Crossing Borders: The Agency of Nineteenth-Century European Theatre Migrants

ongoing

How do migrants influence culture, its institutions and the production of the art? How does the migration process feed back into the migrants’ mind-sets, activities and social relations? These are pivotal questions today as in the past. The nineteenth century was a period of significant mass migration, and theatre – one of the mass media of the day – was profoundly affected by it. T-MIGRANTS will carry out the first systematic and in-depth analysis of nineteenth-century European theatre migrants. By reclaiming and positioning this group of agents, which has largely been ignored by national theatre historiographies, and by stressing their crucial but hitherto neglected influence on processes of modernity and global entanglement within theatre in and beyond Europe, the project will open up new ways of evaluating the influence of migration on culture and its institutions. Focusing on three geographic areas (Europe, the USA and South America), the project has three main objectives: 1. To systematically collect, analyse and make digitally accessible a new stock of data on nineteenth-century migrants, their theatrical work and their international networks. 2. To contextualise European theatre migrants within the migration processes of the nineteenth century. 3. To investigate the pivotal consequences of theatre migrants on institutional and aesthetical level, including significant impulses towards cross-cultural flows and tensions within the theatre business. Utilising a combination of previously unexamined archival material, comparative approaches and cutting-edge methods of digital humanities, T-MIGRANTS will revise established national narratives in theatre historiography, providing the crucial momentum towards a transnational history of theatre. It will make a substantial contribution to our understanding of historical and contemporary discourses on migration processes, integration and cultural identity and to the question of the cultural self-conception of Europe.