caa a22 4500 378884328 CHVBK 20180305123439.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e200407 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/zaa.2004.52.3.287 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/zaa.2004.52.3.287 Heinze Rüdiger ‘History is about to crack wide open': Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner's Angels in America [Elektronische Daten] [Rüdiger Heinze] This paper suggests that beyond the overt - and abundantly discussed - concern with history, Tony Kushner's famous play Angels in America represents - in the phrasing of Walter Benjamin - a figurative ‘shooting at the clocks' not in order to end history but to instigate new histories. The main characters, one of them modeled after the infamous historical Roy Cohn, employ different performative strategies to cope with their infection with AIDS and the impending millennium. Through constantly transfiguring their identity by subverting the names given them and the according discursive power structures, the characters 1. manage to invest the names given them with alternative/new meanings, 2. are able to maintain/obtain individual agency and 3. thus escape the fate that an apparently pre-ordained (i.e. teleological, fixed and heteronomous) history has in store for them. Accordingly, they write their own histories in the new millennium, inverting the assumption that history deter-mines identity by making their identity determine history. This paper will examine how this is achieved, and through which performative strategies. © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/3(2004-07), 287-299 52:3<287 2004 52 zaa https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.3.287 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2004.52.3.287 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Heinze Rüdiger NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik De Gruyter 52/3(2004-07), 287-299 52:3<287 2004 52 zaa CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter