Introduction

With post-1968 ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’, the idea of a single, universal, history was displaced by a pluralism of historical approaches. Cognizant of recent shifts in the conceptual frameworks of history and archive, the editors ask how the history of theatre should be written today. How could it be written to reveal the tensions between and contradictions in the past and present imaginations shaping events and objects? How could it accommodate different, often contradictory, historiographic strategies? They contend that ‘it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’, as Walter Benjamin put it. Given these contexts, the editors propose a particular historiographic approach in the organization of chapters that challenges synchronic approaches to theatre history, and instead build historical narratives through ‘constellations’, a direct reference to Benjamin, who constructed novel conceptions of historical time and historical intelligibility based on spatial dialectics.