A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.

This chapter explains the rationale of the book and discusses Murakami Naojirō’s significance for Japanese historical scholarship. It sets the stage for exploring the practices institutionalized academic historians employed in constructing narratives of early modern Japan’s progressive foreign relations. Translation and hegemonic knowledge claims were major factors in this process, which had lasting consequences for global intellectual trajectories and perpetuated unequal power relations. The imperialist agenda of Murakami and his colleagues was at the forefront of hegemonic thinking about how history ought to be studied: which sources were relevant, whose actions and achievements were important, which groups had histories worth implementing into meta narratives, and whose voices were to be heard and included. The introduction also elaborates on key methodological frameworks such as entangled biography, empirical imperialism, and implicit comparison, and finally discusses important concepts as well as spatial and temporal dimensions of the study.

The chapter addresses the problem of the nation-state centrism of transitional justice through an ethnographic analysis of the self-lustration trial of a Polish academic historian, who was revealed as a secret communist agent by a powerful rightwing politician in the local media. The chapter studies closely the evidentiary process, court testimonies, and courtroom performances to show how law mediates and reproduces the relations of domination and inequality, as it becomes an arena for critical engagement with and even deconstruction of the terms of lustration by revealing, even if sporadically, the largely overshadowed histories of friendship and solidarity. In particular, the chapter highlights that lustration’s nation-state centrism, which manifests itself in its extensive dependence on state security archives and the court’s reliance on the testimonies of former security officers, poses crucial challenges for the court in ascertaining ambiguities and settling suspicions, and thereby gives ample room for the political instrumentalization of law, especially by rightwing groups.

This chapter explores logbooks by non-elite seafarers as a hybrid mode that combines the model of the ship’s official log with the practice of the ordinary terrestrial diary – a form that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. Bringing together original archival research into sea journals with critical approaches to the diary stemming from life writing studies, the analysis reframes the logbook beyond its traditional categorisation as a document of work, in order to position it as a more personal text that allowed for the maintenance of bonds of family and kinship across oceans. The chapter proposes that logbooks were linked to the terrestrial world in other ways too, emerging as a popular literary motif from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, through to fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad in the late Victorian period. Tracing their evidentiary and narrative potential, logbooks – both real and fictive – are positioned as circulating objects that travelled across social, spatial, and generic borders.

Carla Della Gatta considers the relative abundance of the Fornésian archive – several dozen published scripts, very few “lost Fornés plays,” and an artistic practice that is nearly as documented as the productions and plays themselves – in tandem with the disproportionate lack of scholarship on someone so influential to the American theatre. To explain, Della Gatta evinces the challenges posed to documentarians by a bilingual, bicultural artist such as Fornés and argues that the task of documenting Fornés requires an unusually comprehensive sense of her entire canon in order to develop meaningful analysis, context, and criticism. Della Gatta also details the emerging tradition of Fornésian documentation that has evolved since the 1990s, and that not only includes the balance of archive formation, critical analysis, and artmaking necessary to draw forward the integration of Fornésian styles, forms, and perspectives, but also prioritizes a distinctive ethics of care.

José Rizal spearheaded an anticolonial literary movement that aimed to deepen the understanding of Filipinos’ emerging identity through critical engagement with colonial archives. Through his writings in Spanish, the Filipino anticolonial leader gathers and constructs his people’s prehistory in order to promote and comprehend the identity-political transformation his writings describe and prescribe, the consolidation of a “Filipino” identity different from the term’s previous definition of “Spaniards born in the Philippines.” Through analysis of his annotations to Antonio Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas and his novel Noli me tangere, I argue that Rizal serves as a useful prototype for Colonial Latinx studies, as both model and cautionary tale. I eventually conclude that Rizal’s literary and historiographical contributions must be understood as on the one hand, a register of colonial maladies – frustrations with powerful Spanish friars and inept and naïve colonized peoples alike – and on the other hand, a rehearsal space for future liberties, including the freedom to define one’s own identity in dialogue with and against colonial expectations and discourses.

On his death in 1703, Pepys left his library to his old college, instructing that it be preserved ‘for the benefit of posterity’. Among this collection was his diary. This chapter demonstrates that Pepys’s choice to save his journal was part of wider plans to shape the historical record. It was a response to the hostile political climate of the 1690s and to the types of histories then being written. Pepys was an expert in creating and controlling archives – his own and others. He intended his diary to be read alongside his naval records and in conditions that would secure it a sympathetic reception. Pepys’s collecting also shows he had an expansive sense of what (and who) might be worthy of future historians’ attention. What he termed his ‘scheme’ for his library’s future was, ultimately, a design on future readers and we need to factor this in when interpreting his records.

In this chapter I suggest that anthropology’s project of the reflexive and explicit “comparison of embedded concepts” provides useful tools for Ottomanists. Reflexivity and explicit comparison, especially with the present, would bring debates usually left to historiography – concerning comparison, theory, and archives – to the fore, highlighting the contributions of Ottoman history to rethinking our present. Given my emphasis on comparison with the present, I begin with a consideration of presentism and argue that all histories involve an often-unspoken comparison with the present and our contemporary concepts. I then introduce how anthropological comparison operates, especially in making comparison explicit and reflecting on the anthropologist’s position and process. I end with an initial place where Ottomanists could put this reflexivity and explicit comparison to use: a more explicit discussion of how each historian constructs, accesses, and approaches their archive while reflecting on what counts as an archive.

This chapter discusses the subject of archives: what they are, how they are uniquely constructed and preserved, their importance for creating historiographies and scholarly traditions, how they are subject to human error, the consequences of said error, and alternative sources of historical records. These topics are explored primarily through the case study of Nigeria’s Colonial and National Archives. The chapter will explain how the Colonial Archives were used as tools to extend colonial power while also springboarding African historiography through consequential and highly problematic methods. Next, it will explore the transformation of the Colonial Archives into Nigeria’s National Archives, pioneered by Kenneth Dike at the University of Ibadan. This transformation fostered significant changes in Nigeria’s historiography, the details of which will be examined. The chapter will also address the many issues present within Nigeria’s National Archive. Finally, it will explore the alternative voices to the domineering Eurocentric frameworks in “modern” (colonial) African historiography. They include but are not limited to written documents from Northern Nigeria, such as the Kano chronicles, oral traditions from the Yoruba and Igbo peoples from Nigeria’s south and east, rituals, customs, festivals, and much more.