• Editorial Comment: More Life
• Laura Edmondson

I write this comment in the midst of rage. Earlier this month, on May 1, students at my home institution of Dartmouth College erected five tents in the college’s central green space as part of a pro-Palestine protest. In the context of widespread police action on US campuses, Dartmouth’s administration “stood out for its almost instantaneous response to a nonviolent protest,” to quote the New York Times.¹ Just over two hours after the tents went up, the administration called the local police, which promptly brought in the state’s Special Events Response Team outfitted with riot gear, long guns, and batons. Injuries and mass arrests predictably ensued in which Black, Indigenous, Latine, Asian American and Pacific Islander, international, and queer and nonbinary students were disproportionately affected. Many TJ readers undoubtedly share my fury at the criminalization of dissent, the Palestine exception to free speech policy, and the police brutality that has become (with noteworthy exceptions) the knee-jerk administrative response across the country.

My feelings of fury are admittedly at odds with this general issue of Theatre Journal, which does not explicitly address anger, activism, or police violence. Rather, the four articles offer poignant meditations on necromancy, revenants, ghostly presences, and diasporic yearning. In that vein, they expand upon the general issue I edited last year, which yielded the theme of archives and afterlives. In my editorial comment for that issue, I wrote that “these scholars imaginatively and rigorously enfold land, ocean, and bodies as capacious archives,” and that the issue “offers the archive as an opening.”² Since general issues are more a matter of happenstance than curation, they take the pulse of the field. Significantly, these essays sustain the imagination and rigor of the previous issue through their nuanced explorations of archives and counterarchives. Once again, openings proliferate.

Through their focus on absence and loss, these essays have much to teach my anger. They help me to remember that I write this comment not only in a historical moment of widespread protest but also in an era of mass death. They remind me that I should not use the righteousness of my rage as a distraction from the horrific loss of life in Gaza, not to mention Sudan. My anger should not deflect but instead should coexist with grief. It should also attend to the structural and geopolitical inequalities that make certain deaths more grievable than others. In that spirit, I invite all TJ readers to linger on the reflections on grief, loss, and absence contained herein. We have so much loss to bear; how do those losses generate new archives to trace, theorize, and inhabit? In this issue, Westley Montgomery writes, pace Saidiya Hartman, that the archive itself is a space of death. But death does not necessitate closure; rather, these four essays situate [End Page xi] death as an opening through which historians, curators, spectators, and theatre artists seek to grasp the ungraspable. In the process, they articulate new ways of mourning.

Absence itself serves as an archive in the opening essay. Montgomery’s “The Many Voices of Sissieretta Jones: Opera and the Sonic Necromancy of the Black Phonographic Archive” ponders the absence of any vocal recording of Sissieretta Jones (1868-1933), known as the first Black opera singer, even though she never sang on an operatic stage. Through a careful tracing of press accounts as well as “listening” à la Tina Campt to four images of Jones, Montgomery excavates the archival silence “not to enact a mode of recuperation, or in an attempt to locate lost subjectivities, but in order to ensound the assemblages in which sound comes to sound.” The essay contains an implicit warning to all historians searching not only for the urtext but also “for the ur-voice, the ur-body.” As Montgomery writes: “The hope beyond logic for Jones’s recorded voice is a hope for a stable blackness, a legible history, a unity of perception. It is a wish that, however fervently sought, is not capable of the resurrection it strives toward.” Montgomery suggests that to surpass that yearning and to linger in the silent multi-vocality of Jones’s absence...

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  编辑评论：更多生活
•  劳拉·埃德蒙森

我在愤怒中写下这篇评论。本月早些时候，即 5 月 1 日，我所在院校达特茅斯学院的学生在学院中央绿地搭建了五个帐篷，作为支持巴勒斯坦抗议活动的一部分。据《纽约时报》报道，在美国校园内警察广泛采取行动的背景下，达特茅斯政府“因其对非暴力抗议几乎立即做出反应而脱颖而出”。 ¹ 帐篷搭建起来两个多小时后，政府就打电话给当地警方，警方立即派来了配备防暴装备、长枪和警棍的州特殊事件响应小组。可以预见的是，伤害和大规模逮捕接踵而至，其中黑人、土著、拉丁裔、亚裔美国人和太平洋岛民、国际学生、酷儿和非二元学生受到不成比例的影响。毫无疑问，许多《TJ》读者和我一样对异见定罪、巴勒斯坦言论自由政策的例外以及警察的暴行（除了值得注意的例外）已成为全国范围内下意识的行政反应感到愤怒。

诚然，我的愤怒情绪与《戏剧杂志》这期普通期刊不一致，该期刊没有明确讨论愤怒、激进主义或警察暴力。相反，这四篇文章提供了对死灵、亡灵、幽灵存在和流散渴望的深刻思考。本着这种精神，他们扩展了我去年编辑的一般问题，该问题产生了档案和来世的主题。在我对该期的社论评论中，我写道，“这些学者富有想象力且严谨地将陆地、海洋和身体作为宽敞的档案”，并且该期“为档案提供了一个开口”。 ² 由于一般问题更多的是偶然事件而不是策划问题，因此它们掌握了该领域的脉搏。值得注意的是，这些文章通过对档案和反档案的细致入微的探索，维持了上一期的想象力和严谨性。空缺机会再次激增。

这些文章对缺席和失落的关注，让我的愤怒得到了很多启发。它们帮助我记住，我写下这篇评论不仅是在一个普遍抗议的历史时刻，也是在一个大规模死亡的时代。他们提醒我，我不应该用正义的愤怒来分散对加沙可怕生命损失的注意力，更不用说苏丹了。我的愤怒不应该转移，而应该与悲伤共存。它还应该关注结构性和地缘政治不平等，这些不平等使某些死亡比其他死亡更令人悲痛。本着这种精神，我邀请所有《TJ》读者仔细思考本文所包含的对悲伤、失落和缺席的反思。我们有太多的损失要承受；这些损失如何产生新的档案来追踪、理论化和栖息？在本期中，韦斯特利·蒙哥马利（Westley Montgomery）以赛迪亚·哈特曼（Saidiya Hartman）的说法写道，档案馆本身就是一个死亡空间。但死亡并不意味着结束；死亡并不意味着结束。相反，这四篇文章将死亡视为历史学家、策展人、观众和戏剧艺术家试图抓住无法把握的事物的一个开口。在此过程中，他们提出了新的哀悼方式。

缺席本身就是开篇文章中的一个档案。蒙哥马利的《西西埃雷塔·琼斯的众多声音：黑人唱片档案馆的歌剧和声音死灵》思考了西西埃雷塔·琼斯（1868-1933）的任何声乐录音的缺失，西西埃雷塔·琼斯被称为第一位黑人歌剧歌手，尽管她从未在其中演唱过歌剧舞台。通过仔细追踪新闻报道以及像蒂娜·坎普特那样“聆听”琼斯的四张照片，蒙哥马利挖掘了档案中的沉默“不是为了制定一种恢复模式，或者试图找到失去的主观性，而是为了使声音在组合中产生声音。”这篇文章对所有不仅要寻找原始文本而且要“寻找你的声音、你的身体”的历史学家提出了隐含的警告。正如蒙哥马利所写：“对琼斯录制的声音来说，超越逻辑的希望是对稳定的黑暗、清晰的历史和统一的感知的希望。这个愿望，无论多么热切地寻求，都无法实现它所努力实现的复兴。”蒙哥马利建议超越这种渴望，并在琼斯缺席的沉默多声中徘徊……