Transatlantic Broadway

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Description

Transatlantic Broadway traces the infrastructural networks and technological advances that supported the globalization of popular entertainment in the pre-World War I period, with a specific focus on the production and performance of Broadway as physical space, dream factory, and glorious machine. Inspired by post-humanist scholarship, this book pays heed to the non-human entities and the backgrounded or disappeared human laborers who participated in the transnational expansion of theatre networks.

In particular, it examines the transnational performances of ocean liners, piers, telegraph cables, telegrams, typewriters, office spaces, newspapers, and postcards and asks how these objects, as participants in a series of complicated networks, transformed the machinery of US theatre as well as the everyday practices of those who produced and consumed it.

In so doing, it identifies surprising connections between the most mundane of actions - typing a letter, turning over a postcard - and the most extraordinary - firing a torpedo, declaring war. Review: 'As she traces the transatlantic passage of ocean liners, telegrams, producers, artists and objects, Marlis Schweitzer reshapes our understanding of the Broadway theatre wars of the Gilded Age.

Sophisticated, impressively readable, and impeccably researched, this is theatre history at its best.' - Alan Filewod, University of Guelph, Canada 'Schweitzer's compelling study shifts scholarly inquiry away from the traditional space-bound landscape of Broadway and offers a long-overdue investigation of the transnational reach of Broadway's theatrical productions.

With impressive archival research and riveting prose, Transnational Broadway characterizes early twentieth-century theatre as a machine that manufactured a powerful cultural imaginary in the deployment of American Empire. Transatlantic Broadway also uniquely examines the infrastructural politics of theatre, including interactions between human and non-human actors, such as the rise of the telegraph, office technologies, transnational ocean liners, economic booms (and crashes), and geo-political moments.

Schweitzer's impressive theoretical framing and global focus make this a ground-breaking work for scholars and students alike!' - Katie N. Johnson, Miami University, USA