The history play is among the United States' oldest theatrical forms, and since its inception the genre has been used to represent and interrogate questions of identity and citizenship. Over the last quarter of the twentieth century until the present day, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of history plays that focus on questions of race and representation. “Race and Performative Historiography in American Theatre, 1991-2014” provides an explanation for this surge, revealing that theatre-makers (playwrights, directors, actors, and designers) drew on a long tradition of metatheatrical techniques on the American stage to make race central to their representation and creation of history. This dissertation scrutinizes some of these techniques, which I have termed Performative Historiography, as these techniques rewrite the way the audience understands our national and racial past. Combining extensive performance analysis, archival work, race theory, and American theatre history, "Race and Performative Historiography" expands the discipline's understanding of the role of the theater in representing America’s racial past, present, and future. Each chapter of “Race and Performative Historiography” describes one of these techniques: sedimented time, historical synecdoche, and revision and repetition. These techniques provide theater-makers new ways of making vivid the past, exposing embedded power structures and forms of prejudice, as well thinking through and against national myths and structures of thought. Not only do these chapters describe these techniques, but they trace how these playwrights and directors give new life to older American theatrical forms: elements from minstrelsy (such as black, white, and red face), melodrama, and Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project. Tracing the afterlives of these forms, I reveal how the juxtaposition of these older traditions with contemporary models of representation creates new theatre forms, and shows that even the most daring of the new American playwrights draw on a long and storied tradition. The history play has always been a genre that American playwrights have turned to define who we are, and where we have been, as a nation. "Race and Performative Historiography" dissects the means by which they make those claims.

This dissertation is a comparative and transnational study of the techniques of racial impersonation used by white performers to represent black Afro-diasporic people in early modern England, Spain, and France. The racialization of blackness that took place in England at the turn of the sixteenth century has been well studied over the course of the last thirty years. This dissertation expands English early modern race scholarship in new directions by revealing the existence of a multi-directional circulation of racial ideas, lexemes, and performance techniques that led to the development of a vivid trans-European stage idiom of blackness across national borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While early modern race scholarship has traditionally focused on the rhetorical and dramatic strategies used by playwrights to create black characters, this dissertation brings to the fore the ideological work inherent in performance. It does so by arguing that the techniques of racial impersonation used in various loci of European performance culture, such as blackface, blackspeak (a comic mock-African accent), and black dances, racialized Afro-diasporic people as they led spectators in a variety of ways to think of those people as belonging naturally at the bottom of any well-constituted social order. This dissertation shows how the hermeneutic configurations and re-configurations of techniques of racial impersonation such as blackface, blackspeak, and black dance responded to social changes, to the development of colonization and color-based slavery, and to changing perceptions of what Afro-diasporic people’s status should be in European and Atlantic societies across the early modern period.