This Island's Mine: Mapping the Borders of Shakespeare, Whiteness, and National Belonging in Manhattan's Ethnic Theaters, 1890–1910

Abstract

By combining performance history's turn to the performativity of archives with rhetorical studies' turn to the rhetoricity of borders, this essay analyzes English-language press coverage of German, Italian, and Yiddish productions of Shakespeare in Manhattan between 1890 and 1910 to show how mainstream journalists articulated Shakespeare as a normative cultural and rhetorical space in which to explore, negotiate, and even resist the increasingly diverse urban population and the shifting reality of what it meant to be American during this period. It also considers the resistive potential, or “border crossings,” of the immigrant performances themselves as they operated within and against the rhetoric of dominant reviewers. Finally, it suggests the utility of performative border rhetorics, specifically “genealogies of bordering,” for future critical cultural histories.