Preliminary thoughts on the death of the editor

Abstract

In my first editorial for STP, I noted that we were moving in new directions. In the time between then and now, there were many interesting already-accepted articles waiting for publication and several special issues on a variety of topics. This will be the first issue that I have assembled to consists entirely of articles accepted after I came on board. The act of writing this editorial has given me a moment to pause and consider my imagination of the role of editor. As the following descriptions of the articles in this issue will make clear, no one editor could possibly have the linguistic, cultural, historical and methodological knowledges necessary to expertly engage with the richness of the materials offered. In this issue there are a cluster of articles on the Middle East, an area whose theatre tends to be underrepresented in Anglophone academic journals (although this is changing). Majeed Mohammed Midhin and Clare David’s ‘National Cultural History and Transnational Political concerns in Rasha Radhil’s Ishtar in Baghdad’ examines the multiple overlapping frames in which this play might be read, and, in doing so, explores the unequal flows of globalization. Tiran Manucharyan’s ‘Irreconcilable with Time: Lenin al-Ramlī’s Theatre in Times of Crisis’ considers the various temporalities created by competing and overlapping epistemologies in Egypt. Tsu-Chung Su’s ‘The Qibla – A Never-ending Story of Migration, Runaway, and Pilgrimage’ considers the performative nature of pilgrimages in the contemporary context. In each of these cases, the collision of epistemes is visible – through temporality, through movement and through political knowledges. These articles specifically do not contort their material to fit within European theories of theatre, but, instead, shed light on theoretical contexts more local to the materials in question. While focusing on a different geographically region, Yu-Jhung Hwang’s ‘Borderline Society and “Rebellious Mourning”: The Case of South Korean Feminist Activism’ also engages with the intersections and conflicts between epistemes – in this case surrounding gender. Likewise, moving back to the UK Victoria Bianchi’s ‘Bring me a Souvenir: Performing Herstory on Ayr Beach’ considers the ways in which history, myth and geography intersect with storytelling to challenge dominant narratives and to create alternative structures. In that each of these pieces so carefully lays out the ways in which we should understand and approach the materials in question, it would be antithetical for me to then perform an act of reframing – of forcing them to fit together under the auspices of my own episteme. Where then to I leave my mark on this process? Certainly, as an editor, I can provide feedback on clarity, but the methodologies and writing styles of these pieces vary widely enough that I am forced to consider that my thoughts on ‘clarity’ as situated, personal (or systemic) judgements rather than as anything approaching an objective standpoint. STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE 2022, VOL. 42, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/14682761.2022.2037351