Rather than being a direct contribution to either historiography or phenomenology, Fiery Temporalities offers a succession of close readings of two theatrical texts, five postmodern productions, two works of performance art, a dance, and a film in order to exemplify reflections on metaphysical potentiality in theatre and performance. An event—reflected upon as well as instantiated by text or performance—is both an occurrence and an outcome, result, or consequence of an occurrence and usually the focus of historical study. Departing from this axiom, yet acknowledging the eventhood of her case studies, Fiery Temporalities radically challenges the idea that time is inevitably processional even when awareness is multitemporal, which enables Maurya Wickstrom to supersede debates about the ephemerality or durability of performance and instead examine a wide range of cases where quite different insights are enacted. Eschewing claims to “the new” (as a construct of historicism), her cases regulate disruptions in ways that contrast lived durational (experienced) or objective (cosmic) time to enter into a relationship with something like futurity (history, in the sense that temporalities classify ontologies). Their aesthetics stage temporal discordances that denaturalize historiographic explanations, for example, the accordance of defeat and finitude with respect to Indigenous peoples’ “settler time,” and instead separate from processual history’s force à la Afrofuturism.

Close engagement with the texts and critical traditions of C.L.R. James’s Toussaint Louverture (1936) and Aimé Césaire’s The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963) ground the book. The plays dramatize the 1791 to 1804 revolution by Black slaves in Saint-Domingue, resulting in the founding of the Haitian republic by the former slave Henry Christophe, a brutal autocrat, and his incongruous reign as emperor that ended in his suicide in 1820, preemptively avoiding a coup d’état. Wickstrom argues that at the close of the 18th century an insurrection in which Black slaves self-liberated defined a new kind of present: but of what kind? If the causes of the revolution could be traced to numerous antecedents, what did this signal about what was to come? While these are key questions for historical writing, Wickstrom takes up a distinct problem posed by the genre of tragic drama: if Toussaint Louverture is defeated by historical dilemmas and if, in Aristotelian tragedy, the downfall of Henry Christophe is inevitable, can theatre offer something other than individual ruin and the extinction of revolutionary promise in relaying these events? Crucially, history, drama, and theatre coincide in asking whether destruction is inevitable, and how, given these events, there can be an emancipatory present.

Even if one does not subscribe to the eschatology of judgment or the cycle of reincarnation, a punctum called death awaits us all. Such an end point governs the concept of life as well as any theatrical performance. In analyses of Andrew Schneider’s You Are Nowhere (2015), William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour (2012), Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes (2011), and Romeo Castellucci’s On the Concept of the Face: Regarding the Son of God (2010), Wickstrom posits the idea of a thematic kairos: a propitious moment, or opportune time, for action as a creative innovation that highlights the unique experience of events and how “actants can interrupt, modify, interfere, [or] interest” (149) other actants in the passing flow of time that is generally called the present. Acceleration and survival (Gob Squad) or disintegration and decay (Castellucci) are contrasted with children’s exuberance that in turn contrasts with adults’ impasse of mere survival. In a virtuosic analysis, Wickstrom notes that in On the Concept of the Face a formerly debilitated and debased old man walks easily across the stage; contrasting with his former performed incapacity, seemingly at the verge of a particularly undignified death, this serves to “pull the future back into the incoherent and unresolved creativity of the to-come” (170). But this is not merely recursivity (a last minute save), a gotcha (trickery), or wit (a metatheatrical moment). Indicative of her finely honed capacity to invite readers to witness and comprehend performances as philosophy utilizing theatre’s teleology (both as ending and goal-driven causality), Wickstrom sets out what is needed to regard this simple stage cross as an opportune time for contemplating our respective due measures.

In the final chapter, principally a study of Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic (2017) and Cassils’s Tiresias and Inextinguishable Fire (2007), Wickstrom discusses performances that posit time suspended, or waiting, and in so doing create pressure to reach not only out of presentism but beyond the future, utilizing theatre and performance as a chronogenetic tool to make, or prophesy, something else (or other) of time. This is a highly desirable proposition, in contrast to historical determinism, cyclicism, or the reigning view of historical relativism that acknowledges multiple standards of truth, competing versions of how the past makes the present, and (too often) an impasse with respect to change. In Tiresias, Cassils’s trans body melts the torso of ice between them and spectators, heightening awareness of incremental change. Unlike alienation (a historicist perspective on dialectics), Wickstrom stresses that the incommensurability of Cassils’s body and the classically masculinist ice-torso reaches from presentism over the future to an unnameable temporality. Rather than a Brechtian call to action—a causal relationship of performative stimulant, intellectual process, then social consequence—this surpasses both deconstructive relational meanings that call for a different future—not merely a utopian experience in the duration of performance—“to ‘initiate’ as the creation of temporal disorder” (204). This makes maximal use of performance to instantiate metaphysics, putting the lie to Georg Lukacs’s judgment of theatre’s inferior soul relative to cinema’s action, or its stillness versus infinite variability. Performance can, Wickstrom argues along with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, bypass known narratives and refuse finitude to offer “insurgent prophecy” (210).