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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.

‘History is about to crack wide open’: Identity and Historiography in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America