In this absorbing monograph, Maurya Wickstrom challenges the pervading focus on death and failure in theatre and performance studies, pitting the finitude of tragedy against the power of initiation and beginnings. For Wickstrom this challenge is political: a refusal to accept that radical left-wing politics has to make do with ‘whiffs of spectral presence to reassure itself somehow that all is not completely lost’ (p. 36). Instead Wickstrom looks for a ‘life-affirmative’ energy within theatre – the titular ‘initiation of history’ – in which historical moments of radical thought and action are staged in the present to disrupt capitalist models of time and open up emancipatory possibilities for the future (p. 36). Theatre, Wickstrom argues, has the potential to show how time can be made or done differently. Each chapter of Fiery Temporalities mobilizes a different philosophy of time – from Giorgio Agamben's ‘penultimate time’ to Antonio Negri's writing on kairos – in order to explore how linear time is unsettled in a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theatre texts and live performances.
As such, Wickstrom adds to a rich body of work that explores theatre's politics of time, including Joseph Roach on surrogation and Rebecca Schneider on temporal drag, offering an alternative perspective to these theorists’ focus on afterlife, haunting and repetition (which places death at the heart of performance's temporal logic). In her focus on performance as a site for revolutionary beginnings, Wickstrom's argument develops Nicholas Ridout's claim in Passionate Amateurs that in times of apparent political closure theatre can provide a space for the hope or possibility of communism to be held open.
It is in the second chapter of Fiery Temporalities that Wickstrom's critical intervention feels particularly convincing and creative. In this chapter Wickstrom engages with Pierre Bourdieu's writing on the ‘new present’ to examine two plays about the Haitian revolution: Toussaint Louverture by C. L. R. James and The Tragedy of King Christophe by Aimé Césaire. Moving between a close analysis of the playtexts and descriptions of imagined stagings of key scenes, Wickstrom explores how the Haitian revolution provides a key revolutionary moment that continues to hold power in the present. It is in this chapter that her focus on fire as a key image – hinted at in the title – becomes clear, as Wickstrom turns to the enslaved workers’ act of burning colonizers’ plantations as evidence of the violent vitality that sparks revolutionary change.
Throughout the chapter Wickstrom uses David Scott's writing on tragedy in Omens of Adversity (2014) as a foil against which to position her reading of these plays (unusually, Wickstrom only engages indirectly with Scott's 2004 work on the Haitian revolution, Conscripts of Modernity). Both Scott and Wickstrom are invested in exploring historical revolutions in the interest of pursuing an emancipatory politics. Scott, however, thinks through what it means to live on in the ruins of a past revolution, while Wickstrom is invested in exploring how such past revolutions can be reanimated. To do so, Wickstrom turns to the ‘new present’ to find within these plays ‘former presents in which a particular emancipatory truth or idea appeared’ and whose energy can revitalize the contemporary moment (p. 71). With regard to Toussaint Louverture, for example, Wickstrom argues against Jeremy Matthew Glick's (2016) reading of Louverture as a tragic hero (propelled by fate or an unavoidable flaw), proposing instead that the appearance of a chorus of slaves at the play's conclusion presents the audience with the promise of collective action: ‘the initiation by an oppressed people of their own freedom’ (p. 90). What matters to Wickstrom is not that a revolutionary figure failed, but that a revolution occurred in the first place.
Fiery Temporalities raises important questions about how best to initiate political action in the present, and what conceptions of time are needed to make that possible. Combining philosophical and intensely personal meditations on time, Wickstrom counters claims that left-wing politics has reached an impasse. Instead she explores how theatre can offer a unique space to draw energy from the fire of historical revolutions, because theatre is an art form where ‘a sense of time can be in our hands’ and former acts of resistance are – literally – played out in the present (p. 113). This refreshing volume will find a wide readership within theatre and performance studies, touching as it does on contemporary performance practice and circumatlantic culture, while its reflections on time will benefit more broadly those working across visual culture, historiography, philosophy and cultural studies.
