Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires

Abstract

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• Editorial Comment: Informal Archives, Remediations, and Disciplinary Desires
• Laura Edmondson

The 75th anniversary issue of Theatre Journal is replete with pleasure, praise, critique, and desire. The journal’s invitation to think through the past, present, and future of the journal as articulated in the Call for Papers generated a robust response as demonstrated in the fourteen essays that appear in the print issue and six interviews published online.¹ These contributions oscillate between hopes for the journal and aspirations for the field as a whole—a slippage that speaks to the journal’s ability to shape and reflect its many publics over its seventy-five-year history. In these pages, I chronicle the tensions and debates that have played out in the journal since its founding, which sets the stage for imagining the iterations yet to come. I then draw on the rich contributions to this issue to theorize a framework of informal archives, remediations, and disciplinary desires. These concepts not only illuminate the specifics of this issue but also help to shed light on the tensions, turns, and hopes embedded in the field(s) of theatre, dance, and performance studies.

Across its many iterations and publics, editors have consistently commented on the capaciousness of the journal and its “free-wheeling eclecticism.”² As noted by both Sean Metzger and Isaiah Wooden in this issue, founder Barnard Hewitt expressed the hope in the 1949 inaugural issue of the journal, then called Educational Theatre Journal (hereafter ETJ), that it would be “of the greatest possible use to students, workers, and the teachers of educational theatre and drama in all aspects and at all levels.”³ In 1960, incoming ETJ editor Oscar G. Brockett limned this expansive mission with the explanation that the journal seeks to publish “in all aspects of theatre and drama (theatre history, dramatic literature, theory and criticism, acting, directing, all areas of design and production), and it is concerned with all levels of interest (university, community, secondary, children’s theatre).”⁴ This breadth translated into issues in which, to name one representative example from 1964, a discussion of Gordon Craig’s acting theory and an overview of contemporary state-subsidized Swedish theatre coexisted with essays that explored the potential of fiberglass for costume armor and Mixing [End Page xi] Latex Liquid as a paint base for scenery.⁵ Such articles accompanied a plethora of the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA) reports, lists of college and university productions, obituaries, and repeated requests that contributors follow MLA citation guidelines.⁶ In the late 1950s, editor James Clancy wrestled with the implications of these “multifarious” interests, noting that the journal, like Cambises, seems to be “bursting the very confines of definition.”⁷ These early iterations of capaciousness sought to bridge the scholarship/practice divide in university theatre departments, creating a forum in which practitioners as well as scholars would be invested in the present and future of the journal.

These early decades of the journal are seldom addressed in the enclosed anniversary essays; when ETJ does appear, it is usually in the vein of critique. Josephine Lee, for example, describes an article on Thai performance that appeared in a 1953 issue as “reinforc[ing] an imagined opposition between Western artistry and Eastern peculiarity assumed by generations of theatre scholars.”⁸ In a similar vein, Bethany Hughes (Choctaw) locates the first reference to Native Americans in a 1971 ETJ article on the Indian Medicine Show in which Indigenous presence itself is erased. ⁹ Even these fraught and deeply problematic attempts at a more expansive representation (the majority of which focused on Asian performance traditions) were paltry in comparison to countless explorations of historical and contemporary white male playwrights, theorists, and directors based primarily in the US and the UK.¹⁰

Of course, historical narratives are never seamless. Particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, authors and editors challenged what Sue-Ellen Case would later call “white Theatre Journal.”¹¹ In 1969, editor David Schaal articulated a critique of the discipline’s racism and provincialism, seeking to redress it with articles on Japanese theatre [End Page xii] and Black theatre.¹² In one of these articles, the legendary Black director, scholar, and...