1st Edition
History as Performance Political Movements in Galicia Around 1900
This study analyzes history as performance: as the interaction of actors, plays, stages and enactments. By this, it examines women’s politics in Habsburg Galicia around 1900: a Polish woman active in the peasant movement, a Ukrainian feminist, and a Jewish Zionist. It shows how the movements constructed essentialistically regarded collectives, experience as a medially comprehensible form of credibility, and a historically based inevitability of change, and legitimized participation and intervention through social policy and educational practices. Traits shared by the movements included the claim to interpretive sovereignty, the ritualization of participation, and the establishment of truths about past and future.
Introduction
Arenas: Politics in Galicia
Tools: Performance, performativity, ritual, and space
Rules: Research contexts
Strategies: Approaches
1. Finding Roles: The Participants
Heroic narrating, or: Maria Wysłouchowa and love
Dramatic directing, or Natalja Kobryns’ka and books
Theatrical enacting, or: Rosa Pomeranz and charisma
2. Propagating: The Plays
Writing collectives into existence
Composing experience
Enacting history
3. Organizing: The Stages
Ritualizing education
Rehearsing nation
Designing society
4. Mobilizing: The Enactments
Recitations about role models
Monologues about competition
Dialogues about practice
Conclusion
Biography
Dietlind Hüchtker is Professor for Historical Transregional Studies at Vienna University.