In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Introduction
• Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio), Odai Johnson (bio), Chrystyna Dail (bio), and Jonathan Shandell (bio)

This editor's introduction takes a somewhat different form.

Stay with me, please.

There are three sections to it, which I leave intentionally unconnected by my prose, intentionally without transition, a structure reflective of my process/processing of this moment in which I write.

I

As I write this editor's introduction in August 2020, two refrains continue to surface in my mind:

Walter Benjamin: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule."¹

George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future."²

I am quite certain others also find their minds turning to these writings and writers. For me, over the last four years in the Americas, Orwell's and Benjamin's phrases and work have been constant, urgent, recurring companions, alongside Diana Taylor's conviction that "performances operate as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions."³ If Benjamin and Orwell have helped me to remember—with colleagues, students, collaborators—that the stakes of participating in history and [End Page 1] citizenship are always and have always been life or death, Taylor has loaned me faith when my own has faltered. That is, as a historian who works at the intersection of theatre history and performance studies, I have looked to Taylor as a compass: both theatre and scholarship are performances and, thus, both function as vital acts of transfer. Both offer means through which to participate in history and, by doing so, to contribute to the shape of the future, to the world(s) yet to be.

The articles I am proud to share with you, within these pages, are not only fine pieces of scholarly writing but also documents (acts of transfer) of our field's work in the midst of a global pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black, indigenous, and people of color communities in the United States, the Americas, and around the world, (re)exposing hemispheric and global inequities. These articles came to their final stages in late spring and summer 2020, in the midst of large-scale protests in the United States against the state's normalized, perpetual, and systemic violence against Black lives, a brutality deeply imbricated with this hemisphere's founding. The time/space of our geography invented—through colonialism and imperialism—as the "Americas" is founded upon transatlantic and trans-hemispheric violence that normalizes (indeed, depends upon) the disposability of Black, brown, trans, female, queer, disabled, indigenous, people of color, and immigrant bodies.⁴

In what ways does this moment teach us to mark and re-mark the absences in and of both archives and repertoires; to track and retrack the limitations, presumptions, and privileges of access and existence; to interrogate how archives and repertoires tell us which lives have mattered and which have not in the history of modernity/coloniality, issuing cautions as we make those decisions ourselves, in our work; and to confront us, via brute force, with the urgent need to continue to reimagine ways of writing history?⁵ How does this moment demand that we catch and hold Benjamin's moment of danger, ruthlessly reminding ourselves that the state of emergency in which we live is not new? How does this moment demonstrate, in plain, naked sight, the urgency of Taylor's acts of transfer and how the scenario functions as both subject and object of performance, as well as historiographical method?

These preoccupations I offer are my own, but they have been deeply contoured by my work with authors in this volume. In "Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason," Odai Johnson invites the historian to (re)make space for what we deem the "nonrational." Moving through the poetic, theatrical, political, and historiographic imaginations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, 500 BCE to 500 CE Greece, and nineteenthcentury [End Page 2] Egypt, Johnson returns us to a "sense of history and performance" in which "both [are] inexorably, inexpugnably shaped by nonrational experiences in cultures that found the supernatural—ghosts...

中文翻译：

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介绍

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 介绍
• Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio)、Odai Johnson (bio)、Chrystyna Dail (bio) 和 Jonathan Shandell (bio)

这位编者的介绍采取了一些不同的形式。

请留在我身边。

它分为三个部分，我故意将其与我的散文无关，故意没有过渡，这是一个反映我写作的这一刻的过程/处理的结构。

一世

当我在 2020 年 8 月撰写本编辑的介绍时，我脑海中不断浮现出两句副歌：

沃尔特·本雅明：“受压迫者的传统告诉我们，我们生活的‘紧急状态’不是例外，而是规则。” ¹

乔治奥威尔：“谁控制了过去，谁就控制了未来。” ²

我很确定其他人也发现他们的注意力转向了这些著作和作家。对我来说，在过去的四年里，在美洲，奥威尔和本杰明的词句和作品一直是持续的、紧迫的、反复出现的伙伴，而戴安娜·泰勒坚信“表演是传递社会知识、记忆和感觉的重要行为。通过重复的行动来确定身份。” ³如果本杰明和奥威尔帮助我记住——与同事、学生、合作者——参与历史和[End Page 1]公民身份的利害关系始终是并且一直是生或死，当我自己的信仰步履蹒跚时，泰勒借给了我信仰。也就是说，作为一名在戏剧史和表演研究交叉领域工作的历史学家，我将泰勒视为指南针：戏剧和学术都是表演，因此，两者都是重要的转移行为。两者都提供了参与历史的方式，并通过这样做来为塑造未来和未来的世界做出贡献。

在这些页面中，我很自豪地与您分享的文章不仅是优秀的学术著作，而且是我们领域在全球流行病中工作的文件（转移行为），这种流行病对黑人、土著和美国、美洲和世界各地的有色人种社区（重新）暴露了半球和全球的不平等。这些文章在 2020 年春末和夏季进入最后阶段，当时美国正在大规模抗议该州对黑人生活的正常化、永久性和系统性暴力，这种暴行与这个半球的建立密切相关。发明了我们地理的时间/空间——通过殖民主义和帝国主义——因为“美洲”建立在跨大西洋和跨半球的暴力之上，这种暴力使黑人、棕色人、跨性别、女性、酷儿、残疾人、土著、有色人种和移民机构。⁴

这个时刻教会我们如何标记和重新标记档案和曲目中的缺席？跟踪和重新跟踪访问和存在的限制、假设和特权；询问档案和曲目如何告诉我们在现代性/殖民性的历史中哪些生活很重要，哪些生活不重要，在我们自己做出这些决定时发出警告，在我们的工作中；并通过蛮力面对我们迫切需要继续重新构想书写历史的方式？⁵这个时刻如何要求我们抓住并抓住本杰明的危险时刻，无情地提醒自己，我们所处的紧急状态并不新鲜？这一时刻如何以赤裸裸的方式展示泰勒转移行为的紧迫性，以及场景如何作为表演的主体和客体以及史学方法发挥作用？

我提出的这些全神贯注是我自己的，但在我与本书作者的合作中，它们已经深深勾勒出来。在“不读伏尔泰：理性之家橱柜里的幽灵”中，欧代约翰逊邀请历史学家（重新）为我们认为的“非理性”腾出空间。穿越 16 世纪和 17 世纪欧洲、公元前 500 年至公元 500 年的希腊和 19 世纪[End Page 2]埃及的诗意、戏剧、政治和史学想象，约翰逊让我们回到了“历史感和表演感” “两者都无情地、不可解释地受到文化中非理性经验的塑造，这些文化发现了超自然的鬼魂……