ABSTRACT
This chapter hypothesises the existence of a tradition of timbral impersonation of blackness across early-modern European performance culture and explores the methodological difficulties and ethical pressures faced by historiographic attempts at reclaiming that acousmatic facet of the early-modern culture of racialisation in the twenty-first century. Theatre historians must consciously and transparently position themselves on the spectrum of openness to methodologies of historical reclamation induced by the revisionist turn. Ndiaye proposes a historiographic practice called “recording,” which takes seriously the conceptually fertile polysemy of the word “record” in the early-modern period and aims to enable theatre and performance historians to navigate difficulties without abdicating their projects of reclamation. Ultimately, this chapter illustrates the significance of this historiographic model when rereading Desdemona’s Black song in Othello.
