Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama Drago Momcilovic Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter, eds. Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama. Dramaturgies No. 24: Texts, Cultures and Performances. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008. Pp. 314. $54.95 (Pb). Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter's recent edited collection of essays, Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama, reinvigorates many of the familiar debates within memory studies about how playwrights, producers, audiences, companies, and theatre districts throughout North America engage the past and bring it to bear on the social, artistic, and political concerns of the present and future. Coming to us as part of a larger series entitled "Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances," this anthology fulfils the promise of providing a showcase for scholars who actively explore the tensions and interfaces between critical theory, textual analysis, cultural studies, and production history. In addition, the collection relies heavily on comparative methods of analysis, often times juxtaposing Canadian and American engagements with cultural memory in order to illustrate the full and diverse range of experiences and concerns relating to the ongoing [End Page 126] negotiation of "diasporic identities, exilic predicaments, and multiethnic subject positions" within North American anglophone drama (11–12). Despite its ambitious scope, the anthology coheres thematically around an enduring, if somewhat over-familiar, set of critical and artistic anxieties about the way cultures access, deploy, share, and reshape the past, as well as the ends to which those memory-acts are put. In addition, the essays strike a collective methodological chord in their attempt to establish the continuing relevance of these debates and the ways they inform and intersect with the dramaturgies of both widely prolific and less visible playwrights in Canada and the United States. In fact, the editors are to be applauded for assembling a wide range of critical meditations – including close readings, production histories, and even a pairing of creative pieces that speak to the power and ethics of writing and to the performance of both self and persona through writing – under the common preoccupation of performance and the constitutive role it plays in the construction of cultural memory in American and Canadian cultural identity and policy. It is clear from the outset that the anthology follows many of the interpretive manoeuvres of more prototypical inquiries into cultural memory. The essays themselves are more or less deeply indebted to and remain squarely within the domain of Pierre Nora's now canonical formulation of the "site of memory": the place, idea, or material object that offers a symbolic (re)construction of a shared national past. The contributors also appear in their own ways to reaffirm long-standing models of cultural memory that have already been brought to us by theorists like Marita Sturken, whose 1997 study Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering shifts individual and cultural remembrance from being a static offering to being an act of narration and a moment of cultural production – a model that makes us acutely aware of the unfinished and contentious nature of the record thus produced. Yet, despite this familiar line of questioning, Maufort and De Wagter assemble a collection of work that not only appropriates but also juxtaposes the concerns raised by Nora and Sturken and investigate the way this critical dialogue can be transposed within the theatre: a publicly consumed site of memory and, indeed, of memory entanglement that is uniquely spatial. In fact, some of the more valuable insights in this collection emerge in the discussions of the aesthetic particularity of the theatre and the extent to which cultural memories of different kinds – official and marginalized, documented and imagined, commensurate and incommensurate – can be enacted and embodied. Sheila Rabillard, in particular, draws heavily from Peggy Phelan's characterization of the theatre as a space in which loss is continually and inevitably enacted and brings that notion of theatre to bear on the intertwining functions of remembrance and [End Page 127] forgetting so fundamental to any postmodern view of cultural memory. Rabillard's essay, of course, is just one in a long sequence of...

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