr.
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , November 2004 , pp. 219 - 225
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Harry J. Elam Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University. He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, and is coeditor of African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama, The Fire This Time: African American Plays for the New Millennium, and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Black Performance and Popular Culture. He is the outgoing Vice-President of the American Society for Theatre Research, the incoming editor of Theatre Journal and on the editorial board of Modern Drama, Atlantic Studies and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre.