Agency Through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

Document Type

Book

Publication Date

5-2026

Keywords

circus history, circus performers, otherness, race, performance studies, gender, open data, digtial humanities, data visualizations

Abstract

The circus was the largest form of entertainment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. Traveling shows introduced audiences to new music and daring performers, but also ideas about science, ethnology, and colonialist notions about the non-Western world. Pivotal to its appeal was the commercialization of otherness, presenting sensationalized and often fabricated realities about people as entertainment. Agency Through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875–1925 explores the circus in the broader historical context of the US in an effort to understand the lives and labor of circus performers whose identities were framed as abnormal, exotic, and socially marginal. Highlighting performers and data found in unique historical circus route books from the largest circus collections in the United States (Circus World, Illinois State University and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art), this multimodal publication features essays, archival documents and images, dynamic interactive timelines, and robust map data visualizations including circus routes integrated with Native lands, historical railroads, and population data. Drawing together and visualizing these understudied primary sources and the historical data they contain, editor Angela Yon and her contributors examine the possibility of performer agency within systems built on inequality, oppression, and the commodification of difference and illuminate how marginalized performers navigated visibility, labor, and identity in the circus and entertainment industry.

Funding Source

Agency Through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925 was originally created as a digital exhibit from 2020-2021 with funding from the Council of Library & Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections program project Step Right Up: Digitizing Over 100 Years of Circus Route Books. The exhibit has since then been rebuilt and revised into a multimodal book.

Comments

Edited by Angela Yon, with chapters by Angela Yon and Rebecca Fitzsimmons and contributions from Ellie Harman, Elizabeth Hartman, and Mariah Wahl.

Published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW), Urbana, IL; part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network. 

DOI

10.21900/pww.37

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