One of the most forbidding and yet rewarding challenges in a substantive internationalization of arts scholarship is accounting for the experience and passage of time. The extent to which developments in theatre and performance over the past 150 years have been tied up with the larger social, economic and technological transformations reflexively understood as ‘modernity’ is a key reason an international journal readership is able to find interest and value in scholarship on performances they may not have seen, that are practised in places they have never been. At the same time, any such research – it is tempting to say ‘from outside the West’, but in fact the requirement holds everywhere – must register how the work under discussion complicates an otherwise oversimplified narrative of developmental modernity. This narrative treats a homogenized industrial and postindustrial ‘West’ as having led the way and established a model for how other parts of the world would modernize subsequently. The assumption is quickened in discussions of art because arguably one characteristic of those transformations as they happened in numerous centres of Euro-American power was the role that artists played in giving them aesthetic form and expressing their meanings. This is prominent in the emergence of modernism and the avant-garde, and it is logical that in recent times scholars of modernism have been particularly energetic in questioning the developmental narrative and demonstrating not only how such phenomena were constitutively reliant on processes elsewhere, but also how artistic developments everywhere both informed each other (often inequably) and manifested local and highly contingent characteristics.

中文翻译：

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社论：时间旅行

在艺术学术的实质性国际化中，最艰巨但最有价值的挑战之一是考虑经验和时间的流逝。过去 150 年戏剧和表演的发展在多大程度上与更大的社会、经济和技术变革联系在一起，这些变革被反身理解为“现代性”，这是国际期刊读者能够在学术中找到兴趣和价值的关键原因在他们可能没有看过的表演上，在他们从未去过的地方练习过。同时，任何这样的研究——很容易说“来自西方以外”，但实际上这种要求无处不在——必须说明所讨论的工作如何使原本过于简单的发展现代性叙述复杂化。这种叙述将同质化的工业和后工业“西方”视为引领并建立了世界其他地区随后将如何现代化的模式。在讨论艺术时，这种假设加速了，因为可以说，这些转变发生在许多欧美权力中心的一个特征是艺术家在赋予他们审美形式和表达他们的意义方面所起的作用。这在现代主义和前卫艺术的出现中尤为突出，而且合乎逻辑的是，近来现代主义学者特别积极地质疑发展叙事，并证明这些现象不仅在构成上依赖于其他地方的过程，而且艺术发展如何 在讨论艺术时，这种假设加速了，因为可以说，这些转变发生在许多欧美权力中心的一个特征是艺术家在赋予他们审美形式和表达他们的意义方面所起的作用。这在现代主义和前卫艺术的出现中尤为突出，而且合乎逻辑的是，近来现代主义学者特别积极地质疑发展叙事，并证明这些现象不仅在构成上依赖于其他地方的过程，而且艺术发展如何 在讨论艺术时，这种假设加速了，因为可以说，这些转变发生在许多欧美权力中心的一个特征是艺术家在赋予他们审美形式和表达他们的意义方面所起的作用。这在现代主义和前卫艺术的出现中尤为突出，而且合乎逻辑的是，近来现代主义学者特别积极地质疑发展叙事，并证明这些现象不仅在构成上依赖于其他地方的过程，而且艺术发展如何到处两者相互通知（通常是不平等的）并表现出当地和高度偶然的特征。