Editorial Comment: More Life

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• Editorial Comment: More Life
• Laura Edmondson

I write this comment in the midst of rage. Earlier this month, on May 1, students at my home institution of Dartmouth College erected five tents in the college’s central green space as part of a pro-Palestine protest. In the context of widespread police action on US campuses, Dartmouth’s administration “stood out for its almost instantaneous response to a nonviolent protest,” to quote the New York Times.¹ Just over two hours after the tents went up, the administration called the local police, which promptly brought in the state’s Special Events Response Team outfitted with riot gear, long guns, and batons. Injuries and mass arrests predictably ensued in which Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian American and Pacific Islander, international, and queer and nonbinary students were disproportionately affected. Many TJ readers undoubtedly share my fury at the criminalization of dissent, the Palestine exception to free speech policy, and the police brutality that has become (with noteworthy exceptions) the knee-jerk administrative response across the country.

My feelings of fury are admittedly at odds with this general issue of Theatre Journal, which does not explicitly address anger, activism, or police violence. Rather, the four articles offer poignant meditations on necromancy, revenants, ghostly presences, and diasporic yearning. In that vein, they expand upon the general issue I edited last year, which yielded the theme of archives and afterlives. In my editorial comment for that issue, I wrote that “these scholars imaginatively and rigorously enfold land, ocean, and bodies as capacious archives,” and that the issue “offers the archive as an opening.”² Since general issues are more a matter of happenstance than curation, they take the pulse of the field. Significantly, these essays sustain the imagination and rigor of the previous issue through their nuanced explorations of archives and counterarchives. Once again, openings proliferate.

Through their focus on absence and loss, these essays have much to teach my anger. They help me to remember that I write this comment not only in a historical moment of widespread protest but also in an era of mass death. They remind me that I should not use the righteousness of my rage as a distraction from the horrific loss of life in Gaza, not to mention Sudan. My anger should not deflect but instead should coexist with grief. It should also attend to the structural and geopolitical inequalities that make certain deaths more grievable than others. In that spirit, I invite all TJ readers to linger on the reflections on grief, loss, and absence contained herein. We have so much loss to bear; how do those losses generate new archives to trace, theorize, and inhabit? In this issue, Westley Montgomery writes, pace Saidiya Hartman, that the archive itself is a space of death. But death does not necessitate closure; rather, these four essays situate [End Page xi] death as an opening through which historians, curators, spectators, and theatre artists seek to grasp the ungraspable. In the process, they articulate new ways of mourning.

Absence itself serves as an archive in the opening essay. Montgomery’s “The Many Voices of Sissieretta Jones: Opera and the Sonic Necromancy of the Black Phonographic Archive” ponders the absence of any vocal recording of Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933), known as the first Black opera singer, even though she never sang on an operatic stage. Through a careful tracing of press accounts as well as “listening” à la Tina Campt to four images of Jones, Montgomery excavates the archival silence “not to enact a mode of recuperation, or in an attempt to locate lost subjectivities, but in order to ensound the assemblages in which sound comes to sound.” The essay contains an implicit warning to all historians searching not only for the urtext but also “for the ur-voice, the ur-body.” As Montgomery writes: “The hope beyond logic for Jones’s recorded voice is a hope for a stable blackness, a legible history, a unity of perception. It is a wish that, however fervently sought, is not capable of the resurrection it strives toward.” Montgomery suggests that to surpass that yearning and to linger in the silent multi-vocality of Jones’s absence...