Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender Transcultural Perspectives [1 ed.] 2016013182, 9781138682689, 9781315544977

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction: Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives
PART I: Political Agency
1 Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown
2 Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Performing Migrant Identity in Two Italian African Memoirs
3 Recovering Queequeq’s Body: Performing Alterna(rra)tives in the Borderlands
4 Limning the Limit or Notes toward an Outline of Activist Performance at the Limit
PART II: Diasporic Belonging
5 Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity in Réka Pigniczky’s Autobiographical Documentary Incubator (2009)
6 Diasporic Bollywood: Fusionist Practices and Gender Performativity in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood
7 Asian American Family Memoirs and the Performance of Identity and Readership in Transcultural Societies
PART III: Performances of Ethnicity and Gender
8 Gallo-Gallina: Gender Performance and the Androgynous Imagination in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío
9 Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity: Public and Private Spaces in R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend
10 Performing Butterfly: Medial Constructions of Ethnic Identity
PART IV: Cross-Ethnic Traffic
11 Asian American Literature and Literary Theory: Onoto Watanna’s Panethnic Impersonation in Miss Numė of Japan
12 Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community in Michael Bond’s Paddington Here and Now and Don’t Eat the Neighbours
13 The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos by Cornershop and by Ramesh B. Weeratunga
14 Performing Poetry: Langston Hughes, “I, too” and Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender

Performance and performativity are important terms for a theorization of gender and race/ethnicity as constitutive of identity. This collection reflects the ubiquity, diversity, and (historical) locatedness of ethnicity and gender by presenting contributions by an array of international scholars who focus on the representation of these crucial categories of identity across various media including literature, film, documentary, and (music) video performance. The first section, “Political Agency,” stresses instances where the performance of ethnicity/gender ultimately aims at a liberating effect leading to more autonomy. The second section, “Diasporic Belonging,” explores the different kinds of negotiations of ethnic performances in multiethnic contexts. The third part, “Performances of Ethnicity and Gender,” scrutinizes instances of the combined performance of ethnicity and gender in novels, films, and musical performances. The last section, “Cross-Ethnic Traffic,” contains a number of contributions that are concerned with attempts at crossing over from “one ethnicity into another” by way of performance. Bettina Hofmann is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. Monika Mueller is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the ­ niversity of Bochum, Germany. U

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

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For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

82 Social Memory Technology Theory, Practice, Action Karen Worcman and Joanne Garde-Hansen 83 Reviving Gramsci Crisis, Communication, and Change Marco Briziarelli and Susana Martinez Guillem 84 Motherhood in the Media Infanticide, Journalism, and the Digital Age Barbara Barnett 85 The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies Edited by Andrew Hickey 86 Intimacy on the Internet Media Representation of Online Intimacy Lauren Rosewarne 87 The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing Subjugated Knowledges Sarah Lowndes 88 Advertising and Public Memory Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Ghost Signs Edited by Stefan Schutt, Sam Roberts and Leanne White 89 Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood Brand Mom Jorie Lagerwey 90 Technologies of Consumer Labor A History of Self-Service Michael Palm 91 Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender Transcultural Perspectives Edited by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller

Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:29 11 April 2017

Transcultural Perspectives

Edited by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hofmann, Bettina, 1964– editor. | Mueller, Monika, 1960– editor. Title: Performing ethnicity, performing gender: transcultural perspectives / edited by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller. Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies; 91 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013182 Subjects: LCSH: Sex role in literature. | Sex role in the theater. | Performing arts—Political aspects. | Ethnicity in literature. | Ethnicity in the theater. Classification: LCC PN56.S52 P45 2016 | DDC 809/.93353—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013182 ISBN: 978-1-138-68268-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-54497-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

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For Dorothea Fischer-Hornung

President of MESEA (2004–2012)

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Contents

Introduction: Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives

1

M o n i k a M u eller an d Betti na H ofman n

Part I

Political Agency 1 Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown

23

A la n R ice

2 Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Performing Migrant Identity in Two Italian African Memoirs

35

W illiam B o elh ower

3 Recovering Queequeq’s Body: Performing Alterna(rra)tives in the Borderlands

53

A strid M . F ell n er

4 Limning the Limit or Notes toward an Outline of Activist Performance at the Limit

69

S amir Dayal

Part II

Diasporic Belonging 5 Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity in Réka Pigniczky’s Autobiographical Documentary Incubator (2009)

91

Mónika Fodor

6 Diasporic Bollywood: Fusionist Practices and Gender Performativity in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood P i n - chia F e ng

106

viii Contents 7 Asian American Family Memoirs and the Performance of Identity and Readership in Transcultural Societies

118

Ro c í o G . Davis

Part III

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Performances of Ethnicity and Gender 8 Gallo-Gallina: Gender Performance and the Androgynous Imagination in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío

133

Carmen S erran o

9 Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity: Public and Private Spaces in R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend

150

Wo lfga ng Ho lt kamp

10 Performing Butterfly: Medial Constructions of Ethnic Identity

161

A n geli ka Koehler

Part IV

Cross-Ethnic Traffic 11 Asian American Literature and Literary Theory: Onoto Watanna’s Panethnic Impersonation in Miss Numė of Japan

181

I pi n g L ia ng

12 Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community in Michael Bond’s Paddington Here and Now and Don’t Eat the Neighbours

193

J o pi Nyma n

13 The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos by Cornershop and by Ramesh B. Weeratunga

207

M o n i k a M u eller

14 Performing Poetry: Langston Hughes, “I, too” and Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”

222

B etti na H ofma n n

List of Contributors Index

237 241

Introduction

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Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender: Transcultural Perspectives Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann

The concepts of ethnicity and gender are categories by which human beings define themselves. Ethnicity and gender are performed in myriad ways in daily life, on the streets, and in the media. As cultural constructs, ethnicity and gender are subject to continuous change brought about in their enactment or performance. Since they are normative, both categories are often viewed as oppressive. According to Judith Butler’s theories on performance and performativity, which are based on the findings of J. L. Austin and S.  J.  Tambiah, all normative behavior, including the behavior prescribed by the norms of race/ethnicity and gender, can actually be resignified and changed by performing a repetition with a difference, a more or less “parodic repetition” (Gender Trouble 138). Theorists, including Butler herself, who opts for a resignification that is contingent rather than deliberate, have debated how exactly gender and race are constructed and to what extent a transformation of oppressive norms can actually be the intended outcome of performance. Thus, Heath R. Davis, for example, formulates the following questions: How is gender [and, by extension, race] read in or on the body? When coming into a world that pre-exists us how does surface, a series of movements or gestures, “energy,” create a language with which we speak, communicate and transmit/produce knowledge? If our gender [race/ethnicity] is unintelligible, misread or misunderstood, how does it threaten the legitimacy of hegemonic gender [racial] structures? (online) The contributors to this volume address the important controversy over contingency versus intent in practices of poststructuralist resignification by exploring or even postulating a space in-between poststructuralism and poli­ tical activism. In this context, Davis’s notion of an “aesthetics of activism” elucidates that a new political activism—informed by the poststructuralist turn—needs to be considered in order to theorize ethnicity and gender in the twenty-first century. This “aesthetics of activism” proves to be an important concept because it calls for performance-based expression that “scrambles” normative representations and thus makes “their common sense unintelligible” (H. Davis, online) in order to create space for resignification.

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2  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann By presenting contributions by an array of international scholars from England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States,1 who focus on the performance/performativity of ethnicity and gender in the Americas, in Asia, and in Europe, this collection aims to reflect the ubiquity, diversity, and (historical) locatedness of the two normative categories. Our contributors come from the fields of cultural and literary studies, more specifically: American studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, Black Atlantic studies, border studies, gender studies, and performance and film studies. They apply U.S. American and European literary and cultural theory in a “cross-cultural” manner to cultural texts that are important, yet not part of any mainstream or short-lived hype, and they also apply insights from the field of performance studies to literary studies, thus aiming to bring out nuances that might otherwise be overlooked. The concepts of performance and performativity provide the main theoretical framework for this volume; as Marvin Carlson has pointed out, all human activity that is “carried out with a consciousness of itself” can be understood as performance since “our lives are structured according to repeated and socially sanctioned modes of behavior” (4–5). Performances of ethnicity and gender can be activist events or playful explorations; sometimes they are both at the same time. Erving Goffman stresses the social/ activist aspect of performance and defines the term as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (15–16). Activist activities express power and also resistance to it. Activities may be performed on the streets or staged on theater platforms, and they may be watched in movie theaters and on the screens of TV sets, computers, smartphones, and tablets. Staged performances often also explore different modes of social beha­ vior. For centuries, theatrical performances have deconstructed the seemingly fixed identity categories of sex/gender and race/ethnicity2; the performance tradition of Shakespeare’s plays, in which actors have been putting on and trying out different genders and races, is an obvious example. In his seminal Performance Studies, Richard Schechner introduces the categories of “make belief” and “make-believe” performances in order to pinpoint some of the differences between everyday and staged performances. As he explains, “[t]he many performances in everyday life such as professional roles, gender, and race roles, and shaping one’s identity are not make-believe actions (as playing a role on stage or in a film probably is)” (42). In contrast, everyday life performances “‘make belief’—[they] create the very social realities they enact” (42), and thus they stand in sharp contrast to staged “make-­ believe” actions. This distinction between enactment of “make believe” and “make-belief” serves well to explain the important difference between the categories of performance and performativity, “between what goes on at the Metropolitan Opera and what the poststructuralists posit” (167). In performance such as, for example, conceptual art performance, the “make believe” is “analogous to the ‘as if’ of theatre” (168). Performativity, “make belief,”

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Introduction  3 however, creates “made up” social realities (168) and is a characteristic of social discourses that constitute identity. Performance and performativity are important terms for a theorization of gender and race/ethnicity as categories of identity. While social acti­vists are convinced that activist performances can bring about social change, poststructuralists scoff at the idea of such “agency,” preferring to think that change is a contingent product of performativity. Performativity became a household term in the early 1990s, when Judith Butler argued in her Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993) that what seems essential about sex/gender (and race/ethnicity) is actually only the result of performativity, of “make belief.” Butler’s influential resignification of gender and race, which helped occasion a “trans-disciplinary performative turn” (Gade and Jerslev 8), also influenced critical interest in the performance/performativity of race/ethnicity. David Hollinger’s much debated Postethnic America (1995) and Richard Rodriguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2003) are considered major critical works on the performative resignification of race/ethnicity. While the performance of ethnicity has been the subject of many critical articles, so far there has not been a single edited volume with a multiethnic focus.3 Performing Ethnicity, Performing Gender intends to help close this gap by featuring chapters that investigate the performance of ethnicity in transnational contexts. Judith Butler’s claim that the performance of gendered and ethnicized identities actually is constitutive of these identities is based on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and the Austinian performative (Loxley 120). However, it was S. J. Tambiah (rather than Butler) who first added the performance of culturally (and ethnically) constitutive rituals to Austin’s theory (Staal 161–63). In A Performative Approach to Ritual, Tambiah argued already in 1979 that [t]o Austin’s classical examples of constitutive acts such as greeting, baptizing, naming a ship and marriage vows … we can add several anthropological examples: the installation of a Tallensi chief, Ndembu circumcision rites, Lodagaa mortuary rites, a Japanese tea ceremony, a Catholic mass, and a multitude of cosmic rites and festivals which are self-constituting events and of which we have several classic descriptions. (128) Austin and Tambiah thus paved the way for deconstructionist/constructivist approaches toward the constitution of identity. Butler, who bases her own theory of performativity on Austin’s insights, is often cited along with poststructural cultural theorists as she positions herself in a long line of critics (such as, for example, Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall) who view identity as constructed through discourse and performance. Contemporary theories of identity formation emphasize that identity is non-essential and culturally constructed by the discourses that a society uses

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4  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann to make sense of itself and the world at large. They describe “a c­ omplex, ongoing process of identification accomplished by each individual” (­Bendix 84), while older theories view “identification [as] constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristics with another person or group” (Hall 2). By introducing “space” as an identity-­ constituting category because “people’s access to knowledge is determined in part by the places—of conception, birth, death and residence—from and by which they speak” (101), Lawrence Grossberg adds another important dimension to the theorization of personal and collective identity. Migration through space is indeed a decisive factor in the constitution and performance of identity (as both ethnicity and gender) is heavily influenced by the post/modernity of the given location. In her works, Judith Butler provocatively points out the discursive constructedness of categories of identity such as the sex/gender system and race/ ethnicity. Thus, in Gender Trouble, she claims that “gender proves to be performative” (25) and in Bodies that Matter, she includes the concept of race/ethnicity in her discussion. She extends the well-established argument that gender is constructed to the “more essential” categories of sex and race, and she contends about race that it is “partially produced as an effect of the history of racism … its boundaries and meanings are constructed over time” (18). In Bodies that Matter she stresses that her focus is on a performativity that is contingent, “understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (12). Gender, according to Butler, is “a construction that conceals its genesis, the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of such productions” (Gender Trouble 140). Nevertheless, in a statement that seems to allow for a certain measure of deliberateness, she contends that a resignification of a dominant norm can actually provide a glimpse of a “more enabling future”: “[A resignification] is an appropriation that seeks to make over the terms of domination, a making over … which repeats in order to remake—and sometimes succeeds” (137). Theorists have argued about the scope of such a resignification, and, along with those inspired by her work, Butler herself has been criticized for forging “an argument for the performative as politically relevant agency” (Rothenberg 72).4 While the extent of contingency in performativity remains debatable, Butler undoubtedly opened up ways of showing that categories like sex and race, that once seemed fixed because of physical markers, are actually discursively constructed and consolidated by their repeated performances. ­Cultural theorists like to engage with the idea that, like gender/sex, e­ thnicity/ race can be performed and modified through performance. In working with Butler’s insights they usually take one of two basic approaches: a “cosmo­ politan” approach that calls attention to the fact that modern subjects have arrived at a stage where they can try out and “consume” aspects of

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Introduction  5 ethnicity or a political stance that wants to instrumentalize the performance of ­ethnicity to actively change negative scripts associated with aspects of ethnicity. Both approaches stress individual and collective agency and deemphasize the idea that identity-forming processes are so complex that they withstand redirection. David Hollinger, for example, in Postethnic America, postulates a postethnic society in which race discrimination is a thing of the past and ethnicity/race can be freely chosen and performed. He argues that in a postethnic U.S. identification with one’s “less obvious” ethnic affiliation would be possible: [P]ostethnicity would enable [Alex] Haley and [Ishmael] Reed to be both African American and Irish American without having to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Postethnicity reacts against the nation’s invidiously ethnic history, builds upon the current gene­ ration’s unprecedented appreciation of previously ignored cultures, and supports on the basis of revocable consent those affiliations by shared descent that were previously taken to be primordial. (21) Hollinger endorses a postethnic society that transcends race and the notion that it is “the right of one’s grandfather or grandmother to determine primary identity” (116). He strongly emphasizes the elements of choice and deliberate performance in picking one’s preferred cultural/ethnic group: “Affiliation is more performative,” he writes, “while identity suggests something that simply is” (7). As Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters point out, corroborating Hollinger’s insights, according to the 2000 census 6.8 million citizens identified themselves as belonging to more than one race (122). In addition to providing liberating choices, a postethnic society would also enable a reflected, situated cosmopolitanism: “[P]ostethnicity is the criti­cal renewal of cosmopolitanism in the context of today’s greater sensitivity to roots” (Hollinger, Postethnic 5). In an essay that defends his argument almost twenty years after the publication of his influential and contested book, Hollinger, taking into account that the freedom to choose one’s ethnic origin has so far only been available for Americans of European descent, stresses that postethnicity does not preclude strategic essentialism when it is needed: Politically, a post-ethnic perspective actively encourages strategic enclaving; what this perspective opposes is the assumption that people are deeply obligated in the nature of things to make common cause with others of the same skin color, morphological traits, and kinship system. (“Concept of Post-Racial” 176) K. Anthony Appiah actually introduces a plan for a liberatory conception of (ethnic) collective identities in “Race, Culture, Identity” (1996). He suggests that an identification with positive new collective scripts of identity

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6  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann will eventually replace old “negative life-scripts” resulting from negative ­stereotypes conceived by hegemonical power structures: “In order to construct a life with dignity, it seems natural to take the collective identity and construct positive life scripts instead” (98). Appiah here intends to present a viable plan for influencing and directing individual and collective identification processes, but many of his fellow theorists would not support a position that claims so much self-determination and agency. Stuart Hall, for example, opts for an understanding of identity-constituting performativity as contingent and “shorn of its associations with volition, choice, and intentionality” (14). Regina Bendix, in a discussion of Hollinger’s concept of postethnic cosmopolitanism, moves away from theoretical discussions of identity. Zooming in on late capitalist global marketing strategies, she arrives at “two quite simple assertions,” namely that “in the interplay of the capitalist market and democratic politics, ethnic identity easily falls prey to the market; and [that] cultural scholarship continually contributes to a marketplace of ideas from which both commercial markets and political interests draw” (78). Her first assertion comes across as rather negative and seems to imply that the market simply randomizes ethnic affiliation and puts ethnicity up for grabs. According to Bendix—who does not seem to value the idea of “postmodern play” when it comes to ethnicity—the postethnic individual chooses her own networks, emphasizes the affiliations she picks out for herself, and values individual cultural items—that is, she “shops around” for identity. Thus, as a Western consumer, she can construct a multi-faceted profile for herself  as a person who deliberately chooses a stomach-troubling diet of “Mexican Tacos, Indian curries, Sushi and Jamaican jerk chicken, Greek Moussaka, Austrian Knödel and Ethiopian soups” (87). However, market capitalism, as Bendix also shows, in addition to turning ethnicity into a product, can also have positive effects on the constitution of collective cultural identity: “If the market has eroded the power and conviction inherent in identity politics, the market may also have contributed to a reflexive distancing from the more dangerous, essentializing and confining aspects of identity politics” (89). These different critical positions point up a decisive theoretical difference between poststructuralist and social activist critics: while the former can easily dismiss agency in the theorization of postmodern contingency, the latter rely on it in order to take an effective political stance that aims to resist domination by hegemonical forces. Peter Niedermüller, like many other social theorists, brings the need for agency to a point, arguing that in spite of ongoing debates about the joys of hybrid identities in multi­cultural societies “[t]he ordinary experience of being ‘ethnics’ or migrants in contemporary European cities is discrimination” (50) and that the “multiple rooting,” invoked by Hollinger et al., “the right to belong to different cultures and to different localities, is a social and political privilege of late modernity,” associated with and “constitutive of a symbolic attachment in higher social positions and statuses” (52). Here Niedermüller, who certainly makes an important point, does not take into account the “multiple rooting”

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Introduction  7 or “postmodern passing” (Waegner 223) that is possible in popular culture, as Cathy Waegner, for example, shows with regard to hip-hop culture in AfroAsian Encounters. According to Niedermüller, “glocalization” (i.e., the global/local relationship that ethnic migrant groups which are of lower social status often find themselves in) also leads to a conservatizing impulse that might cause a backlash rather than blissful hybridity: “Late modern societies force ethnic groups to represent themselves as the bearers of exotic cultures and offer for this self-representation a certain degree of social respect” (53–54). Thus “the cultural performance of ethnicity” might make ethnic groups that are not associated with a high social status “resist the forces and practices of late modern societies” and cause their emotional investment in an “often imaginary ‘homeland’” (54). This observation points to obvious potential for ethnic/political conflict such as evidenced globally by various radical religious and nationalist groups, but it can also be illustrated by a politically and religiously rather harmless example of traditionalizing performances of culture/ethnicity. Vikki Bell thus cites Catholic mass as an occasion for creating a sense of cultural and ethnic belonging in a non-Catholic country: “Through embodied movements, the citation operates to recall and reconnect with places elsewhere that, through those very movements, are remembered; at the same time, a site of diasporic belonging is created” (3).5 Like Bell, Diana Taylor also values performance as an important way of remembering the past because “performance traditions … serve to store and transmit knowledge” and allow us “to rethink cultural production and expression from a place other than the written word” (“Performance Studies” 12). She argues that a performance studies approach to ethnicity has counter-hegemonical potential because it “explores how performed, embodied practices make the ‘past’ available as a political resource in the present” (qtd. in Schechner 68). In contrast to Bell and Taylor who regard (personal) history as highly important for (ethnic) identity formation, Julian Cha has focused on staged performances of ethnicity that liberate people from long-standing ethnic and cultural constraints. Echoing Butler’s and Appiah’s insights, he suggests deconstructing negative stereotypes on the theatrical stage by means of “cross-ethnic traffic.” He defines cross-ethnic traffic as a performance convention that sees to it that “the borders that separate identities and racial/ ethnic affiliations become interwoven and displaced” (1). In that it “creates a dynamic, imbricated sense of identity and opens new dialogue among racialized categories” (1), cross-ethnic traffic mirrors the liberating power that drag has for the resignification of gender. An important early example of such cross-ethnic traffic is Adrian Piper’s street performance art The Mythic Being (1973). It was based on performance walks for which Piper not only disguised her gender but also her race. Robin Cembalest stresses the impact that these walks had on performance art by writing that “[a]t a time when Conceptual and Minimal art were mostly male domains that pushed

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8  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann to reduce art to idea and essence, Piper pushed back with ­confrontational work that brought social and political issues to center stage” (online). The liberatory potential of staged performances is, for obvious reasons, more immediately accessible than that of written texts. Nevertheless, performance and performativity, especially in relation to gender, have also been a focus of literary analysis. This collection brings performance and performativity in literary texts to the fore by including several contributions that analyze gender and ethnicity in literary texts. In the context of this book’s ­ acandes scope, the postmodern “literary performative,” as coined by Irene K in her study of second-person addresses, is important in reference to performance and activism because it draws the reader into the text (141). In this way “the literary performative makes the boundary between life and fiction permeable” (James 117). Moreover, as Heath R. Davis puts it in her theorization of “reading as activism,” postmodern writing strategies disrupt “unquestioned and normative notions of identity and subjectivity, calling on readers to become uncomfortable with the passive gesture of reading and animate them into action” (online). In our volume this call to action is voiced loudly—at a time of great upheaval in Europe due to the refugee crisis that became a major political issue in 2015—by William Boelhower, who juxtaposes racist statements about African immigrants made in articles published by major Italian newspapers with passages from autobiographical novels by two African migrants who claim their voice and, ultimately, their identity as African Italians. The chapters collected in this book engage with the critical concerns presented in our introductory pages. While our contributors certainly cannot resolve the controversy over contingency versus intent in practices of resignification, they take up the critical currents and cross-currents discussed above. Some scholars demonstrate ways in which activist performances are conceptualized as multi-faceted and multi-layered in order to change constructions of identity to enable more autonomous ways of life; others point to the ways in which ethnicity performance is part of postmodern processes of consumption. Samir Dayal, for example, proceeding from the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, and Julia Kristeva, focuses on an “aesthetics of activism” in the tradition of Adrian Piper that draws in the spectator by using the gendered and “raced” body as theater and actually “risking” the body. The first section, “Political Agency,” stresses instances where the performance of ethnicity/gender ultimately aims at a liberating effect leading to more autonomy. The second section, “Diasporic Belonging,” explores the different kinds of negotiations of ethnic performances in multiethnic contexts. The third part, “Performances of Ethnicity and Gender,” scrutinizes instances of the combined performance of ethnicity and gender in written texts, films, and musical performances. The last section “Cross-Ethnic ­Traffic” contains a number of contributions that are concerned with attempts at crossing over from one “ethnicity into another” by way of performance.

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Introduction  9 While most of the contributions in this collection consider contemporary texts and films, “Political Agency” starts by offering a historical perspective. Alan Rice discusses ethnic activists who already in the eighteenth and ­nineteenth centuries furthered radical politics by their ways of performing (i.e., making use of their voices and bodies). Even though one might presume that it is impossible to reconstruct performances that took place before the age of electronic recording devices in the twentieth century, Rice effectively recurs to written records of oral performances and demonstrates that performance was crucial to the abolitionist movement. He discusses the political activities in England by Jamaican born Robert Wedderburn and American born Henry Box Brown. The latter had escaped from slavery in Virginia by hiding in a box in 1841. After arriving in England, Brown restaged his flight in performances that today would probably be referred to as guerilla theatre. By doing so, he left behind his status of a slave, who lacked any kind of autonomy, and eventually became a free agent who determined himself how to present his past. Robert Wedderburn, the other abolitionist considered here, conceived of his anti-slavery performance as an anti-capitalist critique of the interplay between race and class. Rice demonstrates that the way in which the text is printed, varying in the size of print types as well as deviating from standard English grammar, does not reflect the arbitrary decisions of a printer but rather underlines that Wedderburn’s voice was outstanding and radical because he performed in hybrid English mixing Jamaican features with English ones. In an ironic twist, Wedderburn’s oral performances were also transmitted in writing and thus preserved for posterity in notes taken by informers who reported about his performances to the autho­rities. Both the discussions of Brown and Wedderburn serve as important reminders that next to the slave narrative, whose analysis has dominated the discourse on abolition, one needs to consider performative approaches to radical poli­ tics when looking at radical movements like the abolitionist movement. In the next chapter, William Boelhower reminds us that the subjugation and exploitation of people of African ethnic background are not restricted to a distant past but, as the latest refugee crises have shown, continue to be an aspect of globalization. Boelhower looks at two instances of life writing as performance of ethnicity by African migrants: Bay Mademba’s Il mio viaggio della speranza [My Journey of Hope] (2010) and Yvan Sagnet’s Ama il tuo sogno [Love Your Dream] (2012). Mademba is from Senegal, Sagnet from Cameroon; both men arrived in Europe just like many other nameless migrant workers, bereft of voice and identity. In a strategic move, these two also tried to divest themselves of all traces of a national identity in order to avoid being sent back to their countries of origin. However, like Henry Box Brown, they finally assumed agency and individuality by giving expression to their fate in performative actions. Boelhower juxtaposes articles from mainstream newspapers such as Il Gazzettino, La Nuova di Venezia, or La Repubblica of 2012, which focus on the Veneto, a generally affluent ­northern Italian region heavily dependent on immigrant labor, with writings

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10  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann by these immigrants themselves, which describe how the two men decided to perform their ethnicities strategically. In the discourse of the newspapers, migrants are othered as “strangers” or criminalized as “­prostitutes.” This lack of proper names makes it actually easy to objectify them. The narratives by Mademba and Sagnet, in contrast, focus on the experiences of the subjective body as exposed and vulnerable. The inhumane conditions under which the migrant laborers work become especially apparent in Sagnet’s text when he depicts picking fruit in southern Italy. Sagnet assumes agency as labor organizer; Mademba finally becomes visible as a street vendor. Again, it is crucial that the liberatory performances of their ethnicities of origin take place in the public sphere. Activist performance is essential to Astrid M. Fellner’s contribution, which looks, this time on the North American continent, at the phenomenon of crossing borders and the exclusion of ethnic groups. Fellner shows that performance as theorized by critic Diana Taylor can contribute to the restitution of silenced indigenous embodied practices and the survival of ethnic memory, offering useful analytical tools in the analysis of alternative forms of knowledges. As Taylor demonstrates, a shift in methodological approach to performance studies brings about a rethinking of literary canons, as it allows other forms of practices to emerge in a text. Fellner begins her discussion of performative practices in border crossing by analyzing the installation Third Bank of the River (2009) by artist Alan Michelson of the Mohawk Nation, whose art is concerned with native border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. In his work he refers to the Wampum Belt as sign of a performed treaty between Iroquois and Europeans in the seventeenth century that was the first of many broken agreements. Like Michelson, Thomas King in his novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993) explores space as a site of native counter-memory and engages Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) in an intertextual dialogue. America, as Fellner shows, in both texts can be understood as a performance according to Taylor’s approach; in his novel, King presents Queequeg’s coffin as an example of reemerging native counter-­histories to the dominant narrative of nation building. Ishmael can survive only thanks to Queequeg’s coffin, a marker for the absent bodies of all Native Americans. By exploring performance as a site for radical politics, Samir Dayal ­situates activist performance in a theoretical discussion. His chapter demons­trates how contemporary performance artists paradoxically see in the body’s vulnerability its greatest strength. They turn the human ability to suffer, a rather passive feature of endurance, into an active asset for an aesthetics of activism that can be used to promote radical change. By exposing themselves to extreme situations that are risky, activist performers make the viewers aware of their own fragility; this heightened sensibility then makes the spectators question the precarious circumstances they find themselves in. By building on the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva, on the one hand, and the distancing effects of theatrical tradition as introduced by Bertolt

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Introduction  11 Brecht, on the other, Dayal develops a taxonomy of what constitutes activist performances. His main focus is on the French performance artist Orlan, but he also considers Stelarc, Coco Fusco, and several other artists. Orlan has repeatedly undergone facial surgery and has turned these procedures into performances by having them filmed and by commenting on them while in the operating room. According to Orlan, these surgeries have served to evoke the look of the Ndebele giraffe women (and thus they have ethnicized her). In the same vein, Orlan has presented herself in India on billboards as a Kali-figure, with protruding tongue and many hands holding objects such as a cell phone instead of traditional weapons. In light of this volume’s focus, Orlan’s ethnicized activist performances can be viewed as instances of postmodern passing or cross-ethnic traffic. The volume’s second section, entitled “Diasporic Belonging,” scrutinizes ethnic performance and performativity in different diasporic situations and explores these in written texts as well as in visual media. Mónika Fodor, first in this section, turns to the form of autobiographical documentary when she analyzes Incubator (2009). Here the technique of filmmaking already constructs an ethnic identity, in this case a Hungarian American one. In the film, the Hungarian rock musical Stephen the King (1983) is performed twice, once by Hungarian American youth scouts in a summer camp near Yosemite Valley, California, in 1984 and then again by the same people, now adults, who congregate again on the same site for a nostalgic get together in 2009. The performers are all descendants of dissident H ­ ungarians who found refuge in the U.S. after the Soviet Union had invaded Hungary in 1956. They were sent to this summer camp by their parents in order to find out about and secure a sense of their Hungarian identity. The choice to perform a Hungarian rock musical did not only cater to the musical preferences of the youths. By deciding to perform Stephen the King, they also returned to an imaginary homeland based on the rebel figure of Stephen the King and thus based their group identity on a mythological past in medieval times intended to reflect on the Hungarian situation of the twentieth century. Incubator foregrounds what Hungarian American identity meant to the performers after the end of the cold war in 1989 when some of the former children had even ­ ilmmaker Réka Pignicky herself actually returned to Hungary to live there. F belongs to the group, and the interviews with the other participants and off-film interactions are incorporated into the contemporary performance of the musical. The film explores the question of ethnic identity construction by merging the autobiographical documentary subgenres of portraiture and journal entry that transform the film into a performance itself. Pin-chia Feng also looks at issues of diasporic belonging. In addition to ethnic performance, the performance of gender is also a feature in the film Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) by Deepa Mehta. Feng analyzes this pastiche of two film traditions within the context of both South Asian and North American culture. By way of bodies in performance a fusion between ­Western Hollywood and Eastern Bollywood traditions emerges. Especially

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12  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann the performance of the dance and song scenes is considered in their d ­ istinctly diasporic features. These scenes are more than just colorful spectacles since they affirm classical and religious roots of the Indian experience and provide an interesting deviation from traditional Bollywood films. While in Bollywood films dance performances are usually staged in costume by professional dancers, here amateurs perform in Western attire. Obviously, the members of the diasporic community maintain ties with their Indian roots through performance. By not translating the lyrics of the dance sequences, the artificiality of these scenes is underlined. At the same time, the Western audience is made aware of the fact that cultural knowledge is needed to access and decipher Eastern traditions. Feng zooms in on the gender performance in Bollywood wedding scenes where heterosexual norms are usually validated. In Bollywood/Hollywood, however, these norms are challenged by the transvestite character Rocky, also known as Rokini, who resists cultural misuse and mistranslation when he refuses to be seduced by a white woman. While Feng and Fodor look at film, Rocío Davis explores the (auto) biographical subgenre of family memoir that she identifies as constitutive of ethnic life writing in North America. The texts discussed here are Helie Lee’s Still Life with Rice (1996) by a Korean American writer, Mai Elliott’s, The Sacred Willow (1999) by a Vietnamese American author, and Burnt Bread and Chutney (2002) by Carmit Delman, an Indian Jewish American writer. In contrast to traditional autobiographies, these instances of life writing are more relational, intersubjective, and inter- and intragenerational and contribute to the development of communities. While the stories of different family members are simply told, these memoirs are also performative by virtue of consciously addressing an audience. The creative process here is also a form of reenactment of a performance of the past which is saved from erasure while ethnic identity is promoted. Even though the family members seem to turn to history, they are actually concerned about the future. By following the family stories, the readers position themselves in relation to them. Thus, implied readers are of great importance to these texts. They might either belong to the respective ethnic group or they might be part of a mainstream America that needs to be told about the particular history of the ethnic group in question. Gender once again proves to be crucial: in Helie Lee’s novel there is a strong identification with the female legacy by way of the grandmother, and the grandmother’s voice is appropriated by the third generation in a complex and nuanced way. In Elliott, the focus is on “performatively” righting many stereotypes and misconceptions about the Vietnamese stemming from the Vietnam War. Carmit Delman who belongs to two ethnic minority groups, namely Indians and Jews, reports about experiencing exclusion by both. The following section “Performances of Ethnicity and Gender” starts off in Mexico, where machismo has traditionally played an important role. Carmen Serrano’s object of inquiry is the testimonial novel Hasta no verte Jesús mio (1969) by Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska. She gives voice

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Introduction  13 to the experiences of women who fought in the Mexican Revolution and whose contribution to its success has been neglected for too long. The main character Jesusa Palancares is based on the historical Josefina Bórquez. In this piece of life writing, fact and fiction are conflated. However, the tension between historical veracity and fictional truth is not the main issue in Serrano’s essay which focuses on the performance of gender in Mexican macho culture. Especially during the revolution, women were active on the battlefield. However, the term soldadera later took on the pejorative meaning “prostitute.” Women soldiers often were partly indigenous or mestizas like Jesusa, who negates traditional gender norms and switches between different gender performances in order to enjoy the privileges each gender offers. While she gets away with playing with these norms in times of social upheaval during the revolution, she is ostracized afterward when gender norms regain their full force in a politically stabilized situation. Serrano, relying on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance and Octavio Paz’s observations about the specific gender situation in the Mexican context, identifies Jesusa’s performance of different genders as an expression of androgyny. She discerns different myths of androgyny—which are already visible in Jesusa’s name—in the Aztec tradition and considers the protagonist in the specific Mexican context of gallo-gallina, an androgynous animal used in cock fighting. As a married woman, Jesusa passively accepts the role of a woman suffering at the hands of her husband. But at last she kills him with a gun, thus again assuming the phallic power of the revolution. The topic of gender performance and transgression links Serrano’s ana­ lysis to Wolfgang Holtkamp’s discussion of The Boyfriend (2003) by the Indian novelist R. Raj Rao, who critiques the hetero normative status quo in contemporary queer Mumbai. Upon publication, the novel was celebrated as a major coming out for gay India. Even though the novel seems straightforward and unapologetic, it does not reflect contemporary conditions. After a brief period between 2009 and 2013 when it had been legal, homosexuality was outlawed in India once again. Taking as a point of departure Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s observations on heteronormativity, Holtkamp also applies Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance to the performance of queerness in the novel. In his reading, Rao’s novel challenges the concept of heteronormativity in different ways relating to masculinity, class, caste, and religion. The main characters remain ambivalent toward one another and the world around them, but certainly reject the concept of binary oppositions. They live and examine their gay relationship alongside their traditional family relationships which are questioned by it. Binary concepts such as public versus private are also repudiated as the two men perform their still clandestine life as a couple in public—be it the club Testosterone or the clothing store where Yudi buys clothes for his lover in order to disguise Milind’s lower caste and status. Angelika Koehler is also concerned with the relationship of ethnicity and gender in works that analyze the topos “West meets East” by way

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14  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann of the “butterfly myth.” Due to its ambiguity and infinite potential for ­interpretation, the myth has proven quite productive over time. Koehler focuses on the performative potential of the different media to create diverse layers of meaning. She argues that David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1989) falls prey to his own misinterpretation of Western culture, whereas David ­Cronenberg’s movie version of the drama of 1993, by changing the format from play to film, alters Hwang’s original meaning. Here the music and the stage performance exist autonomously and next to one another, which allows the final scene to be read as a parody of Hwang’s play. The musical Miss ­Saigon (1988), set during the Vietnam War, replays the butterfly myth as a romance between an American soldier and a Vietnamese woman with the Asian woman here serving as a means of restoring damaged ­Western male self-respect. Joyce Wadler’s Liason (1993) is rather a sensationalist version of an espionage story of a romance with a transgender person. In Frédéric Mitterand’s screen version of the opera of 1995, by contrast, the music is added to a setting in the Nagasaki region of 1904. This version’s salient feature is its romanticization of the opera’s melodrama. Robert ­Wilson’s Madama Butterfly (2003), finally, may be regarded as a postmodern deconstruction of the butterfly myth because it debunks all the stereotypes about the East that a Western audience might have in mind. The last section “Cross-Ethnic Traffic” opens with Iping Liang’s analysis of Miss Numė of Japan (1899) by Onoto Watanna, who is also known as Winnifred Eaton. Her novel was the first literary publication in the U.S. by a writer of Asian descent. In contrast to established interpretations, Liang reads the conceptualization of character not as an enactment of impersonation but rather as a model performance. Liang shows how this model performance enables Watanna to simultaneously follow and subvert the stereotypes of Japanese culture. She points out that “the real” and “the fake” as binary concepts concerning the representation of Asians in America are historically important. Watanna was suspiciously regarded as a classical impersonator who more or less deliberately invoked criticism: as the daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, she had dared to write romances under a Japanese sounding pen name writing about Japanese and Eurasian women. Liang’s argument is that Watanna, by crossing these well-­established lines of ethnic identity, challenges them strategically and playfully. Liang builds on the insights of Asian American critics like Tina Chen, Lisa Lowe, and Viet Thanh Nguyen—who in their turn were influenced by Judith Butler— to make her case that Watanna deliberately creates a persona who performs her pan-Asianness by questioning notions of authenticity. Through her use of an exotic setting and by presenting the love affairs of two interracial couples, Watanna feeds the Orientalist imagination, yet at the same time she undermines it by making her heroine self-reliant and self-confident. Jopi Nyman presents a focus on popular culture in his chapter. He explores ethnic identity via animal films and analyzes Michael Bond’s popular ­children’s book classic Paddington Here and Now (2008), in which the bear’s right to stay in

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Introduction  15 Britain is questioned by the authorities, and the Canadian/British ­animated TV series Don’t Eat the Neighbours (2001–02), in which a Canadian wolf and his two sons are forced to relocate to the English countryside. When read in the context of the recently expanding field of animal studies, the text’s indeterminacy is highlighted. Nyman argues that animals are not mere markers of non-human otherness, but that they must be regarded as discursively constructed historical and cultural images whose performances of identity contribute to our imagining of racial and ethnic identities. While they may be employed to perform traditional and dominant identities, they can also be used to resist dominant and anthropocentric meanings. By featuring cross-species transformations, Nyman evokes the concept of cross-ethnic traffic. He points out the counter-hegemonic function of animal characters that can be used to comment on the contemporary British discourse on ethnicity and migration. In Paddington, Britain is undergoing a national identity crisis as the bear fails to perform his ethnicity in crucial situations. In  contrast to traditional views of considering him an alien intruder, the context of the post-7/7 discourse suggests that he may be hiding his identity of a homegrown terrorist. Probably due to its genre as a children’s book, the novel has a happy ending after all, resulting in the confirmation of the bear’s Britishness while the TV series advocates multiculturalism by unmistakably stressing concepts such as community, conviviality, and the sharing of space. Monika Mueller probes questions of musical authenticity and analyzes performances of ethnicity and “cross-ethnic traffic” in Bollywood-style music videos by the British band Cornershop (which features musicians of Indian as well as British origin) and by Ramesh B. Weeratunga, a musician from Sri  Lanka, who lives in Berlin. Cornershop’s “United Provinces of India” (2011) is sung in Punjabi rather than English. While the cheerful Bollywood music of the song plays in the background, viewers are given a look at the colorful street life of a multiethnic, predominantly Indian, neighborhood in London. Weeratunga’s 2009 version of “Ring of Fire” presents a truly transnational Bollywood movie version of Johnny Cash’s 1963 hit. In addition to numerous Bollywood references—including a real elephant—this adaptation of the American classic incorporates Native American and Latino elements, such as a dance around a ring of fire, a totem pole, the character of Zorro, and various Latin lovers. The music videos initially seem to suggest that roughly twenty years after the publication of Judith Butler’s influential works on the performance and performativity of gender and ethnicity, the norms of race and ethnicity have indeed undergone a positive resignification. In the Cornershop video, Britain appears to be a “second space” of unquestioningly positive hybridity and in Weeratunga’s video, ethnicity itself seems to be “up for grabs” since it apparently can be performed as easily as a Zorro costume is donned. Mueller pursues the question if ethnic/racial norms are actually challenged in these videos or if the videos just engage in a postmodern play with ethnicity that is chiefly motivated by commercial considerations. She concludes that the message about ethnicity/hybridity put forth

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16  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann by the “United Provinces of India” video ultimately remains undecipherable. It cannot be ascertained if the song merely presents a type of ethnic parody or if it actually criticizes the bland but colorful world of advertising that it imitates. Weeratunga’s Bollywood-style rendition of “Ring of Fire,” however, is deemed less ambiguous since the video very obviously engages in a playful and postmodernist way with Indian culture and deliberately exploits the ring of fire’s transcultural symbolic potential. The final contribution by Bettina Hofmann focuses on the performance of poetry. While black writing has traditionally been linked with orality, here it is aurality, namely the features pertaining to sounds, that is of interest. Unlike traditional poetry readings, which are unique events performed only once, new media like YouTube allow repeated access to a range of different performances of the same text. Access thus is broadened and becomes more democratic. Hofmann reviews different performances of canonical poems about being black in the U.S., namely Langston Hughes’s reading of “I, Too” (1925) and Gwendolyn Brooks’s performance of “We Real Cool” (1960) and compares the different performances of race and gender in a diachronic perspective. By virtue of being performed by the authors, both Hughes’s and Brooks’s readings convey a special kind of authority. While Hughes, who renders himself as a serious intellectual in the recording of 1953, downplays any markers of his race, Brooks does not conceal her black speech in her performance of 1986. The discussion then turns to Denzel Washington’s performance in the film The Great Debaters (2007), which is set in a historically black college in Texas during the Great Depression. The teacher played by Washington communicates suppressed anger that he does not dare to let on. These historical modes of downplaying blackness are in contrast to a contemporary performance where an anonymous speaker self-confidently performs his blackness. Like Hughes’s poem, Brooks’s lines are also performed by speakers from all walks of life. Especially interesting is the performance by a white high school student from an Irish working-class neighborhood in Boston who, in Hofmann’s reading, does not co-opt a black stance, but finds expression for his own class-based marginalization. In the same vein, Asian girls in New York are able to appropriate the poem in their performance by means of cross-ethnic traffic. These examples demonstrate the vitality of the poems that are found meaningful by different kinds of people who explore the poems’ potential for performance.

Notes 1. The contributors to this book are Dorothea Fischer-Hornung’s MESEA friends and associates. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung served as president of MESEA–The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas from 2004 to 2012. This volume has been compiled by Bettina Hofmann and Monika Mueller in honor of her presidency. The topic was inspired by Dorothea’s interest in dance performance (see EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, ed. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Alison Goeller, 2001) as well as a discussion

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Introduction  17 of Judith Butler’s theories and performance/performativity in a study group that Dorothea participated in at the University of Heidelberg in the mid-1990s. 2. David Hollinger argues that the term “ethnicity” is broader than the term “race.” The use of the term ethnic/ity “recognizes that at issue is all identity by natal community, including that which is experienced by or ascribed to population groups to which the problematic term race is rarely applied. These matters affect the status of Latinos, Arabs, Jews, and other immigrant-based populations not generally counted as ‘races’” (“Concept of Post-Racial” 175). 3. There are a few books which address aspects of the subject. The volume Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art: Performing Migration, edited by Rocío Davis et al. contains only one section (three out of fourteen chapters) on “Performing Ethnicity and Migration: Cultural and Artistic Practices.” Dorinne Kondo’s About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre Understanding Blackness through Performance has a rather narrow focus on fashion and theatrical performance. Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity, edited by Anne Cremieux et al. as well as E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity deal exclusively with the performance of black identity. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, edited by Heike Raphael Hernandez and Shannon Steen, discusses AfroAsian relations in the U.S. and features “postmodern passing” (Waegner 223) between African Americans and Asians. 4. Molly Anne Rothenberg, for example, writes about Excitable Speech (1997) that “throughout the volume, Butler treats this ‘resignification’ as though it can have predictable effects” (73, emphasis in original). According to her, Butler “remains vulnerable to her critics’ charges both that her theory speaks only to individual rather than social transformation and that she is ignoring the social embeddedness of speech acts, the power relations that constitute and enable them” (72). 5. Even though ethnicity may be closely linked to religion—Judaism, for example, can be both regarded as an ethnicity and a religion—we have decided to leave such a discussion aside. The relationships between ethnicities and religions are so manifold and complex that they would open up new fields of investigation that go beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, it is worth stating that some religions like Judaism and also Islam put more emphasis on performance than, for example, the Christian religion. However, this observation needs to be qualified since there are also big divisions within the different faiths. Thus, one might, for example, argue that evangelical Protestantism or Catholicism in general leans more toward performance than other Christian denominations.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections.” Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Ed. K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. 30–105. Print. Bell, Vikki. “Performativity and Belonging: An Introduction.” Theory, Cultury and Society. 16.2 (1999): 1–10. Print. Bendix, Regina. “After Identity: Ethnicity between Commodification and Cultural Commentary.” Managing Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History, and Anthropology. Ed. Regina Bendix and Herman Roodenburg. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000. 77–95. Print.

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18  Monika Mueller and Bettina Hofmann Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Print. ———. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: ­Routledge, 1990. Print. Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Cembalest, Robin. “Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance-Art Show.” Artnews. 10 October 2013. Web. 13 March 2015. . Cha, Julian. “Cross-ethnic Traffic: Performing Ethnicity in Asian/America.” Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 2010. Web. 21 March 2015. . Cremieux, Anne, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi, eds. Understanding Blackness through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print. Davis, Heath R. “Cultural Studies as Awareness.” Cultural Studies ePortfolio. Web. 29 December 2015. . Davis, Rocío G., Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Johanna C. Kardux, eds. Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art: Performing Migration. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Gade, Rune, and Anne Jerslev. “Introduction.” Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum P, 2005. 7–17. Print. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NJ: ­Doubleday, 1959. Goeller, Alison, and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, eds. EmBODYing Liberation:The Black Body in American Dance. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2001. Print. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 87–107. Print. Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1–17. Print. Hollinger, David A. “The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions.” Daedalus 140.1 (2011): 174–82. Print. ———. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Print. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. Print. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Kacandes, Irene. Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Print. Kondo, Dorinne. About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 1977. Print. Loxley, James. Performativity. London: Routledge, 2007. Print.

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Introduction  19 Niedermüller, Peter. “Urban Ethnicity between the Global and the Local.” M ­ anaging Ethnicity: Perspectives from Folklore Studies, History, and Anthropology. Ed. Regina Bendix and Herman Roodenburg. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000. 41–60. Print. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Introduction: Performance and ­Performativity.” Performance and Performativity. Ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995. 1–18. Print. Perlmann, Joel, and Mary C. Waters. “Intermarriage and Multiple Identities.” The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration since 1965. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. 110–23. Print. Raphael-Hernandez, Heike, and Shannon Steen, eds. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print. Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. Rothenberg, Molly Anne. “Embodied Political Performativity in Excitable Speech: Butler’s Psychoanalytic Revision of Historicism.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.4 (2006): 71–93. Print. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Staal, Frits. Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning. Delhi: Shri Jainendra P, 1996. Print. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. A Performative Approach to Ritual. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Print. Taylor, Diana. “Performance and/as History.” The Drama Review 50.1 (2006): 67–86. Print. Waegner, Cathy Covell. “Performing Postmodern Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff, and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface.” AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. Ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen. New York: New York UP, 2006. 223–42. Print.

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Part I

Political Agency

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1 Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance in the Life and Work of Robert Wedderburn and Henry Box Brown Alan Rice In Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach observes that “[t]exts obscure what performance tends to reveal; memory challenges history in the construction of circum-Atlantic cultures, and it revises the yet unwritten epic of their fabulous co-creation” (286). His astute comment highlights the importance of performance and performativity in African Atlantic culture in the years 1789–1865, i.e., between the beginning of the French Revolution and the end of the American Civil War. This can be seen in the stellar career of Ira Aldridge (1807–1867), the American-born “African Roscius” who bestrode the stage throughout Europe from Liverpool to Lodz and was the first black actor to play Othello on a British stage. His transatlantic presence has historically been downplayed in comparison to African Atlantic writers (Rice, “Tracing Roots” 16). For, although the slave narrative genre has been instrumental in the development of a thoroughgoing account of the conditions endured by enslaved Africans across the Black Atlantic in this period, political speeches, dramatic interventions, and performance pieces were also key to African Atlantic expression in the period. The slave narrative has dominated a range of disciplines. Especially in literary and cultural studies, it has served as the primary evidential base for discussions about slavery and abolition. This has meant that African Atlantic expression that is not enveloped within this discourse is often ignored or downplayed. William Wells Brown’s act of guerrilla theatre in the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 disrupted the American exhibit of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave by juxtaposing it with a cartoon image to highlight American slavery, Lisa Merrill reminds us that “[t]he popular cultural as well as the political landscape need be examined together as significant venues for the staging and ameliorating the horrors of chattel slavery” (335). Over the past two decades, a range of critics, including W.T. Lhamon Jr., Hal Roach, Marcus Wood, Daphne Brooks, Lisa Merrill and Deborah Jenson have written important books and articles that have foregrounded performance, the non-literary, visual culture and the vernacular as central to our understanding of the wealth of radicalism beyond the slave narratives. As Deborah Jenson comments, “the majority of slaves, in all Western colonial slave cultures, were ‘impossible witnesses,’ those whose stories we will never hear” (31). A crucial figure in the Black Atlantic, ignored even by

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24  Alan Rice many of the revisionist authors mentioned above—in part because he did not write a conventional slave narrative—is the free black, radical preacher and protean anarchist, Robert Wedderburn (c.1762–1835?). Wedderburn, who was of Scots and Afro-Caribbean ancestry, lived much of his life in Britain, but he is best framed in the context of the Black Atlantic. His scurrilous pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery (1824) regales against the institution extant in his home colony Jamaica and describes how Britain is still tied to it in a nexus of blood and abuse exemplified by his own life as the free mulatto son of the Scottish slave trader and plantation owner, James Wedderburn. As Iain McCalman says, Robert Wedderburn was a “direct product, witness and victim of the Jamaican slave system” (3). However, his political activism was not confined to regaling against the evils of that “peculiar institution” alone, but was directed at ending a domestic British abuse of power he saw as equally antediluvian, namely wage-slavery. His remarkably prescient acknowledgement of the interplay between race and class in capitalism makes his life an excellent example to show the limitations of a dogmatic insistence on the overwhelming primacy of both race and of the written word as the determining factors in the creation of Atlantic personalities. Wedderburn attracted notice from the authorities not so much because of his racial politics, but rather on account of his radical critique of capitalism throughout the British Empire. Also, much of his most pertinent thought was expressed in dramatic political speeches that we only have transcriptions of, highlighting the performative nature of his expression. Wedderburn’s linkage of the two horrors of wage and chattel slavery and his activism designed to end them brought him into a conflict with the authorities, which differentiated him from those black British liberal reformers of the period, as, for instance, Olaudah Equiano, who did not consistently take such radical, class-based positions or exhibited the same class loyalty as Wedderburn (6). His working-class Jacobinism was already developed at the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780, “when he looked on approvingly and later boasted of his friendship with one of the rioters” (7). His radicalism was also honed, in part at least, during his service in the British Navy aboard H.M.S. Polymethus in the late 1770s and later as a privateer. Paul Gilroy identifies such service at sea as foundational for the development of an internationalist radicalism in black activists of the period and links Wedderburn with the radical William Davidson, also from Jamaica, who was to be executed for trying to blow up the cabinet in the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy: [B]oth Wedderburn and his sometime associate Davidson had been sailors, moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines which were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity. Their relationship to the sea may turn out to be especially important for both the early politics and poetics of the Black Atlantic world that I wish to counterpose against the narrow nationalism of so much English historiography. (12)

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Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance  25 Wedderburn’s dynamic internationalism is ironically learned in the service of British imperial power in the Royal Navy. Surprisingly, the ships proved to be a microcosm of radical politics, as attested to by the later mutinies at Nore and Spithead in 1797. His major contribution came as a political activist and rabble-rouser, and his speeches were both cogent critiques of imperial praxis and colorful performances that illuminated the radical fringe of London politics through the early nineteenth century. For instance, he linked oppression abroad against Africans to that against a home proletariat by capitalists who controlled the political machine. At a speech heard by the government spy Sd. J. Bryant at the Hopkins Street chapel, Wedderburn explained: They would employ blacks to go and steal females—they would put them in sacks and would be murdered if they made an alarm. Vessels would be in readiness and they would fly off with them. This was done by Parliament men—who done it for gain—the same as they employed them in their Cotton factories to make slaves of them to become possessed of money to bring them into Parliament. (114) The slave trade here is directly linked as oppressive praxis to the exploitation of laborers at home and the most powerful in the land are the guilty parties. Wedderburn’s idea was that an alliance of rebels across racial divisions would create a class-based revolt against international capitalism in all its manifestations. In addition to writing and disseminating pamphlets and contributions to periodicals containing such inflammatory materials, ­Wedderburn preached sedition in political meetings to the radical working class. He performed his radicalism through a series of speeches in a range of taverns and meeting rooms. Ironically we only have access to these rhetorical delights through the good offices of government spies who repeatedly reported how ­Wedderburn stressed the importance of the global context in his radical ideology, using Caribbean revolt to urge on the working class in Britain. The Reverend ­Chetwode Eustace reported on a speech in August 1819 where [o]ne of those men who appeared to be the principal in their concern is a Mulatto and announced himself as the Descendant of an African Slave. After noticing the insurrections of the Slaves in some of the West India Islands he said they fought in some instances for twenty years for “Liberty”—and he then appealed to Britons who boasted such superior feelings and principles whether they were ready to fight now but for a short time for their Liberties—He stated his name to be Wedderburn. … (qtd. in McCalman 116) Inspired by the rebellion on St. Domingo and the activities of rebellious maroons in Jamaica, Wedderburn uses a Black Atlantic discourse of radicalism to incite revolution on the streets of the imperial capital. Although

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26  Alan Rice we mainly get access to the speechifying, vernacular rhetoric of Wedderburn through his enemies, his performative power nonetheless shines through the perfunctory narrative of the straight-laced Reverend’s discourse. These official narratives cannot drown out the authentic voice of Black Atlantic radicalism that the imperial state apparatus sought to neutralize. In fact, they provide a window on black involvement in these movements that rescues these seminal figures in British radicalism from marginalization. ­Wedderburn should not only be identified as a black radical or even merely as a proletarian revolutionary, but as a key intellectual figure in the circulation of a new vernacular discourse. His language, learned in his struggle against the plantocracy in Jamaica, honed in his travels aboard ship, framed a new counter-hegemonic ideology that challenged the imperial polity before being unleashed in the metropolis where the chapel and the prison both contributed their specific discourses to what became a unique and splendidly polyglot transatlantic dialect. His is the logical outcome of a truly “routed” experience that transcends the national boundaries of traditional historiography. Wedderburn’s life journey is testament to this mobile radi­ calism. He combined a vernacular Caribbean perspective with a demotic metropolitan dynamic to create a truly unique political discourse. Furthermore, the English language could not contain this new kind of voice. This is demonstrated by the way his written discourse is littered with “italic, bold, and upper-case characters from the typographer’s case” as he attempts to bend the King’s English to his oral mode and distinctive vernacular dialect (Linebaugh and Rediker 403). For instance, in his The Horrors of S­ lavery, ­Wedderburn describes the extremities of his upbringing in Jamaica and plain type is shown as wholly inadequate to detailing them: I being a descendant of a Slave by a base Slave-Holder, the late JAMES WEDDERBURN, Esq. of Inveresk, who sold my mother when she was with child of me, HER THIRD SON BY HIM!!! She was FORCED to submit to him, being his Slave, THOUGH HE KNEW SHE ­DISLIKED HIM! … I have seen my poor mother stretched on the ground, tied hands and feet, and FLOGGED in the most indecent manner, though PREGNANT AT THE SAME TIME!!! her fault being the not acquainting her mistress that her master had given her leave to go and see her mother in town! (50–51) Wedderburn manipulates the King’s English here to tell a new story from the colonies, one from its subterranean reaches literally inscribing what Gayatri Spivak would later term a “subaltern” perspective. In order to do so he imbricates his voice through the use of various typographical estrangements so that the plain discourse of written English is, as Homi Bhabha would term it, hybridized. The Horrors of Slavery cannot be related in the plain prose of normal typography; it is too large a horror, a horror that must be challenged with a vernacular discourse outside the traditional literary language.

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Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance  27 Such hybridization “reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other denied knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (Bhabha 175). Bhabha’s description accurately delineates the power of Wedderburn’s vernacular discourse to “unmask” the innocence of the master/slave relationship, showing the perverted and violent relations it perpetuates and moving by florid publication of its evils to a challenge to its hegemonic power in transatlantic discourse. His written pamphlet’s use of capitalization and other orthographic devices is meant to mimic the voice of his oral political discourse, hence imbricating the verna­ cular radical voice as performative praxis. It is not only in the realm of the printed word that Wedderburn challenges the imperial polity. However, his unique brand of political radicalism uses counter-hegemonic discourse as a motor for physical action, too. Wedderburn advanced a radical inclusive agenda that saw the problems of the African in the diaspora as related to those of the nascent British working class. His multi-racial, geographically diverse and radical, class-infected politics are expressed in a ludic vernacular mode. His agenda, though marginalized, was not completely lost at his death. In fact, Wedderburn could be seen as an exemplary figure of the Black Atlantic in that he used the possibilities inherent in the apparent geographical and economic straitjacket of that Ocean’s race and class interrelationships to fashion a life that would ultimately be liberating. Yet it is the way that Wedderburn’s career combines Black Atlantic radicalism with a very British concern with the abuses of monarchy and the nobility that I want to foreground. His polemical, regicidal reaction toward the Prince Regent in the wake of the Peterloo M ­ assacre in Manchester in 1819 where at least eighteen working-class activists for voting reform were trampled and sabred to death by government forces and over seven hundred injured is exemplary of his interventions. Government spies reported him exclaiming at a public meeting in London: That the Prince had lost the confidence and affection of his people but that he the Prince being supported by the Army and surrounded by his vile ministers nothing short of people taking arms in their own defence could bring about a Reform and prevent the bloody scene taking place at the next Smithfield meeting as had taken place at Manchester; for his part old as he was he was learning his Exercise as a soldier and he would be one if he fell in the cause, for he would rather die like ­Cashman if he could but have the satisfaction of plunging a dagger in the heart of a Tyrant. (119) This firebrand speech calls for self-defense in the wake of Government murder, and Wedderburn rallies his fellow radicals to the cause by invoking the Irish sailor, fisherman, and Napoleonic war veteran, Cashman, who had been arrested and executed after a London riot at Spa Fields in 1816. ­Regicide is justified by class warfare to avenge the dead in Manchester and,

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28  Alan Rice closer to home, in London. It is interesting that the only full record of this ­important and dynamic speech that we have comes from government spies, which illustrates again that in order to fully reconstruct Black Atlantic history it behooves the critic to move beyond traditional literary texts and find black expressivity in the interstices of the majority culture, even at their very heart in court and government records. Black, radical, and performative culture is exemplified by Wedderburn’s splenetic discourse. Without these copious “official” documents gathered about Wedderburn’s “criminal” activities, we would only have a partial record of his contribution to a radical black alterity. The fervent atmosphere in Britain polarized opinion, and ­Wedderburn’s speech illustrates the way government repression has radicalized him. His clear-headed and polemical analysis is allied to a riotous, satirical, and comedic performance in his piece Cast Iron Parsons, or Hints to the Public and the Legislature on Political Economy … written from his prison cell in Dorchester and published in 1820. This wonderfully scurrilous pamphlet was a response to his imprisonment for blasphemy in 1819. I will discuss later the brilliance of this satire on religion but at the very end of the pamph­let, his hyperbolic scheme is expanded from the clergy to the monarchy: P.S. In those foreign countries where the Kings are mere drones, sunk in debauchery and licentiousness, troubling themselves with nothing but their own pleasures, and so completely absorbed in luxury and effemi­ nacy that they leave the management of state affairs to the knaves and parasites by whom they are surrounded, signing every paper at random which the minister lays before them—in such cases as these I think a CAST-IRON KING would answer every purpose and be a great saving. (151) Wedderburn’s Swiftian satire speaks of “foreign countries” but obviously aims at his own here indicting a monarchy, which is a rubber-stamp to a corrupt and undemocratic government. What is most interesting about ­Wedderburn’s description of cast-iron oppressors of the common man is that they reflect an industrializing process at that moment changing the terms of engagement between the classes. In Wedderburn’s clear-eyed vision the increasingly mechanistic world is best reflected by a futuristic mecha­ nical monarchy. The irony is that in their iron-hearted rejection of the needs of their subjects, the Prince Regent and his acolytes already function as castiron rulers. Wedderburn’s attack on Monarchy and the Government are merely the postscript, however, to his pamphlet that concentrates most of its ire on the clergy. His attitude in the pamphlet illustrates his radicalism concerning religion, too. Robert Wedderburn had also been a Wesleyan convert in around 1786, but his later trajectory was to a more radical nonconformism in a ­London radical underworld linked to the philosophies of the Jacobin Thomas

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Spence, becoming, as McCalman asserts, “a dissenting minister who cast himself as Spencean prophet or enthusiast who has undergone an ecstatic conversion to the movement’s ideals and goals” which included millenarianism and redistributive politics (12–13). In his radical blasphemy against the Christian religion noted at a meeting attended by government spies, Wedderburn refuses to honor a messiah whose message to oppressed people is to surrender. He describes how government ministers tell us to be quiet like that bloody spooney Jesus Christ who like a Bloody Fool tells us when we get a slap on one side of the face turn gently round and ask them to smack the other—But I like jolly old Peter give me a rusty old sword. … (122) Wedderburn’s depiction of the limits of Christian non-violence in a world of class and race oppression is key to his rejection of a quietistic faith that, in his view, supports a rotten system. This reaches its apotheosis in his satirical polemic describing “cast-iron parsons.” Like Swift’s Modest Proposal, ­Wedderburn’s satire works through an extreme rationality that calculates the economic and social costs of the replacement of the clergy with automota as the only solution to the corruption, venality, and hypocrisy of the Church. He writes: Finding that the routine of duty required of the Clergy of the legitimate Church, was so completely mechanical, and that nothing was so much in vogue as the dispensing with human labour by the means of machinery, it struck me that it might one day be possible to substitute a CAST-IRON PARSON. I had seen the automaton chess-player, the automaton portrait painter, the mechanical figure of a beautiful lady who played delightfully on the piano-dulce. … (145) The problem with these automata is the lack of a human voice, but ­Wedderburn is delighted that progress has now delivered the voice so that sermons can now be given by his cast-iron parsons in parishes across the land. The clerk of the parish is paid more now that he has an enhanced role as he has, superintendence of the said automaton, and that he be punctual in regulating the machinery in such a manner that the ordinary service of the day be gone through in a regular manner, always recollecting that his voice is to be wound up to a higher key when the sermon is placed before him. (148) And of course once they have their voices, these men of the cloth can indulge in their age-old task of supporting local landlords and national governments. Wedderburn gives the task of providing sermons to the local magistrates so that “he will become a more certain and uniform engine of the government

30  Alan Rice

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than a live parson” (149). There would subsequently be no fear of rebel clergy to undermine corrupt government and Wedderburn makes this point: There have been instances of stubborn, headstrong, and independent men getting into the church, and what has happened once may happen again; therefore as the times are getting worse, and arbitrary measures more necessary to keep the “swinish multitude” in order, care must be taken against such an occurrence, by adopting my Cast-Iron Parson, who will at the end of every discourse say, “Fear God, honour the King, pay your taxes, be humble and quiet that you may enter the kingdom of Heaven.” (149–50) The satire works of course because the “cast-iron parsons” are almost exact replicants of the craven clergy they replace. Like Swift in his Modest Proposal, Wedderburn has an economic imperative too, saving £3,000,000 annually by the saving of tax for clergymen’s living. The economic argument is played out like the rest of the argument po-faced here to compound the effectiveness of a sharp satire on the workings of Church and State. Most of all though, Wedderburn, who is in jail at the time, uses the satire to joyously exult in a radical vision that refuses to bow down to so-called accepted wisdoms. His anarchist vision and comic sensibility mean that black voices of this period are not confined to the po-faced abolitionist discourse they have often been assigned to. They also come out of and react to the ribald vision exemplified by the artist William Hogarth and the caricaturists George and Isaac Cruikshank, whose dynamic satirical work illuminated the class and racial problematics of the British imperium in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Dabydeen explains in Hogarth’s Blacks. His work reflects developments in visual and performative culture much more than a limited literary vision. Later in the nineteenth century, black radicalism would assert itself again in a performative mode. To engage this later mani­festation, I want to start with the landmark, epic reconstruction of this later performer. In October 2009 in front of Leeds City Museum, a Black British artist emerged from a packing box, in which he had been placed for nearly three hours, to a crowd of onlookers and local media. Dressed in Victorian garb he ventriloquized a speech that had been made close to that spot over a hundred and fifty years before. Simeon Barclay had determined to do the journey from Bradford to Leeds in the box in homage to the escaped slave Henry ­ ichmond, “Box” Brown. Brown who had escaped in a packing box from R Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1849 made the performative potential of his escape methodology the centerpiece of an abolitionist “roadshow” he brought across the Atlantic and then toured throughout Britain. In West Yorkshire, he had determined to make the emergence from the box even more spectacular by having himself mailed and conveyed on the train from Bradford to Leeds. In May 1851, “he was packed up … at Bradford” and forwarded to Leeds on the 6 p.m. train. “On arriving … the box was

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Old Print Media, Radical Ideas, and Vernacular Performance  31 placed in a coach and, preceded by a band … and banners representing the Stars and Stripes … paraded through the … town … attended by an immense concourse of spectators.” James C. A. Smith, who had packaged Brown for his original escape, “rode with the box and afterwards opened it at the musical hall” (Ruggles 127–28). In all Brown was confined for two hours and forty-five minutes, a mere bagatelle in comparison with the occasion of his escape where he had been in the box for twenty-seven hours. The carnivalesque atmosphere of such events upset many of the more po-faced abolitionists, but was undoubtedly important in publicizing the abolitionist cause to the widest possible audience. Tickets for the show in Leeds cost from one to two shillings, and Brown’s transmogrification from abolitionist orator to performing showman was sealed by such successful coups de ­theatre (see Ruggles 127–28). Box Brown’s reenactment at Leeds is an example of a kinetic or “guerrilla memorialisation” that brought home to a population thousands of miles from the American plantation economy the horrors of a system that would force a man to risk death by suffocation in order to escape. By “guerrilla memorialisation” here I mean to describe the way memorializing sometimes takes on an overtly political character in order to challenge dominating historical narratives (Rice, Creating Memorials 11, 64). Brown’s escape symbolized much for him, too; however, on leaping from the box and delivering his speech, he transformed himself into a radical transatlantic figure, transcending his slave status and becoming a free agent. Barclay’s restaging of Brown’s West Yorkshire “escape” as part of Leeds’ Black History Month celebrations was stunningly successful, attracting large crowds and bringing the media spotlight to an important black figure who had been neglected in local and national historical narratives. Barclay’s aim was to spectacularly reinsert Box Brown into the region’s historical memory. He achieved this and more (Barclay). In fact his intervention exemplifies memorialization that works against the silencing of minority histories: as Box Brown had collapsed geography in his 1851 reenactment so Barclay had collapsed chronology in his 2009 homage. In the mid-nineteenth century such local interventions by African ­American abolitionists in towns and cities throughout the United ­Kingdom were important in helping to build a transatlantic movement against ­American slavery that would build pressure on the American government and help finance the abolitionist campaign. There are still treasures to be found in local archives far from the metropolitan centers, still new light to be shed on the imbricated histories and complex motivations of key actors in this internationalist movement. This can be shown in the life of Brown himself as recent research by Kathy Chater establishes, through census records, new information about his lost years in Britain between 1859 and 1871 including marriage to a Cornish woman, helping to bring up three children and a successful career in show business that allowed him when he lived in Cheetham, Manchester, to frame himself as Professor H. B. Brown

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32  Alan Rice and employ a servant (32–33). Another interesting recent discovery was made in Shropshire archives in 2008: an Entertainments Bill for “Henry Box Brown Showing a Mirror of Africa and America at the Music Hall” in Shrewsbury. The playbill provides new information about Brown’s life as a performer and activist beyond that outlined in the excellent biography by Jeffrey ­Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (2003). The bill promotes “For Five Days Only” in December 1859 Brown’s “Grand Moving ­Mirror of Africa and America! Followed by the Diorama of the Holy Land!” Central to the former was his escape in the box, which also provides the major visual image on the bill. By 1859, Brown’s unconventional escape had become the visual signifier that framed his other performative activities. The text on the poster unselfconsciously promotes the aesthetic dimension of his life and work as a framework for his political agenda: The public … when they witness this entertainment … will not only appreciate it as a work of art but also award it that approbation that all faithfully executed paintings should command. (Entertainment Bill) Casting political action as dramatic art, the bill also promises that “Mr. H Box Brown will appear in his Dress as a Native Prince” in a performance highlighting the nobility of the African … before the advent of the Transatlantic slave trade. “APPROPRIATE MUSIC WILL BE IN ­ATTENDANCE” to provide a soundscape to the chronologies and geo­ graphies presented. These details underline the importance of visual icono­ graphy and the performative in fully understanding not just Brown but the wider culture of abolition, as Marcus Wood reminds us in his seminal studies. Brown uses his black bodily presence as a weapon against slavery, but with an eye to entertainment value that establishes him as the showman par excellence. Playbills posted throughout a town or city invited the non-­literate or those unable to access slave narratives into the exotic, counter-­cultural world of African American abolitionism. They advertise the presence of radical black transatlantic figures, transmitting information about the institution of chattel slavery beyond the sphere of the chattering classes, making inroads into popular culture at the same time as helping to define the political arena. As Daphne Brooks describes, Brown effectively transcended the discursive restrictions of the slave narrative and redirected the uses of the Transatlantic body toward politically insurgent ends. In this regard, Brown engineered ­multiple ruptures in the cultural arm of mid-century Transatlantic ­Abolitionism. (68–69) As Brooks asserts, for a full understanding of African Atlantic writers and history throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the

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critic cannot rely on following the trajectory of the slave narrative alone as sanctioned by the Abolitionist movement of the time and the makers of the black canon in the present, but must study in the interstices of the culture to find the African Atlantic figures that help to reflect their culture in the fullest sense. Hershini Bhana Young reminds us of the centrality of diasporic Africans to the building of modernity. Black bodies were the indispensable coerced mechanisms of labor, the Other against whom the whiteness of the imperial subject was formed. ­Diaspora Africans are both inside and constitutive of modernity and outside and negated by modernity: both haunted and haunting. (47) The task of the critic is to release the specters, to allow the forgotten and troubling voices room for speaking, and make their often performative histories as central in the academy as those famous conventional slave-­narrative writing figures in whose shadow they far too often dwell.

Works Cited Barclay, Simeon. “Henry Box Brown Event.” YouTube 11 July 2008. Web. 5 Jan. 2013. Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and ­Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Race Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 163–184. Print. Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and ­Freedom. Durham N.C.: Duke UP, 2006. Print. Chater, Kathleen. “From Slavery to Showbusiness.” Ancestors Dec. (2005): 32–33. Print. Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art. Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo, 1985. Print. Entertainments Bill, “Henry Box Brown Showing a Mirror of Africa and America at the Music Hall,” 12–17 December 1859, 665/4/367 Shropshire Archives. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Print. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso, 2000. Print. McCalman, Iain, ed. The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert ­Wedderburn. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1991. Print. Merrill, Lisa. “Exhibiting Race ‘Under the World’s Huge Glass Case’: William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851.” Slavery and Abolition 33.2 (2012): 321–36. Print. Rice, Alan. Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Print. ———. “Tracing Roots and Routes and Facing Forward: African Atlantic ­Residents and Sojourners Make Their Mark in the Cottonopolis 1789–1949.” We Face Forward: West African Art Today. Ed. Koyo Kouoh, Christine Eyene, and Lubiana Himid. Manchester: Manchester City Galleries, 2012. 16–21. Print.

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34  Alan Rice Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: ­Columbia UP, 1996. Print. Ruggles, Jeffrey. The Unboxing of Henry Brown. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2003. Print. Wedderburn, Robert. “The Horrors of Slavery; Exemplified in the Life and H ­ istory of the Rev. Robert Wedderburn, 1824.” The Horrors of Slavery and Other ­Writings. Ed. Ian McCalman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991. 43–61. Print. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Print. ———. The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation. Athens: Georgia UP, 2010. Print. Young, Hershini Bhana. Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth CP, 2006. Print.

2 Speaking Up, Speaking Out

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Performing Migrant Identity in Two Italian African Memoirs William Boelhower

In this chapter I focus on the recent life writing of two African migrants— Bay Mademba from Senegal and Yvan Sagnet from Cameroon—who have written in Italian about their experiences of survival and their eventual subjectification in an often xenophobic Italy. Both provide us not so much with a temporal narrative of their vicissitudes as with a trajectory of scenarios in which they become social actors and performers involved in learning to stage the very roles by which they will finally “make it.” In other words, through the roles they assume in civic space—one a street peddler of books primarily about Africa, the other an exploited field hand turned migrant spokesman—they learn to speak up and speak out, in the sense that speech itself now becomes the significant event. As J. L. Austin reminds us in his classic study How to Do Things with Words (1955), a “performative” speech act describes an instance in which “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (6). The two migrant autobiographies by Mademba and Sagnet are exemplary in explicating the performative nature of speech act theory; nevertheless, my discussion of them is also informed by the work of other performance scholars such as Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor, both of whom return to the ­etymology of the word performance. Thus we have the Old French parfournir, meaning “to furnish forth, to carry out thoroughly” (Roach 3, ­Taylor 3–4). It  should be said that both Roach and Taylor borrow from ­Victor Turner’s From ­Ritual to Theatre (13). By entering and helping to establish networks of civic relations through a series of dramatic encounters, Mademba and Sagnet overcome the initial stigma of migrant ­anonymity and finally assume their proper names.1 In a culminating set of narrative scenarios staged as a mediadrama, Sagnet uses Italian regional and national television to lead a strike against mafia-run tomato farmers in southern Italy. As for Mademba, he turns his street-peddler skills into specific performative strategies related to selling books and, finally, to writing about his migrant experiences. In order to capture this important mediological aspect of the two ­memoirs, I will first focus on the heuristic frame by looking at the migrant as both common and proper name, as these are uniquely manifested in the mediasphere of daily newspapers and in migrant life-writing, respectively.

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36  William Boelhower Because of the migrant’s inter-state mobility and tenuous legal status as both a guest and enemy in one person, the key issues facing democratic societies as a whole often come into focus or converge around this figure. As such, we can consider the migrant a semiophor or a sort of human gyroscope of highly charged social, cultural, economic, and political signs. In the words of historian Krzystof Pomian, a semiophor is a special bearer of meaning for people within a particular time and place (113–15). It is both a material figure (in this case, the migrant body as such) and a signifying figure (constantly stirring up new meaning). As Guy Debord explains in his first chapter of Society of the Spectacle, the making of a semiophor is quite simi­ lar to the semiotic process of iconization typical of spectacle societies like our own, in which images and their associations contribute significantly to social knowledge. Perhaps the most immediate semiophoric dimension of the migrant is that she or he attracts a host of common names which function as a form of shorthand to shore up threatened national-popular identities and codify the various roles migrants have come to represent. One of the contributing factors that makes migrants such a pivotal semiophor in the mediasphere of European Union societies is precisely the fact that they often intentionally destroy the evidence of their personal and national identities or change their “given” names from place to place, according to the needs of the moment. Let me cite a few examples, all of them translated into English by myself; I have chosen examples from the Veneto because this region is known as a highly productive area of small factories that rely heavily on migrant labor. In January of 2011, in an article signed by A. Ab, and titled “Chinese Prostitute Taken at Dolo: She Was Wanted Throughout Italy,” the Italian newspaper La Nuova di ­Venezia (January 8, 2012: 30) tells the story of Elisa Li, with no permanent address, who falsified her personal data in stores and hotels up and down the ­peninsula but—and this is the point of the article—was finally captured and jailed. The article ends with a declaration seeking to reassure its readers that the forces of law and order are always on the job: “And meanwhile controls against prostitution will also continue throughout the territory in the next few weeks.” Much of police work these days is dedicated to identifying and controlling migrants. In another typical case reported by La Nuova (October 27, 2012: 25), a young Algerian drug dealer was arrested in campo Santa Margherita in Venice, a popular hangout among young people. The article’s title reads, “In Handcuffs an Algerian with 15 False Identities: Sought by the Police of Naples He Fled to Our City.” Again, the purpose of the article is not so much to announce the exceptional nature of the case but to point out the return to law and order: “Because of his various false identities, it was not easy to discover his real name, also because when he was stopped he did not have any personal documents with him. After being arrested the man was jailed in Santa Maria Maggiore.”

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Migrants in the Mediasphere: Common Names of Migrants in Three Italian Newspapers In order to cull a phenomenology of the migrant in one region of Italy, the industrious Veneto which at that time was ruled politically by the ­xenophobic Lega Nord party, I have chosen as my laboratory a number of local newspapers (La Nuova di Venezia, a center-left sheet, and Il Gazzettino, a center-right organ) and one major national paper, La Repubblica (which leans to the left). All of the papers in question have helped to articulate a media semantics of the common name “migrant” as follows: stranger, refugee, nomad, extracomunitario (someone from outside the European Union), immigrant, “clandestine” (an adjective become noun), drifter, prostitute, beggar, homeless, without papers. And then there was a further storm of equally leveling nomenclature along national lines—Albanians, Romanians, North Africans (Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians, Tunisians), Nigerians, Senegalese, East Europeans (Polish, Ukrainians, Moldavians, Bulgarians), Roms, Chinese, Pakistani, and so forth. By now, if a worker falls to his death from a scaffold or a thief is captured robbing a jewelry store, the papers specify if that person is Italian or some other nationality. This was not so much the case a mere ten years ago. I have chosen to pair newspapers with the genre of life-writing because not only do they cover corresponding topographies and form a narrative continuum on migrant life, but also at their most representative moments they represent and act out two radically different limit-positions. In the sphere of the newspapers the migrant is invariably another person (Rimbaud’s “je est un autre”), certainly not herself. For the migrant is rarely allowed to speak in his or her own person but, in compensation, he or she is often spoken about, most often in stereotypical fashion. In spite of this third-person treatment, the daily papers provide a privileged mediological window onto the world, which it is their mission to report. But that is only part of the story. Besides providing us with a history of the present, an unsorted archive of the contemporary scene, they also must honor a pact with their readers, who have to be continuously won over not only through a selection of news and rubrics but also through a running commentary on the ways of the world. The daily ritual of reading the papers has a deep source in our need to know what is happening around us. It is by reading about the endless flow of events both locally and farther afield that we confirm our “being-in-the world” and our membership in a community of readers (Marrone 67–85). In other words, there is an important symbolic dimension of belonging in the ritual of reading the papers, which in part reassure us of our sense of the world. The papers tend to create and uphold a continuous narrative over time by citing themselves and their own archives. A popular adverbial device suggesting continuity is used in the opening line of Carlo Mion’s article from La Nuova titled “They Were Selling Roses with Grain Underneath: Two Bengalese Caught” (November 8, 2012: 34). “Once again two unauthorized peddlers of grain for pigeons denounced by the local police in Piazza

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38  William Boelhower San Marco”—that “once again” is a convenient way of keeping the paper’s readers tethered to its vigilant narrative of city life. Sticking strictly to the stereotype of a common name, the article continues, “[O]r better, one of them is always the usual Bengalese who up to now has collected unpaid fines of over twenty thousand euros and the other is his compatriot.” Here the use of “once again” and the emphatic “always the usual Bengalese” confirms the stereotype by emphasizing an exasperatingly repetitive act. The two offen­ ders are not specific individuals, they are “the usual” Bengalese. But what proves even more important is that the police—once again—have restored order in the square. We have here a telling instance of how a popular daily paper creates and sustains a mediadrama involving unwanted migrants. A similar media strategy is used in a La Nuova article by Marta Artico (October 31, 2012: 33) titled “Another Request of Evacuation,” which begins by repeating the title, “Yet another Request of Evacuation by the City through the Local Police. …” A few days earlier La Nuova journalist Artico reported on the same issue, with a louder title: “Nomads in via delle Barene: Ordigoni: ‘Away with Them’” (October 25, 2012: 23). As in the previous article, the same reporter provides a history of the various sanitary inspections the police carried out and concludes with a comment by Ezio Ordigoni, Favaro town president, “[N]obody wants to cause them any problems, but the problem has to be resolved, also out of respect for our citizens. …” The face-off between voiceless nomads and angry citizens is menacingly emphasized by the photograph taken of the encampment after someone set fire to it in 2008. In her article the journalist turns a social drama into a media performance. The suggestion seems to be that it could happen again if something is not done soon. The presence of nomad encampments in the Veneto and elsewhere in Italy remains a vexed and unresolved problem of law and order, with the “nomads” almost always getting the bad press. Rarely do the papers break through the common name of “nomads” to the persons behind it. The key buzzword in both articles is “evacuation” (“sgombero”), a word that appears like a rhythmic drum beat when dealing with migrants such as Roms, drifters, prostitutes, unlicensed vendors, and beggars. All are depicted as figures of cultural blight, all distanced from readers by the impenetrable shield of a common name. Certainly the most successful format the papers use to subdue the rich spectrum of migrants to a common name is that of providing and performing what semiotician Gianfranco Marrone calls “virtual news” (100)—namely, events, situations, and people handled statistically. In an article by Daniela Boresi from Il Gazzettino (October 17, 2012: 25), we read, “­Immigrants in the Northeast: Amnesty for 11,000.” Then we are given a complicated series of subtitles, all providing further statistics: At the top, “WORK. In  Italy 145,000 Regularizations, mostly Domestic Help and Careworkers. Cisl [­center-right trade union]: “Women from the East still Clandestine”; and below the main title: “From the Veneto a Third of the Requests of 2009 Presented to the Viminale [Ministry of Internal Affairs]. Verona the City

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  39 with the Most Foreigners. Each year 6,000,000 of Irpef [income tax on ­ aycheck] paid.” And above the graph itself we read, “Foreigners—Requests p for Regularization.” The photograph of a scrub-woman and the little icon of a cleaning lady also target the theme of the article, namely that most of the work-permit requests are from women who work as domestic help or care workers for the elderly. In 2009 in the Veneto there were 29,000 requests, but later there were only 11,000. The reason, as the article points out, is that there are too many onerous expenses and responsibilities involved in the regularization process. As a result, many of these migrants—mostly from Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldavia, Ghana, ­Nigeria, and Bangladesh—remain clandestine or without rights. According to recent estimates, there are about 247,000 immigrants in the Veneto, most of them women. Citing another statistic, the reporter also notes that these immigrants pay taxes of up to 6.8% of the total collected by the government. Because this article is about statistics, it barely alludes to the harsh and unreasonably punitive requirements the employers of clandestine immigrants must meet in order to have them shed their status as non-persons. The existential dramas of living incognito from day to day are covered over by statistics: only 11,000 requests in 2012. In June 2012 La Nuova journalist Natalia Andreani reported landings of refugees in Calabria and Sicily with the following title: “A Night of ­Landings on Italian Coasts. Pilots Handcuffed”; and this subtitle: “One Hundred ­Refugees Rescued in Calabria, Another Fifty in Sicily: The Cei [­Catholic bishops in Italy]: A Humanitarian Effort to Patrol the Sea Is Needed” (July  12, 2012: 9). Although countries like Italy, Greece, Malta, and Spain have become well-known gateways for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, there has been little cooperation among these countries and little help from the European Union to meet the challenges of these flows. The point of the graph accompanying this article is that due to international negligence the ­Mediterranean has become a vast graveyard. The graph’s title reads, “Landings and Deaths of Illegal Immigrants during the Crossing.” The article does not offer direct commentary on the graph, which provides a rough statistical history dating back to mid-2007. Instead, it reports on the latest landings and repeats the point that the graph as an image is meant to make, namely that little or nothing is being done to stop the criminal networks behind these fly-by-night ventures. The article begins by mentioning the relatively recent t­ ragedy involving fifty-four refugees coming from Libya who died of hunger and thirst while their boat was set adrift in the open sea. Only one person, a young man from Eritrea, survived to tell about it. The author closes her article by trusting in the ever-popular opinion poll, according to which 62% of Italians feel that there are too many immigrants in the country, while 59% hold that they are victims of discrimination. Perhaps the most interesting statistic reveals that 72% think that “foreign children born in Italy” should be given citizenship.

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40  William Boelhower Although I cannot discuss the topic of the Mediterranean as a c­ emetery of migrants and refugees and the strictly related one of the island of ­Lampedusa as an administrative “Center of Identification and Expulsion” here, I should mention that the news media have consistently dealt with them in terms of an ongoing “emergency” and an imminent “apocalypse.”2 It may be worth adding that the statistical approach to immigrant and migrant life seeks to convince us that numbers are hard facts and the truth abstract (Il ­Gazzettino, October 31, 2012: 11); after all, numbers are quantifiable. They cut through and rise above incident and person and declare a homo­ geneous order. As a form of persuasion, media statistics rely on the discourse of hard science. Inversely, a case-study approach focuses precisely on scene and event, offering interpretation instead of numerical calculus as a way to insight. In addition, case studies pay attention to the idiographic dimension and never abandon it for an atemporal universal, for no two people are alike and no numerical unit can ever represent an individual life (Ginzburg 1992: 17–59). The above Gazzettino article, signed by Alvise Sperandio and titled “Immigrants Hit Hardest by the Great Economic Crisis,” mentions that at the end of 2011 there were 554,000 strangers in the Veneto, making it the fourth region of immigration in Italy. Of these, 434,297 were from outside the European Union. The first six countries in the Veneto demographically speaking are Morocco, Albania, Moldavia, China, Bangladesh, and Serbia. Of the 434,297, only 253,525 held long-term work permits. The photo that divides the article into two parts portrays a nondescript mass of immigrants queuing in front of what may be a police station. The caption says they are in line for residence permits. La Nuova (M. Ch., “The Crisis Hits Hard: Foreigners Less than 60 ­Percent,” October 31, 2012: 23) reports on the same dossier presented by Caritas-Migrantes (a Catholic organization), but thematizes it with short social watchwords and using a much larger photo. Now the immigrants have their backs to us and are queuing in an identifiable place, at the post office of Mestre. The caption explains that they are in line to legalize their residence status. But what should we say about the selection of photos? It is surprising that both papers have chosen this primal immigrant scene, waiting in line, for their photo insert, one that has little or nothing to do with the Caritas-Migrantes dossier. Yes, the crisis has led to increased unemployment among migrants and therefore a noticeable jump in those who are forced to become “clandestine,” but the covert message of both photos seems to be an assuring one: immigrants continue to seek regularization of their status. In the popular mind, it is this scene of waiting in line for a work permit (for guest workers, the eye of the needle) in which the migrant is conclusively accounted for—a numerical “unit” in the records of police head­ quarters. Perhaps a photo of a migrant at work or a migrant carrying a piece of luggage and getting on a departing train would have been more appropriate. But for both newspapers, a quick dip into their photo archives seems to have offered the best expedient. Obviously, editors must keep

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  41 their loyal publics uppermost in mind. Another article from La Repubblica, titled “Immigrants Assault Naples Police Station, 20 Policemen Injured” (­October 26, 2012: 21), also mentions queuing for documents. The unlikely story (appearing under the rubric “The Case”) reports that twenty angry Mali migrants rushed into the police station demanding to know if they had finally been granted refugee status. As the Naples city councilor in charge of immigration says at the end of the article, “[t]he condition of the migrants who arrived in Italy after the outburst of war in Libya is increasingly desperate” (21). I mention this article because it sheds light on the two earlier photos of migrant queues discussed above. The time spent waiting in line evokes an existential threshold made up of an inside and an outside, a tangent where hope and despair touch with tired feet and a sore back. This is the stuff of microhistory and of migrant life-writing. As for the photo insert from Naples, it is hard to imagine that the police and not the migrants were the victims, and yet that is the reporter’s main point. Inadvertently, however, the article and photo together provide us with a quite different message about the redundant effects of popular opinion which, in the words of sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago, functions as a “mechanism [that] transforms the victims into the guilty ones” (53). This seems to be the case here, where a snail-like bureaucracy has turned these Mali refugees into dangling men and from dangling men into a mob guilty of beating up the police in their own headquarters. Going back to the Gazzettino article about the Caritas dossier, it concludes by pointing out that in Italy immigrants have “broken through” the five ­million quota, even if in the year before (2011) there was an increase of “barely 43,000 units.” To a microhistorian, what can it mean “to break through” a quota, and who established it in the first place? For that matter, what is the significance of calling immigrants “units?” In the latter half of the twentieth century, the “authority” of numbers appealed above all to the advocates of serial history.3 In the spectacle-driven context of today’s mediosphere,4 a corresponding story of numbers can only reinforce the same form of “common sense” that the news media regularly enforce when describing people as migrants, refugees, boat people, beggars, street vendors, Roms, prostitutes, and the invisible homeless. Media scholar Alessandro Dal Lago points out that the daily papers tend to represent migrants not only as delinquents but as “ethnics,” thereby suggesting that “delinquency” and “ethnicity” coincide (95). By reporting migrant lives exclusively in terms of the semantic units of common names—North Africans, Albanians, ­Romanians, Nigerians, Senegalese, and so forth—the news media regularly construct them as the enemy. The following article by G. Ca. from La Nuova (November 9, 2012: 33) and titled “Only Mandatory Signature for Albanian,” provides an example of how this pay-off between public opinion and common names works. The story’s subtitle explains what appears to be the heart of the scandal: “Gjoka Mir, the 25-Year-Old Arrested by the Police after a Car-chase, is Free.” After

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42  William Boelhower the police chased down a car from which a band of four or five thieves fled on foot, they finally arrested one of them. The story is an extended gloss on the police-file mug shot. The reporter points out that the unrepentant Mir refuses to talk and continues to cover for the rest of the band. And yet the judge has decided to let him walk free until his trial. Then the reporter comes into his own as an investigative journalist: “He [Mir] corresponds exactly to the identikit of the new apartment thieves, mostly Albanians, Romanians, Moldavians. A new generation, the offspring of the one that preceded them in the nineties.” The slippage here between delinquency and ethnic stereotyping needs no further comment. Here the daily newspaper substitutes for the judiciary system; the verdict is handed down by the journalist. Almost all the articles on migrants covering a four-month period exude a sense of social emergency and the need for a stricter regime of law and order, as opposed to a policy of solidarity, integration, intercultural dialogue, and hospitality (that ancient Mediterranean art of the politics of respect). To illustrate this, here are some of the standard titles. In an article by Carlo Mion we read, “Robbed in Train: Has the Thief Arrested”— and in smaller letters underneath: “Mestrian Woman threatened to death with a hammer and robbed. Calls the police on her cellphone, the Somali stopped at ­Gaggio” (La Nuova, January 8, 2012: 25). The twenty-fouryear-old youth was homeless and previously had committed other crimes against property and persons, the reporter says. In the same edition of the paper, an article by Giovanni Cagnassi from the coastal town of Jesolo is titled: “He Steals a Purse at a Restaurant: Chased Down and Arrested” (La Nuova, ­January 8, 2012: 32). This time the culprit was a thirty-twoyear-old ­Tunisian, again homeless. Here are a few more titles from La Nuova (July 12, 2012: 27)—by D. Deg., “Inspection of unlicensed vendors. Also three without papers found”; (July 17, 2012: 29) and by G. Ca., “[Market] Stands of ‘­Extracomunitari’ in the Sights of the Financial Police.” And in the same issue (July 17, 2012: 30) there is also “Unlicensed Vendors on Beach also Sell Iced Drinks” by the same author. Note that it is in July and the police are kept busy patrolling the territory for the benefit of local bathers and tourists. To sum this up: the most frequently reported topics in my brief pheno­ menology of migrant semantics are the following: the arrival of boat people in southern Italy (Lampedusa, Sicily, Calabria); unlicensed street vendors; prostitution (or sex slave) rings; incidents of robbery and burglary; drug peddling; inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic sexual and physical violence; begging rackets; nomads (primarily Rom camps); Islamic cultural centers and makeshift mosques; immigrant and migrant businesses; care workers; illegal workers; the homeless. There is quite a difference between national and local papers in dealing with migrant-related topics. Most of those dealt with in La Nuova or Il Gazzettino, for example, concern current news stories covering Venice and the surrounding towns. At this local and regional scale the salient issues are those related to law and order, the local economy, and

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  43 control of the territory. La Repubblica, on the other hand, tends to report only exceptional events having a national resonance, such as the landing of boat people in Lampedusa or Sicily, the break-up of sex-slave rings and international drug networks, attention-grabbing intra-ethnic crime or domestic violence, parliamentary debates concerning migrant regularization and amnesty bills, and the always vexed issue of the presence of mosques in the city centers. What stands out from all the newspapers surveyed, though, is the fact that everyday “truth” is as much a matter of producing it through mediological means as it is a simple process of recording it. In the last days of 2012, quite a number of articles reported on the increase of poverty in the Veneto, counting not only pensioners and those who have ­ ovember, in a fullrecently lost their job, but also entire families. In early N page article in La Nuova (November 10, 2012: 28) we read, “Boom of the New Poor: Social Card Coming.” On the same page there is an alarm from volunteers that rings out in the article’s title: “The Number of ­Homeless Is on the Rise.” Here, at a level where people are perceived simply as human beings in need, the common names “homeless” and “poor” are made to extend indiscriminately to Italians and strangers alike. It is the common figure of the migrant—beyond ethnicity, nationality, gender, or race—that Alessandra Abbadir identifies in the title of her recent article in La Nuova (November 11, 2012: 30), “I Stole Because I Have Nothing to Eat.” Evidently this infraction of the law presents us with one of two choices, either one proffers a helping hand in a gesture of solidarity or he calls the police. As Adelino Carraro, head of Ascom della Riviera, explains: “The crisis forces the storekeepers to suspect everybody and to watch what even once trustworthy clients are up to. Almost all my colleagues have told me that if up until 2007 those who robbed were above all foreigners, now in seventy percent of the cases they are Italian.” It is only by starting from the inclusive and foundational figure of the common—embracing both poor and ­homeless—that we can attribute equal respect and recognition to human beings as such and acknowledge the dignity of their proper name.5

Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Two Migrant Autobiographers Perform Their Names We know that in literature a proper name represents a subject. But a proper name also acts as a functional structure and an instrument of exchange, leading to character development and narrative emplotment (­Barthes 89–91). In the two autobiographical narratives that I will discuss here, Bay ­Mademba’s Il mio viaggio della speranza: Dal Senegal all’Italia in cerca di fortuna [My Journey of Hope: From Seneghal to Italy in Search of Fortune, 2010] and Yvan Sagnet’s Ama il tuo sogno: Vita e rivolta nella terra dell’oro rosso [Love your Dream: Life and Revolt in the Land of Red Gold, 2012], we have a continuous negotiation between proper name and common name, suggesting why the migrant is such a pivotal figure intersecting

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44  William Boelhower all the scales mentioned above. For more than most life-writing, migrant autobiographical narratives are based not only on an intimate nom parlant as key to the subject’s curve of destiny but also, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, on “so many locations and moves … in social space …” (207–08; note 169). Indeed, more than a temporal preoccupation, Mademba’s and Sagnet’s migrant narratives quintessentially unfold a spatial topology resulting from their subject’s border-spanning mobility. And this same topology is further converted into civic space through a rising sequence of mediological performances, as we shall see below. Spatial form is also due to the endowing push-pull dialectic of migrant life-writing, a form of narrative tension that evokes the pair of categories “horizon of expectation” and “space of experience” proposed by historian Reinhart Koselleck in the final chapter of Futures Past. Thus, as Bay Mademba and his fellow migrants are biding their time in a refugee camp in Rhodes, Greece, their minds are all elsewhere: “I was in Greece but all my thoughts were for Italy. Also those who intended to go to Spain were dreaming of Spain; still others imagined themselves arriving in Portugal; others were fantasizing about France; someone else already knew that sooner or later he would have reached Switzerland. Everybody was speaking about their dream” (21). In Yvan Sagnet narrative we also find this same motivational dream: “Like everybody else, I was convinced that in a western country if one wanted to work it was all that was needed to become rich and happy” (32). But once in Italy he quickly learns, “[U]nfortunately the truth is different” (32). Nevertheless, it is this horizon of expectation that urges both authors to face the ordeals of the journey ahead. To cite Bay Mademba, “[H]aving arrived at the age of twenty-six, I decided to give it all I had in me to go to Europe” (12). Note that this decision is existentially radical and non-thetic, invading the entire body—nerves, stomach, and heart. In Senegal, the people speak of “voyages of hope” (56) when referring to the daily boat trips to the Canary Islands and then on to Spain; although the boats themselves, like so many during the Mediterranean crossing, often become “pirogues of death” (61). As for the push factor, the economic and political situation in both Cameroon and Senegal also incites youths like Sagnet and Mademba to dream of elsewhere in order to send money back home. But once they arrive where they are going, and even during the journey, the space of experience immediately begins to take its toll. Sagnet, the scholarship student, stays curled up in bed instead of going to classes at the Polytechnic of Turin. The climate is too cold for him and so are the people. Mademba succeeds in going to Turkey on a tourist visa and then tries three different times to cross over to Greece before succeeding. Stopped by the border police and thrown into prison in Istanbul, he never gets enough to eat: “How I succeeded in resisting all that time I don’t know; I had become half my weight, I had to clench my teeth; only the thought of my mama and prayers to God succeeded in saving my heart” (15). By keeping focused

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  45 on his goal, he is able to overcome severe physical trials: “I thought of two things: one has to die anyhow … and my family. Because I made this journey for my family …, and they had placed their hopes in me” (15). Before landing on the island of Patmos, Bay and the other boat people do what so many migrants do before entering a European Union country: “At that point we made a bundle of everything that might provide a clue leading to the identity of our country of origin and gave it to the pilot: money, clothes, photographs, postcards, letters, liquor. … We slept on the beach and since we were all very cold, we built a fire and burned the last evidence that might have betrayed where we came from: clothes, shoes, belts” (18). And so they reduce themselves strategically to their common name: migrants, people without a people, people without a country—people always from far away, but as migrants, apparently only here. The richness of the paradox reflects the set of sliding scales we are compelled to hold in mind if we want to keep our subject in sight. The continuum of scales we are faced with here is also the result of a contrastive play of self-definition and of bearing up under the alienating effects of a common name. Migrant autobiography records this vacillation in the very process of unwinding a narrative trajectory contemporaneously driven by the clash between expectation and experience. The incipit of Mademba’s narrative includes this paradigmatic observation: “I imagined to myself who knows what, while, now that I live here, I see that reality is quite different from my dreams” (7). As for Sagnet, having lost his luggage, his documents, and also his right to lodging in the student dormitory, he stays with an older student from his country who instructs him, “[T]he real Italy was light years from the one we dreamed of in Africa; he explained that no place in the world existed that was really equal to those dreams” (37–38). As the space of experience in host countries inevitably clouds their dreams, migrant autobiographers are left recording random scenes of contact and contrast across an inevitably opaque social space. Most of these scenes pivot around the crucial theme of work, but Mademba and Sagnet also provide an expansive inventory of scenes dealing with cultural, racial, and economic differences involving food, language, religion, customs, and, of course, the harsh effects of stereotyping. In short, the migrant auto­ biographer cannot help comparing the spatialities of “here” and “far away,” any more than he or she can help feeling nostalgia under the onslaught of involuntary memories and a recollected sense of belonging. “Often I cannot sleep because thoughts of my home down there come to mind. It’s four years since I’ve been away” (41), Bay Mademba’s narrator confesses. At a broader anthropological level, it is this mental reversibility that guarantees the inherently ambiguous stance of being a guest-worker, a stance also imbued with an aura of distance resulting from the comparative perspective of migrant self-reflexivity. It is not surprising, therefore, that these texts focus intensely on the body and, more broadly, the theme of exposure. And to the extent that they do,

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46  William Boelhower they also function as anti-biographies, narratives specializing in discrete ­dramatizations of the physiological self. On these occasions, narrative design seems to break down as it spends itself in representing the broken, humiliated, or suffering self-as-body. As Mademba observes, “[R]acism … happened to me once … in a bus full of passengers who were standing, and the only empty seat for the entire trip was the one next to me” (36). As a text-type, migrant life-writing piques our interest because as proper name it gives witness to a state of exception6 while holding up an unedifying mirror to what life in fortress Europe looks like from below. Herein lies the sociodrama of migrant life, in which the dream of a better life propels them to speak up and speak out. As the subtitle of Yvan Sagnet’s autobiographical narrative, Vita e rivolta nella terra dell’oro rosso (Life and Revolt in the Land of Red Gold), suggests, the themes of exposure and state of exception are central to it. Having lost his scholarship because he is behind in his exams and forced to make a living on his own, he desperately needs a job. A friend tells him he can find seasonal work picking tomatoes in southern Italy, so Sagnet decides to go: “For that matter I was really desperate and on a humid evening in July [2011] I decided to start out on my journey” (55). When he finally reaches the center for migrant workers at Boncuri, he finds “hell on earth” (56). There were farm workers from Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Tobago, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and elsewhere—not only a linguistic babel, but also appalling living conditions: “I have never met men so undernourished and poor during the four years I had been in Italy; their shoes were held together by string, their shirts lacked buttons, everything about the way they looked oozed with a desperation that made me feel like an intruder. … The Boncuri camp was a poorer and sadder version of any situation in Africa that I had ever encountered in my life” (56–58). The camp was run by migrant overseers who functioned as inter­mediaries between the migrants and the owners. It was run on fear and violence, subsistence wages, long hours, inhuman working conditions, and again, bestial living conditions. To cite a simple example, at the end of the day some five hundred sweat-drenched workers had to share five cold-water showers. If someone suffered sunstroke during their twelve-hour day in the fields, he had to pay ten euros for a ride to the first-aid station. At the beginning of the season, the overseers collected the identity cards and work permits of all the migrants and then used them to cover for undocumented hands willing to work for even lower wages. For all practical purposes, Boncuri was run like an internment camp. The workers had no rights and lived in fear, subdued by the menacing presence of the overseers and the farm system. In  these circumstances, the migrant figure represents the biopolitical condition of “naked life” (Agamben 205). Once in the camp the field hands were set apart, becoming both a minimal and maximal sign of indistinct common humanity. This is what Sagnet makes of his experience when he observes: “It was the experience of Nardò that taught me what the African proletariat

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  47 is: in my country, however, dignity is sacred at all levels of the social scale; instead, the labor system of the fields is expressly studied to take from the farm workers even that remnant of humanity” (69). One day an overseer orders that instead of pulling up the whole tomato plant and knocking all the tomatoes off with a single blow on the side of the box, they must hand-pick each tomato so that they could be sold indivi­ dually in the supermarkets for salad. But here’s the rub: they would receive the same wages for each box of tomatoes they picked. At this point there is a general outcry among the workers and Yvan Sagnet becomes their spokesman in what became “the first big protest ever organized in Italy by foreign farm workers” (105). But before the migrants join together in refusing to put a price on their dignity as human beings, Yvan voices this harsh reflection, “[I]t is surprising how little time is needed; it is surprising how in order to survive, the human being is capable of bending to any condition of life” (86). Unlike Sagnet, Bay Mademba enters Italy illegally, without a work permit, and lives in the shadows until a fellow Senegalese suggests he try peddling books about Africa in the streets. “It was my good luck because afterwards, the publishing house I worked for gave me a contract of collaboration and with that I was able to get a work permit, thanks to a law promulgated expressly by the Italian government to remedy the scourge of undocumented immigrants like myself” (29), Mademba recounts. Because of his sunny disposition and affable personality, Bay becomes quite good at his trade, but, as he explains, the real reason is more profound: “At the beginning of this work of mine I had an excellent idea as to how I should approach my clients. I would call them brothers. Indeed, in the bottom of my heart I feel like a brother to all those I approach. Besides, with us in Senegal, this is a sign of respect” (29). In their autobiographical narratives, both Sagnet and Mademba appeal to a form of communion that presumes a common and transnational subject. And it is at this level that common name and proper name converge in a foundational figure bridging all the scales of difference and distance alluded to above. In addition, both memoirs stage this convergence as a self-conscious and critical performance. Both Mademba and Sagnet learn to play roles in the public sphere. Mademba learns to accost his prospective clients by surprising them with a greeting. Rather than silently standing by, he addresses the people who pass his way. “Thus I use my culture, my ethics, my spontaneity in bargaining with my clients, calling them brothers” (30), he explains. In doing so, he momentarily changes his common name (the stereotype of a bothersome migrant street vendor) into a speaking subject in a position to define himself: “I don’t sell books only to make money, I sell them in order to get to know people, to teach what I know, to donate the things I have in my soul”  (33), he adds. In effect, once Bay has found his trade, his narrative becomes less story and more discourse as he takes pains to explain to us and his clients his philosophy of life, the customs of his people in Senegal, and facts like the overwhelming significance of the island of Gorée, “the door of

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48  William Boelhower no return,” where slaves were kept before being shipped to the Americas. And here, almost at the end of his narrative, he performs a surprising leap of scales that returns us to our initial scene of inquiry: “The slavers chose the biggest and strongest Senegalese to transport them over the ocean to the cotton plantations of North America, the weaker and less resistant ones they ignored. So I would have been taken because I am tall and powerful, I would have been chained and carried away” (51). There are three crucial instances toward the end of Yvan Sagnet’s narrative in which he finds himself in the critical situation of feeling he has to speak out, not only in front of his fellow field hands but, in the last two occasions, also in front of the overseers, trade-union representatives, and news media assembled to cover the unheard of event of striking migrants. These fleeting moments are worth considering for the way Sagnet recounts what is happening inside him and what it means “to go all way to the bottom” (95–96) when defending their basic rights: “In the end there were three hundred of us. … We united in an enormous circle, everyone sitting on the ground with legs crossed in the light of a lamp. Nobody had the courage to begin and it was me again to speak first. … I was choked up with emotion also because I knew it would have been anything but easy” (99). How to convince his fellow workers to strike when it meant risking the little money they were making? But there was their dignity to consider and their unquestionable rights. And so, when he speaks, he talks about just wages, what they should be asking for: ten euros a box of tomatoes, and seven euros for normal tomatoes. (Currently, they were making 3.50 Eur per box for the normal ones.) When he is finished, the circle of workers burst out in a loud cheer, chanting in Italian, “seven—ten, seven—ten” (101). On the second occasion, Sagnet must face down the death threats he had received as ring leader of the protest and face up to the bright lights of the television cameras that would flash him into the homes of those who held the territory tightly under their thumbs. Here is what he recounts: Each of us had excellent reasons for not speaking: nevertheless, we had announced an assembly and the volunteers and labor-union representatives were waiting for it to begin. I took courage and then a deep breath: “The first thing that is necessary to understand is that all united we are a force: this is why we must not give in. I know it is difficult, I know that all of you are here to work; but I also know that everything that is beautiful in this world is obtained by fighting. … Tell them that you have figured out their dirty system and you are no longer willing to accept it. You are men, you are a force, you have a mind and you know your rights: it is no longer the epoch of slavery.” (109) Unlike the first time, now the author includes the speech he delivered that evening. And once again, the workers respond enthusiastically, and the moment is wonderful. As Sagnet seems to intuit, his powerful rhetoric has

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  49 now become a rhetoric of power. The workers are behind him, willing to continue the fight for their rights. At the same time, the author confesses, “but I was scared, I admit it, none of the others had exposed himself as much as I had” (111). The last time Sagnet was called on to speak, the strike had already become national news, but still the owners get their way on the ground. Sagnet is eventually forced to escape with his life after the workers themselves began to lose faith in him as a media star whom they felt they could no longer trust. In the end they just wanted to go back to work and make some money. Words were no longer enough to balance the hunger they felt. One day the tension in camp exploded and the workers turned on Sagnet armed with bottles, iron bars, and knives, shouting out in their native tongues, “thief” and “kill him” (126–28). Sagnet was in Nardò a little over a month before having to flee back to Turin. Had he stayed, they would have torn him to pieces. But the media and the newspapers did not forget what he had done, and then, after he was back in Turin for a while, Serge, a fellow worker, called from the camp and they all wanted him to return for a concert organized by various local associations, including the town of Nardò and the region of Puglia. So on August 24, the “Night of the Taranta” took place and Yvan was present. While the overseers had won the battle, they did not win the war. After looking into the events of the Boncuri camp, the national parliament passed legislation outlawing the overseer system. It is at this “Night of the Taranta” that Yvan is called upon yet again to speak: “The crowd in front of me extended as far as the eye could see; while I ascended the stage I was trembling like a leaf. I had never spoken before so many people. I remained quiet for two whole minutes, praying that I would find the strength. I made it through” (135). In his closing thoughts, Yvan Sagnet, like Bay Mademba before him, leaps the gamut of scales that invest the migrant figure by going in a flash from proper name back to common ground: “To be forced to expose myself in front of that sea of people (more than 150,000) made me understand something important: my strength, that which God gave me, lay in my abi­ lity to transmit a message to others” (135). As we learn from the coda, a conversation that took place between Alessandro Leogrande and Sagnet a year after the strike of Boncuri, the author is now an official spokesman for the national trade union Cgil-Flai and actively involved in fighting the overseer system in other parts of southern Italy. In order fully to understand both Mademba’s and Sagnet’s autobiographical narratives, the reader is asked to consider a whole spectrum of perspective scales, each of which captures only a partial aspect of such categories as “the people,” “the state,” “­sovereignty,” “human rights,” “citizenship,” “the single human subject.” Both authors also suggest what it means to be victims of a national emergency caused by migrant flows and summarily included in a state of exception, where administrative law is given precedence over universally acknow­ledged human rights.

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50  William Boelhower And in response to all this, they inaugurate in their own practices a ­ iopolitical space in which so-called solidarity among strangers is not only b a utopian projection but a space of experience circulating mediologically in the public sphere. As representative examples of migrant life-writing, Mademba and Sagnet also stake out a claim for the salience of this compelling new text-type within a uniquely postnational and transnational literary milieu. There is no possibility of knowledge of its significance if not starting from the performance of their proper names. But having learned this much, we also see that their lives represent what historian Edoardo Grendi, called “the exceptional normal” (Ginzburg, Threads and Traces 213)—and what I have referred to as foundational figures of the common. Arriving as migrants, Mademba and Sagnet have chosen to speak up and speak out. They are now part of the Italian mediasphere. Now we know their names.

Notes 1. By the phrase “assume their proper names” I mean to point out that they now actively overcome passive acceptance of being stereotyped as migrants or extracommunitarians (what I refer to in this essay as common names). Indeed, their proper names now have purchase and agency as social and cultural keys to their identity. 2. On immigration as a daily emergency, see Alessandra Sciurba, Campi di forza: Percorsi confinati di migranti in Europa (2009, chapter four); for the remark on the flow of boat people to Lampedusa as an “apocalypse,” see Fabrizio ­Lentini’s article, “Migranti, in mare una strage di donne” (19); for full treatment of Lampedusa and the Mediterranean, see Marcella Delle Donne (119–70), ­Federica Sossi (51–65), and Alessandra Sciurba (note 26). 3. Historians in the 1970s rejected the single event for events that were repeated. The goal, as Carlo Ginzburg points out, was “the equalization of individuals in their roles of economic and sociocultural agents” (Threads and Traces 200). For scholars of serial history, “facts [or individuals] no longer exist in themselves but only in relation to the series that precedes them and follows them” (202–03). 4. The term “mediosphere” is Régis Debray’s; over the last few decades Debray has developed a specific discipline dealing with the historical study of media and their effects on culture. 5. See my discussion of this topic in “Side-by-Side with You: The Common as Foundational Figure.” 6. The notion of “state of exception” is central to Giorgio Agamben’s book Homo sacer (129–211).

Works Cited Ab, A. “Chinese Prostitute Taken at Dolo: She Was Wanted Throughout Italy.” La Nuova di Venezia 8 January 2012: 30. Print. Abbadir, Alessandra. “I Stole Because I Have Nothing to Eat.” La Nuova di Venezia 11 November 2012: 30. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Print.

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Speaking Up, Speaking Out  51 Andreani, Natalia. “A Night of Landings on Italian Coasts: Pilots Handcuffed.” La Nuova di Venezia 12 July 2012: 9. Print. Artico, Marta. “Another Evacuation.” La Nuova di Venezia 31 October 2012: 33. Print. ———. “Nomads in via delle Barene: Ordigni: ‘Away with Them.’ ” La Nuova di Venezia 25 October 2012: 23. Print. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. 1955. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Print. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Una lettura di “Sarrasine” di Balzac. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Boelhower, William. “Side-by-Side with You: The Common as Foundational Figure.” The Journal of Transnational American Studies 3.1. (2011): 47–53. Print. “Boom of the New Poor: Social Card Coming.” La Nuova di Venezia 10 November 2012: 28. Print. Boresi, Daniela. “Immigrants in the Northeast: Amnesty for 11,000.” Il Gazzettino 17 October 2012: 25. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print. Ca, G. “[Market] Stands of ‘Extracomunitari’ in the Sights of the Financial Police.” La Nuova di Venezia 17 July 2012: 29. Print. ­ ovember ———. “Only Mandatory Signature for Albanian.” La Nuova di Venezia 9 N 2012: 33. Print. ———. “Unlicensed Vendors on Beach also Sell Iced Drinks.” La Nuova di Venezia 17 July 2012: 30. Print. Cagnassi, Giovanni. “He Steals a Purse at a Restaurant, [is] Chased Down and Arrested.” La Nuova di Venezia 8 January 2012: 32. Print. Ch. M. “Crisis Hits Hard: Foreigners Less than 60 Percent.” La Nuova di Venezia 31 October 2012: 23. Print. Dal Lago, Alessandro. Non-persone: L’esclusione dei migranti in una società globale. Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004. Print. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Print. Debray, Régis. Cours de médiologie générale. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1991. Print. Deg, D. “Inspection of Unlicensed Vendors.” La Nuova di Venezia 12 July 2012: 27. Print. Delle Donne, Marcella. Un cimitero chiamato Mediterraneo. Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2004. Print. Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1992. Print. ———. Threads and Traces: True False Fictive. Trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. Print. “Immigrants Assault Naples Police Station: 20 Policemen Injured.” La Repubblica 26 October 2012: 21. Print. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past. Trans. Keith Tribe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Print. Lentini, Fabrizio. “Migranti, in mare una strage di donne.” La Repubblica 5 ­November 2012: 19. Print. Mademba, Bay. Il mio viaggio della speranza: Dal Senegal all’Italia in cerca di fortuna. Bientina: La Grafica Pisana, 2010. Print. Marrone, Gianfranco. Corpi sociali: Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo. Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Print.

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52  William Boelhower Mion, Carlo. “Robbed in Train, Has the Thief Arrested.” La Nuova di Venezia 8 ­January 2012: 25. Print. ———. “They Were Selling Roses with Grain Underneath: Two Bengalese Caught.” La Nuova di Venezia 8 November 2012: 34. Print. N.N. La Nuova di Venezia October 27, 2012: 25. Print. N.N. La Repubblica October 26, 2012: 21. Print. Pomian, Krzystof. Che cos’é la storia. Trans. Marco Di Sario. Milan: Mondadori, 2001. Print. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: ­Columbia UP, 1996. Sagnet, Yvan. Ama il tuo sogno: Vita e rivolta nella terra dell’oro rosso. Roma: ­Fandango Libri, 2012. Print. Sciurba, Alessandra. Campi di forza: Percorsi confinati di migranti in Europa. Verona: Ombre Corte, 2009. Print. Sossi, Federica. Migrare: Spazi di confinamento e strategie di esistenza. Milan: Il ­Saggiatore, 2006. Print. Sperandio, Alvise. “Immigrants Hit Hardest by the Great Economic Crisis.” Il ­Gazzettino 31 October 2012: 11. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. Print.

3 Recovering Queequeq’s Body

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Performing Alterna(rra)tives in the Borderlands Astrid M. Fellner

In the spring of 2009, New York City–based Mohawk installation artist Alan Michelson installed his artwork Third Bank of the River in the passenger lobby of the U.S.-Canadian border station at Massena on Cornwall Island. This work was commissioned by the Art in Architecture Program of the ­General Services Administration, which oversees the commissioning of artworks for federal buildings in the U.S.1 The border patrol station at ­Massena was one of the many land ports that the Department of H ­ omeland Security has built or remodeled since September 11, 2001. In fact, the land port of entry on Cornwall Island constitutes the disputed border zone between the U.S. Canada, and the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation. The title of Michelson’s installation Third Bank of the River refers to the shores of Cornwall Island, which is Mohawk territory and which hosts the border crossing. It reflects the unique situation of the “Three Nations I­ nternational Crossing” on this island that lies in the middle of the St. L ­ awrence between the U.S. and the Canadian mainland. Situated high above the wall of the main passenger lobby at Massena, Third Bank of the River is an art glass window panorama documenting pairs of opposing shoreline at the border between the U.S. and Canada. The artist shot miles of shorelines of the Saint Lawrence from a boat “in  order to convey the complexity of the cultural and geographic landscape of the border zone” (Morris, “Medicine Line” 553). Hundreds of pictures were then digitally joined in a unique design made of colored ceramic glass on glass, measuring 5 feet by over 40 feet. In a mirrored arrangement that draws attention to the confluence of different cultures at this site, ­Michelson’s glass installation brings together two diverse cultural traditions, combi­ning tourist river panoramas of the nineteenth century and Iroquois wampum belts and drawing attention to the fact that cultural memory has also been stored in embodied practices and performances. ­Fusing the pictures into an arrangement that is both documentary and abstract, in form and color, this artwork evokes the historic Two Row Wampum Belt, a woven beaded belt that is an early seventeenth-century treaty of friendly co-existence and mutual respect between Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and ­Europeans. Originating in 1613, the Two Row Wampum treaty, also known as Guswentah, has two purple bands that symbolize the two parallel paths

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54  Astrid M. Fellner taken by two ships, one of the Haudenosaunee, the other of the Europeans.2 As Morris explains, “these vessels, a birchbark canoe and a European ship, represented the laws and customs of each people; the agreement stated that neither would impede the other’s progress” (555). Michelson’s “appropriation of the Two Row ­Wampum as an intercultural locator” crosses cultural boundaries, representing “the mobility of Haudenosaunee traditions through cultural formations” (Rickard 476). By evoking the Haudenosaunee Two Row wampum belt, Third Bank of the River recognizes and gives voice to alternative systems of meaning, drawing one’s attention to intercultural conflict that also arose because of incompatible systems of communication. While Europeans only believed in signed contracts as forms of official agreements, the ­Haudenosaunee held wampum belts as the authoritative records of agreement, and they continue to do so until today. As Birgit Brander Rasmussen explains, the wampum belts used in treaty negotiations function as alternative forms of literary, also serving as archival record (70–76). As embodied forms of cultural memory that transmit knowledge, wampum belts can be performatively enacted in front of an audience: At the 1988 session of the United Nations Human Rights ­Commission’s Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva, ­Switzerland, an Haudenosaunee diplomatic delegation, for instance, pre­ uswentah, the Two Row Wampum treaty belt, as a record of the sented the G 1613 agreement. As becomes clear, this sacred belt is part of a long tradition of Native resistance to Europeans’ aberration of Native rights, serving as evidence of the sovereign status of the Haudenosaunee. Using performance theory as my methodological lens, I want to show that the fault lines that Michelson’s installation piece expose and make visi­ ble activate a border poetics which forms part of the dominant cultural imaginary of North America. Michelson’s artwork draws attention to crucial moments in the history of the Americas, the meeting between different groups of people with incompatible frames of reference and the processes of nation building and running the border line that pushed First Nation peoples to a subaltern status. Reanimating the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and westward expansion, this artwork provides a space for counter-memory to evolve. The alterna(rra)tives that this installation voices constitute border performances, alternative forms of literacy, which, as I intend to show, hark back to hidden stories in the archive of U.S.-American literature.

Alterna(rra)tives in the Borderlands of America Alterna(rra)tives encompass alternative forms of knowledge, alternative “stories” or “alterNative” stories, to evoke the name of a play by Drew Hayden Taylor.3 They exist in the borderlands of American culture and can already be found as hidden knowledge in the foundational texts of the canonical literature of the American Renaissance, which contemporary First Nation writers and artists have brought to presence. In fact, instead of

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  55 being erased, these alterna(rra)tives that lie at the core of North ­American ­literary and cultural self-definition have the power to emerge as what ­Walter Mignolo calls “border thinking” or “border gnosis” in the fissures of dominant discourses of colonialism and imperialism (ix).4 The complexity and multivocality of North American literature suggest that a paradigm of analysis predicated on the confines of the development of a national literary tradition with an inclusive focus on writing is limiting. “A more dialogic study of colonial confrontations,” as Rasmussen states, “makes visible the presence, agency, and knowledge of America’s indigenous peoples who can move from seemingly mute objects to literate subjects in the colonial sphere” (4). My basic premise here is that performance functions as an episteme, as a system of learning and meaning making that stores and transmits ethnic knowledge, which, in turn, contributes to a new understanding of what counts as knowledge. Diana Taylor’s distinction between archival memory and the repertoire is helpful in showing that subaltern knowledge is primarily stored in scenarios, paradigms of meaning making that allow us to draw from both the repertoire as well as the archive. According to her distinction, the repertoire functions as a method of transmitting histories and has the power to enact embodied memory. In contrast to archival memory, which “exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, and archeological remains, that is all those items supposedly resistant to change,” the repertoire “allows scholars to trace traditions and influences, offering an alternative perspective on historical processes” (19–20). The shift to performed and embodied behaviors (the repertoire) as a way of studying memory and cultural identity, rather than the traditional emphasis on literary and historical documents (the archive) makes tensions and struggles visible that have defined cultural encounters. Focusing on the repertoire, however, also entails a shift from interpreting cultural phenomena as narratives to recognizing them as scenarios or paradigms that structure and give meaning to social knowledge through formulaic, repeatable, yet also adaptable performances. According to Taylor, scenarios include features of literary analysis, like narrative and plot, but focus attention where text and narrative do not: on the physical environment or scene of encounter and the multiple sign systems in play, including nonverbal images, gesture, and visuals (28–32). It is this performative interplay between archive, repertoire, and scenario which engages “border thinking.” My approach then entails a teasing out of the spectral remnants of ­alterna(rra)tives in canonical nation-building texts and a tracing of their echoes in contemporary literature that focuses on the U.S.-Canadian border. To this end, I will offer as a case study an analysis of the interplay between the performative border epistemologies of two key literary texts: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale, one of the foundational ­ unning texts of U.S.-­American literature and Thomas King’s Green Grass, R Water, a highly popular Native Canadian novel published in 1993. MobyDick, as many critics have observed, offered profound criticism of European

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56  Astrid M. Fellner American expansionism when it appeared on the literary scene in 1851, and Green Grass, Running Water, with its many intertextual references to Melville, offers a rewriting of foundational myths of the Americas. I do not primarily want to show in what ways King offers a critical rereading of Moby-Dick, but rather emphasize how alterna(rra)tives give rise to what George Lipsitz has called “counter-memory.” Counter-memory, as he explains, “looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from dominant narratives. But unlike myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past” (213). Both novels are informed by border thinking, highlighting “localized experience,” which they use to “reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience” (Lipsitz 213). In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger argues that “a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” (152, emphasis in the original). Rather than being understood as defensive markers, then, borderlines can be also understood as sites that create spaces for diverse forms of articulation. Border thinking, as Walter Mignolo has argued, emerges in “the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place” (ix). While the concept of the frontier has for a long time formed part of an overarching national imaginary, serving as the dominant metaphor in the conceptualization of westward expansion, Mignolo’s notion of border thinking shifts the focus to the production of subaltern knowledges. These other forms of “non-authorized” knowledges were suppressed by the dominant imperialist discourse and were ignored by European settler colonialists. As a result, many embodied practices and pictographic writings were lost or remained incomprehensible as they could not be incorporated in the traditional framework of Western epistemology. Performance theory, as I want to show here, can contribute to the restitution of silenced indigenous embodied practices and the survival of ethnic memory, offering useful analytical tools in the analysis of alternative forms of knowledges. As Diana Taylor argues, a shift in methodological approach to performance studies brings about a rethinking of literary canons, as it allows other forms of practices to emerge in a text (16–17). Alterna(rra)tives are in-built in the North American imaginary; they are part and parcel of the foundational myths that constitute and performatively produce “America” and its various border spaces.5

“A wonderous work in one volume”: Queequeg’s Coffin The American Renaissance—a period in U.S.-American literature in which ideas about national identity were articulated and acts of cultural self-­definition were performed—produced a series of texts that are consi­ dered foundational texts in American literature and therefore contribute

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  57 to archival memory. Traces of alterna(rra)tives can, for instance, be found in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Melville wrote at a crucial historical moment in North ­American history, composing much of his fiction during a period when borders were in the making and the U.S. as a nation expanded into its current shape. In 1848 the U.S.-Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had shifted the border west to the Pacific Ocean. Moby-Dick is a text that is deeply concerned with questions of identity, borders, and nation building, constituting, as Susanne Hamscha puts it, an “inconclusive performance of national fantasies that ends in uncertainty and doubt” (191). Crucially, it also ends in the loss of native knowledge. While Melville’s novel can be read as a hemispheric text that involves many instances of cultural border crossings and contains many references to Native Americans, it is, as James H. Cox demonstrates, a “narrative of conquest,” that is a “story that culminates in the absence of Native Americans from the text” (231, emphasis in the original). Functioning, as Edward Said has observed, as a critical exploration of “the American world quest” (288), the novel ends in doom. And this doom not only encompasses Ahab but “his entire crew—the representatives of the world’s extra-European populations” (Cox 232). Native Americans, as Cox puts it, “represent a human prehistory” that Melville “constructs as the source of a ‘savage’ and fundamental component of human identity toward which all participants in the whale hunt proceed” (232). The ship’s voyage, therefore, as Cox concludes, “constitutes the search for and then destruction of a primeval Native American identity that Melville sees as a human rather than as a specific cultural or historical inheritance” (232). The erasure of Native Americans, as Cox has it, is already evoked in the name of Ahab’s ship. When at the beginning of the novel Ishmael chooses to work on a ship named Pequod, he reminds the reader of the origin of the ship’s name: “Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes” (Melville 77). The words “now extinct” are significant in this context because they refer to the erasure of the Pequots by the Puritans. Ishmael’s reference alludes, of course, to the 1637 Pequot massacre. After that massacre, Cox points out, there had been a pursuit of survivors of the Pequots and, according to some historical accounts, a ship with a captain named John Gallop “took twenty or so captives” (Drinnon 44) of the Pequot tribe and threw them into the sea. Cox interprets Melville’s choice of the name of Pequod in the following way: By ignoring to write about the Puritan assault, Pequot resistance, and continued violence Melville constructs an ostensibly unproblematic narrative that allows the crew of the Pequod to occupy a historical and cultural space that serves as a metaphorical inheritance from the Pequots. When Captain Ahab walks the deck of the Pequod, however, he treads upon this erased history; his entire crew floats above the “twenty or so captives” that Gallop drowned. (233)

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58  Astrid M. Fellner While Melville’s Moby-Dick can certainly be read as a narrative of ­conquest of Native America which performs colonialism and silences Native know­ ledge, the novel can also be read as a text that exposes the fault lines in cultural encounters and offers viable alternatives to the dominant narrative of nation building. In the novel, Native knowledge is transmitted through embodied practices in the form of tattoos on Queequeg’s body. From a performance studies point of view, Moby-Dick, as Susanne Hamscha shows, can be seen as “an experiment in sketching viable alternatives to established cultural and social structures and in contesting coherent narratives of democracy and citizenship by recovering deviant bodies and uncovering dissonant memories” (190–91). The novel, then, constitutes an attempt to provide an alternative version of the American nation, enacting a series of cultural encounters, which, in fact, produce “America.” The alterna(rra) tives which the story opens up may be buried in the sea when the entire multifarious crew of the ship drowns at the end of the novel, but their traces remain as imprints in the cultural imaginary. Elsewhere I have argued that “­America,” in palimpsestic fashion “is created by a process of performative layering that consists of erasure and superimposition” (­Fellner 39). The presence of Native Americans in the foundational literature of the United States can never be successfully repressed but lingers on in later texts as “memor[ies] imperfectly deferred” (Roach 4). They can be remembered in later texts, such as Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, or ­Michelson’s artwork. Moby-Dick, therefore, does not completely erase Native America; the text rather relegates embodied Native practices to silence when Queequeg’s body drowns. The enormous knowledge that his tattoos contain is, however, only seemingly erased as it can be said to linger on as palimpsestic memory. In order to see in which ways the text rhetorically stages the loss of Native knowledge, a closer look at the character of Queequeg is indispensable. Queequeg, whose skin has been turned into a signifying surface by his tattoos, “assumes from the start synonymy with the womb of identity” (Bruce-Novoa 38). In the end, as Bruce-Novoa has argued, “when Queequeg is sucked under by the vortex of Ahab’s grand illusion, a widowed Ishmael rides to safety and a new identity as the novel’s narrator on the sign of Queequeg’s absence, that is his coffin” (38). This material object, the coffin, which is inscribed with Polynesian hieroglyphs, is significant as it serves as the bearer of counter-memory, containing a set of alterna(rra)tives that function as subjugated knowledge. While Queequeg dies and his body signs will never resurface so that they can be deciphered, the coffin, which contains embodied practices, survives, serving as Ishmael’s life buoy. But, of course, the reader will never know what Queequeg’s tattoos and the carvings on the coffin originally meant. Their meanings “can only be experienced through the mediation of Ishmael, whose memory is faulty and limited” (39). Nonetheless, as Rasmussen argues, “it represents a critical key to the novel, which likewise cannot be understood separately from the Polynesian text at its

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  59 ‘vital center’” (14). Ishmael, as Bruce-Novoa states, “comes away with only the empty container that marks Queequeg’s absence, the coffin, like a sign, representing the body no longer present” (39). In fact, Melville treats this inscribed coffin as a form of writing that figures “as a metaphor for indige­ nous forms of writing that also have the potential to resurge and form a ‘vital center’ of American literature” (Melville 15). The significance of the loss of the signs that Queequeg’s body bear can only be intimated in connection with Ishmael’s description of the coffin. This is how Ishmael describes the making and the importance of the coffin: Many spare hours [Queequeg] spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wonderous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. (524) Queequeg’s skin held the secrets of the universe, containing all wisdom and truth. In narrating the story and describing Queequeg’s embodied signs, Ishmael can, however, only rescue a small glimpse of the meaning of these body paintings. The coffin thus serves as a marker for the forever absent body, which is “forever cut off from that utopian moment when one native prophet, cosmographer-philosopher still could turn the human body into an all-encompassing sign of cosmic significance” (Bruce-Novoa 40). In the end, Ishmael identifies himself as only “another orphan” (­Melville 625). The most prominent subaltern voice in the founding period of American literature was thus relegated to silence and invisibility in the very act of its recording. The alterna(rra)tives that Queequeg’s body encompassed are lost in the processes of constituting a national literary identity, but, like the coffin, they have the power to resurface, constituting a form of presencing in the very act of absenting Native traditions. Critics usually comment upon the “lost” history that the text alludes to, the so-called “plotting out” of Native Americans in Moby-Dick, but I suggest that rather than mourn the vanishing native traditions in this text, we should focus on the unstoppable creativity by which that “lost” history can neither be entirely repressed nor perfectly remembered. As an embodiment of alterna(rra)tives, Queequeg’s coffin remains a marker of an indigenous textual presence which resurfaces and is enacted in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.

60  Astrid M. Fellner

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“As long as the grass is green and the waters run”: Ishmael’s Return Thomas King’s literary works, which direct readers’ attention to the boundary between the U.S. and Canada, call for an open-minded understanding of identity categories, exploring cross-cultural dynamics, including Native rights, American and Canadian relations, and the cultural traditions of Europe and North America. Of Greek, German, and Cherokee ancestry, King was born in the U.S., but he moved to Canada and now holds ­Canadian citizenship. His biography and cultural affiliation add further complexity to his writings, because “as an ‘American’ Cherokee who moved to Canada, he can be a Canadian writer and a Native writer, but he cannot be a Canadian Native writer because the Cherokees are not ‘native’ to Canada” (Andrews and Walton 605). King therefore truly qualifies as a border writer, who both in his life and in his writings embodies a form of border transgression. His fiction relies on oral forms of storytelling, eclectically mixing a range of different tribal traditions and relying on a comic framework.6 His works, however, also ground themselves in the Western tradition of fiction “as evident in the accessibility of his comic realism to non-Native readers and also in the wide swath he cuts through the Western literary canon in Green Grass, Running Water” (Wyile 108). In his texts, King crosses many borders and “national boundaries, town lines, bridges, rivers, and myriad other signs point to in-­between spaces where King renegotiates hierarchical binaries” (Rintoul 238). Green Grass, Running Water, King’s second novel, is a narrative that comprises a series of border crossings, honoring Melville’s Moby-Dick and acknowledging its precursor as a border text.7 In fact, King’s entire oeuvre has to be read across the U.S.-Canadian border, because as a First Nation writer he criticizes national borders imposed by imperial nations as artificial and imaginary.8 Green Grass, Running Water can also be read as a border-crossing text as it breaks the border between reality and fantasy, questioning the authority of the dominant culture. Directing attention away from the traditionally privi­ leged signifier of Western rational thinking to subaltern, embodied forms of knowledge production and non-authorized alterna(rra)tives, the novel “comprises a postmodern pastiche of cultural counter-narratives that transgress and disrupt racial, sexual, and national demarcations” (Walton 73). The text extensively draws on the archive of North American literature and not only engages Melville, but also Cooper and Thoreau. It performs borders, engages in border thinking, and functions as the repertoire that enacts alterna(rra)tives.9 The first narrative level of the novel focuses on a group of contemporary Blackfoot Indians who live in Southern Alberta and who are on their way to the Sun Dance. The other level depicts a series of counter-myths and legends, which in magic realist fashion undermines the legitimacy of hegemonic linear narratives. The magic realist segments are divided into four sections, in each of which four old Indians, who have escaped from a mental institution, hitchhike to a Canadian Blackfoot reservation on a mission to “fix up the world” (King 133). These four narrators, the Lone Ranger, Hawkeye,

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  61 Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael act as supernatural characters who tell their versions of their respective creation stories. These characters are actually four archetypal mythic Indian women—First Woman, ­Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman—who only pose as white male characters of Western culture. But when First Woman acts as Lone Ranger, Thought Woman turns into Robinson Crusoe, Old Woman changes to Hawkeye, and Changing Woman becomes Ishmael, “each Indian also modifies European narratives of patriarchal and colonialist control” (Rintoul 239). Their performance as Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, Robinson Crusoe, and Ishmael can be said to function as a form of “survival tactic” (Davidson, Walton, and Andrews 158), enacting Native knowledge. As Walton states, “the disruptive aspect of the narratives is located in the cultural position of the characters, who are all Native elders, and who retell the story of how they masqueraded as Whites (and became White legends)” (74). King carefully weaves the stories of his characters into both Native American oral traditions and into revisions of hegemonic Western narratives. The circular structure of the Sun Dance and the textualization of orality give the text a performative quality, contributing to the disruption of the ­linear trajectory of the narrative. The novel shifts between at least nine narrative perspectives, which are all orchestrated by the narrator and his alter ego, Coyote, who as a trickster figure interferes in the narrative. As ­Davidson, Walton, and Andrews claim, King’s use of trickster discourse works through comic inversion as he “incorporates elements of paradox, irony, and parody” not only “to undermine some of the standard clichés about Native peoples” but also to “dismantle the hierarchical relationship between Natives and non-Natives living in Canada and the United States” (35). The structure and style of King’s text are heavily invested in dialogue, involving question and response, repetition and revision. King’s “associational literature,” as he himself refers to his writings,10 consistently draws on traditional forms of oral stories such as creation stories, cycle stories, and trickster tales, making use of digressions and narratorial interaction with the audience. Mediating between cultures and different belief systems, King’s text enacts Melville’s Moby-Dick in many ways. In fact, King’s revision of Melville’s novel can be read as a performance of Moby-Dick. Green Grass, Running Water introduces Melville’s Moby-Dick in the section that begins with the sentence “This according to Ishmael” (112). In Ishmael’s section, Changing Woman travels through the watery world and meets Ahab, who invites her on board his ship. There she meets Ishmael, who introduces himself appropriately: “Call me Ishmael, says the young man” (King 218). But Ishmael is not happy with Changing Woman’s identity, referring to the novel Moby-Dick: Oh dear, says the young man, looking through a book. Let’s try again. What’s your name? Changing Woman. That just won’t do either, says the young man, and he quickly thumbs the book again. Here, he says, poking a page with his finger. Queequeg.

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62  Astrid M. Fellner I’ll call you Queequeg. This book has a Queequeg in it, and this story is supposed to have a Queequeg in it, but I’ve looked all over the ship and there aren’t any Queequegs. I hope you don’t mind. Ishmael is a nice name, says Changing Woman. But we already have an Ishmael, says Ishmael. And we do so need a Queequeg. Oh, okay, says Changing Woman. (King 218) The authority of the book is also called upon when Ahab spots a whale he believes to be Moby-Dick. Disputing his designation of Moby-Dick as the great white male whale, Changing Woman tells Ahab: “You’re mistaken, says Changing Woman. I believe that is Moby-Jane, the Great Black Whale” (King 220). As Linton reads this passage: “Euro-American culture is defined by its own surrender to the authority of the book, the narrative as written, and its insistence that other cultures surrender as well” (229). Coyote, who intervenes in the story, has also fallen into the trap of believing hegemonic narratives when he tries to correct Changing Woman by referring to ­Melville’s novel. As he explains: “‘She means Moby-Dick,’ says Coyote. ‘I read the book. It’s Moby-Dick, the great white whale who destroys the Pequod.’” (King 220). But the narrator makes Coyote aware of other realities which are equally important as the written text: “You haven’t been reading your history,” I tell Coyote. “It’s the English colonists who destroy the Pequots.” “But there isn’t any Moby-Jane.” “Sure there is,” I says. “Just look out over there. What do you see?” “Well … I’ll be,” says Coyote. (King 220) The humorous critique in this passage is derived from “the conflict between Native concepts of history and story and the logocentricism of Euro-­ American tradition” (Linton 229). The crew members also hold on to their realities and shout out that the whale is female and black. When Ahab threatens to throw everyone overboard, the crew members follow Ishmael and jump into a boat and leave. In King’s novel, Ahab’s fate is therefore different: “Rather than being the victim of an inscrutable God, an indifferent Nature, or the ‘savage’ within himself, as in Melville’s text, the Ahab in King’s novel faces resistance from both a female creative force and the avatar of populations marginalized by European North American colonial and patriarchal forces” (Cox 236). King also introduces a queer moment into this story when Ahab’s slip of the tongue “Whaleswhaleswhaleswhalesbianswhalesbianswhaleswhales” (King 219) likens whales to lesbians as the “other” that is to be hunted. When Ahab tells his crew to kill whales, Changing Woman protests,

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  63 demanding to know why they want to kill these animals. Ahab explains: “This is a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don’t like” (King 219). King makes clear that “the prey of the Pequod’s crew are the ‘whalesbians’ who are doubly marginalized by gender and sexual alliance” (Cox 236). In fact, they are triply marginalized as the crew’s performance corroborates Changing Woman’s claim that MobyJane is black. They sing out “Blackwhaleblackwhaleblackwhalesbianblackwhalesbianblackwhale” (King 220). While in Melville’s novel, the whale functions, in part, as the “other” that Ahab is unable to dominate or conquer, King “demystifies the white whale as indecipherable literary symbol by articulating his own understanding of the marks on the whale’s skin: these hieroglyphics represent the inscrutable lives and voices of non-Europeans, whose absence many colonialist imaginations fervently desire” (Cox 237). Moby-Jane finally sinks the ship, and she and Changing Woman swim away in “whalesbian” fashion, enjoying each other’s company. When Changing Woman asks about the fate of Ahab, Moby-Jane explains: “We do this every year. […] He’ll be back. He always comes back” (King 221). King’s story of Moby-Dick thus has no ending but repeats itself. The dialogical quality of Green Grass, Running Water, in fact, constitutes an intercultural awareness, which offers an approach for seeing how juxtaposing this text with Moby-Dick not only sheds light on both texts but also points to the existence of alterna(rra)tives in dominant discourse. King’s novel instantiates what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed dialogization as it offers a narrative space where Native epistemology and alternative literacies coexist with Anglo-American cultural and narrative forms. It offers a chain of responses and repetitions, in which new statements presuppose earlier statements and anticipate future responses.11 The intertextual relationships between the stories of the characters in Green Grass, Running Water and their literary antecedents “represent a kind of ‘floating’ signification that rejects stasis in a word, a name, a text” (Linton 231). The title Green Grass, Running Water draws upon a phrase commonly used in Native land treaties. As a coded reminder of a history of appropriating Native lands and ignoring treaties, it is used in connection with the destruction of a dam, which is built on a fault line on Indian territory. Eli Stand Alone, in the novel a retired University of Toronto literature professor, refuses to relinquish his mother’s cabin to the power company that has built a dam on Native lands: “As long as the grass is green and the waters run. It was a nice phrase, all right. But it didn’t mean anything. It was a metaphor. Eli knew that. Every Indian on the reserve knew that. Treaties were hardly sacred documents” (King 296). This dam is called “The Grand Baleen,” which, of course, is yet another reference to Moby-Dick as the French word for whale is baleine. Eli’s refusal to leave the cabin costs him his life because the flood that the Native elders unleash to destroy the dam kills Eli in the process. His commitment has, however, positive results for the community: in that the dam is destroyed, Eli and the community are honored. The bursting of the dam, as Wyile explains,

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64  Astrid M. Fellner “echoes traditional oral stories in which Coyote breaks a dam to provide water for others or to free passage for the salmon” (117). Coyote returns the dam, the Grand Baleen, to the water, which “rolled on as it had for eternity” (King 455). At the end of Moby-Dick, we may recall, “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (Melville 625). King alludes to this line, but in his novel the “great shroud of the sea” refers to the water that drowns Eli Stands Alone. The book, however, makes clear that water is also a positive force as it brings life to the cottonweed trees used in the Sun Dance. Throughout the novel, water functions as a symbol of both creation and destruction. It dominates the narrative, carrying multiple meanings that range from the water of creation to the biblical flood to the oceans upon which Ahab’s ship travels. It is the source of creation in many Native American origin stories, and King’s novel begins: “So. In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water” (King 1). At the end of the book, the story continues to float and readers find themselves at the beginning of yet another story, circling back to the beginning of the novel: “Sit down,” I says to Coyote. “But there is water everywhere,” says Coyote. “That’s true,” I says. “And here’s how it happened.” (King 469)

Conclusion: “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across” “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” Michel de Certeau notices (129). According to Dwight Conquergood, de Certeau’s aphorism “points to transgressive travel between two different domains of knowledge: one official, objective, and abstract—‘the map;’ the other one practical, embodied, and popular—‘the story’” (369). King, as Goldman points out, revises the maps and mapping strategies of Western culture, rewriting inherited maps and changing them with representations that entail a Native world­view (19). Stories, King shows, contain alterna(rra)tives, and they have the power to travel. What his characters demonstrate in their stories is that “history can be revisited, endings can be rewritten” because stories “are meant to encompass contradictions, to repeat and to evolve” (Linton 228). These alterna(rra)tives reactivate a scenario, the setup of the story, which, as ­Taylor has stated “predates the script and allows for many possible ‘endings’” (28). Stories, as King’s novel suggests, do not necessarily have beginnings, middles, and endings. They do not convey any one truth, as they are not always what they appear to be. They play with language and “float in and out of their written contexts” (Chester 57). As the narrator reminds Coyote when he claims to be a true hero: “There are no truths. … Only stories” (King 432). The dialogic relationship between the works of Melville and King serves to restitute subaltern knowledge. King’s Green Grass, Running Water performs embodied memory, offering an alternative perspective on historical processes. Read as forming part of a dialogue with Melville’s Moby-Dick,

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Recovering Queequeq’s Body  65 King’s text can be said to restore Queequeg’s voice and to excavate the alternative narratives that Melville’s novel contain. By continuing ­Queequeg’s voice and by making Melville’s border sensibility a part of the book’s ongoing story, King’s novel not only honors the best possibilities of Melville’s works and proffers a number of revisionary hidden narratives of dominant master-­ narratives, but also shows that border thinking is part of a long tradition of the North American cultural imaginary. While understandings of North American culture are often conceptually based on the erasure of Native people, performative texts like King’s Green Grass, Running Water create echoes of stories that are hidden in the archive of North American literature. What I have attempted to do here is tease out archival alterna(rra)tive stories and show how they continue and repeatedly perform themselves in contemporary Native cultural production. Subaltern knowledges rest hidden in dominant narratives and lie there buried as shadowy presences. But these alterna(rra)tives can be restored in contemporary literature, performative texts, and artworks. Silenced stories can, for instance, be made visible to travelers when they cross the border between the United States and ­Canada. It is this act of unearthing hidden knowledges that Michelson’s border installation Third Bank of the River performs at Three Nations Crossing International Bridge. Like King, Michelson articulates a native cosmo­graphy that serves as a reminder of a history of appropriation. Michelson’s use of the Two Row Wampun belt as a different form of writing draws the attention to the significance of other forms of writings than Western ones. To this day, the Two Row Wampum is a sacred document to Natives and continues to function as a meaningful symbol to contemporary Akwesasne, whose reserve straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. But King’s metaphor, “[A]s long as the grass is green and the waters run,” points to the reality. For Europeans, treaties are “hardly sacred documents” (King 296). Making travelers aware that they are passing the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, Michelson’s installation activates Native knowledge, thus contributing to the project of recovering Queequeg’s body.

Notes 1. For more details on the biography and the works of Alan Michelson, see: http:// alanmichelson.com/ (Jan. 25, 2014). For more information on the GSA’s Art in Architecture Program and the Massena’s award-winning Land Port of Entry, see http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104456 (Jan 25, 2014). 2. For more details on the meaning and significance of the Two Row Wampum, see the website of the Mohawk Council of the Akwesasne: http://www.akwesasne. ca/node/118 (Jan. 25, 2014). 3. I am grateful to Priscilla Walton from whom I borrow the term “alterna(rra) tives.” She has coined the term to refer to “non-authorized” accounts in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. King’s text, Walton argues, “comprises a postmodern pastiche of cultural counter-narratives” (73). Walton, however, does not further comment on the wordplay in this neologism. I also want to thank Katja Sarkowsky, who has borrowed her book title AlterNative Spaces from Drew

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66  Astrid M. Fellner Hayden Taylor’s play AlterNative. She uses Taylor’s ironic concept to ask whether the spaces constructed in Native literature offer “Native alternatives” (21). 4. Alterna(rra)tives refer to other forms of literacy in the Americas. These “alternative literacies,” as Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo see it, include non-­ alphabethic forms of writing “with the potential to radically disrupt a colonial legacy maintained by narrow definitions of writing and literacy” (Rasmussen 10). 5. As Susanne Hamscha has argued, it “is by way of performance that a notion of ‘America’—or, more specifically, of ‘Americanness’—is produced which is anchored in the imaginary, in national fantasies that serve to unite a very diverse body of American citizens” (13). Moreover, as a European invention, “America,” the New World, has to imagine itself differently than the Old World, which it can only achieve through “a certain kind of performance, a certain kind of thinking against the grain that will be the American signature” (Riddel 23). Rather than treat “America” as a place or an object of study then, I see it as a practice that creates itself through performative acts. Although not quite the same, I use the concepts of performativity and performance interchangeably when I refer both to actual performative practices described by Melville and King, as well as to the performative character of the texts themselves. What connects performance and performativity is the focus on iteration. A performance approach thus allows me to look at cultural texts both as performances that stage cultural encounters and activate alterna(rra)tives as well as performatives that discursively bring “America” into being. 6. As Arnold Davidson, Priscilla Walton, and Jennifer Andrews have shown, King “carefully couples selected aspects of traditional comedies with a distinctively Native sensibility to create his own subversively comic vision” (29). 7. Green Grass, Running Water also contains many references to and engages with Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” For details, see Lisa Karen Christie’s dissertation That Dam Whale: Truth, Fiction and Authority in King and Melville. 8. In an interview King stated: “I guess I’m supposed to say that I believe in the line that exists between the U.S. and Canada, but for me it’s an imaginary line. It’s a line from somebody else’s imagination; it’s not my imagination. It divided people like the Mohawk into Canadian Mohawks and U.S. Mohawks. They’re the same people. […] It wasn’t there before the Europeans came” (qtd. in Rooke 72). 9. There are other Native American authors who have also offered revisions of Melville’s novel, enacting the alterna(rra)tives that are present in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), for instance, also intertextually play with Moby-Dick. 10. As King writes in “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” associational literature concentrates “on the daily activities and intricacies of Native life […] organizing the elements of plot along a rather flat narrative line that ignores the ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature” (14). 11. As Michael Holquist explains in the glossary to Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagi­ nation, “[D]ialogue and its various processes are central to Bakhtin’s theory, and it is precisely as verbal process (participial modifiers) that their force is most accurately sensed. A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’ when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute” (427).

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Works Cited Andrews, Jennifer, and Priscilla L. Walton. “Rethinking Canadian and American Nationality: Indigeneity and the 49th Parallel in Thomas King.” American Literary History 18.3 (2006): 600–17. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Unpacking America’s Boxed Gifts: From Cabeza de Vaca to Donald Duck.” Body Signs: The Body in Latino/a Cultural Production. Ed. Astrid M. Fellner. Vienna: LIT, 2011. 23–51. Print. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print. Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999): 44–62. Print. Christie, Lisa Karen. That Dam Whale: Truth, Fiction and Authority in King and Melville. M.A. Thesis, Dalhousie U, Halifax, 2000. Web. 25 Jan. 2014. . Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. 369–80. Print. Cox, James H. “‘All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something’: Thomas King’s Revisions of Narratives of Domination and Conquest in Green Grass, Running Water.” American Indian Quarterly 24.2 (2000): 219–46. Print. Davidson, Arnold, Priscilla Walton, and Jennifer Andrews. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Print. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-­ Building. 1980. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997. Print. Fellner, Astrid M. “Performing Cultural Memory: Scenarios of Colonial Encounter in the Writings of John Smith, Cabeza de Vaca, and Jacques Cartier.” Transnational American Memories. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 33–58. Print. Goldman, Marlene. “Mapping and Dreaming: Native Resistance in Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999): 18–40. Print. Hamscha, Susanne. The Fiction of America: Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film. Frankfurt: Campus, 2013. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. 1971. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Print. Hill, Elizabeth Boone. “Introduction.” Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 3–26. Print. Holquist, Michael. “Glossary.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.  ­Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 423–34. Print. ———. “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial.” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 10–16. Print. King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. 1993. New York: Bantam Books, 1994. Print. Linton, Patricia. “‘And Here’s How It Happened’: Trickster Discourse in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Modern Fiction Studies 45.1 (1999): 213–34. Print.

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68  Astrid M. Fellner Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. Print. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. Print. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick, or The Whale. 1851. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Know­ ledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Morris, Kate. “Art on the River: Alan Michelson Highlights Border-Crossing Issues.” Smithsonian Institution American Indian Magazine (2009): 37–40. Web. 25 Jan. 2014. . Morris, Kate. “Running the Medicine Line: Images of the Border in Contemporary Native American Art.” American Indian Quarterly 35.4 (2011): 549–78. Print. Rasmussen, Birgit Brander. Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Rickard, Jolene. “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 110.2 (2011): 466–86. Print. Riddel, Joseph N. Purloined Letters: Originality and Repetition in American Literature. Ed. Mark Bauerlein. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Print. Rintoul, Suzanne. “‘Sometimes It Works and Sometimes It Doesn’t’: Gender Blending and the Limits of Border Crossing in Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water.” Thomas King: Works and Impact. Ed. Eva Gruber. Rochester: Camden House, 2012. 238–53. Print. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Print. Rooke, Constance. “Interview with Tom King.” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 62–76. Print. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print. Sarkowsky, Katja. AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations’ Literatures. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Walton, Priscilla. “Border Crossings: Alterna(rra)tives in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Genre-Forms of Discourse and Culture 21.1 (1998): 73–87. Print. Wyile, Herb. “‘Trust Tonto’: Thomas King’s Subversive Fictions and the Politics of Cultural Literacy.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999): 105–31. Print.

4 Limning the Limit or Notes toward an Outline of Activist Performance at the Limit Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:29 11 April 2017

Samir Dayal

A woman’s face is being peeled back. The plastic surgeon unceremoniously cuts round the ear, inserts a surgical implement into a large flap of skin, stretching it taut like fabric. Throughout this operation a camera watches as the knife and implants transform her face into something utterly different, as the woman intended. The performance is broadcast live internationally. The face is transformed, but the woman remains the same. Deliberately, not totally etherized on the operating table, the woman remains lucid under scalpel and glove, responding to questions from spectators live, while offering her body’s transformation by surgeon and transmission by camera as an opportunity for meditation on received notions of “cosmetic” aesthetics. Her gaze into—and relayed by—the camera is never obscured by gauze. I will return later to this cringe-inducing and provocative mediatized event. To begin, however, I want to situate this performance within a category that I call activist performance at the limit. My hope is to tentatively define the category and then outline some characteristics of a successful activist performance, particularly performance that risks the body, tests its limits in some significant way, and therefore touches the spectator powerfully. My premise is that “success” here means that activist performances re-energize psychic life and that they make paradigm-testing social, political, or aesthetic interventions. This essay therefore explores performances at the limit, situated at or in boundary states, in extremis, testing the limits of significant cultural memes or categories. I focus furthermore on performances in which the themes, ideas, and, preeminently, affect are invested in, inscribed on, or relayed through the body to move the audience toward thought or action. The body as suffering, vulnerable, and even maimed or decapitated here anchors a theory of the body in performance. It is precisely in the vulnerability of the body that we can discern the finitude of human life and the fragility of human social order. Thus for me the body’s vulnerability is key to understanding why we find performance “moving.” Performance has the power to move the spectator, and this power is embodied in the p ­ erformer’s movement, whether on stage or in the street. This essay considers this vulnerability conveyed through embodiment, what I call “risking the body” to move the spectator. In activist performance, in particular, the spectator

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70  Samir Dayal is ideally moved to political awareness and possibly action: activist perfor­ mance is a special case, presenting a “pure” instance of the centrality of the body as risked and therefore powerfully moving. How then are we to situate the vulnerable body in performance, with special emphasis on the particular case of activist performance? I begin with a taxonomy of “activist performance” as inaugurating an “event.” This taxonomy will help to frame my approach: I introduce a variety of examples representing the range of “activist performance” that risk the body of the performer(s) and thus explore the limits of the human body in the performative space and time. If risking the body is crucial in eliciting the experience of being moved from the audience in whom activism is meant to evoke political awareness and social consciousness, what happens to risk when the performance is mediated? And what happens when the mediation is driven by commercial or otherwise non-artistic considerations? Do mediation and commodification fatally undermine the legitimacy of the activist performance? How much depends on the credibility of the performer, and how much weight do we place on the purposes motivating the performance as live performance versus the performance as mediated? These questions are at the heart of my project. Although I introduce this range of performances to show their variety, my focus is on Orlan’s work for which I have developed a taxonomy of performance: 1 Performances frequently present a ceremonial or ritualized, formalized choreography: as performances, they are at one remove from the experiential. But the distance from the immediacy of the experiential is strategic, for it affords a critical perspective, analogous to the “alienation” afforded in the Brechtian model of the theatrical Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect or perspectival estrangement). This critical perspective provides analytical clarity or new knowledge, even resists the obfuscations of official discourse. In this sense it is always already political. 2 Activist performance tends to rely on mediated repetition. Mediation is crucial in the dissemination of activist performance. Given the ephemerality and occasional quality of so much activist performance, only mediated repetition guarantees that spectators who were not physically present at the actual performance can actually witness it and be moved to activist purposes that motivated the performance in the first instance. In performance, Cathy Caruth suggests, what is performed is repetition itself (111). Tragic theater for instance “re-presents” an always already familiar narrative—repetition facilitates spectatorial contemplation on the tragic categories of hamartia, anagnorisis, and catharsis. In the contemporary cultural juncture—what Guy Debord famously termed “the society of the spectacle” in his eponymous book—activist performances tend to be multi-mediated, often in response to the regime of the spectacle. In contemporary global cultures, what Raymond Williams had said

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Limning the Limit  71 about “drama”—that it was becoming more and more “built into the rhythms of everyday life”—is true a fortiori (4). Besides, contemporary audiences seem to expect mediation as a token of contemporaneity and are habituated into expecting that performances of all kinds will have some mediatic component, even in the case of a performance from the past being reprised—as in so many recent productions of Shakespeare, to take one prominent illustration. Furthermore, it is not only a matter of re-presentation of a preexisting everyday life, but an ongoing (primary) production or construction of reality as truth: mediation is constitutive of meaning, though the mediated audience encounter with the performance may lag the actual performance (if it is recorded, rather than live) and be physically distanced. The performance’s effects may thus also be deferred or distanced, attenuated or augmented, but in any case made “spectacular” or “theatral.” That the apparatus can itself be an important mediative agency in making meaning has become an important way of understanding activist performance. Bill Viola thus writes that the video camera, the screen, the monitor are tools that “give you the world back, but in the process of doing that … can give you new points of view and new insights in a very simple … very direct way” (Viola qtd. in Wegenstein 37). And Lauren Berlant has suggested how even the surveillance camera can, in activist “counterperformance,” be enlisted in “strategic misrecognitions” to further political agendas, including as an “affectional agent with human or animal emotions” (239). 3 Activist performances aspire to an “evental” (événementiel) force, to use Alain Badiou’s important theorization. Badiou points out the fact that while the truth about a given condition of society is always available, sometimes that truth is not recognized or even understood: it goes unperceived unless a rupture appears at the surface or within the status quo to allow that truth to emerge, even if only in an ephemeral flash of revelation. The event is what enables a subjectivity to emerge in the act of positioning oneself to the truth of the event: “[I]t is from the truth and the truth alone … that [the subject] constitutes himself” (41). Activist performance’s intervention intervenes in a given social or political situation with the avowed intention of creating such a rupture—an event, whose evental function is to reveal, if only for a moment, in the performance, the truth. This rupture’s revelation of the truth has profound political force. Badiou himself suggests other even more momentous “evental” ruptures: The French Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to mention only two (61). A more recent example of a performance with a capacity to bring about a rupture and to reveal the truth about a social or political situation was captured in the moment in Tiananmen Square when a single citizen stood in the path of a government tank, bringing it to a halt. To say that this is political theater is not to diminish it as “only” a theatrical performance but rather that it is an instance of theatral political activism. I regard this as an activist performance

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72  Samir Dayal because it was “only” theater, a gesture in which this young man risked his body performatively. He performed a (successful) act of indirectly rather than directly resisting (armed) force; such a direct resistance would be total miscalculation—it would not have been effective at all, and may even have provided a license to the army to eliminate him. It was not “actual” resistance but a resistance at a remove, not in the actual theater of force but in the theater of performance, and it was effective precisely because both the resister and the army knew that it would be a significant blow to their public image if the lone protester were to be martyred by their public reprisal. This reliance on mediated dissemination is, in my terms, theatral politics. Ideally, activist performances actualize some of the potential of creation and self-recreation described above. Successful activist performances aspire to be true theatral performance events, in the radical sense of being creative, or in the sense of revealing truths occluded or at risk of being obscured by the fog of official discourses of biopower. Biopower, after all, is the process by which the forces of governmentality exercise dominion over populations, masking the brute evidence of coercion by establishing procedures, laws, and institutions; this biopolitical control is an extension of the Hobbesian rule of the sovereign over “naked life”—life outside of its social constructions (Foucault 86, 143). Theatral events, while unmasking the masked evidence of biopolitical power, may also be “events” of momentous awakening to consciousness—they may break the surface of the accustomed everyday practice and thus open up occasions for self-reflection and self-recreation. Activist performance films and videos tend to intervene between the real and the mimetic/­ representational. Activism breaks with both these poles in being productive. Ideally, activist performances would achieve “evental” status in producing a transformative experience for performer and spectator, individual ­citizen-subject and the collective. Rather than constituting direct action, they aspire to have political, social, or aesthetic ramifications and effectivity, and thus produce better informed or more politically sensitized “publics.” 4 Activist performances may be distanced in other senses. When they are not direct stagings of actual activism or real events, they may be allegorical. They may interrupt routine events of everyday life, as when Viennese actionist Günter Brus performed at Vienna University by randomly entering lecture halls (Wegenstein 39). By definition activist performances stop short of direct action. Still, the distinction can become blurred in mediatized performance. For instance, take the case of the Russian feminist punk-rock activist performance artists Pussy Riot. The collective exemplifies activist performance: they stage guerrilla performances in strategic sites, and the success of their interventions may be gauged by the fact that the Russian government frequently quashed their work. In 2012 they staged a guerrilla performance in a Moscow

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Limning the Limit  73 church protesting the church’s endorsement of President Putin and were stopped by security officials: the same day they produced a music video from the event. Within a few weeks, members of the collective were arrested and sentenced to jail. Other members were driven into political exile, and the group drew widespread international support including from pop music stars Yoko Ono, Sting, and Madonna. The persecution of Pussy Riot would hardly have occurred if the government had not found this group’s activist performance politically threatening. This effectivity is important, but equally significant for my argument is that in the very name of the collective we can read a politics of the (female) body put at risk. 5 Activist performances are themselves mediative: the artist is less the master of the spectacle, less an “auteur” than a “medium” for a message or performer of a politics. And the performer furthermore is less important than the affective charge of the performance. 6 Simultaneously, performances have a theoretical dimension. There may be an exhibitionist and self-reflexive character to the performance, though that is secondary or ultimately incidental in activist performance. When they are self-reflexive, activist performances can address theoretical questions of performance. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s “The Couple in the Cage” is a good example, because the “real” identities of the performers are submerged in the performative illusion that they are a primitive couple from a formerly “undiscovered” tribe, the Guatenaui. Their performance was exhibitionist, but the spectacle was self-reflexively a comment on exhibition and on cultural politics, on performance itself. As such it was an effective activist performance with a political edge—and plenty of verve. It certainly put the performers’ own bodies on the line—it was all about their bodies. 7 Activist performances tend to be ideologically motivated—while in some instances they may serve to entrench an existing ideological regime, as in propaganda or indoctrination, they may also perform the function of ideology critique, and in doing so make a political intervention, pointing up alternative regimes of social and psychic life, possible worlds. 8 Activist performances often function through affective excess, trying the limits of established or normative performatives of citizenship, (cultural) identity, and (political) agency. They may attempt to engage psychic life, to activate subconscious responses or mental processes not prescripted by cultural orthodoxy. 9 Activist performances seek to suture the audience directly or indirectly, thereby blurring the distinction between onlookers and performers. Besides, when mediated, they invoke a physical or temporal distancing of the spectator from the spectacle, an “after-audience.” 10 Most importantly, the token of successful activist performance I want to focus on is that this affective excess is often embodied, and risks the body in performance in the service of politically activist causes.

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74  Samir Dayal In the ten elements or criteria introduced above, a critical issue is the centrality of the body in contemporary performance, and particularly the body put at risk, in “limit conditions.” A fundamental premise of my argument is that performance begins from the understanding that the human body is a primary site of human meaning. Amelia Jones appropriately suggests that contemporary art performances are often motivated by the effort to understand body and subjectivity, and I would add the most important of these performances tend to entail a risk to the body in limit situations (1). Embodiment and the risking of the body in limit conditions are also engagements with pressing theoretical issues and significant social concerns, not merely acting out or acting up, as we see in landmark performances: witness Chris Burden’s “Shoot” (1971) in which he has himself shot on camera, and Carolee Schneeman’s body-centered “Interior Scroll” (1975), in which she removes a scroll from her vagina and reads it. More recently Marina Abramovic’s performance “The Artist Is Present” is also in this tradition. It involves the artist sitting motionless staring at volunteers seated across from her, for 75 hours straight, without getting up for bathroom breaks or food. Abramovic herself claims that her art is “about limits” (online). Many less well-known activist performances, such as the Russian group Voina, also risk their bodies to make political statements, even when they are being parodic. Voina was an ancestor of the aforementioned activist collective Pussy Riot, with some of Voina’s members forming the latter collective in 2011. In one performance suggesting a critique of consumerism, a member of Voina was filmed stealing a chicken from a grocery store by secreting it in one of her bodily cavities. Similarly, black dance performers discussed by Alison Goeller and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung may be juxtaposed with these as differently constructed (racialized) interventions: the performative (black) body can become a medium for activist performance by virtue of risking itself as racialized presence in performative space. Understood as personal or as collective “liberation,” such embodiments in activist performance are passages to progressive politics. It is remarkable that the body’s crucial role as the anchor of performance is contested by some critics. To present my own argument, I introduce it below by contrast with the position of performance theorist Bernadette Wegenstein. In offering a dissenting view, my goal is not so much to demonstrate that Wegenstein is wrong. Rather, in acknowledging her important and broad perspective on contemporary performance, I want to use her argumentation that the risked, vulnerable body is a key element in what makes performance intellectually, emotionally, or politically effective in moving audiences. Discussing performance art “from 1960s Wounds to 1990s Extensions” with a focus on the history of this genre” as she presents it, Wegenstein maintains that “the ‘wounded’ versus the ‘extended’ body is a metaphor for what actually happened to the body as a discursive category throughout the last decades in this discourse universe of performance, and how the

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Limning the Limit  75 body—ultimately—has become a disembodied frame, or a mere instance of mediation” (38). In that period, performance art has traced the arc of an evolution from “the theme of the emphasized materiality of the body … in such performances that stage self-mutilation, to the merging of human flesh with digitality to dispense of the body as an entity, and to ‘flatten it out’ onto the screen” (38). The 1980s, she acknowledges, saw the rise into prominence of body performance, especially as produced by female and often feminist performers ranging from American Cindy Sherman to the Japanese Mariko Mori, Korean Lee Bul, Austrian Elke Krystufek, and the French Orlan, among others; more recently, she suggests, the body has become less crucial (62). There is no question that in the new global mediascapes there is an accelerated blending of the body with digital signals; I agree with Wegenstein that “the desire for the real has become more and more eminent in the immersively present media environment of the late twentieth century, and [that] at the same time a strong fantasy has arisen—the fantasy for the medium to disappear, and for reality to push through the fourth wall” (43; emphasis added). Wegenstein introduces the argument, drawing on Richard Grusin, that contemporary culture wants simultaneously to multiply and erase all traces of mediation and therefore of the body. This trait, as she notes, is consistent with the visual style of postmodern hypermediation, a style characterized by fragmentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity. Wegenstein finally does seem to return to the body in the course of her argument. Late in her book, speaking particularly of performance that is sensitive to gender issues, Wegenstein, almost grudgingly, acknowledges that “[a]lthough the body discourse in these performances can be seen in the framework of a politically liberating activism, what matters is that artists’ bodies have become more and more their primary artistic material” (53). Even in the “1990s extensions,” she is forced to admit, “the external twists itself toward the internal where it merges the two regimes [sic] together. As a result, the body starts to matter differently, as a whole and in its fragmentation as mediatic strata” (77). Tellingly, some of Wegenstein’s own illustrations can be read contrapuntally, against her initial claim that the body is not central to contemporary performance. For instance, she refers to the well-known performance artist Stelarc. In his important 2003 installation, “Prosthetic Head,” Stelarc presents a virtual simulacrum of his own head, automated and animated but also capable of learning through artificial intelligence. As the artist himself explains, “[a] problem would arise when the Prosthetic Head increases its data base, becoming more autonomous in its responses. The artist would then no longer be able to take full responsibility for what his head says” (Stelarc qtd. in Wegenstein 74–75). Yet this performance pivots in fact on a catch-22 proposition. If this limit condition were to happen and if then the head became autonomous, obviating the need for the body, Stelarc’s autonomous head could not even assert as much as he supposes. It would then

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76  Samir Dayal make no sense for Stelarc to propose that “Prosthetic Head” was merely a prosthesis because it would have ceased to share the presumptive identity with the artist with which it began. The head would then become an independent (artificial) intelligence, for all practical purposes a detached or even a “decapitated” head albeit one that functions with an artificial intelligence and without a body. Stelarc’s work is interesting precisely because it explores a limit condition—“decapitation”—that is subsequently evaluated for its potential for re-capitation: can this reconstituted head really still be supplanted onto the body of Stelarc? Otherwise the thought experiment proposed by this performance would be trivial, and the issue of “remediation” would be seen as merely a special interest. Recapitation, posterior to decapitation, signals the passage beyond the limit of the body: it is only “au delà” that recapitation becomes significant, if it does not just get everything in inverse order. Thus it seems to me that rather than supporting Wegenstein’s conclusions, Stelarc’s performance piece compels us to return to the question of the body. My argument contra Wegenstein is that the body is not quite made redundant by contemporary performance. And we are not exactly freed from the old problem of the finitude of the human body. This argument supports Fredric Jameson’s position that the subject has been decentered, even dissolved. The subject may no longer be sovereign and self-sufficient as it was in the era of classical capitalism. Postmodernist performance theory would endorse Jameson’s diagnosis of a “waning of affect,” yet it would simultaneously acknowledge that the foregrounding of the body in activist performance also causes an augmentation of affect—which is to say an intensification of bodily experience (Jameson 15–16). The deconstruction of the subject, more importantly, does not necessarily imply the dissolution of (the category of) the body. Indeed this is a central issue for activist performance. Jameson would agree that the material body is not simply transcended, even in an age of hypermediation. Instead, in the face of this hypermediation, the body as such has been reinscribed as precious, fragile, even inadequate for the aspirations of modern and future human beings, cyborgs, or humans with prostheses. If the body remains central, however, the epistemological or phenomenological issue persists: what could it mean for a human being to discount or dispose of the human body, or not to be constrained by it? And how does risking the body in activist performance become a way of reinvesting or even reenchanting it as fragile and precious, the fundamental finitude on the ground of which activist claims for social justice and progressive politics can be tendered? My main focus here is on Orlan, the artist whose project of having surgery performed on her own body I referred to at the very opening of this essay. Orlan presents an especially riveting and provocative case study, soliciting responses at the cultural but also at the deep personal and even psychic levels. If we study Orlan’s performance, we can see how important the body remains in activist performance, indeed how crucial it is to any activism

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Limning the Limit  77 that is not limited to the realms of fine art, literature, or philosophy. Her “anti-beauty”—feminist—project gains from being situated as exemplar of precisely the kind of activist performance that illustrates most of the ten elements on the taxonomy presented above. First, Orlan’s performances are formalized, even ritualized, and choreographed. Throughout her career she has acknowledged her conscious use of the media as central to her project. As early as 1971 she had styled herself “Saint Orlan,” creating a series of performance artworks featuring surgical procedures on her own body as “a site of public debate,” and she certainly received wide publicity, as she intended (Orlan, qtd. in Faber 118). Since 1990, Orlan has undergone, always with a camera rolling, at least nine (anti-)cosmetic surgeries, usually with epidural anesthesia, which allows her to remain conscious, even reading from theoretical and psychoanalytic texts. The first four surgeries entailed liposuction from ankles, knees, hips, buttocks, waist, and neck. The rendered fat, with gleanings from other surgeries including skin, bandages, gloves, even scalp with hair, have been sold as relics—she even gifted some tissue to a grateful Madonna. Her seventh surgery-performance, Omnipresence, was broadcast live to fifteen art galleries internationally, including a concurrent Q&A with Orlan responding lucidly throughout. Orlan’s performances are frequently assisted by spectators dressed in high fashion by Paco Rabanne, Miyake, and others, even dancers or singers. Add to this the choreography of surgical team, media, and provocative props: a devil’s pitchfork, and even a skull. Orlan is inspired by Eastern, notably Indian, ritual practices of flesh mortification: massive piercings, deformations or starvation of the body as among mendicants. She went to India and presented herself on billboards as a Kali-figure, with protruding tongue and many hands holding objects such as a cell phone instead of traditional weapons. It is as though Orlan were engaging in the kind of provocative category-deconstruction also focalized by Jacques Derrida. If Orlan’s surgical self-refashioning is her art-ergon, a work of art in itself, then these accoutrements are parerga. This is neither madness nor self-indulgent exhibitionism: we cannot miss the irony and self-reflexivity of her performances, crucial elements in what makes her activist performances successful. Orlan’s admirable mediated tour de force in multimedia activist performance strategically misrecognizes (to appropriate Lauren Berlant’s term introduced above) the camera as well as the surgeon and audience/interlocutors, enlisting them as “performers,” and thus orchestrating a live performance involving four parties in which she is acted or performed upon more than performing. As she lies on the operating table under partial anesthesia, the plastic surgeon and the camera perform a ballet, using her body to present a political intervention, and the audience/interlocutors complete the mise-en-scène. Yet the performance also exceeds that mise-en-scène. A post-performance installation featured forty-one images of Orlan’s face as it healed from nip and tuck. These images were juxtaposed with images of

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78  Samir Dayal Diana, Mona Lisa, Psyche, Venus, and Europa. This array of female figures is a gesture of homage to the ancient Greek artist and aesthetician Zeuxis, who attempted to combine the best features from different subjects to arrive at the best synthetic representation. Two subsequent surgeries created bony protrusions on either side of Orlan’s forehead. She also had the largest possible breast implants for her frame put in surgically. Always cogent, Orlan explains that, looking at her horned head or distorted face and body, we should not be tempted to judge her as crazy: she wants the viewer to ­entertain the idea that we do not know what a future aesthetics will call beautiful, just as today we may not find large noses jutting out from the forehead beautiful, though pre-Columbian Mayans did. A cross-cultural aesthetic is important in understanding Orlan’s work, for she draws on a storehouse of conceptual and imagistic ideas from various cultures, and these drive her ­self-transformations and aspirations as an activist body artist; some of her performance activism goes so far as to surgically attempt a surgical approxi­ mation of her living face to pre-Columbian African Native masks. She has attempted to incorporate Indian images into her self-­transformations and has even gone so far as to identify herself as at some level African. This transracial or better transethnic re-identification embodies a liberatory potential, as Goeller and Fischer-Hornung seem to imply (22). In depending heavily on mediation—and reflecting on its effect on the performance, Orlan also meets the second element of my taxonomy, that contemporary performance tends to require media for the dissemination of the ephemeral activist performance or “happening.” Above I suggested that activist performance relies on repetition. But repetition is not limited to mimesis. Activist performances as re-presentation also afford opportunities for reflexivity or reflection on cultural arrangements and political institutions. The point can be rendered salient by juxtaposing Orlan with other recent performance activists. Indeed there are several other performances that cast into greater relief Orlan’s project of repetition and reflection through mediation. Repetition or representation seems, for instance, to be encoded into the very title of “Operation Atropos” (2006), a video performance piece by Coco Fusco. Atropos is the name of one of the Fates. Her name in Greek means that (fate) which cannot be “turned.” Along with her two sisters Clotho and Lachesis, she decides the fate of each living person with her inexorable shears. Fusco’s “Atropos” suggests the power of the torturer, especially in the context of the hot debate about “torture” and interrogation following the Iraq invasion—and there are gender and ideological provocations also encoded into the performance, given that all the “prisoners” are women and given that Fusco’s politics are well-known even by the trainers who claim to be “playing” torturers even though they are ex-military and presumably have sympathies with military interrogation procedures that Fusco herself questions. Fusco’s filmed performance is importantly a mimesis that risks her own body and those of six other women, at least in the context of the

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Limning the Limit  79 performance. She recruited and paid for her co-performers to enroll in a one-day immersion—being ambushed, taken captive, subjected to abuse, humiliation, emotional manipulation, and questioning by a group of ex-U.S. military interrogators. The premise for this training was that even this simulacrum of interrogation provides invaluable training for aspiring interrogators. What seemed to have surprised Fusco’s troupe of actors was that their performance of this simulacrum—a second-order simulation—could bring some of them to a breaking point. Of interest here is how reality blurred with the simulacrum when the prisoners perceived themselves to be in extremis. Some of Fusco’s collaborators broke down in tears. This blurring invites reflection on representation, including self-reflexivity on the part of the performers/prisoners, the interrogators—and those who support their methods. Although this performance is arguably “only spectacle,” its ambition is to intervene in a heated civic sphere debate about interrogation techniques employed by a democratic nation of laws. In addition to the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the simulated, there is an implosion of the distinction between actor, spectacle, and spectator—this is coextensive with the suture I alluded to above, something also important to Orlan’s performance. Again, suture as achieved in Fusco’s piece (the spectator is sutured by the fear induced in the performers despite the artificiality of the setup) sheds light on the suture achieved by Orlan’s staging of surgery on her own face and body. The spectator is sutured by a kind of empathetic resonance, for she or he is invited to almost feel the surgeon’s knife while Orlan addresses her or him, reflecting on why she is putting her own body through this deforming surgery, which creates permanent and physical sutures where the knife cuts: the bodily sutures then can be said to find correspondence with the psychically significant “suture” of the spectator with the performer and the spectacle. Suture, I have suggested, presents an occasion to think about identification and related issues. But we must bear in mind that, as Jean Baudrillard notes, the “characteristic hysteria of our times” (online) is the collapse of spectacle and scandal, the loss of a therapeutically alienating (in the Brechtian sense) gap between spectator and spectacle, and an overproduction of difference that produces indifference. For activist performance, this collapse of distance can be disastrous because it interrupts the Verfremdungseffekt Brecht privileged. But the risk for activist performance is increased by a slightly different species of difference, that between the situations performed and situations in which the spectators or performers might actually find themselves. Alyda Faber insists that while Orlan claims to be “desacralizing the surgical act and making a private act transparent, public,” she also “resacralizes surgery by deepening the ritual aspects of cosmetic surgery, and by creating visceral and grotesque images that evoke sensations of awe and horror to elicit the sacred dimensions of the experience” (119). Against Faber’s construction of the meaning of the performance, Orlan’s own surgeon offers a saner assessment: there is nothing ritualistic about Orlan’s art,

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80  Samir Dayal she points out. In no way does it unironically aspire to sacralization. Rituals are codified practices shared across a given culture, helping to maintain its limits. Orlan’s practice by marked contrast may be idiosyncratic yet by the same token it is iconoclastic, and a signal contributing to a theoretical and political reflection on the widely accepted practice of cosmetic surgery that presumes to enhance beauty. Avowedly “blasphemous,” Orlan’s performance borrows the tools and imagery of religion in order to critique it. Oddly, Faber herself notes Orlan’s explicit embrace of the descriptors “parodic,” “grotesque,” and “ironic,” but cannot bring herself to take Orlan at her word (121). The significance of the grotesque element in Orlan’s performance must be acknowledged; indeed it cannot be overemphasized. It is precisely because the cosmetic deformation of the face and the body has been normalized in mainstream aesthetics in the West to the point of disavowal of the deformation itself that it seems important to restore the “cruelty” of beautification measures in cosmetic surgery. Orlan’s activist performances, together with their particular mediatized performative site, the operating theater, could thus be said to constitute a “theater of cruelty,” marking and crossing the limit between self-mutilation and parodic critique of cosmetic procedures, in order to limn the limit. Referencing Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, Derrida points out that Artaud seeks to transcend representation and therefore repetition—thus approaching the limit case of the evental, for the theater of cruelty is “life itself, in the extent to which life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation” (Writing and Difference 234). Orlan makes of herself not a sacred, ritual object but a secular, if also parodic, icon. For as Julia Kristeva writes, “an icon is not an image that represents a lifelike object but an inscription that invites contemplation” (Severed Head 4). This contemplation, which is an amalgam of reflection on the work of art and self-reflexivity, is, I argue here, a hallmark of successful activist performance, and it is precisely a reaffirmation of the body through “hypermediation” to the extent that hypermediation is the foregrounding of process and performance over the “finished art object” (Mitchell 8). In addition to the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the simulated, there is an implosion of the distinction between actor, spectacle, and spectator. This presents an occasion to think about identification and related issues. Especially in activist performance, it can become a disadvantage for the performance to be labeled “only an act,” mere spectacle, because it would fall short of activism. Fusco’s work is a representation, or troping, of what we may loosely term a traumatic experience. If “atropos” indicates inability to turn away, “Operation Atropos” also performs the inability of the spectator to turn away and dismiss it, and the performer’s inability merely to “act.” Notably, these roles are merged in Fusco herself: it is a play of alienation-with-suture, immersing performer and spectator in the experience of a limit condition and simultaneously enabling reflection on it through critical distanciation. It is a double turning, then: the

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Limning the Limit  81 unturnable “atropos” turning against the work’s original iconicity and a re-turning to reclaim it through the “ergon” of activist performance and self-understanding. This is after all the “work” of art always: the transformative psychic turn. Now I return to the performance by Orlan that I alluded to at the outset. More radical than Fusco’s and perhaps even Schneeman’s or Ambramovic’s performances, though in the same family of female body-anchored “ordeal art,” Orlan’s is a radical experiment in “turning” her own body into a plastic artwork, a long engagement with and critique of normative bodies, received aesthetics, and ossified identities. Furthermore, the modality of Orlan’s media-enhanced appeal to and suturing of the spectator through the display of sutures, we might say, instantiates not the waning but the augmentation of affect (Faber 118). Whereas Wegenstein had offered the example of performer Allan Kaprow as someone who “does not care that one cannot follow his events, because he is not interested in the audience at all” (56), it is quite the reverse for Orlan and many other activist performers, for they depend on transmission—often mediated transmission at one or more removes from the original performance—to communicate to spectators and interlocutors. Thus representation, mimesis, is not the sole telos of activist performance: the goal, as Jonathan Friedman puts it in another context, actually is “to use performance as a springboard for discourse, in tandem with any number of other branches of learning, and to maintain a framework of discussion that respects multiple viewpoints, rather than one that imposes on unalterable, monolithic vision,” whether that vision be “postmodern” or “feminist” (285). In the third element of the taxonomy above I suggested that to rise to a level of radical activist performance the aspiring activist needs to stage what Badiou would call an “event”—a transformative act or rupture. This radical and even jouissant transformation—entailing a radical risk to the body or to the psyche, and a traversal of a limit—can easily be confused with mere shock or worse self-indulgence and self-promotion. Orlan explicitly states that her performance of surgery on herself is intended to introduce a rupture into beauty-discourse: it is an anti-cosmetic makeover of her body into something new, something that may at the limit of the experiment entail reshaping not just the face but the entire body. What then becomes of the original person, Orlan seems to be asking, if the face and the body are no longer identical: indeed what does identity mean if effectively one switches from one body and head to another, in what would be effectively a decapitation or a severing of head (if not consciousness) from body? She creates a “new” Orlan, or someone who is no longer Orlan, although it would be an evental transformation if indeed she did become radically someone else while somehow still being identifiably continuous with the old Orlan. It is nonetheless remarkable and performatively interesting that in the very moment of this emergent transformation, she is able to reflect on this event.

82  Samir Dayal

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Underscoring the self-creative element, Massumi observes that the qualitative how-now of the event is the feeling it has of participating in itself. It is the feeling of its unfolding self-relation. If this ‘self-­ enjoyment’ by the event of its own becoming is a form of reflection, it is not only at no remove from the event; it is an essential factor in its occurrence. It is because an event ‘enjoys’ itself in this arcingly immediate way that it is able to follow through with itself. And it is because it follows through with itself that it qualifies as self-creative. (Massumi 4) This conforms to Derrida’s notion of self-­relation or auto-affection (Of Grammatology 165). But in activist performance this auto-affection crucially depends on risking the body. Risking or wagering the body in activist performance has as its goal the freeing up of psychic life, of fantasy. Like the performance art of Abramovic, Fusco, and also Kristeva’s theoretical work, Orlan privileges the body as an unparalleled site for engaging issues vital to civic as well as psychic life. Kristeva’s work helps us to see the larger issues, for it is a corrective to the neglect of “fantasy” and psychic life even among relatively sophisticated critical commentary on the nature of civic and public life. This critical commentary often underestimates or devalues the role of psychic life—of private, unacknowledged, or actively disavowed fantasies, along with anxieties, fears, traumas, and panic attacks. Pushing the body’s limits, particularly in seeking, as it were, to exchange the head she was given for another, Orlan is not naive about the likelihood of truly transforming—“liberating”—the inner self through transformation of skin, bone, and head, in metaphorical “decapitation”—and—­recapitation. In some ways her challenge is similar to Stelarc’s: even if the body is physically transformed to a point of non-coincidence with the “given” or “origi­ nal” body, some qualia-constrained self (to use the technical term from philosophy of mind) seems to resist the decapitation-and-recapitation necessary for a true “evental” transformation. Yet Orlan’s commitment to a kind of post-humanist risking of the given body is an impressive contribution to a radical reimagining of a possible body to come. Corresponding to the fourth element of my taxonomy, Orlan’s activist performance has an allegorical dimension: while on the one hand it is another in a long line of female body–centered art featuring self-mutilation, it refers allegorically to the beauty discourses centered in Western aesthetics. Orlan’s allegorical intervention is effectively anti-beauty activist art, risking the body to inaugurate a practice of “anti-cosmetic surgery” foregrounding the violence done but disavowed in the pursuit of (particularly feminine) beauty within the orbit of received norms. Thus Orlan also meets the fifth criterion of my taxonomy, that activist performances often make the body a vehicle of the performance, for the real “theater” of the performative is her own body—both the object of the performance and the medium through which the message (for it has one) is conveyed. Furthermore, and  this

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Limning the Limit  83 element corresponds to the sixth element of my taxonomy, Orlan’s performance taken to its logical endpoint makes her own body not just the object of attention but also the object of a performative theory pivoting on the implications of self-mutilation. Orlan wants us to theorize the meaning of the body’s mutilation, deformation, amputation, transformation, and even literal or metaphoric decapitation in activist performance at the limit. This embodied theory finds allegorical resonance in, and thus can be illuminated by comparison with, Kristeva’s recent work on the severed head, in a work by that title—for Kristeva’s work is a meditation on what motivates the mutilation and ultimately the decapitation of the body in so many different cultural contexts. Kristeva’s point of departure is Guy Debord’s position in his classic Society of the Spectacle that in contemporary society, there is a collapse of meaning. The result, Kristeva maintains, is an emptying of psychic life, a psychic anorexia or spiritual “amputation.” The subject finds no sustenance in the welter of images and information that constitutes culture, no source of meaning in history, no significant public communion. Kristeva argues that cultural products such as cinema, art, and performance can inaugurate “intimate revolt.” Such revolt can be powerfully induced through contemplation of extremity, of the limit of the human, the sublime terror of the skull—the overdetermined icon and also conceptual figure of thought for Kristeva being the severed head: “[A] ritual of the skull, of beheading, of decapitation, which might be the preliminary condition for the representation of what allows us to stand up to the void that is none other than the ability to represent the life of the mind, psychological experience as the capacity for multiple representations” (The Severed Head, 4–5). The overdetermination bears a second look. The severing of a head is in the first place a radical—evental—rupture of the body’s integrity, but by that token also a profound engagement with the question of what if anything the body’s materiality has to do with what we understand by the head, and with what it “contains,” or stands for, namely perception, intellect, thought. It is not only extremity that is important: it is also worth remembering what philosophers of mind denote as the intentional object of contemplation, the severed head itself. Further, the act or event of contemplation, the faculty of self-reflexivity, is as significant as the intentional object; that act is an event of self re-creation. Activist performance aspires to the condition of the evental, fundamental transformation and even rupture, as Badiou conceptualizes the event. Performance studies has certainly begun to theorize the ramifications of the “event” for the art event. Stephen Foster for instance notes that “[t]he event was adopted as a theoretical reference point, or medium of artistic action, and became a major component of twentieth-century aesthetic activism” (Foster 3). However, in performance studies the event has often been construed primarily as a “response to” (or as a failed response to) more or less traumatic historical events, while the conceptual or theoretical implications of thinking through and with performance in an evental register (for that is the real value of theorizing the event) have remained underexplored, as I suggest in my discussion below (Franko 114–115).

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84  Samir Dayal In The Severed Head, Kristeva proposes that against the encroaching society of spectacle, we need a radical regeneration of psychic life, with sadomasochistic impulses, even an asymptotic encounter with the death drive. It is for this reason that self-reflexivity, routed through the outward-directed reflection on the limit condition for which the skull is metonymic, is so critical. In the contemporary conjuncture of the society of the spectacle, it has become especially crucial to confront “menacing brutality,” or rituals of death, requiring a meditation on death and nothingness (Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness 286). What is hoped for is the traversal of the fantasy. In my discussion of Kristeva’s meditation, I have sought to draw attention to the productive resonances between her “severed head” and Stelarc’s prosthetic head, but also with Orlan’s surgically mutilated head. At the very least, all three performances invite us to contemplate more seriously the question of the finitude of the human, and possible responses to that finitude. Images of death, through decapitation or otherwise, may simply frighten us, “suspend” the symbolic, and this may be what MIA’s controversial video “Born Free” got wrong (Messet 126). In it, a soldier in uniform shoots a young redheaded boy point blank, and another young man’s head is blown off his body. Instead of succeeding as an activist intervention, MIA there managed more often to alienate viewers. It is an axiom of psychoanalysis that the death drive ultimately defeats capture in the Symbolic, or can be approached only anamorphically (as Lacan suggests, through the example of the distorted image of a skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors); imagistic fantasy is crucial in sublimating the terror of death—indeed of the radical “castration” and extinguishing of the subject (Lacan 88–89, 118). Kristeva in the same vein endorses a “cohabitation with mortality” that entails a profound and personal “meditation on the terror of the skull and the appropriation of it through the intervention of a reflection or an image” in the visual regime this privileges for instance decapitated bodies and skulls, icons of “representation[s] of what allows us to stand up to the void” (Kristeva, The Severed Head 4–5, 22, 24, 55). Yet the encounter with the death drive must be asymptotic, supplemented through representation. When a performance falls at this ontological limit, the ideal is a traversal of the encounter with the death drive, and the enactment or mimesis of this encounter, for which the severed head is a synecdoche, is a measure of the power or success of the activist performance. Looking back to the seventh element of my taxonomy, we can also see in Orlan’s activist performance an ideological drive. Orlan rejects both liberal humanist and radical feminist identification, remaining radical and sensible, but still deeply ideological in the way she makes icons of her body and face in the process of subjecting them to the surgical knife. This is also the source of a non-doctrinaire, democratic politics. It is important in this connection to recognize that Orlan’s mimesis of iconicity has two further agendas, and they remind us how Orlan’s performance meets the eighth criterion on my taxonomy, according to which activist performances tend to access excess,

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Limning the Limit  85 to pivot on limit conditions. Orlan wants first to intervene in public sphere ­ iscourse about the future of the body—its limits, but also its potentialities d into the future. This agenda Orlan explicitly identifies with the term politique, a term she uses to describe her activism during one of her surgeries on camera. Second, Orlan is committed to testing the limits of the body through performance, in order to critique received notions of aesthetics (beauty), sedi­ mented ontologies of the body, and conventional notions of the boundaries and destinies of classed, raced, and gendered subjectivities, against the backdrop of biopolitics. That is, Orlan is committed to a kind of critical self-­ reflexivity that impinges on the subject doing the reflection about the subject as object: the I reflecting on itself as other and affecting it in the process. Orlan is creative as well as self-recreative and self-reflexive, something indispensable for any meaningful engagement with la politique—and when Orlan uses the French term itself, even when speaking in English, she seems to want to underscore the long history of the term, traceable back to Aristotle’s specific notion of politeia. Orlan’s surgical experiment in “self”-deformation, deconstruction, and reconstruction is an exemplary activist performance because it enables such an encounter with the “terror” to which Kristeva also refers but Orlan facilitates, indeed performs, its reappropriation through mimesis, giving a radical edge to the term “plastic” art. Thus her use of cosmetic surgery is explicitly a counter to and commentary on normalized practices of surgical beautification. Orlan’s “reincarnation” project embodies these practices to excess, exposing the violence of actually enshrined beauty standards (Faber 115). And embodiment remains crucial to her performance activism. Orlan herself points out that “[b]eing a narcissist isn’t easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of re-creating the self through deliberate acts of alienation,” an alienation accomplished through transformation of the body even beyond the limit, to the extent that the body one began with is no longer the body inhabited (Orlan qtd. in Rose 83). It is not, then a matter of essences, but a question of transgressing limits, of risking excess. Perhaps paradoxically, then, what I have termed Orlan’s “access to excess” is intended to go beyond eliciting merely affective, bodily responses from her audiences—responses such as shock, horror, or disgust. Orlan reinvests in, and risks, the body. The power of this risk accrues from our renewed sense of the finitude of the body: the body is all we have, once the props and accoutrements cease to be distractions, in the moment of performance. We need to think of the body, along with its extensions, accoutrements, and prostheses as an assemblage organized by desire and radiated, sometimes, by drive. Bracketing other forms of performance, we might ask how activist performances can have meaningful effects beyond the stage—in political, social, and psychic life. Can they promise a regeneration of the human? Why do activist performers relay “liberation” and more generally political activism through the body? Wegenstein writes that the “tendency of decorporealization by damaging oneself is an expression of a body dysmorphic disorder typical of the spirit of the avant-garde” (40, emphasis in the

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86  Samir Dayal original). I am not so sure. Activist performance is precisely the opposite of a disorder: it is a motivated disorderliness, an interruptive intervention into received doxa by enacting, or performing, with the body alternative and possible ways of being in the world. It is an implicit exhortation to self-reflexivity on the part of both the spectator and the performer. Insofar as this reflection takes as its object the body as it is interpellated in particular contexts, activist performance offers commentary on biopolitical “ordering” or regulation in the somatic discourses that define the body’s habitus, which was famously described by Pierre Bourdieu as the modes in which an individual (body) is inscribed by the codes, norms, values, governing conceptual paradigms or doxa, of a given social context (170). But equally one might say there is something paradoxical here, and this becomes clear when we turn to see that Orlan’s work responds fully to the tenth and perhaps most critical element of my taxonomy of activist performance— that the affective or psychic risk critical to activist performance is embodied or desublimated in the body. My argument has been that however surgically assisted, or however remediated or hypermediated, the question of the subject, of self and self-transcendence, remains meaningful only to the extent that it remains a body-related phenomenological inquiry. And in this instance the question of the body in performance is as follows: What happens to the body when it is put at risk, when it is a matter of transcendence, of moving beyond a limit so that one can meaningfully raise the question au delà? Without the element of risk, embodied performance is eviscerated. And this limit testing is the key to Orlan’s transgressive activism. As with Artaud’s “cruelty,” the role of transgression in this context of performance studies recalls Georges Bataille’s notion of sacrifice. To both “cruelty” and “sacrifice” we can ascribe a power to push beyond a limit. It is not for nothing that Bataille ascribes to sacrifice the power to bring life and death “into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown … a way into the infinite” (73). The violence of aesthetics to which the society of the spectacle has become inured is the object of Orlan’s critique, and she consequently reinvests performance with a specifically performative violence, to restore to performance the quality theorized by Lacan and Badiou as “evental act.” It is because of the violence, the extremity of her art that spectators are moved, brought to the brink of what Kristeva calls intimate revolt. Orlan’s connection to violence also requires us to think about a performative link to trauma theory. Trauma (in the psychoanalytic register Caruth invokes) denotes that which cannot be symbolized, that which is experienced before it can be known or reflected upon, represented to the conscious mind (11). Orlan’s self-­mutilation, suffered simultaneously with its representation, can be regarded as an invagination of traumatic structure, a turning inside out of the wound. As this phrase suggests, there is at least a submerged gendering of such suffering-­andsymbolization, and commentators including Maria ­Margaroni have traced a similar double movement in the work of Julia Kristeva’s recuperation of the example of St. Theresa. The image of St. Theresa being pierced by the arrow

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Limning the Limit  87 is of course familiar to Lacanian critics as well, but what Kristeva is interested in, Margaroni rightly observes, is the emphasis on symbolizing and not just experiencing the piercing “pain” of the arrow. It is a good idea to remind ourselves of the point of this invagination of the mutilation of the (specifically female) body. The point is to reinstate— through the self-reflexive performative—a pain that is forgotten or repressed or depoliticized in an ideologically motivated self-blinding. That is to say, Orlan’s goal is to remind the spectator that it is not she who is crazy in inflicting pain on, in mutilating, her own body, but rather all those other women who, duped by the ideology of beauty in the wider culture mutilate their bodies and faces: they experience the trauma to the body and do not fully understand its implications. By contrast Orlan undergoes the trauma while concurrently offering critical, performative representation of it and knowledge of its implications. This “concurrently” is crucial: for it is also a critical commentary on the orthodoxy that trauma can only be understood in the après-coup of Nachträglichkeit. Precisely because it engages with and intervenes in an aesthetic debate in the public sphere—repoliticizing beauty, as it were—Orlan’s performance art does not so much seek to be an “art event.” It rather constitutes an opportunity to think through and with performance in an evental register. Its activism lies in its intervention, its political and ideological purchase on issues of importance in everyday life, such as the discourse of beauty that is often such a burden on women especially. This activism can be regarded as an important—if not avowedly feminist—contribution to the affirmatively feminist agenda imagined by Ann Pellegrini: “What would it take for us—for feminists—to be able to tell different stories, messy in all their complexity and ambiguity?” (421). More importantly, it is a testing of a limit central to trauma theory between the experience and the understanding of the wound.

Works Cited Abramovic, Marina. “Interview: Marina Abramovic.” The Guardian 3 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2013. . Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. New York: Continuum, 2005. Print. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. “I. The Precession of Simulacra.” Web. 14 Aug. 2013. . Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge, 1984. Print. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

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88  Samir Dayal Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Print. ———. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. Print. Faber, Alyda. “Saint Orlan: Ritual as Violent Spectacle and Cultural Criticism.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London: Routledge, 2007. 118–24. Print. Foster, Stephen C. “Event Structures and Art Situations.” “Event” Arts and Art Events. Ed. Stephen C. Foster. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Research P, 1988. 3–10. Print. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print. Franko, Mark. “Given Movement: Dance and the Event.” Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed. André Lepecki. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. 113–23. Print. Friedman, Jonathan C. Performing Difference: Representations of “The Other” in Film and Theater. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 2009. Print. Goeller, Alison, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Dorota Janowska. “Introduction.” EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance. Ed. Alison Goeller, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, and Dorota Janowska. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001. 18–22. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Hatred and Forgiveness. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print. ———. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. New  York: Columbia UP, 2002. Print. ———. The Severed Head. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Print. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. JacquesAlain Miller. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981. Print. Margaroni, Maria. “Julia Kristeva’s Voyage in ‘the Theresian Continent’: The Malady of Love and the Enigma of an Incarnated, Sharable, Smiling Imaginary.” Harvard University. 10 Oct. 2012. Lecture to the Psychoanalytic Practices Seminar. Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2011. Print. Messet, Peter. “Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime Fiction: Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure.” The Art of Detective Fiction. Ed. Warren Chernaik, Martin Swales, and Robert Vilain. Houndmills: Macmillan P, 2000. 124–37. Print. Mitchell, W.J.T. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge: The MIT P, 1994. Print. Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive.” Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 413–31. Print. Rose, Barbara. “Orlan: Is It Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act.” Art in America 18.2 (1993): 83–125. Print. Wegenstein, Bernadette. Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory. ­Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Print. Williams, Raymond. Raymond Williams on Television. Ed. Alan O’Connor. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.

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Part II

Diasporic Belonging

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5 Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity in Réka Pigniczky’s Autobiographical Documentary Incubator (2009) Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:29 11 April 2017

Mónika Fodor

The axiom that narratives carry encoded life experience and knowledge has been widely applied in various disciplinary fields of the humanities as well as social sciences (Abbott 1–3, Schank and Abelson 1). Narratives of the self may emerge amidst multiple genre constraints while keeping their essential properties (Ryan 21–22). This may also be observed in the autobiographical documentary film Incubator (2009).1 This chapter explores the role of filmic narrative and performance in constructing ethno-cultural identity. Two performances of the 1983 Hungarian rock opera, Stephen, the King (István, a király) are blended in the documentary with home movies by the participants: the 1984 Hungarian American scout performance near Yosemite Valley, California, and the 2009 nostalgic re-performance by the former scouts on the same site. “We meet again near Yosemite Valley to perform Stephen, the King for the first time in twenty-five years. This will either be embarrassing—or cathartic,” Réka Pigniczky, director-producer-narrator, thus introduces the filmed episode of her life and invites the audience to enter an open-air theater where the master narrative of selfhood construction is performed in a staged grand narrative, together with semi-formal interviews and off-stage filmed interactions and storytelling of the performers. “This film is about us,” states the last line among the opening subtitles of Incubator matter-of-factly. The genre of autobiographical documentary weaves together the independent threads of performing the rock opera with allegorical song-monologues about early medieval Hungary with the vernacular stories of the actors preparing for the grand stage event. In 1983, early medieval Hungarian history is transposed into a still hardline communist country’s wish for freedom, and history is translated into performance. To explore the interplay of film, performance, and narrative identity construction in Incubator, I will reflect on how the parallel use of the two autobiographical documentary subgenres—portrait and journal entry—enables specific time and space management. I propose the concept of the “ethnic heritage site,” an ethnically marked space, defined less by its geographical coordinates than by the meaning making it achieves in the process of ethno-cultural identity construction. Autobiographical documentary becomes performance and synthesizes the interpretation of the musical, the planning and staging of the scout performance, and the narration of

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92  Mónika Fodor second-generation “incubated” ethnicity through embedded home videos. In this transmedial stage event, the performer assumes “responsibility to the audience for a display of communicative virtuosity” (Bauman 419–20). All these plots revolve around the meaning of choice and decision making on individual and community levels, and the scout camp as an “ethnic heritage site” brings together the multiple stories about decisions regarding one’s ethno-cultural identity. Performance is not only a dynamic stage event but it evolves into an agent of identity construction and fosters an understanding of the dilemma of bidirectional assimilation within the temporal and spatial coordinates of the film.

Time, Space, and Ethnic Identity in Autobiographical Documentary as Performance Studies about rendering one’s life in multiple genre formats have mounted ample research interest and established autobiography’s transmediality beyond doubt. Jens Brockmeier defines autobiographical discourse as “the form par excellence in which we give shape to the time of our life … accounts or fragments of it, common and elementary practices of the self [that are] neither bound to a particular age, education or social habitus, nor to the act or linguistic form of writing in the narrow sense” (52–53). Stories of the self are marked by temporal and spatial coordinates. Autobiographical accounts involve “retrospective storytelling” (Gernalzick 2), conceiving complex temporalities. They evolve as attempts to reconcile Kierkegaard’s conceptual discordance of living one’s life forward and at the same time accounting for it backward. “Life can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards” (Kierkegaard qtd. in Brockmeier 52). Through the process of remembering, past events in one’s autobiographical memory become interwoven with the present to subsume the person’s identity within future expectations (Brockmeier 55). In one act of autobiographical storytelling three time scenes are staged simultaneously: one scene has the temporality of the past event retold, the second scene embraces the time of telling or retelling the story on several independent occasions, and the third time scene is the story’s meaning making for the storyteller and listener. The temporal gap between experiencing and narrating life enables the author to interpret his/her self and perform the interpretation. Incubator’s triple temporality—the flashback story of growing up Hungarian American, the scout performance, and the filmic present of the final editing, represented by the voice-over narration—constitutes the narrative time necessary to arrange autobiographical events into a coherent filmic performance. Autobiographical narratives of the self are also tied to space. Multiple temporalities seen in Incubator are conflated into the chronicled episode of second-generation Hungarian American ethnicity at the spot of the

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  93 performance. Of the relationship between story and site, Matthew WolfMeyer and Davin Heckman write: “Our physical environment, the space of our everyday lives, is constituted through telling stories. Landmarks and avenues provide the environment in which the everyday life of the story is lived. A memory of where to turn mediates the places where we end up” (online). Performing narrative transfigures simple geographical places into sites of identity construction, and performed narratives become spatialized discourses through identity work. Deirdre Heddon interweaves the terms autobiography and place, using the term “autotopography” to “signal more specifically the location of a particular individual in actual space, a locatedness that has implications for both subject and place” (online). In Incubator, autobiographical storytelling is located in personalized space. The scout performance takes place in the Sierras, California, for the second time; and this performance evolves into a “site-specific autobiographical performance,” where performers “reflect upon and re-enact certain memories, events and persons associated with [their younger selves] in that place” (online). Thus, subjects are located, and the performance is tied to the actual space, the autobiographical “site of ethnic heritage” (online). The self-reflexive turn in American documentary film tradition and American society’s renewed interest in the ethnic identity of European Americans grew out of the same historical moment in the 1960s. Rooted in one of the twentieth century’s periods of overwhelming uncertainties and manifested on individual as well as collective levels, autobiographical documentary has become the genre and the form, whereas ethnic consciousness has rendered the content that mirrors the turn. Jim Lane defines autobiographical documentary as a cinematic genre that emerged from the documentarist’s use of sound and image as tools of commenting and arguing about the social and historical world (14). The documentary film, Jay Ruby argues, “was founded on the western need to explore, document, explain, hence symbolically control the world” (8). Evolving from the complex interplay of major film-specific generative forces of the sixties, autobiographical documentary aims to have a symbolic control of the self. Turning cameras inward was spurred by “the autobiographical themes of the avant-garde, the rejection of observational direct cinema, and the rise of reflexivity in cinema” (Lane 19). The filmmaker becomes a participant with increased private interest in the profilmic events as well as the historical environment of the film. Particularly this strong personal stake makes the auto-documentary a performance about the entire context of a life. As a cinematographical interpretation, it performs “an enlarged understanding of the self often in the form of assuming membership in a community” (Freeman 30). The merging of documentary discourse with the nonfiction literary genre of autobiography crystallizes specific features to yield a limited yet verifiable truth value of the cinematographic narrative of the self. Such portraits may present the world of the self in separate manners depending on

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94  Mónika Fodor the deployment of narrative chronology. Jim Lane distinguishes two major subgenres within filmic autobiography: the journal entry approach and the autobiographical portraiture. Journal entry documentaries employ the chronological narrative to unpack the meaning of life events and handle temporality and narration (48). Autobiographical portraits, on the other hand, rely on voice-over narration, formal and informal interviews, personal footage, still photographs, and “interactive modes of shooting to establish a less plot-driven and more synchronically organized presentation” (Lane 94). Whether presented as moments or periods of a life or an attempt to present life in its longitudinality, the documentary portrait of the self is rarely apolitical; it rather acknowledges and articulates the historicity of the self and the community that shares the production. Autobiographies with personal themes and self-representations carry much information on U.S. cultural life as well as the relationship of actors in it (Lane 21–27, Jacobson 97). Ethnicity and immigrant experience has already captured interest within the auto-documentary tradition, especially for first- as well as second- and third-generation ethnic-American filmmakers (Cuevas). Alfred Guzetti’s Family Portrait Sittings (1975), Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican (1974), Jonas Mekas’s Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), Pearl Gluck’s Divan (2003), and Réka Pigniczky’s Journey Home (2006) are cinematic ethnic and immigrant autobiographies appropriating the experience of ethno-cultural identity construction. Combining the subgenre traditions of portrait and journal, Incubator (2009) is a film about the ethno-cultural identity construction of second-generation Hungarian American characters, in which the most vocal discourses relate to assimilation as a key process in the late twentieth-century ethnic saga. Recent research on ethnicity in an American context reveals that asserting one’s European American ethnic heritage is an important part of the American experience. Such identification through connections to European ancestors has led to a widened reconceptualization of “assimilation” as a bidirectional process rejecting earlier taken-for-granted linearity. Thus, the process “does not require the disappearance of ethnicity; and the individuals undergoing it still bear a number of ethnic markers” that can be stronger or weaker depending on the choice of the individual (Alba and Nee 11). This perspective implies flexibility in assuming a final stage of incorporation into the host society, as ethnic shifts may occur at any time independent of the number of generations following the migration experience. Accordingly, assimilation as a two-way or bidirectional process, rather than a set of changes along a single continuum (Alba and Nee 11–12, Jacobson 16), subsumes liminality as a continuously shifting, dynamic temporal and spatial frame. In Incubator, true to the conventions of filmic autobiography, the director is also the producer and the narrator-protagonist. As Ruby argues, reflexivity, the documentary camera, and personal discourse add to understanding the self, one’s own culture, and the mediating role of the documentary between self and the audience. Although the generic constraints of autobiography

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  95 would require filmic autobiography to be a one-person show, it never is. Perspectives are blended in a combination of synchronous sound “utterances,” namely recorded speech acts performed at given historical moments, and first-person voice-over narration that function as “enunciations,” which are utterances retroactively incorporated into the final edited documentary as voice-over narration (Lane 25). While rephrasing utterances, enunciations also recontextualize them in space as well as time, often through making use of filmic documentary’s specific subjective camera angle. Enmeshing fact, interpretation, and fiction, the genre itself also represents liminality; such interplay of genre and story strengthens the ethnic self-ascription of participants. Viewers are active participants in the process of validating autobiography in cinema as they see the films with the sense of that it could be about their life as well (Lane 18). Incubator’s meaning making unfolds in the triadic relationship of the participants’ ethno-cultural identity as talked about and acted out. It uses the documentary as a platform of staging fact and its interpretation as fiction. Additionally, the documentary‘s social and political function is to present an episode in the larger tale of immigrant assimilation and later generations’ retained ethnicity.

A Fairy Tale Hungary? Contexts and Plots Incubator interweaves two performative projects while it blends the auto-documentary genres of portrait and journal entry as well as the modalities of narrative and interpretation. The first story—framed as an autobiographical portrait—unfolds through personal home movie clips, still portraits, and interviews with participants, without stringing details into an overarching narrative. Pigniczky portrays how her family, their friends, and acquaintances settled down and raised their children in America while creating a unique shelter of ethno-cultural identity she identifies as an “incubator.” The second plot emerges in a journal entry approach delivering the chronological narrative of an unfolding present. In 2009, the reunion of second-generation Hungarian American former scouts in Yosemite Valley, California, is filmed, twenty-five years after their original scout camp, where they had staged an amateur performance of the then iconic Hungarian rock opera, Stephen, the King. Thirteen participants of the original casting traveled back to Yosemite Valley to reunite and re-perform. The two plots deploy distinctive temporalities. Whereas the rock opera performance narrates a chronologically unfolding presence with flashbacks to the 1984 scout camp event, the portrait, with its jumbled time, serves as an autobiographical backdrop, an explanation for second-generation Hungarian Americans’ views about assimilation. The autobiographical documentary is conceived as performance, an interpretation of events in the journal entry and the portraiture that unpacks the meaning of the ethnic heritage site. The film opens with amateur 8mm footage of the Statue of Liberty, the camera then panning over to the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance to

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96  Mónika Fodor conclude the scene with a man and a woman framed in medium close-up, traveling on a ferry. These images have become mass-mediated icons that “do not resurrect memory, they have become it” (Jacobson 77). The shot connects Réka Pigniczky’s story to mainstream American visual narratives of immigration and makes the viewer see that the parents of the participants in the documentary were part of the American immigrant tale. Posted over the last shot, the following subtitled text contextualizes the autobiographical documentary project and explains the metaphorical use of the word “incubator”: Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fled Hungary in the ­[twentieth] century. After 1945, the United States took in 30,000 refugees and after 1956, roughly 50,000. The majority of these people assimilated. Their children, born in the U.S., hardly speak Hungarian. But there was a small group who remained “Hungarian.” Through great effort and community work, they created their own unique Hungarian “incubator.” We were born into that Incubator. This film is about us. (Incubator) The voiceless, impersonal textual commentary over amateur family footage rejects the classic margin to mainstream trajectory of ethnic arrival and incorporation; it shifts the focus from unidirectional assimilation to possible meanings and gains of ethnicity. Incubator, the metaphoric shelter from immediate and total assimilation that would result in irreparable loss, allows enough time for second-generation Hungarian Americans to make their own decisions regarding their ethno-cultural identities. It is not a shelter to expand the negative impact of fossilization; it rather prolongs time needed for making informed choices and becomes a source of empowerment. In the 83-minute film, the title word “incubator” is used ten times, and its meaning unfolds progressively. Each occurrence within voiced-over narratives adds new details and emphasizes fragmented time and unfinished selfhood-construction. Subtitling ends while folk dancers are shown, and the scene is cut into the amateur footage of the original 1984 scout performance of Stephen, the King. The choir is heard, singing in Hungarian, when Réka Pigniczky’s voice-over narration explains her double project of performance and film. World history plays a crucial role in immigrant-ethnic accounts; the fact that Soviet troops ensured Hungary’s military occupation between 1956 and 1989 is a repeated voice-over vindication of the parents’ choice to stay in the U.S. The flashback ends with an image of a commercial airliner taking off, landing the viewer in California in 2009, which is the documentary present. Indeed, all major scenes in the documentary are separated with images of transportation devices, cars, trucks, and an airplane indicating that identity construction is a journey including real and imaginary topography, crossing spatial and temporal boundaries.

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  97 “The story continues, twenty-five years later. We’re meeting here again, in the same spot near Yosemite Valley, and we’re going to perform Stephen, the King one more time” (Incubator); the voice-over connects the past, represented by amateur recording, with the documentary’s present, and introduces the second plot of the film. Thirteen members of the original cast met, performed, and interpreted the rock musical Stephen, the King, thus contextualizing their coming-of-age in Hungarian American households in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s, the period of the Cold War, the voice-over tells. As teenage Hungarian scouts, Pigniczky and her friends found Stephen, the King fascinating. The unorthodox, richly allegorical rock opera conveyed a subtle, yet strong anti-communist subtext for its contemporary audience both in- and outside Hungary’s borders. The 1983 Hungarian premiere performance perplexed and puzzled the conservative Hungarian American community of the 1980s. “When we first heard Stephen, the King we were surprised because our parents had told us that you were not allowed to say those things in Hungary,” admits Pigniczky. She continues to wonder, “how did they allow this back ‘home’? And nobody was thrown behind bars for it?” (Incubator). The musical’s plot2 is set in 990–1003 to chronicle the infighting and contentious rivalry for political control as well as life in early Hungary, focusing on settlement policy, the introduction of advanced trade, and the amalgamation of various tribal groups into a single Hungarian ethnic unit. Far from being politically united, Hungary’s political elite was torn between the supporters of a strong Western feudal system and the adherents to old tribal traditions. Wedged in between Byzantium and Otto III’s Holy Roman Empire, as well as between the ideologies of Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity imbued with tribalism and shamanism, Hungary faced the dilemma whether to hinge their dreams of independence on the East or the West (Dümmerth 123–24). Ruling Hungary in between 972 and 997, Prince Géza was a direct descendant of Árpád who was said to have led the Hungarian tribal alliance occupying the Carpathian basin. Géza realized the external dangers and made attempts to reconcile Hungary’s diplomatic ties to both the east and the west. In an attempt to strengthen Western Christianity, he “sent representatives to the Holy Roman Empire’s Imperial Diet of 973 and requested missionary bishops” (Makkai 16). Bishop Bruno, however, failed to accomplish major changes among high-ranking and free-spirited Hungarians clinging to their shamanistic ways. Furthermore, Géza’s wife was an “eastern Christian and certainly did not favor the introduction of the western rite” (16). Thus, “Christianization was a foreign policy measure for Géza” who secured Westernization through his son’s baptism. Vajk became István [Stephen], he received a Western, knightly education and married the Bavarian princess Gisela (16). Géza intended to introduce primogeniture and have Stephen take the throne after his death, as was customary in Western hereditary monarchies. Stephen’s older cousin, Koppány, also “claimed Géza’s realm and widow”

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98  Mónika Fodor according to the Árpád family’s tribal succession principles that would make the oldest male member of the family eligible for leadership (Makkai 17). In a desperate attempt to reclaim leadership, Koppány led an uprising supported by pagan and shamanist followers as well as those who would rather support an Eastern diplomatic liaison. Koppány lost the heritage war against Stephen, and his strengthened army of German knights and was executed as an incestuous pagan. Upon request, Stephen received a crown from Pope Sylvester II in 1000 and became Hungary’s first king (Dümmerth 145–61, Makkai 17). Though treating historical events with the convenience of fiction, the musical espouses the trans-historical and trans-cultural themes of choice and the right to take responsibility for the nation’s future. This film left the Hungarian American community puzzled, as the argument was not part of authorized public rhetoric in Eastern European communist countries. They immediately jumped on the bandwagon and interpreted Stephen, the King through performing it. One participant identified the original project as, “a live moment in Hungarian [American] history. This wasn’t about nineteenth century revolutions that nobody cared about. This was going on to live then, and we, who are out here and so focused on what’s going on in Hungary and we’re all up in arms if Hungarians aren’t given the liberty that our ancestors lived and died for” (Incubator). The scouts’ performative interpretation of the rock musical as well as their own second-generation ethnicity makes Yosemite Valley an ethnic heritage site. Growing out of the incubator has brought the recognition for most participants that “the Hungarian communities that [the] parents and grandparents created in America no longer existed in Hungary—they were but memories from times past … It was a fairy tale Hungary” (Incubator). Matthew Frye Jacobson conceptualizes the meaning-making potential of ethnic heritage in contemporary American assimilation discourse as pervasive yet uneven (42–59). He quotes Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in arguing that “heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. … Despite a discourse of conservation, preservation, restoration, reclamation, recovery, re-creation, recuperation, revitalization and regeneration, heritage produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past” (55–56). Heritage links the past and the present and provides performers with the opportunity to break the monotony of linear time development. A dynamic temporal structure emerges from performing the narrative of teenage second-­generation Hungarian Americans and restaging the rock musical. In this process, reunion is the social ritual that frames the platform of sharing stories and emphasizes story time as opposed to real, chronological time. The performance transforms Yosemite Valley into a site of an imaginary “roots trip”3 to Hungary that enables the participants as a community to recast their Americanness and Hungarianness tied to the spot. The film’s merging of the journal entry and embedded portrait modes creates the narrative environment for the geographical transfiguration.

Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  99

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Performing Narrative/Narrating Performance An ethnic heritage site is a topographical site one has to travel to, and in Incubator this journey is marked by a few minutes of footage. “We’re headed for the Sierras,” says Pali, a participant, driving a U-Haul rental truck packed with camp supplies. Traveling shots framed through the windshield of Réka Pigniczky’s van present most en-route sites while travelers are listening to the original Stephen, the King soundtrack. Subjective camera angle is the cinematographic device of first person narration: it gives an illusion of personal experience. Voice-over narration and the subjective camera perspective are the tools that transform filmed autobiography into performance (Gernalzick 3). The camera acts as the eyes of the audience, and the subjective-objective shifts in camera angle mark shifts in and out of stories, the documentary present, and home movie footage past. Upon arrival the reunion begins. While setting up camp, Pigniczky invokes an “imaginary roundtable” interviewing the people already present. A series of jump cut reflexive talks, less than a minute each, focus on how her friends feel about the reunion and the ambitious project of performing Stephen, the King one more time. These interviews interrupt the chronology of the journal entry project emphasizing the constructed nature of film as opposed to the camera being a “natural window on the world” (Lane 100). Not all interviews are conducted at camp. However, the theme and the identical content of the stories connect the interviews into the imaginary roundtable, as if participants were responding to each other. The formation recurs several times during the rehearsal and emerges as the meaning-making forum for the participants where they can express their shared views about ethnicity in America as well as the role of the cultural incubator in their lives. Eszti Pigniczky, the director’s sister, could not go to the reunion. She and her husband, Endre Szentkiralyi, are interviewed in at their home in Cleveland, Ohio. To Réka’s question whether she’s Hungarian or American, Eszti responds that she is American-Hungarian, which means “belonging neither here nor there, [they’re] a new formation” (Incubator). Such reflections on growing up Hungarian in the U.S. and the shared memories connect Eszti and Endre to the participants in the reunion. The interview creates a strange setting between the sisters, which Réka Pigniczky admits: “It’s just that I’ve never interviewed you [it’s very strange for me] but we do everything together, I know everything about you, [and we discuss everything] but I’ve never officially ‘interviewed’ you. So this actually might not work.” [Turns her face to the camera.] (Incubator). The uncut shot of hesitation about interviewing within the family substantiates the documentary present and lessens the artificiality of film’s constructed nature. Moving the interview outside the scout camp also marks the shift to Incubator as autobiographical portraiture, from the progressively unfolding present into a flashbacked past of the participants. It is the filmic translocation rather than the change in narrative modality that marks the generic shift.

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100  Mónika Fodor Fragmented clips from amateur recordings illustrate what is said in the interviews; and while everybody gets ready for rehearsals, the viewer is invited to leave camp and take a grand tour of Hungarian American life and culture in a portrait mode. Réka Pigniczky makes other performers become voice-over guides, too, commenting family recordings as well as still photos of ethnic community life including Réka’s arrival and first years in Hungary, Eszti and Endre’s wedding, commemorations, dinners, debutante balls, childrens’ birthday parties, Christmas celebrations, and the like. Réka assumes the role of the anthropologist and hands over the authority— microphone—to her friends who explain their lives and events that eventually create a coherent grand narrative of the community as told by the members. The portrait is not only documented; it also becomes performance through enhancing reflexivity and putting the viewer in charge of the analysis, who is then able to recognize the group of former scouts as “individuals and as subjects in a social and political system” (Lane 100). Pigniczky illustrates narratively and filmically how the story template is the same for all of them: about their feelings of being different from the mainstream. For a short while the roundtable is suspended and the camp is shown after sunset, around the campfire, preparing for a night raid. Most shots are close-up or medium close-up emblematizing the intimacy of the setting, rather cinematographically performing than dialogizing the spiritual well-being of the participants. A chronological starting point for the otherwise non-linear portrait is forged through amateur recordings and voice-over storytelling of how Pigniczky’s parents arrived in the U.S. separately. Occasional interviews with members of the round-table add commentary, too. “When I was little, I was very different than most Americans. We had weird sandwiches [bread with seasoned cottage cheese] for lunch, we ate raw green peppers, and all sorts of unusual foods” (Incubator). Besides food, the strange-sounding names were a source of peculiarity. While an amateur clip is showing one participant, Ilona, at the age of five spelling her name on a magnetic board in close-up, she says in voice-over: “Everybody had a strange name, so it wasn’t so strange anymore. And that’s where I felt most at home, because I was surrounded by people who were just like me” (Incubator). Following a short switch back to the Cleveland porch, it is mentioned how the weekdays only filled in the space between weekend scouting. Theme music and an aerial shot of the Californian beach jump cut into medium close-up and extreme close-up beach shots sign off the round-table and mark the move back to the documentary present and journal entry mode. Performance is interpretation in Incubator: preparations for the stage event continue with discussions about the meanings of Stephen, the King in 1984 and 2009 as well as how participants choose the songs for the short performance. According to Mark Freeman, the triangularity of life history, interpretation, and fiction can best be understood in close connection as, “virtually all interpretations are fictions: to make sense of a text, whether it

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  101 is the text of one’s past or some other one, is precisely a process of creating a framework, an interpretive context, within which the relevant information may be placed; it is … a going beyond this information, an attempt to confer a measure of order and coherence upon it” (30). Incubator is an attempt to make sense of Hungarian history and contemporary society: to make sense of the information that the characters learned from their parents’ stories as well as their occasional visits to the ancestral homeland. They interpret the rock musical via ascribing subtextual meaning to the songs in it. The interpretation, emerging in the film, revolves around the trope of choice, which is an implied, recurring theme not only in Hungarian history but also in the lives of the performers. The original rock musical has fourteen songs, and it offers a cross-sectional insight into historical tenth-century Hungary’s social problems regarding royal succession and political survival. It depicts debates and war over the throne as if the choice of primogeniture versus the principle of tribal seniority was a democratic decision ultimately made and appropriated by the people. The arguments illustrate the dilemma’s intricacy and its transhistorical and transnational implications for 1980s Hungary as well as second-generation Hungarian Americans. The tacit subtext of continual endurance of Soviet military control as opposed to rising up for free choice is woven into the musical through the discursive trajectory of early medieval history and the rhetoric of religion. The scout restaging includes only the songs representing the argument between the two leaders and their immediate families regarding choice. Adopting some songs and rejecting others, mostly the vernacular ones, emphasizes decision making and choice in one’s life even more. The following comment by Réka Pigniczky on one key song of Koppány’s supporter illustrates the process of performed meaning making: “[This we need. This is the best part.] “We don’t need a God who forgives everything. Who needs a God who kills his own son? Who needs a God who doesn’t speak Hungarian? Free Hungarians don’t need that God” (Stephen, the King). I can’t believe, I mean [we left this out totally] it’s so important” (Incubator). The episode bespeaks the constructed nature of performance that revolves on the axis of self-articulation and identity construction. There is background music from the original musical, and Réka continues telling how her daughter likes this part so much. The remark is part of a small story with the implied theme how one’s cultural heritage is meaningful if it is passed on, just like once inside the cultural incubator her parents created. “This is how they taught us the language, history and the gastronomy. Partly because that’s what they knew and a person can only pass on what he knows” (Incubator). Performing Stephen, the King is important because it is not an imitation of their parents’ ethnicity but an attempt to create their own voice and a particular ethnic heritage site. Occasionally, as the cast becomes complete with newly arriving people, more imaginary round-table interviews are embedded within the discussions and makeshift rehearsals. Interviewees provide voice-over narration

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102  Mónika Fodor to amateur footage of the original performance. As it turns out, the reunion as well as the performance are part of the annual scout camp in Yosemite Valley. “While we’re busy practicing Stephen, the King, there’s a bona fide scout camp underway. Just like every summer from the past 50 years, from New York City to Los Angeles” (Incubator). The story of Hungarian scouting in the U.S. is narrated in voice-over, while old scout camp recordings are screened in comparison with the pioneer movement in communist Hungary. Interviewee stories tell that it was very expensive to visit Hungary and that most families could only afford the roots trip every four or five years. Scouting has come to serve as a substitute roots trip, and the scout camp has become a “floating” ethnic heritage site, transferring the emphasis from where the camp took place to the fact that it brought Hungarian American scouts together. The next scene is constructed as visual support to the ideology of scouting: reunion and regular campers sit together around the fire. The fire is framed in extreme close-up. The nearly translucent structure of charring wood in an orange glow and the purple flames around are seen, while reunion and young scouts are singing folk songs in Hungarian. Extreme close-up on a few faces is cut into a long shot of all the campers. The intimacy and timelessness of the scene imbues the spot with characteristics of an ethnic heritage site that is created regardless of the real topographical location. Rather it is meant to be the place that, with its specific settings, inspires passing one’s heritage from one generation to the other. The climax of the film is the scene of the re-performance of Stephen, the King by the former scouts. The portraiture-plot and the journal entry story are merged into one: the film is about the performance of the rock musical and the filmic performance becomes an allegorical tale of the self. Instead of continuing the prior practice of embedding real amateur footage into the journal entry plot, as if antiquating, Pigniczky applies alternative cinematography and embeds shots from current recording, edited and formatted to 8mm-film-look. The insertion of such “antiquated” shots is used as a cinematographical device of interpretation. It is a reminder that this performance of Stephen, the King is part of the wider chronology and spatiality of second-generation ethno-cultural identity construction. No voiceover is heard in the scene, only music from the original musical soundtrack is played, and occasionally words from songs cut in as cast members walk over to the “bona fide scout camp” and make necessary stage preparations. The documentary performance starts with a flashback 8mm footage of Yudit, director of the “scout theater,” in medium shot, announcing the scout theater in 1984: “Someone must change this world soon, tell me, who would you choose? … Last year they sang these words in Hungary during an open air performance. These are the opening words of Stephen, the King, a modern rock opera” (Incubator). The shot then is cross-cut to Yudit in medium close-up at the documentary present, as she continues with the introduction quoting from the original Stephen, the King: “Someone must rewrite the old stories” (Incubator). Following the medium close-up on Yudit, the scene is

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  103 jump cut to a long shot with all thirteen performers framed in a semicircle as they start singing. The actual performance takes approximately six minutes of documentary time, which makes it the longest scene of the film. Multiple camera recordings are edited into this last film event where each performer is introduced in a medium close-up shot that is cross-cut into antiquated 8mm-film format. Pigniczky’s daughter has also recorded the performance, and some shaky, hand-held camera shots are embedded with her voice commenting and sometimes singing synchronously. Antiquated shots and personal recording bespeak fragmented time and shift the film’s focus from time to space that is constructed as an ethnic heritage site. The performance and the film end with the reunion participants saying goodbye to each other. Réka Pigniczky’s voice-over narration concludes by stating how the cultural incubator allowed her peers to reconsider their and their children’s position in American society and reject assimilation as a fearsome single-continuum process of heritage loss. Incubator renders deep insights into the concerns and perceptions of second-generation ethno-cultural identity construction with special emphasis on the importance of choice and decision making. The film is autobiographical documentary and juxtaposes the genre as a cinematographical framing of a performance of the self within time and space, with the plot about a special performance of a rock musical. Two narrative plots rendered in two autodocumentary frames are merged, both displaying the necessity and challenge of making informed and long-term decisions on multiple levels. The trope of choice emerges as a trans-historical issue present in the lives of the protagonist, the other participants, their parents, and ancestors as well as in history. Integrating life narrative and its self-interpretation, the autobiographical film is a performative approach to the protagonists’ lives. Through the fusion of cinematographic rhetoric and narrated life history, the performance evolves as interpretation, a unique and separate transmedial narrative. Pigniczky’s parallel use of the documentary subgenres of portraiture and journal entry creates a liminal film space where second-generation ethno-cultural identity is presented as a product of the past, as well as the unfolding present of individual decision making. Rejecting the either-or use of classic autobiographical documentary forms of portraiture and journal entry enables the filmmaker to handle narrative time out of the dimensions of chronology versus retrospect. In her community portrait, Pigniczky reinscribes her life narrative within the broader interplay of the community narratives she grew up with, appearing in her friends’ stories, too. The portrait has two functions: through eliciting the conversational stories of the community it appropriates membership and sustainability while showing amateur footage and still photography unfolds a tellable, shared past, a prerequisite to group identity construction. Incubator’s portrait thus reinforces the political work of its journal entry plot, the story of a scout reunion and performance of a Hungarian rock musical as interpretation of Hungarianness in

104  Mónika Fodor

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America. Its reliance on chronology as a principle of narrative temporality emphasizes the subjectivity of the individual’s experience in a social-cultural perspective. The journal entry mode presents a series of profilmic events defined not only in time but also connected to the topographical spot where they happen. The film’s site-specificity transforms the scout camp into an ethnic heritage site that exists without clearly marked geographical coordinates and functions as a location of ethno-cultural identity construction.

Notes 1. A terminological choice is available to render autobiography in the medium of film. Jim Lane proposes the use of “autobiographical documentary” if filmed events are based on the life facts of the director and are presented within a documentary frame (4). Nadja Gernalzick, on the other hand, emphasizes the transmediality of autobiography and offers the term “filmic autobiography” stressing the medium instead. The focus of the present essay allows an interchangeable use of the two terms as synonyms (3). 2. The rock musical Stephen, the King (István, a király) was written by Levente Szörényi and János Bródy. The first performance was also filmed, and its music was released separately. 3. “Roots trip” is a term coined by Matthew Frye Jacobson in his book Roots Too (11–71). The term refers to the tourist visit to and tour of the ancestral land and at the same time gain psychic self-discovery through exploring one’s family geography and occasionally genealogy, too.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Alba, Richard, and Victor Nee. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print. Bauman, Richard. “Performance.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2008. 419–21. Print. Brockmeier, Jens. “Autobiographical Time.” Narrative Inquiry 10.1 (2000): 51–73. Print. Cuevas, Efren. “The Immigrant Experience in Jonas Mekas’s Diary Films: A Chronotopic Analysis of Lost, Lost, Lost.” Biography 29.1 (2006): 54–72. Project Muse. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Dümmerth, Dezső. Az Árpádok Nyomában. Budapest: Panoráma, 1987. Print. Freeman, Mark. Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Gernalzick, Nadja. “To Act or to Perform: Distinguishing Filmic Autobiography.” Biography 29.1 (2006): 1–13. Project Muse. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Heddon, Deirdre E. “Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes and Selves.” Reconstruction 2.3 (2002). Web. 8 Oct. 2012. . Incubator [Inkubátor]. Dir. Réka Pigniczky. 56Films, 2009. DVD.

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Performing Ethno-Cultural Identity  105 Incubator [Inkubátor]. Dir. Réka Pigniczky. 56Films, 2009. Official Trailer. English. YouTube 25 August 2010. Web. 11 May 2012. . Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. Print. Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Print. Makkai, László. “The Foundation of the Hungarian Christian State 950–1196.” A History of Hungary. Ed. Peter Sugar, Péter Hanák, and Tibor Frank. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. 15–22. Print. Ruby, Jay. “The Celluloid Self.” Autobiography: Film/Video/Photography. Ed. John Stuart Katz. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1978. 7–10. Print. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 1–41. Print. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. “Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story.” Advances in Social Cognition. Vol. 8. Ed. Robert S. Wyer, Jr. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. 1–85. Print. Stephen the King [István, a király]. Dir. Gábor Koltay. Mafilm Budapest Studió. 1984. Film. Web. 11 May 2012. . Stephen the King [István, a király]. Premiere Performance. YouTube. Web. 14 May 2012. . Wolf-Meyer, Matthew, and Davin Heckman. “Navigating the Starless Night: Strategies for Understanding Autobiogeography.” Reconstruction 2.3 (2002). Web. 22 Oct. 2012. .

6 Diasporic Bollywood

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Fusionist Practices and Gender Performativity in Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood Pin-chia Feng Holly Bolly, Bolly Holly, different woods same tree. —From Bollywood/Hollywood

Indian Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta calls her romantic comedy Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) a fusion film.1 Bollywood/Hollywood indeed exemplifies the negotiation of Bollywood and Hollywood traditions as fusionist practices and Masala aesthetics.2 The slash in the title of the film indicates an interchange between the two cinematic traditions via the performing bodies. My paper focuses on the ways in which Deepa Mehta revamps the traditions of Bollywood and Hollywood, in particular the deployment of song and dance sequences and the wedding motif from Bollywood. It also analyzes the Hollywood/Bollywood use of the Cinderella story of a girl from the sex industry who captures the heart of a high-caste millionaire—a plot that has made a lasting imprint on audiences as represented in films such as Pretty Woman. Bollywood/Hollywood features an array of Bollywood film clips, as well as song and dance numbers exploring the fusion (and confusion) of Western and Indian cultures and values among non-resident Indians in Canada. The film came to the cinematic scene at a very opportune moment in 2002 during a new rage for Bollywood films, helping Mehta to work through the difficulties and frustrations of filming Water in India.3 For Mehta, Bollywood/­ Hollywood provided a needed digression from the interrupted project, which perhaps explains the overall carnivalesque aura—though tinted with satirical elements—in Bollywood/Hollywood. However, Bollywood/Hollywood is more than just a “feel-good” film. Mehta aims to relocate her diasporic South Asian characters by producing a localized identity for the Canadian desi (South Asian diaspora) community in Bollywood/Hollywood. It thus succeeds in going beyond presenting a merely carnivalesque movie that celebrates boundary crossing and hybridization. Moreover, she adds a further dimension to the subject of performance by including the gender performances that the transvestite character Rocky/Rokini enacts. Deepa Mehta was born in Amritsar, Punjab; her father is a film distributor and theater owner. She began making short documentaries after attending the

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Diasporic Bollywood  107 University of Delhi. In 1973 she emigrated to Canada with her director husband Paul Saltzman and started her film career as a screenwriter for children’s films. This background indicates that Mehta is well versed in the traditions of both Bollywood and Hollywood. As a diasporic South Asian based in both Canada and India, Mehta struggled with her transnational identity as both a visible minority member in Canada and a non-resident Indian (NRI) in India.4 Moving between South Asian and North American subject matters, her films cover a wide range of themes with crossover appeal: intra-communal interaction between an elderly Jewish man and an Indian youth in Sam and Me (1991), intergenerational female bonding between two Caucasian women in Camilla (1994), lesbianism in contemporary Indian society in Fire (1996), stories of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in Earth (1998), the exploration of a heterosexual relationship between a Caucasian couple in Republic of Love (2003), love and marriage between NRIs in Canada in Bollywood/Hollywood, the tragic fate of Indian widows in Water (2005), a magical realist drama about an arranged marriage between a Punjabi woman and her abusive Indian Canadian husband in Heaven on Earth (2008), a comedy about the family of a Canadian diplomat in New Delhi and their Indian cook in Cooking with Stella (2008), and an adoption of Salman Rushdie’s acclaimed novel Midnight’s Children (2012). Bollywood/Hollywood has a simple, melodramatic plotline: The South Asian Canadian dot-com millionaire Rahul Seth (played by Rahul Khanna) has a Caucasian girlfriend, Kimberly Wertham known as “the Brittany Spears of Canada,” who dies in “a tragic freak accident” while practicing levitation. Devastated, Rahul refuses to develop another relationship and instead hires Sue (Sunita Singh, played by Lisa Ray), a sassy “J-Lo meets K-Ko”-type5 escort girl whom he believes to be Spanish, to pose as his fiancée so that his pregnant sister can get married. Rahul falls in love with Sue after she helps his teenage brother gain confidence in school. Later on, Rahul discovers that Sue is actually from a Sikh family and that she works as an escort girl to take revenge on her father who tries to force her into an arranged marriage with a champion wrestler. The film ends with Rahul and Sue driving into the sunset in a limo, supposedly to live happily ever after. Although the film received five Genie nominations from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, won Mehta a Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay, and was a box office success, Bollywood/Hollywood nonetheless received mixed reviews. Mehta’s effort to combine Bollywood and Hollywood was criticized as resulting in “a film without a nation.”6 However, Mehta endeavored to provide a specific location for her film and underscored its geographical identity by repeatedly using shots of the Toronto cityscape—especially landmarks such as the CN Tower. At Rahul’s penthouse apartment overlooking downtown Toronto, moreover, the open cityscape serves as a contrast to the domestic and domesticating space of the South Asian family in the film. The South Asian presence is also emphasized through shots of Toronto’s Little India, such as the Indian restaurant

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108  Pin-chia Feng Moti Mahal, Pooja, the sari boutique, and the Shubh Laxmi Jewelers on Gerrard Street East. Interestingly, shots of Little India are mostly connected with commercial consumption, which realistically reflects the economic involvement of South Asians in a metropolitan site such as Toronto. Mehta aims to produce a sense of the diasporic South Asians’ neighborhood—a neighborhood in the sense of Arjun Appadurai’s situated community characterized by spatial or virtual actuality and its “potential for social reproduction” (179). The humorous exchange between Rahul’s grandmother and Kimberly—“Which village are you from?” “Ah, Toronto?”—reflects a desire to localize the South Asian village culture within a metropolitan space. Toronto, through Mehta’s cinematic lens, is a visual embodiment of multiple cultural traditions and a site of ethnic hybridization where performances of different identities are possible. Hence Mehta’s use of Toronto, a city where peoples of all races meet and one of the world’s most multicultural cities, provides Bollywood/Hollywood and its NRI characters with a geographically specific identity.7 For Deepa Mehta, Bollywood/Hollywood is quintessentially a fusion film. Fusionist practices and masala aesthetics permeate the film and echo with the overall thematic focus on boundary crossing. Take the mixture of Asian and Euro-American religions and spiritual practices for example. The filmic space is crammed with references to Hinduism, Sikhism, New Age witticism, and Christianity. While Hinduism seems to predominate— with the Seth family praying to Hindu gods at the in-house family temple and the Shakespeare-quoting grandmother claiming, “Hindu gods are number one!”—other spiritual practices are clearly represented in a somewhat humorous fashion. For instance, the spirit of Rahul’s white girlfriend, Kimberly, an Anglican, New Age practitioner, advises her surviving lover to listen to his heart—for “only your heart is intuitive, only the heart is the cosmic computer.” The paradoxical combination of spiritual and high-tech language also delivers a satirical comment on twenty-first-century life: we are so very engrossed in computer technology that it affects even how we conceive of spirituality. Finally, the getting together of Rahul Seth and Suita Singh is a marriage across religious and class lines—a union of a high-caste Hindu family and a working-class Sikh one. This is a courageous act consi­ dering the rigid caste system and religious divisions in India. In a sense, it also reflects the diasporic location in which one’s removal from the homeland creates space for such an act. In fact, such fusionist practices also follow a Bollywood tradition. As Ajay Gehlawat observes, Bollywood cinema is by nature a “hybrid art form, blending theatrical and cinematic elements as well as First World and Third World cinema methodologies, plus an assortment of Western and indigenous genres such as the musical, dance drama, to name a few” (xiii). Even the name Bollywood is a hybridized combination of a South Asian and North American location. Tejaswini Ganti traces the coinage and evolution of the term in Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry:

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Diasporic Bollywood  109 “Bollywood”—derived by combining Bombay with Hollywood—was originally a tongue-in-cheek term coined by the English-language press in India to refer to the Hindi film industry. Although dating back to the late 1970s, “Bollywood” gained currency primarily in the late 1990s, with the increased circulation, presence, and recognition of Hindi films in North America, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe, and officially entered the English lexicon in 2001, when the Oxford English Dictionary included the term. (12) Despite its formal inclusion in the English lexicon, however, Bollywood remains a controversial term, used indiscriminatingly by the media to discuss both domestic Indian movies and those of diasporic Indian filmmakers, while at the same time ignoring the fact that Mumbai (Bombay) is not the only Indian city with a film industry and that there are films being made in other languages in the subcontinent.8 Still, Bollywood, like Nollywood, is a useful term for exploring different film industries and traditions in relation to Hollywood—something Deepa Mehta obviously had in mind when she coined the title Bollywood/Hollywood. There is nonetheless a fundamental difference between the traditions of Bollywood and Hollywood, and it is also necessary for a diasporic filmmaker like Mehta to negotiate constantly these two film traditions. In Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, Jigna Desai describes the negotiation of Bollywood and Hollywood in South Asian diasporic filmmaking: South Asian diasporic identificatory processes are centrally configured and contested through the cinematic apparatus. … South Asian diasporic cinema is a developing cinema that negotiates the dominant discourses, politics, and economies of multiple locations. This political and cultural economy affects the form, production, and circulation of the films. South Asian cinema negotiates and traffics among the two largest global cinemas—those of Hollywood and Bollywood—as well as individual national cinemas including British, Canadian, alternative U.S., and alternative Indian. (35) Desai points out three distinct ways in which Bollywood is circulating in South Asian diasporic filmmaking: first, in these diasporic films Bollywood is frequently referred to thematically; second, the aesthetic forms and narrative structures of these films often reflect Bollywood conventions in various ways; and finally, when it comes to distribution, diasporic filmmakers utilize the same networks that circulate Indian films (42). Stephen Greenblatt’s comment on the reproduction and circulation of mimetic capital is useful here in theorizing the syncretic practice of different film traditions: “Images that matter, that merit the term capital, acquire reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves by transforming cultural contacts into novel and often unexpected forms” (6). For South Asian diasporic filmmakers, the

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110  Pin-chia Feng Bollywood tradition is a valuable source of mimetic capital rich in transformative power—one that begs for reiterative circulation and reproduction. As a fusionist film, Bollywood/Hollywood borrows heavily from Bollywood through numerous direct and indirect references. The soundtrack is permeated with popular Bollywood songs, and in the Seth household Bollywood films from different periods are constantly watched. The knowledge of a dedicated film buff would be required in order to comprehend the intertextual richness of the film’s Bollywood allusions. For instance, Akshaya Khanna, a Bollywood star who makes a cameo appearance as himself in the film, is the real-life brother of the male lead, Rahul Khanna. So when Akshaya speaks the line—“Rahul is like a brother to me”—he is making a humorous reference to the extra-filmic familial relationship and subtly invoking the Bollywood tradition of “film dynasties” or star families. On the other hand, the film also self-consciously pokes fun at possible cultural misappropriations. For instance, when the Caucasian cook Lucy tries to seduce Rocky the chauffeur, she sings “Awaara Hoon” (“I am a vagabond”) as a lullaby. The theme song from Raj Kapoor’s seminal 1951 film, Awaara (The Vagabond), in which Kapoor plays a tramp roaming through streets and villages à la Charlie Chaplin, “Awaara Hoon” is, in fact, a vagabond song. Hence, Lucy’s attempt to appropriate South Asian popular cultural capital ironically serves as a cautionary tale against cultural misuse and mistranslation. Rocky’s resistance to her act of seduction is, therefore, not only gendered because of his own sexual orientation but also culturally and racially motivated. The film is an obvious pastiche of the two film traditions and an attempt to perform cultural translation. The slash between Bollywood and Hollywood in the title of the film indicates “a sliding over between two seemingly separate terms” that demarcates “both the distinction” of the two cinematic traditions “and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement” (Palumbo-Liu 1, emphasis in original).9 The movement between Bollywood and Hollywood in Bollywood/Hollywood is Mehta’s cultural practice of bringing together the two cinematic traditions while acknowledging their differences. Gayatri Gopinath, however, is critical of what seems to her an eclectic, and even compromising, practice of fusionism in Bollywood/Hollywood: The film very self-consciously deploys a Bollywood idiom of high melodrama, farce, romance, and musical numbers, all the while providing tongue-in-cheek Indian-English captions that name the various components of the Bollywood-inspired script. This conceit interpellates a hip, South Asian diasporic audience literate in Bollywood codes while it simultaneously reassures a non-South Asian audience that a knowing presence at work behind the camera is guiding them through possibly unfamiliar territory. (127) Indeed Mehta provides captions for different scenes and the song and dance sequences. And yet these are partial translations as the lyrics are not subtitled.

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Diasporic Bollywood  111 Audiences are expected to enjoy the Hindi song and dance sequences without actually knowing the language. I regard this refusal to provide audiences with full translations as Mehta’s way of highlighting the artificiality of the insertion of song and dance sequences in the Bollywood tradition. It is also her way of making audiences experience first-hand the transplanted South Asian culture and subtly nudge them to cultivate the needed cultural literacy to fully appreciate such a hybrid work. The use of Bollywood musical numbers is the most obvious infusion of South Asian film tradition in Bollywood/Hollywood. With an average of six songs in each film, song and dance sequences have been regarded as essential to Bollywood. Indian film megastar Amitabh Bachchan reminisces about the importance of songs in Indian films as an important cultural expression: “Indians express themselves through folklore and poetry. Our heritage provides us with songs associated with all festivals and seasons. This is reflected in our films, where we have songs for every situation: love, separation, triumph or war. Occasionally, an extremely popular song has become an allegory for a generation of film audiences” (11). Deepa Gahlot also echoes Bachchan in highlighting the importance of music in the Indian way of life: [M]usic is part of an Indian culture that has songs for births, marriages, festivals and other celebrations. … The great pioneering directors integrated songs into the story and used them to propel narrative. They conveyed, with economy and emotion, what it might have taken several scenes and much dialogue to express with equal power. The song sequence also offers relief if the film has too many heavy or tragic moments. Since all Hindi films have a romantic thematic element, what better way to portray love between the hero and heroine than a well-worded song? Today a snazzily pictured song and dance number is an effective marketing device and audiences often go to see a film if they like the look and sound of these scenes. (63) The dance number, serving as an illustration of the song lyrics, also has its own cultural roots in Krishna’s Rasa Dance or dance of divine love.10 In Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies, Rajinder Kumar Dudrah suggests that Bollywood song and dance numbers operate beyond the level of spectacle, “playing an extra-narrative role of linking a film to Indian tradition, quoting classical performances, or religious imagery” (48). In short, the insertion of song and dance sequences is rooted in a love of music in Indian culture, and these musical numbers are deployed by Bollywood filmmakers for diegetic purposes, for catharsis, and for commercial promotion. Critics of Indian cinema insist that Bollywood films are not Hollywoodtype musicals. As Sangita Gopal and Sujata Mooti observe in their introduction to Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, the song and dance sequence “is the single most enduring feature of popular Hindi cinema” (1) and that no transnational study of Bollywood can ignore “the

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112  Pin-chia Feng crucial role of that song-dance sequence has played in such disseminations” (4). The song and dance sequence is, by definition, an intrinsic part of Bollywood films: “Far from being an additional element to the entertainment to offer, music is the central axis along which desire and identification are calibrated. While integral to the narratives, these sequences circulate autonomously—objects of aesthetic pleasure and promiscuous reproduction” (5). Song and dance performances in Bollywood films, moreover, entertain a “dual address” that is both realistic and utopian and that facilitates its transnational appeal (5). Furthermore, popular song and dance sequences have their own “independent circuits of distribution” (5) and enjoy a life of their own in popular imagination, a point that can be clearly observed in scenes in which musical videos play in the Seth household. What makes the song and dance sequences in Bollywood/Hollywood distinctly diasporic comes from the performance aspect: they look amateurish and the dancers are often dressed in Western outfits. The male lead, Rahul Khanna, had never before danced in any film. In contrast to the performance of his Bollywood star brother in “I’m simply sweet and salty,” Rahul looks rather unprofessional in the “Just now we are falling in love” number. In the “Featurette” section of the Bollywood/Hollywood DVD, dance choreographer David Connolly mentions that it is a deliberate choice not to make the song and dance sequences seem professional in the film. The purpose of using these musical numbers is to highlight Bollywood songs and dances as social and folk expressions, and to provide a way for the desi community to link with their South Asian roots through cultural performance. In addition to inserting song and dance sequences, Mehta frames the diegesis of Bollywood/Hollywood in the contest of wedding preparations. The deployment of a wedding as a narrative frame repeats one of the most popular themes in Bollywood films. A wedding, in the Bollywood tradition, has a distinct cultural function: it serves as a microcosmic representation of South Asian culture and a ritual of consolidating and assuring the reproduction and continuation of the heterosexual family system. According to Bachchan, the marriage plot in Hindi films has its social function and mythological implication: Marriage was the ultimate goal of most romantic relationships explored in films. The process of falling in love and the obstacles preventing marriage were indicators of prevailing social stigmas and customs. Seldom did films feature erotica that was unacceptable to social norms. Morality was sacrosanct. In stories about lovers who did not ultimately become man and wife, the protagonists were compared to the romantic pair, Radha and Krishna. When a story dealt with an ideal marital couple, their relationship was likened to the union of Ram and Sita, who were devoted to tradition. (11) In Bollywood/Hollywood, Rahul’s efforts to marry off his pregnant sister suggest that he is a responsible “team captain of the family” who is trying

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Diasporic Bollywood  113 to fulfill his deathbed promise to his father. Moral obligations and filial duty asides, Rahul’s marriage with Sue will also contribute to the final harmony in the filmic universe. Moreover, by adopting the marriage theme, Mehta is able to reproduce the traditional scenes of pre-wedding rituals, such as Sangeet, and the singing celebration to showcase Indian culture and thereby recreate a sense of home in the diaspora. Rahul once comments on the diasporic condition: “We’re caught in a time warp here, trying to preserve what we can of the home country.” While the old country is on the other side of the world, the recycled Bollywood familiarities, though modified and revamped, help to bring back a feeling of at-homeness for the South Asian diasporas. In the film, Hollywood traditions are much easier to identify for most non–South Asian audiences. The film employs the plot of the heterosexual courtship of a couple from different social classes, as in Pretty Woman. Sue even self-consciously mentions how her “makeover” in Little India—when she is on shopping spree for saris and jewelry to enable her to perform the role of an Indian bride—reminds her of a Hollywood movie. The allusion to Pretty Woman does not stop at the level of emplotment but goes on to include the final balcony scene in which Rahul stands on a car hood to propose to Sue. The quoted scene is nevertheless deliberately mixed with a Bollywood element expressed by Sue’s father, who claims that instead of being the bullying patriarch he is now “a changed man,” inspired by the Bollywood film Dilruba. As he claims comically and somewhat nonsensically, “[i]nspired by the movie’s inspiring sentiments, from now on the doors of my heart remain open twenty four/seven,” a statement which seems to indicate his willingness to accept the Canadian way of life from then on. The female protagonist, Sue, an anthropology major at the University of Toronto who recites Pablo Neruda and talks about life as being “full of existentialist angst,” is not simply Julia Roberts’ character recast but one who is well versed in cultural performance. As she admits it herself, Sue is “partial to multiple identities” and can easily assume the role of a seductive Latina escort or that of a perfect Indian bride, which clearly manifests Mehta’s view on the performative nature of ethnicity. As a woman of South Asian origin, the chameleon-like Sue unconventionally demands a (heterosexual) relationship on her own terms, which makes her an example of Mehta’s feminist rendition of the South Asian heroine in the diaspora. Hence, she works as an escort to take revenge on her parents for trying to force her into an arranged marriage with Killer Khalsa, the WWS champion from her father’s village who “has a BMW,” indicating his material success in the new country. Sue is also a sharp contrast to Chand, the female immigrant and protagonist in Heaven on Earth, who is the victim of an arranged marriage and domestic violence. In view of the realistic representation of the life of South Asian immigrant women in Canada in Heaven on Earth, Mehta obviously has full knowledge of the hardships faced by diasporic South Asian women. The fairytale ending and wish fulfillment in Bollywood/Hollywood can also be read as a critique of the inherited Hollywood heterosexual plot.

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114  Pin-chia Feng However, the film does not end with the protagonists driving off to the sunset, but with a song and dance number performed by the androgynous figure Rocky/Rokini. Rocky is a loyal chauffeur by day and a drag queen at night—the famous “first drag queen from the land of the Kama Sutra.” The insertion of a transvestite and homoerotic figure in an overtly heterosexual drama such as Bollywood/Hollywood has attracted criticism. Analyzing Bollywood/Hollywood along with Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, for instance, Gayatri Gopinath criticizes Rocky as an instrument of containment that serves to quarantine homoerotic desire: As in Monsoon Wedding, the potential for queerness infiltrating home space is foreclosed by solidifying queer identity on the body of the supporting male character. … Mehta stages one of the film’s several song and dance sequences as a drag performance in what is presumably a local gay bar, although the space remains curiously decontextualized and free-floating. … Solidifying queerness on the body of the servant/ drag queen figure has two key effects. First, it dislodges queerness from contaminating the home space by keeping it safely contained within the gay bar space. Second, as in Monsoon Wedding, it functions as a foil to the heroine Sunita’s gender transgressions by holding them safely within the realm of normative heterosexuality. (127) Gopinath goes on to argue that Bollywood/Hollywood “effaces the possibility of queer female desire that Fire forcefully tackles” and clearly presents a case in which “the chilling effects of Hindu nationalist violence on queer and diasporic cultural production” (130). Implicit in Gopinath’s argument is a comment on Deepa Mehta’s practice of self-censorship in Bollywood/­ Hollywood, a case in which a former radical and feminist filmmaker supposedly has kowtowed to patriarchal authority. The completion of Water three years after Bollywood/Hollywood, however, suggests otherwise. We see how, by insisting on representing the horror and poverty of Indian widows in ashrams, Mehta proves herself as defiant as ever. I regard Rocky/Rokini as exemplary of the fusionist and hybridized gender performance in the film. As Judith Butler writes in Gender Trouble, As much as drag creates a unified picture of “woman” (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. (137, emphasis in the original) Rocky/Rokini’s drag performance unsettles the stability of gender identity in the film, which is crucial to Mehta’s project of fusionism and hybridization precisely because the film is overly determined by the heterosexual plot. His/ her appearance in the film effectively breaks the illusion of hegemonic heterosexuality and succinctly comments on the performative nature of identity.

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Diasporic Bollywood  115 Moreover, the character Rocky/Rokini is culturally specific in that s/he presents a very strong reference to the transgender hijra figure—a member of the third sex that has existed in the Indian subcontinent for over four thousand years. This allusion to the hijra figure has rooted Rocky/Rokini in the Indian cultural context. Rocky explains his hermaphroditic existence by making a quasi-philosophical statement that ends with a Western metaphor: “I’m just a poor man from Batala, driving on the road paved by the Ancient Greeks. You see, for them, the perfect body is what? It was male, it was female, intertwined like … like a choc’o’bar.” Moving from Batala, a city in northern India, to the city of Toronto, Rocky the driver claims that his gender performance is influenced by Greek philosophy. The image of a “choc’o’bar” makes a humorous reference to the constant practice of hybridization in the film and gives a western “flavor” to Rocky’s comment on gender performance. Rocky also appears to be the most philosophical character in the film. He is the character who comments on the eternal theme of appearance versus reality: “Nobody, but nobody, is what they appear to be. I mean we all hide our selves, because life is a sullen coitus.” The philosophizing Rocky, who performs with his body, speaks for the filmmaker who insists that her film is “more ironic than comedic, reflecting the absurdities in life ‘when all those lines get blurred’ between cinema and the real world” (Honey 1). Hence in the first drag scene, s/he is the only one who looks like a transvestite, while the other four—two white, one Asian, and one black—appear to be quite feminine. Rokini’s obviously stiff and flawed performance as a drag queen underwrites Mehta’s self-reflective reexamination of the act of filmmaking. This is especially true in the closing scene, in which Rokini makes a second transvestite appearance. In this final sequence, Rokini’s performance not only crosses gender but also blends cultures when s/he dresses up in the fashion of chinoiserie and sings “Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu,” a Hindi song mixed with English lingo from the 1958 Indian film Howrah Bridge. The members of the entire multicultural film crew gradually join in, which further accentuates a sense of the carnivalesque. This final sequence can be regarded as Mehta’s self-reflexive reminder to her audiences that a film is, after all, a simulacrum of reality and phantom pleasure. Deepa Mehta makes it clear that no matter what film tradition or language she is working with, her artistic work is always already a hybrid construct based on fusionist practices because she herself is a diasporic filmmaker.

Notes 1. This paper is partially the result of a research project supported by Taiwan’s National Science Council (NSC99–2410-H-009–009-MY3). 2. In their introduction to The Bollywood Reader, Jigna Desai and Rajinder Dudrah point out that the genres of Bollywood cinema are sometimes referred to as “Masala—as in a mixture of spices” (10). 3. As Kirk Honeycutt reports, “[s]uddenly, Bollywood is everywhere: ‘Lagaan’ wins an Oscar nomination. Andrew Lloyd Webber's ‘Bombay Dreams’ sells out nightly at London's Apollo Theatre. Cannes all but wraps itself in saris this year

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116  Pin-chia Feng to celebrate ‘Devdas’ and the legacy of Raj Kapoor. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is hosting a major Bollywood exhibition. Baz Luhrmann cites the influence of Indian masala movies on ‘Moulin Rouge.’” 4. Mehta discusses in her interview with Vinita Ramchandani her ambivalence about her transnational identity: “I’ve never felt Canadian. I used to be upset about being called a visible minority, that’s what they called colored people there. I used to come to India and was called an NRI here. The problem was not about belonging anywhere; it was a dislike for labels. … Now I feel very happy being who I am, Deepa Mehta.” 5. This is also a line from Rocky. K-Ko refers to the Indian actress Karisma Kapoor. 6. This is quoted from Michael Atkinson’s review in The Village Voice. Atkinson rates Bollywood/Hollywood as “a film without a nation, without any comic grace, and often without even the slimmest technical efficiency” (online). 7. In 2004, the UN Development Program identified Toronto as the world’s second most multicultural city (http://www.indie-music.com/modules.php?name =News&file=print&sid=4725). 8. According to Tejaswini Ganti, “Bollywood is a contested and controversial term nonetheless, both within the Indian film-studies community and the Hindi film industry. Film scholars are justifiably upset by the indiscriminate use of the term by the media—and even by other scholars—to refer to all filmmaking both past and present within India. An exasperating feature of the global use of the term is the way that Bollywood has become synonymous with any film either produced in India or by diasporic Indians and set in India” (13). 9. Here I am inspired by David Palumbo-Liu’s conceptualization of the slash in terms of Asian American formation, “[T]he proximity of Asian Americans to that ideal should be read as a history of persistent reconfigurations and transgressions of the Asian/American ‘split,’ designated here by a solidus that signals those instances in which a liaison between ‘Asian’ and ‘American,’ a sliding over between two seemingly separate terms, is constituted.” (1). The Chinese title,《好萊塢裡有個寶萊塢》—There is a Bollywood inside Hollywood—is in fact a case of mistranslation, which reveals a desire to appropriate Bollywood by Hollywood and ignore the importance of the slash in between. 10. Lord Krishna, the blue god of love and eighth incarnation of Lord Vishnu, is visualized as dancing joyfully with beautiful gopis or cowherd maidens near the Yamuna at night, the scene symbolizing ecstatic spiritual love for Krishna: “Listening to these soft, healing words of Krishna, the gopis forgot their agony of separation (viraha), and on physical contact with him (anga sanga) felt all their desires fulfilled. Then, on the banks of the river Yamuna, Krishna inaugurated the rasa game (krida), with those jewels among women (stri-ratna), who, with their arms interlocked, were eager to do his bidding” (http://www.kalki.ru/ krishnas-dance-with-the-female-cowherds-a-joyous-spiritual-narrative).

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Print. Atkinson, Michael. “The Young and the Damned.” The Village Voice. 23 Sept. 2003. Web. 25 May 2012. .

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Diasporic Bollywood  117 Bachchan, Amitabh. “Forward.” Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema: A Visual Journey through the Heart of Bollywood. Manschot and de Vos 10–11. Bollywood/Hollywood. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Mongrel Media, 2002. DVD. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Camilla. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Miramax Films, 1994. DVD. Connolly, David. “Featurette.” Bollywood/Hollywood. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Mongrel Media, 2002. DVD. Cooking with Stella. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Mongrel Media, 2009. DVD. Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print. Desai, Jigna, and Rajinder Dudrah. “The Essential Bollywood.” The Bollywood Reader. Ed. Rajinder Dudrah and Jigna Desai. Maidenhead, UK: Open UP, 2008. 1–17. Print. Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies. New Delhi: Sage, 2006. Print. Earth. Dir. Deepa Mehta. New Yorker Films, 1998. DVD. Fire. Dir. Deepa Mehta. New Yorker Films, 1996. DVD. Gahlot, Deepa. “The Song and Dance Sequence.” Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema: A Visual Journey through the Heart of Bollywood. Manschot and de Vos 63. Ganti, Tejaswini. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Gehlawat, Ajay. Reframing Bollywood: Theories of Popular Hindi Cinema. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010. Print. Gopal, Sangita, and Sujata Moot. “Introduction: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance.” Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Ed. Sangita Gopal and Sujata Mooti. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. 1–60. Print. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Heaven on Earth. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Astral Media, 2008. DVD. Honey, Kim. “Welcome to Bollywood North.” Globe and Mail 17 Nov. 2001: 1. Print. Honeycutt, Kirk. Hollywood Reporter. 11 Sept. 2002. Web. 1 June 2007. Howrah Bridge. Dir. Shakti Samanta. Shakti Films, 1958. DVD. Kapoor, Raj, dir. Awaara. Yash Raj Films India, 1951. DVD. Manschot, Johan, and Marijke de Vos, eds. Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema: A Visual Journey through the Heart of Bollywood. Amsterdam: KIT, 2005. Print. Monsoon Wedding. Dir. Mira Nair. Mirabai Films, 2001. DVD. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Pretty Woman. Dir. Garry Marshall. Touchstone Pictures, 1990. DVD. Ramchandani, Vinita. “Passionate Plots: Deepa Mehta Explains the Emotion that Connects Her Films Fire, Earth, and Water.” The Week 6 Dec. 1998. Web. 1 May 2006. . Republic of Love. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Dan Films, 2003. DVD. Sam and Me. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Astral Films, 1991. DVD. Water. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Mongrel Media, 2005. DVD.

7 Asian American Family Memoirs and the Performance of Identity and Readership in Transcultural Societies Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 00:29 11 April 2017

Rocío G. Davis

In this chapter I analyze the performative possibilities of the auto/biographical subgenre called the “family memoir,” in the context of ethnic writing in North America and issues of cultural change in plural societies. I argue that this form of life writing performs history in an Austinian sense, influencing the development of communities, addresses important questions about identity and self-representation, and serves as a vehicle for cultural memory. These purposes overlap significantly and explain the need to continually address the cultural work enacted by these literary texts. Family memoirs— the auto/biographical story of three generations (or one hundred years) in the life of one family—have become ubiquitous in ethnic writing in North America. K. Connie Kang’s Home was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family (1995), Andrea Simon’s Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest (2002), Louise DeSalvo’s Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004), and Carole Ione’s Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (2004) are cases in point. This form of life writing, which focuses as much on other members of one’s family as on oneself, typically blurs the boundaries we tend to draw between autobiography, biography, and history writing. If we contend, as Paul John Eakin does, that “autobiography is, to be sure, a literary discourse, a discourse of fact and a discourse of fiction, but even more fundamentally … a discourse of identity” (“Breaking Rules” 124), then these family memoirs posit new ways of performing personal identity by privileging a relational model that is connected to developing communities. Relational approaches to life writing complicate notions of selfrepresentation by privileging the intersubjective over the individual. This was one of the key insights in auto/biography theory in the 1990s: that identity—for both men and women—is essentially relational, formed and defined in relation to others. We now understand how the first person in autobiography is, as Eakin argues, “truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation,” as it addresses “the extent to which the self is defined by—and lives in terms of—its relations with others” (How Our Lives 43). The relational model of auto/biographical identity functions on two levels: first, within the text itself, as the author draws upon the stories of family

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Asian American Family Memoirs  119 members to complete her own story and, second, because these texts very consciously address an audience. It is at this point that the texts become most performative—in their interpellation of an audience through the author’s engagement with processes of selfhood. As Richard Schechner puts it, “[t]he many performances in everyday life such as professional roles, gender, and race roles, and shaping one’s identity … ‘make belief’—[they] create the very social realities the enact” (42). Ethnic American family memoirs manifestly present the individual author’s self as discursively constituted, as issues of literary traditions, immigrant history, identity politics, and cultural contingencies participate in the construction of the text. The form of the family memoir hinges on the interrelation of the individual narrative and the family stories, the dynamic between connectedness and autonomy serving as a crucial point in the development of identity, followed by the imperative to perform this identity. Generally written by one person, the stories evidence both an inter- and intra-generational collective voice that connects with readers in important ways. Ethnic family memoirs—from the Jewish, Latino, or Asian American communities, to name a few—often have as a central structuring device the story of immigration and adaptation to North America. Thus, they serve an important didactic purpose: they introduce Asian or European history to mainstream or ethnic North Americans, inviting them to rethink the processes that resulted in the creation of particular ethnic communities. My particular focus will be the narrative performance of cultural memory as a way of promoting identity, wherein subjects—artists of their own lives—actively promote their private stories as part of a larger historical and cultural project. Memory allows our consciousness to link concepts and experiences, such that we “remember” not only things that have actually happened to us personally. Perhaps even more importantly, we “remember” events, language, actions, attitudes, and values which are aspects of our membership in groups” (Singh, Skerrett, and Hogan 17) and might serve as “performed rituals” in the sense of S. J. Tambiah’s of “rites … as self-constituting events” (Tambiah 128). Cultural and collective memory is our passport to membership in a group, and family memoirs harness personal memories to represent community stories. As such, these memoirs transcend the individual to speak of and for a wider community. In the context of auto/biographical writing that explores specific experiences like diaspora, assimilation, and integration, we have to take into consideration one important point: these texts re-imagine a past by creating a work that exists in history and as a historical document, making the creative process a form of reenactment, a performance of the past. Indeed, as Mieke Bal explains in the introduction to Acts of Memory, “cultural recall is not merely something of which you happen to be a bearer but something that you actually perform, even if, in many instances, such acts are not consciously and willfully contrived” (vii). In the case of the family memoir, the act of recalling is productive because it obliges the writer to recontextualize memory, which is necessarily subjective,

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120  Rocío G. Davis and historical data considered “factual.” The juxtaposition of fact and memory produces texts which become cultural tools that help us to understand the past and its inscriptions and re-inscriptions in time. The family memoir thus becomes cultural discourse as it produces a subject (or subjects, when we speak of multi-generational memoirs) who participates and performs in a specific cultural, social, and political context at the same time that the text itself reproduces this context. Family memoirs develop from a series of overlapping motivations and tell stories that often challenge uncritical views of ethnic persons and communities, which include (1) the consciousness that the stories of one’s relatives are constitutive of one’s own story. The family memoir generally highlights the acknowledgement of a cultural debt to family while exploring the meanings that the family history might have for the writer’s present family or community. (2) Also included is a recognition of the power of personal narratives inserted in the public forum to engage historical and cultural issues, often in order to challenge dominant versions. It also suggests how, to an important extent, individual identity is constituted in relation to family and national history. (3) There is a commitment to provide ethnic communities with models of identity and potentially empowering narratives, in the sense of K. Anthony Appiah’s “positive life scripts” that enable a performative resignification of identity (98). These motivations function simultaneously on the personal and collective level. Even though the auto/biographical act generally springs from personal motivations, many forms of life writing “exist for [their] public interpretive uses, as part of a general and perpetual conversation about life possibilities. … In any case, the ‘publicness’ of autobiography constitutes something like an opportunity for an ever-renewable ‘conversation’ about conceivable lives” (Bruner 41). In Helie Lee’s family memoir Still Life with Rice (1996), the author speaks in her Korean grandmother’s voice to claim a past she had previously refused to acknowledge. Lee’s appreciation of her identity grows from intersubjective identification as she acknowledges her need for mutual recognition with the women in her family. As an adolescent, Lee underwent the typical process of rejecting her mother and grandmother, espousing the “I am who I am. I’m not like you” (12) declaration of independence. As she narrates: Once someone said to me I am my mother’s daughter. I never believed it to be true and now I believe it even less. I’ve always hated being Oriental/Asian. I hide my face and camouflage my eyes, but not my mother or grandmother. They are both the same, so proud and certain of their identity. They annoyingly intimidate me, yet at the same time, their stubborn loyal spirit draws me toward them. The more I attempt to figure out these two women, the more confused I become as to who I am and where I belong. (14)

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Asian American Family Memoirs  121 Lee’s mother reminds her that she and her father had immigrated to provide their children with more opportunities, not to lead them to renounce their Koreanness. This is precisely the identification that Lee rejects, until she impulsively leaves the U.S. at the age of twenty-five to spend two years in Korea and China. Her serendipitous discovery of displaced Korean communities in China becomes an epiphanic moment: seeing those people makes her want to recover their erased histories and perform her own Korean ethnicity. And seeing her face in those Hangooksahlam—Korean persons—“I realize for the first time that I am my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s granddaughter” (24). There is a strong metafictional quality in Lee’s narrative: she admits at the beginning, that “[l]ooking at myself through the prism of their lives, I’ve finally come to peace with who I am. The emptiness and chaos I once felt is not filled with the past I rejected and the future I will passionately embrace” (25). Having arrived at this conclusion, she proceeds to narrate her grandmother’s story in first person, a performance of both ethnic appreciation and matrilineal connection. A short third-person chapter that recounts her grandmother’s birth separates the two parts of her text, which then centers wholly on the grandmother’s story. This intelligent, independent, resourceful woman recounts the story of survival, of the Japanese occupation of Korea, of exile to China, and a victorious return after the war, of the Koreans’ indomitable pride and courageous fight for democracy, of her husband’s infidelities and her unwavering loyalty to him, of the Christian faith that uplifts them, of the loss of her oldest son when the two Koreas were created. Lee enacts a fascinating strategy: using her grandmother’s voice, she explains to the implied reader numerous details of Korean life and customs—the rituals that surround birth, marriage, death, culinary customs, philosophy, and religion. The authoritative first-person insider voice implicates the reader as it reveals the writer’s personal journey of identity. Yet, because Lee admits to writing the text in order to know the grandmother she had refused to acknowledge, we realize that the principal implied reader is Lee herself. The performance of history and identity is thus directed primarily at the performer and, only later, at the community it connects to. By using her grandmother’s voice, the author listens to the stories she had previously ignored. Notably, however, Lee’s appropriation of her grandmother’s voice is complex and nuanced. She does not skim over the less positive episodes of her grandmother’s life, like her experiences as an opium smuggler, recounting moments of selfishness and cruelty balanced by stories of her genuine devotion to her family. Indeed, Lee does more than just appropriate her grandmother’s voice, she performs her grandmother’s life to provide herself with a basis for her identity as an Asian American, connected to a history and re-rooted in the present because of that history. In the context of ethnic writing, many of these texts may be understood within a particular group’s emancipatory project of self-definition and deployed to forge an identity for its members. As auto/biography transforms

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122  Rocío G. Davis personal life into a narrative, it constructs a life within a community that shares a history, often one that challenges existing essentialist or universalizing modes of reading the past. These auto/biographical texts enact and mediate history first through the recovery and safeguarding of family stories from historical erasure; second, by entering into a dialogue with official or public histories; and, third, by proposing a cultural model for present and future communities. They should therefore be read as active interventions on existing historical records as they reinscribe official versions or provide supplementary material for cultural construction. They function also as palimpsestic and intersecting “systems of remembering” (20), which Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue are both personal—manifested in dreams, photographs, family stories—or public—contained in documents, historical events, collective rituals. Even though these texts look to the past, they are future oriented. Their work of recovery becomes an occasion for insight and action in the present. Ethnic family memoirs epitomize connective processes as they privilege the stories, rituals, and traditions taken from the former home to the new in order to forge a connection between the past and future. The baggage (stories, documents, rituals) of the routes are harnessed to provide roots. As these texts participate in community formation, they invite other members to use the narratives as forms of grounding and identifying themselves through a sharing in the collective voice of the stories. As Angelika Bammer asserts, “[I]t is the relationship between these two—the families to whom we are born and the communities to which we are joined by choice, tradition, or force of historical necessity—that shapes our sense not only of who we are but of our location as subjects of/in history (“Mother Tongues” 105). Duong Van Mai Elliott has a specific purpose in writing The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family (1999)—a family memoir about Vietnam, a country that has figured so prominently, and yet has been woefully misunderstood, in American popular culture. She wanted to [s]how Vietnam in all its complexities at peace and at war, good and bad, traditional and transformed. I have elected to tell a story, rather than write an academic analysis, because I believe that a personal narrative can render history more immediate to readers and make them empathize better with the people who lived through the events. … I have shown them—as they saw themselves—as the central players in their own history. (xii) She also attempts to revise the common focus of American writing about Vietnam which tends to focus on villagers, soldiers, or bar girls, to center on middle-class Vietnamese, who experienced the changes that successive colonizations and wars enacted on the country and its people. For example, by describing her sister’s and cousin’s involvement with the communist-led

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Asian American Family Memoirs  123 resistance, she portrays family divisions that extended throughout the middle class in the mid-1940s, when numerous patriotic Vietnamese chose to fight the French who were trying to reimpose colonial rule. Elliott’s characters—“scholars and mandarins, the silk merchants, the military officers, and the revolutionaries” (xii)—were witnesses and participants in these events. Their stories encapsulate the events of a little over the last hundred years, from French colonization to the socialist transformation of the North, to American involvement until the communist victory in 1975, the evacuation of refugees from Saigon, and the lives of relatives who remained in ­Vietnam (xii). Her work serves the growing Vietnamese community in the U.S. by providing insider accounts of Vietnam, whose public image in the U.S. tends to be reduced to faceless masses and stories of war. She compares the writing of the family memoir to a journey home, after exploring the world that grew from a desire to “return to the source,” using a Vietnamese phrase (468). The book is clearly directed to both family—her nephews and nieces who have become French, Canadians, Australians, and Americans—in order to give them the family story, as well as to all Vietnamese of the diaspora because this is their story as well. The process of representing family-stories-in-history requires us to think about how these texts engage in potentially productive dialogue with their contexts. To a large extent, the ethnic tensions that led to the 1960s and 1970s political unification and mobilization of minority Americans have been resolved. Moreover, recent generations of ethnic Americans are more transnational than ever. Ultimately, the questions Carolyn Steedman asks about the making, writing, and performing of the modern self need to be addressed here as well: “Who uses these stories? How are they used, and to what ends?” (28). Family memoirs nourish and sustain communities by providing stories that unveil connections. I will discuss here a point mentioned earlier regarding the second aspect of relationality: the development of a performative link between the writer and the reader. Family memoirs enable the auto/ biographer’s story to connect to personal family stories as well as to the stories of those in the ethnic community. Stephanie Hammerwold uses the term “realization” to describe the part of the autobiographical moment in which the writer establishes “a connection to others and recognition of the role writing the self plays in creating a space for others’ own stories.” Further, according to Hammerwold, realization also implies connecting to community stories. The process is reciprocal: reading one’s story leads to a moment of realization and also brings the self in contact with the stories of others. Discussing the transformative power of auto/biography, she explains that “it is in the shared space of public discourse that the ‘I’ of self-writing is written into existence. The community shapes the ‘I,’ which in turn influences the ‘we’ to moments of realization. … The narrative of these memoirs is informed by the community metaphorically and physically surrounding the memoirist, whether positive or negative” (Hammerwold,

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124  Rocío G. Davis online). Importantly, “realization leads to others becoming aware of their own potential for selfhood, for claiming identity and voice, and for connecting with others through telling stories,” a process that does not require that the reader view her own story but rather creates “a moment of connection where the reader comes to realize her own potential to tell a story or to even feel something that puts words to her possibly unarticulated experience” (online). Indeed, a family memoir is highly interactive and anticipates the encounter with an implied reader. Susanna Egan describes autobiography as an “‘encounter of two lives’ between the reader and writer of life and of ‘life,’ repeated both outside and inside the text” (3). Egan notes that autobiographers of diaspora, of which ethnic North Americans are a crucial example, discriminate in their act of writing “among a plurality of possible positions, all incomplete and in continuous process, in order to recognize who speaks, who is spoken, and just who might be listening” (121). Readers are therefore closely implicated in the processes that create meaning: there is often clear textual evidence that writers are conscious of their implied readers, who are, in turn, aware of their performative role in validating, disseminating, or, as the case may be, canonizing a given text as emblematic of an ethnic identity or position. “Many texts invite this self-consciousness,” Egan argues, “explicitly constructing an ideal or desired reader” (121). She uses the image of the mirror as her central metaphor for life writing processes to stress “a combination of reflexive practices in autobiography” and to foreground “interaction between people, among genres, and between writers and readers of autobiography” (11–12). The existence of an implied reader marks the performance of ethnic family memoirs in clear ways. The text becomes an occasion for dialogue, as shared experiences—even those of difference—contribute to cultural memory. Readers who implicate themselves in the text are potentially altered by the experience because larger historical and social contexts are always present, offering models for identity in plural societies. In a general sense, we can classify these readers into two main groups, which may occupy intersecting positions. On the one hand, auto/biographers write for mainstream America, to explain their heritage culture from an insider’s perspective and to write their own history into existing “official” versions. On the other hand, they also write for the members of their ethnic communities, to give them characters with whom to identify and in order to preserve a history in danger of obliteration. Many readers of ethnic auto/biography view themselves as subjects fully committed to furthering cultural politics, policies, and developing cultural knowledge in diverse forms. This purpose is manifested more or less explicitly in a number of texts or interviews granted by the writers, who repeatedly demonstrate their commitment to a wider project of the creation and preservation of ethnic validation and cultural memory. Another fascinating example is found in a family memoir about Indian Jews in the U.S., namely Carmit Delman’s Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing

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Asian American Family Memoirs  125 Up Between Cultures: A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl (2002). It highlights the complex identity that develops when a palimpsestic history influences one’s process of connecting with an ethnic group, a religion, a nation, a family, or a history. Delman’s story describes growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, New York, and Israel as the child of a Jewish American father of Eastern European descent and a mother descended from India’s ancient Bene Israel community. The family identifies principally as Jewish, though they casually accept their Indian roots and the blend of Asian customs and foodways into their daily life. India is most clearly represented through Nana-bai, the maternal grandmother, with her Indian English lilt, her idiosyncrasies, and traditional perspectives. Using her maternal grandmother’s diaries as a source of a sense of rootedness, the author describes vividly, for example, celebrating Shabbat as a multi-faceted performance of ethnic and religious identity with curry chicken and wearing long, Orthodox Jewish skirts with bright Indian silks and bracelets. Growing up surrounded by the American Jewish community and Nana-bai, Delman and her siblings are painfully conscious of their multiple differences: “Maybe if we had connected deeply to the general Indian community, our family identity might have been more straightforward, a clear-cut piece of American immigration. But we were Jewish also and general Indian culture was another sphere entirely” (58). Indeed, she looks with envy on those immigrants of unambiguous identification with a heritage culture. To the mostly Ashkenazi Jews of their community, the Delmans do not “look” Jewish and, upon explaining that they were a mix of Indian and Eastern European Jew, “people automatically identified us by the brownness and what made us nonwhite” (151). Though she rediscovers India by enrolling in anthropology classes in college, Carmit Delman continues to be aware that she is mostly a spectator to their ethnic performances. To a large extent, therefore, Delman’s sense of identity is performative, based on “looking” and “doing,” an approach that is already problematic. Delman uses food imagery to convey her indeterminate position. Her description of a Shabbat meal at a Jewish friend’s house reveals the extent of their difference: “[The table before us was full of things I had heard of but never tasted before. Here was Luchshen kugel. Tzimes. Cholent. … For me, a traditional Shabbat meal had always been elaborate Indian dishes. And I was used to the quick fire of their chili powder and chutney. So the heavy pastiness of this new food took me by surprise” (64). Ultimately, a McDonald’s Happy Meal provides the cultural neutrality the children seek: “This food was not kosher or spicy. But it came with bendy straws and toys and ketchup bags on the side. And that was enough” (66). Eating the “right” food (the right brand of cola and chips), as well as dressing the “right” way (store-bought matching clothes, rather than hand-me-downs), becomes an obsession for Delman who longs to fit in. Food, which also strongly reminds her of Nana-bai’s story, the frame of this narrative, later allows her to act creatively and cross-culturally. The memoir’s title gestures toward the use of

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126  Rocío G. Davis food imagery in the process of understanding the role of women, cultural differences, and the meaning of religion. The family memoir, because of the heightened meaning attached to issues of multiple voicing and the idea of preserving family stories, widens possibilities for the reader of the texts. Gillian Whitlock explains that “[a]gency is too often seen as the prerogative of the writer, and yet one of the legacies of recent postcolonial criticism is the renewed sense of the agency of the reader, and the urgency of reading” (203). She defends the centrality of the reader in autobiographical writing, which she affirms is “engaged in an ongoing process of authorization in order to capture not its subject so much as its object: the reader” (3). The ostensible representation of a life, she continues, is only an illusion, or one might say a performance, used to seduce the reader and to claim the privilege to speak to him or her about his or her own life. As Leigh Gilmore points out “access to autobiography means access to the identity it constructs in a particular culture and for particular readerships” (qtd. in Whitlock 3). In this context, we need to explore precisely what it is that the authors perform and what forms of connection they seek to establish with the reader. These family memoirs create a reader by interpellating an implied audience in by means of ideological cultural and historical identity producing cultural discourses, through a form that makes that interaction highly effective. In the encounter between text and reader, Gullestad observes, “readers create the text while interpreting it, and, to some extent, they find their own truths in the texts under study” (31, emphasis added). This idea requires us to think about what a community of readers might mean in the context of ethnic literary and cultural discourse. The earliest Asian American autobiographies focused generally on Asia and the Asian experiences, mostly because the public that could consume these products was primarily mainstream America, readers largely ignorant about Asian realities and susceptible to orientalist stereotypes. As time passed and the community grew, books began to redefine both the Asian American subjects and the readers of those texts. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) radically influenced perspectives on this process. Apart from being the first text to critically interrogate the notion of Chinese Americanness, it launched a debate about the nature of this community in the Asian/American imaginary. However, it seems that the particulars of the debate were less important than the fact of the debate. For the first time, scholars began to critically inquire about the nature of this “hyphenated” identity and the forms in which it could be inscribed. Kingston’s “avant-garde autobiography” also gestured toward a renewed postmodern, feminist aesthetic that decisively changed the way we write and read autobiography. As the literary community began to attend to Kingston’s text, a consciousness began to develop about the cultural work these avant-garde autobiographies could enact. The autobiographical pact also allowed for “authentic” cultural statements that often became part of the collective imaginary. The

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Asian American Family Memoirs  127 community that received these texts became conscious of how these works supported the creation and sustenance of the community by providing the narratives of cultural or collective memory that they needed to validate their history, their positions, and even their political agendas. Connie Kang’s project in Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family (1995) stems from her identification as an immigrant with another history and inspired her to work for the community, to provide it with sustainable knowledge. Her position as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and her awareness of her responsibility as one of the very few Korean Americans writing for a major American newspaper makes her want to influence public opinion and disseminate important information about Asia and ethnic communities. For this reason, she explains: “At last, I was fulfilling my goal to introduce and interpret Asians to the non-Asian mainstream on their terms. And in doing so, I followed the lodestar of the sage Confucius by reminding myself that people’s natures are alike, it is their habits that separate them” (290). The question remains as to how family memoirs create communities and propose models for performing ethnic identity in plural societies. At issue is “the relationship between the experience of cultural displacement and the construction of cultural identity. It is thus marked by the tension of the historically vital double move between marking and recording absence and loss and inscribing presence” (Bammer, “Introduction” xiv). Cultural memory, as negotiated in these texts, is closely linked to collective memory, which shapes our sense of history and of ourselves. This formulation accommodates the dynamic and performative character of memory, which, as Bal notes, is “activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continually modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future” (ix). The writing of individual auto/biographies blends to create collective remembrance and facilitate its continuity. What is considered collective memory in this discussion, then, arises from the dynamics of independence and interdependence of a series of texts that support the exchange of information, memories, perceptions, and designs among individuals who compose the group. Further, as James Wertsch suggests, this “usable past” is empowering and can be harnessed for diverse purposes in the present (31). From a formal perspective, the realization of collective memory promotes continued participation as it encourages the writing of more texts. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan describe this as the structural dimension of collective remembering, “an interpretative code which endows individual memories with meaning according to the living tradition of remembrance of that specific group” (28). The strength of the auto/biographical tradition in ethnic American writing attests to the link between this form of remembering, the generic choice that sustains it, and the actual performance of selfhood. The approach I endorse here reads Asian American family memoirs and understands the search for identity as both performance and mediation. These auto/biographers offer a nuanced representation of the American

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128  Rocío G. Davis subject through an appropriation of the genre of “real life,” which demonstrates persons in the act of creatively ordering their experiences, seeking modes of self-representation. These accounts of individual struggles with ethnic self-definition use memories of the heritage culture, accounts of immigration and shifting national and ethnic affiliation as pivotal elements of self-formation and understanding. These auto/biographies deploy historical and cultural locations to speak effectively to readers and make them participate actively in the creation of cultural memory and understanding of forms of personal identity. Indeed, we know that reading transforms the reader as much as writing serves the writer: the larger context of historical and cultural reimagining shapes the auto/biographical act, as part of a performance and process of conversion. These texts present subjects actively negotiating their own private stories as history, part of a creative adaptation and manipulation of a dynamic network of concepts that transforms them into artists and protagonists of their own lives.

Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections.” Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Ed. K. Anthony Appiah, and Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. 30–105. Print. Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover: U of New England P, 1999. vii–xvii. Print. Bammer, Angelika. “Introduction.” Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Ed. Angelika Bammer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. xi–xx. Print. ———. “Mother Tongues and Other Strangers: Writing ‘Family’ across Cultural Divides.” Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question. Ed. Angelika Bammer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. 90–109. Print. Bruner, Jerome. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. 38–56. Print. Delman, Carmit. Burnt Bread and Chutney: Growing Up Between Cultures—A Memoir of an Indian Jewish Girl. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. Print. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Foods, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. Print. Eakin, Paul John. “Breaking Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration.” Biography 24.1 (2001): 113–27. Print. ———. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print. Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999. Print. Elliot, Duong Van Mai. The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Gullestad, Marianne. “Modernity, Self, and Childhood in the Analysis of Life Stories.” Imagined Childhoods: Self and Society in Autobiographical Accounts. Ed. Marianne Gullestad. Oslo: Scandinavian UP, 1996. 1–39. Print.

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Asian American Family Memoirs  129 Hammerwold, Stephanie. “Writing Bridges: Memoir’s Potential for Community Building.” . Web. 12 May 2006. Ione, Carole. Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color. New York: Harlem Moon, 2004. Print. Kang, K. Connie. Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: The Saga of a Korean-­ American Family. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Print. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts. 1975. New York: Vintage Random House, 1989. Print. Lee, Helie. Still Life with Rice. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Print. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Simon, Andrea. Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. Print. Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, eds. Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1994. Print. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Steedman, Carolyn. “Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self.” Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods. Eds. Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield. London: Routledge, 2000. 25–39. Print. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. A Performative Approach to Ritual. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Print. Wertsch, James V. Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography. London: Cassell, 2000. Print. Winter, Jay, and Emmanuel Sivan. “Setting the Framework.” War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Eds. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 6–39. Print.

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Part III

Performances of Ethnicity and Gender

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8 Gallo-Gallina

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Gender Performance and the Androgynous Imagination in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío Carmen Serrano Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico’s most celebrated authors and journalists, provides a voice for those usually forgotten by historiography in her testimonial novel Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969). The fictional character Jesusa Palancares is based on the real life of Josefina Bórquez whom Poniatowska interviewed over several months. Jesusa Palancares is also the narrator of the novel. Her picaresque and tragic life that spans the first half of the twentieth century is told. Among her many adventures, she narrates how she lived in a prison, worked in several factories, led a union, and even volunteered in the Cristero Revolt. Most importantly, as a female soldier who fought in the Mexican Revolution, she was a combatant and a survivor of one of the most violent episodes in Mexican history in which women played a vital part. Even though many women actively participated in the war as exemplified by Jesusa’s experiences, until recently their participation in the revolution has been mostly ignored by historical accounts. Literary critics are unsure as to how to interpret the novel because the work is deeply rooted in historical and biographical facts creating unstable boundaries between creative writing and the truth it purports to represent. In the novel, the voices of Josefina Bórquez, Jesusa Palancares, and even Elena Poniatowska conflate making it difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. As Beth Jörgensen argues, this testimonial novel continues to be an open book with numerous possible readings due to the many layers in terms of genre, personal identities, ideological value, and aesthetic effects (28–29). Nevertheless, Jesusa’s oral account, as creatively constructed by Poniatowska, provides a type of testimony for many women like Josefina in Mexico’s cultural history. Her story reveals how women contributed to the Mexican Revolution and how they subverted strict models of female behavior during the chaos of the civil war. Jesusa can hardly be described as the stereotypically passive, stoic, and self-sacrificing woman, a role that Mexican women are still expected to embrace. On the contrary, she is fearless, aggressive, courageous, and sometimes violent, thereby negating prescribed gender norms in t­ wentieth-century Mexican society. She is described as braver than a g­ allo-gallina or hen-feathered rooster, an aggressive transgendered breed of fowl commonly used in cock fighting. Similar to the gallo-gallina, Jesusa performs

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134  Carmen Serrano her gender ambiguously in a society in which a woman has well-defined and scripted functions. She very well understands that in a patriarchal society the locus of power lies in the male gender; therefore, as a survival mechanism and as a way of accessing privilege in the course of her life she often performs in ways associated with masculinity. Depending on the historical moment and circumstances, she performs sometimes as female and other times as male, thereby underscoring her newfound empowerment in her mutable gender. Jesusa’s play with gender must also be framed within a theory of performance, since in her language she continually acknowledges how she likes to “hacerle” or perform in ways associated with masculinity. Judith Butler’s work becomes useful in analyzing Jesusa and her gender constitution during the Mexican Revolt. For Butler, gender is performative (Gender Trouble 33). At the same time, she explains how gender performance is a survival strategy, which carries punitive consequences for those who fail to follow the gender norms (“Performative” 189). This performance of gender and its punitive consequences are clearly exemplified in Jesusa. She is the one who transgresses the boundaries and is ostracized for having blurred the clear distinctions established by society, especially after the revolution. Butler’s comments resonate with Jesusa’s own experience because she must remake her exterior image to fit the historical situation: “One is not simply a body, but in some key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessor and successors as well” (“Performative” 184). Jesusa “does” her bodily differently in accordance with the historical events that surround her. For example, throughout her life, she enjoys behaving in ways associated with masculinity; this is especially obvious when she joins the Mexican Revolution. However, later in her life her association with masculinity and male performance falls by the wayside, either because she sees the futility of trying to transgress the fixed norms or because she is altogether disillusioned. At the age of sixty-something, she is living in Mexico City impoverished, sickly, and barely surviving as a laundress, yet she still describes the pleasure of dressing like a man: Yo me visto a veces de hombre y me encanta. Nomás que yo no puedo traer pantalones; en primer lugar porque estoy vieja y en segundo lugar porque, no tengo ya por qué andar haciendo visiones pero de gustarme, me gusta más ser hombre que mujer. Para todas las mujeres sería mejor ser hombre, seguro, porque es más divertido, es uno más libre y nadie se burla de uno … ¡Mil veces mejor ser hombre que mujer. (186) [Sometimes I dress like a man and love it. I just can’t wear pants; first of all because I’m old and second because I don’t have reasons to be performing illusions anymore, but in terms of pleasure, it pleases me more to be a man than a woman. For all women it would certainly be better to be a man because it’s more fun, because you are freer and no

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one makes fun of you … It’s a thousand times better to be a man than a woman. (my translation)] This quote highlights Jesusa’s fascination with male clothing and desire to dress like a man. At the same time, her comments reveal that she is well aware that she is performing. Her ironic words also criticize the patriarchal society that privileges masculinity. Evidently, she perceives women’s roles as oppressive, inferior, and weak, offering very little pleasure compared to men.

The Myth of Androgyny Jesusa’s irresolute gender performance is perhaps a way for her to reach wholeness through the blending of the female/male dichotomy. Her play with gender evokes the fantasy of mystical union as found in various myths associated with androgyny. As I will later describe, Jesusa herself understands the origins of mankind in androgynous terms. According to several creation myths, the androgynous figure was a primal and idealized body that became fragmented after the fall of man. This fall results in a yearning for a return to that utopian androgynous state: As the mythic dream of primal oneness, and hence symbolic totality and universal harmony, androgyny appears in numerous creation myths, a number which suggest that a debased world resulted after the disintegration of a superior state of primordial unity into two polarized (and inferior) principles. (Batra 54) Within the Mexican context, notions of primal oneness are also part of mythmaking. For example, Ometeotl in the Aztec pantheon is a dual-sexed figure and creator of gods who inhabits the highest heaven (Clendinnen 299). Mayahuel, the Aztec female deity associated with pulque and the agave plant also embodies notions of androgyny. According to the Mayahuel legend, the lovers Quezatcóatl and Mayahuel flee the celestial world and become two branches of the same tree on earth (Gaytán 192–93). The myth of androgyny can be understood as a mythic aspiration of oneness that transcends the polarities of gender. As Lisa Rado states in The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime: Invoking the metaphor of androgyny in the twentieth century is thus, to a certain extent, to invoke a spiritual icon of mystical union. … It is to express the fantasy of wholeness, a wish for an inviolate substantiveness beyond the corporeal that is at once utopian and nostalgic. (182) Rado explains that the androgynous imaginary as a way to incorporate women into a phallocentric system has been much contested. Initially,

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136  Carmen Serrano androgyny was seen by writers—such as Virgina Woolf—as the ideal psychological and creative space for literary production; however, some have seen the androgyny myth as masked patriarchy and as another way to essentialize gender (Batra 60). As Batra states: “It is clear then that androgyny is not totally without value and has perhaps seemingly taken us a step closer to equity, but unfortunately it has not attacked the fundamental hierarchies that persist even in the last years of this millennium” (62). In spite of being an unattainable ideal, the androgynous model attempts to corrupt hierarchy and create another way of transcending oppressive gender roles. Furthermore, the notions of androgyny have the power to disrupt and disturb hetero-normative relationships (Hargreaves 9). In this way, Jesusa very much disrupts gender expectations by acting out in ways associated with androgyny. Through her gender bending she also tests the limits of what is deemed permissible and respectable in Mexican society. Yet in the end, her play with androgyny does not bring her closer to equality or wholeness as imagined in the world of myth. Jesusa is the female form of the name Jesus, so her name already has androgynous overtones thanks to Poniatowska’s christening of her protagonist. Jesusa’s transgression of male and female ways of being as dictated in Mexican society seems to suggest that she negotiates an ideal space for herself in which she can embody qualities associated with masculine and feminine modes of behavior. Niamh Thornton, in “(Trans)gendered Lines in Conflict: Jesusa in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío,” describes how the main character crosses gender lines and how she plays with these binary oppositions in an ambiguous manner. Joel Hancock also describes Jesusa’s contradictory stance on gender and sexuality. For example, he argues that in the novel she sometimes emphatically celebrates masculinity and denounces female behavior, and other times she condemns men wholeheartedly. She vacillates, never clearly defining her thoughts and if she does, she contradicts her assertions later in her narration. Hancock explains how Jesusa celebrates masculinity when she says that it would be better to be a man, but she also says: “A mi los hombres no me hacen falta ni me gustan, más bien me estorban, aunque no están cerca de mí. ¡Ojalá que no nacieran!” (173) [“I don’t need or miss men, in fact they bother me even when they are not around me. I wish they had never been born!” (my translation)]. There are many examples like this in which the protagonist creates ambiguity as to her gender preference. Clearly, Jesusa wants to enjoy the same privileges that men have, yet she does not opt to behave and dress solely like a man and instead acts out her gender in a discontinuous manner. At the same time, in spite of enjoying many aspects of masculinity, she continuously reminds the reader that she is straight. Furthermore, she is quite put off by homosexuality and sexuality in general. In spite of having had many male friends and having worked in questionable establishments, she denies ever having sexual relations with men other than her husband, Pedro. Even when she did have

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Gallo-Gallina 137 sexual relations with Pedro, it seemed more perfunctory than pleasurable. In her narration, she very much tries to convince the reader—although her relationships suggest something else—that she is asexual. Nevertheless, Jesusa needs to be understood within the context of androgyny because this was a burgeoning subject among feminists at the time of the novel’s publication. Most importantly, given Jesusa’s religious preoccupation and worldview, framing her performance within notions of androgyny seems more appropriate in understanding Jesusa’s representation of self. Arguably, she sees androgyny as place of equality for men and women. Linda Egan probes more deeply into the topic of androgyny and gives examples of the many ways that Jesusa’s behavior is androgynous. In her article, “Let No One Guess Her Sex: Sor Juana, Jesusa Palancares and the Mask of Androgyny,” Egan speaks of the Sor Juana and Jesusa as androgynous women and as gnostic women. Egan explains how this gnostic space separates body and mind placing women and men on equal plains (32). In Jesusa’s recounting of her life, her spiritual conversion to the Obra ­Espiritual is paramount to understanding her. Through this faith, she becomes a spiritual medium and has other special divine gifts. For example, she can heal the sick and speak to the dead. At the same time, the Obra Espiritual is a sect that believes in reincarnation. In her explanation of re-embodiment, people can return as either gender. Jesusa has returned to earth three times as women, while other women have returned as men in previous incarnations. This suggests that Jesusa sees the soul as androgynous because the physical body can adopt either male or female forms. At the same time, Jesusa describes her own version of the creation in very androgynous terms. She explains how Adam and Eve were genderless creatures in the Garden of Eden before they were banished. In paradise, Eve was like a toy doll, plain and smooth. Once she eats the apple, she immediately develops breasts and pubic hair (308–09). In other words, in paradise Adam and Eve were undifferentiated sexually, but they become two distinct genders once they eat from the tree of knowledge. This utopia—before the division of genders—conceivably is the state that Jesusa aspires to attain. Her faith and religious preoccupation recall the aspiration of primordial unity that is the paradigm of most worship (Batra 55). Furthermore, in many gnostic systems, the androgynous character of the primal man is a fundamental symbol; human suffering results from the division of man and reunification can signify salvation (Meeks 188–89). Her attempt to perform both genders can be seen as a way of trying to return to an ideal primordial place and a way to reduce her suffering. It appears that the androgynous imagination becomes a temporary ideal state of being for Jesusa. In the process of remembering and narrating her past she seems to be looking for self-realization in the interstice. When she speaks about her life, she does not want to be identified purely in male or female terms, but somewhere in between both. She continually destabilizes gender identity and creates ambiguity, so as to create another way of doing

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138  Carmen Serrano her body that goes beyond the two well-scripted models of behavior set out in Mexican society. Her ever-changing gender performance might also be understood as her way of accessing a utopian space, like the paradise that Adam and Eve once inhabited. Nevertheless, as critics and even Jesusa come to appreciate, this imagined primordial unity is fraught with contradictions and ultimately unrealizable. The only time in her adult life that she is able to fully play with her gender and embody aspects of androgyny is during the Mexican Revolution. Given that gender norms weakened during the civil strife, Jesusa subverts well-established sexual categories. In other words, she is free to meander on the gender performance continuum without negative repercussions, and this is, in a certain sense, a utopia for her. In fact, Jesusa expresses that she lived her most meaningful and happiest moments during the revolution. Coincidently, this is also the time when her masculine performance is accentuated, accepted, and even celebrated.

Women and War The way in which women could, like Jesusa, perform gender differently was especially remarkable during the Mexican Revolution when many joined the battlefields dressed up as men. It is interesting to observe in which contexts women participated in the Mexican Revolution. Encouraged by the middle class that protested the long-standing dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), the Mexican Revolution provoked the mass mobilization of people from all strata of society, including women. A civil war promised to bring social change and progress, especially for the illiterate rural population, the indigenous people, and mestizos. This war gave birth to the now famous revolutionary legends such as Pancho Villa, who fought in the northern part of Mexico, and Emiliano Zapata, who fought in the southern part of the country. Alan Knight describes that as a result of the revolution, the old elite lost absolute command, while popular leaders gained political power. Many fought to create a fair society that promised to be more inclusive; however, the aims of that utopian project were never fully achieved. Jesusa herself declares that the revolution was pointless and that those whom it purported to protect were worse off after the revolt. Of this failed project she says: “La revolución no ha cambiado nada. Nomás estamos más muertos de hambre.” (126) [“The revolution didn’t change a thing. We are just hungrier than ever.” (my translation)] During the revolt, women sometimes joined the armed forces, carried rifles, and fought alongside men. At the same time, during this chaotic time of bloody violence and social disorder women could dress and perform in ways associated with masculinity without the usual retribution that existed prior to the Revolution, especially during the Porfirian regime. Relaxed gender norms during wartime are not that unusual, especially if we look at the United States and Europe during World War I and World War II. Because men

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Gallo-Gallina 139 were deployed in battle, this gave greater mobility and liberated women from the usual constraints imposed on them (Diedrich and Fischer-Hornung 2). Propaganda of the time underscores that women were encouraged to work outside the home as part of their patriotic duty (6). Similar to women in the U.S. and in Europe, Mexican women actively participated in the war efforts, but unlike them, they also partook in warfare on the battlefield. Before authors like Poniatowska and other historians began to uncover their history, the female soldiers and female camp followers, often times referred to as soldaderas, were considered unusual and perfunctory to the fighting. Critic Andrés Reséndez Fuentes notes this bias in his study about the role of female soldiers during the revolution: They [female soldiers] were portrayed as fearless women dressed in men’s garb flaunting cartridge belts across the chest and a Mauser rifle on one shoulder. But they were invariably shown in the guise of curiosities, aberrations brought about the revolution. Soldaderas received their share of attention, too. They were depicted as loyal, self-sacrificing companions to the soldiers, or, in less sympathetic renderings, as enslaved camp followers. (525) While in the U.S. and Europe women were mostly excluded from military action, in Mexico all the factions of the revolution saw the participation of women in some way. Some women joined the revolution as soldiers and were also involved in active combat. A few women had commanding roles with the revolutionary troops as in the case “La Coronela” Carmen Parra and Rosa Bombadilla (528). Unlike most advanced armies of the time that abandoned the tradition of taking women along in battles, under the Porfirian regime, women still accompanied men during battle in the federal army (528). During the war, the camp followers foraged, cooked, and served as nurses. According to Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, some women were spies and would even smuggle arms and ammunition hidden under their skirts from the U.S. They were important messengers and served as go-betweens. Some women chose to follow their husbands in battle, while others were abducted or forced to serve as soldaderas or prostitutes. In later years, the term soldadera was synonymous with prostitute; however, contemporary critics have explored and explained the complex relationship of women and their more meaningful and multifaceted contributions during the revolt in both the federal army and revolutionary factions. Although Mexican women did participate on the battlefield and accompanied soldiers, they were obliged to return to their domestic space once the fighting had ended and assume their previous subordinate roles. Subsequently, their contribution to the war was greatly minimized compared to the male-centered narratives of war and death. Jesusa, in spite of having fought in the war, receives no pension as her male counterparts did. To make matters worse, she even lost the small pension as a soldier’s widow.

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140  Carmen Serrano This example reveals the continued victimization of women, especially of the lower class, in postwar Mexico in which women were expected to return to their domestic space and no compensation was offered for their patriotic contribution. Elena Ponitowska’s claims in her book about female soldiers entitled Las soldaderas that it is thanks to photographs and film footage of the time that these women now have a place in history: “Si no fuera por las fotografías de Agustín Casasola, Jorge Guerra, y los kilómetros de películas de Salvador Toscano, nada sabríamos de las soldaderas porque la historia no sólo no les hace justicia sino que las denigra” (21). [“If it were not for the photographs of Agustín Casasola, Jorge Guerra, and kilometers of film by ­Salvador Toscano, we would know nothing of the soldaderas because history does not treat them fairly, and instead disparages them” (my translation)]. The fictional character Jesusa is very much like these women who were either ignored or disparaged in official historical accounts. She too joins the revolution and fights alongside men imagining that this would bring change. Like so many of the soldaderas, she was forgotten until Poniatowska recovered her story from anonymity in this testimonial novel. Looking through the pages of the picture book Las soldaderas, it is evident that many women who fought were for the most part indigenous or mestizas, like Jesusa. Yet the topic of race in Hasta no verte Jesús mío is understated compared to the issues of class and gender. This underscores the many ways in which problems of race and class conflate into a single issue in Mexican society. In other words, the issue of race alone is many times minimized or concealed. Even though Jesusa is marginalized in terms of gender and class, she does not fully appreciate the ways in which she is also ostracized because of her appearance. Thanks to colonization, whiteness is still very much associated with wealth while darker and more indigenous physical appearance is oftentimes linked to the illiterate lower class. Jesusa, a mestiza and illiterate woman, explains that her grandmother was india and her grandfather French (220). She is also aware of the significance of skin color in terms of beauty. This is exemplified when she describes that she is short and brown-skinned and not particularly good looking. She also explains that she is dark or prieta, but not as dark or as india as her sister or brother (31). In another moment in the novel she finds a man, José, unattractive because of his short stature and black skin. She further laments that they would make an ugly couple due to their darkness (266). Her observations reveal that she very much sees beauty in terms of skin color, but she does not fully realize that this is also one of the reasons that she feels so alienated. At one point in the novel she acknowledges that she does not feel ­Mexican nor does she recognize Mexicans (218). It is unclear whether she means that she does not acknowledge their citizenship or whether she does not identify with Mexicans in general. All the same, she declares that she would feel Mexican if she had property or money; however, the reason that she is excluded might have more to do with her indigenous roots. José

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Gallo-Gallina 141 ­ asconcelos, philosopher and influential figure in the forging of a national V identity in post-revolutionary Mexico, made important observations on this subject in La Raza Cósmica (1925). He celebrates mexicanidad by recalling the various cultures that constitute the nation: colonizing Europeans, indigenous cultures, and African slaves. Yet his utopic conception of the fifth race or Raza Cósmica is marred with contradictions. He sees the new race as one of hybridity and inclusion. Paradoxically, this hybridity is also meant to whiten and create a new subject that is less indigenous (Medina 110). The indigenous cultures of contemporary Mexico are but a shadow of the former and are described in pejorative terms. His construction of Mexican identity in many ways excludes people like Jesusa who come from a more rural and indigenous part of southern Mexico. Ostensibly, she does not fully grasp how race plays into the power structure and she does not subvert issues of race in the same way that she disrupts normative gender.

Concepts of Gender in Mexican Society Before describing the ways in which Jesusa performs gender ambiguously, it is important to focus on Mexican gender conceptions in order to reveal how Jesusa subverted these very strict and well-defined codes of conduct. In ­Octavio Paz’s influential collection of essays, El laberinto de la soledad (1950), he deals with issues of Mexican identity, alienation, and gender. His book was deemed so important that it was a required text in secondary education for decades (Stanton 211). Although his essays continue to provoke controversy and are deemed outmoded by some in current criticism, he was widely read at the time of the publication of Poniatowska’s novel; therefore it is relevant to mention his work from a historical perspective. In his essay, “Máscaras mexicanas,” he describes the Mexican male as a hermetic being that hides behind a mask and performs as a form of self-­preservation. In describing the stereotypical notions of what being a man is, he says that “[E]l lenguaje de la ‘hombría’ consiste en no ‘rajarse’ nunca. Los que se ‘abren’ son cobardes” (Paz, El laberinto 51). “The ideal of manliness in never to ‘crack,’ never back down. Those who ‘open themselves up’ are cowards” (Paz, The Labyrinth 29–30). In other words, men are never allowed to let others in, and they must never become frightened or shrink back when confronted by another. Allowing anyone to enter thereby signifies the reduction of the “hombría” or that, which hypothetically gives them their manly qualities. This definition of maleness places women in an inferior role because they are bodies that allow others to enter, especially in relation to the sexual act. Paz continues to describe how “good” women in Mexican society are virtuous due to their passive nature. Furthermore, they are expected to comport themselves in a decent manner, and they are the ones who are expected to be self-sacrificing according to specific models of gender (El laberinto 57). On the other hand, the “mala mujer” or “bad woman” is associated with activity or mobility. She is the one that meanders, looks for men and leaves

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142  Carmen Serrano them. According to Paz, her mobility makes her impenetrable in a certain sense. “La ‘mala’ es dura, impía, independiente, como el ‘macho’” (El laberinto 61). [“The mala is hard and impious and independent like the macho” (Paz, The Labyrinth 39).] In other words mobility makes her a “bad” woman and she therefore becomes more like the macho, which separates her from the passive role that describes a “good” woman. Paz’s attempts to explain gender roles and alienation are in many ways played out and problematized by Jesusa. The protagonist’s description of self resonates with Paz’s description of the various gender categories. She at times is like a macho because she rarely shrinks back when confronted by another. She at times is like the “bad” woman because she is active, mobile, and aggressive. At the same time, in certain moments in her life she is like the “good” woman when she becomes long-suffering in the face of adversity. For example, exploring her more maternal side, she many times tries to raise orphaned children, albeit with varying degrees of failure. During her narration, she continually re-edits and contradicts her own description of self so that she embodies all the models of gender that Paz attempts to explore. In his exploration of Mexican identity, Octavio Paz also describes many of the gender expectations that are very much like those established since colonial times. Susan Migden Socolow describes that gender ideologies from the Iberian Peninsula also shaped the lives of women in Latin America. Women were conceived as not having control of their sexuality and had to remain confined in some sort of interior space or building (6). At the same time, women were expected to live an “honest and sheltered life” (8). During the chaos of the civil war, these strict models of behavior were clearly corrupted as exemplified by Jesusa and the many women like her who joined the military camps. These norms established in the colonial period for women were continually reaffirmed not only by the Church but also by official government policy that regulated women’s bodies during the Porfirian regime. Critic Overmyer-Velázquez describes that the social reformers under the Porfirian dictatorship established clear roles advocating female domesticity in which “women were to remain private and reserved, to be seen in the public only when escorted by a male of ‘decent character’” (66). At the same time, during the project of modernization under Porfirian regime, many sought to control women’s bodies in defined ways: In order to construct a prosperous and modern nation out of the fractious, internecine conflicts of the nineteenth century, Mexican elites throughout the country imagined a nation built upon the virtuous foundation of the family. Women lay at the base of that foundation, both supporting it and oppressed by its weight. (Overmyer-Velázquez 65) This regulation of the female body was openly discussed especially when having to do with the regulation of sex trade in the cities. The ruling class

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Gallo-Gallina 143 charted and controlled the spaces that prostitutes could occupy (73). By mapping these spaces the ruling elites were also defining the spaces that “virtuous” women should not occupy. Putting all of this together, it is possible to see Jesusa’s social context; a structure well established since colonial times and institutionally reaffirmed. Nevertheless, in the short period of the revolution, the strict code of conduct was temporarily punctured, thereby giving women greater mobility and a certain level of freedom. Nevertheless, many times this freedom was really their only means of survival and not necessarily a choice.

Jesusa’s Performance Given the time period in Mexican society, Jesusa has a clear understanding of how and where she can perform her gender. Nevertheless, she does not conform to roles she is expected to embrace nor does she live a sheltered life. She rejects the Catholic Church and joins an obscure religious sect called the Obra Espiritual. She never has any children of her own. She is forced to marry and detests it. She especially loathes cooking and making tortillas (many times a symbol that a woman was marriage-worthy). She avoids any sort of job that will keep her in any interior space for a prolonged period of time. On the contrary, she spends the majority of her time outdoors, thereby transgressing the expectations that she should limit her mobility to convent or household. She consistently trespasses and enjoys spaces usually deemed appropriate for only men: bars, brothels, battlefields, factories, pulquerías, and the nocturnal streets. At the same time, she likes to behave in ways associated with masculinity. She acknowledges the ways in which she does not conform to social norms, even as a child: “Yo era muy hombrada y siempre me gustó jugar a la guerra, a las pedradas, a la rayuela, al trompo, a las canicas, a la lucha, a las patadas, a puras cosas de hombre …” (19–20). [“I was very manly and I always liked to play at war, throw rocks, play hopscotch, play the spin top, play marbles, play at wrestling, play at kicking, purely manly things …” (my translation).] She also speaks of her childhood in very idyllic terms when she was able to play and roam freely in the fields. “Yo era un animal mesteño. Tiraba para el cerro. … Como desde chiquilla no me hallé sino con libertad todo mi gusto era andar sola en el campo o arriba de un cerro” (27–28). [“I was an untamed animal. I would run to the hills. … As a child I had only freedom and my pleasure was to roam the countryside alone or on top of the hills” (my translation).] In other words, she was free and happy in the outdoors, but she did not find the same pleasure in enclosed spaces deemed appropriate for women. Jesusa also says that she was happiest during her childhood and during the combative years in the revolution. Coincidently, these were both moments when she had the most freedom and when she was also able to perform in ways associated with masculinity. Nevertheless, her initial childhood freedom is very much curtailed when she suffers the process of domestication. The way Jesusa is trained to behave

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144  Carmen Serrano like a woman certainly underscores the strict conventions for female behavior. Jesusa’s own description of her upbringing brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s famous words: “[O]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (283). When she is a child, Jesusa describes herself as a wild animal, one with complete freedom; however, when her father remarries, the stepmother, Evarista Valencia, begins to “educate” her in becoming a decent woman. Her education and rearing is of the most violent type considering that she was being molded to fit into proper behavior for her gender in Mexican society. The Valencia family members were wardens at the local prison, and this is where Jesusa lives with her father. In other words, she is literally imprisoned during these formative years. Under the careful gaze of her stepmother, she learns to clean, wash, roast chocolate, and grind spices on a lava stone, or metate, among other labor-intensive duties for a child of eight or nine years. Along with everyone else in the household, she worked from 4 a.m. to about 8 p.m. every day (35). Not surprisingly, these are the duties that she abhors throughout her adult life. Most shockingly, she is made to sleep with a female inmate imprisoned for murder. Every night after a long day of work, she opens the cell door and is tucked deeper into the bowels of the prison in order to accompany the female inmate. It is no wonder that she admires the freedom enjoyed by her male counterparts and not the literal imprisonment she suffers on her path to domestication. When Jesusa narrates the details of her strict upbringing under her vigilant and abusive step-mother, she tries to frame it as a positive experience that was meant for her own benefit, although the reader understands it as quite the opposite: “Y esta señora se dedico a enseñarme a hacer quehacer; me pegó mucho con una vara de membrillo, sí, pero lo hacía por mi bien, para que yo me encarrerara” (35). [“And this woman dedicated her time to teach me household chores; she beat me a lot with a quince rod, yes, but she did it for my own good, so that I would follow the right path” (my translation).] After leaving the prison, for several years she works as a domestic servant in various households where she is continually mistreated, underworked, underfed, or otherwise exploited; however, when the revolution arrives, she breaks free from the domestic walls and wanders into the fields with her father to join the revolution. Like many of the other camp followers, she also sports male clothes, so as to not stand out and to conceal her gender. During her initial days as a female camp follower, she forages, cooks, and serves as a nurse for the troops following the usual duties divided among gender. Most significantly, when she is in the revolutionary camps she expresses her joy and admiration of male freedom: “Al contrario, yo más bien quería hacerle de hombre, alzarme las greñas, ir con los muchachos a correr gallo, a cantar con guitarra cuando ellos les daban su libertad” (70). [“On the contrary, I wanted to perform like a man: put my hair up and serenade with the boys. I wanted to sing along with a guitar when they had their freedom” (my translation).] Because of these experiences, she understands that domesticated women are

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Gallo-Gallina 145 destined to be indoors filling their days with household duties and suffering. Yet she also sees that the outdoors, very much a male domain, is where freedom resides. Outside men can sing, dance, drink, and seek pleasure, and this is exactly what she tries to do. When Jesusa is acting out traits usually associated with men, she is described as fiercer than gallo-gallina (154). Some critics have translated this word as a “junkyard dog,” which does describe her to some extent; however, this gallo-gallina term is especially meaningful in a Mexican context. This term also describes the ambiguously gendered rooster, a sort of androgynous animal used in cock fighting. In typical fights, after the bets are placed, two roosters perform a dance to the death; however, the performance becomes very peculiar when the gallo-gallina is put in the fighting arena. In A Treatise on the History and Management of Ornamental and Domestic Poultry (1853), Edmund Saul Dixon describes that this breed of fowl is specific to Mexican rooster fights. According to the author, this breed resembles an ordinary hen and is supposedly more violent and stronger than the standard rooster. The gallo-gallina is described in the following way: “He has … no bright-coloured plumage, no long pendent feathers on neck or back, nothing, in fact, to mark his sex, but a proud stately gait, and erect mien” (247). During the fight, the common rooster is confronted with another rooster, but in female form; confused, the common rooster does not immediately attack and is consequently massacred. As Dixon states in his treatise, “[i]n Mexico, they are fought without training, and the common game cock will not attack these hen-looking cocks until it is too late” (248). The gallo-gallina reference becomes very useful when describing Jesusa, because she many times performs like this ambiguously gendered creature that embodies both female and male traits. She, like the hen-feathered rooster, dresses her body in female form disguising aspects of herself usually associated with masculinity, especially in reference to adjectives used to describe the macho. When confronted by death, Jesusa’s feisty and combative character emerges, resulting in a truly transformative moment for her. One day, when Pedro, her husband, takes her far away from the military camp, she realizes that he plans to kill her. Pedro, a revolutionary soldier, is cruel and beats her mercilessly and arbitrarily. Initially she does not defend herself but instead accepts this situation quietly and stoically, temporarily assuming the role of a self-sacrificing woman. Nevertheless, at this most dire moment, she outwardly assumes a very male posture when she pulls out a gun and becomes the aggressive and dominant figure. The phallic meaning cannot be overemphasized. This action very much surprises Pedro since up to this point he had completely dominated her. When Jesusa points the gun, she embodies both female and male postures simultaneously: Traía un blusón largo con dos bolsas y en las bolsas me eché las balas y la pistola … No sé de dónde me entró tanto valor, yo creo que de la

146  Carmen Serrano desesperación, y que saco la pistola. Lueguito se asustó, vi claramente que se asustó. (99)

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[In my long blouse I had two pockets in which I put the bullets and the gun … I don’t know where I got so much courage, perhaps from desperation; I took out the gun. Right away he got scared, I saw clearly that he was afraid. (my translation)] After the episode of defiance, Jesusa realizes that violence, as usually performed by men, can be lifesaving. From that point onward, she understands that aggression, as personified in masculinity at that time, is a survival mechanism and a form of empowerment. As proof of her new place of power, she tells her diminished husband: No, ya se volvió el mundo al revés. Ahora no me manda usted, ahora lo mando yo y ahora se va adelante, ándele y si no le gusta, lo trueno aquí … Pedro se volvió más bueno desde que lo balacié … la bendita revolución me ayudó a desenvolverme. (100–01) [No, the world has turned upside down. You don’t give the orders now, I do. Keep walking and if you don’t like it, I’ll shoot you right here … Pedro became a good man after I threatened to shoot him …; the blessed revolution helped me evolve. (my translation)] In this manner, she reverses a form of victimization, and she never again passively accepts violence against her. In this episode she embodies qualities of both genders, recalling the term gallo-gallina that is used to describe her. As I have previously shown, she is able to use her male appearance as camouflage and as a way to establish camaraderie with the other male soldiers. On the flip side, like a gallo-gallina she is able to defend herself when she dresses in female costume. Another example of this female exterior that conceals a more aggressive interior self occurs on the streets of Mexico City. At that time, it was not deemed prudent for women to walk alone in the streets at night. In spite of that, one night she goes out to the theatre with a girlfriend sporting a white dress and wearing her long and beautiful hair down. Her attacker apparently perceives her as feminine and weak. He assaults her not realizing her strong and combative spirit. She surprises him with her violent fighting side by slapping him across the face and later taking a crossbar off the door and beating him and even pursuing him down the streets, striking him again and again. Jesusa is quick to realize that her female exterior accompanied by her ability to fight violently, like a man, is not only a survival strategy, but can also be disarming. The injured man tries to denounce her to the authorities, but since it seems unbelievable that one woman could cause such horrible injuries, he officially declares that he was attacked by five women and six men, therefore avoiding shame and inadvertently giving Jesusa her freedom. In another false statement, the man says “No, si fueron muchos hombres y muchas

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Gallo-Gallina 147 mujeres las que me golpearon. Conmigo no puede uno solo, menos una mujer” (179). [“No, there were a lot of men and a lot of women who beat me. One person couldn’t take me on, much less a woman” (my translation).] In this way, her female demeanor coupled with her fighting expertise again gives her protection and autonomy. This episode also stresses male preoccupation with performing in ways in which they cannot be humiliated or dominated by another, a stance that Jesusa assumes by not backing down when confronted by a man. Jesusa seems to enjoy dressing as a man and riding horses with the men and making fun of straitlaced women; however, she also enjoys dressing in ways associated with femininity. For example, when her husband leaves for battle during the revolution and she is left in a small town to wait for him, she again performs in an ambiguous way that dislocates expectations having to do with female behavior. Feeling lonely and abandoned, she decides to go into business selling liquor with another woman, a widow. While selling liquor on the streets of Chilpancingo, she acts in ways very much associated with the notions of the macho. For example, she describes how she would make drinking bets with the customers, men mostly, and always win. She also claims to have finished four to five bottles of mezcal never suffering a hangover. In spite of behaving in this way, paradoxically, she fondly remembers that she also wore the finest and the most delicate of clothes: ¡Y nunca tuve vestidos tan bonitos, corpiños con encajes de bolitas y enaguas amponas de muchos olanes! Hasta vestido de seda, hágame el favor ¡y blusas de satén! ¡Y horquillas para alzarme el chongo con cintas de colores! (89) [I never had such pretty dresses, bodices with lace and petticoats with lots of frills! Even a dress of silk, oh please! And a satin blouse! And hairpins to raise my hair with colored ribbons! (my translation)] Clearly the exclamation points and the list of fine and expensive items draw attention to the pleasure she found in dressing in feminine clothing. Dressed in this manner, she is able to sell liquor in the streets while singing and outdrinking men. This instance again emphasizes the female/male binary she so many times tries to fuse in her performance. Arguably, Jesusa is trying to create a more meaningful and full life for herself in a world that she deems unfair to women. In the examples mentioned, I describe the ways in which she enjoys dressing like a man and performing like a man at times, but I also describe how she enjoys certain aspects associated with female behavior. She never completely assumes a male role at all times, but rather switches her gender performance. Sometimes she behaves in ways very much associated with the macho and other times she behaves in ways usually associated with women and still, at other times, she seems to combine both.

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148  Carmen Serrano Jesusa explores the ways in which she can perform both female and male roles differently. By doing this, she is able to temporarily enjoy freedom in ways that other women could not, especially during the revolution. Clearly, she desires the same privileges that men have, and she dresses her body to obtain the maximum amount of power, protection, and pleasure; however, her ambiguous gender constitution is unsustainable in a society that desires clearly defined modes of behavior. Despite her strength and courage, she ultimately does not transcend female gender roles. Likewise, she is unable to better her social position even after participating in the Mexican ­Revolution. There is a peculiar mirroring of failed projects. According to her, the ambitious aims of the Mexican Revolution are in the end unrealized. ­Similarly, her attempts at corrupting normative gender are untenable. Both were promising illusions of equality that went awry.

Works Cited Batra, Nandita. “After Androgyny: The Dialectics of Gender.” Atenea 14.1 (1994): 53–63. Print. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage, 2011. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. ———. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. London: Routledge, 2004. 187–99. Print. Clendinnen, Inga. Aztecs: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Diedrich, Maria, and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s. New York: Berg, 1990. Print. Dixon, Edmund S., and J. J. Kerr. A Treatise on the History and Management of Ornamental and Domestic Poultry. Philadelphia: Butler, 1851. Print. Egan, Linda. “Let No One Guess Her Sex: Sor Juana, Jesusa Palancares and the Mask of Androgyny.” Cuadernos de música, artes visuales y artes escénicas 4 (2009): 27–52. Print. Gaytán, Marie Sarita, and Ana G. Valenzuela Zapata. “Más allá del mito: mujeres, tequila y nación.” Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos 28.1 (2012): 183–208. Print. Hancock, Joel. “Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío: The Remaking of the Image of Woman.” Hispania 66.3 (1983): 353–59. Print. Hargreaves, Tracy. Androgyny in Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print. Jörgensen, Beth E. The Writing of Elena Poniatowska: Engaging Dialogues. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Print. Knight, Alan. “The Mexican Revolution.” History Today 30.5 (1980): n. pag. Web. 10 July 2013. Medina, Rubén. “El mestizaje a través de la frontera: Vasconcelos y Anzaldúa.” Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos 25.1 (2009): 101–23. Print.

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Gallo-Gallina 149 Meeks, Wayne A. “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity.” History of Religions 13.3 (1974): 165–208. Print. Overmyer-Velázquez, Mark. “Portraits of a Lady: Visions of Modernity in Porfirian Oaxaca City.” Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos 23.1 (2007): 63–100. Print. Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. 1950. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Print. ———. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. 1950. Trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press, 1985. Print. Poniatowska, Elena. Hasta no verte Jesús mío. 1969. México: Ediciones Era, 2009. Print. ———. “Hasta no verte Jesús mío: Jesusa Palancares.” Vuelta 24 (1978): 7–9. Print. ———. Las soldaderas. México, D.F: Ediciones Era, 1999. Print. Rado, Lisa. The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000. Print. Reséndez Fuentes, Andrés. “Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution.” The Americas 51.4 (1995): 525–53. Print. Socolow, Susan Migden. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. Stanton, Anthony. “Models of Discourse and Hermeneutics in Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 20.2 (2001): 210–32. Print. Thornton, Niamh. “(Trans)Gendered Lines in Conflict: Jesusa in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83.1 (2006): 87–101. Print. Vasconcelos, José. La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana. 1925. México: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1948. Print.

9 Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity

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Public and Private Spaces in R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend Wolfgang Holtkamp Sociologists often understand “sexual and gender identities as products of interaction between structure and agency” (Valocchi 755). They argue that the institutionalization of social structure and culture shapes and stabilizes identity. Thus, the power of the state and various other social institutions also largely determines gender identities. However, within institutional parameters “individuals and groups can exercise agency and enact their individual identities in different ways or mobilize their identities collectively to change the institutional structure to gain material and cultural support for a different understanding of the meaning of those identities” (755). This type of sociological approach presumes that there actually is an agency that operates within the social paradigm. In opposition to the structure/agency paradigm, queer theory sees agency itself as a social creation “derived from the manifold social, cultural and economic forces that construct the false notion of the autonomous self, and provide the discursive material for the conscious and unconscious enactment of that self” (755). For Judith Butler, for instance, identities are formed in a repeated performance of certain cultural practices and conventions. As a result, the conscious and unconscious connection to the norms and cultural signifiers of sexuality and gender both bring the subject into being. At the same time, they strictly limit the identity enactments of that subject (see “Critically Queer” 17–18). For Butler, individuals internalize the norms offered by discourses of sexuality and gender and thus function as self-­regulating subjects. This aspect is addressed in queer theory’s understanding of heteronormativity as a “set of norms that make heterosexuality seem natural or right and that organize homosexuality as its binary opposite” (Valocchi 756). This can be illustrated by a discussion of laws curtailing homosexuality in India. For instance, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code from 1861 declares homosexual relation as unnatural and therefore illegal. This paragraph was changed on July 2, 2009, by the High Court of Delhi, stating that homosexual relations/acts would not be a felony any more. However, four years later the Indian Supreme Court overruled this decision and “upheld India’s 1861 sodomy statute” (Katyal 12).

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Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity  151 This decision can be seen as an expression of heteronormativity as defined by Laurent Berlant and Michael Warner. They use the term “heteronormativity” referring to “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent—that is organized as a sexuality—but also privileged” (355). The authors believe that such coherence is always provisional. It can either be unmarked (as the basic idiom of the personal and the social), marked (as a natural state), or projected (as an ideal or moral accomplishment). Here it must be noted that heteronormativity differs from heterosexuality in that it has no parallel. In terms of binary oppositions, homosexuality is in opposition to heterosexuality; however, there is no opposite of heteronormativity. In this chapter, I apply the theoretical framework introduced above to Raj Rao’s novel The Boyfriend (2003) which shows the situation of homosexuals in Mumbai in the 1990s by challenging heteronormativity. Rao’s novel presents conflicts of queer Mumbai featuring Yudi, a forty-something freelance journalist; Milind Mahadik, a semi-literate office peon and Dalit boy with whom Yudi falls in love; and Gauri, a female artist and eco-activist from a wealthy background who loves Yudi. This is the frame for the homonormative and heteronormative negotiations that the characters engage: “Every cultural form, be it a novel or an after-hours club or an academic lecture, indexes a virtual social world, in ways that range from a repertoire of styles and speech genres to referential metaculture” (Berlant and Warner 362). Challenging the norms of their culture, the characters find a compromise with regard to their expectations and expressions in life. However, before this happens, Rao investigates a number of issues related to class, caste, religion, and masculinity. Rao’s novel challenges the status quo and investigates gender roles with fictional lives of the poor, the middle class, and the rich. He does so by sketching a lively and colorful portrait of Mumbai’s public and private places, where traditional gender roles are tested, homosexuality is equated with liberty, and personal decisions and dilemmas are met and challenged. The novel questions notions of sexuality and identity—“the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture” (Berlant and Warner 355). Due to its many topics, the novel seems to get off balance at times (see Sahgal, online) but effectively tries to unsettle the powerful norms of heterosexuality in India. Rao’s protagonist Yudi believes in the homonormativity of a gay world. Yet he must learn that his ideal cannot be achieved under the conditions he lives in. The novel seems to suggest a type of performativity that can be seen as a type of binormativity, shaped by heteronormative and homonormative features. With regard to heteronormativity, two examples from the U.S., given by Berlant and Warner, illustrate the social space that also Rao refers to in his discussion of gender roles throughout his novel. The first one is a Time Magazine special issue about immigration called “The New Face of America” which was published in 1993, the year of the

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152  Wolfgang Holtkamp setting of The Boyfriend. The novel was actually published in 2003. According to Berlant and Warner, Time showed “what the model citizen will look like when, in the year 2004, it is projected, there is no longer a white statistical majority in the United States” (356). The magazine cover girl presents a morphed computer simulation that encompasses various immigrant groups (e.g., Middle Eastern, African, and Asian). This amalgamated person suggests a national future based on blood relations rather than racial difference: “In the twenty-first century, Time imagines, hundreds of millions of hybrid faces will erase American racism altogether: the nation will become a happy racial monoculture made up of ‘one (mixed) blood’” (356). This very idea is based on the concept of national heterosexuality: National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship. … In Time’s face it is not symbolic femininity but practical heterosexuality that guarantees the monocultural nation. (Berlant and Warner 356) The second example of heteronormativity provided by Berlant and Warner refers to a zoning law, passed by the New York City Council in 1995, which postulates that adult media and social businesses like bookstores, theaters, and clubs may only operate in certain areas (357). Their essay states that none of these businesses was a target of local complaints: “Gay men have come to take for granted the availability of explicit sexual materials, theaters, and clubs. That is how they have learned to find each other; to map a commonly accessible world; to construct the architecture of queer space in a homophobic environment” (357). The authors see the United States as a heterosexual culture but stress at the same time “that national heterosexuality is anything like a simple monoculture. Hegemonies are nothing if not elastic alliances, involving dispersed and contradictory strategies for self-maintenance and reproduction” (358). With regard to the situation in India, The Boyfriend operates within this contradictory social space in the presentation of its main characters and their ambivalent relations to each other and the world around them. In the novel Yudi lives in Nalla Supara and commutes in notoriously overcrowded trains to the newspaper agencies in Colaba, Mumbai’s central business area. He frequently has sex with strangers in various places: “Certain parts of certain toilets, certain bogeys of certain trains, certain areas of certain parks stop being mere public facilities and come into view for what they are: forums for fevered homosexual activity, where all kinds of men—rich, poor, beggars and thieves—come to hustle other men” (Sahgal). The novel’s settings vary between editors’ offices, art openings, filthy toilets, and the one gay bar in Mumbai, Testosterone: “The novel submits an unsentimental Mumbai: a crazy, cruel layered and labyrinthine city, both physically and psychologically, full of cultural chaos and class conflict, where people

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Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity  153 stumble through their lives, making a buck, pushing their luck, looking for love in all the wrong places” (Sahgal). At the time of its publication, homosexuality was illegal in India and punishable by ten years’ imprisonment. The Boyfriend has been acclaimed as a major “coming out” for gay India. Terry Goldie reminds us, however, that India has a different perception of homosexuality than the West: “While homosexual acts remain illegal in India, opportunistic malemale sex has been tacitly accepted as ‘masti’ or play, a form that does not necessarily disrupt the essence of Indian society, which is heterosexual marriage (online).” Aradhika Sekhon believes that “[t]he novel is an eye-opener insofar as the extent of the homosexuality prevalent in Mumbai goes” and continues: “For R. Raj Rao, it appears, homosexuality is not an ‘issue’ or a ‘concern’ but merely a fact of life that he is living through” (online). His protagonists deal with homosexuality in Mumbai in private and public spaces: gay hang-outs and earmarked places like certain compartments in local trains, Churchgate Station, areas in public parks like Azad Maidan or some city streets are explicitly mentioned as locations challenging heteronormativity. Simon During, editor of The Cultural Studies Reader in which Berlant and Warner’s essay was published, argues that the personal and the public are divided most by the “idea that the personal is where intimacy happens, with sex being the most intimate area of all” (354). In the authors’ understanding, “sex and intimacy are used to regulate the personal/public opposition so routinely that sex and intimacy might be used to shift and unsettle that opposition. [Their] essay appeals for ‘non-standard intimacies’ and welcomes occasions where such intimacies occur in some kind of public space” (During 354). Rao’s novel shows the instability of the public/private opposition with regard to Mumbai’s gay community. This becomes evident in the novel’s opening paragraph titled “Gentlemen,” which introduces the reader to Mumbai’s Churchgate station: [It] is a tranquil place on a Sunday morning. It doesn’t choke with humanity as it does Monday to Saturday. The station is an asylum for Bombay’s down and out, but on a Sunday morning one is unlikely to find too many bootblacks. Even they like to forget their Cherry Blossom tins and loll about in bed till mid-day, like the youngsters in high rises on Cuffe Parade and Malabar Hill. … Trains, of course, keep zooming in and out. But there are no stampedes on the platform. (Rao 1) Yudi has made it a routine to come to Churchgate to purchase his Sunday newspaper: “And then, of course, there was the loo. He would be lying if he did not admit that this was the most urgent of factors that drove him to Churchgate. The gent’s toilet at Churchgate provided a twenty-four-hour supply of men; the amount of semen that went down the urine bowls was enough to start a sperm bank” (2). The omniscient third-person narrator

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154  Wolfgang Holtkamp tells us this matter of factly which corresponds to Shekon’s evaluation of the novel. The public space of the urinal is used as a semi-private space among Mumbai’s gay community. The “[i]nstabilty of the public/private opposition, especially the way in which private life is actually lived as if it were open to wider—more public—inspection and assessment, as a kind of open secret” (During 354) is known among the city’s gay population. Large cities in India often have public places such as bars “where young men preen on the dance floor and older men leer from the corner. The former have the latest fashions and the latter have the money” (Goldie, online). However, Rao makes his protagonists meet in a well-known public toilet of a Mumbai commuter train station rather than a gay bar: The Churchgate loo has two sections. By convention one of them is the gay wing, the other the straight. The hetero wing, of course, has a better supply of mainstream men, but one dare not cruise in that area for fear of being bashed up. The gay wing gets nice guys only intermittently. As a college student, Yudi often felt like spending the whole day inside the loo to see what it yielded. But that was possible only in theory. There were loo attendants who knew what went on inside; some of them were on the payroll of the cops. They looked at people who hung around the loo with a great deal of suspicion. (Rao 6) It is here that Yudi meets nineteen-year-old Milind with whom he has hurried sex at his mother’s close-by apartment. Yudi is selfish about his interest in young men. To make Milind his lover, he decides to buy him goods for sex: He would locate Kishore [Milind], take him out for a beer, and put to him his proposal: would he be his steady? If he refused, he would take him out to swanky shopping mall, and ask him to choose what he wanted: shirt, trouser, bicycle, pen, shoes, goggles, wristwatch. And then he would repeat his proposal. (40) They eventually lose track of each other, but during the 1993 Mumbai riots Yudi is concerned about Milind’s safety. To his surprise he discovers that he has fallen in love with Milind and sets out to look for him. Yudi is neither a charismatic torchbearer nor a gay rights activist. His agenda is determined by his sexual desire as Sekhon points out: “He is totally honest and comfortable with his sexuality and very categorical about his sexual preferences and inclinations” (online). Rao follows this member of the middle class whose dilemma is his situation as a homosexual in a heteronormative society which only opens a few public spaces for its gay members: “Testosterone, after all, was Bombay’s only gay bar, and the city had more homos than the populations of London and Paris put together” (92). Yudi is conscious of social codes, just as other

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Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity  155 people are of proper attire. However, by choosing to perform his homosexuality, he has to navigate gender norms. As Lester observes, “[o]ne’s gender identity (and performances) are determined to the extent that social norms support and enable the performances. [While] the content of the performance is determined by social convention, thus limiting individual agency … [it] is not entirely limited, and by overperforming or resisting the norm, the norm is exposed and has the potential for social transformation” (Lester 283). However, Yudi’s gender performances are “stylized repetition[s] of acts” (Butler, Gender Trouble 140). After a chance encounter that brings Milind and him together again, Yudi starts buying new shirts, trousers, and shoes for his young friend. This time this action should not be read as an attempt to buy Milind but as an act of disguising him and their situation. The interplay between (hetero)normativity and subjectivity occurs within the limits of uniformity as expressed by the style of clothes. In the novel, “outgrowing” the uniform pattern does not occur in the public space but first and foremost in the private place. The older, richer, intellectually superior journalist and the much younger peon and fetch-and-carry person “with the most disgusting habits of personal and spatial hygiene” (Sekhon online) meet regularly and, before going on a short vacation together, spend a whole week at Yudi’s apartment. Yudi is aware of their class and caste difference as this conversation between him and Milind shows: “Homos are no different from Bhangis. Both are Untouchables. So why should I have a problem eating jootha?” “But you are a Brahman, aren’t you?” “No. I am a homosexual. Gay by caste. Gay by religion.” “I don’t understand what you are saying.” “What I am saying is that homosexuals have no caste or religion. They have only their homosexuality.” (Rao 81) The retreat to the private place of Yudi’s apartment in Nalla Sopara, far away from Mumbai’s public center, is both a tribute to the social situation and a first attempt to establish a “homonormative ritual” for them. Acknowledging his situation, Yudi calls his place ironically “Mate House,” a homophonic play on the owner’s surname which is “Maa-tey.” The apartment becomes a place of improvisation and symbolical performance: Yudi and Milind start their week together with purification and a mutual washing and cleansing act that leaves the outside world behind and puts them on a more equal level: They soaped each other copiously, till both looked like astronauts, just back from the moon, and scrubbed every inch of each other’s bodies … By the time they had washed off the rich lather, so much water

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had seeped out from under the door that a part of the flat had been transformed into Vasai Creek. (Rao 103) Both are symbolically reborn. Their ritual bath resembles one in a river and takes on the mythological meaning of a new quality for their relation. This scene in the private space of the apartment foreshadows one in the public space outside of Café Volga, another popular hangout for them, sometime later during a pre-monsoon shower: Both Yudi and Milind felt rejuvenated by the raindrops that lashed against their skin. Their anger melted away and they hugged each other as if it were in Yudi’s bathroom, showering together. They allowed themselves to get drenched to the bone. Yudi even managed to kiss Milind in public—their first kiss in weeks—because when it rains cats and dogs in Bombay no one is bothered about anyone but himself. (Rao 148) The atmospheric change indicates, on the one hand, a climax in their relation, but the upcoming clouds hint, on the other hand, at a turning point in Milind’s personal situation because he has “various issues with ‘­manliness,’ [and] money [and] does not share Yudi’s comfort levels with sexuality” (­Sekhon, online). With Milind, Rao presents a contradictory character who is reluctant to admit his sexual orientation and almost violent about defending his masculinity. Milind feels a need to perform the norms established by his social environment. Soon after their public kiss he disappears without any trace, which makes Yudi eventually look for him at Milind’s home. ­Visiting Milind’s family raises very existential questions for Yudi. Even though he usually feels secure in private spaces, in this case he is very uncomfortable due to his ignorance about his friend’s background: Beggars on one side, prisoners on the other. An eclipse in the sky above. Yudi felt like a prisoner and a beggar rolled into one. Why else was he making this journey to a house where he couldn’t be welcome, calling on a family who, if they knew who he was, would be shamed by his presence? For crumbs of mercy? For deliverance from the prison of an emotion he thought he had overcome years ago? (Rao 163) Homosexuals and untouchables are conflated here again. Not knowing that Yudi is Milind’s lover, the family invites him to a pilgrimage to Chaitya Bhoomi Mandir at Shivaji Park to pray for Milind’s safe return. During the procession, Yudi notices how the dalits are looked upon by the bystanders and the policemen: Many of them seemed to believe in untouchability still. They took great precautions to make sure no one’s shadow fell on them. Or else

Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity  157

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they would have to rush home and bathe! In the last analysis, they regarded the lives of these fellows as worthless. What difference did it make if some of them died in the melee, or drowned in the Shivaji Park Sea? The world would be rid of that many Chamars. (172) This is not only the situation of the untouchables, but also Yudi’s and that of Mumbai’s homosexuals by extension. Meanwhile Milind takes a different route to find himself. He wants to take part of the economic upswing he observes around himself and that Yudi is part of: “How long could he let life pass him by, while all his desires to eat good food, wear swanky clothes, and own consumer durables remained unfulfilled?” (183). Milind joins a modeling/call-boy agency run by a closeted bisexual film star. The split identity of its owner is reflected by that of the agency’s clients. Their sexual orientation remains hidden from their families; they rent hotel rooms or own second homes for their sexual pleasure. This double-life is the model Milind relies on. Rao also shows how money is made by trading sex. ­Milind is “picked up by ad men, mad men, corporates, corporators, and once a retired Army General” (200). He escapes from this situation the moment a client tries to rape him and returns home to his parents. They do not know about his past, welcome their prodigal son, and decide to marry him and his older brother off. At this point, Milind does not resist this form of assimilation but accepts the social norm of arranged marriage: “Regulatory power operates on gender and has its own disciplinary regime, which primarily functions as a norm” (Lester 284). Milind’s behavior represents and reinforces social practices that will be partly challenged later in the novel. “Why must we arrive?” (Rao 131) is one of Yudi’s most often asked questions. He thus wonders how one can proceed given the constraints imposed by society. In his novel, Rao explores gay relationships alongside familial relationships. With Milind gone, Yudi falls ill: “The reason for all of Yudi’s problems, they agreed, was that he had no woman to take care of him” (191). Yudi’s mother reflects on the implications of her son’s situation in life: “If he were married,” she said to herself, “there would be somebody to look after him and I could die in peace.” She knew why her son was a bachelor, but it wasn’t something she could bring herself to talk about, even in her nightmares. “Where did I go wrong?” she frequently asked herself in moments of despondency. On his part, although Yudi was radically gay, he respected his mother’s old-fashioned views and never openly discussed the subject with her. There was a magnificent no man’s land between them. (193) Yudi’s mother acknowledges this heteronormative aspect when she expresses her belief that Yudi and Gauri could be at least friends: “‘Please take care of Yudi,’ she pleaded with the younger woman. ‘He’s so lucky to have a friend like you. I am getting old. Who knows how long I have to live?’” (196).

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Perhaps to spare Yudi’s mother, the closeted characters engage in various form of pretense: Pretence was everywhere in the air. Yudi’s mom pretended not to be embarrassed by the pictures of almost naked men (including one of Ajay Kapur) that he’d put up all over the house. The sex of the people in the pin-ups bothered her more than their nudity. If nakedness was what he cherished, why couldn’t he put up posters of Manisha Koirala? Why did it always have to be men, men and men? On his part, Yudi pretended to be happy, when the truth was that he was anything but, because if he went about sulking, his poor mom would think she was unwelcome in the house. (198) Gauri, on the other hand, is aware of Yudi’s sexual preferences. But she is also madly in love with him and wants to marry him, thus meeting her own expectations, those of her parents, and those of Yudi’s mother. Rao’s critique of institutionalized forms of arranged and pretended partnership in India is also obvious in the description of Milind’s wedding to which Yudi is invited by Milind’s elder brother Rajesh who seems to know about the two men’s relationship. Gauri wants to accompany him to the wedding, but Yudi prefers to go alone: Moreover, to go with her would be to accede that heterosexuality had triumphed, for they would only be seen as the third start couple by all and sundry, after RAJESH WITH SHEELA and MILIND WITH LEELA; YUDI WITH GAURI! … Couldn’t she see that this was a tender moment in Yudi’s life, when he wanted to be left alone?” (217–18) Milind’s arranged marriage does not go well. The novel’s final chapter presents the characters three years later with Milind and his family living in Kandivili slum in constant need of money. His wife suggests contacting his rich friend for money: “She ordered her husband to go and see Yudi. For the sake of the children” (223). Reluctantly Milind obeys and finds a welcoming and forgiving Yudi who accepts the new arrangement. Milind would be both his wife’s husband and Yudi’s lover, albeit in exchange for money that Milind wants to keep for himself. Still, he is confused about his new double role: “What did it mean to him, his meeting with Yudi? He wasn’t sure” (230). Gauri follows a similar strategy: “For sex, and a fat allowance she turned her attention to a widower of sixty who was looking for a wife” (227). She does not marry him but sees Yudi nearly every day: “She hadn’t succeeded in reclaiming Yudi, but one day it had occurred to her that she must think of him as a sister. That did it. From that day onwards, Gauri’s brain was conditioned, at last, into viewing Yudi as a non-sexual object” (227). At the end of the novel, when she expresses an interest in Milind’s wife, it is

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Performing Identity as a Challenge to Heteronormativity  159 suggested that Gauri might turn lesbian; this sounds like a “perfect arrangement” (232) to Yudi. The novel does not follow this course, but it seems ironic that Rao’s attempt to give voice to the marginalized objectifies Milind’s wife at the same time. Rao overcomes traditional, stereotypical arrangements and in presenting his characters favors performative models of gender identities: “Individuals do not just perform gender roles as a character fictitiously adopts roles for a play; rather, individuals perform roles in relation to their identity and often recreate and reinforce their gender identity through the act of performing” (Lester 284). Nonetheless, the plot’s ending seems overstretched, even for the sympathetic reader and critic. In his exploration of what it means to be a modern Indian writer, Amit Chaudhuri compares the Indian writer to the prevailing Indian paradigm for the a son-in-law as someone we can be proud of, can depend on, who is, above all, a safe investment. He is solvent; preferably settled abroad. He is capable of addressing questions consonant with our emerging prestige. He is not a failure, a daydreamer, a misfit. The Anglophone intellectual tradition in India, unlike other intellectual lineages in modernity, has developed no space for daydreaming, irresponsibility, failure, or for the outsider; it has little understanding of the role these play in shaping the imaginative life. (309) The Boyfriend challenges notions about power structures in India and the individual’s role in a social reality that negates its gay and lesbian members. Rao thematizes the role of the sexual outsider in modern day Mumbai not as an exception but as a matter of fact. It is one of the novel’s strongest accomplishments to follow a curious and open approach of this matter in a straightforward fashion. This works against muddled conceptions of love in contemporary Indian society: The idea of love, in India, is a very confused one. … The meaning of romantic love, for instance, has been debatably changed. On one hand, 9 out of 10 marriages are still arranged, and on the other, there have been laws legalising live-in relationships. Moral policing, of course, is another story. What is probably accepted in some parts of the Indian society is, however, majorly not accepted in other parts. (Puthillam 98) In The Boyfriend, Rao presents identity as created by constant negotiations. Moreover, the novel, just like its characters, is in the process of being made and shows that “identity is not a fixed state of being, but a fluid process that is able to change. Multiple and competing identities exist simultaneously with individuals choosing to perform each identity based on the contexts

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160  Wolfgang Holtkamp in which they find themselves” (Lester 283). To various degrees, this applies to the gender performances of all three main characters. Their intimacy and their experiences may irritate the reader, but they also make Rao not just a writer about Mumbai, but intellectually and emotionally of Mumbai: After all: “Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city” (Berlant and Warner 365). Against the background of public and private spaces, Rao contributes to a redefinition of Indianness: “Indian writing, in the last one hundred and fifty years, presents not so much a one-dimensional struggle for, or embodiment of, power, as a many-sided cosmopolitanism” (Chaudhuri 311). As a result, the discussion of homonormative vs. heteronormative identities has been shifted from margin to center.

Works Cited Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 2003. 354–67. Print. Butler, Judith. “Critically Queer.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 1.1 (1993): 17–32. Print. ———. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Chaudhuri, Amit. Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature, and Culture. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008. Print. During, Simon, ed. “Introduction.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 1–30. Print. Goldie, Terry. “R. Raj Rao’s The Boyfriend: A Model of the Indian Homosexual?” Web. 10 June 2008. . Katyal, Sonia K. “India’s Troubling Reversal on Gay Rights.” International New York Times 16 Dec. 2013: 12. Print. Lester, Jaime. “Performing Gender in the Workplace.” Community College Review 35.4 (2008): 277–306. Print. Puthillam, Arathy. “The Relevance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Contemporary India.” Ithaka Nov. (2013): 96–101. Print. Rao, R. Raj. The Boyfriend. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003. Print. Sahgal, Tara. “Sex and the City: The Chaotic Side of Mumbai’s Gay Subculture.” 2 June 2003. Web. . Sekhon, Aradhika. “Portraying Mumbai’s Gay Underbelly.” 15 June 2003. 10 June 2008. Web. . Valocchi, Stephen. “Not Yet Queer Enough: The Lessons of Queer Theory for the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality.” Gender and Society 19.6 (2005): 750–70. Print.

10 Performing Butterfly Medial Constructions of Ethnic Identity

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Angelika Koehler

For more than a century, the Butterfly myth, the archetype of Oriental femininity, has functioned as a highly ambivalent trope calling into question established Western concepts of gender, genre, race, and empire. The story of Madame Butterfly is the result of multiple interactions of diverse texts and contexts: these range from the narrative of German physician Dr. Philip Franz von Siebold, who taught Western medicine in the Nagasaki area during the 1820s (van Rij 19–22), to Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysanthème, a light opera of the same title composed by André Messager, to John Luther Long’s short story “Madame Butterfly,” and David Belasco’s play and Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly. The Japonisme of the late 1890s, an American fascination with Eastern culture, is one of the roots of today’s transcultural concepts and has gained new significance in postmodern discourses. The numerous retellings of the Butterfly myth in the twentieth century1 document the instability of the trope, its refusal of coherence. Lacking an identifiable original referent, the Butterfly trope materializes Judith Butler’s concept of identity as “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (25). Only reconstructed on page, stage, or screen—performing or impersonating the Butterfly figure—can it gain meaning and thus empower the ethnic performance to “be read as parody, calling into question the concept of cultural essence” (Christian 17). The ongoing fascination with the Butterfly story, about an Asian female sacrificing herself for a Western male, is rooted in its ambiguity, its infinite potential for interpretation. It was bound to be transformed into a myth because the story is decidedly open to generic versatility. As the linguistic hybridity of its name already implies, the myth of Madame Butterfly is located in a borderland space that “speaks to the concerns of cultures increasingly uncertain of their self-representations within an increasingly mediated and globalized technoscope” (Cavell 158). Simultaneously marked by a provocative elasticity and an extraordinarily dense cultural significance, the story possesses what Homi Bhabha calls the “power of supplementarity” (306), the power of seeing things differently. This essay seeks to explore some of the complexities of mediated performances of ethnicity and to promote an encounter with Orientalism as a process of cultural self-positioning and self-examination. I propose a way

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of reading the Butterfly trope that focuses on its performativity, taking into account the performative potential of media to create meaning. A wide spectrum of techniques and aesthetic strategies of postmodern de- and reconstructions of the myth of the Asian woman is used in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg’s movie version of the play, Joyce Wadler’s prose narrative Liaison, the musical Miss Saigon, and a screened version as well as a filmed live performance of the opera.

Experimenting with Stereotypes: David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988) When in 1986 the American playwright David Henry Hwang came upon a brief report on a French diplomat’s love affair with a Chinese actress— who after nearly twenty years turned out to be a man—his interest was not directed at the question of how a man could manage to play the female part in a heterosexual love relationship for so long but why he succeeded so easily in his role play. Hwang found the answer in the Butterfly myth and felt inspired to rewrite the Western envisioning of the demure and submissive Asian woman2 by blending the historical events with the myth of the Oriental female as a butterfly. “[D]oing a deconstructionist Madame Butterfly” (Hwang, “Afterword” 95), the playwright created a metafictional text in which the story of Puccini’s opera provides the context for a “Frenchman [to] fantasize that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that it is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman was duped by love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton” (95–96). With this example of politically subversive theater, Hwang follows Brecht’s concept of re-theatricalization but produces a postmodern play that goes beyond simple gender- and culture-crossing. M. Butterfly is highly self-reflexive. Its meta-level is supported by “a host of Eastern and Western, elite and popular representational styles” such as Kabuki theater, Chinese Opera, Western opera, television sitcoms” (Watt and Richardson qtd. in Kerkhoff, online). Still, the diverse theatrical styles and techniques do not simply blend. Functioning on stage and upstage at the same time, they reveal the binary opposition of West versus East (illusion versus reality, dominance versus subordination) as arbitrarily constructed constellations that can be easily exchanged for each other. They show what a Western male imagination supposes an Oriental woman to be like and play with the concept of Occidental male superiority which assumes, as Song argues in the French courtroom, that “being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (Hwang 83). Thus, the Chinese opera singer takes advantage of his double consciousness as a feminized Asian male. M. Butterfly’s multiple role play confronts and ridicules the Western world in a humorous way with its own stereotypical self-image. Simultaneously it exemplifies how the assumed power structures are gendered, thus pointing to the vulnerability and fragility of the concepts of Western dominance. Still,

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Performing Butterfly  163 using stereotypes against themselves is daring and dangerous at the same time (Watt and Richardson in Kerkhoff, online); the reversal of stereotypes runs the risk of creating new ones since, as the play demonstrates, “neither man really wins, no matter who plays which role, they are still caught up in the conflict of binaries, unable to escape the old ‘racist and sexist clichés’” (Ross 116). Unfortunately, Hwang becomes the victim of his own biased perception of Western culture when he acknowledges his familiarity with the Butterfly image as a simplified cultural stereotype. However, he is not familiar with the historical origins of this myth, which for more than a century has actually challenged stereotypical concepts of Asian women. Casting himself in the role of Pinkerton, Hwang’s protagonist Gallimard wants to live the Oriental fantasy negotiated by his nineteenth-century predecessors from Long to Puccini as rather purposefully constructed for the benefit of imperial Western masculinity. The Chinese American writer’s reductionist reading of the narrative of Puccini’s Butterfly as that of a “lotus blossom pining away for a cruel Caucasian man, and dying for her love” (Hwang, “Afterword” 95) disregards its protagonist’s female strength. Her remarkable potential for self-expression and pride in an Eastern cultural tradition finally empowers the supposedly demure Japanese woman to die with honor, thus following her father’s Samurai values in order to secure her moral integrity, her loyalty, and heroism. Pinkerton and his wife gamble their life with honor for their belief in a cultural stereotype and remain burdened with the memory— personified by Cio-Cio-San and Pinkerton’s son—of having succeeded in raising the child only at the expense of his mother’s death. If Hwang’s Song tells Gallimard that he will “never do Butterfly again” (Hwang 17), he can only refer to the Western stereotype, but not to Puccini’s figure of Madame Butterfly.3 We also need to be careful not to read M. Butterfly too closely within the context of the historical Boursicot-Shi case, since, as my discussion of the semi-fictional, semi-authentic Liaison by Joyce Wadler will show, a simple role and power reversal creates another dangerously reductionist reading of the obviously much more complex situation of Asian men. Nevertheless, as a 1988 play, M. Butterfly marks a significant achievement in the discourses of cultural and gender identity construction and justifies being read as a fictionalization of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Pointing to the self-destructive potential of the Western man’s imperial fantasies, it reveals the hegemonic position of the Occident in general and the assumed superiority of Western masculinity in particular as elements of a tradition in which the Oriental world functions as its other.

Masculinity in Crisis: David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly (1993) David Cronenberg’s 1993 movie, based on the play and produced in cooperation with David Henry Hwang, renegotiates the playwright’s concept

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164  Angelika Koehler of revenge. Transferring the stage production into the medium of film has resulted in cinematic techniques that do not simply vary the modes of narration. Cronenberg’s adaptation does not immediately construct a metafictional context. Gallimard is introduced as a lower-ranking employee, a diligent accountant at the French embassy in Beijing. Caught in a series of close-ups, he appears to be likeable, even slightly pitiful, not just due to his uninspiring job, his ignorance of the cultural specifics of his country of temporary residence, and his unfamiliarity with the European opera tradition, but also due to his marriage to a dominant, rather non-emotional woman. Listening to an aria from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly performed by the ­Chinese singer Song Liling, Gallimard is fascinated by the unexpected sameness of his projection of a fragile (Oriental) woman and the Chinese actress. He immediately falls in love with her as the personification of a woman who is prepared to die for her love for a man—a Western man. The imperial contexts soon become apparent when Gallimard, returning from a performance of the traditional Beijing Opera, encounters an old Chinese man catching dragonflies, which, just like butterflies, are insects with two pairs of transparent wings and an elongated body. Since neither Gallimard nor the audience understands Chinese, both have to make do with the shots that present the protagonist as attracted to the gorgeous luminescent insect. Again, the potential audience is assumed to sympathize with his forlornness in the foggy darkness and strangeness of the exotic world rather than to identify the cinematic codes of this episode as anticipating Gallimard’s quest for power by misinterpreting the dragonfly. The dragonfly, in Western culture a “sinister” insect, symbolizes courage, strength, and happiness in the Japanese tradition. This makes it as admired as the butterfly, the beautiful, collectable, and mountable insect is in the Occidental world.4 Compared to the play, the film apparently works the other way around. At the beginning the audience is not confronted with the self-reflexive potential of Gallimard’s story, but in order to give meaning to the bizarre cinematic images, it—like Gallimard—gradually identifies the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, namely the popular story of Butterfly. The movie’s techniques now take advantage of this blurring of the boundaries between nature and art, between reality and imagination for performing Gallimard’s ambivalent, and ultimately self-destructive, “growth” from the lived experience of male insignificance to a fantasized one of exploitive masculine superiority rooted in his assumption of having caught a butterfly. Cinematically, the close-up shots on the protagonist’s facial expressions, which dominate the opening scenes and reveal his emotional condition, are now replaced by shots that focus on the Frenchman’s body language. The delicate insect Gallimard believes to possess, however, eventually turns out to be a powerful and courageous dragonfly, namely the actor Song (Beard 375). The Western man, cocooned in his fantasized role play, gradually loses control over the events, and his supposed “butterfly” gains agency in his/her activities as a Chinese spy.

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Performing Butterfly  165 After Song’s role play and cross-dressing are revealed in a French courtroom, the power roles are reversed. At first cornered by Song’s discursive demonstration of superiority in the police van after the trial, Gallimard restores his subject position by rejecting Song’s “true” self, which completely emasculates the Chinese man. This leaves him as a pitiful figure full of grief and despair, the total opposite of the dramatic figure who plays his roles for political reasons but does not identify with them. This decline is already prepared in the trial scene when Song responds to the judge’s question with “I have no opinions.” Song’s lack of identity is foreshadowed implying that he has no voice of his own. He has always played roles—whether that of woman or man—assigned to him by Chinese or Western cultures. Gallimard acknowledges that he had loved “a lie, [a] perfect lie,” but he is now determined to transform his fiction into reality, to live it, thus redefining “truth” in a postmodern sense as that what is experienced to be true (Beard 364). Realizing his inability to impersonate the dominant Western man, ­Gallimard has no other choice but to assume the role of the submissive Oriental other, although some critics doubt the appeal of this ideal to a postmodern American consumer society’s audience (339). The movie ends with Gallimard dressed in a Japanese kimono, his face hidden behind a thick layer of make-up, preparing himself on an improvised stage in prison to perform the final act of Madama Butterfly (significantly without the proper music). These shots alternate with shots presenting Song in a rather pitiful condition between cultures and genders. Elegantly dressed in a Western suit but bearing a desperate facial expression, he silently waits for the departure of his plane to China. Song does not succeed in repositioning himself in the liminal spaces he performatively created. The Chinese artist obviously mourns the loss of Gallimard, a moment that reconnects him with the Western image of the weak/female/Asian other. Since both scenes interact with each other through the powerful sound of Puccini’s popular love aria, it suddenly does not seem to be clear any longer who is who. Impersonating the discursively constructed personae of the fragile Oriental woman, the figure of Gallimard invites ambivalent interpretations. At face value, the scene basically follows the plot line of Hwang’s play in its deconstructionist attempt to reveal the discursive constructedness of power and gender relationships. Still, unlike the play, which right from the beginning re-theatricalizes the story of the Western man who has fallen in love with an Oriental woman, the film theatricalizes Gallimard’s final moments of life. The Puccini opera dissolves into two elements: while the audience listens to Butterfly’s love aria (significantly not the death aria, but “Un bel di” which powerfully stresses the contrast between the romantic fantasy of the lyrics and the disillusioning reality of the situation) being played on a tape recorder, the Frenchman puts on his stage make-up that transforms him into Butterfly. The music and the stage performance exist independently of each other, which allows the final scene to be read as a parody of Madama Butterfly. The aria tries to keep alive the popular Occidental fantasy

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166  Angelika Koehler as anticipated by the audience. Accompanying Gallimard’s preparations for committing suicide, the music deconstructs into a medium symbolizing the purposefully constructed patterns of Western hegemony and makes the moviegoers question the mutually exclusive concept of Orient and Occident when confronted with an in-between space in which the boundaries between East and West can no longer be clearly distinguished. Gallimard, cross-dressing as Butterfly, again reflects on “her” love for a man and states, with the camera light directed at the image in the mirror: “When I look into the mirror, I see nothing but. …” The audience has to fill in the blanks. The mirror shot is twice repeated, revealing a rather grotesque face behind a thick layer of white and red make-up that denies any identification in terms of male or female, Occidental or Oriental.5 Who is this figure on the stage? When Gallimard, nearly voiceless, whispers, “[d]eath with honor is better than life with dishonor,” s/he echoes Puccini’s Cio-Cio San’s final words that reconnect her to her father’s Samurai code of honor. Eventually finishing with, “[m]y name is Rene Gallimard, also known as Madame Butterfly,” he repeats his performative act in the form of language, thus completing a discursive self-construction that suggests ethnic and gender ambiguity, which ultimately questions the Western binary pattern. Again it is the self-reflexive potential of the movie that provides a space for a deconstructionist “testif[ying] to the disappearance of a fixed, unified, and coherent model of male subjectivity” (Suner 61) and points to the inevitability of creating a performative concept of identity construction. As Asuman Suner argues, “the narrative death of Gallimard is not a closure but a beginning” (62); the story of the “[o]ther half is yet to be told” (62). It is certainly no coincidence that unlike Hwang’s Song, who successfully creates a space for his “dualistic presence as neo-Butterfly and as a de-constructive Butterfly-critic” (Beard 351), the Song in the movie finally meets the Western image of the Asian man. In Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, the Oriental myth symbolizes a deep crisis of masculinity, a situation which requires a radical rethinking of the binary patterns of power, race, and gender that must go beyond any reversal of positions.

Staging “Order”: Miss Saigon (1989) The musical Miss Saigon by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil premiered in London in September 1989 and two years later on ­Broadway. The French producers claim to have been inspired by a photograph that shows a Vietnamese mother parting from her child at an American air base to enjoy a better life with her father, an ex-GI, in the U.S. (Pao 31, ­Degabriele 7). Apparently, they interpret this picture by way of the Butterfly myth. Relocated to Saigon during the Vietnam War, the musical tells the story of Kim, a seventeen-year-old orphaned Vietnamese woman, who, on her first day as a bar girl, meets Chris, an American GI soon to go back to his country. With the fall of Saigon immediately expected, Kim arranges

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Performing Butterfly  167 to marry Chris in an impromptu ceremony in order to go together with him to the U.S. Three years later, Chris, now happily married to Ellen, an ­American, learns from a friend that Kim and Tam, the child he had fathered, live in Bangkok. The Vietnamese woman, desperately longing for her American dream to come true, meets Ellen and begs her in vain at least to take Tam with them to the U.S. When Chris and his wife finally arrive at Kim’s place, exactly at the moment when she shoots herself, all the American man can do is hold her a last time. The musical’s multiplicity of racist and sexist stereotypes can only at face value remind the audience of Madama Butterfly. As the powerful debate about Miss Saigon “as the latest in a long line of western misrepresentations of Asians” (Yoshikawa 276) initiated by the Asian American acting community and their supporters underlines,6 the plot is based on a strictly dualistic pattern which sees the “good,” the Americans, at least after their return home, on the one side, and the “bad,” the Asians, where the men are pimps or violent brutes, and the women bar girls or prostitutes, on the other (Zheng 164). Shimizu speaks of “[a] fiction of hypersexuality,” as if “a pathologically intense and excessive propensity for sexuality … were a natural characteristic, one directly linked to a particular raced and gendered ontology” (248). The producers’ instructions regarding the sexually loaded performance of the first scene, which takes place in a Saigon brothel, as well as the opening lyrics, “[t]he heat is on in Saigon/The girls are hotter ‘n hell/ One of these slits here will be Miss Saigon” (Boublil and Schönberg, Music and Lyrics 9), support this impression. Contrasted with Chris and Kim’s as well as Ellen’s love scenes, the Asian woman comes to “signify extreme sexual perversity against the white female norm” (Shimizu 249). Yoko Yoshikawa, after experiencing the musical’s New York debut, even compares the opening scene to “soft porn” (277). The trauma of a lost war is coped with by casting the Vietnam experience in frivolous images of Asian women as repositories of racial and sexual anxiety. This reflects a displacement of fixed identity markers, which testifies to a crisis of Western national identity in general and Western masculinity in particular. In order to confirm their imagined superiority, Western men compare themselves to their constructs of the other, the hypersexual Asian female, whose life is completely guided by the body. Still, Miss Saigon’s intertextual potential deconstructs Orientalism. The Asian woman is no longer stereotyped as the turn-of-the-century “porcelain doll,” an allusion to the “angel in the house” who was expected to sacrifice herself for her children. Already at Puccini’s time, the Victorian concept was gradually being replaced by images of the new woman who, forming a growing women’s movement, wanted to leave the home in order to realize more diverse ambitions (Pao 30). In Miss Saigon, the stereotype of the Asian woman as submissive has been changed into that of an object of sexual desire, which is supposed to “justify” a moral reevaluation of the power conflict between a utopian West and a dystopian East (Degabriele 3). In both texts, stereotyping the Asian woman functions as

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168  Angelika Koehler a means of restoring the male protagonists’ damaged self-perception and reinscribing their Western concepts of masculinity. While Puccini’s Cio-Cio-San is transformed from a rather stereotypically naïve and obedient “little plaything” into a disillusioned woman who is determined to defend her moral integrity and pride in her quest to be a wife and mother, Kim is blinded by her perception of the American dream. Like Madame Butterfly, she remains faithful and even accepts betrayal. Yet unlike her, Kim does not sacrifice her life for the sake of virtue and honor, but rather for the material temptations of American consumer society. Kim’s suicide also reflects her strong character— still, it leaves her son facing an uncertain future. Even though Chris and Ellen promise to support him financially in Thailand, he will never become part of their American family. Children like Tam do not have a chance, as Chris’s friend John, an African American former GI committed to saving Vietnamese American children born after the departure of the American troops, realizes: “They’re called Bui doi, the dust of life,/conceived in hell and born in strife” (Boublil and Schönberg 60–61). The production of Miss Saigon was apparently marked by a considerable potential for conflict caused by a lack of sensitivity to race. Nonetheless, Miss Saigon turned out to be an immediate success. Searching for an explanation, Angela Pao assumes that one reason for the musical’s public triumph lies in the fact that Boublil and Schönberg worked on Miss Saigon at a time when the London musical theater was supposed to “reinvent … the form” (Steyn qtd. in Pao 24)—that is, to “mov[e] in the direction of the grand opera,” which becomes formally visible in the “’through-sung’ text, in which there is no dialogue” (25). Therefore the musical is not supposed to derive its credibility “from social verisimilitude; rather it has been constructed by combined historical and theatrical imperatives that first led to the association of the Asian woman with one of the most popular genres of the last century— the maternal melodrama” (Pao 22). The enthusiastic public response to it is therefore primarily rooted in what Todorov has called its generic verisimilitude, the mimetic construction of a Butterfly story, “an image of an image” (Übersfeld qtd. in Pao 24) that can be recognized by the audience and that meets their expectations.

The Myth as “HiStory”: Joyce Wadler’s Liaison (1993) Joyce Wadler’s Liaison sets out to tell “[t]he gripping real story of the diplomat spy and the Chinese opera star whose affair inspired ‘M. Butterfly’” (Liaison, front cover). Bernard Boursicot, at that time a twenty-year-old accountant at the French Embassy in Beijing feels “cut off from the Chinese, [like] a misfit among the French” (31) and is strongly attracted to Pei Pu Shi, a former artist of the Beijing Opera and now a writer. As a great storyteller, with “a gift for creating an atmosphere” (Wadler 308), he serves to familiarize Boursicot with Chinese culture, such as the legend of Butterfly, the story of the girl who dresses as a boy in order to attend school. When a young man

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Performing Butterfly  169 falls in love with her, Butterfly reveals her secret. Since she has been forced to enter into an arranged marriage, they both, independently of each other, come to prefer death over life; transformed into butterflies they can finally come together (40). For Boursicot, fed up with his parents’ provincial life, books and movies have become “as real as life” (21). Shi provides the young Frenchman with “the perfect mate: the librettist whose profession it was to create drama” (Clemons 14) and whose talent to “elevate the ordinary to the marvelous” (14) perfectly matches Boursicot’s dreams of romance and adventure. Sexually ambivalent, yet inexperienced with women, he buys Pu’s “Butterfly history.” Realizing his friend’s suffering during the Chinese cultural revolution, Boursicot casts himself in the role of “her” savior who “restore[s] her personality” (46). In order to protect his relationship with a Chinese woman dressed as a man in China (Chinese-Western relationships were forbidden, just as homosexual ones), he passes on information about diplomatic affairs to the Chinese. As the French yellow press later writes, Boursicot turns into a “SPY FOR LOVE” (12). This sensational story basically forms the core of Wadler’s Liaison. Wadler acknowledges that her interest in the historical case was inspired by seeing Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway. She even opens her book with a “revelation” and contextualizes Shi’s story in terms of the Butterfly myth that supposedly challenges established concepts of gender. Yet what she actually accomplishes is primarily guided by “journalistic voyeurism” (Levine 206). Wadler follows a popular sensational pattern and creates a story of bizarre love and espionage (largely following Boursicot’s point of view), which does not fulfill its late ­twentieth-century potential to feature a postmodern deconstruction of Western concepts. Wadler does not recognize “transvestism as both a personal and a political, as well as an aesthetic and theatrical, mode of self-­ construction” (Garber 236). Shi, most likely born “intersexed”—that is, with partially developed male and female external sexual organs that deny a clear sex identification—is never given the chance to live his/her transgender identity which does not match his/her officially assigned sex. In both cultures, the Oriental and the Occidental, s/he is forced to make a clear decision to be either male or female. For Pei Pu Shi, masquerading is the only way to realize his/her gender indecisiveness (236–38). Not unlike her protagonist, the journalist neither questions the Chinese “man’s” explanations of “his” role play nor discusses the incongruencies between “his” story and the result of the medical “examinations.” The option of being biologically ambivalent and performing one’s ambivalent gender identity simply does not exist for him/her since it would violate the binary patterns of Western thinking. Limiting her observations to Boursicot’s perspective, thus telling only half of the story, Wadler constructs her protagonist as “a classic fool for love, the victim of a hyperactive romantic imagination” and assigns the role of “a sexual magician” (Ansen 84) to Pei Pu. Unable to confront the Chinese wo/man’s transgender identity, she Orientalizes him/her in order to position him/her in Western cultural dualisms. As the other, Shi can

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170  Angelika Koehler remain silent—s/he does not seem to have a story of his/her own. Striving for popular success, the journalist wants to find out how Pei Pu managed to “fool” Boursicot. But it remains unclear whether or not s/he really succeeds. Instead of functioning as a truly postmodern example of gender discourses, Liaison simply disregards the implications of the Butterfly myth. Shi’s quest to construct his/her identity through the performative acts of living as a wife and mother is stunning and at best just tentatively suggested. Since this right is denied to the Chinese artist in France as well, s/he ultimately cannot cooperate with Wadler’s plan to write a book about the “true” history of the two people. In contrast to Boursicot, who immediately agrees to the author’s conditions since it offers him the chance to live on with his illusion of having been part of a heterosexual relationship with Pu as his “wife” and the biological mother of their son, his former Chinese partner rejects the offer to sell “his” story. Even though it is not clear whether the journalist was indeed unaware of Shi’s intersex status or whether she suppresses this issue in order to secure her conformity with the popular mainstream, she was apparently ignorant of the one-sidedness of her presentation. Her final conclusion: “In defense of love, a story we love, a person we love, is there any one among us who has not closed his eyes and refused to see?” (304) reverses her goal to go beyond the story of the “spy for love” and constructs just another romantic illusion. In its attempt at translating the Butterfly myth into lived history, Liaison significantly reduces its deconstructionist potential as it misses the crucial point that gender, like empire, does not depend on essentialist ideas of sex or race but is a socially constructed category.

The Ambivalent Power of Images: The Film-Opera Madame Butterfly (1995) Frédéric Mitterand’s film-opera Madame Butterfly has been debated about— not only among lovers of the classical opera genre. The film-maker wanted to create a masterpiece for all the senses, and most critics agree that while he succeeded in doing so, the production lacks coherence. In this screened version of the opera, in contrast to a filmed live performance, the audience listens to a musical performance recorded in advance and added to the film afterward and basically watches a shift of the Butterfly plot from the stage to a more or less natural landscape that is supposed to suggest the 1904 Nagasaki area (it was actually filmed in Tunisia). This focus on visual realism is all the more problematic since opera as a genre is deeply rooted in artifice and convention and its frequently stylized scenes are hopelessly at odds with realism (Sterritt 2),7 hence appealing to a more limited audience. But even though Puccini’s Madama Butterfly shares these generic specifics, it simultaneously negotiates issues that play a central role in postmodern discourses of gender and identity. The pseudo-realism of popular culture that this production is characterized by may have opened up spaces for a

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Performing Butterfly  171 re-reading of the Butterfly myth in general and of Puccini’s concept of the Oriental woman in particular. Unfortunately, it makes only limited use of this opportunity and prefers to romanticize the opera’s melodramatic plot in the tradition of Gone with the Wind. The movie’s camera movement constantly alternates between a variety of complex shots providing glimpses of picturesque local landscapes, which seem to directly echo Loti’s verbal descriptions of the Nagasaki area, and a frequent use of close-ups with a strong emphasis on the actual performance, in particular the singers’ facial expressions. As critic James Berardinelli states, “[f]rom a technical standpoint Mitterand’s approach to Madame Butterfly is unique” (online)—and it is certainly worth mentioning that the roles of Cio-Cio-San and Suzuki are filled by Chinese singers. Yet Mitterand’s Pinkerton, more obviously than Puccini’s, is not the one he pretends to be. He does not exhibit a Yankee masculinity typical of the time of Roosevelt’s politics of expansionism. He demonstrates how the power of money creates “realities” and, encouraged by alcohol, he mimics rather ­ inkerton than acts his role. Unable to take responsibility for his actions, P has Sharpless and his wife cope with the consequences. His performance therefore creates a sharp contrast to his discursive self-construction which is reinforced by Puccini’s music. Before the audience sees Cio-Cio-San, they hear the words of her song. The Japanese woman responds sensitively to nature and identifies as part of it in her voluntary subordination to the Western man, yet she still speaks in a voice entirely her own. This becomes particularly obvious when she coquettishly compliments her husband-to-be, acknowledges her awareness of the risk of becoming a “Butterfly,” goes to the mission before her marriage in order to find spiritual protection in a new religion, honors the figures representing the souls of her ancestors, resists any attempts at being married off to wealthy suitors, and reflects on her dancing-girl past as a possible future to support herself.8 The ambivalence of Puccini’s figure comes to life in the movie in rather unintended ways, which Berardinelli regards as slightly problematic when he argues that the Pinkerton singer’s “vocal performance is somewhat weak, especially in comparison with that of the [Cio-Cio-San soprano] whose arias are clear and vibrant” (online). For this reason, Joel Kasow’s observation that Mitterand’s figure of Cio-Cio-San is characterized by “[o]riental passivity and restraint” (online) needs to be questioned even more. She certainly is quite different from Puccini’s protagonist. The French director places her in a hybrid space of interacting Eastern and Western cultural images, such as the Japanese and the American flags and Christian and Buddhist icons. When Cio-Cio-San works at her sewing machine, she is not only connected to the modern Western world but also subjugated to “male superiority” as suggested in the phallic symbolism of the needle, “metaphorically ‘mounting’” (Boyd 64) her like a butterfly. This interpretation clashes significantly with Puccini’s B ­ utterfly, whose voice is so powerful that neither naiveté nor inferiority can be associated with her.9 As Vera Micznik writes, “Puccini’s

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172  Angelika Koehler opera materializes through music a very particular vision of [the victimization of Butterfly], one that succumbs only in part to the Western desire to dominate, yet on the other side accomplishes a sophisticated critique of the socio-political reality that produced the transformation of women into subjects of abjection” (56). She concludes that Butterfly does not die for her love for Pinkerton, but “because death was the natural outcome inscribed in her condition” (56). Since Cio-Cio-San identifies herself as Butterfly, she can live only within a cultural context that provides a space for this role. Realizing her metaphorical non-existence (as Pinkerton’s wife) and her spiritual non-existence in traditional Japanese terms, she investigates both cultures and positions herself in a transcultural space of her own creation. In the movie, she first sets the caged bird free, a nineteenth-century Victorian image of femininity, thus symbolically liberating herself from all Western social confinements. Afterward, following Puccini’s opera, she acts on her father’s Samurai values and “die[s] with honor” in a performative reconstruction of her Japanese identity. Mitterand adds revisionist moments but seems to ignore some of the opera’s complexities. Significantly, the close-ups, recording nuances of the Chinese singer’s facial expressions, at least partly reveal the ambiguity of Butterfly’s performance. She plays the role she is supposed to play, but her ultimately disappointed belief in the validity of the male-defined Western values of honor, personal integrity, and dignity reveals her reversal of the assumed power relationships. Like a butterfly she experiences a metamorphosis and reverses her position from an acceptance of inferiority (comparable to the stage of the caterpillar) to a performance of superiority (comparable to the imago). Even the melodramatic final scene of the movie does not interfere with this reversal of roles: Butterfly dies in Pinkerton’s arms—he can only react to her acting out. The French production does not offer a new reading of the Butterfly myth; the film functions on two levels, just like Puccini’s opera: it fictionalizes the discourse of Western culture’s superiority and simultaneously comments on it by suggesting the discursive constructedness of these power relationships.

Re-Mythologizing the Myth: Robert Wilson’s Madama Butterfly (2003) In contrast to Mitterand’s screened version of Puccini’s opera, which shares the opera’s early twentieth-century spirit of romance, the filmed live performance of Robert Wilson’s production of Madama Butterfly, in cooperation with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, can be read as a postmodern deconstruction of the Butterfly myth. His interpretation suggests a re-mythologizing of the image by liberating it from all the fake and clichéd exotic attributes a Western audience might expect. On a vast, nearly empty stage, the audience sees Cio-Cio-San, Pinkerton, Sharpless, and also a diabolically looking Goro, who resembles a Samurai warrior of the emperor rather than a Westernized go-between marriage broker. The  three main

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Performing Butterfly  173 characters create an atmosphere of defamiliarizing timelessness; their costumes, (in which Pinkerton and Sharpless look more Japanese than Cio-CioSan), make them appear like statues reminiscent of Greek tragedy. One can hardly imagine that one is listening to the melodramatic narrative of an East-West love relationship. The focus here is on listening, since the protagonists’ acting is reduced to only very few purposefully controlled gestures. The actors show mostly neutral facial expressions; only the eyes seem to be allowed to reveal any emotional involvement. As Wilson points out in an interview included on the Madama Butterfly DVD, his intention was to reveal “just 78 per cent” of the story, thus creating a space left for “the public to complete the action.” His dramatic strategy aims at giving life to Puccini’s music, and in order to make the audience concentrate on listening, any distraction caused by watching (looking at props or stage action) is minimized. Whereas Mitterand’s movie translates the words of the libretto of Puccini’s opera into action, this filmed live performance realizes the conflict through its music. Cheryl Barker, the female lead singer, explains how Puccini “could orchestrate … the music around [people’s] roles into the character,” which means that Butterfly’s character reveals itself in her music, not in her acting. Wilson interprets the specifics of the opera as a particular interaction of the (in-)visible and the audible. In this highly stylized production, the music telling the story of the Japanese woman’s self-destructive love for a Western man seems to separate itself from the action on stage. And indeed, Wilson wants his Butterfly to “walk against the music,” thus creating “a tension … between what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing.” He argues that “ideally, I can hear the music because of what I’m seeing” (Madama Butterfly DVD). With the love relationship not performed on stage, the dramatic conflict between the audible and the visible, between emotional involvement and rationally controlled distance deconstructs the opera’s spirit of romance. Madama Butterfly gains a new universal significance when interpreted not in a specific geographical place but in an artificially constructed space that denies identification in terms of Orient or Occident. This version brings to mind the wasteland of modern life whose only sign of orientation is the human quest for dominance. Here the power struggle between Butterfly and Pinkerton is carried out by way of music. But even this is more confusing than helpful, since it is Cio-Cio-San who carries the dramatic, emotional, and musical weight of the opera (McClary 23). She possesses a powerful voice that enables her to control the entire performance; in her dialogic interaction with the other characters, especially with Pinkerton, she clearly blurs the boundaries between the dominant and the subordinate. Supported by the statuesque appearance of the characters, the power conflict gains an archetypal significance independent of time, space, and individuality. Archetypal images operate on two levels: they simultaneously explain individual experience and the formation of a collective cultural memory. But in Wilson’s production, a community is at best suggested; it is never

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174  Angelika Koehler realized on stage. We, the audience, are supposed to share Butterfly’s cultural knowledge, thus breaking down the boundaries between “us” and “the others.” The Western myth of Butterfly is deconstructed as a universal quest for male dominance. In its interaction with music, the performance does not only suggest the gendered character of power relationships, but also calls for a reconsideration of imperial concepts in general and provides further insight into the functioning of the Butterfly myth in Wilson’s formal concept of the opera. The artists are expected to create distance to the characters they impersonate; they are also expected to open up spaces for the audience to critically reflect on the contrast between what they hear and what they see. The audience is never invited to connect emotionally or to identify with what they watch on stage. The stylized character of Wilson’s production also re-theatricalizes the Butterfly myth in a Brechtian sense. Wilson locates the timeless fascination of the story of Madame Butterfly not in its plot, but in its performance. This production creates a meta-language version of the Asian woman’s story that in a first step demythologizes the myth and in a second one re-mythologizes it as a discursively constructed power struggle open to negotiation and revisionist interpretation. Wilson’s production substantiates Degrabriele’s argument that when speaking of “Madame Butterfly” we refer to a rather “unspecified” narrative which in the course of popular transmission has become a myth, “mov[ing] between cultures, genres, and genders” (2). Whether reconstructed on page, stage, or screen, the figure of Butterfly rewrites itself within the specifics of the respective cultural contexts, thus blurring the boundaries between the medium and the message. Acting in a hyperreality, a space of simulation, of “indifferentiation of the active and the passive” (31), as Baudrillard argues, where the “real” and the “imaginary” are no longer identifiable (29–31), it is finally the performative moment that allows the trope to play with stereotypes, to reinscribe and to subvert them at the same time since repetition always includes change. Performing Butterfly, the figure creates her cultural identity. As we have seen from the discussion of a variety of performed versions of the Butterfly myth that appeared between 1988 and 2003 and that include a narrative, a play, a film, a musical, and a filmed opera, the myth has remained productive due to its ambiguity. It has inspired a plethora of Orientalist concepts of gender and gendered power structures. Most texts, as has been demonstrated, romanticize the plot and rely on Orientalist stereotypes. While Hwang’s play and Cronenberg’s film version show Western masculinity in crisis and question stereotypical distinctions between East and West, the musical Miss Saigon reiterates sexist and racist prejudices in the post-Vietnam era. Moreover, Wadler uses the Butterfly plot to create a sensational narrative of love and espionage while ignoring (trans)gender issues, whereas Mitterand’s ­ econstructs film-opera lacks coherence. Wilson’s filmed opera, however, which d the myth in a postmodern fashion, refuses to perpetuate old stereotypes about race and gender.

Performing Butterfly  175

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Notes 1. Among them are Sidney Olcott’s film Madame Butterfly, starring Mary Pickford (1915), Joshua Logan’s film Sayonara, starring Marlon Brando (1957), David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly (1988), the musical Miss Saigon by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (1989), and the plays The Seven Streams of the River Ota by Robert Lepage (1996) and Far East by A.R. Gurney (1998) (Wisenthal et al. ix–x). 2. With regard to the “Asian” woman, two different aspects need to be considered. First, Hwang’s blending of stereotypes of Chinese and Japanese femininity is based on the traditions of both Chinese and Japanese theater, in which “the figure of the cross-dressed ‘woman’ … functions simultaneously as a mark of gender undecidability and as an indication of category crisis” (Garber 238). The fact that Western culture does not pay explicit attention to the heterogeneity of Asian cultures and does not distinguish between Japanese and Chinese traditions but subsumes them under the homogenizing term Oriental is another expression of the hegemonic Western quest to use language as a means to create political power relations and realities. In this essay, I use “Asian” woman as a (technical) term referring to Western male imagination’s projection of Japanese and Chinese femininity. 3. In Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San, the Asian woman, is given a voice for the first time, a voice that is silenced at the end, as in many operas, but one that “finally achieves a personal autonomy and a dignity” (Wisenthal 13). 4. The dragonfly functions as a Japanese symbol of adolescence and the Japanese homeland (the shape of the Japanese islands has sometimes been compared to that of a dragonfly), thus symbolizing a syncretic unity of strength and metamorphosis. 5. Marjorie Garber has pointed out the differences between the sign systems of Japanese and Chinese face painting (in Japanese theater whiteness symbolizes the ideal, in Chinese treachery), thus shedding light on Gallimard’s habit of conflating the two (“subordinate”) cultures (243). 6. The Broadway debut of Miss Saigon was prompted by a heated debate about the casting of an Asian woman as the female protagonist, in contrast to the part of the engineer, who was modeled after the figure of Goro and played by a Caucasian actor. Asian actors were not auditioned for the role; they interpreted this as “‘an affront to the Asian community’” since it barred them from the “opportunity for Asian actors to break stereotype and gain leading roles in major plays” (Zheng 163). The emphasis on the Asian woman’s “authenticity” locates “the success of the performance on the credibility of Asian women as an object of romantic interest and sexual desire,” which does not take into consideration the significant historical changes in Asian women’s lives, but reproduces a traditionally interpreted Western Butterfly image (163). 7. This incongruence is, for example, visible in the magical realist elements of Cio-Cio-San’s uncle priest Bonzo’s arrival as a heavenly vision that seem to be borrowed from stage. 8. Here Puccini reveals a considerable lack of cultural knowledge, since a Geisha is a self-confident woman who entertains Western men, but would never enter into a sexual relationship with one of them (Micznik 39–40).

176  Angelika Koehler

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Works Cited Ansen, David. “Much Stranger than Fiction.” Newsweek 18 Oct. 1993: 84. Print. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print. Beard, William. “M. Butterfly (1993).” The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. 338–78. Print. Berardinelli, James. “Madame Butterfly (1995).” Web. 16 May 2011. . Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Boublil, Alain, and Claude-Michel Schönberg. Miss Saigon: Music and Lyrics. ­Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1988. Print. Boyd, Melinda. “‘Re-Orienting’ the Vision: Ethnicity and Authenticity from Suzuki to Comrade Chin.” Wisenthal et al. 59–71. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Cavell, Richard. “Madama Butterfly and the Absence of Empire.” Wisenthal et al. 155–69. Christian, Karen. Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997. Print. Clemons, Walter. “The Imaginary Woman.” New York Times Book Review 31 Oct.: 14. Print. Degabriele, Maria. “From Madame Butterfly to Miss Saigon: One Hundred Years of Popular Orientalism.” Critical Arts 10.2 (1996): 105–18. Print. “Dragonfly.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2012. 20 Feb. 2012. Web. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume, 1989. Print. Kasow, Joel. “Madame Butterfly.” Web. 2 Oct. 2012. . Kerkhoff, Ingrid. “An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” Web. 4 Jan. 2004. . ———.“David Henry Hwang.” Contemporary American Drama (Since 1980). Web. Jan. 2004. . Levine, Steven I. “Wadler, Joyce: Liaison.” Library Journal 9 Jan. 1993: 206. Print. Loti, Pierre. Madame Chrysantheme. Teddington, U.K.: The Echo Library, 2007. Print. M. Butterfly. Dir. David Cronenberg. Perf. Jeremy Irons, and John Lone. Warner Bros, 1993. DVD. Madama Butterfly. Dir. Robert Wilson. Perf. Cheryl Baker, and Martin Thompson. Opus Arte, 2005. DVD. Madame Butterfly. Dir. Frédéric Mitterand. Perf. Yin Huang, and Richard Troxell. Sony Pictures, 1995. DVD. McClary, Susan. “Mounting Butterflies.” Wisenthal et al. 21–35. Micznik, Vera. “Cio-Cio-San the Geisha.” Wisenthal et al. 36–58. Pao, Angela. “The Eyes of the Storm: Gender, Genre and Cross Casting in Miss ­Saigon.” Text and Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 21–39. Print.

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Performing Butterfly  177 Ross, Deborah L. “On the Trail of the Butterfly: D. H. Hwang and Transformation.” Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works. Ed. Phyllis Frus, and Christy Williams. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 111–22. Print. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print. Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. “The Bind of Representation: Performing and Consuming Hypersexuality in Miss Saigon.” Theater Journal 57.2 (2005): 247–65. Print. Sterritt, David. “‘Butterfly’ Flutters onto Big Screen.” Christian Science Monitor 88.111 (1996): 12. Print. Suner, Asuman. “Postmodern Double Cross: Reading David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly as a Horror Story.” Cinema Journal 37.2 (1998) 49–64. Print. The Heat Is On: The Making of Miss Saigon. 2008. DVD. Van Rij, Jan. Madame Butterfly, Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San. Berkeley: Stone Bridge P, 2001. Print. Wadler, Joyce. Liaison. New York, Toronto: Bantam, 1993. Print. Wisenthal, Jonathan. “Inventing the Orient.” Wisenthal et al. 3–18. Wisenthal, Jonathan et al., eds. A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. “Ying Huang: The Making of a Butterfly.” Making-Of Featurette. Mitterand, 2002. DVD. Yoshikawa, Yoko. “The Heat is On Miss Saigon Coalition: Organizing across Race and Sexuality.” The State of Asia America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Ed. K. Aquilar-San Juan. Boston: South End P, 1994. 275–94. Print. Zheng, Da. “‘I Will Sing with You Our Song’: Cultural Representations of Asian Americans.” Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism. Ed. Magdalena J. Zaborowska. Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 1998. 163–77. Print.

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Part IV

Cross-Ethnic Traffic

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11 Asian American Literature and Literary Theory

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Onoto Watanna’s Panethnic Impersonation in Miss Numė of Japan Iping Liang Born of an English father and a Chinese mother, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna became the first published Asian American writer. When Miss Numė of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance appeared in 1899, the author was only twenty-three years old. Already having acquired some professional experience in writing, as a stenographer in Jamaica and as a typist in Chicago, she became a bestselling author in New York at a very young age. She went on to publish fifteen Japanese American romances, which were all bestsellers, two autobiographical works, which were based on her and her sister’s lives, and numerous magazine articles and short stories. She is indeed, in the words of Jean Lee Cole, “most surprising [in] her sheer productivity” (1). Shortly before Miss Numė of Japan was published, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. The success of a prolific Chinese American woman writer was an oddity at the time, and the reception history of her works has been marked by extreme reactions. As Eve Oishi observes, “critics of Asian American literature simply do not know what to do with a Eurasian writer of Chinese and Anglo descent who assumed a Japanese identity and a ­Japanese-sounding pseudonym—Onoto Watanna—in order to write romance novels about Japanese and Eurasian women” (xi). Often, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna did not claim her biological Chinese background in her writing but instead “impersonated” a Japanese identity. During her lifetime, Winnifred was primarily known as the younger sister of writer Edith Eaton, who was ten years older. While Edith was considered a pioneer of Asian American literature, who depicted the tribulations and hardships Chinese immigrants had to face, Winnifred was regarded as an “impostor” because of her Japanese pseudonym. Despite her popularity in the early decades of the twentieth century, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna was subsequently forgotten until interest in her writing revived in the 1970s. Amy Ling was among the first critics to rediscover the Eaton sisters; she praised Edith, older by ten years than Winnifred, as the “good sister” and denounced Winnifred as the “bad sister.” Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna was finally rediscovered in the 1990s when  Yuko Matsukawa argued in her essay “Cross-Dressing and Cross-­ Naming: Decoding Onoto Watanna” that “Winnifred Eaton crosses cultural

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182  Iping Liang lines to challenge what we perceive as the conventional boundaries of ethnicity and authenticity” (106). In her view, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, whom she deemed “tricksterlike in her self-representation” is “far more subversive than she is usually credited to be” (107). In 1999, Johns Hopkins University Press finally reissued Miss Numė of Japan and critics began to see Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna in a different light. In her introduction to the novel, Oishi stated that Winnifred Eaton’s novels “are replete with Orientalist stereotypes—beguiling geishas, outcast princesses, and fearless samurai. In many ways, her Japanese heroines match the popular stereotypes of Asian women—childlike, naïve, and charmingly exotic” (xix). According to Oishi, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna “was capitalizing on the western stereotypes of Asia and Asian women” (xxii), yet it is nevertheless interesting to note that at the same time “she was instrumental in creating them” (xxii). In 2002 three important studies about Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna that presented her in a positive light were published. Dominika Ferens’s Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances places the Eatons in the context of ethnographic interest and Christian missionary work in Chinatown. In Ferens’s view, “both were involved in the production of … ethnographic knowledge for popular consumption, yet they developed disparate subjectivities” (1). Jean Lee Cole in The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity investigates the “cultural and historical nuances of the ‘ethnic voice’” (8). She focuses on Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’s novels as dialect fiction examining the “complexity of [Eaton’s] voices” (10) and observes that there is a variety of “ethnic voices” in the articulation of her stories—“the pidgin English of Japanese geishas, the half-breed Indians and the lilting brogues of Irish maids, the slang of Chicago working girls and Canadian cattle ranchers” (2). Having discovered a plethora of “ethnic voices” in her works, Cole claims that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna has redefined the “conventional frontiers of ethnicity and authenticity” (4). Most importantly, Cole points out that “the rejection of ‘authenticity’ as a standard for judging Eaton’s work has enabled analysis that moves beyond the ‘good sister, bad sister’ assessments” (4) that had been pervasive since Ling. In the following, I want to contend that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna should be recognized as a model “impersonator” who uses performative strategies that enable her to appear simultaneously “like and unlike” a Japanese author. I argue that this impersonation and double-hybridization results in an aesthetics of subversion and distancing from Asian American identity politics. As Tomo Hattori has pointed out, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’s performative disidentification makes her an “‘unashamed pioneer of Asian American culture as a bad subject discourse’” (qtd. in Nguyen 35).1 This chapter is divided into three sections. Part one reviews the discursive relationships between Judith Butler and Asian American bodily performances. Part two, engaging in an argument with Frank Chin’s distinctions between “the real” and “the fake,” examines the politics of “fake performances” and “real impersonations.” Part three finally turns to Miss Numė of Japan by

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Asian American Literature and Literary Theory  183 providing a close-reading and textual analysis of the novel. By avoiding the binary of “the real” and “the fake,” Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna not only impersonates panethnic Asian American identities, but also puts on a “model performance” that helps bring Asian Americans into social visibility. “Model performance” is a term that I coin to echo and modify “model minority,” the notion that Asians are praised for their upward mobility within the racial hierarchy of the United States. Similarly, the term “model performance” suggests that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna has made Asian Americans socially visible and important by her impersonation of multiple ethnicities. In her seminal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler argues that the essentialist category of “woman” is problematic: “[T]he presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions” (7). Instead of endorsing biological essentialism that serves as the empirical foundation of the category of “woman,” Butler draws attention to bodily acts that influence our perception of gender. She observes that acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body. … Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (173)2 While Butler has had a decisive impact on gender studies, I am here concerned with the implications her theory has on the study of Asian American identity politics. I argue that the “gender trouble” she critiques may serve as a pretext for the racialized “identity trouble” of Asian Americans. Under the influence of Butler, a generation of Asian American critics, such as Lisa Lowe, Traise Yamamoto, Leslie Bow, Viet Thank Nguyen, Kandice Chiu, and Tina Chen, has effected a poststructuralist turn in Asian American identity politics. While Butler argues that the gendered body “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (173), the racialized bodies of Asian Americans, as critics have argued, have undertaken multiple performances of bodily acts that bring about their social visibility. Here, Tina Chen’s work on impersonation is particularly noteworthy. While Chen does not deny the performative constructedness of Asian American identities, she is instead “concerned with the acts of impersonation [which] Asian Americans have enacted in order to perform into existence their identities as Asian Americans” (xvi, emphasis in the original). Lisa Lowe is one of the first Asian American critics to adopt a post-­ structural approach to investigate Asian American identity politics. Drawing on the work of Butler and others, Lowe maintains in Immigrant Acts (1996) that “the notion of ‘immigrant acts’ attempts to locate in the works the ‘performativity’ of immigration, that is, the aesthetics of disidentification

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184  Iping Liang and the practices of resignification” that are made possible by “the ‘outsider-­ within’ condition of Asians in America” (33). Lowe historicizes the political context of Asian immigration to the U.S. and contends that Asian Americans are situated “outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation” (6). The “outsider-within” condition of Asians in America unsettles the assumed coherence and stability of the U.S. The “performativity” of Asian immigration as “a critical disruption of symbolic categories” (196) can therefore be seen as constituting Asian America as an “oppositional site” that counters the imagined community of nation. In Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (1999), Yamamoto examines “racial drag” by drawing on Butler’s discussion of “gender performativity and the subversive possibilities of drag” (30). Her case in point is the Hollywood movie Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), which features a yellowface performance by Marlon Brando. Set in the era of the U.S. occupation of Okinawa in the aftermath of World War II, the movie highlights the scheme of assimilation that would bring “American-style democracy” to Okinawa (Yamamoto 28). While the movie recycles the plot of Madame Butterfly—the romance between American Captain Fisby and Japanese geisha Lotus Blossom—the role of the yellowface translator “Sakini,” performed by Brando, is noteworthy. As “Sakini” translates the Japanese language into English, Brando’s yellowface performance provides a racial translation between Japan and America. Yamamoto argues that the yellowface performance lays bare the racial performativity of the Japanese. She further comments, “Brando/Sakini could be read as foreshadowing and commenting on the performativity of Japaneseness manifested by the geisha and the teahouse” (31). The yellowface performance, like the geisha and the teahouse, therefore functions as the “racial drag” that provides a façade of Japaneseness.3 Moreover, Lowe’s notion of Asian immigration as performance becomes more complex if we take into consideration the issue of Asian American female sexuality. In Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (2001), Leslie Bow reads Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar (1973) and examines the intricate relationship between being female and Asian American citizenship. Set in the context of the Japanese American internment camps, Houston’s text features a female protagonist who is trying to secure her American identity while her Japanese father is accused of “betrayal.” After the war, her marginalization continues when she is turned down by the Girl Scouts due to her Japaneseness. She then tries to make friends with the whites by participating in her school’s spring carnival. Knowing that she cannot look “too Japanese-y” (qtd. in Bow 50), the protagonist decides to go “exotic” by playing the role of an indigenous Pacific island woman. The racial cross-­ dressing wins her not only the applause of the spectators, mostly male, but also symbolically the approval of the patriarchal nation. Bow argues that the female protagonist’s desire for inclusion lies in her “willingness to play with racial [and sexual] meanings through masquerade” (50). Due to the

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Asian American Literature and Literary Theory  185 particular circumstances of her internment, it becomes clear to her that she has to play a role other than that of a “native” Japanese. Hence, as Bow points out, “going native is a means of becoming American” (51). That is to say, the performance of the racial cross-dressing wins her the admission into the nation, and hence she eventually bids “farewell to Manzanar.” While Lowe, Yamamoto, and Bow have shown that cross-racial performances of race/ethnicity are constitutive of Asian American identities, Viet Thanh Nguyen turns to Winnifred Eaton in order to insist on her historical significance. In Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), Nguyen contends that Asian Americans today are caught in the binary between being “bad subjects” or representatives of “model minorities.”4 This, he argues, is similar to the situation faced by the Eaton sisters a hundred years ago. Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna is “emblematic of a flexible political strategy” (56) and important because she deliberately left behind her origins. In Ngyuen’s view, she is a panethnic entrepreneur who excelled in the performance of racial cross-dressing when such a category as “Asian America” did not yet exist. Hiding her Chinese ancestry and putting on a Japanese mask, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna could be considered a female yellowface performer in the sense of “Brando/Sakini.” She is also a predecessor of the female protagonist in Farewell to Manzanar in her performance of the exoticism of “Miss Numė of Japan.” Following Chen’s theory of impersonation, I regard Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna as a pioneer Asian American “panethnic impersonator.” In the following section, I turn to the Orientalist representations of John Chinaman and Dr. Fu Manchu in order to review fake performances of Asian Americans. In the historical context of the representation of Asian Americans, the yellowface has been a dominant type of performance. In Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (1999), Robert G. Lee studies the Orientalist representations of Asian immigrants in American popular culture. He states, “popular culture [is] taken up as a process, a set of cultural practices that define American nationality—who ‘real Americans’ are in any given historical moment” (6). He further argues that stereotypes “portray the Oriental as an alien body and a threat to the American national family” (8).5 In order to emphasize features of Chinese physiology, minstrel show performers, for example, highlighted bodily features, such as “the slanted eyes, overbite, and mustard-yellow skin color” (2) to portray stereotypical traits. The character John Chinaman was often seen in yellowface on the minstrel stage of the mid-nineteenth century. In the well-known song, “The Heathen Chinee,” sung by the popular minstrel performer Luke Schoolcraft, broken Cantonese English was featured to “present the yellowface singer as childlike” (37): Hi! hi! hi! Ching! ching! ching! Chow, chow, wellie good, me likie him. Makie plenty song song, savie by and bye. China man a willie man, laugh hi! hi! (qtd. in Oriental 37)

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186  Iping Liang In addition to featuring Pidgin English, the yellowface minstrel show presented exotic Chinese foodways, especially the consumption of dogs and cats as the epitome of Oriental savagery. Besides, the Chinaman’s queue became a point of ridicule, which was taken as a manifestation his being “anomalous, ambiguous and hence representative of a dangerous pollution” (Oriental 41). Lee argues that yellowface is a trope of the Orientalist performance imagined and enacted by whites. He states, “[y]ellowface marks the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental; it sharply defines the Oriental in a racial opposition to whiteness” (2). Krystyn Moon also states in her study that “[y]ellowface manifested degrading images of Chinese immigrants on the stage … [which] marked the Chinese body as inferior and foreign” (6). Lee adds, “[yellowface] minstrelsy was a powerful vehicle for constructing the Chinaman as a polluting racial Other in the popular imagination” (32). Moreover, the Orientalist performance of yellowface minstrel shows contributed to paving the way for the mass hysteria about a Yellow Peril that followed in the 1880s. In the wake of the Yellow Peril, the fear of and discrimination against the Chinese reached a climax, and the Orientalist imagination came up with the sinister figure of Dr. Fu Manchu. According to Lee, “Fu Manchu was the first universally recognized Oriental and became the archetype of villainy” (114). Josephine Lee observes that “Fu Manchu developed into a racial archetype that has maintained its popularity” (10). The first of the series of thirteen Fu Manchu novels was published in 1913, the last in 1959. The figure became even more popular due to the release of blockbuster movies like The Cheat (1915), and Broken Blossoms (1919). In the words of his creator, the British writer Sax Rohmer, Fu Manchu is imagined to be [t]all, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare, and a face like Satan, a close shaven skull and long magnetic eyes of true cat green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect. … Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (qtd. in Oriental 113–14) My summary of the yellowface archetype makes clear that it is fabricated and fake. I further argue that the debate surrounding Fu Manchu parallels the debate between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston. In his 1991 essay, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” the introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, Chin accuses Asian American writers such as Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan of fraudulent use of Chinese culture and history. Chin accuses them of faking Asian American traditions in their writings: Here, we offer a literary history of Chinese American and Japanese American writing concerning the real and the fake. We describe the

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Asian American Literature and Literary Theory  187 real, from its sources in the Asian fairy tale and the Confucian heroic tradition, to make the work of these Asian American writers understandable in its own terms. We describe the fake—from its sources in Christian dogma and in Western philosophy, history, and literature— to make it clear why the more popularly known writers such as Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Amy Tan, and Lin Yutang are not represented here. Their work is not hard to find. The writers of the real are very hard to find. … (xv) Widely accepted as a manifesto of Asian American authenticity, Chin’s essay has caused a great deal of controversy among scholars from the field of Asian American studies. The Chin versus Kingston debate has prompted reactions from many Asian American critics. Lisa Lowe observes that the Chin/Kingston controversy must be understood as “a struggle between the desire to essentialize ethnic identity and the condition of heterogeneous differences against which such a desire is spoken” (76). A similar assessment is made by Leslie Bow, who theorizes the Chin/Kingston dispute from a feminist perspective. She remarks, “in his insistence on ‘real’ and ‘fake’ Chinese Americans, basic to Chin’s charge of ethnic feminist betrayal, is an effort to establish an essential ethnic identity [that is] based on masculinist notions of resistant consciousness” (29). Furthermore, Nguyen regards Chin’s notion of “the real” as a metaphor of “territorialized ethnicity” (20) which is “embodied in the model minority [ideology]” (20). Nguyen zooms in on “the fake,” which he calls “a discourse of the bad subject, which both appropriates the dominant representation of Asian Americans as a dangerous and subversive population and idealizes Asian America as a site of political opposition and resistance” (29). This discussion elucidates that the divide opened up by critics between the “good sister” and the “bad sister” is similar to that of “the real” and “the fake” upheld by Chin. It is therefore not surprising that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna was not included in the The Big Aiiieeeee! anthology. While Lowe, Bow, and Nguyen analyze and deconstruct the binary of “the real” and “the fake” along the divide between essentialism and heterogeneity, masculinity and femininity, “model minority” and “bad subject,” it is Tina Chen who manages to reinvest the debate with new theoretical vigor and insight. In Double Agency (2005), Chen revisits the debate about “the real” and “the fake” and opts for a politics of impersonation. She argues that “a central aspect of the existence of Asian Americans involves the doubly conscious awareness of playing parts that seems distasteful and unnatural, but are perceived by others to be somehow representative of one’s identity” (4, emphasis in the original). Her case in point is the character Vincent Chang in Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1991). Vincent is a famous actor who is known for his “impersonations” of such stereotypical roles as John Chinaman and Fu Manchu. Chen maintains that an impersonation could be “a simple act of disguise” on the one hand, and on the other, “a double construction of identity: a performance always involving the

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188  Iping Liang acting out of roles, the contestation of the performances that we both wish to participate in and would like to somehow disavow” (4). There is always an ambivalence in the “impersonations” of Asian American identities. In the case of Vincent, it is important to observe that his Asian American identity is “doubly” constructed by the roles which he “participates in and [yet] would like to disavow” at the same time. Chen therefore argues that the impersonations of Asian American identities are characterized by what she defines as an enactment of “double agency”—a “doubled project of both undermining and yet not annulling” (20) the performances of Asian American identities. If we recast the character of Vincent in Chin’s terms, it is easy to see that Vincent, like Kingston, would be regarded as an impostor, someone who is accused of “fake” performances. Based on his rejection of “ethnic fabrication,” Chin accused Asian Americans such as Kingston, Hwang, Tan (and Vincent by implication) of faking it. These fake performances follow the binaries of America/Asia, authenticity/inauthenticity, masculinity/femininity, and so on, to construct a vicious stereotype of Orientals as feminine, inferior, and fake. By challenging this binary, Chen reverses the logic of the construction of Asian American identity politics. Instead of calling them fake, Chen redefines Asian American acts of impersonation as constitutive of identity. If Kingston is a “fake” in Chin’s account, she is a “real” impersonator in Chen’s terms. As Chen’s notion of impersonation deconstructs the binary of “real” and “fake,” each act of impersonation would be “real.” Thus, each “fake” performance would be a “real” impersonation.6 Chen’s work on impersonation therefore sheds new light on Orientalist performances. In contrast to “the fake” of Chin’s terminology, Chen regards Orientalist performances as conscious of impersonation that both endorses and subverts dominant stereotypes. Proceeding from Chen’s insights, I finally turn to Miss Numė of Japan and argue that the ethnic cross-dressing by Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century should not be regarded as a case of impersonation, but rather as an example of “model performance.” The term “model performance” is based on the widely used term “model minority,” which has often been applied to Asian Americans. Following Chen’s argumentation, I maintain that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’s representation of Japanese culture and characters both endorses and subverts Japanese stereotypes; her “model impersonation” paves the way to her pioneering role in “panethnic impersonation.” Miss Numė of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance features the love affairs of two interracial couples, Orito Takashima and his American girlfriend, Cleo Ballard, as well as Numė Watanabe and her American boyfriend, Arthur Sinclair. The romance is unusual in its interracial pairings. Orito comes from a rich and noble family in Japan. His father wants him to become “a modern man” by sending him to Harvard University to receive the best education in the West. Orito thus leaves home at an early age and

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Asian American Literature and Literary Theory  189 studies in the United States for eight years. He learns about the Western way of life and falls in love with Cleo, the daughter of a rich family. Orito wants to marry Cleo and take her back to Japan to live with him and his family. Cleo, however, is not able to decide if she really wants to get married to Orito and live in a foreign country. Miss Numė has been a dear friend of Orito’s since childhood. She and Orito have been designated as future marriage partners; so she is waiting for Orito’s return to carry out the marriage arranged by both families. At the same time, Arthur Sinclair, the American consul stationed in Japan, becomes fascinated with Miss Numė. For Mrs. Davis, Numė’s English teacher, Numė is even too beautiful to be Japanese: “[Y]our face is lovely—it is a flower—a bright tropical flower. No! It is too delicate for a tropical flower—it is like your name—you are a wild plum blossom” (69). Numė is presented as an exotic Oriental beauty, someone who is too foreign to be decoded by either Mr. Sinclair or Mrs. Davis. The story is remarkable for several reasons. First, Miss Numė is a love story of the rich and famous. Both Orito and Cleo are children of wealthy families, and they enjoy the luxuries and comforts of high society. This is one reason why this romance became a bestseller: it fulfilled the readers’ desire for fantasy and sensation. Second, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna is able to present Japan in exotic and picturesque settings and stimulate the Orientalist imagination of Japan. The descriptions of famous scenic spots such as Kyoto, Mt. Fuji, the cherry blossom, Matsushima bay, and so on, are presented in vivid details. They serve to give a favorable impression of Japan as an ancient and refined civilization. Third, the narrative is well crafted in terms of structure and characterization. The book includes a total of fifty-nine chapters that are tightly knit and fast paced. The characters of Orito and Cleo are stereotypical and predictable. Orito is presented as a respectable Japanese high-society gentleman who is well educated and well groomed. He speaks perfect English and is very mindful of propriety and social customs. Cleo is a typical American flirt, reminiscent of Henry James’s Daisy Miller. Unlike Orito, who is very concerned with tradition and convention, Cleo shares with Daisy a willful temperament and a sense of egotism. The sharp contrast between Orito and Cleo also heightens the cultural stereotypes of Japan and America. Fourth, and most importantly, contrary to our expectation, Miss Numė does not fit the stereotype of Madame Butterfly. In contrast to the stereotype of Japanese women, Numė is confident, individualistic, and selfish, which is very different from the soft and submissive image of Madame Butterfly. While Madame Butterfly dies for love in John Long’s opera, in Miss Numė of Japan it is Orito who commits suicide as he realizes that he has been jettisoned by Cleo. Miss Numė, however, wins the heart of Sinclair and gets married to him at the end of the story. It is important to point out that the characterization of Miss Numė empowers her with the “double agency” that Chen advocates. On the one hand, Miss Numė appears to be very “Japanese.” Nguyen mentions that in

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190  Iping Liang the 1899 edition of the book there are many pictures of Japanese women who wear traditional kimonos and pose as submissive and docile Japanese women. While the pictorial representation of the lovely and exotic Japanese women might have helped sell the book, the characterization of a strongwilled Miss Numė certainly runs counter to the readership’s expectations. Nguyen therefore comments that “Onoto Watanna positions herself through these photographs as both object and subject of the Western gaze on Japan” (50). This corresponds to Chen’s notion of “double agency,” which she defines as a “double construction of identity: a performance always involving the acting out of roles, the contestation of the performances that we both wish to participate in and would like to somehow disavow” (4). More than a hundred years before Nguyen and Chen, Winnifred Eaton/ Onoto Watanna was the first Asian American impersonator who claimed “double agency” for the roles she played. In Race and Resistance, Nguyen argues that the recovery of Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna manifests a “judgment of her work as possessing the typical traits of subversion and resistance—the work of the bad subject—that Asian American literary criticism has always valued” (34). While Nguyen views the story of Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna “as a kind of ‘parable’” (25) for Asian Americans, it must be pointed out that she has more than one role to play. She is able to cross racial boundaries by vacillating between a white and a Japanese identity. Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna “passed as both Japanese and white, depending on occasion” (25). She thus is indeed a pioneering “panethnic impersonator” of Chinese American origin. I agree with the critics who have argued that Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna deserves special recognition. Her work “[possesses] the typical traits of subversion and resistance” of “the work of the bad subject” (Nguyen 34). Rather than performing the “model minority” expected by the dominant society, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna puts on a “model performance” by staging a “panethnic impersonation” between her Chinese ancestry and her Japanese mask.

Notes 1. Tomo Hattori has argued that Asian American discourse has been caught in the binarism between “model minorities” and “bad subjects” (see Nguyen 34–35). 2. My use of the Butlerian terms “performative,” “performance,” and “performativity” is consistent with those introduced by her in Gender Trouble and does not take into account her modifications in Bodies That Matter. In other words, I focus on the bodily acts, not the acts of reiteration (Bodies 9), which make a connection with the notion of “impersonation” that I will discuss later in my paper. Moreover, the “performative” is conceptualized as a set of bodily acts that constitute a performance. That is to say, the “performative” is taken to be the bodily gestures, movements, and histrionics that give shape to a performance. 3. Yamamoto actually uses the mask as the trope for the Japanese American women’s subject positions.

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Asian American Literature and Literary Theory  191 4. This argument is also made by Tomo Hattori in “Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense.” 5. There had been much interest in the visual representation of the Chinese, such as the Peale Museum’s display of Chinese curiosities in 1784, the first show of the “Chinese Lady,” Ah Fong Moy, in Barnum’s American Museum in 1834, the establishment of the Chinese Museum by Nathan Dunn in 1838, and the most famous exhibition tour of the Siamese Twins, which ran from 1829 to the 1870s. 6. Chen’s notion of the “real” impersonation can be seen in Kingston’s revision of Fa Mulan. As is widely known, Kingston was accused by Frank Chin of forgery and falsification as she replaces Yue Fe in the “word-carving” scenario with Fa Mulan. In Chen’s account, the fabrication of a “word-carving” Fa Mulan would a “real” impersonation of Mulan playing the role of the male hero of Yue Fe.

Works Cited Bow, Leslie. Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Asian American Women’s Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. Chen, Tina. Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Print. Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American ­Literature. Ed. Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fausao Inada, and Shawn Wong. New York: Penguin, 1991. 1–92. Print. Chiu, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian American Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. Gotanda, Philip Kan. Yankee Dawg You Die. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1991. Print. Hattori, Tomo. “Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense.” ­Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11.2 (1999): 228–47. Print. Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999. Print. Lim Shirley, et al., eds. Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits. ­Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. Print. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: ­Pergamon, 1990. Print. ———. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist.” American ­Literary Realism 16 (1983): 287–98. Print. ———. “Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Chameleon and Popular Success.” MELUS 11.3 (1984): 5–15. Print. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Print. Moon, Krystyn. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print.

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192  Iping Liang Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. Oishi, Eve. “Introduction.” Miss Numė of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance. Onoto Watanna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. xi–xxxiii. Print. Watanna, Onoto. Miss Numė of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance. 1899. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Print. Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Oakland: U of California P, 1999. Print.

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12 Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community in Michael Bond’s Paddington Here and Now and Don’t Eat the Neighbours Jopi Nyman Popular culture and media are key sites where identities are negotiated and reviewed, performed and deconstructed. In performing gender, race/ethnicity, and nation, popular texts from advertisements to music videos and computer games explore contemporary values and ideologies and offer sites of identification for the consumer. This chapter seeks to examine the ways in which contemporary popular narratives—children’s literature and an animated television series—perform ethnic and migrant identities by telling stories with animal protagonists. Recent work in the field of animal studies has suggested that animal texts, whether literary or media texts, perform and negotiate identity in various ways. Whereas classic Disney films such as The Three Caballeros (1944) featuring Donald Duck and the cigar-smoking Latin American parrot José Carioca promoted U.S. propaganda and circulated stereotypical ideas of other cultures, the various genetically engineered animals encountered in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel Oryx and Crake (2003) problematize the alleged human and technological mastery over nature in a post-human era. The various roles allotted to animals emphasize the texts’ indeterminacy. The textual animal, since it gains meaning(s) contextually and discursively, may perform traditional and dominant identities but it may also resist and counter dominant and anthropocentric meanings (see Nyman, “From Harrods” 301–05). The idea of the performative construction of identity is frequent in recent cultural criticism where it is understood to stem from the theories of Judith Butler and other scholars of performativity. According to Butler, all identities, including gender, are performed according to a cultural script. Rather than expressions of a pre-existing self, they are citations and produce identity through performance, through “a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 140; emphasis in original). Gregson and Rose suggest that for Butler discourse is “multiple and contradictory but always productive; it has specific effects, and this is where its power lies” (436). Yet citationality, in Butler’s view, is not merely repetitive but also provides an opportunity for counter-hegemonic performances such as parody and drag that challenge the expectations of discourse (137–38). However, it should be noted that not all performances are successful and transformative. Gade and Jerslev suggest that “to perform” is also “to conform” in the sense that performances

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194  Jopi Nyman revisit and select “between … identity stereotypes” (7, emphasis in ­original). In the view of Gade and Jerslev, what is often referred to as a unified field of performance studies consists of two theoretically distinct strands, performance studies and performative theory (9–10). While the former analyzes acts and situations that “can be read as signs and as symbolic elements in performative acts” (10), the latter has expanded the notion of the performative as stipulated by philosopher J. L. Austin from language to culture: “events … happen because someone does them, in the cultural domain” (Bal qtd. in Gade and Jerslev 10). In both approaches, identities are actively created, performed, or “done.” In Gade and Jerslev’s view, the benefit to be gained from the notions of performance and performativity is that they are both “located in the shared part … found in ‘reality,’ the everyday, the social field” and show “how reality is produced and mediated within various contexts” (10). This emphasis on the ordinary, daily repeated practices as central to “reality,” is what other scholars addressing the performance of identity in popular culture have also found important for the power of such performances. As Tim Edensor writes with particular reference to the performances of national identity: [E]veryday ways of doing things are also conveyed through popular representations of everyday life, in soap operas, magazines and other forms of popular fiction. … So dense are these intertextual references to habitual, everyday performances in the fictional worlds of television and media, and so repetitive are their enactions by one’s intimates, that they acquire a force which mitigates against deconstruction. (92) This chapter focuses on the ways in which contemporary cultural texts set in twenty-first century Britain use anthropomorphized animals to perform the everyday realities of ethnicity and migration. As I show, the animal figures in the texts under study perform not only animalness but also various other identities, especially those constructed upon nation, ethnicity, and migration. The first part of the analysis addresses Michael Bond’s Paddington Here and Now (2008), the recent sequel to the famous children’s story of Paddington Bear telling of Paddington’s life in contemporary Britain. This narrative shows how transnational discourses of asylum and criminality affect the life of everyone in Britain. In the second part of the chapter, I explore my main object of study, Don’t Eat the Neighbours, a Canadian/British animated television series produced in 2001–2002. This series focuses on the forced relocation of the Canadian Wolf and his two sons, Simon and Barry, to the English countryside where they end up living as the next-door neighbors of Rabbit and his three children, most prominently Lucy. Wolf also appears to develop a very close relationship with Fox, a gentlemanly English character wearing a mustard-colored vest and a red tie. While the affair starts as a shared attempt to catch Rabbit, it develops into an emotional and

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  195 apparently gay relationship. The series elaborates on questions of immigration, identity, and community, as well as the reconstruction of familial and gender roles since both Wolf and Rabbit are single fathers. By discussing selected episodes from the series in the context of migration, I will show how its performances of identity critique stereotypical views of immigrants as neighbors, and problematize the role of home and tradition in the construction of immigrant and national identity. In my reading, the identities of the host (Rabbit) and the guest (Wolf) as performed in Don’t Eat the Neighbours resist populist conceptions of immigrant others as threats. Rather than promoting xenophobia, the series emerges as a proponent of multiculturalism because of its emphasis on community, conviviality, and the sharing of spaces.

Animals and Ethnicity Cultural constructions of animals have often explored issues of immigration and ethnicity. This can be seen in various popular cultural texts ranging from the immigrant journey of the Russian Jewish Mouskewitz family to the U.S. in director Don Bluth’s independent animated film Fievel: An American Tail (1986) to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels dealing with the Holocaust. This is not a contemporary trend but has a longer history, stemming of course from the fables by Aesop and Perrault that used animals for the didactic purposes of promoting preferred moral values or alleged human truths. The early twentieth-century writings by the Canadian naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, while ostensibly portraying animals in their natural settings, place them in discourses of race and ethnicity. As Andrew Isenberg comments on Seton’s narrative of the wolf Lobo threatening the livestock at Currumpaw; in describing the death of the wolf, once the ruler of the wilderness, Seton uses the idea of the noble savage to “transfer … the dime-novel Indian’s dubious qualities” onto the wolf (51; cf. Nyman, Postcolonial 80–84). Animals are not mere markers of non-human Otherness, but they are discursively constructed historical and cultural images whose performances of identity contribute to our imagining of racial and ethnic identities. While the emphasis in current human-animal studies is on the relations between humans and animals, some critical studies have addressed the performance of ethnicity and nationhood in animal narratives. For example, Richard Horwitz’s reading of the 1905 U.S. children’s story “Pigs is Pigs” by Ellis Parker Butler shows how its animals are embedded in the period’s debates concerning ethnicity and national belonging. In Horwitz’s reading, this apparently innocent narrative telling of the shipping of two guinea pigs by rail becomes a site of contesting ethnic identities as the guinea pig is racialized. In what becomes a narrative of exclusion, the story’s guinea pigs are barred from traveling by a simple-minded Irish railway agent, who tries to fix the identity of the guinea pigs: are these “dago pigs” proper pigs or

196  Jopi Nyman not, and should they be allowed on the train? In Horwitz’s view the story has message to tell:

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While, we learn, the boundaries among the variety of Americans can be considered an irrational jumble, two categories remain: “we” who are pragmatic, white, adult, English-speaking and male, and “other,” inscrutable, promiscuous foreigners who belong elsewhere. (244–45) The animal, then, is used in Ellis Butler’s story to perform a racialized identity in a period of turmoil when boundary crossings remained forbidden and heavily symbolic. Similarly, Werner Sollors has pointed out the fact that in 1958 Alabama librarians were not allowed to acquire Garth Williams’s children’s book Rabbit’s Wedding for their libraries because it presented a story of the marriage between of a white and a black rabbit (19–22). In a similar vein, narratives drawing on colonialist discourse and Victorian discourses of race and evolution have contrasted humans with apes, for instance, to suggest that the lower classes (and non-Western people) are more animal-like in their behavior and appearance, as seen in such texts as Eugene O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape (1922) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series. This discourse of the animal has promoted ways of addressing the other in a degrading manner by using animal imagery. Its legacy is evident in racist and xenophobic vocabularies where the immigrant other is not infrequently dehumanized by labelling it as an animal or a parasite (O’Brien 42–44). More recent literary and cultural narratives of animals address animals in ways rooted in changes in philosophical, ecocritical, and postmodernist discourses. Novels as different from each other as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), as Philip Armstrong suggests, examine different aspects of modernity in their telling of animal-centred stories, often showing how “the organic world,” degraded by modernity and its relentless hunger for science, expansion, and profit, has become a “Frankensteinian workshop” (181). In a similar vein, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin have suggested that contemporary postcolonial writing, such as by Martel and Coetzee, seeks to re-envision the relationship between the human and the non-human animal and consider “linguistic cognition, carnivorousness, and animal sacrifice” to promote “less anthropocentric and imperialist ideas of community” (183). These studies, however, do not examine animal performances in the context of ethnicity and migration, where the animal may occupy positions of in-betweenness, thus hybridizing and transforming spaces formerly reserved for humans and their dominant ideologies. An example of this is the African lion Christopher, whose presence in central London changes the naturalized ordering of space and its division into human and animal spaces (Nyman, “From Harrods” 294–95). Other instances can be located in texts as varied as Paul Auster’s Timbuktoo (1999), a novel telling of an immigrant dog’s journey through the American class system and his performance of

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  197 Americanness, or Rafi Zabor’s jazz novel The Bear Comes Home (1998) where the genetically mutated bear performs a hybrid identity that transgresses conventional species boundaries. In my reading, such animal narratives show how the non-human enters diverse human spaces and how the performance of identity transforms conventional views based on such polarizations as those of race, ethnicity, and species. The effect of animal performances is, then, to problematize and offer alternatives to dominant ways of thinking. The following sections will deal with depictions of immigrant animals in recent British literary and media texts. I will first discuss Paddington Bear in the context of British discourses on illegal immigration, and then address the relationship between host and guest in the animated television series Don’t Eat the Neighbours.

An English Bear from Peru While the status of the popular children’s classic Paddington Bear as an immigrant bear from “Deepest Darkest Peru” has been commonsense knowledge for a long time, Michael Bond’s latest novel in the series, Paddington Here and Now (2008), published thirty years after the previous book in the series, locates Paddington in debates of immigration and asylum particular to twenty-first century Britain. The first episode of the book where Paddington Bears performs the illegal immigrant is central to my reading. In this chapter, Paddington’s shopping cart disappears while he visits a stall in the Portobello Market frequented by tourists as well as pickpockets. The book’s Britain is one where the innocent are targets of heinous crime and it is also a nation whose benign tradition is undergoing a crisis. This view is attributed in the book to an h-dropping London stallholder who says the following upon hearing about Paddington’s loss: “It’s coming to something if a young bear gent can’t leave ‘is shopping basket unattended while ‘e’s going about ‘is business,” said one of the stallholders, who normally supplied Paddington with vegetables when he was out shopping for the Brown family. “I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” (8) The story juxtaposes a safe past, that is populated by familiar people speaking with local accents but which is apparently doomed to disappear, with the globalized world, its foreign tourists, and transnational criminals. The presence of the two groups becomes evident when Paddington enters the police station. Feeling somewhat uneasy, but yet determined to report the incident, the bear is greeted by a young police officer, first in German and then in French, as he expects the bear to be a visitor. An explanation is offered: “[I]t’s ‘Be Polite to Foreigners Week. … It’s the Sergeant’s idea’” aimed at “overseas visitors” (15). Upon reporting the incident to the young and inexperienced officer, Paddington is too vague and talks about the disappearance

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198  Jopi Nyman of his vehicle—this the officer takes to be a car which in his view is now “probably on its way to the Czech Republic or somewhere like that” (18). It is conspicuous in this passage that the general positive attitude toward “visitors” transforms gradually into one characterized by dislike, nervousness, and suspicion, as it becomes evident that Paddington is without a driver’s licence, insurance, and certificate of paid road tax. Furthermore, invoking his ignorance and referring to the lack of such things in “[d]arkest Peru,” which he stresses as his place of origin, turn him into a suspicious stranger. Because of his ethnicity, the police officer identifies him as a potential criminal or at least as an illegal immigrant: “If that doesn’t make you foreigner, I don’t know what does” (15). This gradual acquisition of the status of the culturally different is supported by Paddington’s lack of knowledge of the Highway Code, and his inability to recognize (or read) traffic signs or, by extension, to show any awareness of the cultural customs and values allegedly known to and shared by all Britons: “What does that one show?” “A man trying to open an umbrella,” said Paddington promptly. “I expect it means it’s about to rain.” “It’s meant to depict a man with a shovel,” said the policeman wearily. “That means there are roadworks ahead. …” (20) In other words, his performance of Britishness is failing and leads to nearly fatal consequences as the episode culminates in the arrest of the bear and the reading of his rights: “Talking of paws,” he said casually, as he came round to the front of the counter. “Would you mind holding yours out in front of you?” Paddington did as he was bidden, and to his surprise there was a click and he suddenly found his wrists held together by some kind of chain. … “I’m going to take your dabs now,” said the policeman, “My dabs!” repeated Paddington in alarm. “Fingerprints,” explained the policeman. “Only in your case I suppose we shall have to make do with paws. First of all I want you to press one of them down on this ink pad, then on some paper, so that we have a record of it for future reference.” … “After that … you are allowed one telephone call.” (23) In transforming Paddington Bear, an emblem of Englishness with a red hat and a blue duffel coat who has a celebratory statue at Paddington Station, the site of his rebirth as English, into a potential foreign criminal lacking knowledge of and respect for Britain, its culture and laws, the narrative shows that contemporary British discourses on foreignness utilize xenophobia and suspicion to a remarkable degree. Although Paddington’s ostensible crime is linked

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  199 with alleged traffic violations, the text also hints at the general atmosphere of suspicion and fear characterizing social and racial relations in post-7/7 Britain. It appears that Paddington is rendered suspicious at two levels: while the xenophobic discourse would emphasize his immigrant status, the post-7/7 discourse suggests that his assimilated status may hide a homegrown terrorist. Paul Gilroy has suggested that the discourses of 9/11 and 7/7 strongly suggest that civilizations are “contending” and their cultures “mutually incompatible”: “A cat born in a kipper box will nonetheless remain a cat” (133). In the case of Bond’s book, however, the narrative suspense is canceled and Paddington’s non-British status is erased, at least partially because the text is primarily a children’s book demanding narrative closure. By doing so it also restores the readers’ belief in British institutions and their ability to rectify the situation in the form of the absent sergeant’s return to the station. When restoring order and rationality, the sergeant correctly identifies Paddington as “the young gentleman who’s had trouble with his shopping basket on wheels” (24) and thus decriminalizes him. Thus the narrative— while linking crime and foreignness—returns Paddington to the safe world of Britishness. The end of the story shows how he enjoys his “­elevenses” with his elderly friend Mr Gruber, ironically also an immigrant (from ­Hungary) and thus a marginal inhabitant in Britain. However, the incident casts an ugly shadow on their lives, suggesting that their sheltered way of life in merry old England with its rituals such as the “elevenses” may come to an end.

Canadian Wolves, English Rabbits The various dilemmas related to the experience of migration, including, but not limited to, family and parenting, the relationship between the host and the guest, and home and tradition in diasporic space, are central themes in the UK/Canadian animated television series Don’t Eat the Neighbours. In 2001–2002 twenty-six episodes of the series, which is known for its combination of sarcastic humor with animal characters whose voices belong to well-known British and Canadian actors and comedians (e.g., Robert Lindsay, Doon Mackichan, and Sean Cullen), were produced. As I show in my reading of selected episodes of the series, especially the first episode “A Rabbit for All Seasons” (2001) and episode 21, “Lucy Blows Her Top” (2002), its treatment of migration and the presence of others in a formerly relatively stable space touches upon issues of tolerance and hospitality in a way that can be read from the perspective outlined by Paul Gilroy. The immigration of the Wolf family is a result of forced migration. The first episode shows the reasons for Wolf’s exile. The film opens with a shot emphasizing his masculine status by showing him wearing a motorcycle jacket and stalking deer in the Canadian wilderness. This is supported with his preferred self-identification as “the lone wolf, nature’s predator, the hunter … his teeth … a deadly weapon, his body a coil spring, graceful and

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200  Jopi Nyman agile” (“A Rabbit”). This is, however, a failing performance of gender. When he fails as a hunter, he is forced to order “three pizzas with everything” from his mobile phone to provide food for his family. To emphasize his disappointment and loss of status as a proper wolf, the pizza company is unable to provide any pies with raw meat but can only deliver pepperoni pizzas. At this point his two young sons, Simon and Barry, one wearing a woollen cap with the Canadian flag and the other a 52 t-shirt, approach their father noisily, shouting out aloud “Dad” in turns while waving a letter. While Wolf assumes that the letter has been sent by “the Great Wolf Lodge” and informs him of his successful membership application, it actually serves a contrary purpose as it banishes failing Wolf and his family from Canada “before sundown” or “sooner if possible” (“A Rabbit”). The following scene introduces their space of exile, Pondwood Lake, England. The sunny English countryside is a clearly national space populated by such eccentric native animals as boastful Rabbit with his three children, their frightful friend Terrapin, artistic Bear, and cunning Fox, Rabbit’s archenemy. This landscape is the site of the performance of English national identity. It is a land of afternoon teas, hedgerows, and other signs of Englishness such as presumptuous vegetable gardens, plentiful “sweet cabbages,” and ironically also the constant smell of manure (“You’ll get used to it” [“A Rabbit”]). This previously monocultural English space is, however, transformed into a multicultural land by the introduction of the non-native animal, the wolf, who ends up living next door to the English Rabbits. For the wolves, the arrival marks a new beginning: WOLF:  This is it, boys, our new home. SIMON:  Where’s the rest of it? WOLF:  The size doesn’t matter, Simon. It’s what’s inside that counts. BARRY:  It’s got cable? WOLF:  No, son. It’s got us, the three of us, enjoying our new lives together

here, surrounded by the wild countryside in the bosom of Mother Nature. (“A Rabbit”) This countryside, however, is not a terra incognita but populated by a variety of indigenous animals. Even before the entry of Wolf, this space has not been without prejudices based on stereotypes of others. Many of its inhabitants, Rabbit and Terrapin in particular, fear Bear. When Bear catches the two when they try to steal his cabbages, Rabbit and Terrapin are shown to sit in his drawing room, trembling and expecting death. As shaky Terrapin puts it, “He wants me as a trophy. Yes, by the end of the day I’ll be a flower pot” (“A Rabbit”). While Bear is a civilized and philosophical character in the series, stereotypical expectations mask his true nature. In this scene he is shown to approach Rabbit and Terrapin from behind a Japanese screen: while his shadow appears threatening, his real intention is to offer the two visitors cucumber sandwiches, not to devour them. The scene, however, emphasizes the otherness of Bear’s house: the camera, following the gaze

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  201 of Rabbit and Terrapin, pans in on the strange Japanese objects decorating his living room: works of art, kabuki masks, and the screen separating the rooms from each other, and finally a peaceful bear dressed in Asian costume and cap. Rather than violent and malicious, as Rabbit believes, Bear is a tolerant character, fond of painting and the arts, someone who is not only willing to offer hospitality to his uninvited guests but often acts as a source of support and advice, to Lucy in particular. By showing how the migrant wolves enter a world of contested intergroup relations and established prejudices, the series emphasizes the status of the wolves. In other words, by showing how they become ethnic others in ­Britain, it calls attention to their performance of ethnicity, their C ­ anadianness in particular. This is explored in various ways that contrast their home country with the space of the cost, including language and other links with the old country. Canadian English is contrasted with the ­British accents of native animals, and their home shows several instances of C ­ anadian paraphernalia that contribute to the performance of C ­ anadianness. In addition to Simon’s cap with its Canadian flag, showing attachment to their non-­British home, their new house, as shown in the episode “Colin Pays a Visit,” is constructed as a Canadian space. It has a wall painted red and white, complete with a red maple leaf, a souvenir moose on a shelf, and a satellite dish linking the diasporic family with home. “Lucy Blows Her Top” offers further examples: this time the living room has a red and white wall plate with the text ­Canada, a metallic maple leaf with similar text, and a moose trophy above the fireplace. To use the terms of Michael Billig, these objects are examples of “banal nationalism,” an almost unconscious way of promoting the nation as a part of everyday life (6). These performances of Canadian identity in England emphasize the importance of identity in the series. The dilemma of maintaining tradition and passing its values on to the second generation of immigrants is addressed in Wolf’s attempt to describe and promote proper performances of wolfness in his sons, who prefer to spend their time watching television, playing in a band, and fraternizing with the local kids, especially Lucy Rabbit. This generational conflict is apparent in the following lines emphasizing the opposition between the two animal species. Upon realizing that their house is next to Rabbit’s, Wolf dashes home to meet his indifferent offspring with little interest in the wolf tradition: WOLF:  Boys! Boys! You won’t believe what’s living next door! SIMON:  OK. Do we have any nachos? WOLF:  Where’s my sack? … WOLF:  You don’t need nachos anymore, Simon. This is a sign.

I’m talking about rabbit, boys. Fresh meat living right next door. It’s a new start for us all. We’ve ordered our last pizza. … It’s time to embrace our heritage, become hunters once again. Like our noble ancestors, arrowed hunters, sought by many, feared by all, except for lions and really big cows. BARRY:  Are cows the ones that breathe fire?

202  Jopi Nyman know, it’s all my fault, I haven’t been a good role model and I’ve let you grow lazy. But all of that is about to change. We’re wolves, boys, and it’s time to start acting like wolves. SIMON:  OK, but that howling thing really hurts my throat. … WOLF:  Tonight we eat meat, fresh from the bone, raw, dripping and bloody. BARRY:  Can’t I just have the side salad? (“A Rabbit”)

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WOLF:  I

In other words, the meaning of the traditional wolf identity is not shared with their father by Simon and Barry. Exemplifying the values of second-­generation immigrants whose values are formed on the basis of popular culture and their peers, Simon and Barry are a disappointment to their father. For Wolf, the only way to successfully implement the values of wolves in his sons and thus salvage the tradition is, as I will show later, to return them to Canada.

Hosts, Guests, and Ethnic Conflicts In addition to discussing the dilemma on maintaining identity in the conditions of diaspora, the series constructs the dispute between the host and the guest as an ethnic conflict. The episode “Lucy Blows Her Top” starts from a minor misunderstanding between Lucy and the Wolf boys concerning a failed class experiment with a volcano. Lucy has herself caused the failure but blames the wolves and refuses to accept her fault until late in the episode. This incident, however, has serious consequences as it leads to a situation where the host practically expels the immigrant from Britain. This episode clearly shows how xenophobic discourse is used in interethnic conflicts to boost intolerance, here by the means of scapegoating, a common strategy of othering (see Shapiro 3–4). Starting from the rather innocent-sounding banter between frustrated Lucy and her friends (“Why did I have to partner the clumsy idiot wolves” [“Lucy Blows”]), it expands into a series essentializing generalizations upon her return home to the company of Rabbit and Terrapin. These views proclaim the superiority of rabbits as native animals and stress the inferiority of immigrant wolves as immigrant others: TERRAPIN:  And

then I said we don’t want your sort here. Now leave before I do something I regret. RABBIT:  Wow. You told him. TERRAPIN:  I know. That’s one duckling who won’t be back in a hurry. LUCY:  Uhh. Wolves. They need intensive training before they’re even allowed to be called stupid. RABBIT:  Yes. If nature had meant wolves to be clever, she would have made them rabbits. But how could they even begin to understand the gifts nature has given us. We’re better than them, and that’s a fact. We’re rabbits, and we’re a thousand times smarter than they’ll even be. LUCY:  Yeah, and what’s with the howling. They’re just so slow and brainless. RABBIT:  Ah. This is the happiest day of my life. (“Lucy Blows”)

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  203 Not only does the scene reveal the construction of racist discourse in its appeals to “nature” and “facts” as markers of fixed identity; it also shows how the views of parents are discursively transmitted to their children. This is seen in the fact that Lucy repeats, almost word by word, the arguments of her father when she confronts Simon and Barry soon after the scene. The demeaning discourse and performance of anti-immigration host identity continues with jokes about wolves (“What do you call a wolf with no brain? Barry” [“Lucy Blows”]) and supports further the oppositional division between the two groups. Later Simon and Barry confront Lucy with similar rabbit jokes, to which she responds angrily by resorting to arguments familiar from the discourse of anti-Semitism, that the wolves are responsible for all evil in the world: “ozone depletion, capitalism, the state of British cricket. It’s one big global wolf conspiracy” (“Lucy Blows”). This conflict culminates in Lucy’s use of phrasing well known from the lexicon of racism: “Coming here with their wolf ways, thinking they own the place. I think we should teach them a lesson” (“Lucy Blows). The following plan devised by Lucy involves a telephone call to Wolf allegedly originating from the Association of Canadian Wolves: “We are withdrawing your membership. You’re no longer allowed to be a wolf. All howling privileges are hereby revoked” (“Lucy Blows”). Lucy’s anger at the wolves reaches such a stage that her friend Bear comments on her harsh words: “Lucy, this isn’t you talking. … I’m sorry. Lucy, this attitude isn’t welcome in my house” (“Lucy Blows”). For Wolf, Lucy’s hoax telephone call means a loss of cultural identity, loss of wolfness. His subsequent renaming as Steve, as a human rather than a wolf, stresses his inability to perform his identity as a wolf and a father in the conditions of diaspora. In the manner of many migrant parents, he decides to return to tradition and to travel back home so that his children can be raised in the old land and construct a proper wolf identity: “You need somebody to teach you how to be wolves. Somebody better than me. So  I’m taking you home” (“Lucy Blows”). Thus the series problematizes the notion of home and shows that its meaning is different to first- and second-­generation migrants since the latter are unwilling to return at this stage. Barry in particular has only hazy memories of Canada and is shown to be studying Canadianness with the help of The Pop-Up Book of Canada. In so doing he tries to learn to perform the unknown identity and tradition of Canadianness alien to him. This is shown in his attempt to learn to recognize Canadian fauna and master the correct pronunciation of one of its species in particular: “Moose. Moose” (“Lucy Blows”). This shows the extent to which the episode explores issues of home and belonging in diaspora: while Wolf relies on the power of the imagined tradition, his children are already more assimilated and consider Britain their home. The ethnic conflict between the host and the guest is resolved in the narrative when Lucy, who has emphasized her independence from others throughout the episode, realizes the extent of her malice after a nightmare involving a nuclear explosion in which everybody else disappears and she

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204  Jopi Nyman becomes the only remaining living creature in the universe. To keep the wolves from leaving the country, she prepares, assisted by Bear and his set of calligraphy pens and parchment, a certificate from the “Association of Kanadian [sic] Wolves,” which manages to reach Wolf while waiting for the taxi to the airport. This document reconstructs Wolf as “one of the most successful wolves ever” whom the Association is “proud to have … in England as one of our [its] ambassadors” (“Lucy Blows”). The document reinstitutes Wolf’s identity (“I’m Wolf again” [“Lucy Blows”]) and restores his right to represent and reproduce the cultural tradition. This reintroduces the co-existence of the various species. Even Rabbit claims to have learned something from the events, as is seen in his words addressed to Lucy and Terrapin: “I’ll set a better example and start respecting my fellow animals. OK Shellboy, let’s go … to get some cabbages” (“Lucy Blows”). This idea of co-existence, friendship, and tolerance is in fact central to the world view of the series and emphasised in its theme song that ritualistically opens every episode, “Oh we live in the forest. … at peace with one another.” Co-existence is, indeed, a key to the series. While Wolf and Fox are constantly shown to be hunting for Rabbit, they never succeed in the task. Similarly, the transspecies networks of second-generation immigrants, who go to school and play in a band together, contribute to the leveling of potential conflicts and show the growing extent of their mutual relations. Regardless of occasional conflicts, the younger generation are constantly in touch with each other. In terms of the series coexistence means that neighbors and friends, regardless of their ethnicity, are not to be devoured. Rather, they are to be treated as fellow members of the local community. While utopian in many respects, such a multiethnic society as imagined in the series resembles what Paul Gilroy considers specific to the lived, everyday experience of the British project of multiculturalism. Critiquing U.S.-based models of racial and cultural relations, Gilroy suggests that the story to be told of immigration and “race” is not that of “immigration as invasion and the melancholic blend of guilt, denial, laughter, and homogenizing violence that it has precipitated” (166). Rather, the emphasis should be on the everyday level, on what he calls “the banality of intermixture and the subversive ordinariness of this country’s [Britain’s] convivial cultures” (166). Conviviality, in other words, signifies in Gilroy’s view the ordinarization of multicultural cohabitation and patterns of intergroup relations, specifically in the urban areas of Britain (xi). While Don’t Eat the Neighbours supports the same idea of coexistence and the ordinariness of multicultural interaction, it takes it slightly further by locating the story in the nationally symbolic landscape of the English countryside. In addition to representing non-normative families and relationships, it critiques contemporary appeals to national purity and emphasizes the need to live harmoniously with others who look and speak differently. In the world of the series conviviality functions as Gilroy suggests (xi). It undoes fixed identities and opens up positions where living “side by side” and “at peace with another” is possible without the fear of violence and racial hatred.

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Performing Immigration, Ethnicity, and Community  205 I have argued in this chapter that the performances of immigrant identities in the two texts set in contemporary Britain take place in the ambivalent context of nation and otherness. Since Bond’s Paddington, deeply embedded in the discourse of Englishness as is evident in his iconic status, becomes a source of suspicion because of his foreignness and performance of the illegal immigrant, the book hints at a transformation in the British public opinion concerning the status of the non-British, be they European guest workers or tourists, or non-European immigrants or asylum seekers. While Paddington safely returns to the British tradition, a rupture in hospitality has been cracked open, a rupture that links the narrative to the role of insecurity in post-7/7 Britain. In contrast, Don’t Eat the Neighbours, commenting on xenophobic discourse and the lexicon of racism based on ethnic stereotypes and essentialist identities, is more optimistic in providing a vision of a multicultural Britain, which may result from the fact that the series was produced well before the events of 7/7. The various performances of identity in the series explore various dilemmas linked with ethnicity and immigration, ranging from Lucy’s performances of xenophobia and racism to Wolf’s failing performances of masculinity and cultural heritage. While addressing the problems of maintaining cultural identity in diasporic space characteristic of the migrant condition, the series also emphasizes the need to participate in new performances of identity. As a sign of this, Wolf and his sons adapt to the local conditions and participate in new identity performances. For instance, Wolf himself takes up a new hobby with Fox, line dancing, and enjoys his peaceful afternoon teas with Fox. Similarly, his sons go to school and mix with rabbits and other local animals. Co-existence, co-operation, and the ability to adapt are suggested as keys to survival in the new country. As Don’t Eat the Neighbours suggests, in this liberal multicultural space of the English countryside, to maintain and insist on the purity of one’s cultural tradition appears as an outmoded strategy and a form of fundamentalist thinking that is to be replaced with hybrid performances of identity and boundary-crossings.

Note The research reported in this article has been funded by the Academy of Finland (“Companion Animals and the Affective Turn”; project 14875).

Works Cited “A Rabbit for All Seasons.” 2001. Don’t Eat the Neighbours: A Rabbit for All Seasons and Other Stories. London: VCI Group, 2002. DVD. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. London: Routledge. 2008. Print. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Print. Bond, Michael. Paddington Here and Now. London: HarperCollins, 2008. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge, 1990. Print.

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206  Jopi Nyman Edensor, Tim. National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. Berg: Oxford, 2002. Print. Gade, Rune, and Anne Jerslev. “Introduction.” Performative Realism: Interdisciplinary Studies in Art and Media. Ed. Rune Gade and Anne Jerslev. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005. 7–18. Print. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Gregson, Nicky, and Gillian Rose. “Taking Butler Elsewhere: Performativities, Spatialities and Subjectivities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 433–52. Print. Horwitz, Richard P. Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture. London: Macmillan, 1998. Print. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Isenberg, Andrew. “The Moral Ecology of Wildlife.” Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 48–64. Print. “Lucy Blows Her Top.” 2002. Don’t Eat the Neighbours: A Rabbit for All Seasons and Other Stories. London: VCI Group, 2002. DVD. Nyman, Jopi. “From Harrods to Africa: The Travels of a Lion Called Christian.” Society and Animals 20.3 (2012): 294–310. Print. ———. Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2003. Print. Shapiro, Johanna. “Walking a Mile in Their Patients’ Shoes: Empathy and Othering in Medical Students’ Education.” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 3.1 (2008): 1–11. Print. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

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13 The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos by Cornershop and by Ramesh B. Weeratunga Monika Mueller Ramesh B. Weeratunga’s video rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and “United Provinces of India,” a video by the British band Cornershop, both present their viewers with intriguing Bollywood-style performances of ethnicity. In “United Provinces of India,” Britain appears to be a “second space” of impossibly positive ethnic hybridity expressed in song and dance, and in Weeratunga’s “Ring of Fire” ethnicity is shown to be an empty signifier since it apparently can be assumed as easily as a Zorro costume is donned. Both videos engage in “cross-ethnic traffic,” the performance of one or several ethnicities other than one’s own. This performance convention, according to Julian Cha, “contributes a complex dimension to embodiment as the borders that separate identities and racial/ethnic affiliations become interwoven and displaced” (1).1 By the way it is presented in the videos, cross-ethnic traffic raises, but does not necessarily answer, important questions as to how ethnicity is conceptualized in (postmodern) music video performance. The Cornershop video features an immensely colorful performance of the song by the U.K. band, whose frontman, Tjinder Singh, and female vocalist, Bubbley Kaur, are, respectively, second- and first-generation Indian-English. “United Provinces of India” is the opening track of the band’s sixth studio album, Cornershop & the Double ‘O’ Groove Of (2011). On the Cornershop website, the song is advertised as “full fat funk melds with the cream of Punjabi folk, asking the question, why has such naturalness never been done before” (online). Robert Stribley from Skyscraper Magazine commends the album accordingly: “Rare it is that an album combines Western rock’n’roll instrumentation [so] elegantly with Indian instrumentation like dholki, tamboura, tumbi, and, of course, sitar” (online). Viewers of the video version are given a look at the vivid and colorful street life in the London borough of Hoxton: while the song’s fast paced, cheery, if a bit “jarring,” Bollywood music plays in the background and ­Bubbley Kaur is singing in Punjabi, Britons and Indians are interacting happily with one another in their trendy neighborhood.2 The video opens to a charming market scene; neighbors are talking to one another, and a middle-aged Asian man takes two young boys—one Asian, one British—shopping. In the next scene, the boys are merrily at play in a dance studio where later young Indian ladies in colorful saris will perform a Bollywood-style dance. During

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208  Monika Mueller the performance they are spontaneously joined by British people sans saris, and the attending crowd is multiethnic as well. In another scene the boys frolic in a park and then come back to the dance venue. Throughout it all, the British boy is presented as a natural extension of a big happy, Indian family. The band itself does not figure in the video. This particular performance of ethnicity in “United Provinces of India” might leave viewers wondering why Indian ethnicity in multiethnic Britain is performed in such a “much too good to be true” manner. Could the ­Punjabi lyrics perhaps shed some light on the action? In order to gain a better understanding of what happens in the video through finding out more about the lyrics (which are not available in translation on music lyric pages on the Internet), I corresponded with Rashmi Mehta, a Mumbai student who participated in a student exchange with Stuttgart University. Ms. Mehta seemed to be a bit taken aback by the video. On May 24, 2012 she wrote, “it confuses me to no extent because while the song is semi-folk and talks about love, the clothes are garish and so is the music. [It’s] rather loud; that makes it lose its folk touch. I cannot understand what the video is trying to show as the lyrics are something about love but the video has no connection to the lyrics.” The action of the video having no apparent connection to the lyrics brings to mind strategies from the make-believe world of advertising. The name of the song and video, “United Provinces of India” (which, perhaps ironically, makes no reference to its obviously British setting), is reminiscent of the advertising campaign “United Colors of Benetton.” One might speculate if the band perhaps intended to make a connection between its video and Benetton ads that use striking but often totally unrelated images to sell their products,3 thus drawing attention to the fact that the video might actually invite ironic distancing from its images of perfect (multiethnic) harmony. Ramesh B. Weeratunga’s Bollywood-style rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” from 2009 is an equally colorful and perhaps even more playful video. Weeratunga, a Sri Lankan musician who has been a longtime resident of Berlin, has shot a truly transnational “Bollywood meets Bacardi ad” version of Johnny Cash’s hit song for a Johnny Cash tribute in Berlin. U.S.-“Indian” and “Indian-Indian” and Latino themes and settings are showcased throughout the video—but Weeratunga’s adopted hometown of Berlin is not referred to at all. In addition to numerous Bollywood references—including a real elephant— this adaptation of the American classic (which is already flavored with ­Mexican mariachi trumpets) incorporates Native American and Latino elements, such as a dance around a ring of fire, the Western movie character of Zorro, and various Latin/ate lovers. Weeratunga’s “Ring of Fire” video is an incredibly fast-paced feast for the eyes. It plays with variations of ring of fire visuals as well as the double meaning of the word Indian: this already occurs in the hilarious opening scene, in which Indians/Sri Lankans perform “Indianness” in front of a totem pole. In the second scene, the action changes to a movie theater lobby, where Bollywood dancers are dancing to the tune of “Ring of Fire.” Weeratunga,

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  209 performing Zorro, brandishing a dagger-cum-microphone, shows up and pays CASH ONLY for a movie ticket to “Ring of Fire.” At the same time, in the movie theater, a movie reel operated by a turbaned man catches fire and turns into a ring of fire. In the third scene, Zorro hangs out on a beach peopled with Hawaiian-style beach beauties of both sexes and then falls through a hole in the sand (and in time?) into the bed of a beautiful, half-clad lady in a sari, who is surrounded by Bollywood dancers. After romancing the lady a bit, he is set on fire by a rival of hers, runs away, finds himself on the beach again, and runs into the water to extinguish the flames. The video ends with director Weeratunga sporting a Hawaiian shirt, giving the finger, and falling off a chair on the beach, exclaiming “Not bad, hey, I like it!” In an interview episode on the German music interview website “muso talk tv—make more music:-),” Weeratunga was interviewed by host Non-Eric about the creation of the music for the video. During the twenty-minute interview, he explains how he mixed and layered canned and live music played on traditional Indian and non-Indian instruments (chanai, tablas, tumbi, as well as banjo) to create this unique sound (online). The imagery of the video, perhaps because its images are so clearly “over the top,” was not a major part of the interview. Both videos make ethnicity seem like “something that one does as one chooses”—which “can appear like a hobby or a leisure activity” (Murray  4)—and which thus questions notions of ethnic/cultural authenticity. This approach to the performance of ethnicity in “United Provinces of India” (as well as other songs by Cornershop) and “Ring of Fire” raises a number of questions: Is the multiethnic Britain featured in the Cornershop video just too good to be true or are Cornershop possibly even making fun of and/or exploiting their lead singers’ ethnic background? Is it less o.k. to make fun of Indian/Sri Lankan culture than to make fun of British (“Norwegian Wood,” Cornershop) or American culture (“Ring of Fire,” Weeratunga)? Did Cornershop and Ramesh Weeratunga make these videos in order to show the inherent absurdity of the idea of ethnicity in a postmodern world? Is there a political agenda or just a “sell-out” commercialism behind this? Do they actually instrumentalize a happy shallow multiculturalism to usher in a cynical, commercialized end to the politics of ethnicity?

Theoretical Positions on Post-Ethnic Performance and Cultural “Authenticity” In the early 1990s, theorist Judith Butler became known for her insights into the constructedness of both the sex/gender system and the concept of race/ ethnicity. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler argues that “gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (25). In Bodies that Matter (1993), she includes the concept of race/ethnicity in her discussion. Thus, according to Butler, normative behavior—in this case behavior prescribed by racial/ethnic norms—can be resignified and changed through its performance. Sneja Gunew, in a complex analysis of a case of

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210  Monika Mueller Australian “cross-ethnic transvestism,” suggests adding ethnicity to Marjorie Garber’s often quoted observation about the circumstance that gender owes its entire existence to the fact that we see it being performed every day. Thus, Gunew quotes Garber’s “gender … exists only in representation—or performance” (6) as a possible blueprint for: “Ethnicity … exists only in representation—or performance” (6). Postmodernist identity politics in the wake of Judith Butler’s insights encourage individuals to try on and try out aspects of identities that are not necessarily their own. The two music videos analyzed here seem to suggest that more than twenty years after the publication of Butler’s books the norms of race and ethnicity have indeed undergone a drastic resignification. Buying into the theory that like gender, ethnicity emerges through performance and representation, several theorists of identity have suggested that a future social order needs to be postethnic/postracial—or, to use Vijay Prashad’s term, polycultural. David Hollinger thus argues that in a postethnic society, the “ethnoracial categories central to identity politics would be more matters of choice than ascription; … mobilization by ethnoracial groups would be more a strategic option than a presumed destiny attendant upon mere membership in a group; and … economic inequalities would be confronted head-on, instead of through the medium of ethnorace” (1033). According to this view, ethnicity is, indeed, “up for grabs.” Vijay Prashad explains in a similar vein about his idea of polyculturalism that “the framework of polyculturalism uncouples the notion of origins and authenticity from that of culture” (53). This is possible because “[c]ulture is a process … which has no identifiable origin, and therefore no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is claimed to be his or her authentic culture” (53).4 These envisionings of societies beyond ethnicity and race might sound very intriguing, but they are by no means accepted uncritically by all contemporary cultural theorists. The fact that at times there is considerable resistance to performance of an/other ethnicity can be illustrated by two examples from Australia, which problematize the argument that culture is simply the result of long-standing practice and show that postmodern theory is not always readily accepted by society. Sneja Gunew, in “Performing Australian Ethnicity: ‘Helen Demidenko’” denounces Australian writer Helen Darville (who is the daughter of two British immigrants to Australia) for having published an allegedly anti-semitic book dealing with a Ukranian family’s involvement in the Holocaust under the guise of being the Australian-Ukranian author “Helen Demidenko.” Darville engaged in an active performance of an ethnicity other than her own by “signing her book with Ukrainian inscriptions and performing Ukranian songs and dances” (2). One concrete harm that—according to Gunew—came from Darville’s performance is that “Demidenko,” as a cultural outsider posturing as an insider, passed judgment on “[a] lot of Ukrainian families” who as she claimed “don’t want to own up to their pasts” (7). Moreover, the

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  211 fact that Darville got quite a few historical details wrong enraged various spokespeople from “so-called ‘ethnic groups’” (7) who felt that “the writer’s function was a representative one and therefore the minority view had to be ‘correctly’ represented” (7). Gunew somewhat wearily concludes from her discussion of the “Demidenko” case that contemporary Australian society’s conception is not on par with Butlerian/postethnic identity theory and thus has a very limited understanding of what “authenticity” can mean in a purely academic discourse: “In Australia, what is recognised as ‘authentic’ has in a sense be been reduced to an ‘identikit’ of markers that we have been taught to recognise as ‘ethnicity’” (8). Therefore, “‘speaking as’ can only be heard as ‘authentic’ in certain circumstances” (8)—and notions of ethnic authenticity still seem very much alive on a street level.5 Another attempt to understand cultural authenticity within the framework of cross-ethnic traffic was made at the beginning of the millennium by the African American ethnographer E. Patrick Johnson in Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, where he presents a complex analysis of African American gospel music and “authenticity.” He discusses the gospel performances of “The Café of the Gate of Salvation,” an all-white Australian gospel choir mostly made up by atheists, and analyzes how his initial reaction to the choir’s performance changed from dismissing it as inauthentic, “not the real thing,” to viewing it as “instance of cultural performance” (207). He initially missed the “authenticity” granted by the conviction and expression of faith of African American gospel choirs and acknowledges that he feels ashamed for being “immersed in the essentialism that I adamantly oppose elsewhere” (183). He reports being somewhat irritated by the fact that the choir members practiced gospel music without taking into account its historical locatedness. In his view, the white ­Australians purported to identify with African Americans in terms of a common history of discrimination (in the case of the white ­Australians by the British who deported their ancestors as convicts), yet failed “to acknowledge the specificity of black American history” (186). Perhaps even more importantly, he felt that they also failed “to acknowledge the ways in which they participate in the subjugation of ‘the blacks’ of their own country” (182). In spite of his misgivings, he nevertheless continued to collaborate with the choir and even decided to “disseminate ‘[authentic] blackness’ in Australia” (200) by hosting gospel music workshops and giving interviews in the media. He writes that he finally came to terms with his ambivalent role in promoting “real gospel music in Australia” by adopting Paul Gilroy’s model of understanding black performance as “a complex dynamic, intricate web of significations and meanings that are simultaneously experienced as real and imaginatively produced” (207).6 This new critical stance enabled him to understand white Australian interest in gospel music and to “view the Australians’ performance of gospel … as an instance of cultural performance, wherein the performances provide a space for social and cultural reflection and critique” (207).7

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212  Monika Mueller In both cases—the Demidenko impersonation and the Australian gospel performances—performativity actually worked as an essentializing agent, running counter to the post-ethnic potential of the cross-ethnic traffic involved. The audiences were (initially) not able to see beyond their own expectations of an “authentic” performance of ethnicity. One insight to be gained from this is that to this day for many people performing an/other ethnicity is only acceptable when “proper respect” is shown for the performed ethnicity. This appears to be of particular importance when the ethnicity in question is a marginalized one. D. Soyini Madison calls for respectful cross-ethnic traffic in terms of a “performance of possibilities” (472). She suggests that the individuals in charge of the performance should consider three key questions before the staging of a cross-ethnic performance: 1) By what definable and material means will the Subjects themselves benefit from the performance? 2) How can the performance contribute to a more enlightened and involved citizenship that will disturb systems and processes that limit freedoms and possibilities? 3) In what ways will the performers probe question of identity, representation, and fairness that will enrich their own subjectivity, cultural politics, and art? (472) In cases in which the audience and performers actually manage to identify with “the substance” of “who [the acknowledged Others] are, where they are, and what they do” (474), this type of performance can be successful and “the acknowledged Others” (474) actually do become “Subjects.” According to Johnson, such a dynamics did actually evolve in the case of the Australian gospel choir—albeit over time.

Postethnic Performance in Cornershop’s and Ramesh B. Weeratunga’s Music Videos The parodic aspect of Cornershop’s “United Provinces of India” video as well as Ramesh B. Weeratunga’s “Ring of Fire” video might perhaps not appeal to critics like Johnson and Madison, who are looking for (mutual) respect as well as socially activist messages in performances that engage in cross-ethnic traffic. Parody and postmodern play by definition run counter to such expectations. It is quite obvious that Weeratunga’s ­Bollywood-dance-Zorro-impersonation is purely postmodern performance aimed at a sophisticated audience. Thus, at least at a first glance, it does not seem well suited to inviting critical scrutiny of its race politics. Cornershop’s songs, videos, and stage performances, however, have again and again been analyzed in terms of their “ethnic messages.” And, as we will see, some critics have expressed their dislike of Tjinder Singh’s performance of the Asian part of his British Asian hybrid identity, fearing that he, in spite of looking Indian, might be making fun of his Indian background.

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  213 Due to the fact that various ethnicities are performed in the songs and videos discussed in this chapter, the important question as to “who speaks for and about whom” cannot be avoided: “[T]he matter of who to speak for and about whom is possibly the most sensitive and impassioned issue circulating within discourses of identity politics,” as Carolyn D’Cruz points out (online). In performing an/other ethnicity, one inevitably speaks from a subject position other than one’s own. This can become a problem when a person who is perceived as a member of a dominant ethnic group decides to speak from the position of a member of a marginalized group—or also when a person with a hybrid identity (as, for example, Tjinder Singh) speaks from the position of the dominant group. Cornershop fuses British and Indian speaking positions due to Tjinder Singh’s hybrid status. By virtue of Singh’s (and also Bubbley Kaur’s) ethnic background, the British band seems authorized to perform both the British and the Indian part of their singers’ hybrid ethnicity. “Funk meets punk meets raga-and-roll” (Hebert qtd. in Coulombe 183), as the band amalgamates Britpop, Indian, and electronic dance music. The majority of Cornershop’s songs are performed in English, yet some, like “United Provinces of India” and their popular, Paul McCartney–approved (Unterberger, online) version of “Norwegian Wood” (from When I Was Born for the 7th Time, 1997), the Beatles song that features a sitar, as well as “6 a.m. Jullander Shere” (from Woman’s Gotta Have It, 1995) also feature Punjabi lyrics. Anglo-Indian reviewers who have analyzed Cornershop’s musical output, just like Rashmi Mehta, the student interviewed about the “United Provinces of India” lyrics, have often been critical of the band’s performance of ethnicity, whereas reviewers whose names sound Western do not seem to have any issues with it. In “Killing in the Name of Good Music,” the author of the “Movies on my Mind”-blog comments that s/he finds it “hard to figure out why the Brit Asian community reacted with such hostility towards Cornershop [and other British Asian bands]” and reasons that it might have to do with the fact that making pop music is not considered a serious enough endeavor by some members of the Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim faiths. S/he continues to speculate that the music by Cornershop et al. might be deemed too intellectual by the British Asian community or that the dislike for it may also derive from a festering hatred towards fellow Asians who are perceived to pander to ethnically white crowds, hence abandoning their own community’s support by creating music that borrows heavily from Indian sounds but cheapens it by allowing English consumers to casually buy in to it. (online) Quite a few American reviewers who are second-generation Indian immigrants seem to agree with those British Asian critics who do not trust Cornershop. Amardeep Singh, for example, writes: “Though I’m enthusiastic about Cornershop, I’ve always had the nagging feeling they are a novelty

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214  Monika Mueller act: that is, they use lead singer Tjinder Singh’s difference as an Indian as a gimmick to distinguish themselves from scores of other retro indie rockbands” (online). In order to investigate if the band actually uses Singh’s ethnic background represented by the Punjabi lyrics in a flippant or “gimmicky” way, Singh tries to establish if Cornershop seeks to engage in a commercial type of “rock multiculturalism” or a more sophisticated “artistic hybridity.” He defines rock multiculturalism as “a crass, minstrelish mainstreaming of a minority culture for commercial reasons,” whereas “hybridity might be a symbiotic exchange between two parallel traditions not driven by commercial success.” Having established this distinction, he asks: “[D]oes Cornershop perform multiculturalism, or does it enact hybridity?” Furthering his argument about Cornershop’s possibly callous “inauthentic” postmodern multiculturalism, Amardeep Singh calls attention to the fact that it is lead singer Tjinder Singh’s ironic performance along with the seemingly unrelated (and in one case even blasphemous) lyrics that causes this ambivalence: Tjinder [seems to be] clowning on India for the amusement of Anglo-American (and perhaps also Asian) consumers. The vocals on the Punjabi songs on the albums are all heavily distorted, whereas the songs in English are recorded with his voice ‘straight.’ … I’ve been particularly puzzled by the song ‘Jullundar Shere 6 AM.’ [sic] … The lyrics here are so earnest in their [religious] content—in contrast to the jokey, ironic English language tracks—as to make the ironic reading hard to dismiss. … I find it puzzling that the climax of the song is this plea for forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? I might speculate that forgiveness is needed, not from God but from the Indian community; not because of a sin committed but because of the abuse of religion in this song!” (online) Concerning the “United Provinces of India Song,” which features a similar discrepancy between what is depicted in the video and the song lyrics, Rashmi Mehta draws a similar conclusion. She criticizes the overdrawn aspects of the video when she writes on May 31, 2012: “It is in Punjabi. And I’m just going to re-emphasize this and try to put it in a subtle manner, but well, it’s definitely not a video I’d like to watch over and over again. It has this ring to it, the voice … even the camera movements are jerky and abrupt.” Apparently not wanting to make a (possible?) connection between love and the colorful Benetton-style multiethnicism, she continues: “The magic of love has spread is something that is repeated throughout the video, which serves as an explanation for me saying that I don’t see any connection between the video and the lyrics.” Amardeep Singh apparently seems to think that Tjinder Singh exploits the more marginalized Punjabi part of his hybrid identity to sell records to the British mainstream. He goes as far as claiming that Cornershop’s Punjabi songs “are a rather unpleasant muddle—not hybridity but bad

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  215 multiculturalism,” yet he does not entirely give up on the band based on his judgment of their songs performed in English: “I see Tjinder’s English-­ language songs as a much more natural and casual pose, even when he references immigrant experience or Indian politics (‘We don’t care ’bout no Gov’t warnings,/’bout their promotion of a simple life/And the dams they’re building/Brimful of Asha on a 45’). ‘Brimful of Asha’ works so well because it has a great hook and a charming pop sound; it also perfectly captures the diasporic nostalgia for playback film music” (online). American reviewer Gautam Premnath views the band in a more positive light when he remarks about Cornershop’s superhit “Brimful of Asha” that one of the keys to the song’s power is “its deceptively simple listing of iconic cultural references, ranging from Mohd Rafi and Bhosle herself to All India Radio and ­Ferguson receivers.” According to him, the song incorporates a second level of more sophisticated meaning: “On a first hearing this comes across as mere freshoff-the-boat nostalgia. But, sung in Tjinder Singh’s broad Midlands accent, the song begs the question: whose memories are these? “‘Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow,’ says Singh, but his delivery slyly undermines the prospect of such an easy refuge in the comfort of the past.” Premnath’s final evaluation of Cornershop’s multiethnic performance seems positive when he writes that “[t]heirs is a world in which a love of film tunes and ­Punjabi expressive culture can co-exist with passions for country music, dub, hiphop, and punk” (online). The most positive reaction to Cornershop’s music discussed here comes from music theorist Reneé T. Coulombe, an academic who does not seem to have any apparent connection to India. Coulombe discusses When I Was Born for the 7th Time in the context of postmodern music and postcolonialism. The most salient characteristics that she attributes to postmodern music are that it “includes quotations of or reference to music of many traditions and cultures,” “embraces contradictions,” “presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities,” and “includes fragmentations and discontinuities” (181). As the previous discussion has shown, all of this also describes Cornershop’s music. Based on her analysis of the song “Sleep on the Left Side,” which she views as emblematic of Cornershop’s postcolonial stance, she concludes that with their music Cornershop present “a sort of ‘postmodern polyamory,’ in which things “ ‘Indian,’ ‘English,’ and more generally ‘Western’ can remain side by side without ever resolving the intense conflicts among them” (188). Like fellow critics Amardeep Singh and Ravi Krishnaswami, Coulombe also tries to find clues for Cornershop’s rather hermetic song meanings in Tjinder Singh’s enigmatic, Dylanesque performance and interview style, but remains more undeterred by his demeanor. Krishnaswami reports in his thesis about “Western Orientals: Cornershop, Talvin Singh, and New Hybrid music from the South-Asian Diaspora” that he was disappointed by Singh’s reaction when he asked him on the occasion of a Cornershop concert in Washington, D.C., “about the significance of his blending of east and west”

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216  Monika Mueller and the singer replied, in a heavy cockney accent: “I don’t know. … I don’t really think about it. I just play the dholki” (online). Amardeep Singh proposes reading Tjinder Singh’s “stiff delivery” as a part of a performance, namely “the projection of a stereotypical FOB [fresh off the boat] persona.” He wonders if the Cornershop lead singer has “these two sides of himself that variously find voice in the two languages (and postures) in play?” and if he is “truly located at the hinge of languages, musical (rock/raga) and spoken (Punjabi/English)?” Or is his purpose more sinister and “does he use the persona precisely to separate himself from it—is he mimicking the silly songs and unhip phraseology of more recent immigrants as well as his (our) parents, while remaining comfortably ensconced in a second-generation, ‘cool’ vantage point?” (online). Coulombe does not share this skeptical evaluation of the Cornershop frontman’s behavior, but instead puts a positive spin on it by viewing it as the reaction of “an artist acutely aware … of his own position in a complicated postcolonial landscape” (190). She maintains that what other critics might view as an intentionally ironic and illegible “stiff delivery” actually is a logical consequence of Singh’s wanting to protect his hybrid subject position: Struggling against the weight of a saturating hegemonic system, in which his own music conspires against him, leaves Singh in a difficult position. Not only must he struggle “to get that chance [to speak],” he must remain in the spotlight long enough, escape the pressure to remain faithful to a “schizophonic” subject position. Avoiding eye contact with his audience, he avoids staring directly at the biggest threat to his hybridized identity: his audience. (190) I would like to argue that the “United Provinces of India” video presents a similar “split subject position” by using a mix of sounds and images that defies interpretation. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, “United Provinces of India” is reminiscent of advertising that deliberately juxtaposes unrelated subject matter. Remy Melina explains that this type of advertising “is referred to as ‘nonrational influence’ (NI) because it circumvents consumers’ conscious awareness by depicting a fun, vague or sexy scene that seems to have nothing to do with the product” (online). In this case, a Punjabi folk tune about “the magic of love” is combined with images of unbelievably positive British Indian hybridity, but what exactly is being advertised or advocated here remains unclear: Does Cornershop really want to claim by means of this collage of musical and visual images that the “magic of love” is somehow related to postcolonial bliss in Hoxton? Or is the video featuring “garish clothes and music” (Mehta) just a more or less good-natured “clowning on India” (Amardeep Singh)? Or does “United Provinces of India” (perhaps in the tradition of throwing an “IBM

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  217 tha Coca-Cola, motherfucker Lak lamth” into the Punjabi lyrics of “We’re in Yr Corner”) actually intend to criticize the bland world of advertising that creates scenario after scenario of unlikely harmony? Ramesh Weeratunga’s “Ring of Fire” video, by contrast, uses various strategies to cleverly circumvent the problem of possibly ridiculing one’s own ethnicity. Weeratunga himself sings the song dressed in a Zorro outfit against changing backdrops, including “Indians” dancing around a totem pole while Zorro rides up on an Asian elephant. The video features ­Bollywood dancers, Hawaiian dancers, and (illicit) lovers from various backgrounds. What might look like “ethnic overkill” actually is a strategy of making ethnic identity not matter. On his website, Weeratunga reveals that for filming the video he devised a (postmodern) strategy to conceal his identity—including his ethnic one: Suddenly my plan to become famous without anyone knowing my identity was revived. … The only way I would do my own video was to play someone else so anyone who watched it wouldn’t know who I am. … Anyway eventually I was flying off to Sri Lanka to become unknown in my very own video. Wild. I had no idea becoming anonymous could be so much work. I had been unknown my whole life and up until then it had been pretty easy to accomplish. Now it took long hours, days and nights, 100 person crew, a masked elephant, exotic dancing girls, tons of equipment, wardrobe, makeup, special EFX and “the” appropriate disquise [sic]. (online) In addition to these obvious hints at the playfulness of the “Ring of Fire” project, there are several other reasons as to why the Bollywood “Ring of Fire” adaptation might seem less controversial than Cornershop’s work. Weeratunga’s “Ring of Fire” adaptation cannot as easily be viewed as “a crass, minstrelish mainstreaming of a minority culture for commercial reasons.” Obviously, “Ring of Fire,” even if it is presented here in a heavily ethnicized version, is an old mainstream commercially successful hit that already used Mariachi trumpets for Mexican flair. Moreover, Weeratunga engages with Indian culture through the lens of the Bollywood movie, which also presents love as “a burning thing, a ring of fire.” This creates several layers of ironic distancing that the Cornershop video does not seem to command as easily. The symbol of the ring of fire in and of itself is already laden with transcultural meaning as it is understood as a symbol of daring and danger across cultures. Courageous circus lions around the world jump through burning rings of fire, looking at a “ring of fire” can blind a person during a solar eclipse, and June Carter wrote the song that proclaims that love is a “burning ring of fire” at the beginning of her adulterous love affair with her future husband, Johnny Cash. In Buddhism the ring of fire is a symbol of the process of the transformation that humans

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218  Monika Mueller must undergo before being able to enter the sacred territory of the temple; in Hinduism, Shiva, as Nataraja, the Lord of Dance (and thus also of ­Bollywood dance) “is surrounded on all sides by a circular ring of fire” which “represents the energy that is responsible for creation and also the dissolution of the worlds at the end of creation” (online). In spite of its heavy ring of fire symbolism, Weeratunga’s video might not be ushering in the end of the world just yet. However, it might be understood as an attempt to change the world by resignifying ethnicity—and thus working toward the end of racism—through cross-ethnic performance that erases “racial” meaning. Both Cornershop and Weeratunga in performing various ethnic identities (including their own) in their videos do not approach ethnic “authenticity” in the respectful way that Johnson and Madison would like to see observed. Madison calls for recognizing “acknowledged Others” (474) as “Subjects” in ethnic performances and wants “performers [to] probe question of identity, representation, and fairness that will enrich their own subjectivity” (472). As the above discussion has shown, Cornershop has been criticized for not respecting Indian culture and “selling out” by catering to the tastes of the dominant ethnic group in Great Britain. The message about ethnicity/hybridity incorporated in the “United Provinces of India” video ultimately remains undecipherable. Does the song criticize the bland, yet at the same time colorful world of advertising or is it ethnic parody? Does Cornershop really intend to make fun of India or British Asians with songs like “United Provinces of India” or “6 a.m. Jullander Shere”? And if that is actually so, isn’t it the right of British Asians to make fun of both parts of their ethnic identity—especially in the wake of the popular TV show Goodness Gracious Me? The most diplomatic approach to conundrum is Coulombe’s identification of Cornershop’s dual identity in terms of a “postmodern polyamory” that allows “Indian” and “English” or rather “Western” aspects “to remain side by side without ever resolving the intense conflicts among them” (188). If the “United Provinces of India” video comes close to ethnic parody, the “Ring of Fire” video actually is ethnic parody. But in this case, since the entire idea of ethnicity rather than just “Indianness” is parodied, the parody does not seem to lack “authenticity” or smack of “making fun of the marginalized part” of a hybrid group’s identity. Thus, Weeratunga’s video illustrates what Vijay Prashad argues, namely that “[c]ulture is a process … which has no identifiable origin” and that “therefore no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is claimed to be his or her authentic culture” (53). By mixing so many ethnic elements that ethnicity (and particularly “Indianness”) ultimately becomes unintelligible, Weeratunga’s art implements Prashad’s definition of polyculturalism as uncoupling “notions of origin and authenticity … from that of culture” (53) and thus points toward a possible postethnic future that is not quite here yet, but might be just around the corner.

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Notes 1. For a discussion of cross-ethnic traffic in terms of “postmodern passing” or “blackface minstrelsy” see the article by Cathy Covell Waegner and Mita ­Banerjee in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen. 2. The German online magazine Ear Eye Am identifies the location as Hoxton and also calls attention to the vivid cheerfulness of the video: “Das entsprechende Video wurde im Londoner Stadtteil Hoxton gedreht und inszeniert das Viertel als farbenfrohes, außergewöhnlich sonniges Little Punjab” (“Ausgabe 3/11”). 3. As the administrator of the Model Diaries NYC blog writes in “Congratulations to Kaback Kids”: “United Colors of Benetton first made it into the spotlight with its original, yet controversial ‘United Colors’ publicity campaign. The latter originated when professional photographer Oliviero Toscani was given carte blanche by the Benetton management. Under Toscani’s direction, ads were created that contained striking images unrelated to any actual products being sold by the company” (online). 4. This, however, according to Prashad, does not mean “that we reinvent humanism without ethnicity, but that we [do, however,] acknowledge that our notion of cultural community should not be built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethnonationalism” (53). 5. Helen Darville’s impersonation of Helen Demidenko brings to mind the famous case of Australian writer Colin Johnson who “passed” as the Aboriginal writer Mudrooro Nyoongah. For an in-depth discussion of Johnson’s identity forgery see Maureen Clark’s dissertation: “Mudrooroo: A Likely Story, Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia.” 6. For Johnson, the gospel performance of the white Australian choir—which eventually presented itself in Harlem—finally came to signify not only the transcendence of a mere performance/appropriation of an “other” ethnicity, but also a liberatory potential for Australians in Australia. As he writes: “Although they are performing an Other’s culture, their engagement with the music [finally] emerges from a cultural site specific to their own history as well—namely the legacy of British propriety and the secularity of contemporary Australian culture” (207). 7. Denis Dutton’s observations on the “authenticity of music” are also useful in order to shed further light on what the Australian gospel choir had finally “gotten right” in Johnson’s view. The choir’s performance ultimately acquired a characteristic that, using Dutton’s terminology, can be referred to as “expressive authenticity”: “[T]here is another current sense of the term: performance authenticity as ‘faithfulness to the performer’s own self, original, not derivative.’ … Here authenticity is seen as committed, personal expression, being true musically to one’s artistic self, rather than true to an [other] historical tradition. From nominal authenticity, which refers to the empirical facts concerning the origins of an art object … we come now to another sense of the concept, which refers less to cut-and-dried fact and more to an emergent value possessed by works of art. I refer to this second, problematic sense of authenticity as expressive authenticity” (online).

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Works Cited “Ausgabe 3/11.” Ear Eye Am. 19 Apr. 2011. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. . Cha, Julian. “Cross-ethnic Traffic: Performing Ethnicity in Asian/America.” Diss. U of California, Los Angeles, 2010. Web. 21 Mar. 2015. . Clark, Maureen. “Mudrooroo: A Likely Story, Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia.” PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 2004. Web. 21 Oct. 2012. . “Congratulations to Kaback Kids from the It Factor Productions Submitted for ­Benetton Kids Ad Campaign.” Model Diaries NYC. 29 May 2014. Web. 1 Mar. 2015. . Cornershop. Web. 16 Aug. 2013. . ———. United Provinces of India.” Online video clip. Vimeo 2011. Web. 23 Aug. 2015. . Coulombe, Renée T. “Postmodern Polyamory or Postcolonial Challenge?”: Cornershop’s Dialogue from West, to East, to West …” Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. Ed. Judy Lochhead, and Joseph Auner. New York: Routledge, 2002. 177–93. Print. D’Cruz, Carolyn. “ ‘What Matter Who's Speaking?’: Authenticity and Identity in Discourses of Aboriginality in Australia.” Web. 3 Mar. 2015. . Dutton, Denis. “Authenticity in Art.” The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Web. 15 Mar. 2015. . Gunew, Sneja “Performing Australian Ethnicity: ‘Helen Demidenko.’” From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement. Ed. Wenche Ommundsen and Hazel Rowley. Geelong, Austral.: Deakin University Press, 1996. 1–10. Print. “Hindu God Lord Shiva (Siva)—The Destroyer.” Web. 23 Mar.2015. . Hollinger, David A. “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future.” Callaloo 31.4 (2008): 1033–37. Print. Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print. “Killing in the Name of Good Music.” Music on My Mind. 22 Mar. 2011. Web. 17 Mar. 2015. . Krishnaswami, Ravi. “Western Orientals: Cornershop, Talvin Singh, and New Hybrid Music from the South-Asian Diaspora.” Honors thesis, U of Virginia, 1998. Web. 27 Apr. 2013. . Madison, D. Soyini. “Performance, Personal Narratives, and the Politics of Possibility.” Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief. Ed. Yvona S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 469–86. Print. Mehta, Rashmi. Message to the author. 24 May 2012. E-mail. ———. Message to the author. 31 May 2012. E-mail. Melina, Remy. “How Advertisements Seduce Your Brain.” Livescience 23 Sept. 2011. Web. 17 Mar. 2015. .

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The Performance of Ethnicity in Bollywood-Style Music Videos  221 Murray, Stephen. “Being Italian American: Performing Ethnicity in Atlanta.” MA thesis, Georgia State U, 2008. Anthropology Theses. Paper 27. Web. 21 Oct. 2012. . Prashad, Vijay. “Bruce Lee and the Anti-imperialism of Kung Fu: A Polycultural Adventure.” Positions 11.1 (2003): 51–90. Print. Premnath, Gautam. “Chiclete com Masala.” Web. 27 Sept. 2013. . Raphael-Hernandez, Heike, and Shannon Steen, eds. AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print. Singh, Amardeep. “ ‘Norwegian Lakri’: Thoughts on Cornershop.” Spring 2002. Web. 27 Sept. 2013. . Stribley, Robert. “Cornershop: Cornershop & the Double ‘O’ Groove Of.” ­Skyscraper Magazine. 14 June 2011. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. . Unterberger, Andrew. “SPIN 30: Cornershop Flash Back to ‘When I Was Born for the 7th Time.’” 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 26 Aug. 2015. . Weeratunga, Ramesh B. Interview by Non-Eric. Muso Talk TV: Make More Music 23 Nov. 2009. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. . ———. “Ramesh Weeratunga: Bio, Music, Projects, Studio, Contacts.” Web. 24 May 2013. . ———. “Ring of Fire.” Online video clip. YouTube 2 May 2009. Web. 12 Mar. 2012. .

14 Performing Poetry

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Langston Hughes, “I, too” and Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” Bettina Hofmann

In poetry, as in other literary genres, the European tradition has privileged the written form over the oral. Hence far more attention has been paid to the poem printed on the page than to different ways of performing poetry. This general dismissal of orality has had far-reaching consequences, among them the lack of appraisal of the aurality of poetry. Thus we are dealing with two phenomena that are related yet distinct. Charles Bernstein has understood that at “issue is not the written text versus the oral, but the embodied acoustic performance—the aurality of the work” (5). In the same vein, Diana Taylor argues that “the schism does not lie between the written and spoken word, but rather between discursive and performative systems” (12). In this chapter I examine two examples with regard to this “embodied acoustic performance” by analyzing different recorded performances of “I, too” (1925) by Langston Hughes and “We Real Cool” (1960) by Gwendolyn Brooks. In both widely anthologized poems, the concept of race is considered a crucial issue. The analysis of different performances of these poems will show, however, that this notion of race is not stable but contingent upon the ways every performer realizes race or ethnicity. Before any link between performance and race or ethnicity can be made, some introductory remarks on the contextualization of poetry performances are called for. In his Essay on Criticism (1711), Alexander Pope demands that “[T]he sound must seem an echo to the sense” (74; l. 365), a prescriptive statement with lasting normative effects on poetry in English. If the modal verb is stressed, the deontic function, which means that a poet ought to strive to make a link between meaning and form, is emphasized. Thus, according to Pope, only someone who has managed to give his ideas the proper form can be called a successful poet. Here both concepts, of sound and sense, appear to be on the same level. If, however, the following noun “echo” is stressed instead, the focus shifts to the inherent hierarchy between the two nouns. This privileging of meaning over sound has lasted over the centuries and has remained part of general knowledge as this leading contemporary college textbook, for instance, attests to: “The peculiar function of poetry … is to convey … meaning or experience through sounds. … In first-rate poetry the sound exists not for its own sake nor for mere decoration, but as a medium of meaning” (Perrine and Arp 197–99, emphasis in the original).

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Performing Poetry  223 While the editors so far have not established a hierarchical relationship between sound and sense, the next sentence reiterates Pope’s evaluation: “its [i.e. the sound’s] function is to support the leading player, not to steal the scene” (198). This notion has largely remained unchallenged and has relegated a supporting role to sound effects within the study of poetry, which has primarily been concerned with the use of meter and rhyme encompassing the use of onomatopoeia and phonetic intensives. Yet little attention has been dedicated to the actual processes that take place when poems are recited and performed. The dynamics between performers and audiences have largely been ignored, as Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus deplores.1 This is an impression shared by Charles Bernstein: “While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and contemporary poetry performance has been negligible, despite the crucial importance of performance to the practice of poetry in this century” (3). It is a truism that the oral tradition has been of major importance in African American literature. In an inversion of the English literary tradition, Alden Nielsen finds “nearly hegemonic assumptions about the nature of the relationship between African-American oral traditions and writing, with a clear privilege given to the prevailing ideal of the oral” (18). Connected to this sphere of orality, also forms of language performance, aurality, have been of great importance within the African American tradition. Patricia Brown identifies different instances of “vernacular cultural expressions” (8) from the sermon and the spiritual to work songs, the gospel, blues, jazz, and more. She recognizes that “all of these are present in African American poetry” as well (8). However, also in this area, the study of how performance actually creates meaning has often been omitted: “[O]ne problem with continued privileging of orality over the written in the study of ­African-American writing is that such privileging often leads to a critique that inadequately listens to the relationships between script and performance” (Nielsen 21). Consequently, Nielsen goes on to postulate: “Unless we are willing to read fully the nuances of these movements between scripting and voicing, we cannot hope to historicize the continual unfolding of these problematics in the poems of black writers” (21). More research into this realm of aurality, its historic dimensions, and its expression of ethnicity is desirable, especially since the aurality of performance with its accompanying auditive reception has become more accessible, due to the technological progress we have witnessed over the last few decades (Meyer-Kalkus 350). The ubiquitous reach of CDs, DVDs, the Internet, and also YouTube is an important factor. This wider distribution made possible by technology has had the curious effect of also reinforcing the practice of traditional readings. Instead of superseding an old-fashioned, obsolete form of analogous recitals, the custom of poetry readings is enjoying intense popularity. Among the contemporary popular forms of poetry performance are rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and performance poetry

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224  Bettina Hofmann (Gioia Ink 7). The pervasiveness of performative forms is, for example, illustrated by poetry festivals, projects like Poetry in Motion that has taken poetry to public transport systems all over the U.S. (Bauridl 20–22). In this context, Dana Gioia even speaks of a “new orality” (Ink 21). Prominent readers, such as Robert Frost or Edna St. Vincent Millay, already made money on the reading circuit in the first half of the twentieth century (Bernard 74). While Peter Middleton observes a proliferation of readings since the 1950s (271), Gioia locates the beginning of a new importance of recitals with the Beat poets in the 1960s (Ink 21). Maybe it is less important to determine the exact date of this rise than to take a look at the types of audience involved. While nowadays poetry readings often take place in bookstores and are characterized by an intimate atmosphere (Bernard 74), rap and hip-hop performances tend to draw larger crowds. New forms of oral performances have in common that they are characterized by a primarily non-academic audience and popular in appeal (Gioia, Ink 20). While these contemporary oral forms of hip-hop poetry, slam poetry, or black performance poetry have recently received some critical attention, see for example the monography of 2013 by Birgit Bauridl, few studies have taken the step to analyze the relationship between performance and texts concerning poetry that belongs primarily to the written tradition by black authors, and it is this relationship I am interested in here. As Bernard points out, “[p]ractically speaking, poems these days have two distinct, if overlapping existences: how they live on the page, and how they are heard in performance” (74). In contrast to traditional readings where a poet reads his or her poems in a certain place at a particular time, technology now enables the listener/ viewer to experience multiple versions of the same poem as well as infinite repetitions of the same performance. Audio and video technology, however, prove not only decisive for changes in access and distribution. While some scholars consider recorded performance as a reduction of all possible interpretations (Meyer-Kalkus 352), the view I subscribe to is that competing versions enable us to consider a range of possible interpretations and explore nuances in understanding. As I will explain in more detail later, there is a socio-political dimension to be considered as well. In order to make my points, I will discuss two poems as examples, namely Langston Hughes, “I, too” and Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool.” Even though it might be interesting to know how Phillis Wheatley, or Edward Taylor for that matter, performed their poetry, we have, of course, no way of knowing. Sometimes performance may be inferred from historical sources as when, for instance, Daniel Day Lewis gives a “high, earnest and folksy” (McGrath) voice to Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln of 2012. Lewis’s performance prompted a debate about the historical accuracy of the aural qualities of Lincoln’s voice. But only after the invention of recordings do we have a corpus of sources to examine these features more closely. The first recordings of poets performing their own

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Performing Poetry  225 works, which may be considered a major historical divide, occurred already in 1890 when Robert Browning’s and Alfred Tennyson’s readings were documented in Britain (Rasula 234–5). At about the same time, in 1889 or 1890, in America also Walt Whitman presumably recorded four lines of his poetry (Folsom 214–16). Every voice that reads (whether in a room with a live audience or technically recorded), of course, belongs to a body. Thus gender, age, and ethnicity of the speaker are immediately communicated, features that are connected to questions of identity, authenticity, and authority (Forman 39). Additionally, when video productions are involved, facial expressions and body language convey an attitude, a mood that is communicated to the listeners. And the sounds generated are shaped by an array of features: speed and variations of it, pauses, caesuras, the use of (audible) breath, rhythm, volume, and the dynamics involved by changes in volume, pitch and its variations, and maybe even polyphony (Meyer-Kalkus 355). This experience of sound is foremost sensual and irrational “for sound registers the sheer physicality of language” (Bernstein 21). Its sensual quality might be an explanation as to why many scholars have shunned exploring this field. In this context, Peter Middleton draws attention to another crucial feature: “the words uttered are momentarily given a life context, as if the reader were showing what it means for a life to say these words. The physical presence of the speaker acts as their warrant for their relevance to a specific body, point of view, and history” (268). In other words, performing poetry contains a social dimension. First, the audience needs to be considered as part of the performance, whether concretely present at a poetry reading or virtually present with recording media. Performing poetry does not take place in a vacuum. It rather is an intersubjective activity, always an instance of collaboration between reciter and audience (Middleton 291). Thus, the quality of the social relationship that is being established in a reading is of utmost importance, as Peter Quartermain remarks, “recitations are ‘social’ rather than ‘aesthetic’ or ‘literary’ occasions” (217). The resulting bonding between performer and audience that takes place—a feature shared with theater audiences—may be potentially considered as an agent for social change (Dolan 21). Bernstein also emphasizes this point when he states that “[R]eadings are the central social activity of poetry” (22). The U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, Billy Collins, whose use of the radio made him popular beyond academia (Gioia, Ink 22), explicitly turns to the political dimension that is inherent in this social quality when he says: “To hear a poem is to experience its momentary escape from the prison cell of the page, where silence is enforced, to a freedom dependent only on the ability to open the mouth—that most democratic of instruments—and speak” (Collins 3). This socio-political dimension has, of course, always been an important feature of African American writing. From a different angle, Audre Lorde

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establishes this link of ethnicity/race and voice in the first stanza of her poem “Coal” (1976). She establishes a connection between blackness and the act of speaking—that is, the performative aspect of language with its socio-­political implications: “Coal is the total black.” It is seen as something entirely positive, bringing forth, as the poem asserts, treasures—namely ­diamonds and language. In the sixth and seventh lines, the qualities of sound and color are synesthetically coupled: how sound comes into a word, coloured by who pays what for speaking. … This is a comment on the spoken word, on the aurality of language. “Color” may on the one hand be understood in the sense of timbre. On the other hand, “colored” has another, more loaded political meaning since it used to designate Americans of African heritage at the time of race segregation in the U.S. So what this line implies is that it matters who the speaker is and to which ethnic/racial group she or he belongs. Speaking out loud involves risk, in modern capitalist society expressed by the monetary metaphor of “who pays what.” Thus, a further aspect is introduced, namely that of economics and social stratification: there is a price to be paid for speaking out loud. These lines address the spoken word, not only as produced in the oral tradition of African American poetry, but the spoken word as performance (i.e., as social practice). In the following, I scrutinize the consequences of different performances of two poems by two African American poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks for changes in meaning brought out through performance. In order to understand the dynamics between written text and performance, Langston Hughes offers a first good example. He has achieved canonical status as a writer and has not only been most influential on later generations of poets but, more importantly, Hughes has also proved to be a popular writer attracting new readers in every generation. This is why some of his poems have spawned an array of different readings. While quite a few poems by Hughes may rightfully be called jazz poetry and are almost impossible to differentiate from musical forms, he has also composed poetry definitely rooted in the written tradition. One of these is “I, too” (1925) which deems suitable for analysis simply for the sheer number of performances to be found on YouTube and which attest to the poet’s great appeal to contemporary audiences.2 One reason for the poem’s popularity, besides being rather short and written in a deceptively simple language, is that it has been anthologized in various textbooks and is taught in schools and colleges.3 That it foremost belongs to the written tradition is already suggested by the implicit reference to Walt Whitman in the first line.4 In a self-assertive, if not boisterous way, the speaker here claims Whitman’s status as the representative American poet of the twentieth century. Whitman had presumed to speak for the common man. Hughes takes up this claim, which in turn has

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Performing Poetry  227 been taken seriously by many readers and has encouraged people from all walks of life to recite this poem. Also in its form, by employing free verse, Hughes follows in Whitman’s footsteps. The use of this form is quite congenial for performance purposes for free verse is “speech-based … it tracks the movement of breath itself” (Perloff 94), which may possibly be a further reason for the poem’s popularity. Among the numerous versions on YouTube a few tendencies can be identified. There are, for instance, performances by young children, also two by six-year-olds. The girl is sitting in an armchair and emphatically recites the text in Black English.5 Her intonation suggests that she indeed understands what she is saying. At the same time she is obviously enjoying her performance. The performance by the boy of the same age, in contrast, takes place outside at a harbor with yachts in the background.6 He is expensively dressed, his pronunciation is sloppier, and he gets the stress a bit wrong. All this makes for the impression that it might be mostly his parents who take pride in the video. A sense of accomplishment—the boy’s family might well own one of the yachts in the background—may be detected, too. This idea of inclusion, of having made it in American society is also discernible in the performance by an immigrant woman who recites the poem in an American classroom with a Spanish accent.7 With exaggerated gestures—almost in the pantomime way that some people prefer to use when talking to foreigners— she points down the whole length of her arm when saying “darker” and wipes across her whole face at the adjective “beautiful.” A lively element is added by a black child who happens to walk into the classroom and, noting the camera, makes friendly faces to the unknown audience. Other clips turn to images of the civil rights movement for illustration of the text. My aim here is not to establish a classification of all the performances that can be found but to discuss interesting instances of the performance of race or ethnicity. Thus I am going to discuss three versions, one by the author himself, one by the actor Denzel Washington, and one by an anonymous performer. While many modernists, except for T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, felt uncomfortable performing their poetry (Gioia, Ink 21), Hughes was quite eager to embrace the opportunities modern technology had to offer. He recorded a reading of “I, too” of his own in 1955 with Folkways, a professional label specializing in jazz.8 Later he would also make recordings of his poems to the music of jazz musicians such as Leonard and Charles Mingus (Nielsen 177). Since YouTube is often used as a visual medium, images are added to the audio reading by Hughes. There are different visual versions accompanying the same spoken performance. One is illustrated with a photograph of a very young Langston Hughes, dressed smartly in a suit and tie on the right, while the printed text of the poem— pages are turned over three times—appears on the left. His appearance of an (­middle-class) intellectual is non-threatening. The fact that the picture is in black and white underlines the historical dimension of the composition of the poem. It is first the picture that presents the poet and speaker as a black

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228  Bettina Hofmann man of the middle class. His smart outfit identifies him as a respectable intellectual whose authority as speaker is strengthened by his simultaneously being the author. Neither in his appearance nor in the aural qualities of the reading does Hughes conjure up any notion of what “authentic blackness” might look and sound like and which have often been privileged (Japtok 46). Nonetheless, by reciting the poem Hughes delivers his own performance of blackness. The whole reading appears unexcited, almost detached. He reads slowly, in a laid back manner, and his pronunciation is standard American. No trace of black speech can be detected. The viewer sees an educated man who utters every word at a slow, deliberate pace. There is hardly any dynamics because pitch, volume, and tempo remain more or less even throughout the reading. Only in the third stanza is a special emphasis audible. This stanza is bracketed by two adverbs of time that point to the possibility of change. The first one, “tomorrow,” indicates that change is about to start in the near future. Social equality, expressed by sharing a meal as equals, will be achieved soon. Self-confidence and physical strength, in any event, will prevent the others even from attempting to exclude the speaker. The concluding “then” underscores the definite prediction. Yet at the same time it is more vague than the more specific “tomorrow.” Hughes stresses “then” through a preceding pause. This has the effect of emphasizing the utopian element in the poem’s vision. The last stanza adds an afterthought, directed at the “lighter brothers” whose social status had been enhanced by their discrimination against blacks. While the preceding two stanzas concentrated on the reaction of the self to segregation, the next three lines predict the whites’ reaction to the change of social roles and simultaneously introduce an aesthetic category, namely beauty. By this Hughes anticipates the slogan of the black power movement, “black is beautiful.” It is interesting to note here that the spoken version deviates from the written authorized text of the Complete Poems. While the printed version sticks to the first person singular, Hughes changes it to the communal first person plural, “how beautiful we are.” This aesthetic category may be applied both to the black body and to black art. For not having appreciated black people or their aesthetic contributions, the whites will feel shame (i.e., a moral and physical reaction of regret). Here it is interesting to note how moral and aesthetic values are merged, similarly to the synesthetic fusion in Lorde’s poem. The concluding statement in “I, too” comes full circle when the introductory line is picked up again, with a change from “sing,” a performative verb, to “am,” just being, an essentialist claim of equality that can no longer be denied. Hughes’s mode of speaking is unaggressive and exhibits calm superiority. This posture must be set in its historical context. At the time of writing the poem during the Harlem Renaissance as well as later in the 1950s when he recorded it, Hughes, like others, demanded social equality with whites but was not necessarily antagonistic to white norms. There is pride in being black and a demand for further inclusion into general society but no rejection of American standards set by whites. By virtue

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Performing Poetry  229 of being the author, his version constitutes an authoritative reading against which other performances are measured. In the movie The Great Debaters (2007), directed by Denzel Washington starring himself in the lead role of teacher at a black college, the poem “I, too” is recited by this character quite at the beginning of the movie after a few opening shots that mostly visually, without much dialogue, introduce the three major characters in their different settings, which serve to characterize them. One is in church, when the camera focuses on the minister and father (Forest Whitaker) and his fourteen-year-old son, the other in a shack where people drink alcohol and dance to music, and the third setting is a bus with the lead female character, Jurnee Smollett, passing victims of the Great Depression on the roadside on her way to college—the subtitle reveals that the general setting is in Texas in 1935. After these fragments the continuous action of the film begins with the camera in the back of a classroom, the viewer taking on the role of a student. As expectantly as the freshmen, the audience awaits what will happen next. Then the teacher enters and steps onto a worn-out chair, a subtle piece of evidence for the scant endowment of black institutions of education. He wears proper but visibly worn, simple clothes: blue trousers, a blue-grey jacket, and a brown striped tie. His outfit suggests that he is not vain but knows how to dress matching his position. To his right on the wall there is a large picture of a big river, probably the Mississippi; behind him on the board there is a small colored map of Africa, and above the board in red letters the summons “vote” sticks out. These items reveal confidence in and knowledge of both American history and African roots. Additionally, other photos of black personalities, Sojourner Truth among them, are attached to the chalkboard. Without introduction, which intensifies the dramatic impact, the teacher, after having asked the class who had risen to their feet in a clipped manner to sit down (all instances of respect reigning in the classroom), intones very slowly the first line “I am the darker brother,” emphasizing the adjective and thus calling attention to his and the students’ blackness. The next two lines are rapidly spoken. The increased speed contains and simultaneously suppresses a sense of aggression. The fast pace also seems to suggest that what the others do is not important. Rather, the speaker hurries to get to the line when he can focus on the self again. This is where he can show his superiority when he is excluded from sharing a meal. Washington emphasizes “laugh” while smiling toward the female lead actor as well as the adjective “strong” which he underlines by nodding his head. He increases the volume of delivery in the next stanza almost shouting “Nobody’ll dare” while the word “beautiful” is almost sung. The oddity of the expression “how beautiful I am,” potentially embarrassing for a man to say aloud, is minimized for the camera focuses on the attractive female character. In the last line, however, any notion of flirting and kindness is gone from the voice, when he all serious finishes with “I too am America.” A switch in pace, from aggressively fast to a more solemn, triumphant ending is discernible. During the recitation, his arms

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230  Bettina Hofmann hang down in a relaxed and confident manner. It is only the fingers of the left hand that inconspicuously tap slightly against the leg that communicate some impatience. The poem is performed in Standard English betraying neither regional origin nor a trace of Black English, features of the professor’s learnedness. Interestingly, it is the female character in the movie whose language sounds most black, contrary to the general observation that women’s speech tends more often toward standard use of language in pronunciation and grammar than men’s (Trudgill 70–72). This introductory scene presents striving for racial equality as the main topic of the movie. The film, which is based on historic events, traces the activities of the debating team of the black Texan college, which is coached by its professor, and ends in the climactic duel of this school against Harvard. Anyone who might be unfamiliar with Hughes’s poem, however, is not left ignorant by the director. After all, the film makes use of the fact that the viewers share the students’ point of view while the teacher is giving a lesson. So he asks, stepping down from the chair, if anyone knows by whom and when the poem was written. Pleased with the slightly wrong answer— he nods benevolently when the student says “1924” instead of “1925,” Washington is shown to be a caring, kind, and competent teacher. He then goes on to write the word “Revolution” onto the board. The social implications, possibly overturning the social order, that are entailed in the noun and that have been prepared by the solemn performance of the poem, however, are revised when it becomes clear that he is talking foremost about the revolution in literature brought about by Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance. Standing in the middle of the classroom, he starts quoting from another poem, namely “Saturday’s Child” by Countee Cullen, and then picks as the first member of the debating team the student who, without prompting, knows the poet’s name. This scene with the recital of Hughes’s poem is emblematic of the whole film. The yearning to overturn the social order is asserted and in a way negated at the same time. The political, revolutionary implications that appear on the board are not practiced. Even though political activism and union activities constitute a secondary story line, this is never fully developed. The plot of the movie, the underdog debate team overcoming different kinds of obstacles and then prevailing over the establishment reinforces rather than challenges the American ideology of equality and democracy. The link between the democratic form of participation by speaking out loud and trying to persuade others is presented as a first step to political action. This is reinforced by the final credits that point to the activities of the different debaters in the civil rights struggle twenty years later. However, the movie itself ultimately shuns any radical position and does not explicitly make this link. Denzel Washington’s reading appears in a further version in which a high school teacher incorporates his reading but adds different images.9 He takes a visual walk through African American history from slavery to the present. Prominent are photos from the Civil Rights era, including two pictures of

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Performing Poetry  231 Martin Luther King, leading up to pictures of President Obama. It is interesting that this line of progress does not stop with Obama as its climax but with the Oscar award given to two African American actors, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington. Thus popular culture is acknowledged to be at least as important as politics. The last line of the poem is illustrated by a waving American flag that extends over the whole screen. Thus the film ends on a patriotic note again affirming, not challenging American ideology. The lofty background music further underlines this impression. Equality has been achieved; the open-endedness of the film performance is gone. The didactic message from the teacher who has prepared this video for his ninth graders is unmistakable. While the performance in the movie is made by a professional actor, most renditions on YouTube are performed by amateurs. These need not be of lesser quality or interest. Quite the contrary, an intriguing version was recorded on March 24, 2007, at an open mic night.10 The speaker is anonymous. The video looks as if taken by an amateur in some private venue with a small audience as one can tell by the sounds they make. The impression that the recording was not done by a professional is underscored by the lack of contrast in the speaker’s face. The fact that simply a silhouette of a young black male is seen produces an interesting effect. In contrast to the authority conveyed by Hughes’s own reading, here the representative character of the experience, any black person may have gone through this, is underlined. It is the common man speaking. And, again in contrast to Hughes’s performance, here we hear definitely Black English pronounced. The “dare” is stressed by the quick raise of the black power fist—something Hughes would probably not have been inclined to do, even if this gesture had been known at the time. In the movie, Washington contains his nervous energy in the clenched fist that is hanging down. Now the anonymous performer releases this energy into air. Stunned outrage about the assigned inferior social position is expressed by the voice melody that gives “in the kitchen” special emphasis. The interaction with the audience adds another dimension when female voices respond and laugh as the speaker declares, “how beautiful I am.” One may speculate whether the concept of black beauty is still not a matter of course today or whether the laughter is the nervous giggle of hormonally challenged teenagers. Whatever may have prompted the chuckling, it is clear that both the reciter and the audience are involved in the text that it is meaningful to them. Both reciter and audience form part of the performance. So while Hughes’s recital exhibits an almost neutral, definitely non-­ aggressive atmosphere, characterized by an even pace with no pitches, delivered in Standard English, Denzel Washington’s performance shows more aggression and maybe also more insecurity. The teacher of a black college in the South in the 1930s (according to the version of early twenty-first century) still needs to convince himself of the sentiments in the poem. In contrast, the performance of the anonymous black man in the amateur

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232  Bettina Hofmann video shows more emotion than Hughes’s but less pathos than Washington’s ­delivery. More relaxed and laid back, the self-confidence does not need to be demonstrative. There is no aggression discernible, just calm self-assurance. An equally short piece, “We Real Cool” of 1959 by Gwendolyn Brooks, a black poet of the following generation whose influence by Hughes has been attested,11 has also been widely anthologized. The performances of “We Real Cool” on YouTube are less numerous than of “I, too,” the number of hits, about 950, however, is still impressive.12 Even though Brooks claims in an interview in the Library of Congress13 that she does not consider herself a spokeswoman for the whole black community, she has been widely considered a poet who has given a voice to the experience of African Americans. In the interview, she admits: “There are many aspects to that community, and I just talk about how I feel. Many of the brothers and sisters feel the same way, but then many of them do not.” She goes on to tell of the inspiration for the poem when she came about youths in her neighborhood in Chicago as she was passing a pool hall: “I wondered how they felt about themselves. And I decided that they felt that they were not quite valid. That they certainly were insecure, that they were not cherished by the society. That they should feel they should spit in the face of the establishment” (interview 21:18–21:33). It is interesting to note that this distance to the people she observed vanishes in the poem. By using the first person plural “we,” the speaker of the poem identifies with these young men. In contrast to the first line (and the eponymous title), this pronoun is afterward placed only at the end of each line. This end position on the one hand speeds up the pace of the poem; on the other hand, it may signal the lack of self-respect these youths have. If they proudly emphasized their existence, the pronoun would be found at the most prominent place, namely at the beginning of every line. Here, however, by saying “we” at the end of each line, they actually seem rather to hide than to assert themselves. The copula deletion in the title insinuates that the speakers are black because Black English usually leaves out this feature. The shortness and preoccupation with social questions is shared with Hughes’s poem. Its inherent pace, however, is much faster due to the short lines of two monosyllabic words in each line that are alliterated and due to the enjambments—most lines end with the personal pronoun “we.” Again, the first person plural pronoun stresses the aspect of community. The resulting “staccato effect” (interview with Brooks) of these enjambments taken together with the other features constitutes clearly poetic devices. This sophistication on the discourse level is undermined by the activities that are not suitable in proper society, such as drinking, gambling, and being sexually active. But the last line shows that there is a price to be paid for these sensual enjoyments when ultimately death is evoked. Again, the performance by Brooks herself sets an authoritative standard against which the other versions need to be compared. Her recital is very melodious, resulting almost in a kind of singing. The lively execution of the poem may suggest that from the point of view of the youth, early death is worth paying for such a life.

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Performing Poetry  233 Another compelling performance is delivered by John Ulrich, a white youth, whose performance may serve as an instance for cross-ethnic traffic.14 After all, he performs a poem that, as has been shown, is characterized by black markers. The youth is from South Boston, the rough, traditionally Irish, blue-collar neighborhood in the city. The introductory sequence shows him with his mom in the kitchen, a tail-wagging dog completing the domestic scene. The mother who is slicing onions asks about her son’s finals. He comments from the off on the scene, “[I]t’s a big loving family … with unconditional love.” The stress on family life is further underlined when he goes on to speak of his four sisters and three brothers pointing to a family photograph on the wall. The peaceful domesticity, however, proves deceptive when he then mentions the high number of his peers who died by drugs and suicide stating that “in 1997, 25 friends and neighbors tried to commit suicide” of whom six succeeded. The support from his family seems to be an explanation as to why he is still alive, a fact he still seems to be wondering about. Now he takes part in an art program to “redirect” youth “from their depression, this despair.” In the next scene, he is shown reciting the poem on a roof with the camera panning the neighborhood. In his performance, the enjambments are not audible. Every line sounds as if it were made up of a noun-predicate-object construction. He states every sentence matter-of-factly, and his facial expression is totally immobile. Here the tone is much more resigned and even bitter. All the enjoyment and glee palpable in Brooks’s performance are gone. The ending in death is not sudden but prepared by the foregoing lines. After his recitation, he comments on the significance of the poem for him when he encountered the poem at school for the first time. His explanation sounds didactic, quite as obviously didactic as the high school teacher’s version of the Hughes poem discussed earlier, but Ulrich’s comments appear more authentic and as such more credible since obviously his own life has been touched by it. Afterward he is shown laughing with a friend in a more relaxed manner, and then he recites the poem once more on the roof. In the background looms the silhouette of the distant Boston with the Hancock Tower sticking out: the affluent city center is in sight yet far away. Critics who see in Brooks mostly a writer of black experience might consider his performance as an improper way of appropriation by some white youth. But this is only possible when a notion of essential blackness is subscribed to. Contrary to this, I would argue that the young student transfers the poem to a different, equally valid context and thus moves the meaning of the poem from the domain of race to that of class. His recital shows the universal appeal for marginalized, disillusioned youth who feel excluded from society at large. While Brooks was inspired to write the poem in the late 1950s by watching presumably male African American youths, its appeal has extended beyond this group and has taken on a more universal character. Another instance of this cross-ethnic and cross-gender appeal can be seen in the video by Asian American girls in an inner-city environment who self-confidently strut down an alley making hip-hop movements.15

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234  Bettina Hofmann Their performance is the result of an English class project in which Brooks’s poem is paired with Dorothy Parker’s “Resume.” The video is shot in blackand-white, which communicates a film noir atmosphere. The first shot is vertically up from a city alley. One Asian girl appears dressed in a woolen cap and a sweater with Chinese characters on it and recites the Brooks poem while walking in the direction of the camera. She struts down the alley, joined by another girl who repeats the recital. The second person, with her tinted sunglasses, white shirt, and dark jacket, brings a Yakuza to mind. All the time, one can hear drum beating in the background that enforces the aggression and determination exhibited by the young women. Here the context of the poem is again shifted, from black to Asian and also from male to female. This is another instance of successful cross-ethnic traffic, which is quite persuasively done and not in the least out of place. My discussion has shown that the relationship between sense and sound, between the written text that is stable and the performed text that is more volatile, needs to be explored in further studies. The proliferation of poetry performances in the new media is going to “revitalize, democratize, and decentralize the presentation and discussion of American poetry” (Gioia, Can Poetry Matter XV). If the production of performed written poetry continues, another field of diachronic comparison will open itself. Of course, analyzing different performances of poetry with regard to ethnicity and gender can also be implemented in the classroom. Staging their own performances, students can discover and interpret poetry for themselves and present it to others. Close listening, next to close reading, may be the future task.

Notes 1. “Die Klanggestalt der Literatur scheint seit einem halben Jahrhundert kein seriöser Gegenstand der Forschung mehr zu sein,” writes Meyer-Kalkus (352). 2. A Google search on September 8, 2013, produced 9.170 entries for “I, too” by Langston Hughes. 3. Its fame is not confined to English; it is also the “single most translated poem of Hughes’s” into Spanish (Kutzinski 62). 4. Most often, a direct link is made to Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing” in which different builders of America such as a mason, a carpenter, and other artisans and working-class people are supposed to represent the common American citizen. Women are explicitly included in this array of American types, but different races or ethnicity are not mentioned. The trope of singing America, however, can be found throughout Whitman’s work, as for instance in “One’s Self I Sing” (1) and Song of Myself (28–89) collected in Leaves of Grass. 5. For the girl’s performance see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxSFxWa​ AiMM. 6. For the boy’s performance see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loB66KKw2XY. 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYMvcm2nwb8. 8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiCWngPt-L4. 9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaDMSKZVKNY. 10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHD5MdOJ4w.

Performing Poetry  235 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

For an early comparative assessment see R. Baxter Miller. September 19, 2015. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVZ6KTLN7O8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t_kkjAhDNw. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9HOpochFFk.

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Works Cited Bauridl, Birgit M. Betwixt, Between, or Beyond?: Negotiating Transformations of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. Print. Bernard, April. “A Poet Who Dares: Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart.” New York Review of Books 60.13 (2013): 74–75. Print. Bernstein, Charles. “Introduction.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 3–26. Print. Brooks, Gwendolyn. “We Real Cool.” The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks. Ed. ­Elizabeth Alexander. New York: Library of America, 2005. 60–61. Print. ———.“An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” 1986. Online video clip. HoCoPoLitSo. YouTube 15 Oct. 2012. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . Brown, Fahamisha Patricia. Performing the Word: African American Poetry as ­ Vernacular Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. Print. Collins, Billy. “Poems on the Page, Poems in the Air.” The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop and the Poetry of a New Generation. Naperville, IL: Sourcebook MediaFusion, 2003. 3–5. Print. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print. Folsom, Ed. “The Whitman Recording.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (Spring 1992): 214–16. Print. Forman, Murray. “Machtvolle Konstruktionen: Stimme und Autorität im HipHop.” Die Stimme im HipHop: Untersuchungen eines intermedialen Phänomens. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 23–50. Print. Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf P, 1992. Print. ———. Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. Saint Paul, MN: ­Graywolf P, 2004. Print. The Great Debaters. Dir. Denzel Washington. Perf. Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Nate Parker, and Jurnee Smollett. Weinstein Company, 2007. DVD. Hughes, Langston. “I, too.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1994. 46. Print. ———“I, too.” Anna Monar recites. Online video clip. YouTube 4 Feb. 2010. Web 19 Sept. 2015. . ———“I, too.” Future Delta recites. Online video clip. YouTube 9 Mar. 2009. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . ———“I, too.” John Ulrich recites. Online video clip. YouTube 6 July 2014. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . ———“I, too.” Langston Hughes recites. Online video clip. YouTube 8 Aug. 2010. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . ———“I, too.” Library Players. Online video clip. You Tube 24 Mar. 2007. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. .

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236  Bettina Hofmann ———“I, too.” Maya P. Online video clip. YouTube 11 May 2010. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . William Sexton. Online video clip. YouTube 31 Mar. 2010. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . Japtok, Martin, and Jerry Rafiki Jenkins. Authentic Blackness, “Real” Blackness: Essays on the Meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Print. ———“We Real Cool and Resume.” Online video clip. YouTube 15 Nov. 2012. Web. 19 Sept. 2015. . Kutzinski, Vera M. The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012. Print. Lorde, Audre. “Coal.” 1976. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: ­Norton, 2000. 163. Print. McGrath, Charles. “Abe Lincoln as You’ve Never Heard Him.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2012. Web. 4 Oct. 2015. . Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart. “Vorlesbarkeit—zur Lautstilistik narrativer Texte.” Stimme(n) im Text: Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen. Ed. Andreas Blödorn. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006. 349–81. Print. Middleton, Peter. “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Carl Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 262–99. Print. Miller, R. Baxter. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1978. Print. Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print. Perloff, Marjorie. “After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Carl Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 86–110. Print. Perrine, Laurence, and Thomas R. Arp. Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. 8th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Print. Pope, Alexander. An Essay on Criticism. 1711. Pope: Poetical Works. Ed. Herbert Davis. London: Oxford UP, 1966. 64–85. Print. Rasula, Jed. “Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding.” Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Carl Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 233–61. Print. Taylor, Diana. “Performance Studies: A Hemispheric Focus.” Performance Studies: An Introduction. Ed. Richard Schechner. London: Routledge, 2006. 12. Print. Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. 4th ed. London: Penguin, 2000. Print. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1891–92. New York: Norton, 1973. Print.

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List of Contributors

William Boelhower is the Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University. Before, he taught at the Universities of Padua, Trieste, and Venice, Italy. A former editor of Atlantic Studies, Boelhower’s most recent work has appeared in The Association of American Geographers Review of Books, The Yearbook of English Studies, and The Hemingway Review. His interests include migrant literatures in Europe, Atlantic world literatures, and geocultural aesthetics. He has translated the cultural writings of Antonio Gramsci and Lucien Goldmann, has published and edited many books on multiethnic literatures in the U.S., and is currently completing a book project on Frederick Douglass. Rocío G. Davis is Professor of American Literature at the University of Navarra, Spain. Her research focuses on autobiography, Asian American literature, and graphic narratives. She is the author of Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs (Univ. of Hawaii P, 2011) and Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (Univ. of Hawaii P, 2007) and the editor of The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music (Routledge, 2013). Furthermore, recent coedited volumes include Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Art, Media, and Music: Performing Migration (Routledge, 2010) and Ethnic Life Writing and Histories: Genres, Performance, and Culture (LIT Verlag, 2007). Samir Dayal, Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University, Boston, recently published Dreamweaving: Realism and Fantasy in Hindi Cinema and is completing a new book, Synthetic Imaginings: Art, Information and the British Empire. He is the author of Resisting Modernity: Counternarratives of Nation and Modernity, and coeditor of Global Babel: Interdisciplinarity, Transnationalism and the Discourses of Globalization (with Margueritte Murphy). As Cultural Studies series editor for Other Press in New York, he is editor, with an introduction, of Julia Kristeva’s Crisis of the European Subject. He has published widely in Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies.

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238  List of Contributors Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies and Vice President for European and International Affairs at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. After teaching at the University of Vienna, she held the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at ­Stanford U. Her monographs include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002) and Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture (forthcoming). She has also published a series of articles and coedited books in the fields of U.S. ­Latino/a literature, Canadian literature, Gender/Queer Studies, and ­Cultural Studies. Pin-chia Feng is Chair Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Chiao Tung University and Research Fellow of the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. Feng was NCTU’s Provost of Academic Affairs, Chair of NCTU’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, President of the Comparative Literature Association of ROC (2005–08), President of the Association of English and American Literature (2009–11, 2014–15), convener of foreign literature discipline of Taiwan’s National Science Council, and a recipient of the 2007, 2010, and 2013 NSC Outstanding Research Award and 2015 Academic Award of the Ministry of Education. Mónika Fodor is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs. Her research interests include narratology, identity, ethnicity, oral history, and ethnographic fieldwork. Since she has a degree in Applied Linguistics, she has also published in multidisciplinary fields such as didactics and narrative and translation studies. She is coeditor of Mobile Narratives. Travel, Migration and Transculturation (Routledge, 2014). Bettina Hofmann is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. She is the author of Ahead of Survival: American Women Writers Narrate the Vietnam War (Peter Lang, 1996) and coeditor of Translated Memories: Intergenerational Perspectives on the Holocaust (forthcoming). Her publications are in the fields of ethnic literatures, particularly Jewish American Literature and War Literature. Wolfgang Holtkamp is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is the editor of Rediscovering America: New Approaches to American Culture (Metzler Verlag, 2001). His teaching and research interests focus on postmodernism, simulation theories, American culture studies, and e-learning. Currently, he is Senior Advisor on International Affairs in the Rectorate at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Angelika Koehler is apl. Professor of American Studies at Dresden University of Technology, where she teaches American literature. She is the author of Ambivalent Desires: The New Woman between Social Modernization

List of Contributors  239

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and Modern Writing and has published articles on gender, genre, and ethnicity. She was a visiting scholar at UCLA and a guest professor at Belmont University, Nashville. Her research interests are in the fields of turn-of-the-century literature, gender and media studies, postcolonial and transcultural writing. Iping Liang is Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University. Her research interests include Herman Melville, Asian American Literature, Ecocritical Aesthetics, and Global Indigeneity Studies. She is the author/editor of Storytelling Survivance: A Critical Reading in Native American Fiction (2016, forthcoming); I’m(m)igrant: New Perspectives of Overseas Chinese Studies (2016); Asia/Americas: Asian American Literatures in Taiwan (2013); Ghost Dances: Towards a Native American Gothic (2006). Her current research project concerns a critical study of Taiwanese American fiction. Monika Mueller is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Bochum, Germany. She is the author of Gender, Genre and Homoeroticism in Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance and Melville’s Pierre (FDUP, 1996) and George Eliot U.S.: ­Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Perspectives (FDUP, 2005). She has coedited Vampires and Zombies: Transcultural Migrations and Transnational Interpretations (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe (FDUP, 2011) as well as volumes on multiethnic detective fiction and on disgust as a cultural phenomenon. Jopi Nyman is Professor and Head of English at the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, Finland. He is the author and editor of almost twenty books in the fields of Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies. His most recent books are the coedited volumes Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation, with Eleftheria Arapoglou and Mónika Fodor (Routledge, 2014), Animals, Space and Affect, with Nora Schuurman (Routledge, 2016), and Ethnic and Racial Identities in the Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), with Eleftheria Arapoglou and Yiorgos Kalogeras. Alan Rice, Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and Co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research was academic advisor to the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster (2001–08), and a co-curator of the Whitworth Art Gallery 2007–08 exhibition Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His two monographs are Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003) and, Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool UP, 2010). He has organized landmark events on Black British history and has contributed to documentaries for Border Television, the BBC, and Korean Television.

240  List of Contributors

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Carmen Serrano is Assistant Professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She graduated with a Ph.D. in Spanish with a specialization in Latin American literature from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently working on her book project Vampires, Doppelgängers and Live Burials: Innovation and Transformation of Gothic Forms in Latin American Narratives.

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Index

Abbadir, Alessandra 43 Abbott, H. Porter 91 abolition 9, 23, 30–33 Abramovic, Marina 74, 82 activism: aesthetics of 1, 8; and ethnicity 9; as performance 2–3, 8,10, 32, 69–87, 212; political 1, 4, 9, 24–25, 27, 69–87, 230; and poststructuralism 6; social 6 aesthetics 1, 69, 72, 78, 80–83, 85–86, 106, 108–09, 112, 126, 133, 162, 169, 225, 228; of subversion 182–83; Western 82 Agamben, Giorgio 46, 50n6 Alba, Richard 94 alterna(rra)tive 53–65, 66n4, 66n9 Ama il tuo sogno: Vita e rivolta nella terra dell’oro rosso (Sagnet) 9, 43–50 Andreani, Natalia 39 Andrews, Jennifer 60–61, 66n6 androgyny 13, 114, 133, 135–138, 145 animal studies 15, 193, 195–96 Ansen, David 169 Appadurai, Arjun 108 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 5–7, 17, 120, 128 Artico, Marta 38 assimilation 92, 94–96, 98, 103, 119, 157, 184 Atkinson, Michael 116n6 aurality 16, 222–224, 226, 228 Austin, J. L. 1, 3, 35, 118, 194 authenticity: ethnic 14, 26, 126, 175n6, 182, 187–88, 209–212, 214, 225, 228, 233; musical 15, 211, 219n7 autobiography 8, 11–12, 35, 43–47, 49, 91–96, 99, 103, 104n1, 118, 120, 124, 126, 181; documentary as autobiography 11, 91–95, 103–04; as family memoir 12, 118–120, 122–24, 126. See also life writing

Bachchan, Amitabh 111–12 Badiou, Alain 71, 81, 83, 86 Bakhtin, Mikhail 63, 66n11 Bal, Mieke 119, 127, 194 Bammer, Angelika 122, 127 Barclay, Simeon 30–31 Barthes, Roland 43 Bataille, Georges 86 Batra, Nandita 136–37 Baudrillard, Jean 79, 174 Bauman, Richard 92 Bauridl, Birgit 224 Beard, William 164–66 Beauvoir, Simone de 144 Bell, Vikki 7, 17 Bendix, Regina 4, 6, 17, 19 Berardinelli, James 171 Berlant, Lauren 13, 71, 77, 151–53, 160 Bernard, April 224 Bernstein, Charles 222–23, 225 Bhabha, Homi K. 26–27, 161 Billig, Michael 201 Black Atlantic 2, 24–28 body 10, 45–46, 59, 225; dead 58–59, 65; and gender 1, 8, 114, 134–38, 142, 145, 148, 167, 183; migrant 36; and performance 74–87; and race 1, 8, 184–86, 228; risking of 69–70, 72–87 Boelhower, William 58n5 Bollywood 11–12, 15–16, 106–113, 115n2, 115n3, 116n8, 116n9, 207–09, 212, 217 Bollywood/Hollywood 11–12, 106–114, 116n6 Bond, Michael 193–94, 197, 199, 205 Boresi, Daniela 38 Boublil, Alain 166–68, 175n1 Bourdieu, Pierre 8, 44, 86 Bow, Leslie 183–85, 187 Boyd, Melinda 171

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242 Index Boyfriend, The (Rao) 13, 150–53, 159 Brecht, Bertolt 11, 70, 79, 162, 174 Brockmeier, Jens 92 Brooks, Daphne A. 23, 32 Brooks, Gwendolyn 16, 222, 224, 226, 232–34 Brown, Fahamisha Patricia 223 Brown, Henry Box 9, 23, 30, 32 Bruce-Novoa, Juan 58–59 Bruner, Jerome 120 Burnt Bread and Chutney (Delman) 12, 124–125 Butler, Ellis Parker 195–96 Butler, Judith 1, 3–4, 7,13–15, 17n1, 17n4, 114, 117, 150, 155, 161, 182–84, 190n2, 193, 209–11 Butterfly myth 14, 161–62, 169–72, 174 Cagnassi, Giovanni 42 capitalism 6, 9, 24–25, 27, 76, 109, 203, 226 Carlson, Marvin 2 Caruth, Cathy 70, 86 Cash, Johnny 15, 207–08, 217 Cavell, Richard 161 Cembalest, Robin 7 Certeau, Michel de 64 Cha, Julian 7, 207 Chater, Kathleen 31 Chaudhuri, Amit 159–60 Chen, Tina 14, 183, 185, 187–90, 191n6 Chester, Blanca 64 Chin, Frank 186–88, 191 Chiu, Kandice 183 Christian, Karen 161 Christie, Lisa Karen 66n7 cinema 93–94, 99, 106, 110. See also film, movie cinematography 102–03, 108–09, 164 Clark, Maureen 219n5 class 16, 24–25, 27–30, 32, 103, 122–23, 138, 196, 227–28; and caste 13, 151, 155; and gender 85, 140; and race 9, 24–25, 27–30, 85, 140, 151–52, 233; and religion 108 Clemons, Walter 169 Clendinnen, Inga 135 Cole, Jean Lee 181–82 Collins, Billy 225 colonialism 27, 54–56, 58, 61, 63, 196 Connolly, David 112 Conquergood, Dwight 64

Cornershop 15, 207, 209, 212–18 cosmopolitanism 5, 160 Coulombe, Renée T. 213, 215–16, 218 Cox, James H. 57, 62–63 Cremieux, Anne 17n3 Cronenberg, David 14, 162–64, 166, 174 cross-ethnic traffic 7–8, 11, 14–16, 207, 211–12, 234 Cuevas, Efren 94 Dabydeen, David 30 Dal Lago, Alessandro 41 Davidson, Arnold 66n6 Davis, Heath R. 1, 8 Davis, Rocío 12, 17n3 D’Cruz, Carolyn 213 Debord, Guy 36, 70, 83 Debray, Régis 50 Degabriele, Maria 166–67 Delle Donne, Marcella 50 Delman, Carmit 12, 124–25 Derrida, Jacques 77, 80, 82 Desai, Jigna 109, 115n2 DeSalvo, Louise 118 diaspora 7–8, 11–12, 27, 33, 106–10, 112–14, 116n8, 119, 123–24, 199, 201–03, 205, 215 Diedrich, Maria 139 Dixon, Edmund S. 145 documentary: autobiographical 11, 91–95, 103–04; filmic 95–97, 99–103 Dolan, Jill 225 Don’t Eat the Neighbours 15, 193–95, 197, 199, 204–05 Drinnon, Richard 57 Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar 111, 115n2 Dümmerth, Dezsö 97–98 During, Simon 153–54 Dutton, Denis 219n7 Eakin, Paul John 118 Eaton, Winnifred. See Watanna, Onoto Edensor, Tim 194 Egan, Linda 137 Egan, Susanna 124 Elliot, Duong Van Mai 12, 122–23 embodiment 7, 10, 108, 207; and gender 137, 142, 145–46; memory and practices 53–56, 58–60, 64; and performance 69, 73–75, 78, 83, 85–86, 134, 222

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Index  243 ethnicity: and gender 1–3, 7–8, 11, 13, 15–16, 43, 110, 141–44, 147, 150, 161–63, 165–67, 170, 174, 175n2, 183–84, 193, 210, 225, 233–34; and identity 2–8, 11–12, 14–15, 17n2, 91–95, 102–04, 118–28, 161–75, 183, 187, 190, 193–95, 197–98, 201–02, 205, 210–14, 217–18, 225; performance of 1–5, 7–12, 15–16, 17n3, 17n5, 91–93, 95–97, 100–03, 104n2, 121, 124–26, 161, 175n6, 181–88, 190, 196, 198, 200–01, 203, 205, 207–10, 212–13, 215, 218, 233–34. See also race and stereotypes Faber, Alyda 77, 79–81, 85 Fellner, Astrid 58 feminism 113–14, 137, 187; aesthetic of 126; and performance 72, 75, 77, 81, 84, 87 femininity 147, 152, 172, 175n2, 187–188. See also gender Ferens, Dominika 182 film 8–9, 11–12, 14, 16, 72, 74, 78, 91–104, 106–115, 140, 157, 162, 164–65, 170, 172, 174, 175n1, 193, 195, 199, 215, 229–31, 234; studies 2. See also documentary and movie First Nation 54, 60 Folsom, Ed 225 Forman, Murray 225 Foster, Stephen C. 83 Foucault, Michel 72 Franko, Mark 83 Freeman, Mark 93, 100 Friedman, Jonathan C. 81 Fusco, Coco 11, 73, 78–82 Gade, Rune 3, 193–94 Gahlot, Deepa 111 Ganti, Tejaswini 108, 116n8 Garber, Marjorie 169, 175n2, 175n5, 210 gay. See homosexuality, queer Gaytán, Marie Sarita 135 Gazzettino, Il 9, 37–38, 40, 42 Gehlawat, Ajay 108 gender: and ethnicity 1–3, 7–8, 11, 13, 15–16, 43, 110, 141–44, 147, 150, 161–63, 165–67, 170, 174, 175n2, 183–84, 193, 210, 225, 233–34; and identity 2–4, 8, 12–13, 85, 114,

133–148, 150–60, 161–63, 165–67, 169–70, 174, 175n2, 183–84, 193, 195, 200, 209–10, 225; and race 1–4, 7–8, 119, 166–67, 209; stereotypes 133, 141, 162, 167–68, 175n2, 182, 188–89. See also femininity, masculinity, and sex Gernalzick, Nadja 99, 104n1 Gilroy, Paul 24, 199, 204, 211 Ginzburg, Carlo 40, 50, 50n3 Gioia, Dana 224–25, 227, 234 Goeller, Alison 16n1, 74, 78 Goffman, Erving 2 Goldie, Terry 153–54 Goldman, Marlene 64 Gopal, Sangita 111 Gopinath, Gayatri 110, 114 Gotanda, Philip Kan 187 Green Grass, Running Water (King) 10, 55–56, 58–61, 63–64, 65n3, 66n7 Greenblatt, Stephen 109 Gregson, Nicky 193 Grossberg, Lawrence 4 Gullestadt, Marianne 126 Gunew, Sneja 209–11 Hall, Stuart 3–4, 6 Hammerwold, Stephanie 123 Hamscha, Susanne 57–58, 66n5 Hancock, Joel 136 Hargreaves, Tracy 136 Hasta no verte Jesús mío (Poniatowska) 12, 136, 140 Hattori, Tomo 182, 190n1, 191n4 Heddon, Deirdre E. 93 hegemony 1, 6–7, 15, 26–27, 60–61, 114, 152, 163, 166, 175n2, 193, 216, 223 Heidegger, Martin 56 heteronormativity 13, 112, 136, 150–51, 153, 155, 160 heterosexuality 12, 107, 112–114, 151–53, 158, 162, 170 Hill, Elizabeth Boone 66n4 Hollinger, David A. 3, 5–6, 17n2, 210 Holquist, Michael 66n11 Home was the Land of Morning Calm (Kang) 118, 127 homoeroticism 114 homonormativity 151, 155, 160 homosexuality 13, 136, 150–57. See also queer Honeycutt, Kirk 115n3 Horwitz, Richard P. 195–96 Huggan, Graham 196

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244 Index Hughes, Langston 16, 222, 224, 226–228, 230–33, 234n2, 234n3 Hwang, David Henry 14, 162–63, 165–66, 169, 174, 175n1, 175n2, 186–188 hybridity 6–7, 9, 15, 26–27, 106, 108, 111, 141, 152, 161, 171, 182, 197, 207, 212–16, 218; and gender performance 114–115, 205; and political 24; space 196 “I, too” (Hughes) 16, 222, 224, 232 identity 2–3, 5–6, 15, 17n2, 17n3, 50n1, 57–58, 81, 91–93, 96, 101, 118, 120, 126, 128, 161, 165, 202, 204, 209–11, 219n5, 225; African American 5, 17n3, 211, 229; Asian American 2, 14, 17n3, 106–09, 112–13, 116n9, 118–129, 161, 163, 165–167, 174, 181–83, 185, 187–88, 190, 213, 217–18; Canadian 15, 201; cultural 6, 54–56, 58, 65, 91–104, 127, 163, 203, 205; ethnic 2–8, 11–12, 14–15, 17n2, 91–95, 102–04, 118–28, 161–75, 183, 187, 190, 193–95, 197–98, 201–02, 205, 210–14, 217–18, 225; gender 2–4, 8, 12–13, 85, 114, 133–148, 150–60, 161–63, 165–67, 169–70, 174, 175n2, 183–84, 193, 195, 200, 209–10, 225; Hungarian 11, 91–92, 94–103; impersonation of ethnic 14, 161, 165, 174, 181–83, 185, 187–190; Indian Canadian 106–07; Mexican 141–42; national 9, 56, 59, 141, 167, 194–95, 200; performance of 119–21, 127, 166, 170, 190, 193–95, 197, 203, 205; and race 1–4, 43, 85, 140, 161, 170, 185, 193, 209; transnational 107, 116n4 Il mio viaggio della speranza: Dal Senegal all’Italia in cerca di fortuna (Mademba) 9, 43 immigration 8–10, 17n3, 37–42, 47, 50n2, 94–96, 113, 119, 125, 127–128, 151–52, 181, 183–86, 193, 195–99, 201–05, 210, 215–16, 227. See also migration impersonation (of ethnic identity) 14, 161, 165, 174, 181–83, 185, 187–190 Incubator [Inkubátor] 11, 91–103 indigeneity 12–13, 54–56, 59, 138, 140–41, 184

interculturality 42, 54, 63 intertextuality 10, 56, 63, 66n9, 110,167, 194 Ione, Carole 118 Isenberg, Andrew 195 István, a király. See Stephen, the King Jacobson, Matthew Frye 94, 96, 98, 104n3 James, Erin 117 Jameson, Fredric 8, 76 Japtok, Martin 228 Jörgensen, Beth 133 Johnson, E. Patrick 17n3, 211–12, 218, 219n5, 219n6, 219n7 Jones, Amelia 74 Kacandes, Irene 8 Kang, K. Connie 118, 127 Kapoor, Raj 110, 116n3 Kasow, Joel 171 Katyal, Sonia K. 250 Kerkhoff, Ingrid 162–63 King, Thomas 10, 55–65, 66n5, 66n6, 66n7, 66n8, 66n10 Kingston, Maxine Hong 126, 186–88, 191n6 Knight, Alan 138 Kondo, Dorinne 17n3 Kosellek, Reinhart 44 Krishnaswami, Ravi 215 Kristeva, Julia 8, 10, 80, 82–87 Kutziniski, Vera 234n3 Lacan, Jacques 84, 86–87 Lane, Jim 93–95, 99–100, 104n1 Lee, Helie 12, 120–21 Lee, Robert G. 185 Lentini, Fabrizio 50n2 lesbian 62, 107, 159 Lester, Jaime 155, 157, 159–60 Levine, Steven 169 Liaison (Wadler) 162–63 168–170 life writing 12–13, 35, 37, 41, 44, 46, 50, 118, 120, 124. See also autobiography Linebaugh, Peter 26 Ling, Amy 181–82 Linton, Patricia 62–64 Lipsitz, George 56 logocentrism 62 Long, Luther 161 Lorde, Audrey 225, 228 Loti, Pierre 161, 171

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Lowe, Lisa 14, 183–85, 187 Loxley, James 3 M. Butterfly (Hwang) 14, 162–63, 166, 168–69, 175n1 McCalman, Iain 24–25, 29 McClary, Susan 173 McGrath, Charles 225 machismo 13, 142, 145, 147 Madama Butterfly (Puccini/Belasco) 161–63, 167, 172, 175n3 Madama Butterfly (Wilson) 14, 172–174 Madame Butterfly (Mitterand) 161–163, 170–71, 175n1, 184 “Madame Butterfly” (Long) 161, 184, 189 Mademba, Bay 9–10, 35, 43–47, 49–50 Madison, D. Soyini 212, 218 Makkai, László 97–98 Margaroni, Maria 86–87 marginalization 16, 26, 62–63, 140, 159, 184, 199, 212–14, 218, 233 Marrone, Gianfranco 37–38 masculinity 134–36, 138, 143, 145–46, 151, 156, 163, 166–68, 171, 174, 187–88, 205. See also gender Massumi, Brian 82 media 1, 14, 38, 40–41, 77, 109, 116n8, 152, 161–62, 193–94, 211, 225; new 16, 234; news 37–50; print 23; visual 11, 16, 194, 197 mediation 70–73, 75–76, 78, 80–81, 86, 93, 96 mediasphere 35–37, 50 Medina, Rubén 141 Meeks, Wayne A. 137 Mehta, Deepa 11, 106–115, 116n4 Mehta, Rashmi 208, 213–14 Melina, Remy 216 Melville, Herman 10, 55–65, 66n5, 66n7, 66n9 memory 23, 31, 55, 64; archival 55, 57; autobiographical 92; cultural 53–54, 118–119, 124, 127–28, 173; ethnic 10, 55–56, 58 Merrill, Lisa 23 Messer, Peter 84 metafictional 121, 162, 164 Mexican Revolution 13, 133–34, 138, 148 Meyer-Kalkus, Reinhart 223–25, 234n1 Michelson, Alan 10, 53–54, 58, 65, 65n1

Micznik, Vera 171, 175n8 Middleton, Peter 224–25 Mignolo, Walter D. 55–56, 66n4 migration 4,15, 17n3, 94, 194–96, 199. See also immigration Miller, R. Baxter 235n11 Mion, Carlo 37, 42 Miss Numė of Japan: A JapaneseAmerican Romance (Watanna) 14, 181–82, 185, 188–90 Miss Saigon (Schönberg/Boublil) 14, 162, 166, 168, 174 Mitchell, W.J.T. 80 Mitterand, Frédéric 14, 170–74 Moby-Dick (Melville) 10, 55–61, 63–64, 66n9 Moon, Krystyn 186 Morris, Kate 53–54 movie 14, 15, 99, 106, 109, 116, 162–67, 169, 171–73, 184, 186, 208–09, 217, 224, 229–31; home 91, 95; Hollywood 113. See also documentary and film multiculturalism 6, 15, 108, 115, 195, 200, 204–05, 209, 214–15 multiethnicity 3, 6, 8, 15, 204, 208–09, 214–15 Murray, Stephen 209 musical 11, 14, 91, v97–98, 101–03, 104n2, 108, 110–12, 162, 166–68, 174, 175n1 national/ism/ity 29, 31, 35, 37, 42–43, 49, 66n5, 109, 128, 152, 185, 204; boundaries 26, 60; history 120; identity 9, 15, 36, 56–57, 59, 141, 167, 194–95, 200; literary tradition 55 Nguyen, Viet Thanh 14, 182–83, 185, 187, 189–90, 190n1 Niedermüller, Peter 6–7 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn 223, 227 Nuova di Venezia, La 9, 36–43 Nyman, Jopi 193, 195–96 occident 162–66, 169, 173 Oishi, Eve 181–81 opera 14, 161–62, 164–65, 168, 170–74, 175n3, 189; rock 91, 95, 97, 102; soap 194 orality 9, 16, 26–27, 60–61, 64, 133, 222–24, 226 orientalism 161, 167. See also stereotype, oriental

246 Index

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Orlan 11, 70, 75–87 other, the 54, 62–63, 85, 165, 167, 169, 186, 196 Overmyer-Velázquez, Mark 142 Paddington Here and Now (Bond) 14–15, 193–94, 197–99, 205 palimpsest 58, 122, 125 Palumbo-Liu, David 110, 116n9 panethnic 181, 183, 185, 188, 190 Pao, Angela 166–68 Paz, Octavio 13, 141–42 Pellegrini, Ann 87 performance 23, 25, 28, 35, 38, 44, 47, 50, 53–55, 61, 63, 66n5, 119, 121, 126–27, 150, 161, 164–65, 170–74, 193–95, 197, 207, 212; activist 2–3, 8,10, 32, 69–87, 212; of ethnicity 1–5, 7–12, 15–16, 17n3, 17n5, 91–93, 95–97, 100–03, 104n2, 121, 124–26,161, 175n6, 181–88, 190, 196, 198, 200–01, 203, 205, 207–10, 212–13, 215, 218, 233–34; of gender 1–4, 8, 11–16, 106, 111–115, 133–35, 137–38, 143, 147, 155, 160, 167, 200, 226–28, 234; movie/ film 3, 15, 91, 95, 99, 106, 109, 162–66, 172–73, 184, 208–09, 217, 224, 229–31; of music 8, 11, 14–15, 73, 91, 97–98, 101–03, 104n2, 108, 111–12, 162, 165–68, 170–74, 175n1, 193, 207–16, 219n6, 219n7, 227, 229, 231; of poetry 222–34; on the stage 2, 7–8, 12, 14, 69, 72, 85, 95, 100, 161–62, 164–66, 170, 172–74, 175n7, 185–86, 212; theory of 56; video 15–16, 71–73, 78, 84, 92, 112, 193, 207–210, 212–14, 216–18, 219n2, 224–25, 227, 231–34. See also activism performativity 1–4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 17n1, 23, 26–27, 66n5, 106, 151, 162, 183–84, 193–94, 212 Perlmann, Joel 5 Perloff, Marjorie 227 Perrine, Laurence 222 phallocentrism 135 Pigniczky, Réka 11, 91–97, 99–103 polyculturalism 210, 218 Pomian, Krzystof 36 Poniatowska, Elena 12, 133, 136, 139–41 Pope, Alexander 222–23 postcolonialism 126, 196, 215–16

postethnicity 3, 5–6, 210–12, 218 postmodernism 6–8, 11, 14–16, 17n3, 60, 65n3, 75–76, 81, 126, 161–62, 165, 169–70, 172, 174, 196, 207, 209–10, 212, 214–15, 217–18, 219n1 poststructuralism 1–3, 6, 183 Prashad, Vijay 210, 218, 219n4 Premnath, Gautam 215 Puccini, Giacomo 161–68, 170–73, 175n3, 175n8 Puthillam, Arathy 159 Queequeq 10, 53, 56, 58–62, 65 queerness 13, 62, 114, 150–52. See also homosexuality race 17n2, 24, 108, 141, 161, 168, 186, 193, 195–97, 204, 212, 222, 226–27; and class 9, 27, 29, 140, 233, 234n4; discrimination 5; and gender 1–4, 7–8, 119, 166–67, 209; and identity 1–4, 43, 85, 140, 161, 170, 185, 193, 209; norms 1, 95, 210; performance of 5, 16; roles 2, 119. See also ethnicity Rado, Lisa 135 Ramchandani, Vinita 116n4 Raphael-Hernandez, Heike 17n3, 219n1 Rao, R. Raj 13, 150–60 Rasmussen, Birgit Brander 54–55, 58, 66n4 Rasula, Jed 225 Repubblica, La 9, 37, 41, 43 Reséndez Fuentes, Andrés 139 Rice, Alan 23, 31 Rickard, Jolene 54 Riddel, Joseph N. 66n5 “Ring of Fire” (Cash) 15, 207–09, 217 “Ring of Fire” (Weeratunga) 15–16, 207–09, 212, 217–18 Rintoul, Suzanne 60–61 Roach, Joseph 23, 35 Rodriguez, Richard 3 Rooke, Constance 66n8 Rose, Barbara 85 Rose, Gillian 193 Ross, Deborah L. 163 Rothenberg, Molly Anne 4, 17n4 Ruby, Jay 93–94 Ruggles, Jeffrey 31–32 Ryan, Marie-Laure 91

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Index  247 Sacred Willow, The (Elliott) 12, 122–23 Sagnet, Yvan 10, 43–50 Sahgal, Tara 151–53 Said, Edward 57, 163 Sarkowsky, Katja 65n3 Schank, Roger C. 91 Schechner, Richard 2, 7, 119 Sciurba, Alessandra 50n2 Sekhon, Aradhika 153–56 sex (as category of gender and identity) 2–4, 12, 60, 63, 110, 115, 135–36, 138; industry 106, 142, 150, 156–57, 159, 169–70. See also gender sexuality 142, 150, 153–54, 157–58, 175n6, 184, 232; and perversity 167; and violence 42 Shapiro, Johanna 202 Shimizu, Celine Parrenas 167 Simon, Andrea 118 Singh, Amardeep 213–16 Singh, Amritjit 119 slave narrative 23–24, 26, 32–33 Smith, Sidonie 122 Socolow, Susan Migden 142 Sollors, Werner 196 Sossi, Federica 50n2 speech acts 3, 35, 95 Sperandio, Alvise 40 Staal, Frits 3 Stanton, Anthony 141 Steedman, Carolyn 123 Stelarc 11, 75–76, 82, 84 stereotypes 194; ethnic/racial 6–7, 12, 14, 37–38, 42, 45, 47, 50n1, 126, 162–63, 167–68, 174, 175n2, 182, 185, 187–89, 193, 195, 200, 205, 216; gender 133, 141, 162, 167–68, 175n2, 182, 188–89; orientalist 14, 126, 161–67, 169, 171, 174, 175n2, 182, 185–86, 188–89 Stephen, the King 11, 91, 95–102, 104n2. See István, a király Sterrit, David 170 Still Life with Rice (Lee, Helie) 12, 120–22 Stribley, Robert 207 subaltern 54; knowledge 55–56, 64–65 subalternity 26, 59–60 Suner, Asuman 166 Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja 1, 3, 119 Taylor, Diana 7, 10, 35, 55–56, 64

Thornton, Niamh 136 transatlanticism 23, 26–27, 31–32 transculturality 1, 16, 118, 161, 172, 217 transmediality 92, 104n1 transnationality 3, 47, 50, 101, 107, 111–112, 123, 194, 197, 208 Trudgill, Peter 230 Turner, Victor 35 Ulrich, John 233 “United Provinces of India” (Cornershop) 15–16, 207–09, 212, 216, 218 Unterberger, Andrew 213–14, 216 Valocchi, Stephen 150 Van Rij, Jan 161 Vasconcelos, José 141 Wadler, Joyce 14, 162–63, 168–70, 174 Waegner, Cathy Covell 7, 17n3, 219n1 Walton, Priscilla 60–61, 65n3, 66n6 Washington, Denzel 16, 227, 229–32 Watanna, Onoto (Eaton, Winnifred) 14, 181–83, 185, 187–190 “We Real Cool” (Brooks, Gwendolyn) 16, 222, 224, 232 Wedderburn, Robert 9, 24–30 Weeratunga, Ramesh B. 15–16, 207–09, 212, 217–18 Wegenstein, Bernadette 71–72, 74–76, 81, 85 Wertsch, James V. 127 Whitlock, Gillian 126 Whitman, Walt 225–27, 234n4 Williams, Raymond 70 Wilson, Robert 14, 172–74 Winter, Jay 127 Wisenthal, Jonathan 175n1, 175n3 Wolf-Meyer, Matthew 93 Wood, Marcus 23, 32 Wyile, Herb 60, 63 Yamamoto, Traise 183–85, 19n3 Yoshikawa, Yoko 167 Young, Hershini Bhana 33 Zapata, Emiliano 138 Zheng, Da 167, 175n6