Description
Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Strollers without Borders; Introduction: Britain's Theatrical Empire; Part I. Playing: 1. Peripheralizing the Spheres: Theatrical Assemblages of the Imperial Provinces; 2. Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Colonial Family Strategies and the Imperatives of Nation; 3. The Lure of the Other: Jews, Nabobs and Enslaved Africans in a Transcolonial Imaginary; Part II. Theatres of Empire: 4. Performances of Freedom: Jamaican Maroons in Imperial Transit; 5. Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian; 6. Zanga's Colony: Revenge in Sydney; Part III. East India Company Peripheries and the History of Modernity; 7. Performing The Wonder in Sumatra: Theatrical Ethnography in a New World History; 8. In Conclusion: Napoleonic Gothic, or St. Helena as Center of the British World.
