Leopold Lippert Knihy

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American theater emerged as a crucial cultural space for debates around gender stereotypes, gendered conduct, sexual desire, the politics of intimacy and domesticity, female authorship, as well as the complex intersections of gender and other markers of cultural difference, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, or nation. This collection explores the role of gender in the formation of American theatrical culture in this period. It features essays on well-known early American dramatists such as Susanna Rowson or Judith Sargent Murray, but also sheds light on anonymous authors and more obscure theatrical practices.

What happens to ‘America’ when it does not coincide with the geographical and institutional boundaries of the U. S. nation-state? What does ‘America’ mean when it is performed abroad and circulates among populations and publics outside U. S. national contexts? ‘Performing America Abroad’ explores an unlikely American studies archive: contemporary cultural performances in Austria and Germany which refer to the American cultural imaginary, but enact it with a ‘transnational difference.’ The book discusses the ambivalent cultural politics of these enactments in the context of neoliberal capitalism; specifically, it looks at several cross-racial performances of ‘Indianness’ on various Austrian stages, it examines queer political demonstrators on Vienna’s central Ringstraße, who celebrate the legacy of the 1969 New York Stonewall riots, and it discusses the ‘Americanness’ of a series of theatrical adaptations of Arthur Miller’s 1949 play ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Germany and Austria.