Transatlantic Broadway

the long version

"Transatlantic Broadway traces the infrastructural networks and technological advances that supported the globalization of popular entertainment in the pre-World War I period, with a specific focus on the production and performance of Broadway as physical space, dream factory, and glorious machine. Inspired by post-humanist scholarship, this book pays heed to the non-human entities and the backgrounded or disappeared human laborers who participated in the transnational expansion of theatre networks. In particular, it examines the transnational performances of ocean liners, piers, telegraph cables, telegrams, typewriters, office spaces, newspapers, and postcards and asks how these objects, as participants in a series of complicated networks, transformed the machinery of US theatre as well as the everyday practices of those who produced and consumed it. In so doing, it identifies surprising connections between the most mundane of actions - typing a letter, turning over a postcard - and the most extraordinary - firing a torpedo, declaring war"--