The last two years have seen some significant anniversaries being celebrated – one hundred years of the Bolshevik Revolution, fifty years since May 1968, two hundred years since the birth of Karl Marx and, most recently, the birth centenary of Rosa Luxemburg. As a student activist more or less masquerading as an amateur theatre historian, I have never felt more in need of the tools of my so-called trade than during these interesting times when I found myself assiduously attending conferences, memorials, re-enactments and commemorative performances earmarking moments of radical histories. David Wiles's article, charting the contours – often clear and sometimes obscure – of the field of theatre history as it stands at the moment brings into relief some of the questions that have been running in the background of the heady extended solidarity party that has been my engagement with the field in recent times, resonating with his conclusion of history-writing as ‘practice, not product’. I will attempt to glean from Wiles's reflections some points that I feel may be important for scholars for whom history writing is most certainly a ‘social practice’, if not also a deeply political act.

Reporting from a gathering of theatre historians in Bloomsbury, Wiles touches upon the issue of history as a process of identity formation, remarking tellingly, ‘no one in the room spoke up for now familiar forms of minoritarian history based on gender and ethnicity’. The observation is a reminder of how professionalized neo-liberal education recognizes the appeal of minoritarian knowledge for the purposes of profit and cultural capital. Specialization in such discourses may lead to employment and real empowerment for those to whom this knowledge is a lived experience (‘Chinese theatre, women's theatre or community theatre’). However, students from minoritarian backgrounds who are already living precarious lives may find it difficult to be able to contribute to or change the narrative of these experiences or histories, even if they are present in the room. On this point, I believe there is a need to seriously question access to the space of the university (as it stands today) and how far the creation of ‘clans’, perhaps designed for purposes of strengthening disciplinary boundaries, works as a border wall for some. Is it really a case of preaching ‘subversion to the subverted’, or do we have to take stock of the burning question of access if we are to speak at all about working in a field within historical thought?

Identitarianism, the so-called great bane of today that has led to a neo-fascist wave worldwide, could also be called ‘clan’ behaviour, and it makes masterful use of affect towards creating cultures of consensus around non-truths. As theatre historians who work in the cross-section of affect, identity, truth-value and history writing as a social and, I daresay, political practice, we need to take serious cognizance of our clannish resemblance to those ‘in the triumphal procession in which today's rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot’,Footnote ² such as lynch mobs on the streets of Dadri, Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, right-wing demos in Chemnitz. In other words, we need to remain alert to who exactly gets to use the means of history writing today, and for what purpose. And hopefully, we shall emerge from this humbling moment with the acknowledgement that the Benjaminian ‘moment of danger’ is here, and we can no longer afford to treat history writing as anything but an active political frontier of knowledge production. We have all been drafted. In light of this, I believe we need to strategize.

As historians who have to deal regularly with anti-theatrical scorn about our objects of study, we should not be afraid to wade the waters of the so-called ‘post-truth’ world. From a feminist perspective, truth remains outside our grasp, no matter how empirically sound we are as women. Whether it is the casual disbelief of menstrual cramps as a source of real physical pain, or the blow-by-blow account of sexual assault of Dr Christine Blasey Ford that failed to stop the appointment of US Supreme Court judge Brett Kavanaugh,Footnote ³ women have lived in a post-truth world for long, and the recent #Metoo movement and the outraged disbelief around it only reify this fact. So how exactly have women, traditionally deprived of real access to the idea of truth, written their histories?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gives us a glimpse into a subaltern exercise in truth generation when she writes about how young Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri hanged herself while menstruating in her father's north Calcutta apartment in 1926, avoiding posthumous allegations of illicit love and only discovered a decade later to have been a freedom fighter who killed herself because she could not carry out a political assassination.Footnote ⁴ History writing, if it is to be a social practice and a political one, is also history doing in the hope of being read in posterity. By that logic, we theatre historians are truly privileged to be in a field where our bread and butter is the reading of performative actions which are pregnant with history. If we are to commit ourselves to the relationship that history has with truth, not that of objectivist prescription but of somehow dignifying the process of claiming to be true, we would need to prepare ourselves for the task of reading unreadable acts of minoritarian truth generation, a task that is highly conducive to the world of theatre and performance because of the sheer polyphony of voices that theatrical events and objects speak in. In turn, we would also need to be able to wade through ethical questions such as who is performing and who is doing the reading, bringing us back, rather circuitously, to the exercise of challenging educational access and dismantling ivory towers masquerading as conference rooms.