It Is Now Time for Music

IF 0.4 3区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES Pub Date : 2023-09-01 DOI:10.1353/ecs.2023.a909452
Joseph Roach
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Each of the distinguished contributors remembers something of horizon-expanding importance that I forgot to know: Lisa Freeman, that the neologism glocal would have more clearly expressed the geohistorical relationships I had in mind, had I thought to use it; Kathleen Wilson, that performance—transportable, adaptable, irresistible—both proselytized for the British Empire and fomented resistance to it across all the oceans of the world, \"from the Caribbean to the bay of Bengal, and the South Atlantic to the China Sea\"; Elizabeth Dillon, that a walk in Ralph Waldo Emerson's footsteps along the \"Freedom Trail\" across America's oldest park traverses a regional palimpsest of hemispheric racial violence; Amy Huang, that our mapping of the transoceanic flows of cultural substitutions must include Asian peoples; and Daniel O'Quinn, that Jessye Norman's Dido verifies Afro-diasporic surrogation. Perspicaciously, O'Quinn queries my omission of the haunting curse that Virgil's Dido puts on the departing Aeneas and his descendants, calling on her avenger to rise from her bones. My excuse is as abject as it is pertinent to the occasion: I forgot. Indeed, none of these or other similarly recovered memories should ever be taken for granted. \"What Americans mean by 'history,''' James Baldwin wrote, \"is something that they can forget.\"1 Today, when the latest instant newsfeeds reenact scenarios of the Enlightenment's greatest failure, scholars of performance, past and present, have it in their power to challenge such refractory postponements of racial reckoning. In the Prologue to her transformative Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (2022), for instance, Kathleen Wilson remembers what generations of theater historians forgot: the \"good ship Charming Sally,\" which famously [End Page 41] delivered the first professional acting company to American shores in 1752, was a slaver. Daniel O'Quinn navigates another quadrant of the same sea of tears when he evokes the cries of the drowning jetsam in NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Did their avengers arise from their bones? Do they still? Will they always? And Amy Huang maps an oceanic Asian current that runs so far and so deep, reminding her senior colleagues not to forget that the next wave of scholarly research in the field is already building even as ours crests. Anyone's memory can fail, but forgetting to remember differs from remembering to forget. Forgetting to remember might arise from unconscious repression, inattention, infirmity, or, as is so often the case, intractable cluelessness. Remembering to forget, by contrast, requires volition. I remembered to forget the Puritans, for instance, as Elizabeth Dillon points out. But the best antidote to forgetting, as Lisa Freeman emphasizes in her introduction, quoting Cities of the Dead, resides in the \"aesthetic tangibility\" of performance, whether it is experienced live or vividly reconstructed. Appositely, the cover art for both Dillon's New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World (2014) and Wilson's Strolling Players comes from festive scenes of Jamaican Jonkonnu captured in eye-popping prints by Isaac Mendes Belisario, ca. 1833–37. \"Koo Koo, or Actor Boy\" struts his stuff for Dillon: flowing plumes, periwig, and whip set off his black face, which peeks out from under his white mask, bowing ironically to Jamaica's seventeenth-century founding English overlords, contemporaries of the great Shakespearean Thomas Betterton, whose soul-shaking performance of Othello Amy Huang invokes. \"The Red Set Girls\" pirouette for Wilson: twirling pink parasols and raising their white petticoats to pay homage to a haystack-like \"Jack-in-the-Green.\" Nominally a character associated with English May Day celebrations, Jamaican Jack, also known as Pitchy Patchy, bears a closer resemblance to West African-derived Egungun masqueraders.2 These mysteriously ambulant, hut-shaped effigies mediate relationships between the living and the ancestral dead to affirm their spiritual cohesion in defiance of diaspora and genocide. 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Abstract

It Is Now Time for Music Joseph Roach (bio) What an extraordinary honor it is to be remembered so generously for a book about the persistence of forgetting. My gratitude wells up proportionately. Each of the distinguished contributors remembers something of horizon-expanding importance that I forgot to know: Lisa Freeman, that the neologism glocal would have more clearly expressed the geohistorical relationships I had in mind, had I thought to use it; Kathleen Wilson, that performance—transportable, adaptable, irresistible—both proselytized for the British Empire and fomented resistance to it across all the oceans of the world, "from the Caribbean to the bay of Bengal, and the South Atlantic to the China Sea"; Elizabeth Dillon, that a walk in Ralph Waldo Emerson's footsteps along the "Freedom Trail" across America's oldest park traverses a regional palimpsest of hemispheric racial violence; Amy Huang, that our mapping of the transoceanic flows of cultural substitutions must include Asian peoples; and Daniel O'Quinn, that Jessye Norman's Dido verifies Afro-diasporic surrogation. Perspicaciously, O'Quinn queries my omission of the haunting curse that Virgil's Dido puts on the departing Aeneas and his descendants, calling on her avenger to rise from her bones. My excuse is as abject as it is pertinent to the occasion: I forgot. Indeed, none of these or other similarly recovered memories should ever be taken for granted. "What Americans mean by 'history,''' James Baldwin wrote, "is something that they can forget."1 Today, when the latest instant newsfeeds reenact scenarios of the Enlightenment's greatest failure, scholars of performance, past and present, have it in their power to challenge such refractory postponements of racial reckoning. In the Prologue to her transformative Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833 (2022), for instance, Kathleen Wilson remembers what generations of theater historians forgot: the "good ship Charming Sally," which famously [End Page 41] delivered the first professional acting company to American shores in 1752, was a slaver. Daniel O'Quinn navigates another quadrant of the same sea of tears when he evokes the cries of the drowning jetsam in NourbeSe Philip's Zong! Did their avengers arise from their bones? Do they still? Will they always? And Amy Huang maps an oceanic Asian current that runs so far and so deep, reminding her senior colleagues not to forget that the next wave of scholarly research in the field is already building even as ours crests. Anyone's memory can fail, but forgetting to remember differs from remembering to forget. Forgetting to remember might arise from unconscious repression, inattention, infirmity, or, as is so often the case, intractable cluelessness. Remembering to forget, by contrast, requires volition. I remembered to forget the Puritans, for instance, as Elizabeth Dillon points out. But the best antidote to forgetting, as Lisa Freeman emphasizes in her introduction, quoting Cities of the Dead, resides in the "aesthetic tangibility" of performance, whether it is experienced live or vividly reconstructed. Appositely, the cover art for both Dillon's New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World (2014) and Wilson's Strolling Players comes from festive scenes of Jamaican Jonkonnu captured in eye-popping prints by Isaac Mendes Belisario, ca. 1833–37. "Koo Koo, or Actor Boy" struts his stuff for Dillon: flowing plumes, periwig, and whip set off his black face, which peeks out from under his white mask, bowing ironically to Jamaica's seventeenth-century founding English overlords, contemporaries of the great Shakespearean Thomas Betterton, whose soul-shaking performance of Othello Amy Huang invokes. "The Red Set Girls" pirouette for Wilson: twirling pink parasols and raising their white petticoats to pay homage to a haystack-like "Jack-in-the-Green." Nominally a character associated with English May Day celebrations, Jamaican Jack, also known as Pitchy Patchy, bears a closer resemblance to West African-derived Egungun masqueraders.2 These mysteriously ambulant, hut-shaped effigies mediate relationships between the living and the ancestral dead to affirm their spiritual cohesion in defiance of diaspora and genocide. As counter-performing strollers of empire staging a New World drama that is still playing, Koo Koo, Pitchy Patchy, and the Red Set...
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现在是音乐时间
是时候听音乐了约瑟夫·罗奇(传记)能因为一本关于遗忘的持久性的书而被如此慷慨地记住,这是一种非同寻常的荣誉。我的感激之情相应地涌起。每一位杰出的贡献者都记得一些我忘了知道的、具有拓展视野的重要性的东西:丽莎·弗里曼(Lisa Freeman),如果我想到要使用新词“全球的”(glocal),它会更清楚地表达我心目中的地理历史关系;凯瑟琳·威尔逊(Kathleen Wilson)的表演——可移动、适应性强、不可抗拒——既为大英帝国传教,又在世界各大洋煽动对它的抵制,“从加勒比海到孟加拉湾,从南大西洋到中国海”;伊丽莎白·狄龙(Elizabeth Dillon)认为,沿着拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生(Ralph Waldo Emerson)的足迹,沿着“自由之路”穿越美国最古老的公园,穿越了一个半球种族暴力的地区性重写本;Amy Huang,我们对跨洋文化更替的描绘必须包括亚洲人;和丹尼尔·奥奎因,杰西·诺曼的黛朵证实了非洲侨民的代入。很明显,奥奎因质疑我遗漏了维吉尔笔下的狄多对即将离去的埃涅阿斯和他的后代施加的挥之不去的诅咒,呼唤她的复仇者从她的骨头中复活。我的借口很卑鄙,但又很应景:我忘了。事实上,这些或其他类似的恢复记忆都不应该被视为理所当然。“美国人所说的‘历史’,”詹姆斯·鲍德温写道,“是他们可以忘记的东西。今天,当最新的即时新闻重现启蒙运动最大失败的场景时,研究表演的学者,无论是过去的还是现在的,都有能力挑战这种难以接受的种族清算推迟。例如,在凯瑟琳·威尔逊(Kathleen Wilson)的《帝国的变革漫步者:1656年至1833年(2022年)英国帝国省的戏剧和权力表演》的序言中,她记得几代戏剧历史学家忘记的事情:“迷人的莎莉号好船”是一艘奴隶船,它在1752年向美国海岸运送了第一个专业表演公司。丹尼尔·奥奎因(Daniel O'Quinn)在唤起《诺贝斯·菲利普的宗》(nourbeese Philip's Zong)中落水的快艇的哭声时,在同一泪水之海的另一个象限进行了导航!他们的复仇者是从他们的骨头里冒出来的吗?他们还在吗?他们会一直这样吗?Amy Huang绘制了一幅亚洲洋流的地图,它跑得如此之远,如此之深,提醒她的资深同事不要忘记,即使在我们的研究达到顶峰时,该领域的下一波学术研究也已经开始了。任何人的记忆都会衰退,但是忘记记忆和记住忘记是不同的。忘记记忆可能是由于无意识的压抑、注意力不集中、身体虚弱,或者通常是由于顽固的无知造成的。相反,记住忘记需要意志。例如,正如伊丽莎白·狄龙指出的那样,我记得忘记了清教徒。但是,正如丽莎·弗里曼(Lisa Freeman)在引言中引用《死亡之城》(Cities of the Dead)所强调的那样,遗忘的最佳解药存在于表演的“审美触感”中,无论是现场体验还是生动再现。同样,狄龙的《新世界戏剧:大西洋世界的表演公地》(2014)和威尔逊的《漫步的玩家》的封面艺术都来自牙买加Jonkonnu的节日场景,由Isaac Mendes Belisario在1833-37年拍摄,令人瞠目。“古柯,或演员男孩”在狄龙面前炫耀着他的东西:飘逸的羽毛、假发和鞭子衬托着他从白色面具下露出来的黑脸,讽刺地向17世纪牙买加的创始英国领主鞠躬,与伟大的莎士比亚作家托马斯·贝特顿同时代,他在《奥赛罗》中的表演震撼灵魂。“红衫女郎”(The Red Set Girls)为威尔逊表演了旋转舞:旋转着粉红色的阳伞,扬起白色的衬裙,向草垛状的“绿衣杰克”(jack -in- green)致敬。名义上,这个角色与英国的五一庆祝活动有关,牙买加杰克,也被称为Pitchy Patchy,与西非的Egungun假面舞者更相似这些神秘的、移动的、棚屋形状的雕像调解了生者和祖先死者之间的关系,以肯定他们的精神凝聚力,蔑视流散和种族灭绝。作为反表演的帝国漫步者,上演了一部仍在上演的新世界剧,咕咕、皮奇、红套……
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来源期刊
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
74
期刊介绍: As the official publication of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), Eighteenth-Century Studies is committed to publishing the best of current writing on all aspects of eighteenth-century culture. The journal selects essays that employ different modes of analysis and disciplinary discourses to explore how recent historiographical, critical, and theoretical ideas have engaged scholars concerned with the eighteenth century.
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