ENGLISH

Strolling Players of Empire: Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833

By Kathleen Wilson

Book information

Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Year
2023
ISBN
1108479782, 9781108479783
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
22 MB (22614944 bytes)
Series
Critical Perspectives on Empire
Pages
510\511
Topic
History
Time added
2022-12-11 12:26:28

Description

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass London, Kingston and Calcutta, Fort Marlborough in Sumatra, St. Helena and Port Jackson in New South Wales as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural tradition through their own performances, as Englishness became also a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

Similar books