Reviewed by: Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History by Maurya Wickstrom Rosa E. Schneider FIERY TEMPORALITIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE: THE INITIATION OF HISTORY. By Maurya Wickstrom. Methuen Drama Engage series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018; pp. 264. At the nexus of phenomenology, theatre/performance studies, and the philosophy of time, Maurya Wickstrom’s excellent and finely detailed Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History offers a new politics of time that rejects the sense of a stable and triumphant march forward, while imagining a new orientation toward the future and disrupting imperialist and racist histories along the way. For theatre scholars, her book shifts focus from the way performances end (the climax, the denouement, the “11 o’clock number”) to how performances initiate new beginnings and create moments of extended possibility in place of endings. These possibilities depend on Wickstrom’s three theories of time: the new present, penultimate time, and kairos. All three challenge the notion of finite endings as well as, in the case of the second chapter, revolution. As Wickstrom rightly argues, if the conception of time is altered, so the definition of history is transformed. History, in her estimation, is not a narrative of events or movements, but a state of possibility that can bring about new conditions of justice. This reframing is particularly intriguing for the theatre, as plays about history and historical subjectivity have entered a new renaissance—for example, in the works of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Paula Vogel, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Naomi Wallace, and Lynn Nottage. Although Wickstrom does not engage with these plays specifically, her theories of temporality are particularly useful for explaining how plays that are concerned with history manipulate time not only in their dramaturgies, but also in their approach to historical periodization. Although her claims about temporality are complex, she expertly illuminates them through thickly described performance analyses that range over a variety of forms. Wickstrom’s first chapter is a detailed introduction, outlining her theoretical concepts, guiding principles, and terminology. She begins to explore the new possibilities offered by her theories of time in chapter 2, in which she reads a pair of plays on the Haitian revolution through Alain Badiou’s theory of the “new present.” Badiou’s argument is that when revolutionary ideals reappear in different forms in different moments in time, they produce “new presents.” Wickstrom reads C. L. R. James’s Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History and Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe as successful stagings of the triumph of this new present. For example, in James’s second scene, which dramatizes the beginning of the revolution in a voodoo ceremony, the leaders of the new rebellion harness the energy of both a previous slave rebellion led by a slave named Mackandal and the more recent French Revolution, as Dessalines declares that his comrades’ password shall be “Liberty or Death.” This moment mingles three revolutionary moments by bringing the present and the past onto the stage simultaneously. The “new present” reframes both these plays from tragedies of failure to resurgences of revolutionary possibility. This refocus takes advantage of the theatre’s process of embodiment, by which audiences see these revolutions play out before their eyes again and again. If chapter 2 reinvents the way we see the past, the third chapter uses several performance analyses to reveal how theatre can stretch out the moments before the end. While the previous chapter is inspired by Badiou, this one takes its cue from Giorgio Agamben and his conception of penultimate time—the time before the end (her colloquial example is the time between a diagnosis of terminal cancer and the moment of death). While penultimate time does not prevent death for Wickstrom, the theory changes the way that we understand the meaning of life. Death is no longer the culmination [End Page 121] of life, but existence becomes measured by the time we have to change time. For theatre studies scholars, this perspective shifts attention away from endings and toward process. Wickstrom details her theory of penultimate time using a richly described performance of Gob Squad’s 2016...