The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance 9780190863456, 0190863455

Table of contents :
Cover
The oxford handbook of POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE
Copyright
Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: Politics and/as Performance, Performance and/as Politics
Definitions
States of the Art
Performance and/in Politics
Politics and/in Performance
Is/As: Intertwining Politics and Performance
Co-constitution
Note
References
Part I: PERFORMATIVITY AND THEATRICALITY
References
Chapter 1: Colonial Theatricality
Introduction
Colonial Theatricality
The Case of Mpundu Akwa and the Phenomenon of Imperial Imposterism
Performance, Mimicry, Race
Imposterism and Racial Masquerade
Representing Back
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 2: Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance: Beyond Theater of Roots
Theatricality and the Limits of Postcolonial Resistance
Stylization and the Problem of the New
Sonic Theatricality and (Counter) Sovereignty: The Tone of the Contemporary
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Authenticity and Theatricality: World Spectatorship and the Drama of the Image
Introduction
Scene 1: “The Horrors of the Sea”
Scene 2: “Our Boat”
Scene 3: “After the Torture of the Storm”
Scene 4: “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ ”
Scene 5: Restaging “The Spectacle of ‘the Other’ ”
Conclusion: “Seeing through Race”
References
Chapter 4: Law, Presence to Absence: The Case of the Disappearing Defendant
Introduction
The Politics of Presence: The Body of the Defendant
The Disappearing Defendant
Video-Link Remand Proceedings: The “Pixelated Prisoner”
Online Courts: The Single Justice Procedure
Trials in Absentia
Toward a Politics of Absence
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 5: Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line
Notes
References
Chapter 6: Protest and Performativity
Protests and Performance
New Trends in Protest
Performative Strategies
The Indigenous Claim
The Zócalo
Masks and Disguises
A New Narrative
Social Networks
Conclusions
References
Chapter 7: Representation
Political Representation and Theatricality
Performativity
Concrete Perspectives: On Representation as Eminence and as Nearness
Notes
References
Part II: IDENTITIES
References
Chapter 8: Class, Race, and Marginality: Informal Street Performances in the City
Introduction
Space, Politics, and Injustice: Class, Race, and Marginality in the City
Hip-Hop and the City
Litefeet
Grime
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 9: Gender, Politics, Performance: Embodiment and Representation in Political Institutions
Introduction
Framing Gender, Politics, Performance
Gender and Political Performance in Indian Politics
Institutional Opportunities for Representative Claim-Making among Indian Women MPs
Embodiment and Symbolic Representation: Meira Kumar’s Election as the First Female Speaker in the Indian Parliament
Embodying Representativeness: Authenticity and Its Contestation
Global and Local Circulations of Gender and Political Representation
Toward Transformation? Parliamentarians’ Performative Labor for Baby-Friendly Legislatures and Beyond
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 10: National Identity
Historical Performance in the Construction of National Identity
National Theater vs. Public Theater
Conflict, Resistance, Postcolonialism
References
Chapter 11: Performance and Citizenship: The Roma in Europe
Everyday Acts of Resistance as Performances of Citizenship
Bollywood Dances as Performances of Countercultural Citizenship
Reading the Gypsy Soaps through Roma Counterpublics
Performance and Citizenship: Toward an Embodied Epistemology
Notes
References
Chapter 12: From Exile to Migration: Staging (the) Face of the Human Waste
Political Theater and Migration: Toward a Methodology of the Craft
The Jungle: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee
Notes
References
Part III: SITES
References
Chapter 13: Island Impasse: Refugee Detention and the Thickening Border
Constructing Manus Prison
Clandestine Acts: Evidentiary Work
Time, Space, and the Border
Collaboration and Transnationalism: Acts of Citizenship
Uneven Mobilities and the Kyriarchal System
Coda
Notes
References
Chapter 14: Media Sites: Political Revivals of American Muslim Women
Terms and Concepts: Media Sites as Political Performances
Mass Media’s Performance of Microaggressions
Mass Media and American Muslim Women
Using Performance Methods: Revivals and Reciprocities
Veil (W)rapping: Alternative Media
Mass Media Case Study: Performing Social Microaggressions
Note
References
Chapter 15: The Force of the Somatic Norm: Women as Space Invaders in the UK Parliament
Disorientation
Infantalization
Burden of Doubt
Super-Surveillance and the Burden of Representation
Habitus, Networks, and Becoming Insiders
Conclusion
References
Chapter 16: The Market: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices
Introduction
Defoe and the Performance of Market Agency
Smith and the Performance of Market Agency
Conclusion
References
Chapter 17: Staging Memorialization: Performing the War on Terror and Resilient Nationalism
Introduction
Staging the Resilient Recovery
Off-Staging the Economic Recovery
Staging for Future Generations: Inverting the Relationship between Audiences
Conclusion: Who Is Doing the Staging?
Notes
References
Chapter 18: Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International: The Other City and the Aesthetic Subject
Introduction
Mapping the Field
Method
The Other City
When the Ordinary Becomes Political
Conclusions
References
Chapter 19: The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals: Performing the Institutionalization of Liminality at Trade Fairs
Trade Fairs: Neoliberal Ordering Rituals
Ritual Ordering
Ordering Indeterminacy
Performing Sacred and Affective Trade Fair Rites
Reinstating the Magic of Capitalism
Affecting the Bodily Senses beyond Language
The Politics of Institutionalizing Liminality at Trade Fairs
Victor Turner’s Hope
Inscribing Commercial Forms of Liminal Politics
Conclusion: Building in Inegalitarian Instability
Notes
References
Chapter 20: Empire: A Performative Approach to Imperial Frontiers and Formations in Palestine
Introduction
The Politics of Empire and Settler Colonialism
The Performativity of Empire: Palestinian Elections and the Legitimate Use of Violence at the Frontier
Terrorist Bodies as Frontiers of Imperial Formations
Cultural Frontiers in the Reproduction of Imperial Formations
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part IV: SCRIPTS
References
Chapter 21: Nativism: African Bodies and Photographic Performance
Introduction
Photographing African Bodies
Muholi and African Nativism
Performing Nativism in Photographic Portraits
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 22: Immersion
Linear Concepts of Communication
Circular Concepts of Communication
Aesthetic Experience
Women in Science
Lise & Otto
Ada
Maryam
Presence and Participation
From Involvement to Immersion
Producing Immersion
Immersion, Verfremdung, and the Political
Notes
References
Chapter 23: Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology
Introduction
From Etymology to Political Theology
Histories of Ceremony
Aspects of Ceremony
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 24: Pedagogy: (Mis)Performing the Contemporary University
(Mis)Performing: A Possibility
Neoliberal Acting
(Mis)Performing Bodies
(Un)Learning How to Learn
(Mis)Performing World Politics
Learning Nothing
Note
References
Chapter 25: Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy: The View from China and Beyond
Optimistic Stories and Unifying Scripts: The “China Dream”
Contrasting Scripts: Jeremiad, Division, and Improvisation in Anglo-American Political Performance
Scripts, Authority and Legitimacy: Different Stories, Varied Intents
Note
References
Chapter 26: Political Leadership “Saving the Show”
Performance Frameworks
Two New Frameworks
Bagehot’s Leadership Framework
Rousseau’s Critique of Liberalism
Rousseau on Leadership Performance
Implications for Leadership Performance
Tribunes, Dictators, Censors, Civil Religions
Conclusion
References
Chapter 27: Adaptation and Environment: Landscape, Community, and Politics in Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm by Duncan Macmillan (2019)
Rosmersholm: Landscape as Politics
Community Activism: Political, Social, and Environmental Justice
Conclusion
References
Part V: BODY, VOICE, GESTURE
References
Chapter 28: Interruption and Interpellation: Leaving the Theater in Search of the Theater
Tableau
Scenes of Interruption in the Theater
“Does Anyone Have a Lighter?”
Leaving the Theater in Search of the Theater
Scenes of Interpellation
Notes
References
Chapter 29: Performing Political Ideologies
Introduction
Ideas, Ideologies, and Rhetoric
Performing Ideological Character
Performing Societal Ideologies
Governing and Evaluating Rhetorical Performances
Conclusion
References
Chapter 30: Music: Women Rewriting Punk Performance Politics
Introduction
Mapping the Field
“Punks and Poses”
Women Rewriting the Punk Playlist
The Slits, “So Tough” (Cut, 1979)
The Fall: “U.S. 80’s–90’s” (Bend Sinister, 1986)
Sleater-Kinney: “Faraway” (One Beat, 2002)
Conclusion
References
Chapter 31: Eroticism and the Politics of Representing the Abused Body
Introduction
The Appeal of Violence
Violence, Vulnerability, and Ignorance
Vulnerability, Sexual Violence, and the Pornographic
The Exposed Body: Abu Ghraib
The Concealed Body: The Example of The Monument
Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 32: Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites
Focusing on Gestures of Protest
Gestural Sites of Communalism and Hypernationalism
Contesting Gestures
Identifying Sites of Critical Gestures in the Public Realm
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 33: What’s in a Name?: The Politics of Labeling in Disability Performance
Labels, Labeling, the Development of Disability Identity
Disability Arts, Disability Performance, and Politics
The Politics of Labeling in Disability Performance
The Pros, Cons, and Tensions of Labeling Practices
Present and Future Priorities
References
Chapter 34: Taking a Position: Contemporary Dance and the Communication of Deep Political Feeling
Brexit Means . . . um, er . . . [Nervous Cough]
Dancers: Making Their Appearance Explicitly
Working with Embodied Political Feelings
References
Chapter 35: The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back: Questions of Embodiment in the Performance of Politics
Embodiment vs. Representation
Bodies in Performances of Contemporary Politics
Notes
References
Part VI: AFFECT
References
Chapter 36: Postmemory: Politics and Performance in Latin America
New Documentary Theater in Latin America
Memory as a Collective Effort
Villa+Speech
Recess: A Practical Guide for Trials of Crimes against Humanity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 37: Performing Political Empathy
Introduction
Conceptualizing Emotions and Conflict
Prevailing Approaches to Conflict: Managing Communities of Fear and Anger
Appreciating the Performative Dimensions of Emotional Politics
Alternative Approaches to Conflict: Toward a Performative Politics of Empathy
Illustrative Case on Art, Empathy, and Peacebuilding
Conclusion
References
Chapter 38: Care
Care and Affect
Considering Care: Defining the Concept
Performing Care: Care as Resource
Formal Care Settings
Conceptualizing a Politics of Care: Examining Performativity
Case Studies of Care
Chronicities of Care
Case Study 1: Carer or Spouse?
Beyond Work: The Mutualities of Care
Paid Care
Case Study 2: Maureen
Politics and Performativity of Care
Notes
References
Chapter 39: The Nation as Family: Motherhood and Love in Japan
Introduction
Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell
Hideki Noda’s MIWA
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 40: Constituency Performances: The Heart of Democratic Politics
Introduction: A Relational Approach
A Political Anthropology of Constituency Work
Political Performance in Constituencies
The Performance of Emotions in Politics
The Politics of Affect
Multidisciplinary Conclusions
Notes
References
Chapter 41: Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit
Introduction: The Failure of Post-Brexit Comedy
Comedy Politicians
The Comedy Establishment
Moving On?
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 42: Atmospheres of Protest
Social Movements and Protest
Policing Atmosphere
Affective Atmosphere
The Tone of Space
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 43: Performance and Populism: Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity
Constructing the People
The Choreography of Articulation
Imagining a Popular Form of Collectivity in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

T H E ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

POL I T IC S A N D PE R FOR M A NC E

the oxford handbook of

POLITICS AND PERFORMANCE Edited by

SHIRIN M. RAI, MILIJA GLUHOVIC, SILVIJA JESTROVIC, and

MICHAEL SAWARD

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at Library of Congress ISBN  978–0–19–086345–6 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents

List of Contributors

ix

Introduction: Politics and/as Performance, Performance and/as Politics

1

Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic, Shirin M. Rai, and Michael Saward

PA RT I   PE R F OR M AT I V I T Y A N D T H E AT R IC A L I T Y 1. Colonial Theatricality

27

Lisa Skwirblies

2. Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance: Beyond Theater of Roots

43

Ameet Parameswaran

3. Authenticity and Theatricality: World Spectatorship and the Drama of the Image

57

Adrian Kear

4. Law, Presence to Absence: The Case of the Disappearing Defendant

73

Kate Leader

5. Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line

89

Sophie Nield

6. Protest and Performativity

101

Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga

7. Representation

117

Jean-Pascal Daloz

PA RT I I   I DE N T I T I E S 8. Class, Race, and Marginality: Informal Street Performances in the City Katie Beswick

135

vi   contents

9. Gender, Politics, Performance: Embodiment and Representation in Political Institutions

151

Carole Spary

10. National Identity

169

Edgaras Klivis

11. Performance and Citizenship: The Roma in Europe

183

Ioana Szeman

12. From Exile to Migration: Staging (the) Face of the Human Waste

199

Yana Meerzon



PA RT I I I   SI T E S

13. Island Impasse: Refugee Detention and the Thickening Border

217

Emma Cox

14. Media Sites: Political Revivals of American Muslim Women

235

Kimberly Wedeven Segall

15. The Force of the Somatic Norm: Women as Space Invaders in the UK Parliament

251

Nirmal Puwar

16. The Market: Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices

265

Matthew Watson

17. Staging Memorialization: Performing the War on Terror and Resilient Nationalism

279

Charlotte Heath-Kelly

18. Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International: The Other City and the Aesthetic Subject

293

Matt Davies

19. The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals: Performing the Institutionalization of Liminality at Trade Fairs

307

Anna Leander

20. Empire: A Performative Approach to Imperial Frontiers and Formations in Palestine Catherine Chiniara Charrett

325

contents   vii

PA RT I V   S C R I P T S 21. Nativism: African Bodies and Photographic Performance

347

Desiree Lewis

22. Immersion

363

Willmar Sauter

23. Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology

377

Stuart Elden

24. Pedagogy: (Mis)Performing the Contemporary University

391

Erzsébet Strausz

25. Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy: The View from China and Beyond

405

Julia C. Strauss

26. Political Leadership: “Saving the Show”

421

John Uhr

27. Adaptation and Environment: Landscape, Community, and Politics in Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm by Duncan Macmillan (2019)

437

Vicky Angelaki

PA RT V   B ODY, VOIC E , G E S T U R E 28. Interruption and Interpellation: Leaving the Theater in Search of the Theater

455

Sruti Bala

29. Performing Political Ideologies

471

Alan Finlayson

30. Music: Women Rewriting Punk Performance Politics

485

M. I. Franklin

31. Eroticism and the Politics of Representing the Abused Body

501

Lisa Fitzpatrick

32. Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites Bishnupriya Dutt

517

viii   contents

33. What’s in a Name? The Politics of Labeling in Disability Performance

531

Bree Hadley

34. Taking a Position: Contemporary Dance and the Communication of Deep Political Feeling

545

Stephen Coleman

35. The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back: Questions of Embodiment in the Performance of Politics

561

Julia Peetz

PA RT V I   A F F E C T 36. Postmemory: Politics and Performance in Latin America

581

Jordana Blejmar

37. Performing Political Empathy

595

Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison

38. Care

609

Narelle Warren

39. The Nation as Family: Motherhood and Love in Japan

623

Nobuko Anan

40. Constituency Performances: The Heart of Democratic Politics

637

Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra

41. Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit

653

James Brassett

42. Atmospheres of Protest

665

Illan rua Wall

43. Performance and Populism: Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity

679

Goran Petrović Lotina Index

693

List of Contributors

Nobuko Anan teaches theater and performance studies in the Department of Foreign Language Studies at Kansai University in Japan. Her publications include a monograph, Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (2016) and articles in journals such as TDR, Theatre Research International, and the Journal of Popular Culture. Vicky Angelaki is a professor in English literature at Mid Sweden University, where her teaching focuses on Anglophone cultures, literature, and drama, with an emphasis on social concerns, internationalism, and ecocriticism. She was previously based in the United Kingdom for a number of years. Major publications include the monographs Theatre and Environment (2019), Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis (2017), and The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange (2012) and the edited collection Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground (2013, 2016). She is coediting The Cambridge Companion to British Playwriting since 1945 (forthcoming) and the Palgrave Macmillan series Adaptation in Theatre and Performance. Sruti Bala is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Amsterdam, where she currently coordinates the MA Theatre Studies program. She is affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis and Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies. Katie Beswick is a senior lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter. She thinks about how theater, performance, and other artistic and cultural products (visual art, literature, television, film, news media) shape our experiences in the world. She has been particularly interested in the relationship between class, culture, and city spaces, especially housing. Her monograph Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate On and Off Stage was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. She is the editor of the Studies in Theatre and Performance special issue “Housing, Performance and Activism” (2020) and the author of numerous articles and chapters on performance, housing, art, class, and culture. She writes regularly for the music magazine Loud & Quiet and has published features based on interviews with numerous musicians and hip-hop artists from all over the world, including the UK, USA, Canada, Iceland, and Norway. Roland Bleiker is a professor of international relations at the University of Queensland, where he coordinates an interdisciplinary research program on visual politics. His research explores the politics of aesthetics, visuality, and emotions, which he examines across a range of issues, from humanitarianism and peacebuilding to protest movements and the conflict in Korea. His books include Visual Global Politics (2018), Aesthetics and World Politics (2009, 2012), Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (2005, 2008), and Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (2000).

x   List of Contributors Jordana Blejmar is a lecturer in visual media and cultural studies at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (2016) and coeditor of three books: Instantáneas de la memoria: Fotografía y dictadura en Argentina y América latina (2013), El pasado inasequible: Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo mileno (2018), and Entre/telones y pantallas: Afectos y saberes en la performance argentina contemporánea (forthcoming). She is an editor of Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and of Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies. James Brassett is a reader in international political economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. Jorge Cadena-Roa is Senior Researcher at the Center for the Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Catherine Chiniara Charrett is a lecturer in global politics at the University of Westminster. Their research is on anti-imperial and queer approaches to European-Palestinian relations. Chiniara Charrett was an Early Career Research Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation for a project entitled “Performing Technologies in European, Israeli and Palestinian Security Cooperation,” which used transdisciplinary and queer methods to investigate Israeli access to H2020 funding and the EUPOL COPPS mission based in Ramallah. Chiniara Charrett has produced two Politics in Drag performances on the topics of their research, Sipping Toffee with Hamas in Brussels (2014) and The Vein, the Fingerprint Machine and the Automatic Speed Detector (2018). Chiniara Charrett has a single authored manuscript, “The EU, Hamas and the 2006 Palestinian Elections: A Performance in Politics,” and has published in the European Journal of International Relations and Review of International Studies. Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. His main research interests include political aesthetics, performance and rhetoric; literary and ­dramatic representations of politics; and intersections between popular culture and formal politics. He is researching Communicating the Pandemic: Improving Public Communication and Understanding. He is widely published in his field and is the author of How People Talk About Politics: Brexit and Beyond (I.B. Tauris 2020); Can The Internet Strengthen Democracy? (John Wiley & Sons 2017), and with Jim Brogden Capturing the Mood of Democracy The British General Election 2019 (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). Emma Cox is a reader in drama and theater at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism (2015) and Theatre and Migration (2014) and the editor of the play collection Staging Asylum (2013). Her writing has been published internationally in journals such as Theatre Journal and Theatre Research International. She is a coeditor of a major new interdisciplinary book, Refugee Imaginaries: Research across the Humanities (2020). Emma Crewe is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of Global Research Network on Parliaments and People (http://parliaments4people.com), SOAS University of London; and a visiting professor of University of Hertfordshire Business School. She is an anthropologist researching parliaments and civil society in the UK, South Asia, and East Africa. She began her research into organizations in 1987 and into parliaments in 1998, carrying out ethnographies in both the House of Lords and the House of

List of Contributors   xi Commons. Since 2014 she has been managing coalitions and giving grants to scholars in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Myanmar to research their parliaments and civil society. She is a member of faculty teaching students on an innovative course (doctorate in management by research) at the University of Hertfordshire. Her The Lords of Parliament: Manners, Rituals and Politics (2005) and The House of Commons: an Anthropology of MPs at Work (2015) were the first anthropological accounts of the Westminster Parliament. She is chair of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Committee on Policy and Practice. Jean-Pascal Daloz is a senior CNRS research professor at the new SAGE Centre in Strasbourg. After having worked in sub-Saharan Africa, he held positions at the Universities of Bordeaux, Oslo, and Oxford. He is also a faculty fellow of the Centre for Cultural Sociology at Yale and chaired the Research Committee on Comparative Sociology of the International Sociological Association from 2008 to 2018. His research mainly focuses on the comparative study of elite distinction and on the symbolic dimensions of political representation. He is also an authority in the field of cultural interpretive analysis. He has published fifteen books so far, including Africa Works: Disorder as Public Instrument (1999), and Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning (2006) and coauthored The Sociology of Elite Distinction: From Theoretical to Comparative Perspectives (2010), Rethinking Social Distinction (2013), and La représentation politique (2017). Matt Davies is a senior lecturer in international political economy at Newcastle University. Until recently he was the director of the postgraduate programs in politics and degree program director for the MA in world politics and popular culture. His current research involves a theoretical critique of contemporary international political economy. Bishnupriya Dutt is a professor of theater and performance studies in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her area of research includes colonial and postcolonial histories of theater and feminist readings of Indian theater and contemporary performance practices and popular culture. Her recent publications include Gendered Citizenship: Performance and Manifestation (coedited with Reinelt and Sahai, 2017), “October Revolution, Echoes of the Past: Lenin in Popular Sites and Theatre” (2019), and “Protesting Violence: Feminist Performance Activism in Contemporary India” (2017). She has led a number of international collaborations with University of Warwick, Freie Universitat, Berlin, and University of Cologne. She is currently the vice president of the International Federation for Theatre Research. She has been involved in active theater with the People’s Little Theatre, where she performs and directs. Stuart Elden is a professor of political theory and geography at the University of Warwick. He is the author of books on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Lefebvre. His most recent books are Shakespearean Territories (2018) and Canguilhem (2019). He is currently working on a study of the very early Foucault, as well as editing a collection of Lefebvre’s writings on rural sociology with Adam David Morton. A longer-term project explores the concept of terrain as a way of thinking about the materiality of territory. Alan Finlayson is a professor of political and social theory in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Lisa Fitzpatrick is a senior lecturer in drama at University of Ulster and course director of the MA in contemporary performance practice. She completed her PhD at University of Toronto. Her work is mainly concerned with gender, violence, and conflict, and her

xii   List of Contributors monograph Rape on the Contemporary Stage (2018) investigates the representation of sexual violence in British and Irish theater. She is currently working with Kabosh Theatre Company on a project on sexual violence and conflict. She is one of the conveners of the Feminist Working Group for IFTR and is a founding member of the Irish Society for Theatre Research. M.  I.  Franklin is a professor of global media and politics at Goldsmiths University of London. This contribution draws on ideas from Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural (2021) and Change the Record: Punk Women Music Politics (2021). Milija Gluhovic is a reader in theater and performance at the University of Warwick. His research interests include contemporary theater and performance, memory studies, migrations and human rights, religion and secularism, and international performance research and pedagogy. His publications include Performing European Memories (2013) and the coedited volumes Performing the “New” Europe (2013), Performing the Secular (2017), and International Performance Research Pedagogies (2018). His latest book is A Theory for Theatre Studies: Memory (2020). Currently he serves as the director of graduate studies for TPS at Warwick. He is a member of the IFTR Executive Committee and the EASTAP Journal editorial board. Bree Hadley is an associate professor and study area coordinator for acting and drama at Queensland University of Technology. Hadley is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Disability Arts Culture and Media (with Donna McDonald, 2018) and author of Theatre, Social Media and Meaning Making (2017) and Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers (2014), and has published extensively in journals such as Disability & Society, CSPA (Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts) Quarterly, Performance Research, Australasian Drama Studies, and Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance. Charlotte Heath-Kelly is a reader in politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. She has published two monographs: Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite (2017) and Politics of Violence: Militancy, International Politics, Killing in the Name (2013). She currently leads a European Research Council–funded project at  Warwick, exploring the transfer of countering violent extremism policies between European states. Emma Hutchison is an associate professor and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Her work focuses on emotions and trauma in world politics, particularly in relation to security, humanitarianism, and international aid. She has published across these areas in numerous academic journals and books. Her book Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma (2016) was awarded the British International Studies Association Susan Strange Book Prize and the ISA Theory Section Best Book Prize. Silvija Jestrovic is a professor of theater and performance studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology (2006) and Performance Space Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile (2012); her latest book is Performing Authorial Presence and Absence: The Author Dies Hard (2020). She has been leading the interdisciplinary project “Cultures of the Left: Manifestations and Performances” (funded by the British Academy) and has coedited with Ameet Parameswaran the special journal

List of Contributors   xiii issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance, “Performing Worksites of the Left” (2019). She is associate editor of the journal Theatre Research International. Adrian Kear is the program development director of performance arts at Wimbledon College of Arts, the University of the Arts London. His publications include Thinking through Theater and Performance (with Maaike Bleeker, Joe Kelleher, and Heike Roms, 2019), Theater and Event: Staging the European Century (2013), International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice (with Jenny Edkins, 2013), “On Appearance” (coedited issue of Performance Research, with Richard Gough, 2008), Psychoanalysis and Performance (with Patrick Campbell, 2001), and Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (with Deborah Steinberg, 1999). Edgaras Klivis is the head of the Department of Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. Kate Leader is a lecturer in law at York Law School. Prior to this, she was an associate lecturer in theater studies and an associate lecturer in criminal justice at Birkbeck, University of London. She holds a PhD in performance studies (2009) from the University of Sydney and a PhD in law (2018) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Anna Leander is a professor of international relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She also holds part-time positions also at PUC, Rio de Janeiro, and at the Copenhagen Business School. She is known for her contributions to the development of practice theoretical approaches to international relations and for her work on the politics of commercializing military and security matters. Her work is always interdisciplinary and mostly collective. She recently published articles in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, and the European Journal of International Security. She currently works on two major research projects: the “Violence Prevention Initiative” and the “Nordic Centre of Excellence on Security Technologies and Societal Values.” In both projects, she focuses on the material politics of commercial security technologies and the aesthetic and affective dimensions of this politics. She has extensive experience with collective editorial and organizational work. Desiree Lewis has taught literary studies at the universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town, Kwazulu Natal, and the Western Cape. She has also lectured on women’s and gender studies at universities in and beyond South Africa. She has a research interest in literary and popular culture, global feminist knowledges and politics, the politics of visuality and representation, and postcolonial writing and culture. She has been a Fulbright scholar-in-residence, a research associate at the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and a visiting researcher and lecturer in the United States and Sweden. She currently serves on the editorial boards of four academic journals and is a council member of the National English Literary Museum. Yana Meerzon teaches in the Department of Theatre, University of Ottawa. Her research interests are in drama and performance theory and theater of migration and nationalism. Her book publications on this topic include Performance, Exile and “America” (2009), Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (2012), History, Memory, Performance (2015), Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre (2019), Theatre and (Im)migration (2019), and Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (2020).

xiv   List of Contributors Sophie Nield teaches theater and film in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London. She writes on questions of space, theatricality, and representation in political life and the law and on the performance of borders of various kinds. Recent work has focused on the figure of the refugee, the theatrical legitimation of law, and the political viability of the riot. She also publishes on aspects of nineteenth-century culture, including studies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, migration and disease, the London Dock Strike of 1889, and the evolution of theatrical technology. Ameet Parameswaran is an assistant professor of theater and performance studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has published articles in Theatre Research International, Performance Research, and Studies in Theatre and Performance. His monograph Performance and the Political: Power and Pleasure in Contemporary Kerala was published in 2017. His areas of research include political theater and performance, performance historiography, theatrical exchanges, and regional studies. Julia Peetz is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where her research engages with questions of political distrust, representation, democracy, and performance, particularly in the context of the US presidency and in Anglo-American relations. Her work has been awarded the 2017 James Thomas Memorial Prize (PSA Media and Politics Group) and the 2019 Asako Okukubu Prize (University of Surrey) for excellence in PhD research; it is published in both politics and theater and performance journals such as Contemporary Political Theory, Contemporary Theatre Review, and Performance Research. Goran Petrović Lotina is a scholar and curator in visual and performing arts. He has studied in Belgrade, Ghent, and Paris. Petrović Lotina is Research Fellow at the University of Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study and Department for Theatre and Performance Studies; Lecturer in performance and politics at Sciences Po: The Paris Institute of Political Studies; and the Founder and Co-curator of Fogo Island Film in Newfoundland, in Canada. Petrović Lotina’s research combines political philosophy and performance studies to examine the political dimensions of civic and artistic performances. His main field of inquiry is to explore how performance practices contribute to contesting dominant politics and invigorating democracy. He finds inspiration in theories of strategy, discourse, and hegemony and has published on these topics in various journals and books. Petrović Lotina is a WIRL-COFUND Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick (2019/21). These fellowships were supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions COFUND programme (grant agreement number 713548). Cristina Puga is a professor of political sociology, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is currently engaged in a project about changes in applied social sciences research in Mexico and works with a laboratory on governance mechanisms at The Peninsular Research Center in Yucatan. Nirmal Puwar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University and codirector of Methods Lab. She has been a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective since 2000. Puwar has coedited seventeen collections, including Post-colonial Bourdieu, Orientalism and Fashion, Intimacy in Research, Live Methods, and South Asian Women in the Diaspora. She has written about and researches postcolonialism, institutions, race and gender, and critical methodologies, and has written two books: Fashion and

List of Contributors   xv Orientalism (2003), and Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004), in which she argues that diversity is about perceptions of whiteness rather than how whiteness operates. In 2007 she directed the film Coventry Ritz, which emphasizes “the haunting remnants of emptied out architecture and unused space.” Shirin  Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies and the Director of the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development. Her current work has three strands: 1) feminist international political economy: 2) Gender and political institutions and 3) politics and performance. She has written extensively on these issues and was Director of the Leverhulme Trust programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007–2011). Her latest book is Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Carole Spary; OUP), 2019. She also edited The Grammar of Politics and Performance (eds. with Janelle Reinelt, Routledge, 2015) and Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed. Palgrave, 2014). Nicholas Sarra is a psychotherapist and organizational consultant with Devon Partnership NHS Trust and a visiting professor at University of Hertfordshire Business School. His work in the local healthcare community mainly involves leading on mediation, debriefing, and staff support issues. He is an active clinician and researcher, supervising staff and convening psychotherapy clinics. He trains clinical psychologists at Exeter University and doctoral students at the Business School at Hertfordshire University. He is a qualified group analyst (member of the Institute of Group Analysis) and mediator. He has consulted to and mediated for numerous organizational groups, particularly within healthcare in the UK, Europe, and USA. He has also been involved in postconflict situations, such as South Sudan and the aftermath of the Beslan hostage-taking crisis in Ossetia, and lived and worked in the Sudan, the People’s Republic of China, and Saudi Arabia. Willmar Sauter is a professor of theater studies and dean of humanities at Stockholm University in Sweden, author of Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice, and former president of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Michael Saward is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. Author of numerous articles and chapters on democratic theory and practice, representation and citizenship, his books include The Representative Claim (2010) and Democratic Design (2021). His work on performance and politics includes Making Representations (2020). Kimberly Wedeven Segall is a professor of English and director of the cultural studies major at Seattle Pacific University, as well as an affiliate faculty of gender, women, and sexuality studies at University of Washington. Her recent article “De-imperializing Gender” in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2021) is part of her research trajectory on political and artistic performances, also evident in her book Performing Democracy in Iraq and South Africa: Gender, Media, and Resistance (2013). Lisa Skwirblies was an Early Career Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick, a guest lecturer and mentor at the Theater Academy in Amsterdam in the School for New Dance Development and the Master for Theater and Dance, and a guest lecturer for science theory at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of

xvi   List of Contributors Amsterdam. In addition to her academic work, she has worked on various theater and dance projects as a dramaturge and dramaturgical consultant, most recently with Edit Kaldor, Oneka von Schrader, Hyoung-Min Kim, Enkidu Khaled, and Joachim Robbrecht. Between 2014 and 2016 she was a board member of the Dutch theater festival SPRING Festival. Carole Spary has a PhD in politics from the University of Bristol. She is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and deputy director of the Asia Institute, University of Nottingham. She is the author (with Shirin M. Rai) of Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (2019) and Gender, Development, and the State in India (2019). Julia C. Strauss is a professor of Chinese and comparative politics at SOAS, University of London., where she served as editor of the China Quarterly between 2002 and 2011. Her research interests span both sides of the Taiwan Strait and are focused on state building, the performative dimensions of politics, and China’s rise as a development actor, particularly with respect to Africa and Latin America. Her monograph State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign and Performance was published in 2020. Coedited volumes include State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood (2018) and Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa (2007). Her books include the edited volume The History of the People’s Republic of China (2006) and the monograph Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927–1940 (1998). Erzsébet Strausz is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations at Central European University. She holds a PhD from Aberystwyth University, and her research focuses on poststructuralist theory, critical security studies, critical pedagogy, and creative, experimental, and narrative methods in the study of world politics. She was awarded the British International Studies Association’s Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize in 2017 while she was teaching at the University of Warwick, and her research monograph Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations: Towards a Politics of Liminality was nominated by Routlege for the Sussex International Theory Prize in 2019. Together with Shine Choi and Anna Selmeczi she is coeditor of Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics: Creativity and Transformation. Ioana Szeman is a reader in drama, theater, and performance studies at the University of Roehampton, London. Her book Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania (2018) is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with urban Roma. She currently researches the representation of Roma in nineteenth-century Eastern European theater. Her articles have appeared in books and journals, including Theatre Research International, New Theatre Quarterly, TDR, and Performance Research; her most recent publications include “Black and White Are One: Anti-Amalgamation Laws, Roma Slaves and the Romanian Nation on the Mid-nineteenth Century Moldavian Stage” (2018) and the introduction (coauthored with Anneeth Kaur Hundle and Joanna Pares Hoare) to Feminist Review issue 121, “Transnational Feminist Research” (2019). She is a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective. John Uhr is a professor of political science and former director of the Centre for the Study of Australian Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.

List of Contributors   xvii Illan rua Wall is a reader in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. He is a critical legal theorist, working on ideas of protest, sovereignty, and constituent power. His book Law and Disorder (forthcoming) develops an atmospheric account of sovereignty and social unrest. He is on the editorial board of the journal Law and Critique and a founding editor of CriticalLegalThinking.com and the open-access publisher CounterPress.org.uk. He also curates the undergraduate student podcast series OrdersInDecay.com. Narelle Warren is a senior lecturer in anthropology and sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne. Since 2003 she has researched lived experiences of aging-related disability in Australia and Malaysia from the perspectives of people living with neurodegenerative conditions and their caregivers. Matthew Watson is a professor of political economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. From 2013 to 2019 he was also a UK Economic and Social Research Council Professorial Fellow, pursuing a project called “Rethinking the Market.” His most recent book, published in 2018, is simply called The Market.

I n troduction Politics and/as Performance, Performance and/as Politics Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic, Shirin M. Rai, and Michael Saward

The atmosphere was lively in the House of Commons (the main chamber of the United Kingdom Parliament) in the early hours of the morning of September 10, 2019. In controversial circumstances, the Parliament was being suspended (prorogued) at the behest of the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Two sets of performances in the House were taking place at that moment. The first featured Black Rod, a dignified and senior Commons official in a dark corded suit, black gloves, and elaborate lace shirt and scarf and wearing a large medallion. Her sword sheathed and mace over her shoulder, she proceeded with deliberation along the floor of the chamber. Her role was to go to the Speaker of the House, and then to accompany him to the House of Lords as part of the procedure that officially suspends the parliamentary session. This was a ritual performance, a ceremony that repeated the patterns of appearance, speech, movement, and timing of innumerable others over hundreds of years. The second set of performances featured several members of the House, unhappy with the suspension that was about to take place. As reported in The Guardian newspaper of September 10: As John Bercow [the Speaker or presiding officer of the House] began proceedings to prorogue parliament, a group of opposition MPs carrying signs reading “silenced” drowned out Black Rod as she tried to address the Speaker, a ritual that initiates the suspension. Several MPs were also involved in an altercation near the Speaker’s chair, as they attempted to prevent him leaving his seat and attending the House of Lords, the next step in the formalities required for the suspension of parliament. One Labour MP threw himself across Bercow’s chair in protest at the shutting down of parliament. Lloyd Russell-Moyle tried to block the Speaker by lying across him momentarily to stop him leaving to the House of Lords in the

2   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward official ceremony to prorogue parliament. Other Labour colleagues, including the shadow women and equalities minister, Dawn Butler, and the backbencher Clive Lewis held up posters that read “silenced.” Lewis tweeted that the group of MPs had been trying to re-enact an event from 1629 when the Speaker was pinned to his chair to prevent the prorogation of parliament. Cries of “shame on you” rose from the opposition benches as government MPs left the chamber. Labour MPs, who remained in their seats after government MPs and the Speaker had left to attend the House of Lords, sang the Red Flag, SNP [Scottish National Party] MPs Scots Wha Hae and Plaid Cymru MPs Calon Lân, with harmonies.

Through positioning and movement of bodies (around the Speaker’s chair), speech (chanting, shouting), visuals (holding up signs), song, and other actions (preventing the Speaker from moving), this was a counterperformance of protest. Though mostly planned, it performed a repertoire of spontaneity (the antithesis of ceremonial ritual). This group of MPs had their own deep historical reference point: an event from 1629, before the English Civil War. Indexing a time “out of joint,” this performance of protest reactivated a scenario from the past, making the past available as a political resource in the present. Across popular genres, the activity of physically replaying the past is often figured as pompous, foolish, and pointless—something for the mad and the vain. Yet these performances—in their detailed features, historical and contemporary references, and staging—captured, focused, intensified, and affected diverse audiences in and well beyond the chamber of the Commons. Performing history again—but with a difference—and further negotiating between theatricality and authenticity, this “restored” or “twice-behaved” behavior was not a mere surface reflection of underlying realities; rather, through an affective engagement with the past, the parliamentarians embodied and constructed identities, social positions and roles, and a range of emotions. They had affects and effects. In short, they were one instance amid innumerable others—in and outside government and other institutions—where politics is constituted through performance in ways that have material and affective consequences: variously dividing, uniting, revealing, concealing, angering, and motivating. That day in the Commons represented one among many other examples of performance in politics. In another context, on another stage, the director Oliver Frljić, an already established agent provocateur of European theater, positioned the issues of refugee crisis, religion, and otherness at the center of his show Our Violence, Your Violence at the Marulićevi Dani festival in Split, Croatia, in 2016. The provocative content of the production painted a dystopic and cynical picture of Western democracy. In one scene, prisoners dressed in orange uniforms resembling those worn at the Guantanamo detention camp are shot one by one, point blank, as they tap dance to American swing classics. In another, the figure of Jesus rapes a burka-clad woman, and then climbs onto a cross made of oil canisters. In yet another, the Croatian flag is pulled out of a performer’s vagina; her naked body, save for her hijab, is covered in Arabic script. Unsurprisingly, Our Violence, Your Violence was the subject of heated media and TV debates, public uproar, prohibitions, and even threats of violence in a number of places where the show was to be performed. However, a particular incident at the theater festival in Split spilled over the proscenium arch, provoking strong affective reactions in the local audience(s). Political divisions and passions took over the theater. Nationalists, right-wing groups, and war veterans (from the secessionist Yugoslav wars of the 1990s) gathered in front of the theater to protest, throwing insults at theatergoers wanting to see the show. Some opponents of Frljić’s performance bought tickets and tried to subvert the show, protesting and booing to prevent the actors from performing. At that point, the

Introduction   3 performance spilled over from the stage into the auditorium, and a battle of audiences ensued. While the right-wingers shouted curses and sang nationalistic songs, the other part of the audience responded by singing a famous children’s song, “Kad bi svi ljudi na svjetu” (If all the people of the world), by a legendary Croatian singer and poet, Arsen Dedić, that called for understanding and solidarity—the same song that became the anthem of the 2016 civic protests in Croatia over education reforms. Self-righteous anger from one party was met with a strong rebuttal in a song about tolerance. The Croatian New Left was among the political parties who openly stood in defense of the show: “The nationalist and religious hysteria aroused by a theatre performance, which has been shaking Split for days now, demonstrates the full intellectual and moral depravity of the local Right” (quoted in Kerbler 2016). The performance spilled not only from the stage into the auditorium and from the performers to the audience(s) but also from the sphere of theater into the political public sphere. To use the terms of the theater scholar Christopher Balme (2014, x), “the closed circuit of primary theatrical reception” had been “broken open and engagement with other public spheres” took place. The politics of performance is clearly visible here. Both events—at the House of Commons and at the theater in Split—reveal a repertoire of scenarios, embodiments, gestures, repetitions, and rhetorical and improvisational strategies through which a political event reveals its theatricality and a theatrical performance foregrounds its politics. Both involve a repertoire of symbolic acts and activate an affective register that to a greater or lesser extent resonate beyond the immediate political or theatrical event. According to the sociologist Erving Goffman ([1959] 1990), the reiterative process at the heart of every performance regulates and shapes social relationships from the individual to the collective. It is against the backdrop of this reiteration—from theater and ritual to politics and everyday life—that expectations are either met or subverted. Both examples show how the intimate link between politics and performance can work. They involve an element of disruption and divergence from the expected scenarios, and in both there is a level of excess—of performance in the latter and of politics in the former. Of course, most performances do not share such excess; more commonplace performances of the political take place every day in parliaments in the form of debates, motions, and voting. Similarly, few plays burst through proscenium boundaries. These are, however, just two among many examples that prompt us into thinking about the core concepts and arguments at the heart of this Handbook: politics is performative, performance is political, and both matter to our understanding of our worlds. The main objective of the Handbook is to capture and to advance an emerging trend across the social science/humanities boundary: the recognition that politics and performance are intertwined in significant and consequential ways. The notion that politics and performance are connected intrinsically is of course not new, but we argue that the interdisciplinary dialogue that has been emerging promises to take the conceptual paradigms of both disciplines to a new level. In capturing this trend, the Handbook aims to bring the study of politics and performance together into closer and richer dialogue than ever before. We acknowledge that this ambition—of bringing disciplines together to develop a dialogue and new frameworks of analysis—is not an easy one to realize. We see the Handbook as a leading contribution to the attempt to do so, and we outline in this introduction how one might approach the task. Earlier steps in exploring the co-constitutive nature of politics and performance involving this editorial team include the Warwick Politics and Performance Network. Founded by Shirin Rai and Janell Reinelt in 2013, the network has gathered interdisciplinary communities of

4   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward scholars in colloquia and workshops, culminating in the collection Grammar of Politics and Performance edited by Rai and Reinelt (2015; see also Edkins and Kear 2013). That volume outlined shared conceptual frameworks and thematic concerns of the two disciplines through which a joint interdisciplinary grammar could be formulated. The Handbook represents an expansion of this work, a vehicle through which to explore in greater depth the scope of the co-constitutive nature of politics and performance. It explores how working across disciplinary and geographical boundaries enables not only the formulation of shared grammars but also new ways of thinking through existing frameworks and at times even destabilizing and redefining our key concepts. The editors look to expand the conceptual, thematic, and linguistic aspects of the shared grammars of politics and performance in the following ways: (1) by exploring specific thematic categories that are especially pertinent across disciplines; (2) by extending the contextual and geographical scope through the work of diverse authors and case studies; and (3) by aiming to generate scholarship where concepts, case studies, and methodological approaches destabilize disciplinary boundaries. The contributors to this Handbook are negotiating conceptual frameworks and vocabularies across disciplines, confronted all the while by the challenge of writing both for their own audience and for those from the other discipline. Elaborating both context and content for the chapters that follow, we turn now to (1) definitions of key terms that inform the contributions to the Handbook; (2) the states of the art in theater and performance studies and politics1; and (3) key challenges and opportunities that attend bringing the two broad fields closer together for mutual enrichment and to build a new, hybrid field of study.

Definitions What do we understand by the central terms grounding the work in the Handbook? Politics is understood broadly as a contest of power, values, resources, and representations. Such contestations take place through different modes—bureaucratic, electoral, discursive, and ritualistic. Open conflict, sometimes violent, characterizes politics when contestations over values and resources spill out of the boundaries of institutional politics. Thus, at its core, politics as a discipline concerns who has power or authority over whom, and how that power is institutionalized and contested; the different values that a range of communities and their members hold and pursue, and which ones become dominant; who holds what resources in terms of, for example, wealth and status; and who speaks for whom (representation) and with what authority (legitimacy). Politics takes place in a variety of settings, formal and informal, routine and exceptional, institutional and personal—from the House of Commons and international leaders’ summit meetings to mobilizations and actions on the streets, trade union picket lines, and occupations of buildings or public sites to gender and other status relations (caste or race, for example) within households and communities. To speak of “the political” is to refer to the wide field of human and social relations in which power, values, and rituals are enacted and expressed. An important aspect of the political is to maintain order, which is where the state and its organs—legislature, executive, judiciary, and the police and military—enact and seek to sustain claims to legitimate authority (Weber [1921] 1991).

Introduction   5 That said, what politics refers to is also highly contested. Some radical conceptions of politics, such as the debates on structure and agency within the Marxist tradition, focused on politics being about order as mobilized by the state in the interests of the dominant classes, and social change as the product of class struggle (e.g., Althusser 1971). Later, poststructuralist interventions such as that of Michel Foucault (1991) emphasized a view of the political as the circulation of power in society and regulation of the everyday as governmentality. Rancière (2010, 27–28) defined politics in terms of “the part of those who have no part,” highlighting politics as concerned with the role and actions of those who experience radical exclusion from a narrower governmental realm—a more expansive form than the earlier radical focus on class, where exclusions based on gender, race, caste, and sexuality, for instance, take center stage. These insights were further expanded to include what Ahmed Siraj (2017, 196) calls “the practices our political institutions excluded at their very origins,” such as those of nonstate societies, including indigenous peoples. Being aware of such debates, the Handbook has an expansive approach to politics and the political; multiple approaches flourish between its covers, including (post)colonial, institutional, and discursive, that analyze contestations of power and politics to encourage the development of an interdisciplinary dialogue. What is performance? First, in the words of Richard Schechner (2002, 2), “any action that is framed, presented, highlighted or displayed is a performance”; it is a repeated or rehearsed behavior, the “showing” of a “doing.” Performances as such are reflexive actions, events, or behaviors that are relational and self-conscious: to perform is to be aware of the act of doing something, and to show doing it (McKenzie  2001; Schechner  2002; Carlson  2004; Balme 2014). Schechner (2002, 38) notes that “just about anything can be studied ‘as’ performance.” In principle, one could analyze a given performance through the frames of both “is” and “as.” Not all performance is confined to individual subjects; institutions also perform (or constitute the setting, resources, or rationale for performance) when they demonstrate their power in particular scenarios or moments. Individual and collective actors make claims for and about themselves and others (Saward 2010), through ceremonies and rituals of the state, representative institutions, and informal politics (Rai  2010; Rai and Johnson  2015). They do so in particular spaces of everyday life, for example in political actions and protest as they unfold within cityscapes in different contexts (Jestrovic 2000, 2012) or by mobilizing memories (or forgetting) of these performances (Gluhovic 2013). Second, a defining feature of performances is that they are transactional—between the performer(s) and the spectators or recipients of the act. Bertolt Brecht pointed out that the relationship between performer(s) and recipient is above all political. The transactional relationship between performance and audience—in the broadest sense of both categories— more often than not plays out in the tension between control (a desire for the ideal spectator, interlocutor, supporter, follower) and that which escapes control (through improvisation, interpretation, or interruption). In this “liminal” (Turner 1970) space between performers and audiences, there emerges a possibility for dialogue, and indeed for confrontation. Further, the lines between the performers and the audience can become blurred, often raising a range of aesthetic and ethical questions in the process. Indeed, political and ideological battles often play out through artistic performances and cultural forms, while political sites and actors take on theatrical dimensions and strategies. For example, during the performance of Frljić’s piece, where in the battle of songs the audience stole the show, as well as in the event of the prorogation of the UK Parliament, unscripted and uninvited

6   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward participation is specific to the here and now of performance being theatrical or political. Listeners become speakers and speakers become listeners. Third, the transactional character of performance involves mediating agents, which have taken various forms through the history of both theater and politics—from the chorus in Ancient Greek theater, epitomizing the internal audience and providing the connection with the community, to the roles of MPs as representatives, and finally to the modern media that not only shapes the reception of various kinds of actors and events but also carves out new performance sites. Performing is a verb that emphasizes the effort, labor, intent, and process undertaken to make a performance. If deconstructing performance helps us to understand, for example, the flows of power underpinning politics, a focus on performing helps us reveal the materiality of power in a different way. “Doing”—be it “showing doing” or “doing” as in performance making—is at the heart of the act of performing and of understanding performance both in its practical and in its conceptual sense. Performing as “doing” implies action or reiteration of actional patterns, unfolding in time and space, ranging from acts (as in stage acts) to activism (as in politics) and activity (as in everyday life). Building on Bourdieu’s (1991) work, we can see the labor of performing in its social frame; not everyone performs easily, comfortably, or well. Performing takes learning, rehearsing, and mobilizing resources (Rai  2015). A further aspect concerns the questions of accomplishment, of effects and affects: Is the “doing” unfolding as planned or as rehearsed? Has it succeeded or failed? What has been its impact? Two further concepts, theatricality and performativity, help us describe the empirical dimensions of these two aspects of effects and affects, but also the conceptual complexity of the dynamics of performance in any sphere, be it cultural or political. Theatricality is used in a wide range of meanings—negative ones when used to describe artificiality, inauthenticity, and dishonesty (ethical, political, artistic), more positive ones (with richer conceptual implications) when invoking artistry, artistic quality, aesthetic stylization, and divergence, along with an arsenal of (re)presentational strategies, devices, and methods. One way or another, theatricality is that which unfolds through scripts and through embodied and gestural patterns and codifications, through repetitions, rehearsals, and re-performances. Patrice Pavis (1998, 395) defines theatricality as “the specific enunciation, the movement of words, the dual nature of enunciator (character/actor), and his utterances, the artificiality of performance (representation).” Thus theatricality can be viewed as a special kind of stylization emphasizing the aesthetic and self-referential dimensions of performance. Theatricality also displays extratextual (visual and auditory) aspects; Roland Barthes (1972, 26) argues that theatricality is “theater-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument; it is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice—gesture, tone, distance, substance, light—which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language.” Theatricality has also been seen as an almost anthropological category and an organic part of being human; for the Russian avant-garde director Nikolai Evreinov, for example, theatricality is as inherent in humans as the will to play (echoing Nietzsche’s will to power). For Evreinov theatricality is played out more as theatricalization of real life and of self than of theater. The intrinsic theatricality of life is played out through transformation (in Golub  1984, 52), as one deliberately transforms I into other, turning the familiar, supposedly intrinsic self into one’s own stranger (Jestrovic 2002, 2006).

Introduction   7 Theatricality is also a historical and socially rooted phenomenon; Yuri Lotman (1976, 56) identifies theatricality as a manifestation of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century zeitgeist, at least in the context of Russian culture: “It is precisely because the life of theatre differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave man new possibilities for behaviour.” Theatricality is not simply a device, a way something is performed, but also a shape in which the hierarchical structure is made and codified. Thus, as Lotman (1985, 70) notes, some forms of theatricality in everyday life become matters of social privilege and power: “Play-acting at everyday life, the feeling of being forever on stage,” is “extremely characteristic of Russian gentry life in the 18th century. The common people were inclined to view the gentry as masqueraders; they observed their life as watching a play.” Theatricality combines rhetorical grammar with authenticating conventions (Burns 1973). For example, the juxtaposition of religious, cultural, and ethnic symbols in the controversial performance Our Violence, Your Violence (e.g., the cross made of oil canisters, the national flag of Catholic Croatia birthed by a woman who wears a hijab, the tap dancing prisoners) formulates its own stage language through unpredictable pairings and contrasting codes. Through such clashes of signs (religious, national, gender, ethnic, and stage), the performance formulates and communicates its subversive political perspective by means of theatricality, that is, in a combination of the rhetorical and the authenticating elements. The embodied quotation of the historical event from 1629, before the start of the English Civil War, alluded to by the group of MPs in the event of proroguing Parliament in September 2019, could also be described as an instance of theatricality, or rather “intertheatricality.” The notion of intertheatricality is defined as a relationship of a particular performance to other performances, whether of theater, politics, or everyday life. It suggests that not the textual but the performative links dominate the relationship of one performance to the others (Jestrovic 2006). Each intertheatrical performance is an act of memory, bearing traces of the other performance styles and formats that it copies, simulates, and transforms. As with some forms of intertextual dialogue (e.g., satire, parody, allusion), intertheatricality can be overtly and deliberately political both in the political arena and on the theatrical stage; the parliamentary reenactment is a case in point. Theatricality in both art and life thus highlights the constructed and the conventionalized aspects of performance and performing, often challenging the parameters of reality and artifice. Performativity in both art and life cuts through that which is immanently theatrical and that which escapes theatricalization. While theatricality is always in need of asserting itself, at least partially, as an aesthetic or formal quality, performativity inhabits a much broader realm. Performativity both reinforces and limits the potential of theatricalization (Jestrovic 2006). Josette Féral (2002, 5) explains the distinction and codependence of these two categories: Theatricality does not exist as a pure form, nor does performativity. If “pure theatricality” existed, it would be a repetitive, dead form of art, where all signs would be identifiable, decidable and meaningful—a kind of “museum play” that would recreate old art forms as museum pieces. Not as living art forms. . . . On the other hand, a performance based on performativity alone would be carried away by the action itself, without any possibility for the spectator to understand it as a meaningful process linked to signs, codes or references. If it is easier to imagine such performances (sport events, car races, fireworks), we know also that this performativity is meaningless if not enriched by theatricality.

8   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward Performativity thus concerns the consequences of performance as well as its unfolding. J. L. Austin (1975) captures how acts are performed through words—or, how words contain actions. The marriage vow is Austin’s now famous example of a performative utterance, whereby “I do” both creates the marriage and implies potentially a range of consequences, including changes of legal (and in some cases social) status. There are, however, more extreme scenarios of Austinian performativity. Let us, for example, take the case of Julius Streicher, the publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which became one of the central voices of the Nazi propaganda machine in the 1920s and 1930s. Streicher’s words, in numerous speeches and articles, incited the death of millions of Jews and eventually led to his conviction for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials. As Judith Butler (1997, 18) writes, hate speech (like Streicher’s) “does not merely reflect a relation of social domination; speech enacts domination, becoming the vehicle through which that social structure is reinstated” (our italics). Even though Streicher did not take part in any military or administrative action during the Second World War, his words alone were enough to secure him the death penalty. Performativity thus shows how to do a very wide range of things with words, from acts of love to social control and establishing the conditions for mass killings. Performativity is not only language based but also embodied. For example, Butler (1990, 274) links the concept to gender construction, arguing that “the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised and consolidated through time.” Butler (1993, 2) uses the term performativity to designate the effects that performances can achieve, create, reinforce, or prompt, “that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” For Butler there is no full escape from “the prison-house” of performativity (to paraphrase Jameson  1972). Nevertheless performativity can also be subversive, especially in combination with theatricality. Butler (1990) herself writes about subversive body acts that lay the construction of gender bare—drag performances, for example, where through exaggerated theatricality, the regulating power of gender performativity comes to be unmasked. Performativity is therefore also unpredictable, as stage performance demonstrates. It is through performativity—of scripts, sites, bodies, voices, gestures, and affects—that a given frame comes to be established and perhaps regulated. Yet it is also through the performativity of these elements that glitches, failures, subversions, improvisations, and breakages of the frame become possible. Performativity realizes the reiterative power of performance, but at the same time it carries the potential for the repetition to be broken and for a new scenario to be imposed in its stead. Thus performativity is the realization of two oppositional forces of performance: that which has been established and controlled through repetition and reiteration and that which spills over, cracks the frame, or escapes control. This is a meaning-making process whereby form (theatricality) becomes action (performativity), resulting in a consequence. In brief, in analyzing performances, we explore the “who and what” of politics and performance; in analyzing performing and theatricality, we study the “how”; in analyzing performativity, we examine the effects and outcomes of performance. However, as the diverse authorial voices and case studies featured in this Handbook show, these categories are almost never neatly delineated but rather are interwoven and entangled. They are further complicated by factors such as spatiotemporal contexts and social relations, identities (of both performers and audiences), bodies, voices, gestural repertoires, scripts, and affective

Introduction   9 registers. All these factors make up the complex yet empirically and epistemologically rich field of politics and performance, where the demarcation lines between the two become porous and blurred.

States of the Art Theater and performance studies has long engaged with the political in performance. Likewise, although perhaps not so extensively, a range of politics scholars have discussed ways in which political life produces or features drama, theatrical events, or performance. In this section, we aim to capture briefly some of the key elements of these discourses in order to build on, extend, and reshape these interdisciplinary conversations.

Performance and/in Politics The study of politics is a huge scholarly enterprise, with a range of subfields and methodologies within the conventional divisions among political theory, international relations, comparative politics, and public policy. It is fair to say that performance in the sense of “showing doing” or the theatrical has been a minor current within the larger flow of the discipline’s development, though somewhat more visible among political scientists focusing on media and communications. Performance in a different—though in some ways linked— sense of achievement (e.g., a “high-performing economy” or “performance targets”) has at times been more prominent, not least in our neoliberal times, when a logic of market competition is predominant in political strategy, measurement, and calculation. If we go a long way back in the Western tradition, it is notable that classical works by Plato and Cicero (2001) include sophisticated accounts of performance in politics: Plato as a critic, Cicero as a proponent and analyst of rhetoric. More recently in the Western tradition, Rousseau was a major critic of performance in politics, seeing literal and metaphorical theater as a source of immorality and insincerity (underscoring his opposition to political representation) in such works as Lettre d’Alembert (1960) and The Social Contract (1973) (though as Uhr shows in chapter 26, Rousseau also presents us with positive versions of “leadership performance”). So one persisting thread plays off centuries-old antitheatrical prejudices (Barish 1981)— from Plato and Rousseau to Austin—to condemn the presence of theatricality in politics as nonserious, or immoral, shallow, and artificial. This thread is implicit in a good deal of study of politics today; central concepts—interests, preferences, policies, and so on—are approached as serious and real as opposed to superficial performances. Performance and theatricality are often seen as “marker[s] of artificiality” (Nield 2010, 3). Much of the more recent politics literature that has engaged with performance has been in the field of political sociology. In particular, building on the work of Weber ([1921] 1991) and Durkheim, scholars have been interested in exploring how societies and political systems cohere, especially through an examination of the role that political rituals and ceremonies play in this regard. Neo-Durkheimian scholars provide a normative functionalist account of rituals that focuses on how collective or political identities are shaped through

10   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward witnessing and/or participating in public or political rituals (Shils and Young 1953). In this tradition, where political rituals provide the integrative glue for societies, there were important studies of the coronation (Warner 1959) and investiture of the Prince of Wales (Blumler et al.  1971). Commenting on this normative functionalist perspective, Stephen Lukes (1975, 302) outlined a cognitive approach to the role that political rituals play in our understanding of political systems; he argued that the study of rituals in specific political contexts can enable us to raise different questions about how power is reflected as well as challenged through political ritual. Gender scholars have found rituals to be important modes of stabilization of gendered power relations; appropriate behavior, issues of access to public spaces, gendered roles that are sanctified through norms of social interaction, and containment of challenges to the social status quo, are all part of the landscape of nations and nation-building (Sangari and Ved 1990; Chatterjee 1993; Rai and Johnson 2015). Critiques of nationalism and postcolonialism have also generated analyses of the cultural politics of nation-building (Guss 2000; Njogu and Maupeu 2007) Belonging (to communities and nation-states) is, Young (2000) argues, underlined by different modes of public recognition: greeting or public acknowledgment that fosters trust between those involved; rhetoric, which allows the speaker to bring specific points to public attention and “situating speakers and audience in relation to one another”; and narrative, which could empower the marginalized to bring their experiences to bear upon public debate (53). Others, like Hajer (2009), for example, while recognizing the role of theatricality in political life, point to the need to disguise it if political success is to be achieved; rhetoric in democracy thus needs to come across as an “artless art,” the danger being when “the veil of artlessness” is “suddenly lifted to reveal the artful machinery at work beneath” (Kane and Patapan 2010, 386). Alexander (2010, 12) likewise notes that “politics is signifying, but if it appears to be symbolic action, it is bound to fail.” Without doubt, there are themes in the work of a number of observers broadly associated with the discipline of politics that touch on components of performance and theatricality without embracing the larger analytical potential of these concepts. These themes include rituals of parliament and the state (Crewe 2007; Banerjee 2014; Rai and Johnson 2015); symbolic politics wherein, for example, governments claim to act on social problems but in fact only put up a show of so acting (Edelman 1977); the arts of rhetoric in and by government and the wider political sphere (from Cicero all the way to recent revivals such as Finlayson 2012); the importance of the skills of acting in politics (Miller 2001, who discusses Ronald Reagan and others in this context); right-wing women’s performative agency in India (Bedi 2017); narrative and storytelling as a way of governments and other political actors getting their preferred messages and interpretations of events to the wider public (Salmon 2010); and theater and theatricality (again) as metaphors for a range of actions and events in, for example, electoral campaigns (Chou, Bleiker, and Premaratna 2016). Arguably, the concepts of performance and theatricality are best placed to draw together the components that such work examines: rhetoric, gesture, drama, symbolic representations, and so on. For example, if one focuses on language or discourse, then why not other key components of performance such as staging and acting as well? If on words, then why not bodies? If on rhetoric, then why not its staging and framing? The concept of performance carries the potential to enlist such concepts in the attempt to achieve a wider interpretive purchase, taking the study of politics beyond the simple use of theatrical metaphors to describe political action. Rai (2015) has attempted to address these questions by developing a politics and

Introduction   11 performance framework that tries to bring together different elements of performance in and as politics. Specifically she takes the concept of “political performance” as referring to “those performances that seek to communicate to an audience meaning-making related to state institutions, policies and discourses” (2) through mobilizing bodies, scripts, spaces, and labor. So, while a number of politics scholars write about acting and performing on political stages (e.g., electoral and parliamentary stages), we would argue that a further step is strongly desirable: moving beyond acting and performance as metaphors for political practices to a more three-dimensional embrace of performance’s appearances, impacts, components, and methods. With notable and diverse exceptions—Friedland (2002) on “political actors” in the French Revolution, Raphael (2009) on Reagan, Butler (1997) on performativity, Hajer (2009) on authority, Rai (2010) on ceremony and ritual in political institutions, and Saward (2020) on performative representation—serious and sustained politics research on politics and performance does not go far enough beyond the use of theatrical metaphors. The study of politics, according to the theater and performance scholar (and Handbook contributor) Julia Peetz (2019, 64), needs to address its neglect of “the specificity of the theatrical sense of the performance.” This move would, for example, foster study of the political deployment of gesture, voice, movement, text, siting, staging, and timing—the elements of performance and markers of theatricality—to become part of researchers’ analytical and critical armory. What is needed now, we argue, is not only the importing and adapting of the tools, techniques, and perspectives of performance studies to make good on the call to get under the skin of performance in politics, its character and impacts; we need to view performance as critical to our reading of politics itself. That is both a significant need and a complex and challenging task, not least (arguably) because, despite the kind of interaction between performance and politics that we have outlined, performance largely continues to be seen more narrowly and more negatively across the subdisciplines of the contemporary study of politics. A second gap that we identify is that a good deal of politics scholarship remains focused on Western political institutions and movements; we need to expand our analyses to bring into focus how performance of politics in different historical and social contexts generates new conceptual and analytical tools to study political performances. Our own situatedness in Western academia is clear; however much we bring our own histories and political interests from India, Serbia, Bosnia, and Australia to bear on our writing, we remain framed by the power dynamics of Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western hierarchies of knowledge production, identification, and circulation. Attempting to reach out and disturb these hierarchies has been difficult and yet perhaps one of the most rewarding aspect of putting this Handbook together. The Handbook includes authors working in fifteen different countries across South and Southeast Asia, North and Central America, southern Africa, Australasia, and Western and Eastern Europe.

Politics and/in Performance Performance studies is both an old and a relatively young field. On the one hand, it is as old as its manifestations—from ritual performances to vernacular acts in streets and marketplaces. It can be traced across the globe and through history, variously revealing our innate

12   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward urge to play and to organize our daily experiences through imaginaries of which political and theatrical structures are both part. Performance is indeed an older playing field than theater (although a much younger institutional discipline); as Erika Fischer-Lichte (2014) argues, performance and theater should be viewed as integrated rather than separate disciplines. Performance is also an old discipline because the first scholarship on theater and performance takes us to figures of antiquity such as Aristotle and his Poetics and Bharata Muni, the Indian theologian and author of the famous text on performance art Natya Shastra. On the other hand, it is a relatively new discipline because performance studies as a subject to be studied at university emerged from the avant-garde movements of the 1960s, in which one of its founders, Richard Schechner, was a participant, under the influence of and in collaboration with the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. Schechner developed an elaborate conceptual framework highlighting the notion of performance outside theater and the idea of restored behavior. Since its inception as an institutionalized discipline in the United States during the 1980s, performance studies has focused on the interdisciplinary analysis of a broad spectrum of cultural behaviors that include theater, dance, folklore, popular entertainment, performance art, protest, cultural ritual, and the performance of self in everyday life. From the start, performance studies foregrounded political dimensions incorporating Western and non-Western performances in curricula, as well as feminist and queer studies. However, as Fischer-Lichte (2014, 12) states, “the academic discipline that comprises Theatre and Performance Studies has had a different history in different national contexts, and has often been connected to both innovation in theatre and broader political development.” In her book Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson (2004) has pointed out how performance studies in the United States was involved in larger political debates related to democratization of knowledge and autonomy of universities. With Dwight Conquergood’s work, performance studies took a sharper political turn. In his essay “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics” (1991), Conquergood proposed that culture be seen as a set of performance practices (see, e.g., our earlier discussion of political ritual) rather than a culture-as-text model. Indeed, building on postcolonial and feminist critiques of positivist research in the social sciences, Conquergood and D. Soyini Madison further affirmed the positioning of performance studies as a form of a radical academic activism. There are two ways in which the political could be considered within this discipline: (1) as the politics of the discipline itself and (2) as the political within various kinds of performances (artistic, sociopolitical, everyday life). In the 1990s one of the main political battles within the discipline concerned the relationship between performance and theater and between body/embodiment and text/drama. Schechner (1992, 7) positioned performance studies in opposition to theater and drama as Eurocentric formations, asserting that “performance engages intellectual, social, cultural, historical, and artistic life in a broad sense” and negotiates the many cultural, personal, group, regional, and world systems comprising today’s realities. Despite the cultural wars of the 1990s, performance studies today does not identify so strongly with rejection of theater. Not only do we find methodological analogies between theater stage and political platform, but political realities have been addressed and debated and structures of power confronted and ridiculed in theater throughout its long history worldwide. Therefore, for this Handbook, although we do not consider theater central in mapping the cross-disciplinary field, we do not exclude examples and analytical tools of theater; theater is treated as integral with other artistic, cultural, social, and political practices that are considered.

Introduction   13 More recent focus on political criticality within the discipline has concerned the approach to non-Western performances and issues of cultural appropriation and domination. Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, and C. J. Wan-Ling Wee (2010) suggest that, while Schechner’s broad-spectrum approach includes the entire globe, it is not the only approach from across the globe, and to assume that it is promotes intellectual and cultural hegemony. These contestations point to research sites outside of the academy and to alternative methodologies generated by and applied to the study of political performance traditions from diverse locations around the globe. It also points to the need to “displace the dominance of Euro-American paradigms in a global performance studies” (Levin and Schweitzer  2017, 25), while at the same time warning against risks of instrumentalizing decolonizing practices themselves. From Conquergood’s (1991) and Madison’s (2005) postcolonial and feminist critiques to the more recent reassessments of dominant knowledge systems within the discipline and in relation to non-Western epistemologies (Bharucha 2014; Raheja, Phillipson, and Gilbert 2017), performance studies has been developing self-critical, dialogic, and performative methodologies often focused on social justice. While this Handbook is not alone in addressing a number of these issues, we hope it opens up a space of broadening and potentially internationalizing the conceptual vocabulary of both politics and performance. It is a step toward rethinking how interdisciplinary engagement can make space for further disciplinary and cross-disciplinary interventions to enable new and more inclusive epistemological frameworks.

Is/As: Intertwining Politics and Performance At this stage of the interdisciplinary engagement, it is important to understand the location of the political in performance (in the broadest sense of the term). Picking up on terms introduced earlier in this introduction, the location of the political within various forms of performance could be described via the is performance/as performance distinction (Schechner 2002; Taylor 2003, 2016). Is performance refers to performances that are meant as performance, which certainly includes performing arts and theater; as performance points to the theatricality and performativity of actions that are not meant as performance, such as social scenarios in everyday life. By analogy, the location of the political in performance could be expressed through the distinction is/as political. Is political in performance would here mean that there is a conscious, deliberate, and foregrounded political dimension and aim. Theater historians have shown how European theater was political from its beginnings, stating that even the oldest preserved play, Aeschylus’s war tragedy The Persians, is essentially a political play. The term political theater emerges in the twentieth-century historical avant-garde, most notably as formulated by Erwin Piscator. Numerous works, including those of Brecht, Utpal Dutt, Wole Soyinka, Joanne Littlewood, David Edgar, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Lola Arias, and debbie tucker green, identify as works of political theater. Beyond text-based theater performance, interventions such as Christoph Schlingensief ’s Foreigners Out and Tanya Bruguera’s Art Util are among numerous examples of politically engaged art practices. This is not limited to political theater and socially engaged art but includes various forms of political activism: the protest activities of Extinction Rebellion in their fight for radical responses to climate change, Paris Opera’s ballet dancers performing outside the theater in protest over pension reforms, the Indian artist Maya Rao performing her piece Walk as part of the protest vigils in response to an infamous rape and murder case in Delhi,

14   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward the Afghan artist Kubra Khademi’s street performance in Kabul in 2015, and protesters in Hong Kong using a range of artistic forms, from puppetry to graffiti. Performance studies has often defined itself as “radically democratic and counter elitist” (Pelias and VanOosting 2009, 221), highlighting scholarship that shows how performances disrupt or contest dominant sociopolitical hegemonies (see Fisher and Katsouraki  2019; Tomlin 2019; Eckersall and Grehan 2019; Zaroulia and Hager 2015). Somewhat less explored is how performances consolidate and perpetuate hegemonies. Hence is political in performance is not limited to activism, protest, or struggles for social justice, but also includes other performances in the political sphere scripted by PR strategists to affirm the existing order (such as in the case of the Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, who acts in semicomic propaganda video sketches that celebrate the achievements of his government). As political may not include any conscious or deliberate political dimension in performance; it might even be self-declared apolitical. However, through the politics and ­performance studies lens the performance becomes viewed in a wider sociocultural and political context where unintentional or unacknowledged political dimensions become visible. Analysis of events such as the Olympics (Gilbert and Lo 2007) and the Eurovision song contest (Gluhovic 2013; Fricker and Gluhovic 2013) have revealed political dimensions by examining how national identities are performed and curated through sporting and musical events. In their book Girls Night Out, Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (2013) look at popular entertainment and its audience that is not meant to be political, such as the large female audiences of the Mamma Mia musical, as instances of feminist bonding that reaches beyond middle-class feminism and into a more diverse demographic. Rustom Bharucha’s (2014) reflections on his experience of directing Jean Genet’s Maids in Manila in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks also point to the ways in which context infuses theatrical works with unexpected political dimensions. In this case, a play normally read as addressing class, sexuality, and a sense of domestic oppressiveness becomes “haunted by the explosive power of terror” that entered “the political unconscious of the production” (1). Performance and political analysis of urban spaces is another instance where everyday experiences of the city are read through the architecture and itineraries of social stratification (Lefebvre 1992; Smith 1987; de Certeau 2011; Whybrow 2010, 2014; Shah 2014; Phadke et al. 2011; see Davies in this volume). These are just a few of numerous examples of performance as political in various spheres of art and life. As political in performance is less about the intentionality of doing or showing doing than about how it becomes fully formulated in the eye of the beholder. In the modes of as/is political and as/is performance, what does performance and theater do that politics does not? Take, for example, institutional politics such as parliaments (the subject of Puwar’s chapter): What does performance studies bring to our study of political institutions such that we are better able to read, recognize, and communicate to an audience meaning making of a political performance? If politics is a study of power relations within which individuals and institutions are embedded, these are performances that present collective aims or norms or ways of doing politics (Giugni, McAdam, and Tilly 1999). Schechner calls this “restored behavior,” how performances are made up of previously learned and executed actions that both repeat and modify the received understanding of their meanings through time. It is only recently that the focus on performance of these power relations has been studied as important to the study of politics itself (Brassett, forthcoming; Rai and Reinelt 2015; Saward 2010).

Introduction   15 Arguing that a political event or practice—a government leader’s set-piece speech, for example—is a performance is often, as noted earlier, a way to denigrate the event or practice as cynical, overly contrived, or hollow. But how would citizens and others know what (or that) politicians are doing, or claiming to be doing, if there were no “showing doing”? The showing—by citing, staging, scripting, choreographing, recording, and so on—of an event or practice is, at one and the same time, a demonstration of political presence, activity, progress, and engagement (or so the actors and organizers hope) and an opening to critical appraisal and accountability of the leader or official. The messages, content, and style of a political event that is a performance will (to some extent) always be open to critical reception. The fact of such performance is not to be decried in itself. On the other side of the equation, seeing a political appearance or action as a performance can cast it in a revealing new light. An election candidate, for example, walks down a busy street in her would-be constituency. She greets, smiles, shakes hands, kisses babies, listens, and responds (or not in times of public health pandemics such as the new coronavirus, when her compliance with social distancing may elicit different modes of responsible communication with her constituents). Seeing her actions as a performance draws our attention to dress, movement, interaction, accent and tone, timing, and so on—the elements of theatricality. This, in turn, provides a fresh analytical and critical perspective, enabling us to explore what is new, repeated or cited, adapted, powerful, effective, or off-putting in its specific spatial and cultural context. The Handbook contains a number of examples of this type of perspective and analysis: displacement techniques linked to walking in the city (Davies), the performance of representing (Daloz), performing political bodies (Peetz), and markets as performative spaces (Watson). Performance studies methodologies bring new modes of analysis to which politics is important (if not central). Is/as performance and is/as politics as conceptual frameworks offer an interdisciplinary and dialectical mode of approaching the relationship between politics and aesthetics beyond the boundaries of a single discipline.

Co-constitution The claim that (almost) everything can be read as performance (whether of performing arts or sociopolitical life) inevitably foregrounds a political lens. Politics and performance foregrounds politics as a key hermeneutical, conceptual, and empirical dimension in understanding performance in the sense that Schechner (showing doing) and Taylor (is/as performance) have defined it. Both modes—as/is political—are based on strategies of political defamiliarization whereby conditions, structures, and experiences that are taken for granted come to be shown in a new light, where mechanisms of power are often made visible. When a performance is political this defamiliarization originates from its actors or authors; when the performance is viewed as political it is through the hermeneutics of politics and performance scholarship that the hidden politics becomes transparent. Both— is/as political in performance—become, however, fully realized in the transactional process, be it in the gaze of the audience or in the discourse of politics and performance scholars. In this Handbook, we underline the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics to suggest that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach in

16   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward understanding our complex political world. Rai (2015) outlined how performance studies and politics can be brought into conversation with each other to reveal the co-constitution of the two: one that maps individual performance, which is nevertheless socially embedded, and the other that charts the political effects of performance. In order to read a political performance we need to understand its component parts as well as the whole performance and its effects (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006); reading the materiality of performance allows us to reflect upon its power. Butler’s framing of the reproduction of power relations through the concept of performativity, while critical, does not in itself press us to deconstruct the performances that make for the stylized repetitions. Nor does it press us to analyze why and how some performances mark a rupture in the everyday reproduction of social relations. To reiterate key points: There have been countless and illuminating contributions in theater and performance studies that involved interdisciplinary approaches making use of politics scholarship as a hermeneutic tool. While these approaches have opened the door for syncretic and epistemologically rich analysis, we hope that the essays featured in this Handbook will suggest how theater and performance studies might forge interdisciplinary engagement with politics in even more systematic, comprehensive, and contextualized ways. Similarly, there is a certain amount of work in politics on drama, theatrical moments and events, and phenomena such as stages, roles, and scripts. However, arguably, a good deal of that work remains rather narrowly focused on political rituals aimed at stabilizing power relations, making it methodologically more limited than it could or should be. The different components of theatricality, and the range of tools of performance analysis that are central to performance studies, may be critical to extending and deepening the engagement of politics with the fact and importance of performance in and to political action and organization; some of the chapters in this Handbook attempt to do this and thus to suggest new approaches to the study of politics (see, e.g., chapters by Bala, Puwar, and Wall). As noted, the space we wish to create with this Handbook is not, of course, entirely new; we are cognizant of other disciplines’ engagement with and deployment of the grammars of performance: psychology (Freud’s primal “scene”), sociology (Goffman’s “backstage”), and anthropology (Turner’s “liminar” and Singer’s “cultural” and Bateson’s “ritual” performances), as well as politics. In the Handbook, however, we are trying to bring into conversation with each other not only the ideas about performance but also the interpretations of politics; if we take politics and performance to be co-constitutive, then we need to understand what is the political in (any) performance as much as how politics is performed in different modes. This approach stretches both disciplines and indeed (we could argue) leaves them behind in some senses. This Handbook is, we hope, a genuinely interdisciplinary space for exploring the relationship between politics and performance on the broadest spectrum, opening up intellectual spaces, generating new vocabularies, introducing novel performative modes of analysis, and revealing how power circulates and sediments in different contexts. The Handbook can serve to bring theatricality (e.g., staging, movement, gesture), performance (appearance, “rehearsed behavior”), and performativity (effects, affects) to the heart of the study of politics. Therefore politics as a set of practices does not simply distribute resources; it uses and deploys these resources in a complex array of embodied practices— performances—in order to achieve, reveal, appraise, criticize, or deny that distribution. It can likewise serve to bring an explicit and nuanced definition of politics (practices + resources)

Introduction   17 into the study of performance, exploring a range of institutional, governmental, societal, and marginal practices. Performances (directly or indirectly attempt, succeed, or fail to) reveal, illustrate, enact, critique, create, or destroy certain power and resource dynamics and distributions, for example, by contesting the politics of visibility and identity. We need to explore jointly and more systematically the intersections of the two disciplines—the way politics looks toward performance for vocabulary and hermeneutic devices (including but also moving beyond theatrical metaphors in describing political events) and performance studies use of politics scholarship to unpack various aspects of contemporary performance practices (artistic, institutional, everyday). This is no longer simply conceptual borrowing between disciplines but rather working together simultaneously from both disciplines, genuine cross-fertilization that builds on existing advances, while at the same time encouraging “vigilance against various kinds of synecdochic fallacies in cross-disciplinary inquiry—moments when scholars assume that one body of texts adequately represents an entire field” (Jackson 2004, 4). In so doing, this new working develops analytical tools and demonstrates how these might be deployed by other disciplines—such as law (Wall) and anthropology (Crewe and Sarra), sociology (Warren) and political economy (Brassett, Watson). The Handbook is organized along six themes that we have already gestured toward: performativity and theatricality; identities; sites; scripts; body, voice, and gesture; and affect. With this organizational form we have focused on specific concepts to explore them through a range of empirical case studies chosen to illustrate how the methods and analyses of our interdisciplinary approach can be realized. Including work by authors based in six continents and multiple countries, the Handbook draws upon a great and rich variety of case studies from a great many contexts across the globe. We hope to show in a range of examples and through different disciplinary lenses that constructing the mise-en-scène, the artifice, and the effects of political practice means to construct identities, sites, scripts, bodies, audiences, and affects. Politics and performance demands attention to the particular textures of theatricality, performative labor, and embodied practice that in turn suggest reception of performances in different registers. Politics and performance foreground the political dimensions of performance and the performative shaping of the political. Moving beyond one’s disciplinary comfort zone, risky and messy as it can be, is where the cross-fertilization takes place and the disciplinary co-constitutive nature of politics and performance comes to be articulated. Such interdisciplinary work is not easy. There are many definitional and ontological issues to negotiate. The vocabulary is different; there is an understandable wariness about whether and how to use concepts that are familiar in one discipline but not in the other. We aim to open up a space where we can collectively explore new ways of approaching old problems—of voice, presence and absence, scripts and stage, and of how power circulates in society and polity. As will be clear from the essays in the Handbook, the attempt is to think both outside and inside familiar intellectual boxes without attempting to generate a new orthodoxy in thinking about either politics or performance. With this diverse and challenging set of essays we wish to open a dialogue between the disciplines of politics and performance studies. But more than that, we wish to develop an interdisciplinary conversation in the broadest sense. Contributors to this Handbook are lawyers, sociologists, and anthropologists; and media studies, English, gender, and race studies scholars outlining their commitment to opening up their own interdisciplinary channels. As the Handbook’s editors, we recognize that this volume is part—possibly a quite

18   Gluhovic, Jestrovic, Rai, and Saward early part—of a shifting and unpredictable evolution of mutual influence, borrowing and blending across disciplines toward richer and more diverse theoretical and empirical analyses. The challenges and opportunities of this endeavor are open-ended.

Note 1. We use “politics” when referring to the discipline most commonly called political science. Politics is often used in the names of academic departments, and we prefer its suggestive breadth as the name of this discipline. Politics as a discipline includes a range of subdisciplines, such as international relations, comparative politics, and political theory.

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pa rt i

PE R FOR M AT I V I T Y AND T H E AT R IC A L I T Y Performance has effects on audiences, participants, observers, and others—emotive, animating, provocative, and so on. Among these are political effects—on how we understand and view politics, on the organization and practices of politics, and on how we understand a political actor and a political subject. This section of the Handbook explores a range of effects that may be desired, decried, achieved, or relinquished, not least social and political order and disorder, the regulation of people and things, and processes of social change. The notions of theatricality and performativity offer here a shared interdisciplinary vocabulary for us to explore various ways of doing and performing politics, on the one hand, and of understanding the political elements of performance, on the other. As discussed in the introduction, the concepts of theatricality and performativity are among the central co-constitutive components of politics is/as performance and performance is/as political.With varied points of departure, the essays featured here build on central tropes of theatricality and performativity, engaging with foundational works of Burns (1972) and Austin (1962) and more recent critical perspectives provided by Féral (1982, 2002), Balme (2007), and Butler (1990, 2015), to mention a few. The authors highlight the fact that theatricality and performativity stretch and mold differently within different cultural, political, geographical, and historical contexts. This section covers a range of manifestations and meanings of theatricality and performativity. Contributions explore the device and effect relationship between the two concepts through different forms of political protest, from the UK (Nield) to Mexico (Cadena-Roa

24   Performativity and Theatricality and Puga) and through different forms of representation, from theatrical to political and legal (Daloz, Leader). Other essays foreground the context-specific dimensions of these key concepts, exploring how they become critically redefined through various manifestations of alterity: colonial theatricality, postcolonial resistance, representations of race, and the figure of the migrant Other. Adrian Kear, Lisa Skwirblies, and Ameet Parameswaran develop the concept of theatricality through a critical lens, expanding on Christopher Balme’s (2007, 98) point that “theatricality is a particular Western style of thought” that repeats the colonial perspective. In his essay Kear makes the connection between the notion of authenticity and the signification and reception systems of theatricality through which the authenticity claim comes to be verified. Theatricality is viewed here as a cultural and historical construction of spectatorship that has been part of the colonial regime. Kear explores the relationship between theatricality, authenticity, and the spectatorial gaze through the repertoire of scenes that seek to capture the drama of contemporary migration and the spectacles of the racialized Other, epitomized in the objectified black female figure of “the Hottentot Venus” from the nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions to her re-creation in the controversial project “Exhibit B” of the South African director Brett Bailey. In her essay Skwirblies explores the construction of the spectatorial gaze in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial context, to address epistemological consequences of what she calls “colonial theatricality.” This kind of theatricality, argues Skwirblies, emerges as a mode of framing in colonial and cross-cultural contexts. She argues that a revised definition of theatricality must account for modes of bracketing or “enframing” that serve as tools to assert power over those who find themselves in the frame of perception. Parameswaran proposes further negotiations of the notion of theatricality in the Indian postcolonial context. He examines canonical Malayalam and Sanskrit productions of the significant playwright-director from the state of Kerala, K. N. Panikkar, as modes of framing of postcolonial resistance. Analyzing assumptions about theatricality within the Western critical discourses, Parameswaran negotiates and adapts the concept to both modern theater practices in India and indigenous and traditional performances. His critical approach can be read as a gesture toward decolonizing the notion of theatricality as a predominantly Western mode of thinking. Sophie Nield and Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga examine theatricality and performativity within different contexts of political struggle. Cadena-Roa and Puga explore forms of political protest in contemporary Mexico, placing notions of theatricality and performativity within the cross-disciplinary discourses on performing protest. Nield focuses on the boundaries of performance and theatricality, analyzing the politics of space and action on the picket line as a theatrical history. She reads this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lens of space and spectatorship, introducing innovative notions of “political performativity” and “public theatricality” that enhance these concepts and extend the vocabulary of politics and performance. In their respective chapters, Kate Leader and Jean-Pascal Daloz focus on the theatricality and performativity of representation, invigorating these concepts by linking them to manifestations of presence and absence (Leader) and categories of eminence and nearness (Daloz). Leader explores performativity in the criminal trial format and in relation to the presence and absence of the defendant. She analyzes the ways in which the presence (and also absence) of the defendant is shaped by confrontation and demeanor assessment, among other factors,

Performativity and Theatricality   25 and how that shaping plays important roles in the construction of truth within the trial. Exploring the performativity of how a defendant enacts and inhabits her role—how she is displayed, positioned, constrained, or silenced—Leader aims to understand the performative and judicial implications of presence and absence. Daloz outlines the polysemic nature of the term representation, drawing parallels between political and theatrical representation. He reexamines the terms representation, theatricality, and performativity as they are shaped, depending on how political actors deal with the opposing imperatives of eminence and nearness. This section is in a dialectical relationship with the definitions outlined in our introduction, demonstrating that shaping the interdisciplinary grammar of politics and performance does not necessarily require inventing a new vocabulary; rather, it demands new ways of understanding existing and familiar terms through different historical, cultural, and contextual critical perspectives. Three key points emerge from this section that contribute to the discourse on theatricality and performativity: (1) Whether they are manifesting in theater, street, courtroom, or Parliament, theatricality and performativity are immanently political in that they always involve certain modes of framing or frame-shifting. (2) Theatricality is not only a set of aesthetic devices and signifying systems, but also a way of seeing; performativy is the consequence, the unpredictable element of and response to what has been experienced and perceived through theatricality. In that context, performativity also has an ethical dimension. (3) Theatricality and performativity are not universal categories; they tend to impose their own conceptual orthodoxies. Therefore, rethinking and adaptation of these conceptual paradigms of politics and performance is key to their vitality. All the essays featured here make the familiar tropes of theatricality and performativity fresh again and imbue them with a sharper political edge. They show that definitions of the central co-constituting concepts of politics and performance are only as good as they can be stretched, negotiated, and opened to challenge.

References Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Balme, Christopher. 2007. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Burns, Elizabeth. 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. Harlow, UK: Longman. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Féral, Josette. 1982. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject De-mystified.” Modern Drama 25, no. 1: 170–81. Féral, Josette. 2002. “Foreword.” SubStance 31, nos. 2–3: 3–13.

Chapter 1

Col on i a l Theatr ica lit y Lisa Skwirblies

Introduction Describing events from the political domain by referencing theater is in high fashion. Headlines declaim a “Brexit circus,” reveal a “White House spectacle,” and judge other political events as “dramas.” Underlying these theatrical references is an implication of falsehood, inauthenticity, and emptiness. Since at least the eighteenth century, drawing on analogies to theater to describe people or events has served as a pejorative epithet, calling into question their or its credibility by suggesting some degree of deceit, duplicity, and simulation and linking morality with aesthetic and social behavior. In this chapter, I argue that references to the theater are never merely innocent metaphors but instead are historically and culturally determined modes of perception that allow us to see certain problems in the political realm such as authenticity, representation, and spectatorship as essentially theatrical problems. This has particularly been the case in nineteenth century German colonial discourses with its technique of theatricalizing the colonized people and places. Therefore, as a “travelling concept” (Bal 2002), theatricality is not bound exclusively to the realm of the theater nor to the discourses of theater and performance studies. Rather, as I will show in this chapter, it holds meaning and potential as an instrument for analysis in the field of political science as well. The cross-disciplinary possibilities of the term theatricality lie in the term’s applicability for a better understanding of both the theater-like character of the political and social domain as well as of the grammar of performance as an aesthetic medium. Scholars from the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropolgy, have long been fascinated by theater as a model for social action. To them, theater is a fruitful analytical lens for understanding the nature of human interaction (Plessner 1982), rituals (Turner 1982), and structures of social behavior (Goffmann  1974).1 A key work is the monograph Theatricality by the sociologist Elizabeth Burns (1972), who positions theatricality at the intersection of social science and theater studies. To Burns, theatricality is a mode of

28   Lisa Skwirblies perception that “attaches to any kind of behaviour perceived and interpreted by others and described (mentally or explicity) in theatrical terms” (14). She defines theatricality not as something that resides within a person or a situation, but as a process that emerges from the spectator’s act of recognition. What we perceive as theatrical depends therefore on our specific moral viewpoints as beholders, on our socialization, and on the particular time and cultural circumstances in which we perceive something. In other words, theatricality as a mode of perception is always culturally and historically determined. Burns’s positioning of theatricality has greatly influenced the field of theater and performance studies, and this influence can be seen in the recent revival of the term. With the rise of performance studies in the 1970s, the term theatricality was superseded by performativity, which brought with it strong theoretical ties to poststructural critique. Performativity thus became a favorite lens of analysis in the field. Since about 1990, though, scholars have shown a renewed interest in theatricality, especially in scholarship aimed at more deeply understanding the relationship between performance and politics. The theater historian Tracy C. Davis (2003), for instance, expands the definition of theatricality to encompass eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of civil society. To Davis, theatricality is “a spectator’s dédoublement resulting from a sympathetic breach (active dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity) effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to the theater” (145). In best Brechtian manner, Davis’s definition of theatricality allows for distancing oneself from the thing observed and thus engenders agency and critical engagement. Similarly, the theater scholar and editor of the special issue on theatricality in SubStance Josette Féral (2002, 105) understands theatricality as a process that allows the spectator to create “an ‘other’ space, no longer subject to the laws of the quotidian, and in his [sic] space, he inscribes what he observes, perceiving it as belonging to a space where he has no place except as external observer.” Here, theatricality as a mode of perception brackets moments of actions in such a way that they are infused with extreme focus and concentration. More recently, theatricality has been used in theatre and perfromance studies as an analytical category to explore a great variety of issues and topics from the social and political realm. These include questions of migration (Nield 2006), the production of space and the manifestation of policitical appearances (Ridout 2008), and the larger field of political speech and gestures (Schmidt 2010). In more recent political theory we find a revival of Burns’s notion of theatricality as modes of perception, reinterpreted and reconceived in the figure of the “frame” or in framing and enframement. When reflecting on the relation between representation and social justice, the political theorists Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler, for instance, introduced the figure of the frame and its role as it relates to allocating recognizability and determining questions of humanization and dehumanization. In her article “Reframing Justice in a Globalized World,” Fraser (2005, 78) argues “that no claim for justice can avoid presupposing some notion of representation, implicit or explicit, insofar as none can avoid assuming a frame.” In other words, all political claims of recognition and redistribution fundamentally rely on representation, understood as both symbolic representation and representation as accountability. Similarly, Judith Butler (2009) argues in her book Frames of War that frames, understood as both discursive as well as visual phenomena, work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot. Certain kinds of lives appear in the field of perceptual representation as more precarious and more “grievable” when lost than others do. This “differential power at work,” Butler argues, distinguishes “between those subjects who

Colonial Theatricality   29 will be eligible for recognition from those who will not” (138). Both Fraser and Butler not only render the frame itself visible, and thus the mode of perception itself, but point out the epistemological consequences that such modes of enframement can have for those who find themselves either inside or outside the frame. This question of the epistemological consequences becomes particularly pivotal when considering theatricality as a mode of enframement in colonial contexts and as a technology of imperial violence.

Colonial Theatricality In Western cultures since at least the sixteenth century, human behavior and relationships have been understood as theatrically structured, as “presentations of the self ” and as “acting out roles” (Fiebach 1999, 190). This understanding is based on an assumed demarcation between society as reality and theater as mimesis, with the two realms often compared and related to each other on a metaphorical level. As a discursive field, theatricality emerged in the eight­ eenth century. The age of Enlightenment, expansionism, and empire was a time of deeply embedded transformations in aesthetics and philosophy, from an emphasis on the aural to an increased focus on the visual. There was a dawning recognition that everything, from nature to human beings, including the abstraction of law, science, the market, and even God, was set in time “made for a season of observing” (Dening 1993, 76). The protagonists of this age of observation were the observers themselves, who now managed to look at the world from a different perspective—literally—through the microscope or from the height of a balloon. This shift brought with it a new understanding of vision as geometric, and representations as more real than reality: “I have acted all the Parts of my life as a Looker-On,” wrote Joseph Addison, founder of the Spectator and a contemporary of the age of observation, on this new emphasis on the perceptual (cited in Marshall 1986, 9). A “season for observing” arguably resonated most strongly with the eighteenth-century expansionist project and its discourses on navigation, voyaging, and discovery; in its vast production of literature, paintings, pantomimes, and poetry; and on otherness and the mirroring function of the self in creating an imperialist observer position as invisible yet all-encompassing. As the cultural anthropologist Greg Dening (1993, 77) has pointed out, “In many ways, it was the actual voyaging more than the discovered substances that excited. It was the experiencing of otherness rather than otherness itself. That was its theatre.” In his monograph Pacific Performances, Christopher Balme (2007, 1) builds on Dening’s reflections and points out that references to the theater in colonial discourse need to be understood as “symptoms of deeper-seated, fundamental categories of perception that can be best embraced by the term ‘theatricality.’ ” While in Davis’s aforementioned definition of theatricality this mode of bracketing allows for active dissociation, alienation, self-reflexivity, and a beholder’s critical stance, in the colonial context this definition needs to be revised. A revised definition of theatricality must account for modes of bracketing or enframing that serve as tools to assert power over those who find themselves in the frame of perception. As a discursive strategy, theatricality is symptomatic of colonial discourse’s drive to circumscribe, confine, and constrain. In other words, it needs to be understood as part of the technology of imperial epistemic violence, as, for instance, Edward Said (1978, 63) has most famously formulated it in his seminal text Orientalism: “The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is

30   Lisa Skwirblies the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.” In highlighting colonial representation as always theatrical and “affixed to Europe,” Said thus stresses the power relation at play between Europe as a beholder and “the Orient” as the observed and which emerges as an object of this particular mode of perception. Another excellent account of enframing as a colonial tool is offered in the monograph Colonizing Egypt by the historian Timothy Mitchell (1988), who shows how the mode of the nineteenth-century world exhibitions in Europe became a practice of representation (rendering “things” up to be viewed, setting the observer apart from the observed) that the British colonial government applied to the production of colonial space and colonial subjectivities in Egypt. To Mitchell, a “world-as-exhibition” model “exemplifies the nature of the modern European state” (2). A similar argument could be made for a “world-as-theatre” model in which everything appears as if represented on a stage. Similarly, the anthropologist Mary Louise Pratt (1992) in her monograph Imperial Eyes emphasizes the role of the gaze in the construction of colonial he­gem­ony and order. Her discussion of historical European travel accounts shows how they created an observer position that allowed for the imperial beholder to remain invisible. To see without being seen not only confirms the separation of oneself from the scene observed but also corresponds with a position of power, a position that was a prerequisite for the European “to ‘view’ the African in order to comment on their physiology and actions,” as the historian Obioma Nnaemeka (2017, 95) has argued. Pratt (1992, 7) called these modes of perception and representation “anti-conquest” strategies, “whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European he­gem­ony.” In other words, theatricality in a colonial context needs to be understood as a power dynamic putting something or someone not only on display but also at a “condescending distance” by which imperial beholders literally remove themselves from the picture and thus out of a position of implication or complicity with the scene or action observed (Johnson  2003). These modes of perception and representation—colonial theatricality—will be discussed in the following section through the historical case of the Cameroonian prince Mpundu Akwa and his court case in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Case of Mpundu Akwa and the Phenomenon of Imperial Imposterism Like many other sons of influential families from the African West Coast in the nineteenth century, Mpundu Akwa had been sent to Germany at a young age to be educated, and he later tried to build a business there. The founding of the German Empire in Africa in 1884 created direct shipping links that allowed “colonial subjects” from the new colonies like Cameroon and Togo, and to a lesser extent from German East Africa (today’s Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania) and German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), to emigrate to Germany. Whereas most of the colonial subjects went to Germany as part of an international workforce, as domestic servants of missionaries and colonial functionaries, or as

Colonial Theatricality   31 ­ erformers of the so-called human zoos at the turn of the century, another crucial incentive p for emigration came from members “of the wealthy Togolese and Cameroonian coastal elites—traditional and religious leaders, notables and traders—[who] paid or sought sponsors for their children to be educated or serve as apprentices in Germany,” the political theorist Robbie Aitken (2018, 87) explains. While these educational visits were seen by the Cameroonian families as a means to strengthen their own political influence with the colonizers, the German colonial administration similarly hoped to bind African notables to their colonial aims and to educate skilled indigenous informants who could carry out these activities for the colonial administration. The German authorities thus often supported and even facilitated the emigration of children of African notables2—but only to a certain extent. When it became apparent that many of the young Africans not only took up permanent residency in Germany after completing their studies but also started to speak out publicly against the German colonial administration in their home countries, attitudes in Germany toward emigration from the colonies became increasingly hostile. In addition to these ties and attitudes, rules and legal distinctions were an important part of the colonial project. Once empire became about the governance of people rather than merely about trade, as the cultural historian Catherine Hall (2002, 774) points out in her book Civilizing Subjects, the imperialists had to think about “the creation of new subjects— colonial subjects—who would consent to being ruled.” Colonial subjects were interpolated into different categories of legal subjectivity. Subject and citizen, white, black, native, mixedblood, and naturalized formed the foundation for rules and regulations determining which legal designations applied to whom. These categories show how the law produced, formed, and reinforced recognizable legal, racial, and “manageable” identities.3 The local populations of the German colonies were not considered members of the empire. Hence German colonial subjects living in Germany had no claim to German citizenship. They were given certificates declaring their colonial status, leaving them—in a legal sense—without nationality (El-Tayeb 2005). Mpundu Akwa’s precise legal status was and remains unclear: his registration papers from Hamburg identify him as originating from the “German Protectorate” (Deutsches Schutzgebiet) and as simply a “Traveller” (Reisender) (Joeden-Forgey  2002, 85). When the colonial administration in Cameroon heard about Mpundu Akwa’s business plans in Germany and that he had used his father’s royal status as financial security, they informed Akwa’s business partners in Kiel and Hamburg that he had borrowed money from them on a false premise: his royalty. For the German colonial authorities, sovereignty and the title of king were closely linked, and as the German African colonies were completely under the sovereignty of the German emperor, Dika Akwa could not have been a king—that is, a sovereign— without undermining the sovereignty of the German emperor.4 In Berlin, Mpundu Akwa was one of the young Africans who advocated for the interests and rights of his family, and at one point he even had a personal audience with the German emperor. He acted as spokesperson for the Akwa family and was an outspoken critic of the colonial governor in Cameroon, Jesco von Puttkamer. The Akwas had written an official petition of complaint against von Puttkamer’s regime that Mpundu handed over to the German emperor.5 Considering that Akwa lobbied against Governor von Puttkamer in Berlin and Hamburg, and gained a lot of media attention in the process, the real reason he was put on trial in Hamburg was not likely for credit fraud, as claimed, but rather in an attempt to silence him. The large number of documents in the colonial archive documenting his deportation that are marked geheim (secret) seem to corroborate this assumption.6

32   Lisa Skwirblies

Performance, Mimicry, Race On June 27, 1905, Mpundu Akwa was charged with credit fraud in Hamburg-Altona. He was represented in court by his lawyer Moses Levi, a member of an established Altona Jewish family. Levi subsequently published his client’s defense speech under the title “Reminiscences and Perhaps a Small Contribution to the Cultural History of the Fin de Siécle” after having fled from the Nazis to the US. I argue that Levi’s defense was successful because he framed Akwa’s royal status as performance: “One cannot be surprised that Mpundo Akwa, after years of this beguiling intercourse with society, this competition for his company, this glorification of his blue blood, should not have developed certain grand airs and mannerism[s], perhaps not even in a positive way, airs and mannerisms which also can be observed in these circles among the young” (Levi, cited in Joeden-Forgey  2002, 96). Levi frames Akwa’s claim of being a prince as a performance and as essentially an act of mimicking the surroundings in which he grew up: the houses of the Northern German aristocracy, where Akwa had been a well-received guest. It is this aristocratic behavior that Levi alleged Akwa had been mimicking and that, like a method actor, had mimicked so well that he began to actually believe in his own performance. In addition to these claims, Levi’s defense of Akwa also plays into what Homi Bhabha (2012), elaborating on mimicry, calls the colonial desire for “a reformed recognisable Other.” His seminal study, The Location of Culture, identifies colonial mimicry as “one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (122) since it does not eliminate cultural differences and assimilate colonial subjects but instead keeps these differences alive and prevents subjects from assimilating. The performance of mimicry also highlights the inherent paradox underlying colonialism’s “civilizing mission”: while the stated goal was to transform the local culture by making it “repeat” the colonizer’s culture and thus “reform” and “elevate” the colonial subject, the colonial project was founded on an ontological difference and a fixity of “races” within an alleged stable racial hierarchy. Actions based on these ideas deny colonial subjects any possibility of elevating their position, since elevation would imply the possibility of change. Bhabha describes this paradox of mimicry as containing a destabilizing “ironic compromise . . . the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (cited in Moore-Gilbert et al. 1997, 120). The performativity of mimicry—as well as its theatricality—thus disturb the equilibrium of social existence and cultural identity. Whereas Levi’s defense presents class as a cultural performance (by insinuating that Akwa learned his behavior from the German aristocracy)—and thus as a construct—his argument introduces the identity marker of race in essentialist terms: If, furthermore, one takes into account the different mentality and outlook of a black person, his basically different attitude with regard to morals, ethics, customs, and decorum, and quite a different innate cultural and critical capacity; if one considers that in spite of his conversions [sic] to Christianity there must be some remnants of paganism in his psyche; considering all this, it seems more than unfair to hold him completely accountable for his behaviour, his way of dressing, and his general attitude, [since all of these make him] seem to be [not] what he really is, [and from these] we should not draw unrealistic conclusions about the worth and character of his personality.  (Levi, cited and translated in Joeden-Forgey 2002, 96)

The basis of Levi’s argument is thus essentialist in that it assumes that all Africans are culturally and racially disposed to mimicry. Levi’s essentialist race marker is a textbook example

Colonial Theatricality   33 of what the critical-race studies scholar Maureen Maisha Eggers (2017) has described as racializing practices of marking (rassifizierte Markierungspraxis), which is a two-step process. In a first step, subaltern categories of people or groups are assigned a character trait, which provides knowledge about them to a hegemonic group. Providing knowledge about a subaltern group articulates the difference between them and the hegemonic white group, whose character and traits are both different from and allegedly superior to the subaltern group. The next step is applying invented traits of “difference,” which, according to Eggers, are presented as an insurmountable part of the “nature” of the marked-as-Other (57). The act of naturalization provides an a priori foundation of order on which practices of racialized forms of exclusion can be presented as logical (i.e., based on facts of nature). Part and parcel of this differencing is that the hegemonic white center remains unmarked, allowing it to function as a neutral authority. Levi not only marked Akwa as prone to mimicry but naturalized this alleged character trait by attaching it to a larger complex of racialized knowledge on the alleged nature of black people in general. Whereas Joeden-Forgey (2002, 94) argues that Levi’s defense managed to “lessen the power of those racial stereotypes which cast Africans as inherently deceitful,” I argue that the racializing strategies of marking that Levi used strengthened the power of these stereotypes by naturalizing them. Moreover, I argue that Levi’s defense was successful precisely because he used these techniques of evoking the racialized image of an “authorized version of otherness” (Bhabha 2012, 126)—the image least threatening to the authority of the colonial and imperial order. In other words, his defense strategy paid off because it was compatible with already existing racialized and racist forms of marking within discourses of the law at that time. However, the public reaction to the case outside of the courtroom quickly overturned this success: Akwa’s “authorized version of otherness” was suddenly transformed into an “unauthorized version.” The public image of Akwa following his acquittal was that of an imposter—a “Black imposter prince,” to be precise—and it was this image that dominated the headlines of pro-colonial newspapers in the aftermath of the trial.7

Imposterism and Racial Masquerade News of the “Black imposter” spread beyond the confines of the courtroom, and the question turned from his guilt or innocence to whether Akwa really was or was not the prince he claimed to be. Conservative voices like that of a former navy lieutenant, Heinrich Liersemann, who published a book8 about Akwa in 1907, and pro-colonial newspapers like the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten responded to the trial in explicitly racist terms. The growing racist discourse on the presence of black individuals from the German colonies residing in Germany shows that Akwa’s case was not an exception but rather was consistent with widespread racism, evidence of which can be seen in the large number of newspaper articles linking questions of citizenship to race and presenting the combination “black” and “German” as inherently contradictory. Newspapers did not get tired of reporting with paternalistic curiosity on Akwa’s European clothes and on the fact that he spoke fluent German, and they mocked the fact that he was dressed like a Kulturmensch (literally “a human with culture”). Akwa’s appearance in the German public sphere thus clearly challenged ideas of the essential difference between Europeans and Africans that had been part of the racist discourse in turn-of-the-century imperial Germany.

34   Lisa Skwirblies The label “Black imposter prince” arguably identified Akwa with role-playing, acting, deception, make-believe, and the realm of the theater more generally. Similar to actors, imposters possess a carefully executed repertoire, have an audience, and make use of a costume that enhances their skillful deception. Phenomena like public role-play, social masquerade, and commodity spectacle were fashionable at the turn of the century, and so too was the figure of the imposter. As the theater historian Peter W. Marx (2008) argues, the popularity of the imposter figure reflects the deep-seated social transformations that German society at large was undergoing in the wake of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization in the late nineteenth century. The unfettered spectacle of advertisement in the world of commodities, the urban rhythm, and the everyday jostling of the masses were indicators of the changes taking place in the social structures of public life and in modes of perception. Added to these changes were new media, such as photography and film, which brought with them a new system of signs and social codes (Schramm 2005). Also the function of theater shifted during this time, from an eighteenth-century ideal of a moralische Anstalt (moral institution) to that of a “social school” in which social codes and behavior could be tested, legitimated, or dismissed and through which the idea of an ideal political community could be formulated.9 In this context, it is not surprising that German theater in the literature of the time was referenced primarily in terms of deception, deceit, and make-believe (Schramm 2005; Marx 2008). In order for us to understand what the framing of Akwa in theatrical terms, as in the figure of the imposter, meant in his own time, we need to read it in light of the shifts taking place in theater at the time, in its transition from a moral institution to a social school. In that light, Marx’s reading of the popularity of the imposter figure as a symptom of a “society in motion”10 that was looking to the theater to assure itself of its social and behavioral codes needs a more transnational framing: the racializing of Akwa as the “Black imposter prince,” needs to be read as a symptom of a society anxious about class mobility and fearful of immigration from the colonies and the instability of what had been perceived as stable racial hierarchies. Through this lens we can understand the shifts in German theater and society at the end of the nineteenth century in terms of nation-building and modernization but also as a reaction to early forms of globalization expressed in notions of ethnonationalism. Stronger even, Akwa’s case calls for a new and long-overdue approach to German theatre history that attends to the role that colonial power and questions of ‘race’, as well as the diasporic and genocidal histories of Africa, played in the creation of Germany’s theatrical modernity. This shows, for instance, in the way the causa Akwa was represented a year later on the theatre stage. Here, in the 1906 annual revue of the most popular theater of the German Empire at the time, the Metropol Theater in Berlin, the imposter’s trickery was represented theatrically by an actor in blackface mask exploiting popular racial stereotypes of the time. The infamous revues of the Metropol highlighted the political and social events of the preceding year and presented dialogues, songs, and jokes full of political innuendo about the Wilhelminian authoritarian state. The revue that featured Mpundu Akwa focused specifically on the German colonial empire. With the title Und der Teufel lacht dazu (And the devil laughs with you),11 the revue theatricalized the German Empire by staging it as a teatrum mundi metaphor: a colonial “world-theater” in which the devil reigned. It is a telling example of how events and people who were already framed within the tropes of the theatrical were further theatricalized on the stage. Akwa was depicted on stage in the racist manner of a black urban dandy who tries to adapt to his white bourgeois surroundings but fails to do

Colonial Theatricality   35 so, a reference to Akwa’s designation as the “Black imposter prince.” The popular German actor Henry Bender portrayed Akwa in blackface as “the African prince.”12 The cover of a popular music journal at the time shows a photograph of a scene from the revue, with Bender wearing white gloves, a tailcoat, a short flower-patterned vest, and a white shirt underneath. His checkered pants seem slightly too big, and the enormous bow tie around his neck even more so. The stage directions describe this character as “half civilized, half African,” confirming that in the eyes of the author (and likely the audience) “civilized” and “African” are mutually exclusive.13 Bender’s blackface performance recalls nineteenth-century American minstrelsy,14 which became popular in European metropolises like Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, and it is thus very likely that Bender’s costume was inspired by it (Kusser  2013). For the German context there is very little scholarship on blackface traditions.15 What does exist includes contributions from the literature scholar Jonathan Wipplinger (2011, 462), who argues that the German reception of blackface was unique in that blackface was read as a “racial ruse, an intentional deception of identity.” His definition of blackface as a “nodal point of societal uncertainty” (458) comes close to my reading of the imposter figure as a symptom of the social uncertainties of turn-of-the-century Germany along the lines of race. Like the trickster, who deceives his or her audiences ­by ­pretending to be someone he or she is not, the blackface mask plays on the white audience’s fear of losing control over a symbolic order. Both of these definitions, the deception of the trickster and the “racial ruse” of the blackface mask, play into the label of the “Black imposter prince.” Akwa was labeled an imposter because his public performances of self-fashioning were perceived as adopting cultural and social signs that were marked as white. The term “Black imposter” thus called into question his authenticity, as it was symbolically represented by skin color and based on his performance of a culturally inscribed repertoire of dress and behavior. This conception of authenticity was based on “ ‘essential’ blackness or whiteness” (Johnson 2003, 4). Theatricalized moments of blackness, like Bender’s blackface impersonation of Akwa, might thus have had less to do with entertaining a European public than with perpetuating an implicit racial equation of whiteness with Germanness and humanness. Yet both the cultural repertoire and the racial equation also rely on a certain amount of ambivalence. As Bhabha writes, mimicry empowers colonial subjects to return the colonizer’s gaze. It allows them to elude the position to which the colonial order tries to confine the colonial subject. A final important element is Akwa’s strategic self-positioning in response to all these attempts to frame him as fraudulent and duplicitous. Although we have very little historical evidence of what Akwa thought himself, his trial against a former lieutenant and his complaints against the colonial regime in Cameroon are evidence of his attempt to represent back.

Representing Back In 1907, after a former Captain Lieutenant Liersemann had claimed in an article in the conservative newspaper Preußische Korrespondenz to have personally known Mpundu Akwa from his early years in Kiel as “an undeserving [minderwertig] subject,”16 Akwa sued Liersemann for defamation. The German public saw this second trial as even more

36   Lisa Skwirblies “spectacular” than the first. Many were outraged as well as intrigued by the novelty of the suit: “It may be the first time in the annals of criminal history that a ‘Black’ sues a ‘White,’ ” the Hamburger Correspondent reported.17 The attorney for Liersemann even spoke of the “exceptional” nature of this trial in his opening remarks: “This is no common libel case. It is rather something exceptional, that a Black sues a White and the case clearly has a strong political undertone.”18 The only testimony from Awka himself during that trial is his defense statement: “I would not have sued Captain Lieutenant Liersemann if he had not tried to ruin me because I filed a complaint against Mr. von Puttkamer [the colonial governor]. . . . Mr. Liersemann contended that I had been punished for theft, but I have never stolen. I have been working as a travelling cigarette salesman for quite some time and have supported myself respectably. I plan to establish an import-export business between Germany and Cameroon, but I cannot do this if I am suspected of being a thief.”19 In claiming his right to sue Liersemann for libel, Akwa tried to reassert his position in a public sphere that had framed him as fraudulent and duplicitous. His legal response to this insult was not at all an exception. In the early 1900s many of those in marginalized and outsider groups (such as Jews, workers, and women) started to defend their honor in court. What was extraordinary about these cases, as the legal historian Ann Goldberg (2010, 11) explains, was the verticality of the lawsuits, through which “unequals . . . could also now take legal action against their social superiors and even against government officials.” This verticality clearly applies to Akwa’s defamation suit against Liersemann, which disrupted the order of white hegemony over colonial subjects and probed the “frames of social justice” (Fraser 2005) by questioning who could make claims for justice in the first place and how these claims were being adjucated. In other words, Akwa showed the extent to which representation always concerns the intersection of symbolic framing and political voice. In filing such a lawsuit Akwa not only insisted on his inherent claim to dignity and his right to legally defend it but also exposed the norms that constituted the legal framework in which these claims could be made in the first place. With Butler’s figure of the frame we could argue that Akwa’s defamation suit works here as an act of reframing. While Butler asserts that all lives are born precarious, the reiterated frames let some lives appear more precarious and thus more “worthy” of protection than others. If it is only under conditions in which the loss of a life matters that the value of life appears, and then “grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters” (14). In insisting on the right to protection, Akwa represents himself as equal to the white naval lieutenant and also presents precariousness as a collective condition of existence, to speak with Butler, a condition in which all lives depend on society for survival. This is shown in a letter Akwa wrote to the German emperor in support of the Akwa family’s demands for a reformation of the colonial system in Cameroon. It is another rare archival document testifying to Akwa’s attempt at “representing back,” at positioning himself, his father, and the Duala collectively as “German subjects” rather than as colonial subjects, who as such have the right to make a formal complaint against their superiors: Altona, 30 January 1906 Most serene, most Emperor and King, Most gracious Emperor, King and Lord, By judgment of the competent court in Cameroon, my father, the King Dika Mpundo Akwa of Bonambela in Duala, was sentenced to 9 years in prison because in the summer of 1905, according to the highest German Reichs authority, he insulted the imperial governor von Puttkamer and his representative Mr von Brauchitsch. . . . I believe that a German subject,

Colonial Theatricality   37 wherever he lives, must be allowed to raise complaints to the superior of his superiors, to apply to those authorities which in his opinion are responsible here. The right to appeal is thwarted if the applicant is punished for daring to complain.20

In insisting on “the constitutional right to appeal,” Akwa petitioned the justice system of the German Empire to live up to its promises of equality and justice for all its citizens. He took the ideals of the West at their word by claiming for himself and his family the same rights as those German citizens who tried to defame him. And indeed the court ruled in favor of Akwa, declaring that “there could not be different forms of justice for blacks and whites” (Joeden-Forgey  2002, 102). Liersemann was charged in this first instance with a minor fine. His appeal was supported by an immense outcry from pro-colonial circles, and he was later acquitted of all charges by a higher court. Although Akwa ultimately lost his libel suit, it is a remarkable example of how an outsider used the legal language of honor to claim his rights under German state law and interfered in the frames of empire by highlighting the epistemological consequences of their theatrical power.

Conclusion The great amount of archival evidence produced about Akwa and the few documents produced by him speak to a degree of colonial theatricality in the imperial archives themselves—particularly to the dynamics of rendering the Other as both seen and unseen at the same time. The gaps and silences say just as much about the colonial truth claims and knowledge formation of its time as the thousands of imperial files marking, observing, and making its colonial subjects. More than only a biography of an individual, Mpundu Akwa’s story testifies to how strategies of theatricalization, as represented in the figure of the “Black imposter,” helped to frame questions of citizenship and subjectivity in the German Empire in terms of race and racialized ideas of mimicry, duplicity, and deceit. It also testifies how nineteenth century popular theatres were complicit in further theatricalizing those events and people who were already framed within tropes of the theatrical. When German newspapers warned the public of Wirtschaftsflüchtlinge (economic refugees) in the summer of 2015, they conjured up an image similar to that of the “Black imposter”: of Africans seeking refuge for economic (and not political) reasons, framed as “freeloaders” who would take advantage of gullible and good-hearted Europeans, and linking ideas of worthiness and unworthiness of protection to ideas of authenticity and pretence. In other words, while this chapter discussed the concept of colonial theatricality through a historical example, the current discourses and developments around Fortress Europe point to the legacies that these modes of perception and representation have left behind and prompt us to reassess the implications that these legacies might have for framing and marking migrants and Europeans of Color today.

Notes 1. While these theories were certainly deeply influential at the time, they have been criticized for using a very Western conception of theater, and moreover, a model of theater based on the proscenium stage (Goffmann’s frame analysis, for instance). As the theater scholar

38   Lisa Skwirblies Joachim Fiebach (1999, 186) has pointed out, “African cultures do bear out what Western anthropologists, sociologists, and artists like Brecht have advanced about theatricality and performance beginning in the 1920s.” 2. The Akwas and the Bells were the two foremost lineages in the Duala region in Cameroon in the nineteenth century. In 1884 a council of established Duala authorities from these two largest families, among whom Dika Akwa had been present, signed the so-called protectorate contract (Schutzvertrag) with the German trading companies Woermann and Jantzen & Thormählen in the hope that the alliance with the Germans would strengthen their own position within their communities. Duala was at the time a strategically important harbor city where European trading companies and settlers had established themselves among the old trading houses of the indigenous population throughout the nineteenth century. The trading companies later transferred the sovereignty of the contracts to the German Empire without the knowledge of the Duala notables, and with this move Cameroon became a German colony. 3. This differs, for example, from the legal status of colonial subjects in the British and French empires (Banerjee 2010). The legal status of the German colonies, also euphemistically called “protectorates,” were neither independent states nor parts of the empire. They were subject to the sovereignty of the German Empire but not constitutionally incorporated. 4. The historian Elisa von Joeden-Forgey (2002, 93) points out that the designation “king” was given to the Duala by the British. She posits that titles like “prince” and “king” “can be seen as linguistic markers of a shared social space between European and Duala traders, and the product of an attempt to negotiate economic and political alliances during a time in which Duala notables controlled the coast” (93). In contrast to colonizers—whose language and actions were based on the ideal of separation—Duala notables used language and titles, and analogies and similarities that framed relationships as being based on a partnership of equals between the German state and their own. These lingusitic equivalents had grown out of the long shared history and contact with Europeans through trade on the West Coast of Africa in the nineteenth century (Eckert 1991; Schaper 2012). 5. A copy of the petition can be found in the Federal Archives in Berlin, “An den allerdurchlauchtigsten allergnädigsten deutschen Reichstag Berlin,” June 19, 1905, BArch R1001 4435. It was also reprinted in the protocols of the German parliament’s commission when they investigated the petition in 1906 and can be found in the Hamburg state archives: HH 111–1 CL VII, Lit.Lb., file 294, attachment 1, p. 3393. 6. See, for instance, Federal Archives Hamburg 111–1 Senat, CL VII, Lit.Lb., no. 28a2, vol. 110, fasc. 24. 7. See, for instance, Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, no. 212, August 8, 1905, Federal Archives Berlin Lichterfelde, file BArch R1001/4300. 8. Using Akwa’s royal title in the title of the book, “S.H.K.  Prinz” Ludwig Paul Heinrich M’Pundo Njasam Akwa. Ein Beitrag zur Rassenfrage, is a reference to Akwa’s business card, which indicates his royal status (HRH) and which resulted in a great number of derogatory comments from the newspapers at the time. 9. This shift arguably has to do with the fundamental changes that the theatrical landscape in Germany underwent in the nineteenth century. For instance, in 1869 the Gewerbefreiheit (law for the freedom of trade) was ratified and profoundly diversified the German theater scene by opening it up to economic interests and replacing the old system of privileges with a more transparent and codified system for distributing theater concessions. 10. This is a quote from the historian Fritz Stern, who described German society at the turn of the century as “a society in motion, and mobility was its essence and its trauma” (cited in Marx 2008, 18).

Colonial Theatricality   39 11. Und der Teufel lacht dazu: Grosse Jahres-Revue in Sieben Bildern, September 23, 1906, score for piano and voice. Text by Julius Freund. Music by Viktor Holländer. Stage directions. The libretto can be found in the theater collection of the Free University Berlin, Kst 7 97/92/W180 13. 12. The front page of the journal Musik für Alle 10 depicts Fritzi Massary in the role of “the cousin” and Henry Bender in the role of “Mpundu Akwa” in the Revue Und der Teufel lacht dazu 1906, http://operetta-research-center.org/. 13. Und der Teufel lacht dazu, stage directions. 14. The historian Eric Lott (2003, 37) describes the function of the blackface mask in its tradition of nineteenth-century American minstrelsy as that “of staging racial categories, boundaries, and types even when these possessed little that a black man could recognize as ‘authentic.’ ” 15. See, for instance, Sieg (2015) for a discussion of contemporary incidents of blackface in German theater. 16. The English translation of Liersemann (1907) is “H.R.H.  Prince” Ludwig Paul Heinrich M’Pundo Njasam Akwa: A Contribution to the Race Question. 17. Hamburger Correspondent, no. 13, January 8, 1908, evening edition), HH 111–1 Senat, CL VII, Lit.Lb., no. 28a2, vol. 110, fasc. 24. 18. Hamburger Nachrichten, no. 822, November 22, 1906, evening edition, HH 111–1 Senat, CL VII, Lit.Lb., no. 28a2, vol. 110, fasc. 24. 19. Hamburger Nachrichten, no. 822, November 22, 1906, evening edition. English translation in Joeden-Forgey (2002, 100). 20. Letter of Mpundu Akwa to the emperor, BA Berlin Lichterfelde, file BArch R/1001 4435.

References Aitken, Robbie. 2018. “Germany’s Black Diaspora: The Emergence and Struggles of a Community, 1880s–1945.” In The Black Diaspora and Germany: Deutschland und die Schwarze Diaspora, edited by BDG-network, 84–101. Münster: Edition assemblage. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Balme, Christopher. 2007. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Sea. New York: Palgrave. Banerjee, Sukanya. 2010. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 2012. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Burns, Elizabeth. 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. London: Longman. Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Davis, Tracy C. 2003. “Theatricality and civil society.” In Theatricality, edited by Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait, 127–156. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dening, Greg. 1993. “The Theatricality of History Making and the Paradoxes of Acting.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 1: 73–95. Eckert, Andreas. 1991. “ ‘Der beleidigte N****prinz’: Mpundu Akwa und die Deutschen.” Etudes Germano-Africaines 9: 32–8. Eggers, Maureen Maisha. 2017. “Rassifizierte Machtdifferenz als Deutungsperspektive in der kritischen Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland.” In Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers et al., 56–73. Münster: Unrast Verlag.

40   Lisa Skwirblies El-Tayeb, Fatima. 2005. “Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity.” In Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History 1890–2000, edited by Patricia Mazon and Reinhild Steingröver, 27–60. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Féral, Josette. 2002. “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language.” SubStance 31, nos. 2–3: 94–108. Fiebach, Joachim. 1999. “Dimensions of Theatricality in Africa.” Research in African Literatures 30, no. 4: 186–201. Fraser, Nancy. 2005. “Reframing Justice in a Globalized World.” New Left Review 36 (November–December): 69–88. Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldberg, Ann. 2010. Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ha, Kien Nghi. 2013. “ ‘People of Color’ als Diversity-Ansatz in der antirassistischen Selbstbennungs- und Identitätspolitik.” Migrationspolitisches Portal Heimatkunde, Heinrich Böll Stiftung. heimatkunde.boell.de/2009/11/01/people-color-als-diversity-ansatz-derantirassistischen-selbstbenennungs-und. Hall, Catherine. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Joeden-Forgey, Elisa von. 2002. Mpundu Akwa: The Case of the Prince from Cameroon. The Newly Discovered Speech for the Defense by Dr. M. Levi. Münster: Lit Verlag. Johnson, Patrick E. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kusser, Astrid. 2013. Köper in Schieflage: Tanzen im Strudel des Black Atlantic um 1900. Münster: Transcript. Liersemann, Heinrich. 1907. “S.K.H. Prinz” Ludwig Paul Heinrich M’Pundo Njasam Akwa: Ein Beitrag zur Rassenfrage. Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke and Son. Lott, Eric. 2003. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marshall, David. 1986. The Figure of Theater. New York: Columbia University Press. Marx, Peter  W. 2008. Ein Theatralisches Zeitalter: Bürgerliche Selbstinszenierung um 1900. Marburg: Francke Verlag. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonizing Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore-Gilbert, Bart, et al. 1997. Postcolonial Criticism. London: Longman. Nield, Sophie. 2006. “On the Border as Theatrical Space: appearance, dis-location and the production of the refugee.” In Contemporary Theatres in Europe, edited by Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, 61-72. New York: Routledge. Nnaemeka, Obioma. 2017. “Bodies That Don’t Matter: Black Bodies and the European Gaze.” In Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, edited by Maureen Maisha Eggers et al., 90–105. Münster: Unrast Verlag. Plessner, Helmuth. 1982. “Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers.” In Mit anderen Augen: Aspekte einer Philosophischen Anthropologie, 146–63. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Pratt, Mary Louise. (1992) 2008. Imperial Eyes. Travel-Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Ridout, Nicholas. 2008. “Performance and democracy.” In The Cambridge companion to performance studies, edited by Tracey C. Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Vintage Books.

Colonial Theatricality   41 Schaper, Ulrike. 2012. Koloniale Verhandlungen: Gerichtsbarkeit, Verwaltung und Herrschaft in Kamerun, 1884–1916. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag. Schmidt, Theron. 2010.“’We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality.” Law Text Culture 14, no.1: 55-78. Schramm, Helmar. 2005. “Theatralität.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, Band 6, edited by Karlheinz Barck et al., 48–74. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler. Sieg, Katrin. 2015. “Race, Guilt and Innocence: Facing Blackfacing in Contemporary German Theater.” German Studies Review 38, no. 1: 117–34. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Publications. Wipplinger, Jonathan. 2011. “The Racial Ruse: On Blackness and Blackface Comedy in ­‘Fin-de-siècle’ Germany.” German Quarterly 84, no. 4 (Fall): 457–76.

chapter 2

Theatr ica lit y, Sov er eign t y, a n d R esista nce Beyond Theater of Roots Ameet Parameswaran

In the past couple of decades, the term theatricality has become a significant concept and discourse within the field of theater and performance studies. While the term has been used in English only beginning in the early nineteenth century (Davis and Postlewait, 2003, 2), it has been theorized in differing manners. A significant conceptual theorization of theatricality has been offered by Josette Féral (2002). Féral argues that theatricality cannot be seen as a “property that belongs uniquely to theater” (94). Drawing on a Kantian framework, Féral argues that one can see “the possibility of attributing a transcendent nature to theatricality” (98). Rather than conceiving of theatricality as “a property with analyzable characteristics,” for Féral theatricality is critically “a process that has to do with a ‘gaze’ that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge” (97). This alterity and the cleft in the mundane can be instituted by either an intention of the actor or the gaze of the spectator on the mundane, foregrounding that theatricality allows one to understand “the performance-like character of the social domain” (Hughes and Parry, 2015, 302). While the problematic of alterity is critical, Féral’s conceptual definition of theatricality as transcendental and universal needs to be interrogated, for theatricality is simultaneously a discourse with differing genealogies. Janelle Reinelt (2002), thinking through the genealogies of the terms performativity and theatricality and their contestations, highlights the preference for performativity by the Anglo-American academy as compared to theatricality within the European academy. Reading through these complex genealogies, Reinelt argues for a negotiation between the concepts wherein “the identification of certain of these applications with specific nations or regions, what we might call ‘local struggles,’ enables a challenge to the limits of these discourses in light of an increasingly urgent imperative to

44   Ameet Parameswaran rethink and resituate performance theory in relation to our contemporary transnational situation” (201). Rather than neat partitions or assumptions of superiority of the conceptual strength of either, Reinelt foregrounds the need to think the possibility of the emergence of the new. She suggests that one can think of how “performance makes visible the micro-processes of iteration and the non-commensurability of repetition, in the context of historically sedimented and yet contingent practices, in order that we might stage theatricality, and render palpable possibilities for unanticipated signification” (213). In their introduction to their edited volume, Davis and Postlewait (2003) similarly lay down the complexity in the conceptualization and discourse of theatricality. They rightly highlight how the term has been seen in relation to a range of other terms and ideas, such as ritual, religion, mimesis, theatrum mundi, performance, and performativity, as well as being used as an antonym of antitheatricalism. Historically situating the concept, they write that one cannot “stipulate a single, regulative meaning” (38) for theatricality. Resisting an overly expansive usage of the term that results in erasing differences between the varied terms and ideas, they state that the objective of historical analysis is also to “clarify possible meanings and to account for how and why it resonates with a series of related but distinct terms and ideas, from mimesis and theatrum mundi to metatheatre and performativity” (39). The present paper draws from these perspectives to historically locate theatricality both as an object and as discourse in India in the 1960s through 1980s, focusing on how it was centrally deployed in framing the category of resistance. One central tendency of theater historiography in India posits an overarching postcolonial impulse driving the practices of the period whereby theatrical practices are seen as using ritual and traditional forms to resist the colonialism and the hegemonic practices of Western theater, especially naturalism and realism. This historiographical position has become almost a foundational problematic in understanding postindependence theater in India, especially in the framing of a range of practices brought under the nomenclature “theater of the roots.” Their ideological framing as an authentic return to the roots and a reigniting of the traditions of Natyasastra has been thoroughly critiqued (Bharucha, 1989). Yet the sheer diversity and complexity of the theatrical practices of directors in the varied regions in India have fashioned a reformulation of the practices as “postcolonial resistance” located within a homogenizing (national) culture in the scholarly literature. At the heart of these new interpretations are assumptions about theatricality of modern theater practices as well as what is categorized as indigenous or traditional practices that necessitate an investigation into the relationship posited between theatricality and related ideas of ritual, epic, and performativity. Unpacking these positions about theatricality, or sometimes precisely the absence of the frame of theatricality, such as in ritual or the force of what Reinelt highlights as the “micro-processes of iteration” in performativity, will reveal the limits and the power of this discourse and the imagination of resistance. I argue that it is precisely by the elision of the force of discourses of theatricality and how theatricality opens out the political—especially sovereignty and countersovereignty—in the region that an imagined national is instituted. I specifically investigate the discourses around the theater practices of the significant playwright-director from the southern Indian state of Kerala, K.  N.  Panikkar, on whom now there is a considerable amount of academic focus both in the vernacular Malayalam language and in English. While Malayalam does not have a specific term that is easily translatable as theatricality, I examine how it is being conceptualized even without that nomenclature.1 The first section critically looks at the historiographical framing of Panikkar’s

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   45 practice as postcolonial resistance within a national framework, problematizing their claims about (theatrical) community. The second section explores critical debates on theatricality in the region encapsulated by theater discussions led by the poet and critic Ayyappa Paniker around the early productions of Panikkar. I read these sympathetic discussions as offering a grounded example of spectatorship to what is perceived as an emerging new form, as well as setting up a discourse on theatricality. The paper ends with an exploration of the critical essay by the Malayalam novelist, critic, historian, and public intellectual P. K Balakrishnan on Srikanthan Nair’s trilogy of Ramayana plays, conceptualizing them as a site of understanding a new sonic theatricality—registered as “tone”—that offers a critical world of countersovereignty.2

Theatricality and the Limits of Postcolonial Resistance K. N. Panikkar (1928–2016), the playwright, director, poet, and song lyricist from Kerala, has directed nine Sanskrit productions and authored over twenty original Malayalam plays and directed most of them. Panikkar rose to prominence at the national level with his Sanskrit productions, especially those written by Bhasa, starting with Madhyama Vyayoga, performed at the Kalidasa festival in Ujjain in 1978. The productions draw upon training and movement patterns from kalaripayattu (a martial art form from Kerala); aspects of acting and movements from classical dance and theater such as kathakali, mohiniyattam, and kutiyattam; and the regional ritual-healing performance Teyyam, with music derived from the Kerala temple music tradition of sopanam. The congruence of these diverse elements offers a complex theatrical experience that became the signature style of his productions. Dharwadker (2009, 205) argues that in Panikkar’s aesthetics the relation between text and performance is reconceived as Panikkar uses “the text as an occasion to explore the full range of possibilities of ‘nontextual’ staging and communicates philosophical meanings through physical devices of enactment, thus both elaborating and reinterpreting the ­original.” Theater scholar Brian Singleton (2001) in his analysis of Panikkar’s performance of Teyyateyyam (1991) frames it as resisting both interculturalism as well as colonialism. Drawing on a Saidian critique of Orientalism, Singleton (2001, 134) takes forward A. J. Gunawardana’s critique of how the “rational view of the world” espoused by colonial discourse posited that, in Asia, “many of the received ways of thinking and behaving depend on non-rational (magical, superstitious, religious) beliefs” and therefore are deemed “obstacles to economic and social progress.” As opposed to such economic pressures that urge rationality, Singleton foregrounds that “intracultural” practice “takes on an added political significance in that it is giving currency to inherited culture, and both an allegorical and vital place in the post-colonial world” (134). With this frame, Singleton contextualizes the practices of Sopanam as going back to “its traditional roots in search for a way forward for the modern Indian theatre which, since Independence, has separated itself from its origins in performance terms.” He concludes that by “operating as a non-exploitative bridge between the past and the present, between the rich indigenous traditions and the modern

46   Ameet Parameswaran urban world of the creative arts,” Sopanam allows “Panikkar’s actors [to] exploit their form and practice for new creative expression” (135). The mainstay of Singleton’s analysis is the ritual-healing practice of Teyyam at the heart of the play Teyyateyyam. Starting with his play Daivattar (1973), Panikkar uses the figuration of Teyyam, the ritual-healing performance of northern Kerala, in many of his plays. Teyyam, linked to sacred groves in northern Kerala, is generally performed by the male members of the Vannan, Malaya, and Velan caste groups who were earlier considered “untouchables” by the upper castes. In Teyyam, the performer, who is otherwise regarded as “polluted,” is possessed by the god and performs for the wider heterogeneous communities of the region. In many cases, Teyyam is someone who has been unjustly killed and then deified. In the historical study of Teyyam, Dilip Menon (1993, 189), drawing on a Bakhtinian theorization of carnivalesque, highlights how Teyyam creates a “moral community.” Analyzing the early colonial period and the transformations in the economic structures of northern Malabar and caste equations, Menon foregrounds the ambivalences in the stories of the different popular Teyyams and the way Teyyam-s bring together different hierarchical communities in the same space. Through the analysis of Teyyam stories, Menon shows how they “contain implicit as well as explicit regulations on behaviour, and a sense of right and wrong, of injustice and justice, of morality and immorality emerges,” which he terms “a ‘moral community’ of castes built around a notion of the limits to the actions of both upper and lower castes” (206). In Urubhangam (written by Bhasa and performed in 1987), Panikkar adds to the original text a Teyyam figuration, performed by an actor on stilts, who silently follows the main character, Duryodhana (the antihero of the epic Mahabharata). As Dharwadker argues, without adding any new lines to the original Sanskrit text, this critical visual addition reinterprets the original; by the end of the performance, when Duryodhana dies, through the figure of Teyyam, Duryodhana (dur-evil) is transformed into Suyodhana (suy-good). While these usages of Teyyam in the mise-en-scène allow symbolic interpretations, in his Malayalam plays, including Teyyateyyam, Panikkar interrogates the concrete site of a Teyyam performance, its belief structure, and mythic and real temporalities and transgression. The narrative of Teyyateyyam is complexly layered as it works at two levels. At the first level is the trope of localization of Ramayana as a Teyyam performance, wherein RamaLakshmana-Sita-Hanuman transforms into Daivattar-Ankakkaran-Poonkanni-Beppooran and Ravana becomes a Paranki. Paranki-Ravana is the haughty pirate from Portugal “travelling around the world in his sailing ship” ( Panikkar, 2001, 145) wearing a belt that gives him immense power, and who in his murder has become a Teyyam. Paranki as a figuration indexes the history of colonization in the region with the arrival in India of the first European by sea—Vasco da Gama from Portugal—in the port of Kappad in northern Kerala in 1498. At this level, the problem of sovereignty is problematized with the haughty pirate-colonizer usurping power against what is deemed to be the sovereign—God—who on the other hand does not seem to have any semblance of power and does not belong per se to the region. Having defeated the general population devoted to Daivattar, and Daivattar and Ankakkaran with outright physical strength and magical powers, Paranki, who has taken a liking to Poonkanni, kidnaps her and goes away. This first level of narrative of transgression of Paranki is interrupted as police enter the stage to tell the villagers, “This issue of the story of Ramayana which took place in ancient times [should] be set aside. Even if there

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   47 is a mistake in retelling it, there is nothing to worry” (150). For there is something more pressing at the level of the real in the present. Ramunni, the performer from the lower-caste community who is to perform Paranki Teyyam, has murdered the landlord Mekkanthala, who tried to assault his lover, Kannippoo. After the murder, Ramunni eloped with Kannippoo. The two levels gets theatrically folded into each other in complex ways as one actor plays both Paranki and Ramunni, and another doubles for Poonkanni and Kannippoo, selected by the chorus from the group of actors at various points of the performance. Kannippoo’s father, Satguni, and the police intervene in the first level in their search for Kannippoo. The performance keeps shifting between and at times even merges the two levels. In the mythical one, the dejected Rama and Lakshmana start searching for Sita. Rama is caught in a moment of melancholy, unable to do anything. Unlike in the mainstream Ramayana, Beppooran (Hanuman), after stealing the belt while Paranki sleeps, kills Paranki to bring back Sita. In his death, Paranki emerges as a Teyyam. At the level of Ramunni’s story, on the other hand, he makes the ethical choice of coming back and embodying Paranki Teyyam so that bad times do not fall on the village due to the nonperformance of the ritual-performance. But as he comes to the space of performance, he is murdered by the crowd who has come to watch the performance for his “transgression.” Teyyam of a Teyyam: hence the title and the condition of Teyyateyyam. Singleton (2001) in his analysis of the production discusses Panikkar’s critique of naturalist and realist techniques. Highlighting Panikkar’s notion that the contemporary period is seeing a “corruption of folk forms” as they have moved away from natydharami, Singleton points out that Panikkar’s theater is not simply a critique of interculturalism. Instead it “is a defiant attempt to legitimize his performance heritage by resisting the dominant ideology through ritual practice” (140). Singleton sees ritual as inextricably linked to the “regional belief systems,” and thereby sees Panikkar’s theater as disallowing or nullifying the cleft in the mundane effected by theatricality: “This vital act of transformation in the modern theatre is an allegory of the regional and religious value system. The religious belief represented through theatrical allegory not only resists urbanizing and westernizing rationality, but also any metatheatrical self-consciousness on the part of the spectator. Resistance, therefore, becomes theatrical as well as social, religious, and non-rational” (138–9). With the category of transformation, Singleton folds theatricality of the performances into ritual and religion, ironically in a negation of the former. Theater seems to have shed its specific theatricality to become the allegorical-real ritual itself, with the spectators becoming the participants. Erin B. Mee (2008), on the other hand, while still highlighting the category of “transformation” in Panikkar’s aesthetics, takes the opposing perspective on theatricality by highlighting categories of self and individuated spectators aware of (meta)theatricality. Analyzing theater of roots in India as based on hybridity, Mee states that Panikkar does not reject the proscenium stage completely and thereby undertakes a “deliberate ‘failure’ to completely ‘decolonise’ his theatre. . . . [Panikkar] has created a new hybrid modern theatre on his own terms, rooted in performing arts and culture of Kerala” (130). Basing her analysis on her observation and anecdotal information on the directorial intervention and actors’ processes in rehearsal derived from interaction with Panikkar, Mee describes the performances as critical responses to “text-dominated theatre” (2) as they foreground a new experience that recognizes “the value of the other (non-text based, nonlinear) ways of perceiving, structuring

48   Ameet Parameswaran and processing experience” (6). Mee primarily examines Panikkar’s aesthetic through Sanskritic aesthetic categories such as dhwani, rasa, and the concept of sahrdayan (the ideal spectator as defined by Abhinavagupta as having the quality of imagination), and the role of theater itself to allow for such activation of imagination. She explores how certain techniques of kutiyattam such as pakarnnattam (wherein a character plays other characters, shifting from one to another without any change of costumes or props) as well as svarikkal (a technique of vocalization used in Chakyar Koothu) and the movements and training derived from the martial art kalaripayattu offer the possibility of elaboration and improvisation in theater. For Mee, the transformation of these movements into theater even offers a cleft that allows one to read a sensory critique. For instance, discussing the war sequences in Urubhangam wherein the actors use movements from kalaripayattu, Mee describes the “distancing effect” of war. She says that when the kalaripayattu is turned “into a beautiful slow-motion dance . . . spectators see how much the soldiers actually enjoy the battle in spite of its obvious costs, and the way they get caught up in the beauty of the martial movement that was originally intended to inflict pain.” Though she uses the term distanciation— radically different from Brechtian distanciation—her reading of distanciation is in fact closer to stylization and is at the heart of her argument of transformation effected by the performance. This becomes clear when Mee analyzes the play Ottayan (Lone Tusker), which takes natyadharmi (stylized acting)3 and transformation as its main theme. The play explores the acting capability and power of illusions created by a kutiyattam actor, chakyar. In a forest when the chakyar encounters a lone tusker, he transforms himself into an elephant to scare away the lone tusker, and when he is caught as an elephant by woodsmen and is threatened for life, he destroys this illusion and creates different one of building a house for them in order to escape: the actor himself is the lone tusker in his peregrinations before returning safe to society. As different from the ritualistic framework of transformation, Mee (2008) highlights the possibilities of the actor’s transformation as the basis of defining self. She argues that in Ottayan, self is defined in “terms of behaviour” that makes it radically “anti-essentialist” (111), for Ottayan “forces spectators to practice seeing people” not for who they are, but for what they can become, thereby foregrounding the question of self as “the act of embracing behavior—and the potential for transformation” (111). While Mee does foreground the ways in which Panikkar encourages “participation” as a category, especially for the spectator, she assumes that theatricality is unrelated to cultural conditioning. At the heart of Mee’s critique is at once a celebration of the sovereignty of the actor and his (stylized/natyadharmi) transformations (transferred as value to the masterdirector allowing it) as the basis of a definition of self by the spectator—theatricality as a supposedly transcendental model for life, without interrogating the specificity of theatricality at play in Ottayan and its imbrication in power and conditioning of the spectators. On the other hand, by taking the aesthetic as fully formed, Mee does not address theatricality as an object and discourse formed historically in the region. The problematic of spectatorship she sets up is simply based on an assumption; the complexity of a practice that is precisely felt as new in the region is left uninterrogated. Panikkar’s works, especially the early Malayalam productions, in fact offer a fascinating ground to understand the discourse of theatricality in the region, both setting up the Sanskritic categories that Mee invokes as well as issues it raises in a form (Panikkar’s productions) seen as new and emerging.

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   49

Stylization and the Problem of the New I analyze here in detail the discussions on Ottayan of nine male participants—poets, playwrights, critics, and actors—that bring out complex issues and critiques of the production. In the discussions of Panikkar’s earlier plays, one of the issues that is dealt with in detail is the problem of categorization of his performances: whether it is theater or another kind of performance. C. N. Sreekanthan Nair, the significant playwright who coined the term tanatunatakavedi (authentic or native theater) in his famous C. J. Memorial speech in 1968, foregrounds the impact of Panikkar’s performances. Asserting that with the term tanathu he means that “our theatre should be Authentic” (Paniker, Nair et al, 2008,158; term in italics originally in English), he says that after writing the play Kali his thoughts crystallized to make the call for tanatunatakavedi. Yet with this vision, while he “only thought, spoke of and tried to write plays,” K. N. Panikkar “showed it in performance/presentation” (159), and “the most striking/special aspect of his presentations is that they have the potential to generate a new theatrical form” (161–2). Nair adds, “One cannot say that it has reached a new theatrical form” (162). He sees the possibility for Panikkar’s production to either remain as theater or become something that one cannot categorize as theater once it is formed (163). What the discussants are grasped in the case of Ottayan (Pillai, Paniker et al, 2008) is the eschewal of lokadharmi fully for natyadharmi, and how it affects the quality of experience for the spectator. Kainikkara Kumara Pillai makes his critique bluntly, saying that Ottayan did not move him emotionally as there are no emotions from actual life and not a fragment of a fleeting emotion of karuna (sorrow). The discussants agree that it is not a demand for realism and naturalism as karuna rasa is in fact evoked by forms that are natyadharmi based such as kathakali. Ayyappa Paniker (Pillai, Paniker et al 2008, 311) summarizes the central problem of the peculiarity of the form and the differing responses of the general audience: “First, one group criticises that elements such as dance have not been used as properly as they are in forms such as kathakali. Another group criticises that this is not theatre, and one cannot see real life in it” (311). But the issue at hand seems to be the complex cultural conditioning to theatricality for both actors and spectators and the contemporaneity of performances such as Ottayan. Appukkuttan Nair says that he did not enjoy it, perhaps because the actors were trying to simply imitate the acting patterns of chakyar, which is in fact acting in natyadharmi. K. N. Panikkar responds that the actors did not in fact try to imitate anything. Since they were not trained in either kathakali or kutiyattam, he says, they simply “developed the ‘svarikkal’ technique of chakyar to embellish emotion. . . . The use of it here was to make the emotions stronger. This might come across as imitation for the people who watch kutiyattam in a disciplined manner” (313). Critically, these discussions do not take for granted the question of transformation in a ritualistic manner. Narendra Prasad, like P. K. Balakrishnan, highlights the issue of familiarity or conditioning to understand theatricality in plays such as Ottayan, and that one needs to have watched the earlier performances by Panikkar and connect them to understand Ottayan. Prasad foregrounds his perception of critical distancing in Panikkar’s earlier plays in relation to rituals, a distancing effect distinct from Mee’s folding of distancing into

50   Ameet Parameswaran stylization. Pointing out that, for him, Daivattar offered a very “serious and radically different theatrical experience” (320), he says that the “objective of stylisation in Daivattar was ­simultaneously plot-related as well imaginative. The evidence for it is that the performance could generate in us an intense tragic consciousness even in situations that are humorous. For example, even in a context when the mass transforms into devotees and moves in a procession with humour-filled slogans, in its totality it offers a cynical tragic sense. It touches the heart. The effect of the totality of the work ripples at all points. By creating irony in one context, that work could touch the spectator in its totality” (320; term in italics originally in English). The last part of the discussion takes head-on the central aspect of the play, the notion of theatrical transformation itself as linked to acting style. Prasad raises what he feels is the critical issue in the stylization of chakyar and the woodsmen. Since this theater is not kutiyattam and deals with a theme that is not traditionally dealt with in kutiyattam and is in fact performed before a modern public, Prasad points out, the performance is unable to provide the stylization of the village or folk arts for the woodsmen as they also seem to be caught in the overall classical stylization. He raises the critical issue of how the distinction between classical and folk is not a binary but is a matter of particular disciplining of the body (chitta), and in fact how if the “chakyar loosens his discipline, it merges more with the village-ness of the savages” (327). Ayyappa Paniker succinctly ends the discussion by remarking on a peculiar paradox about the play. He argues that the play raises certain curious questions about theatrical representation itself as it is a rare play that takes theater acting itself as its central theme: “it is not the chakyar who is the character here in the play; instead it is acting itself that is the character.” He adds that one might not expect the playwright to write another play such as Ottayan (327) and concludes the discussion by saying that while the playwright might have kept in mind acting strategies of earlier plays, “the theme of the play is very limited. In a sense, this play is a rehearsal. More than representing an incident, it attempts to explore how an acting system can be made successful. In that sense, [I] think [we] can say that this is an experiment. [One] cannot see the other plays of this playwright in a similar manner. That, in itself, is the uniqueness of this play” (328). The indication of the failures of the performance in the discussion needs to be seen in relation to Mee’s interpretation. Mee attempts to fix the performance in the mainstream normative discourse of Sanskritic imagination by not problematizing the reception of the performances in the region. It is especially significant as Ottayan—which was chosen by the discussants for its failure to capture the contemporary—is in fact a critical performance in Panikkar’s foray into the national. As Panikkar (2008) himself records, after watching a performance of Ottayan in Thiruvananthapuram, a friend of his, Ashok Vajpeyi, then the cultural secretary of Madhya Pradesh, asked him whether he could make a Kalidasa performance in Sanskrit in this style. Since, at the time, he was already thinking about translating Bhasa’s Madhyama Vyayoga, he volunteered to direct it. Panikkar notes, “That’s how I started to direct a play for the first time” (18–9). What was critical in the discussions was not that the play diverged from naturalism or realism; even within the stylization, what was being highlighted was that something was missing at the level of sense and affect. It is not simply that Mee’s nationalist position misses to acknowledge the discourse and simply reiterates the Sanskritic categories. The categories that Mee institutes have been in fact discussed in detail in the region and are set up as a discourse of theatricality. Yet they do not institute a simple binary of text and performance or stylization and realism; instead,

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   51 without extending theatricality and actors’ sovereignty as a model for life, they also in crucial ways are not collapsible to the national as they categorically foreground issues confronting the contemporary. In this sense, it is only by eliding the regional that a national self can be instituted. To understand the regional, I now turn to one specific conceptualization of theatricality that goes beyond the framework of postcolonial resistance to open out the contemporary.

Sonic Theatricality and (Counter) Sovereignty: The Tone of the Contemporary P.  K.  Balakrishnan ([2004]2013), in his article “Sreekanthan Nair and Ramayana Plays,” analyzes Sreekanthan Nair’s trilogy of Ramayana plays, Kanchana Sita (1958), Saketam (1965), and Lanka Lakshmi (1976). Nair, as mentioned earlier, is one of the significant playwrights who in fact coined the term tanatunatakavedi in his famous speech in 1967. The three Ramayana plays, especially the first, Kanchana Sita, have been extremely popular on the stage as well as on the radio, performed in Thiruvananthapuram. Kanchana Sita inspired the iconic film by G.  Aravindan (1977). Following a common strategy in the vernacular critical writings, Balakrishnan merges biographical and anecdotes to accentuate critical analysis of the writer’s oeuvre and its contexts. The article starts by humorously setting up the personality of Nair: his supposed comportment of a king who seems to have been mistakenly born two centuries late (Balakrishnan,  2004, 69). This peculiar comportment is then concretized to the particularity of Nair’s personality with a recollection of Balakrishnan first meeting Nair. While Balakrishnan was working as journalist, Nair once walked into the office asking, “Is Chummar here?” In fact, he was asking in Malayalam, with a stress, “Chhummarivide untho?,” not “Chummarivide undo?” Balakrishnan admits that he might have slightly exaggerated the stress that Nair used, but he is sure that Nair would never have spoken the way a normal person does (70). With this anecdote, Balakrishnan captures the theatricality of language wherein a breach in the mundane occurs as language is brought forth for its sound. Such a gaze of alterity at the first instance records Balakrishnan’s dislike and a critique of Nair’s pompous feudal posturing, wherein the heightened stress of the accent undertakes a Sanskritizing of everyday Malayalam language that seems to exist without any contradiction in the body of the upper-caste Nair. Balakrishnan does indicate this with his reference to the kingly comportment of Nair. Yet, by Balakrishnan through the lens of theatricality and not simply as identity, for Balakrishnan it also becomes a fundamental frame to understand the personality of Nair. Nair is what he terms a “sonic creature” (72). Balakrishnan elaborates the phrase by highlighting the relationship between language, sound, and meaning. He says: It was impossible for Srikanthan to take in sounds of a language at the general level as nomenclatures denoting each and every object. This ability or inability was equally physiological as it was psychological. . . . Srikanthan’s was a self that connects nomenclature-sound and the object in an undivided manner. Shakespeare is lucky that the Shakespearean saying “What is

52   Ameet Parameswaran in a name?” did not come to the attention of Srikanthan early in his life, for he would have changed it to “Everything is in a name.” The objects, ideas, sensations—all these can be taken in by Srikanthan’s consciousness and self only through a special order or arrangement of sound. (72–3)

After setting up this basic premise of a special relationship to sound, Balakrishnan ([2004]2013) analyzes Nair’s plays in relation to the amateur theater forum in Thiruvananthapuram. Balakrishnan highlights that the Thiruvananthapuram theater, having a seventy-five-year tradition, was based on the two strands of prahasanam (social satire, farce) and historical plays. For him, these strands as well as overall sensibility and “his own innate interest in exaggerated sound” possibly generated in Nair “the desire to write Kanchana Sita” (76). He further argues that what might have given “concrete form” to this desire was the Thiruvananthapuram amateur theater that surrounded him and the constant audiences that it drew. The description of the amateur theater practice itself and the value that Balakrishnan ascribes to it seem to be guided by an antitheatrical impulse: an amateur theater in which “the important actor uses a style of declamation, [uses] selective strategies to create stage effects for them, the Kanchana Sita is a play that has been written keeping in mind their fixed and decided nature of declamations and movements that generates assured celebratory response from the audience. . . . In my understanding once the style of speaking dialogues, action segments, etc. have seeped into his mind, similar to the “Six Characters In Search Of An Author,” Srikanthan Nair in his search for the ideal play arrived at the story of Sita’s abandonment” (76). After setting up where Nair might have drawn the primary sources for his play (in certain novels and interpretations other than Valmiki’s version), he concludes that after watching the production umpteen times, even with a strong desire to identify the artistic value in it, he comes to the conclusion that one cannot ascribe any more artistic value to it than one ascribes to the commercial theater of the time (78). The antitheatricalism of Balakrishnan’s position need to contextualized. When one takes into account that his reckoning that Lanka Lakshmi as a classic tragedy had occurred to him while listening to the play being read by Nair, one wonders whether such a position is a simple negation of theatrical practices of the time by categorizing them as commercial. In his study Stage Fright, Martin Puchner (2002) argues that one needs to move away from the tendency of seeing celebration of theatricality (by the avant-garde) and antitheatrical impulse (by modernism) as a binary. Puchner writes that in fact one has to understand the “constitutive anti-theatrical dynamic within modernism as a form of resistance” (2). Antitheatricalism is a “process that is dependent on that which it negates and to which it therefore remains calibrated. . . . The resistance registered in the prefix anti thus does not describe a place outside the horizon of the theater, but a variety of attitudes through which the theater is being kept at arm’s length and, in the process of resistance, utterly transformed” (2). Balakrishnan’s modernist resistance invokes (anti)theatricality to open up a relationship between the theatricality, soundscape, and sovereignty. The critique of sonic theatricality of Thiruvananthapuram amateur theater in relation to Kanchana Sita foregrounds the formulaic sovereignty wherein the audience is stunned into subjection and celebration in the experience of sovereignty. The relation between characters in the Rama play who use only codified comportments, gestures, and styles of declamations and the audience are formal, ritualized, with theatricality simply restaging and reproducing

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   53 the performative world of sovereignty in its full glory and power, as they experience it in the heavy-sounding Sanskritic Malayalam in the present—“fireworks,” in Balakrishnan’s terms. Against this celebration of sovereignty, Balakrishnan highlights how Nair relocates and gets disconnected from the amateur theater circle and engages deeply with Valmiki’s Ramayana, and that the gap of sixteen years to the play Saketam marks the transformation of the formulaic sonic theatricality and the arrival of a different tone. Balakrishnan (2004, 88) argues that Nair’s later Ramayana plays evidence how “rather than as a device to communicate necessary words to describe necessary facts and ideas, language has transformed into an investigator discerning objects that yield to ‘proper/suitable’ nomenclature-sounds. [For Srikanthan] sound was the central emphasis/thrust of his aesthetics as well as the self-manifesting value or the value that exists on its own accord. I consider that this impediment of talent/gift was also his special talent.” In fact in Nair, this skill of sound offers “accomplishment of total illumination” and has “risen and risen” to a “grand tone” (88). Balakrishnan highlights the difficulty of adapting epics in the present as one cannot simply differentiate characters using normal dialects and variations nor make a complete move away from the normal language; it requires an artificial language and its mannerisms, “unnatural story-fragment; unnatural characters; unnatural language.” “The writer has the difficult work of generating a feeling of reality and authenticity of movement of action while holding on to these and within that construct moving non-human characters as believably self-complete individuals who could be distinguished from each other.” Critically, in the process Balakrishnan investigates what might be the appropriate register of public address and how varying “public address” as performative iteration constitutes differing political subjects. Highlighting the use of words nee (you), karanavare (lord), and unni (son) in the Lanka Lakshmi in place of feudal terms such as adiyan (slave, said by one in lower-caste status) and rajan (king, said by one in lower status) between various characters and Ravana, Balakrishnan lucidly shows the distinction between language and its sonic effect in the three plays. Resisting the formal protocol of address, the world of the sovereign has suddenly become intimate; the address is not royal, but it is still elevated and elite. Balakrishnan argues that it is not the absence of sound that distinguishes them; instead, “the sounds have loosened” (96). “Lanka Lakshmi is also an art of sound”; “it is a literary and theatrical art wherein emotions and meanings are attracted to sound” (96) and where, “many a times, the unrelenting/implacable ill-temperedness of even meaningless sound has transformed into unceasing reverberating serious/grand emotion” (98). Balakrishnan contextualizes this aesthetics of language: “Lanka Lakshmi is not happening in the ordinary level of believability of life; instead, it happens at the truly believable extraordinary level of the extraordinary” (99). While the essay starts with a funny anecdote about Nair, it ends with one linking the relationship between Nair and his mother, with whom he was living during the writing of the play and who was diagnosed with cancer and passed away before the play was finished. Balakrishnan places the gendered performative intimacy between mother and son in relation to the sequences of Kaisiki (Ravana’s mother) with Mandodari (Ravana’s wife) and the latter’s description of his mother’s wishes to Ravana. This movement from a seeming pompous Nair to a personal tragedy to the citation of the intimate relationship on the one hand reveals how the play recasts light on the contemporary by transforming Ravana into a classic tragic figure and thereby the world of sovereignty as a world of contestation and failure: a world of countersovereignty. On the other hand, reflecting in detail on the qualities of the tragic wherein Ravana’s fall is not simply a fall of an individual but emblematic of the fall of

54   Ameet Parameswaran rakshasas in all its grandeur and sorrow as distinct from the binary characterization of Ravana as a villain or a hero, Balakrishnan ends by saying that while the characters of this epic could have been “dead characters,” the reason the main characters are able to be dynamic and offer a tragic sensibility is the personal in Nair: his gift that recasts the world through sonic theatricality. Ravana’s tragic questioning of himself—“Was my life a futile endeavour?”—is a condition of exposure as opposed to celebration of sovereignty that crystallizes both the tragedy of the rakshasa clan in the epic as well as the tragedy of a consciousness inextricably tied to theatricality. Distinct from nationalist definitions of India as time immemorially absenting the tragic, Balakrishnan therefore ends by asserting that Lanka Lakshmi holds a place in the Malayalam cultural world precisely because it is an ideal Greek tragedy that captures the tone of the tragic in the contemporary.

Conclusion The nationalist framing of postcolonial resistance in relation to theater posits a binary of West-East (Greek-Indian/Keralite) and text and performance and projects a preexisting and often homogeneous community of spectators. Concentrating on the lens of theatricality demands that one needs to problematize these binary positions. By historicizing theatricality as an object and discourse in the 1960s through 1980s, I have explored the significance of practices as experimentation and how sometimes it is in marking their failures that the potentiality of the new is felt. The discussion of theatricality in the form of tone in Balakrishnan in this vein offers something distinct from the nationalist position. Far from a universal understanding of theatricality, Balakrishnan thinks through theatricality as a cleft in the mundane, wherein theatricality opens out countersovereignty at the everyday (performativity of public address), the personal, as well as the artistic (poetic, theatrical world of the extraordinary). It is precisely the sociopolitical that is opened out as tone without assuming an authentic community or already formed community before the performance, as Balakrishnan highlights a theatrical community, a community constituted through the soundscape that can register the newness troubling the existing worlds of sovereignty and power.

Notes 1. The word that might be used for “theatricality” in Malayalam is natakeeyam, derived from the term natakam used for “theater.” Yet it does not capture the issues foregrounded by the term theatricality. The term natakam used as a generic term for theater is the ideal form of play as categorized in the Sanskrit text Natyasastra. The usage and popularization of the term itself points to questions of power as it erases the distinct terms in vernacular languages such as koothu, aattam, etc. 2. All translations of the theater discussions as well as Balakrishnan’s article from Malayalam to English are mine. 3. Natyasastra distinguished between natyadharmi and lokadharmi. While the former is stylized, the latter is acting based on the everyday.

Theatricality, Sovereignty, and Resistance   55

References Balakrishnan, P.  K. 2004. “C.  N.  Srikanthan Nairum Ramayana Natakangalum.” In P.K Balakrishnante Lekhanangal, 69–113. Kottayam: D. C. Books. Bharucha, Rustom. 1989. “Notes on the Invention of Tradition.” Economic and Political Weekly 24, no. 33: 1907–14. Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait. 2003. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. 2009. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Feral, Josette, 2002. “Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language.” Trans. By R.P. Bermingham. SubStance 31, no. 2: 94–108. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2002.0026. Hughes, Jenny, and Simon Parry. 2015. “Introduction: Gesture, Theatricality, and Protest— Composure at the Precipice.” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3: 300–12. Mee, Erin B. 2008. Theatre of Roots: Redirecting the Modern Indian Stage. Calcutta: Seagull. Menon, Dilip M. 1993. “The Moral Community of the Teyyattam: Popular Culture in Late Colonial Malabar.” Studies in History 9, no. 2: 187–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 025764309300900203. Paniker, Ayyappa, Sreekanthan Nair et al. 2008. “Nataka Charcha-1: Accatippaathavum, Abhinayapaathavum.” In Kavalam Natakangal: Natakangal, Pathanangal, 150–187. Kozhikode: Haritham Books. Panikkar, Kavalam Narayana. 2001. “ ‘Teyyateyyam’ Once a God-Dancer, Now a God-Head.” Indian Literature 45, no 5 (205): 143–65. Panikkar, Kavalam Narayana. 2008. “Pinnampurangal.” In Kavalam Natakangal: Natakangal, Pathanangal, 15–21. Kozhikode: Haritham Books. Pillai, Kainikkara Kumara, Ayyappa Paniker et al. 2008. “Nataka Charcha-3.” In Kavalam Natakangal: Natakangal, Pathanangal, 302–328. Kozhikode: Haritham Books. Puchner, Martin. 2002. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reinelt, Janelle  G. 2002. “The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality.” SubStance 31, no. 2: 201–15. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2002.0037. Singleton, Brian. 2001. “K. N. Panikkar’s ‘Teyyateyyam’: Resisting Interculturalism through Ritual Practice.” Indian Literature 45, no. 5 (205): 133–40.

chapter 3

Au then ticit y a n d Theatr ica lit y World Spectatorship and the Drama of the Image Adrian Kear

Introduction In his famously coruscating critique of the “jargon of authenticity,” Theodor Adorno (1973) traduces the tendency of early twentieth-century philosophy to valorize existentialist markers such as authenticity, care, and death in a way that occludes their historicity as products of material social processes and casts them as seemingly self-evident, politically incontestable terms. For Adorno, the use of these words to denote supposedly self-referential content demonstrates the mystification of language into a mode of “magical expression” or “jargon” that serves to naturalize an ideological formation and justify its relations of domination. Terms like authenticity appear to lay claim to exist outside of historical determination and reification rather than being produced by them, as if authored by an absolute creative subject rather than articulated to political processes of fetishization and subjectification. If Adorno’s point is that there is no simple, objective presence outside the modes of representation that do the work of making present, then it follows that the term authenticity should be conjoined with another term that indicates the constructed nature of this presentation and its operation of staging: theatricality. This juxtaposition is not designed simply to void the authentic of its apparent content by suggesting it is something “inauthentic” but rather, as Erica Fischer-Lichte (1995, 88) notes, to mark “a shift of dominance within the semiotic function” by which it achieves its effects so that it appears “not as an objective given” but as contingent upon historical conventions and structures of representation. Theatricality, Fischer-Lichte contends, can be seen to appear when signs operate as “signs of signs,” drawing attention to the arbitrariness and ontological emptiness of the sign as such and marking its ideological construction. In this respect, as Elin Diamond (1988, 85) has argued, theatricality

58   Adrian Kear operates as both a medium of signification and the means by which “the spectator is enabled to see a sign system as a sign system.” The interconnections between theatricality and authenticity are explored from a slightly different perspective by Elizabeth Burns (1972) in her foundational text on the subject. Burns suggests that theatricality becomes evident when a gap is opened up between the social norms governing spontaneously lived and ideologically naturalized forms of behavior and breaches in the modes of presentation “composed according to this grammar of rhetorical and authenticating conventions” (33). For Burns, theatricality is characterized as depending on historically and culturally determined authenticity effects framed by aesthetic codes and discursive practices which construct a specific mode of relationship with the spectator. This frame constitutes theatricality as a “mode of perception” (3) rather than an ontological condition, a way of seeing as much as an apparatus of staging, in which the space between reality and representation is opened up at the very moment it is subsumed into the normalizing conventions of the ideological formation. Josette Féral (1982, 178) advances this proposition by arguing that theatricality “emerges from the play between these two realities,” positioning the spectator as a “desiring subject” imbricated in its operation. For Féral (2002, 10–11), “theatricality is the result of an act of recognition on the part of the spectator” in which they perceive “cleavages” or ruptures in the fabric of representation. These “cleavages” reopen the gap between presence and representation, “reality and fiction,” in a way that “creates disjunction” and disrupts “systems of signification.” Yet theatricality is also at play in covering over this gap, “suturing the real and the really made-up” (Taussig, 1993, 86). Theatricality is therefore “not necessarily resistive or contestatory; it is as much inscribed in the regime of representation as in any apparent moment of its destabilization” (Kear,  2019, 301). Accordingly, theatricality is not simply experienced by the spectator as a moment of recognition; it is implicated in the production of the spectator as subject and the cultural construction of the spectator position. In this respect, it is important to recall Christopher Balme’s (2007, 98) designation of theatricality as “a particularly Western style of thought which ultimately was brought to bear on most of the colonized world.” Drawing heavily on Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism, Balme cautions that theatricality and colonialism are “related phenomena” and that rather than opening up a horizon of “alterity,” as Féral (2002, 12) claims, theatricality constructs “a closed field, a theatrical stage” repeating colonial perspectives (Said, 1978, 63). The “mode of perception” produced through theatricality’s cultural and historical construction of spectatorship therefore needs to be interrogated as part of a colonial regime of representation. In this chapter, I propose to trace its operation within and across a series of visual scenes that serve to demonstrate both the codependency of the authenticity-theatricality relation in the cultural politics of spectatorship and its central position in the construction, circumscription, and continuation of racialized ways of seeing. By pursuing this “method of dramatization,” I aim to show rather than simply explain its cultural and historical formation, allowing access to “the dramatic dynamisms that thus determine it in a material system” (Deleuze, 2004, 98). The scenes are drawn from a repertoire of images that seek to capture, in various ways, the “drama of immigration” attendant on the contemporary crisis of clandestine migration and the forced trafficking of people that makes up what Ruben Andersson (2014, 37, 14) calls the “illegality industry.” At the same time, the images also evidence the fact that border politics and policing itself involve a certain “staging,” the construction of a mise-en-scène of risk, rescue, and redemption and the composition of sympathetic and consolatory registers of

Authenticity and Theatricality   59 address. Each scene presents a singular event as an image, restaging it as an optic through which to view the relations of presence and representation underpinning its operation. Taken together, the scenes are composed dramaturgically to demonstrate the workings of the material system of spectatorship they evidence and expose, interweaving the perceptions, affects, and visceral experience of the aesthetic-political regime from which they emerge (Rancière, 2013, xi).

Scene 1: “The Horrors of the Sea” After a month that had witnessed some of the worst episodes of the contemporary crisis of “irregular migration” in the Mediterranean, including an infamous shipwreck off Lampedusa in which an estimated 700 to 1,100 people died after being locked by traffickers in the cargo hold, BBC News Magazine published a collection of images by the award-winning photographer Juan Medina under the title “The Horrors of the Sea” (April 27, 2015). Although none of the images selected was actually of the events of that month, they were nonetheless presented as testifying to the recent disasters at sea. In appearing to make visible something that otherwise could not be seen, their authenticity (as real photographs, capturing real events) was put into the service of theatricality (as a mode of perception, a constructed point of view) in order to produce and reproduce political effects. The photographs are presented to the viewer as a visual point of access to an invisible and inaccessible scene by actively creating a spectator position from which they are to be seen. They work, in other words, through a logic of staging in which the authenticity of the image is articulated to the theatricality of its composition. One image in particular seems to condense and display the dynamics of the authenticitytheatricality relation and its construction of a privileged spectator position. It shows the terrified faces of six black men desperately trying to clamber aboard a rescue boat after their makeshift patera had capsized. As several hands reach up toward the deck, one man’s face, centrally framed, looks up at the camera as he appears to be sinking down into the depths. The drowning man seems to return the viewer’s gaze directly, his look of helpless entreaty— captured at the very moment of his disappearance into the sea—locking the mode of perception of the image into a theatrical relation through which the spectator’s pity is generated in response to his precarity. The face of a drowning man is thereby turned into the image of clandestine migration— commodified, circulated, and reproduced regardless of the context of its production or “authentic” signification. His mute presence is made to speak for the figure of the migrant that he appears to embody and express, the image economy theatricalizing him as an actor whose iconic function extends far beyond the confines of his own self-presentation. Medina took the photograph over a decade earlier, yet it is redeployed here to visualize an otherwise unseen disaster off the coast of southern Italy. The reproduction of the image in this context is designed to suture a gap in the visual field by drawing upon the repertoire of representations through which it is repeatedly structured. The photograph of the drowning man appears as a surrogate for an otherwise unrepresented scene of suffering, its authenticity as the material trace of a singular event being subsumed into its signifying function within a regime of representation. Medina himself seems super-conscious of the tendency to tear

60   Adrian Kear these images away from the material conditions of their production. He notes that the image was taken in pitch darkness, without his being able to see anything. The flash alone illuminated the scene as “a glimpse of the unseen,” creating the iconic image of the drowning man as “a bare, naked, drowning life,” even though Medina’s own intention had been to move beyond the construction of a “humanitarian gaze” (Andersson, 2014, 151–4). Yet the image is circulated within a visual economy designed to reproduce the ideological stability, political security and liberal sensibilities of the spectator position it constructs. As Georges Didi-Huberman (2007, 69) reminds us, “The event—emotional or ‘pathetic’ as it is in our case—never comes to us without the form that presents it to the gaze of others.” The image is never simply seen (in its authenticity); it is always formed by historical relations of seeing and culturally constructed modes of perception (its theatricality).

Scene 2: “Our Boat” The theatrical cleavage created in the visual field by the absence of an authentic image of the disaster at sea of April 18, 2015—the event of a shipwreck that, by definition, it would have been impossible for the spectator to see—was reopened by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel’s contribution to the 2019 Venice Biennale. Highly controversially, Büchel’s exbibit, Barca Nostra (Our boat), consisted solely of the installation of the recovered remains of the Lampedusa shipwreck on the quayside of the Arsenale. The boat had been salvaged by the Italian navy in 2016, with the then prime minister, Matteo Renzi, proposing to send the wreck to Brussels as a reminder of “the scandal of migration.” While this suggestion offers a tacit recognition that border politics and policing always involve a certain desire to render clandestine migration “spectacularly visible” (Andersson, 2014, 138), the fact that the boat was shipped off to the Biennale makes its function as visual spectacle appear almost inconvertible. Despite the claims made by the organizers that Barca Nostra serves as “collective monument and memorial to contemporary migration” by representing “the collective policies and politics that create these kinds of disasters,” the exhibition of this authentic artifact reclaimed from the sea in fact performs its act of political recuperation through the dramatic dynamisms of theatricality. Although the authenticity of the boat itself is not in question—the holes ripped in the side of the hull can be clearly seen—the staging of it as an image most certainly is. For the scene being indexed necessarily remains unseen—the almost unimaginable scene of drowning, terrified people locked inside the hold—which renders the boat a scene of crime regardless of its disjunctive semiotic situating of the spectator by its framing upon dry land. In his seminal book, Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg (1997) recounts how images produce the ground of not only conceptual thinking but political subjectivation. Using the image of the spectator’s relation to the scene of shipwreck as an extended example of the process of constructing “an inviolable, solid ground for one’s view of the world”—a political as well as epistemological standpoint—he traces the historical formation of world spectatorship as a cultural practice or way of life. Starting with the classical formulation set by Lucretius’s evaluation of the pleasure of observing the “scene of emergency at sea”— which derives not from enjoyment of another’s suffering but rather from “enjoying the

Authenticity and Theatricality   61 safety of one’s own standpoint” and perception of subjective security (26)—Blumenberg situates the spectator as the incarnation of the pleasures of theoretical distance over experiential engagement. It is therefore not surprising that the spectator metaphor seems to find its structure of feeling directly embodied in the theatrical scenario. If “it is only because the spectator stands on firm ground that he [sic] is fascinated by the fateful drama on the high seas”—i.e., the spectator’s experience is itself devoid of danger because it is both vicarious and at a safe distance—then “theatre illustrates the human situation in its purest form. . . . Only when the spectators have been shown to their secure places can the drama of human imperilment be played out before them. This tension, this distance, can never be great enough” (39). The political operation of the shipwreck metaphor is to ground the spectator as its effect. Theatrically, the spectatorial relation is inscribed in the materiality of distance necessary to produce the illusion of proximity and emotional affect; the pull of intimacy and the push of distance continually reframe the performance of otherness as a means of shoring up the security of the spectator’s political subjectivity and sensibilities. Something of this configuration can be seen to be in play in the aesthetic construction of Barca Nostra as theatrical mise-en-scène. It is “our boat” not only because the image is the construction of the spectator (and the disaster is thereby framed as “our responsibility”) but also because the material position of the spectator is reaffirmed by the boat’s very appearance as image. Even though “simple images turn us into spectators,” as Blumenberg (2010, 31–2) puts it, “there is no connection between the sinking ship out there and safety here, other than the heartfelt weighing of form of life [Lebensformen].” This lack of connection foregrounds dramatization as a mode of political subjectivation through the theatricalizing operation of world-spectating. The dramatic scene functions as a dispositif whose theatrical setup and performative operation serve not only to reinstantiate the spectator as the locus of political subjectivation but to act as a reminder of the inseparability of the event from its mode of representation. Accordingly, the drama of the image is composed as much through triangulation with the spectator as it is through pure presentation. The spectator’s encounter with the image can thereby operate as the site for reopening rather than simply foreclosing the tension between authentic presence and theatrical representation, providing the opportunity for exceeding the containment of the dramatic frame and creating a moment of aesthetic experience that “pulls presence into another world, creating a hole in the visual field” (Demos, 2013, 99).

Scene 3: “After the Torture of the Storm” The drama of J. M. W. Turner’s controversial masterpiece, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (The Slave Ship) (1840)—appears to condense the theatrical depiction of a scene of historical suffering into a visual intensification of the dynamics of the spectatorial relation (Figure 3.1). A noncommissioned work first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 to coincide with the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, the painting seeks to confront the horrors of the “middle passage” and the criminal trafficking of human beings. The specific historical event it references—the decision by the

62   Adrian Kear

figure 3.1.  Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), J.M.W. Turner, 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced by permission. captain of The Zong, in 1781, to cast his live “cargo” into the sea to try to outrun the coming storm and then claim the “loss” for insurance purposes (Riding and Johns,  2014, 257)— operates as a synecdoche for the broader catastrophe of transatlantic slavery. The scene of the disaster at sea is thereby set up to configure, metonymically, the disastrous effects of the trade as a dehumanizing tragedy, viscerally illustrating the reduction of life to the level of the commodity. At the same time, the work is not simply representational. The event of this image appears to be not only the scene depicted within it—the event it captures, presented at a standstill— but the simultaneous opening out of the image as the locus of the viewer’s aesthetic encounter and experience: the “event of the gaze, ephemeral and partial” (Didi-Huberman, 2005, 156). The viewer is struck by the image’s flatness rather depth, by its frontal, almost confrontational visual address. The line traced by the light of the setting sun appears to create a fold in the fabric of the depicted scene, pushing the perspective forward and outward so that it seems to simultaneously pull the sky over the sea to produce a disorienting experience of vertiginous “frontality” under the pressure of which the image “suddenly rends” (Didi-Huberman, 2005, 228). With this rupturing of the horizontal plane, the materiality of the image itself—as painting—appears to interrupt the scene it represents, breaking open the ostensibly representational logic of the composition to construct a distinctively theatrical visual event. This moment of interruption, in which the viewer becomes the event’s spectator, thereby opens up the image as drama. The frontal fold creates an asymmetric cut within the

Authenticity and Theatricality   63 composition of the seascape, establishing a diagonal relation between the subject of the image—the slave ship occupying the left of the central horizontal plane—and the anamorphic objects floating in the foreground. These are the material traces of presence upon which the painting builds its theatrical, representational economy: bits of broken bodies turned into image material, the remnants of transported human beings whose fragmented limbs remain gazed upon insistently. While the severed leg in foreground seems to disrupt the spectator’s field of vision and recodify the act of looking as an act of witnessing, it nonetheless functions within the painting’s visual economy to reproduce the relations of power and exchange it appears to critique. The image seeks to confront the spectator with the fact of slavery through the theatrical instrumentalization of slavery’s suffering, inviting us to both look on in horror and to look away in disgust and shame. The painting’s register of address is thereby both sympathetic and consolatory, a drama staged directly to enable the spectator to experience politically the theatrical dynamics of emotional proximity and optical distance, simultaneously allowing us to be pulled into the aesthetic of the image and repulsed by its representational frame. The spectator is thereby positioned as the point of assimilation and integration of the agonistic confrontation between “the guilty ship” metonymically indexing the extended network of economic relations practiced by the triangular trade and the torturous suffering of the discarded “dead and dying” rendered visible in the foreground of the painting even as its visual structure appears to rend, splitting open the gap between the materiality of the image as representation and the materiality of what it represents. In this moment of confronting the image, “vision is here rent between seeing and looking: the image is rent between representing and self-representing,” constructing an “event of the gaze” in which the viewer experiences their own subjective position—their point of view, so to speak—as partially and temporarily “breached,” as if being looked at while looking, forced to “face up” to “what presents a front to us—of what looks at us—when we look” (Didi-Huberman, 2005, 156, 271). What this image of atrocity confronts us with, and what it makes us confront, is something like the politics of spectatorship sui generis, requiring us to examine how what we see affects and alters us and reproduces and reinscribes the logic of world spectatorship itself. This necessitates that we interrogate how seeing suffering not only “ruins but renews our desire to see,” how the very act of looking at the image effectively reenacts the logic of the gesture it interrupts so that “it infects our gaze, meaning that our gaze is devastated but holds on, resists, returns,” repeats (Didi-Huberman, 2003, 278). In other words, the aesthetic-political experience of being confronted by the image appears as but one moment of a dialectical movement in which the regime of representation renews itself through the recuperative dynamics of repetition. Turner’s staging of the scene of suffering functions within an explicitly “racialized regime of representation” (Hall et al., 1997, 245) in which the objectification of the black subject is rendered and repeated in its dismemberment, displacement, and disappearance into the structure of signification (Bhabha, 1994, 92). The fragmented black bodies in the foreground of the painting—visual evidence of the “epistemic violence” of the racist gaze despite being aimed at producing in the spectator the sententious affect of its antiracist inversion—appear at once to disrupt and to restabilize the allegorical shipwreck’s disastrous field of vision. The materiality of the violence suffered by them becomes tacitly yet tangibly integrated into the materiality of the painting itself, rendered visible in the swirling surface of the seascape on the canvas at the same time that it disappears “after the torture of the storm.” The phrase is John Ruskin’s, who eulogizes The Slave Ship as “the noblest sea . . . ever painted by man,” “a perfect composition . . . dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions.”

64   Adrian Kear Ruskin’s reading thereby continues the overextension of the logic of displacement and ­disappearance by removing the tortured black figures from the scene entirely, as Paul Gilroy (1993, 14–7) notes, relegating their significance to a footnote reluctantly recognizing that “the near sea is encumbered with corpses” while elevating the presumed subject of the painting to the spectator’s encounter with the Sublime. To this extent, Gilroy argues, Turner’s painting “remains a useful image not only for its self-conscious moral power” but as an index of how “modernity itself might be thought to begin in the constitutive relationships” it frames with racialized others (16–7). For Gilroy, the painting’s reception illustrates the processes by which “race has been tacitly erased” from the discussion of aesthetic experience—both at the level of content and in the constitution of discourses of spectatorship— and yet at the same time returns within in the historical regime of representation that appears to enact its disavowal. While this demonstrably negates the work’s “racial content” by refusing to afford it an “aesthetic significance of its own” (Gilroy, 1998, 335–7), the dynamics of modernity’s racialized regime of representation do not simply serve to dramatize content alone but situate the theatrical production of spectatorship’s mode of perception as integral to the construction of a racialized frame, form, and regime of representation.

Scene 4: “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ ” The contention that the politics of spectatorship, race, and representation are mutually co-constituting is not exactly a new one. Stuart Hall’s textbook essay “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” for example, traces the historicity of the practices of representation “which have been used to mark racial difference and signify the racialized ‘Other’ ” throughout the colonial and postcolonial formation, arguing that they provided the “discursive site through which . . . ‘racialized knowledge’ was produced and circulated” (Hall et al., 1997, 239, 244). Drawing on a range of cultural historians, he demonstrates the centrality of the development of a “racialized regime of representation” to both the operation of colonial power relations and the identification of aesthetic-political strategies of critique and contestation. Crucially, this recognizes that “the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which ‘difference’ is represented” (232)—the objectifying technologies of display and degradation, fragmentation and fetishism—functions as an apparatus of subjectification, securing the reproduction of the power-knowledge effects of racial difference and racialized ways of seeing at the level of lived subjectivities. The call to the spectacle of the other is therefore both reiterative of the visual dynamics of Fanonian “epidermalization: literally, the inscription of race on the skin” (Hall, 1996, 16) and reduplicative of the internalization of these in historically lived identities. For Hall, following Fanon, both the racially marked performativity of blackness and the relatively unmarked normative position of spectatorial whiteness are co-constituted by the regime of representation’s apparatus of staging, mimetically reproduced through its construction of positions of enunciation and identification and structural logics of enactment and observation (20). The appearance of the black body in the space of representation is always, in this respect, an appearance in the “place of the other” on the stage constructed by the gaze of the white spectator, which confirms the spectator’s whiteness as its effect. The “epistemic violence” of such a staging of blackness creates a discombobulation disrupting the black body’s “own frame of reference,” rendering its “field of vision

Authenticity and Theatricality   65 disturbed,” split, and alienated by the incorporation of an external perspective (Bhabha, 1986, xii). Not only, then, are the subjectivating dynamics of race co-constitutive—producing and reproducing the identificatory binary white/black as the ontological effect of the representational “return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in the Other place from which it comes”—but so too are the structural relations governing its appearance in “the differentiating order of otherness” (Bhabha, 1994, 45). Race and representation must therefore be seen as co-constitutive, at least within the dynamics of the persisting social formation, operating through modes of repetition congruent with the theatricality of the actor-spectator relation and the performativity of dis/identifications made through, before, and for the gaze of the Other. Hall recounts numerous instances in which the specific modalities of theatrical display have served to condense, codify, and contain the relational configuration of race and representation into the formal fixity of stereotypical images of racial difference and alterity. Foremost among these is the notorious exhibition of Saartjie Baartman, otherwise known as “The Hottentot Venus,” whose objectification “through the medium of display” provided the precursor to the nineteenth-century form of the living ethnological exhibit (Greenhalgh, 1988, 82) and the instantiation of a pruriently pathological and fetishizing view of racially and sexually marked bodies. Brought to London from the Cape region of South Africa in 1809, two years after the abolition of the slave trade by Britain, Baartman’s exhibition as a cultural curiosity apparently designed to justify colonial exploitation through the ocular “evidence” of the spectacle was controversial from the outset. Her self-presentational performances on a raised platform drew condemnation from antislavery protestors who objected to the humiliating and degrading utilization of the conventions of the “freak show” to install a logic of racialized cultural difference. As Susan Stewart ([1984] 1992, 109) has argued, these spectacles produced the performer as “anomalous” in the eyes of the viewer by creating and accentuating the distance—and thereby the difference—between performer and spectator, “normalizing” the position and self-perception of the latter in the process. Central to the construction of such distance was the denial of a verbal relation between actor and audience, achieved by the muting of the performer’s voice so that she could only be seen to show herself as image rather than speak for herself as a subject. Accordingly, spectatorial interpretation was mediated by the barker acting as commentator on both the action and the performer, remediating the significance of the performer’s presence for the benefit and entertainment of the audience (109–10). Such compression of the space between presentation and representation attempted to anchor the performance in an apparently self-authenticating “reality,” situating the performer as seemingly unaware of the representational—and political—frame governing her appearance and theatricalizing her behavior as performance. The erasure of any signs of direction, choreography, or even rehearsed behavior sought to ensure that the authenticity of the show confirmed the ideological reality of the representation as well as obscuring its reality as representation. In order to assure spectators of the “naturalness” of the display—and reassure them of the propriety of their own spectating—the theatrical setup of the spectacle demanded of the performer “a feigned unawareness of the very act of performance” (Strother, 1999, 33), an orchestrated and internalized denial of her agency as an actor. It is therefore not surprising that, in the case of the living ethnological exhibit especially, signs of resistance to the display or reluctance to enact its objectifying dynamics were identified as evidence of coercion and control by antislavery campaigners concerned that free

66   Adrian Kear actors would not consent to their own racial humiliation and sexual degradation. In the case of Baartman’s exhibition in London in 1810, the tension between the apparent agency of the performer and the spectatorial affect of the performance was eventually tested in a court case. The abolitionists who brought the case pointed to Baartman’s reluctance to play her instrument, and therefore her role, as evidence of her compulsion to perform. The case was lost on the grounds that Baartman gave her “consent” to perform, and thereby participated in the representation itself, repeating the long history of protecting the vicarious violence of the voyeuristic spectator through recourse to the attestation of willing participation by the objectified performer (Strother, 1999, 32–3).

Scene 5: Restaging “The Spectacle of ‘the Other’ ” Something of these dynamics returns in the periodic reemergence of the figure of “The Hottentot Venus” as “the embodiment of difference” (Hall et al., 1997, 265)—racial and sexual—long after the withdrawal of Baartman’s body from theatrical, medical, and museological display. Her function as “the central image of the black female throughout the nineteenth century” appears to reappear, for example, in the South African director Brett Bailey’s highly contested resurrection of the living ethnological exhibit as a contemporary performance form. Exhibit B was presented at the Black Box Theatre in Galway, Ireland, in July 2015 after the shows in London and Paris were either canceled or disrupted by protest at the work’s self-evident resuscitation of racial stereotypes and a demonstrably racialized theatrical gaze. In this work, constructed as a series of living images of racialized violence, and in particular the “epistemic violence” of spectatorship, the Hottentot Venus is framed once again as the epitome of the dynamics of theatricalization. She appears in the form of a young black performer standing on a small raised platform clearly set up as a stage. Above her head hangs a white plaster picture frame. Her presence is framed as an image, an object to be looked at even though she can be seen looking back. She is clearly costumed although stripped to the waist. Rows of buttons adorn her arms and thighs. Her skin is darkened yet shimmering, theatricalized by both the blue light of the illuminated stage and the historicity of racialized relations of looking. Her position on the elevated stage means the spectator looks up at her while she looks straight ahead. As the stages revolves, she appears to catch the spectator looking as she turns into their gaze—returning it not with the force of recognition but rather the nervous realization of being looked at. This moment of realization is evidently supposed to be shared with the spectator, who experiences themselves as seen as well as seeing and perhaps questions whether they have the tacit consent to look assumed by the conventions of theatrical performance. Yet this exchange of looks does nothing to alter or challenge the visual economy within which the exchange takes place; returning the gaze does not weaken its performative force but rather renews and reauthorizes its operation. Although this image is only the first of thirteen comprising the visual dramaturgy of Exhibit B, the contours of the work’s claim to be constructing the ground for a visual encounter between performer and spectator can already be traced quite distinctly. For Bailey, the question is less about who gets to look at whom than how the gaze is met, yet this

Authenticity and Theatricality   67 in itself simply mirrors the racialized relations of power and desire that reproduce the position of world spectatorship as their political effect. Tellingly, the image of the Hottentot Venus is prefaced by that of a “Jamaican immigrant/asylum seeker” (the difference in either status or trajectory is not made clear). Stationed just inside the entrance door, framing the spectator’s entry into the space, this image is simply a man wearing sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt, his hands at his sides. He is looking forward, looking back at us but without a gleam of agency. There is no sign of recognition, no gesture of mutuality, no glimpse of identity. His presence is framed by the statistical information set to the left: “Mode of entry to EU; Port of Entry; Country of residence.” This is how his presence is represented, how he is rendered visible in the context of official discourses of immigration and asylum and their attendant racializations. But the image also frames the setup of the performance as such, suggesting that the contemporary theatricalization of migration maintains a direct historical continuity with the colonial aesthetic regime governing the production, reception, and circulation of the images it reproduces. The subsequent image, captioned “The Age of Enlightenment,” shows the whitened figure of an elegantly attired black man reclining on a sarcophagus. This appears to reference the fate of Angelo Soliman, a historical figure from the Austrian court of late eighteenth century. Despite being a man of numerous cultural accomplishments, he was subjected to brutalizing taxidermy after his death and rendered an “exotic savage” through this mode of preservation and posthumous exhibition. Like Baartman’s, Soliman’s reduction to an eviscerated, hollowed-out body can be seen to be the effect of his being rendered into an image. A stuffed pelican, similarly whitened—another example of exotica, perhaps—stands over the performer’s body.

figure 3.2.  “Still Life,” from Exhibit B, Brett Bailey, 2014. Photo: Sofie Knijff. Reproduced by permission.

68   Adrian Kear The fifth image, “Still Life,” is staged opposite Soliman’s (Figure 3.2). Set up as a Dutch golden-age picture, it offers a pastiche of a conventional still life in which exotic fruits, animals, objects, etc. are established as a representational frame within the frame of representation. Such opulence is indexed as the mise-en-scène of mercantilism and trade, without eliding their appropriative, necropolitical dimension. Standing within the gold picture frame, central to the image, is a black male performer in an iron slave mask, emblazoned with a gold painted crest as a brand on his chest. He is restrained, denied voice, unable to speak—appearing as an object among other objects within the frame of the image. His eyes look back, accusatory, contesting the frame within which he is set. His looking-back acknowledges that the image itself is animated by looking, existing because it is looked at. The image condenses and exemplifies the theatricalization of otherness, situating spectatorship as a technology of appropriation and exploitation. It likewise suggests that the spectator is not only implicated in its operation but is actively constituted by the interanimating relations of power and violence manifested in, through, and as the ground of the image. Reconstructed from a 1920s colonial exhibit, “A Place in the Sun” presents a chained and manacled black woman, torso exposed, sitting on a bed with her back to the audience, looking into a mirror at an angle that allows her face to be seen and her to see the spectator (Figure 3.3). The spectator does not see themselves but sees their look being apprehended, and held, by the performer. She appears within the mise-en-scène as part of the master’s props and property, arranged along with other objects metonymically delineating the space as “his”—boots, britches, hat, gun, photographs. The photographs on the walls show the historical fact of racism and colonialism: authenticating images of black people captured

figure 3.3.  ‘A Place in the Sun’, from Exhibit B, Brett Bailey, 2014. Photo: Murdo Macleod. Reproduced by permission.

Authenticity and Theatricality   69 and enchained, including one depicting the lynching of several black men. Juxtaposed to these atrocity trophies are photographic portraits of a white family—likewise authenticating the racialized relations of power encoded in the images and accentuating the historical reality of these people having existed, these things having happened. As Roland Barthes (1982, 32) observed in analyzing the image of a slave market, part of the ontological dynamic of photography serves to “ratify what it represents,” asserting the “this has been” of the photographically captured event. At the same time, the apparent authenticity of the photographic image operates in relation to the more indeterminate temporality and ontological undecidability of the theatrical image. The theatrical image puts into play the performative retroactivity of the “has been” alongside the anticipatory dynamics of the “will have been” to construct the event of the woman’s anticipated and evident violation. (She will be/has been/is being raped.) The implication of the spectator in the unfolding event of this crime seems to be secured through the performer’s look in the mirror as a gesture to the absent presence within the scene—whether the master for whom it is intended or the spectator to whom it is directed. While theatrical images are not made without the construction of a future present and anticipated presence of a spectator to come, the temporality of the image enables action to be put into suspension; the spectator must animate its retroactive anticipation and recognize its dynamics of theatricalization. Hence the spectator’s gaze is not returned by the performer; it is instead directed inward, creating a projective canvas for the spectator’s composition. It is returned and recognized only as the spectator looks away. As Katherine Sieg (2015, 264) notes, “the performer’s alert, intense gazing without verbally articulating” the text’s silent injunction “can be perceived as a command to carry the performance forward by putting into speech what has remained unsaid.” However, this nonreciprocal relation—the theatrical relation of nonrelation at the heart of world spectating—creates a tension in not knowing how to recognize or show recognition to the performer or how to acknowledge the relation between their actorly agency and aestheticized positioning within the theatrical frame. In Exhibit B, the spectator is set the problem not only of having to navigate the discomfort of intersubjective (mis)recognition but of negotiating the politics of racial (dis)identification and (re)mediation. The question posed by the images appears to be how to (dis)articulate the structural spectatorship position assumed and produced by the exhibition’s regime of representation. This testifies to the theatricalizing logic of colonialism’s aesthetic-political formation, and to spectatorship as a technology of otherness. Accordingly, the spectator is expected to occupy a fixed, intrinsically racialized position in the theatrical apparatus of the exhibition—an assumption of whiteness as a relation of seeing. Its theatricality insists on locating the spectator and the frame of spectatorship as the locus of racialization; situating the ways of seeing it seeks to explicate as operating not only within the exhibition but within the “exhibitionary complex” (261) of colonialism’s aesthetic-political regime. Yet this fixity appears to essentialize racialized representational practices and to install spectatorship as coextensive with whiteness. The argument appears to be that spectatorship as such operates within and is the product of a racialized regime of representation, which the occupation of the spectatorial position itself continues to produce and reproduce through an essentially racialized way of seeing and apparatus of staging. Not only does this risk reproducing the logic of the racist modes of perception and the performative production of otherness it seeks to critique, but it offers little space for spectators

70   Adrian Kear to occupy a position that is not already overdetermined as white. The image entitled “Separate Development” seeks to instantiate the racialization of the spectator position within the material setup of the frame of spectating itself. The scenography demarcates the viewing space for the image as a designated “whites only” area, separating the spectator from the figure of a woman sitting on a kitchen stool. She appears without makeup, in a plain dress, simply returning the spectator’s gaze. While the performer appears to embody the signifying structures of racial segregation, it is the spectator who is fenced in by the material frame of the compound. Caged within a three-sided space—an inverted theatrical picture frame in which world spectatorship appears as mise-en-scène—the spectator is staged as the figure conditioned and contained by theatricalization. The spectator is explicitly constructed as white and spectatorship is correlated with whiteness, yet the anamorphic presence of the wire cage disrupting and distorting the field of vision suggests that spectatorship itself is a theatrical construct and that the whiteness it produces is the condition of seeing through a racialized regime of representation and aesthetic political frame.

Conclusion: “Seeing through Race” In his W. E. B. Du Bois lectures, W. J. T. Mitchell (2012, 39) recognizes that “there is no other social abstraction quite like race, no other idea quite so difficult to see through rather than with.” The double-edged meaning of this phrase suggests both the necessity of seeing through racism as ideology and recognizing that its theatricalizations continue to structure the authenticating conventions of materially lived experience. It suggests that race operates as the lens through which seeing itself is conducted. It is therefore both “a medium and an iconic form—not simply something to be seen, but itself a framework for seeing through” (14). In situating race as a medium, Mitchell follows Du Bois in suggesting that racialized ways of seeing obscure the capacity for recognition by creating a theatrical “surface where images of the other are inscribed, painted and projected,” while at the same time leaving the medium of race “always open to remediation” (89). He suggests, accordingly, that the political task at hand is to “learn to see through, not with the eye of race” (40). All the while the epistemic violence of the racist gaze repeats itself indefinitely, and the concept of race seems impossible to do away with or move on from politically. This chapter has argued that, in this context, it is necessary not only to critique the way in which race is represented and constituted through representations but also to interrogate spectatorship itself as the ontological ground of race’s performativity as a medium. “Seeing through race,” as Mitchell puts it, necessitates examining how aesthetic-political ways of seeing are always already overdetermined by the theatricalizing constructs of racism and racialization, and how claims to authenticity operate as an optic producing, and seemingly substantivizing, racial subjectivation and objectification (Fanon,  1986, 95). In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate how the racialized regime of representation depends on mobilizing the epistemic violence of theatricalization and instantiates world spectatorship as a mode of political subjectivation. The dramatic dynamisms at play in the constitution of “the medium of race as material social practice”—a practice of representation—have been seen not only to frame racialized ways of seeing but to constitute them. As Mitchell contends, if “seeing through race” entails seeing it as medium—as “an ‘intervening

Authenticity and Theatricality   71 substance’ that both enables and obstructs social relationships” (4)—then this chapter has demonstrated that it remains necessary to situate practices of representation within the historical, political, and aesthetic regime that governs their operation. By investigating the ways in which seeing and subjectivity are co-constituted in the politics of world spectating, the chapter has sought to contribute to the historical tracing of race as a medium of theatricalization and theatricality as a medium of racialization.

References Adorno, Theodor  W. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Fredric Will. London: Routledge. Andersson, Ruben. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. Oakland: University of California Press. Balme, Christopher. 2007 Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Barthes, Roland. 1982. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage. Bhabha, Homi K. 1986. “Foreword: Remembering Fanon.” In Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, vii—xxv. London: Pluto Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Blumenberg, Hans. 1997. Shipwreck with Spectator. Translated by Steven Rendall. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Blumenberg, Hans. 2010. Care Crosses the River. Translated by Paul Fleming. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burns, Elizabeth. 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. Harlow, UK: Longman. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “The Method of Dramatization.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 94–116. New York: Semiotext(e). Demos, T.  J. 2013. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Diamond, Elin. 1988. “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism.” TDR 32, no. 1: 82–94. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Translated by John Goodman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2007. “Emotion Does Not Say ‘I’: Ten Fragments on Aesthetic Freedom.” In Georges Didi-Huberman et al., Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images, 71—80. Lausanne: Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Féral, Josette. 1982. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject De-mystified.” Modern Drama 25, no. 1: 170–81. Féral, Josette. 2002. “Foreword.” SubStance 31, nos. 2–3: 3–13. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 1995. “Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies.” Theatre Research International 20, no. 2: 85–9.

72   Adrian Kear Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1998. “Art of Darkness.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge. Greenhalgh, Paul. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Word’s Fairs. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skins, White Masks?” In The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, edited by Alan Read, 12—37. London: ICA. Hall, Stuart, et al. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. Kear, Adrian. 2019. “How Does Theatre Think through Theatricality?” In Thinking through Theatre and Performance, edited by Maaike Bleeker et al. 296—310. London: Methuen. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2012. Seeing through Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Translated by Zakir Paul. London: Verso. Riding, Christine, and Richard Johns. 2014. Turner and the Sea. London: Thames and Hudson. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Sieg, Katrin. 2015. “Towards a Civic Contract of Performance: Pitfalls of Decolonizing the Exhibitionary Complex at Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B.” Theatre Research International 40, no. 3: 250–71. Stewart, Susan. [1984] 1992. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Strother, Z. S. 1999. “Display of the Body Hottentot.” In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, edited by Bernth Lindfors, 1—61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge.

Chapter 4

L aw, Pr e sence to A bsence The Case of the Disappearing Defendant Kate Leader

Introduction A defendant’s live presence is an essential element of the adversarial1 method of evidence testing; confrontation (a constitutional right in the US, a more watered-down right in England and Wales [Leader, 2019]), and demeanor assessment, among other factors, play important roles in how the “truth” is determined within the trial (Fisher, 2014; Leader, 2010; Rossmanith, 2015). As such, performative concerns, how a defendant enacts and inhabits her role, how she is displayed, constrained, or silenced, while not always explicitly articulated in such terms, have long been of concern to scholars of the sociology of law and some theater and performance scholars (Garfinkel, 1956; Morgan, 1988; Halewood, 1997). These performative concerns are also implicated in the question of defendant rights, such as the right to a fair trial and access to justice. But in the twenty-first century we face new challenges that call into question fundamental ideas around defendant presence and evidence testing. First, technological advances have led to an increase in defendants appearing in hearings remotely from the police station or prison in which they are being held (Gibbs, 2017; Donoghue, 2017; Ward, 2015). Second, “online courts,” where a defendant enters her plea via computer, have emerged as the future for some criminal proceedings (Rossner and McCurdy, 2018). Third, it has become easier for trials in absentia to take place, which means that criminal trials may take place in a defendant’s absence. All of these shifts, while disparate, suggest that seeing a defendant’s presence as a precondition of criminal proceedings is becoming outmoded.

74   Kate Leader This chapter therefore tries to understand the implications of these changes for a defendant by shifting the conversation from presence to absence.Drawing on sociolegal and performance theory I consider the implications of absence in the criminal trial, asking what happens when the defendant disappears. I begin by considering the “politics of presence” (Phillips, 1998) in the criminal trial, which I argue is predicated, at least for the defendant, on a contradiction. On the one hand, physical presence facilitates the rights-based promise of “confrontation”: being seen and being heard, ideas fundamentally associated with meaningful participation.2 On the other hand, scholarly literature on the defendant’s body in a courtroom repeatedly invokes this physical body as a site of subjection and constraint, problematizing any redemptory ideas of transformation or self-expression inherent in such performances (Halewood, 1997; Garfinkel, 1956). In the second part of the chapter, I look specifically at shifts toward defendant absence from the courtroom. I examine three examples of changes that in different ways “disappear” the defendant; the rise of live-link proceedings, the advent of online courts, and the use of trials in absentia. Such changes, I argue, carry the same contradiction from a defendant’s perspective that presence does; a defendant’s physical absence from the courtroom can potentially avoid the traumatizing theater of the criminal trial, but that absence is a denial of the confrontation that such a trial guarantees. So how do we begin to make sense of, or evaluate the effect of, these changes? In the third part of the chapter, I address this question by arguing that we need to shift our understanding from the troubled politics of presence to, instead, a politics of absence. I will suggest that arguments in favor of presence in legal proceedings tend to, at times, valorize this “liveness” (Auslander, 1999) in contrast to mediatized or remote processes, but that this valorization does not stand up to critical scrutiny. Instead of arguing that presence is automatically fairer or better, we should concentrate on what is lost when the defendant disappears. Reflecting on this “politics of absence” can then lead us to what I will argue to be the most serious implication of all these changes: the loss of risk and chance inherent in a defendant’s live presence. As I conclude, when the defendant disappears, so does the possibility of something happening that would not happen any other way. Before beginning, it is important to note that this chapter primarily charts changes in practice in England and Wales. However, I draw from a larger pool of adversarial jurisdictions to critically reflect on the implications of these changes because each are also, in their own ways, wrestling with similar questions (Wallace et al.,  2018; Sela,  2016–7). As such, while the particular processes analyzed here may be specific to England and Wales, the broader questions raised remain pertinent to a wider audience. The relationship between performance and law is one with diverse interpretations and approaches (Hibbitts, 1996; Carlen, 1976; Leader, 2009; Read, 2015). As such, this work confines itself to thinking about the relationship between law and performance primarily by thinking of the trial as a live event and the defendant as a performing body. This invokes the work of Foucault (1972), whose analysis of the value of a defendant’s body, and how it is signed and exploited in criminal proceedings, is a fundamental theoretical building block of this research. This approach also invokes the work of Peggy Phelan (1993, 1998) and her analysis of the “essential” qualities of live performance, as well as the work of Philip Auslander (1987; 1999) on “liveness” and presence. The debate between these two scholars is well known in performance scholarship circles, and while these arguments date back to the 1990s, the essential questions—revolving around liveness and the controversial power

Law, Presence to Absence   75 of presence—remain relevant for this chapter, given the criminal trial is an “ontologically live” event (Auslander, 1999, 161). As I will argue, critical evaluation of what presence means in a live courtroom and how mediatization and remote proceedings will affect this is essential to understanding what happens when the defendant disappears.

The Politics of Presence: The Body of the Defendant A defendant’s body and its presence in the courtroom is the site of contested but highly politicized discussions as to its practical and symbolic role. On the one hand, a defendant’s presence has long been considered necessary in adversarial adjudication to assist the court in determining the truth (Langbein, 2003). This can be attributed to a number of factors, one of them being that a defendant’s presence gives the trier of fact, whether it be judge or jury, an opportunity to assess the defendant’s demeanor and behavior. A trier of fact may look for clues as to how the defendant behaves when particular evidence is introduced or when witness testimony is being given (Porter, 2009). Such clues enable them to draw inferences from what the defendant does or doesn’t do, says or doesn’t say. This can be understood as a kind of reading the body, and therefore explicitly requires that body’s presence to function (Leader, 2009). A defendant’s presence in the courtroom is also intrinsically linked to the concept of defendant rights and a fair trial. Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights makes explicit the right of any defendant to have a fair and public hearing (6.1) and to examine witnesses or have them examined (6.3d). As such, this article is considered to give weight to the right of confrontation, where a defendant confronts her accusers in open proceedings. Such a guarantee is made explicit in the US Constitution, where the Sixth Amendment (the Confrontation Clause) mandates the right of a defendant to “be confronted with the witnesses against him.” While the interpretation of these different clauses and what they mean vary jurisdictionally (in England and Wales the courts have rejected the idea that Article VI implies an absolute right to confrontation [R v. Horncastle, 2009], whereas the US Supreme Court, while permitting exceptional provisions, has maintained the idea that the Confrontation Clause is literal [Coy v. Iowa, 1988]), openness and confrontation are fundamental features of the criminal trial and are essential to guarantees of fairness for the defendant. The importance of openness, confrontation, and bodies gathering together in space means there are rich opportunities for performance theory to engage directly with understanding the politics of legal proceedings, not least because this is something that legal scholarship itself generally struggles to articulate. As Auslander (1999 128–9) notes, the criminal trial is “rooted in an unexamined belief that live confrontation can somehow give rise to the truth in ways that recorded representations cannot.” The language of performance theory can help us consider power, violence, and fairness in legal proceedings. To begin with, if we are discussing the importance of live presence, the work of Phelan becomes essential. Phelan’s work is predicated on essentialist claims as to the power of presence. She argues in Unmarked that “performance implicates the real through the presence

76   Kate Leader of living bodies” (1993, 148). For Phelan (1998, 10), presence is constitutive of authenticity because “presence can be had only through the citation of authenticity, through reference to something called ‘live.’ ” This idea resonates strongly in legal proceedings; as Auslander (1999, 9) notes, “the legal arena may be one of the few remaining cultural contexts in which live performance is still considered essential.” But as Auslander also points out, essentialist claims about the power of live performance are problematic. In his 1999 book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatised Culture, Auslander critiques the symbolic value of live performance, arguing that making claims for the power of the live is a largely self-serving construct adopted by performance practitioners to distinguish themselves from mediatized forms of performance (128–9). Moreover, following Derrida, who argues that presence and absence can exist only in a relationship with one another and are a false duality, Auslander’s critique of the live takes its genesis from Derrida’s second argument: that Western “metaphysics of presence” tends to privilege and mystify the notion of presence over absence, despite the two requiring one another to have any meaning. As Derrida (1972, 21) writes, “An opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination.” As such, Auslander’s work on live presence draws our attention to power and violence and how it operates in trial practice. This is something sociologists of law have long pointed out: that the live presence of a defendant allows that defendant’s body to be used in ways that are contrary to the defendant’s self-interest (Foucault, 1972). A trial, after all, is never only about the defendant’s guilt or innocence in a single case. As Robert Cover, in an influential 1986 article, “Violence and the Word” argues, “Any account which seeks to downplay the violence or elevate the interpretive character or meaning of the event within a community of shared values will tend to ignore the prisoner or defendant and focus upon the judge and the judicial interpretive act” (1608). Accounts of the criminal trial that focus on the triers of fact and the law, for Cover, are likely to fail to properly consider the position of the defendant in these proceedings. This is because, of course, a defendant’s experience is very different. As Cover points out, what is important is that “the defendant’s world is threatened” (1607) A criminal trial, after all, is a means of determining if punishment is merited and, if so, determining the nature of this punishment. As such, the body of the defendant, far from being a site of truth-telling, becomes instead a site of violence. This argument of violence flows from Foucauldian arguments elaborated on in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault (1972, 24–6) argues that the disappearance of explicit violence (such as public executions) was replaced with the inauguration of other, subtler forms of violence that sought to exploit, sign, and use the body of the defendant (or prisoner) to bolster the authority of the state.3 Foucault’s ideas of the “signing” body subjected to violence are richly performative (25). For Foucault, how a body behaves (or is made to behave) constitutes a form of performance, but this performance is one that shores up the authority of the state, emphasizing the state’s ability to impose punishment and its legitimacy in doing so (26). As such, a defendant’s body in the courtroom for Foucault has limited agency because it is exploited. And indeed, if we do as Cover suggests and focus on the defendant, Foucault’s arguments of subtle state violence have rich material in evidence for them in the courtroom where any mythologies that exist about defendant agency tend to dissipate: a defendant’s actual performance is routinely constrained. In England and Wales, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for example, the dock is still routinely used. This dock is a physically demarcated space that functions to separate the

Law, Presence to Absence   77 defendant from the other participants in the courtroom. Today these docks are likely to be, in England and Wales at least, enclosed cubicles at the side of a courtroom where the defendant remains completely behind a pane of glass. Placement in a dock is a means of using the defendant’s body, but in a way that signs this body as potentially dangerous, the glass panel serving to reinforce the idea that other participants in the courtroom need to be protected from this individual. Such ideas arguably preemptively criminalize a defendant and undermine the presumption of innocence to which every defendant is entitled under Article 6 (Rossner, et al., 2017). In addition to signing a defendant’s body as dangerous, the dock can act as a means of undermining other aspects of defendant participation because a defendant cannot sit with her legal representative in England and Wales, as she can in the US. Due to the architecture of the dock, defendants are also often on the periphery of the courtroom, positioned out of the eye line of any legal representative who will be further forward and facing the front of the courtroom (Mulcahy, 2010). In such scenarios, defendants may (and often do) need to tap on the glass to attract their representative’s attention. Finally, of course, the physical sidelining of the defendant emphasizes how little agency such an individual has. Any notion of a defendant’s being able to give a free account of what happened at her trial misrecognizes the role that legal discourse, as a form of social capital, plays in dividing “players” in the court into those who can participate and those who cannot. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1987, 828) points out, “In reality, the institution of a ‘judicial space’ implies the establishment of a borderline between actors. It divides those qualified to participate in the game and those who, though they may find themselves in the middle of it, are in fact excluded by their inability to accomplish the conversion of mental space—and particularly of linguistic stance—which is presumed by entry into this social space.” A defendant, unless she is testifying, is in fact likely to stay completely silent throughout the adversarial proceedings. As Charles Cottu, a French observer of the nineteenth-century English courts, noted, the “defendant does so little in his own defence that his hat stuck on a pole might be his substitute at trial” (quoted in Langbein, 2003, 6). The historical developments resulting in the rise of the dominance of the lawyer have effectively silenced other participants. Even if a defendant is able to speak, such speech will be adduced through and translated into legal discourse, and there will be no opportunity to freely communicate. Given all this, a defendant’s live presence in the courtroom becomes a means of legitimating state violence. When a defendant enters a courtroom and participates in her own trial, this constitutes a form of seeming acceptance of these proceedings even though this is not something she does voluntarily but simply acts out because she has no choice (Halewood, 1987, 566). What we are left with, then, is ultimately a complicated politics of presence for a defendant, where such presence is considered to be fundamental to a defendant’s right to participate and something valued as somehow “authentic” in the way that symbolic claims of live performance are often advanced—but is something that in practice exerts considerable constraint and control over a defendant and, arguably, undermines fairness and due process.

The Disappearing Defendant My analysis of a defendant’s presence therefore leads us back to the problematic question of a “metaphysics of presence” and, in performance theory terms, back to Philip Auslander

78   Kate Leader (1987, 25), who argues in “Towards a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre,” drawing on Derrida, that live presence is inherently suspicious, “a suspicion which derives from the apparent collusion between political structures of authority and the persuasive power of presence” of actors participating in a performance. The “persuasive power of presence” in a courtroom functions to bolster the legitimacy of the state’s claim of authority over a defendant’s body; indeed, the repetition of this practice through repeated trials perpetuates, and naturalizes, this authority (Leader,  2007). But a defendant’s presence is arguably based on violence and constraint. So it invites the question; Would it be better for defendants if they didn’t have to be there? In this section I consider three changes in proceedings that in different ways disappear the defendant from the courtroom: the use of live-link remand proceedings, the rise of online courts, and the use of trials in absentia, considering how each operates in practice and reflecting on the impact these processes have on defendant participation. As I will argue, all of these changes have the ability to limit the defendant’s exposure to the traumatic and exploitative tendencies of being present in the courtroom. However, they also have a tendency to dehumanize interactions between a defendant and a trier of fact, and potentially impinge on presumption of innocence, openness, and fair trial rights. In this respect, like presence, absence carries a similarly mixed bag of consequences for a defendant. However, all three forms of alterations charted here significantly limit defendant agency and exert greater control over the nature of defendant participation; this extended control is something that has significant consequences for a defendant and is a direct result of her physical disappearance from the courtroom.

Video-Link Remand Proceedings: The “Pixelated Prisoner” On a Monday morning at any magistrates court in England and Wales, you are likely to find a whole court being presided over by a district judge or magistrates’ bench and dealing with on-screen defendants who have been held on remand over the weekend. Once, these defendants would have traveled from the police station or prison to the courtroom; instead defendants are now taken to a designated space in the police station and are beamed into the courtroom via live video link. A two-way feed between this remote space and the courtroom transmits a live image of the defendant to the courtroom and a live image of the court to the defendant.4 What takes place via these video links is a defendant’s first appearance; this is when a defendant goes before the court for the very first time, where the charges she is facing are read out to her and where she will enter a plea.5 If a defendant pleads guilty, sentencing can take place there and then,6 and all proceedings are therefore completed via this video link.7 If a defendant pleads not guilty, a date will be set for the trial and, importantly, a decision will be made as to whether the defendant will continue to be held on remand or released on bail. Currently this technology is most commonly used for remand proceedings, but live-link feeds are also used for case management hearings, bail hearings, and sentencing. In the summer of 2017 a historic moment occurred: Rolf Harris was beamed in remotely from the prison where he was being held for the majority of his trial. This was the first, and to date only, time in the history of England and Wales that any criminal trial had been conducted via live-link technology. This was an important moment that passed with almost nobody

Law, Presence to Absence   79 noticing (BBC News, 2016). While Harris’s trial was framed as an exceptional circumstance, there is no doubt that the Ministry of Justice, with its emphasis on closing courts, cutting staff, and reducing budgets, is keen to roll out technology as much as is possible, including, in the future, full live-link trials (Bowcott, 2018b). So, given the growing use of this technology, what is different in such proceedings, and how might the experience differ for a defendant compared with being present in the courtroom? There are of course several benefits for a defendant. First, she does not have to travel to a courtroom and spend a significant part of the day waiting for her hearing. Second, being able to testify remotely means that she does not have to enter the intimidating space of a courtroom. While she will be able to hear and see the magistrates or judge, she does not have to be there in person. However, for all these positive outcomes, there are several more troubling ones. As Carolyn McKay (2018) makes explicit in The Pixelated Prisoner, and as has been detailed by other scholars, there is a variation in provision of quality of the live-link feed due to camera and network issues (see also Rowden, 2011; Mulcahy, 2008). Delays, interruptions, and poor-quality feeds remain a commonplace occurrence (Rossner and McCurdy, 2018). There are a number of potential consequences that may flow from this. The most obvious one is that a defendant is dependent on this feed to communicate with the courtroom, and any interruption impairs that interaction. But there are other consequences. A defendant on a live video link is physically separated from her legal representative, as the lawyer will be in the courtroom making representations on the defendant’s behalf. In remand cases, individuals often meet their duty solicitor8 for the first time via video link, where they are given a fifteen-minute consultation (Gibbs, 2017). While this may not necessarily be more time constrained that it would be in person, network dropouts and poor feeds eat into this time and may also arguably impair the trust necessary to have a full and frank discussion between solicitor and client to build rapport. Second, there is the potential dehumanization that can result from a defendant’s pixelated image. This issue has long been of concern to those working with vulnerable or intimidated witnesses, those individuals deemed by a court to be too vulnerable to be examined in person in a courtroom (usually young people and complainants of sexual assault [Ellison and Munro, 2009,  2014; Taylor and Joudo,  2005]). Technology, in the form of live-link and prerecorded testimony, has existed for a number of years to prevent the trauma for rape complainants of confronting their accusers in the courtroom. When this technology was first introduced, however, concerns were raised, and never fully allayed, that revolve around the degree to which a jury or trier of fact may be able to empathize with a witness if she is no longer physically before them (Leader, 2010). The potential implications for this on defendant participation and fairness are very clear, given that triers of fact can pass sentence or deny bail based on their assessment, without ever meeting the defendant. Concerns exist, for example, that an individual on screen from prison may have a lower chance of bail being granted (Gibbs, 2017). Finally, what a defendant can see through a two-way video link is highly circumscribed. While the exact dimensions of viewpoint given to a defendant will vary from place to place, the shot for the defendant will focus on the triers of fact. This control of gaze is very different from the experience a defendant has when she attends court in person. In a courtroom, even while a defendant is in a dock, she is still far freer to look where she chooses. This can affect her experience significantly, as it involves her ability to see any family or friends who

80   Kate Leader have attended as well as her legal representative. In addition, there are more contextual clues and information, such as taking in the dimensions of the court and seeing who else is present. The control of a defendant’s gaze impairs participation by constraining the defendant’s ability to familiarize herself with her (remote) surroundings. In a live-link feed, a defendant can be seen by the court without really seeing, and the court exerts far more control over her gaze. There are clear implications here in terms of limiting a defendant’s (already limited) agency even further and exercising greater power over her. This can be argued to be in keeping with an extension of Foucauldian surveillance in terms of the power delineations of what is rendered visible or invisible and to whom (Foucault, 1972 200).

Online Courts: The Single Justice Procedure Another plank in the court reform taking place in England and Wales is the rollout of online courts, an initiative also taking place in multiple other adversarial jurisdictions.9 The Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 introduced a new form of hearing for individuals facing summary (less serious), non-imprisonable offenses. Under this new system, defendants receive a notice and must respond online within twenty-one days. They then enter their plea online. If the plea is not guilty, a single magistrate will decide the outcome “on papers,” i.e., without any public hearing, assisted by a legal advisor. As banal as this has been represented to be by the UK Ministry of Justice (2018) (which emphasizes that it is only for lesser offenses, that a defendant can “opt out” of online proceedings), this is an opening into a world where more and more offenses may potentially be within its scope. It is easy to see the lure of such proceedings from the perspective of the Ministry of Justice (or, indeed, any adversarial jurisdiction). Online proceedings save money; they don’t require court time; and they don’t require court buildings (half of all magistrates courts have been closed since 2010; many of those that remain are in a terrible physical state). From a defendant’s perspective, too, there are multiple benefits. First, of course, she doesn’t have to come to court. Court opening times and delays mean that getting to court for a working individual or those with caring responsibilities can be disruptive and difficult. But the move to online and paper-based proceedings is the move to proceedings where a court not only doesn’t see an individual properly; they don’t see her at all, and the defendant doesn’t see the court in turn. It is difficult to see how the disappearance of the defendant from the courtroom fits within the Article 6 protections offered to defendants, which entail a right to “confront” witnesses. While it is far from clear exactly what “confrontation” entails, one thing confrontation does do is guarantee the gathering together of participants in a shared space (whether that be live or virtual). But online courts are essentially closed proceedings. There is no confrontation of any kind, and the public are not able to witness these proceedings; no one is. This is a total dematerialization of the courtroom. So what are the consequences that may flow? For a defendant, regardless of how minor the consequences are, this does not take away the fact that this process still involves a potential criminal conviction, a stigma that can have long-term impacts on employment prospects, and impacts that a defendant may not understand when she is logging on at home. In this respect, going to court, though intimidating, does potentially serve to make the defendant aware of the seriousness of proceedings. In addition, the absence of legal representation

Law, Presence to Absence   81 is significant. Removing the process of going to court is likely to reduce the chances of defendants seeking any kind of advice before entering a plea, which increases the risk of defendants pleading guilty when they are not guilty or entering a plea when they do not fully understand the consequences of this. In addition, if adjudication becomes a paper-based exercise, if individuals judging a defendant no longer encounter her in person, does this remove the potential for understanding, empathy, or mitigation? Answering this question involves acknowledging the important role discretion plays in adjudication. We allow triers of fact the authority to use their discretion, and this involves seeing and hearing a defendant and taking this into account in some way, for example, in considering the role remorse may play in the sentencing process for a convicted defendant (Rossmanith,  2013;  2015). We take this discretion, predicated on face-to-face contact, so seriously that in some jurisdictions appeals cannot be made on this basis (Porter,  2001). But if the defendant is no longer physically there this discretion is lost. And while such critical nuances are based on ideas difficult to talk about in law (performance, behavior, embodiment, emotion), they remain easier to disregard or overlook.10

Trials in Absentia The final alteration to proceedings I consider here is the oldest: trials in absentia. In some ways this form of change does not fit with the other two, which look specifically at technological changes. However, I would argue that its relevance here is because trials in absentia are the purest version of the disappeared defendant, where a trial carries on as normal, the only difference being a defendant’s absence from the courtroom. Understanding the consequences of a defendant’s absence helps point to the underlying issues for defendant participation inherent in all three forms of change. Trials in absentia have been permitted in England and Wales since 2001 (R v. Jones, 2002) and in crown court (which deals with more serious offenses) are meant to be “exceptionally rare,” used only when in the “interests of justice.” R v Jones lays out the test to be applied: to conduct a trial in absentia, a court must satisfy itself that a defendant had been given notice of her trial. If a defendant has had notice and has not attended, this is sufficient to indicate that she has “waived” her rights. However, the court then still needs to consider the question of “overall fairness.” This involves considering “the extent of disadvantage to the defendant” as well as whether the defendant has legal representation. Only if the court is satisfied the trial will be safe can it then proceed in a defendant’s absence. This means that it is unlikely for a trial to proceed in the absence of a defendant and a legal representative, but it is still theoretically possible for this to happen. In the lower courts, however, such protections are less strict. In magistrates courts, which in England and Wales deal with less serious offenses, changes brought by Section 54 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 permit the triers of fact to proceed without a defendant without the need to inquire why she isn’t there. There is a significant gap in data on how and why trials in absentia take place; however 2004–5 statistics, from before this change making trials in absentia easier, suggest that up to 15 percent of lower court trials were trials in absentia where defendants did not show up or in any way participate (National Audit Office, 2006: 9). This suggests it is likely this figure is now higher.

82   Kate Leader It is difficult to talk about the positive aspects of defendant experience and participation of trials in absentia because there are limited advantages to a defendant from not attending her trial. There are of course the important advantages, in that attending court may be difficult, as outlined earlier. However, a defendant’s absence means she necessarily has no input into what may happen. In magistrates courts too it is perfectly possible (and in fact likely) for trials in absentia to happen for unrepresented defendants, as those defendants who are so passive as to not attend are very unlikely to have hired legal representation. This means that at these trials, no one at all may speak for the defendant. It is easier, of course, to see why trials in absentia are on the rise because of the benefits they bring the court itself. Trial-in-absentia provisions are designed to deal with delays that can result from a nonattending defendant. A strong case can be made for the need to reform, with cracked and abandoned trials delaying outcomes for all participants and coming at considerable expense. However, the idea that expediency means that trials can potentially proceed without any inquiry as to why a defendant is not in attendance is much more troubling. Cases successfully appealed involving trials in absentia include a case wherein a defendant was being prevented from entering the building by security; he was still considered to be “voluntarily absent” and the trial went on in his absence (R v. Solihull, 2008; R v. Thames Youth Court, 2002). Considering how little the defendant does in adversarial proceedings due to the primacy of the lawyer, one could suggest perhaps very minor changes with trials in absentia. But I argue that a courtroom is not the same at all without a defendant in it. And without video link or written submissions, trials in absentia are completely free of a defendant’s presence: no body, no voice, only representation through her legal representative if she has one. This means that decisions involving very high stakes (loss of liberty, the stigma of criminal conviction) are conducted without any defendant input. Trials in absentia, then, are ­trials where the court is unable to exploit the body of a defendant through enforced participation, but this also means that a defendant cannot have any input. The absence of a defendant’s body from the courtroom extinguishes any (albeit limited) opportunities for agency. What can we draw from these changes about the effect of loss of presence? All three types charted here are very different: early hearings with a pixelated or dematerialized defendant, an online defendant who makes a plea from her own home, and an empty dock in a courtroom, which is the most explicit example of an actual absence. In all three situations we are missing the defendant’s presence, and this negatively impacts on her agency and participation, carrying the risk of undermining presumptions of innocence, of preemptively criminalizing individuals, of defendants being judged without being seen, of defendants pleading guilty because it is easier than pleading not guilty. But does this mean that live presence is therefore better for a defendant? This would seem to be the underlying idea behind critics of some of these kinds of developments; judges, for example, have increasingly argued it is better for defendants to be face to face with them in a courtroom (Gibbs, 2017). But there is a problem here: by criticizing mediatized or remote processes, we are drawing on an idealized vision of what presence constitutes. This is in keeping with Auslander’s argument in Liveness, where he argues that essentialist claims about liveness idealize a phenomenon that is politically suspicious and is also faulty, because the concept of liveness is one that exists only in relation to mediatization. So while potential concerns in the implementation of the changes I have charted are obvious, it is simply too easy to argue that live presence is better unless we can explain why. All of the new developments I have considered carry both positive and negative consequences. While a

Law, Presence to Absence   83 potential risk of dehumanization arises from being on screen, many defendants may actually prefer this to having to attend in person, and there is evidence to indicate that those who testify remotely are better witnesses because they are less intimated (Hamlyn et al, 2004). Some critics of live-link technology emphasize that a defendant appearing from a police station or prison may make such an individual seem dangerous, yet one can equally argue that a defendant’s being in a dock is potentially even more injurious in terms of undermining presumption of innocence). Following this line of argument, too, while the risk of judgment becoming a paper-based exercise carries fears of a loss of opportunity for mitigation or empathy for a defendant, a minority ethnic defendant never meeting an adjudicator, who considers her merits “blind,” may be judged far more fairly in a criminal justice process we know disproportionately convicts and punishes more severely those of minority ethnic backgrounds (Lammy, 2018).

Toward a Politics of Absence Where do we go from here? Auslander (1999, 128–9) asserts that the criminal trial is “rooted in an unexamined belief that live confrontation can somehow give rise to the truth in ways that recorded representations cannot.” The “unexamined” nature of these ideas is what stumps us when trying to make a case for the live. This is why I argue that we need to turn from legal scholarship and research to performance theory to try to understand how to evaluate the effects for defendants of these changes. I began this chapter by charting what I termed the “politics of presence”; drawing on Derrida and Auslander, I argued that presence is a politically suspicious concept in that it is used as a form of mystification that can valorize what are in practice violent and constraining methods, something clearly in evidence in a courtroom. And I would argue we can observe such valorization in the preference for the live over the remote advanced by critics of live-link technology. The concern over the loss of face-to-face contact is based on an idealized, or perhaps at least unexamined understanding of what being face-to-face contact actually means for a defendant. As Auslander (2016, 297) observes, “Physical co-presence does not obviate distance, and even when we are physically there the potential for fraud does not disappear.” We need to think through these changes in another way, then: by shifting our thinking from the loaded and problematic question of presence to thinking instead about absence. It may be argued that moving from one problematic term only takes us to another equally difficult one; there is no “pure absence” any more than there is “pure presence.” But what focusing on the concept of absence does is allow us to think about what is lost. The loss in the changes I have charted is the simple fact that the defendant’s body has disappeared from the courtroom. This is where we can start to think through the consequences of that absence. To do this, I suggest that Phelan’s scholarship is critical. While her work is predicated on essentialist claims as to the power of presence, something I have been critical of in this chapter, she draws our attention to the critical role belief plays in sustaining our preference for live presence. The live presence of bodies in a courtroom has deep resonances of authenticity in a criminal trial, not because this is fairer or better but because we believe it does. These beliefs are what sustains the mystification of what are in practice violent and constraining processes for a defendant.

84   Kate Leader But these beliefs are also fundamental to why we invest the way we do in the symbolic value of the criminal trial, despite its effective vanishing across jurisdictions (Galanter, 2004). The gathering together of participants, the presence of a defendant in person—her body, in the courtroom—is deeply entrenched in notions of fairness and legality in criminal trial proceedings. This means that we still symbolically invest in the notion of an open trial, even in its growing absence. A constrained body, on display, necessitates a degree of openness. Not having this openness is the first significant loss. Most important for this work, though, Phelan (1993, 148; my italics) argues that live presence provides a “maniacally charged present” where “anything can happen.” And it is this quality that is the crucial loss when the defendant disappears. When a defendant disappears from the courtroom, the possibility that “anything can happen” disappears with her. In the criminal trial, the ability to be present is a form of theatrical potential: a defendant has the ability to “act up,” and this opens up chance and risk. As Butler (2015, 59–60) notes, “Plural and public action is the exercise of the right to place and belonging, and the exercise is the means by which the space of appearance is presupposed and brought into being.” The potential of the theatrical here is a defendant’s right to place: it means a defendant has the chance to be seen, and to be seen differently from how she is presented, the chance to be recognized as a human being, the risk that a defendant may even be able to say or do something different. This chance and risk can manifest in negative ways, at least from the perspective of authorities. Theatricality has long had pejorative overtones (Barish, 1981) and is frequently used to police behavior in legal proceedings (Leader,  2009). After all, the ability of a defendant to protest her treatment, to draw attention to her constraint and silencing, has historically been a powerful means of criticism of the adjudicating authority. The most recent example of this is the on-camera suicide of Slobodan Praljak after being convicted at the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Swigging a bottle of cyanide, Praljak declared, “With disdain, I reject your verdict.” He died in hospital shortly afterward. In 1969 Bobby Seale, on trial for conspiracy, was bound to a chair and gagged after protesting his prosecution, the racism of the court, and the court’s refusal to let him speak. Virtually the only agency afforded to a defendant is her ability to take advantage of her presence in court, to disrupt the court (Zellick,  1980; Lahav,  2004). Such power is often exercised by unsympathetic defendants and given short shrift by a judge, who may remove such defendants from the courtroom and find them in contempt (Zellick,1980, 121–35). But none of this takes away from the radical promise that underpins this possibility: that the live trial, the live presence of the defendant, the theatrical potential this generates, allows for anything to happen, i.e., something, anything different to happen.

Conclusion I have argued that changes in technology and adjudication methods are leading to a significant disappearance of the defendant from the courtroom. There is no doubt that this disappearance raises the possibility of dehumanization and may impair presumptions of innocence for a

Law, Presence to Absence   85 defendant. But I have also argued that it is impossible to judge what is fair or not fair in these absences without considering what is fair and not fair in live presence. Live presence is a double-edged sword: it may protect a defendant’s rights, but it also subjects her to a traumatic experience. It is too simple to say presence is better without confronting why it is better. I argue instead that we need to think about what is lost. What we know is lost is the defendant’s live presence in the courtroom. This not only takes away from the openness of the trial and the authenticity we invest in by its presence, but, most important, the disappearance of a defendant also removes the risk that an ontologically live practice carries. This loss is not one simply for the defendant but is relevant more broadly as well, not just because a lack of openness means a lack of witnessing but because a defendant’s ability to protest can speak beyond her immediate situation to greater injustices that affect many more people. The removal of the live presence of a defendant is a means to extend control over her by limiting her agency, by killing off the theatrical potential of the live. As such, these moves are a closing down of spaces of appearances, which, among other things, means a closing down of a site for political protest. A politics of absence is one in which chance or risk can no longer exist. As such, the power of a defendant to disrupt, protest, or break her constraints is removed. The power of a defendant to be visible, to potentially overcome her constraints, to be perceived in a different way, to do anything differently, is removed with the removal of the theatrical potential that comes with the live. The ability to show up, therefore, to be there is a critical means—perhaps the only means—a defendant has of acting with agency, of being visible, of making things different. And when a defendant disappears, this possibility disappears with her.

Notes 1. “Adversarial” is the mode of proceedings used in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth countries and refers to the “one side versus the other” nature of the trial, where defense and prosecution gather and present evidence, trying to win by persuading the trier of fact that their version of events is persuasive. 2. The “politics of presence” comes from Anne Phillips (1998), who examined questions of visibility of minorities in representative assemblies. However, I use it in a different context here to capture the messy and somewhat contradictory nature of how physical presence is understood in legal contexts. 3. While I have seemingly moved here from talking about social space and the event to the body of the defendant, I do not conceive of these as discrete; as Bourdieu (1992, 20) points out, “The body is in the social world but the social world is in the body.” 4. For information, see the Crown Prosecution Service Guidance on live links at https://www. cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/live-links. 5. This is a requirement brought in since 2010 in the name of greater efficiency. If a defendant gives an equivocal plea, this will be entered as “not guilty.” 6. Unless the court is awaiting a presentence report from Probation Services. 7. This will depend on the seriousness of the offense. If the offense merits greater than six months’ imprisonment, or one year for two offenses, the defendant will have a date set for sentencing in the crown court, which has greater sentencing powers.

86   Kate Leader 8. A duty solicitor is a lawyer provided for free to any defendant facing an imprisonable offense. 9. This includes the Civil Resolution Tribunal in Canada and the proposed online dispute resolution tool in New South Wales’s civil justice strategy, among others. 10. There are wider consequences beyond a defendant. Proceedings that are closed prevent us from understanding how a decision is made. The scrutiny of the public is a means of holding adjudicators to account for their decisions. The scale of a case and the seriousness of an infraction do not indicate its potential public value, but this is lost if the trial is not open to the public in the first place.

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Law, Presence to Absence   87 Gibbs, Penelope. 2017. Defendants on Video—Conveyor Belt Justice or a Revolution in Access? Transform Justice. London. Halewood, Peter. 1997. “Violence and the International Word (Conceptualizing Violence: Present and Future Developments in International Law).” Albany Law Review 60, no. 3: 565–70. Hamlyn, Becky, Andrew Phelps, Jenny Turtle, and Ghazala Sattar. 2004. Are Special Measures Working? Evidence from Surveys of Vulnerable and Intimidated Witnesses. London: Home Office Research Study 283. Hibbitts, Bernard. 1996. “De-scribing Law: Performance in the Constitution of Legality.” Paper delivered at Performance Studies International Conference, Northwestern University. Lahav, Pnina. 2004. “Theater in the Courtroom: The Chicago Conspiracy Trial.” Law and Literature 16, no. 3: 381–474. Lammy, David. 2018. The Lammy Review: An Independent Review into the Treatment of, and Outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Individuals in the Criminal Justice System. London: Ministry of Justice. Langbein, John. 2003. The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leader, Kate. 2007. “Bound and Gagged: The Performance of Tradition in the Adversarial Criminal Trial.” Philament 11, no. 1: 1–20. Leader, Kate. 2009. “Trials, Truth-Telling and the Performing Body,” PhD. Diss, Department of Performance Studies, University of Sydney. Leader, Kate. 2010. “Closed Circuit Television Testimony: Liveness and Truth Telling.” Law Text Culture 14: 312–36. Leader, Kate. 2019. “National Report: England and Wales.” In Personal Participation in Criminal Proceedings: A Comparative Study of Participatory Safeguards and In Absentia Trials in Europe, 65–92. Switzerland: Springer. McKay, Carolyn. 2018. The Pixelated Prisoner: Prison Video Links, Court “Appearance” and the Justice Matrix. Routledge London and New York. Morgan, Edward. 1988. “Retributory Theater.” American University International Law Review 3, no. 1:1–64. Mulcahy, Linda. 2008. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Shifts towards the Virtual Trial.” Journal of Law and Society 35: 464–89. Mulcahy, Linda. 2010. Legal Architecture: Justice, Due Process and the Place of Law. London: Routledge. National Audit Office. 2006. Effective Use of Magistrates’ Courts Hearing. Available at: https:// www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/02/0506798.pdf Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy. 1998. The Ends of Performance. New York: NYU Press. Phillips, Anne. 1998. The Politics of Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, Chester. 2001. “The Demeanour of Expert Witnesses.” Australian Journal of Forensic Sciences 33: 45–50. Porter, Stephen. 2009. “Dangerous Decisions: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding How Judges Assess Credibility in the Courtroom.” Legal and Criminal Psychology 14, no. 1:119–34. R v. Horncastle and others (2009) UKSC 14. R v. Jones (2002) UKHL 5, (2003) 1 A.C. 1. R. (on the application of Davies) v Solihull Justices [2008] EWHC 1157. R v. Thames Youth Court (2002) 166 J.P. 711, QBD (Pitchford J.). R. (M.) v. Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale Magistrates’ Court (2009) 174 J.P. 102, QBD (Langstaff J.).

88   Kate Leader Read, Alan. 2015. Theatre and Law. London: Macmillan International Higher Education. Rossmanith, Kate. 2013. “Getting into the Box: Risky Enactments of Remorse in the Courtroom.” About Performance 12: 7–26. Rossmanith, Kate. 2015. “Affect and the Judicial Assessment of Offenders: Feeling and Judging Remorse.” Body and Society 21, no. 2: 167–93. Rossner, Meredith, and Martha McCurdy. 2018. Implementing Video Hearings (Party-to-State): A Process Evaluation. London: Ministry of Justice. Rossner, Meredith, David Tait, Blake McKimmie, and Rick Sarre. 2017. “The Dock on Trial: Courtroom Design and the Presumption of Innocence.” Journal of Law and Society 44, no. 3: 317–44. Rowden, Emma. 2011. Remote Participation and the Distributed Court: An Approach to Court Architecture in the Age of Video-Mediated Communication. PhD. Diss. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Rowden, Emma. 2018. “Distributed Courts and Legitimacy: What Do We Lose When We Lose the Courthouse?” Law, Culture and the Humanities 14, no. 2: 263–81. Rowden, Emma, Anne Wallace, David Tait, Mark Hanson, and Diane Jones. 2013. Gateways to Justice: Design and Operational Guidelines for Remote Participation in Court Proceedings. Penrith, NSW: University of Western Sydney. Sela, Ayelet. 2016–7. “Streamlining Justice: How Online Courts Can Resolve the Challenges of Pro Se Litigation.” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 26: 331–388. Taylor, Natalie, and Jacqueline Joudo. 2005. The Impact of Pre-recorded Video and Closed Circuit Television Testimony by Adult Sexual Assault Complainants on Jury Decision-Making: An Experimental Study. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. UK Ministry of Justice. 2017. Transforming Our Justice System: Assisted Digital Strategy, Automatic Online Conviction and Statutory Standard Penalty, and Panel Composition in Tribunals. London: Ministry of Justice. Wallace, Anne, Sharyn Roach Anleu, and Kathy Mack. 2018. “Judicial Engagement and AV Links: Judicial Perceptions from Australian Courts.” ’ International Journal of the Legal Profession, July 10. doi:10.1080/09695958.2018.1490294. Ward, Jenni. 2015. “Transforming ‘Summary Justice’ through Police-Led Prosecutions: Is ‘Procedural Due Process’ Being Undermined?” British Journal of Criminology 55, no. 2: 341–58. Zellick, Graham. 1980. “The Criminal Trial and the Disruptive Defendant: Part Two.” Modern Law Review43, no. 3: 121–35.

chapter 5

Towa r d a Th e atr ica l History of th e Pick et Li n e Sophie Nield

This chapter proposes a theatrical history of the picket line, reading this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lenses of space and spectatorship in order to explore the boundaries of performance and theatricality. Tracking its evolution from the nineteenth century to the Thatcher era, the chapter interrogates the picket line in British industrial and labor history as a site of the interplay of legality and performativity, and argues for the value of reading the political picket through a theatrical lens. A picket line, I will argue, functions as both a practical enactment of rights in space (understood as an occupation of or claim on public space intended to make visible a form of collective identity) and the symbolic expression of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively. Its theatricality resides in this space between symbolic and practical action, in the relationship between presence (a literal placing of bodies in space) and representation as a process of claim-making. The theatricality of what is happening in a picket also potentially has to do with interpretation and perception, as it engages offenses of molestation, intimidation, the threat of violence, as well as literal disorder and violence. In other words, the affect of performance, the symbolism of space, and the materialization of community, identity, and working-class respectability are mobilized. It is not simply the police, in a formal sense, preventing someone from crossing a peaceful picket line. This is the operation of a different kind of theater. As a negotiation between political performance and public theatricality, I suggest that the picket line offers a potentially more complex site for analysis than the demonstration or barricade, as it is subject to a nuanced, and performative, negotiation of permissible actions within a changing legal framework. It is simultaneously intended to be both efficacious and symbolic, as it makes visible solidarities, rights, and community allegiances, which themselves then have reciprocally affective performative force. It exists as an example of both an improvisatory protest performance and the legally constrained articulation of particular

90   Sophie Nield formations of labor organization and identity. Questions arise here of how far the performance of the picket lies in its overt, staged presence and how far it is contextual, being manifested through the invocation of community, locality, solidarity, family allegiance, and the implied threat to belonging. As such, I suggest that it offers a fruitful site for investigation of questions of order and disorder at the intersections of theatricality and political performance.1 The presence of picket activity is woven through the broader formative histories of the labor and trade union movements. This struggle for rights and recognition was enacted along a number of key lines: the question of combination vs. conspiracy; the right to work vs. the right to trade; the nature of the legal relationship between masters and servants; and the legal and corporate status of a trade union as a collective of individual workers. The legislative journey sees these concerns revisited and revised against a changing backdrop of industrialization and the rise of the organized labor movement, with Acts of Parliament and individual court judgments repealing, amending, and restating previous iterations of the law in response to particular disputes, or simply when the legislation did not achieve its aims. This changing relationship between employers and employed can be tracked through a succession of “Master and Servant” Acts, terminology that evolved into “Employers and Men” toward the end of the nineteenth century. Both of these interest groups were articulating evolving rights over property: the rights of the masters over their factories and rights to trade and profit, and the rights of the worker to determine the terms and conditions under which they would sell their property—labor. This led directly into questions of individual agency and combination and whether workers should be able to act in concord with other workers to seek to secure terms, or whether they could negotiate, contract, or withdraw their labor only as individuals. The various Acts and judgments that engage this long debate were articulated alongside a parallel set of legal concerns to do with the right to picket—the peaceful persuasion of other workers to join or support a trade dispute—and it is here, I think, that some of the more abstract discussions implicated within the wider trajectory of trade union legislation are materialized and made manifest in the theatrical encounter of the picket line. The early legal framework, designed to address small local disputes, was simply not equal to the longer-term historical changes. The nonspecialist, unskilled labor of the growing industrial working class could so much more easily be replaced from what Marx would call the “reserve army” of workers. The centralization of workplaces in the form of the factory, the mill, the foundry, and the dock provided locations where a focused picket might be effective. Developments in transport increased the ease with which scab labor, army personnel, or police could be transported from site to site to disrupt local strike activity and which also enabled trades unions to organize on a national scale. For, of course, the police have a role in this, in the sense that their own labor is implicated in the management of what happens during a strike or on a picket line. Interactions between strikers and police have given rise to some of the most controversial moments in UK picketing and labor history, notably the events at the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire during the 1984–5 miners’ strike. In particular, what happens to the legal position and the responsibility of the police has been particularly nuanced as trade union disputes became increasingly treated as civil rather than criminal issues and later, as picketing has explicitly been dealt with under public order legislation. The role of the police in regulating the spatial organization of a protest site continues to be a part of the dramaturgical work of the picket line.

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line   91 The concept of the picket derives from military terminology, indicating an outermost posting of a defensive or offensive force; it is not expected to offer serious engagement with the enemy but to observe, monitor, and give warning. The term could be applied equally to personnel or to a row of stakes that formed a picket fence. In industrial contexts, the picket line was intended to monitor the boundaries of a workplace, functioning as discouragement to scab labor that might otherwise undermine or break a strike by going in to work. Strike action, or the withdrawal of labor, dates back within British labor history to the fourteenth century, but the word strike did not enter general use until the late eighteenth century. The practice of picketing, or “the act of men [sic] standing at the gates of mills, dock etc, watching those who go in and out, and inducing them to strike work” (Shaxby, 1897, 1), became subject to sustained legal and parliamentary discussion from the early nineteenth century onward. It occurred in parallel with key evolutions in labor organization: the formation of what we would recognize as industrial trade unions; the employment of large numbers of workers in centralized workplaces able to provide a suitable performance site for a picket; and the gradual trajectory identified by the social historian Charles Tilly (2010) as a shift from material to symbolic repertoires of protest. Before industrialization, labor in the United Kingdom was relatively unorganized, and most forms of work that were not agrarian were unskilled. Those in skilled trades might form a craft gild, or association, in which both masters and journeymen would control the regulation of the trade. From about the fourteenth century, wages were fixed locally by Justices of the Peace, an arrangement confirmed in law by the 1563 Statute of Artificers, which sought to balance advantage between workers and masters so as to provide a reasonable standard of living for all. These arrangements were, of course, open to manipulation and the imposition of interests, and in the seventeenth century associations of journeymen operating independently of masters began to bring pressure to bear upon JPs (and sometimes via petitions to Parliament) to protect conditions of entry to their respective trades. This was becoming all the more urgent, as the old patterns of progression into skilled work were themselves changing: a journeyman would no longer necessarily expect to become a master himself but to continue as a permanent wage earner, which meant that the protection of conditions of labor remained an ongoing concern. As T. S. Ashton (1964, 230) explains, “The scattered women spinners, labourers and others involved in the trade of weaving were too disparate and poor to organise. Skilled artisans such as wool-combers, dyers, tailors and shipbuilders had organisations such as friendly societies and box-clubs, whose role was to assist in circumstances of unemployment or sickness—and also to work to limit the numbers of those following a particular trade, and to prevent their own labour being undercut by workers not participating in the society or club.” Mostly these organizations operated as clubs and Friendly Societies and concerned themselves more with offering assistance in cases of illness or unemployment, not with what might later be understood as collective bargaining over pay or conditions of labor. Even where these early “unions” or “combinations” of workers acted locally in regard to various disputes with local employers, the combination for the most part broke up as soon as the cause was won or lost. Meanwhile, employers claiming their right to trade was being infringed by collective action of this kind could bring actions for conspiracy under the common law. By the turn of the century, the so-called Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were in force, carrying penalties of prison terms. Although these Acts were equally intended to prevent the

92   Sophie Nield formation of cartels of employers, as Edward Vallance (2009, 298) observes, “when stockingers in Nottingham succeeded in forming a union of 2390 members with a common fund of £195, their organisation was broken up by an employers’ committee that was equally illegal under the strict terms of the Combination Acts.” The 1823 Masters and Servants Act effectively made it unlawful for an employee to break a contract with the hope of securing better pay or conditions; on this basis, any individual striker was immediately open to prosecution. Evidently this was not workable, and against a backdrop of further efforts to establish large-scale trade unions2 a House of Commons inquiry led to the Combination Act of 1824, which repealed all previous antiunion legislation and offered unions some legal protection from the common law offense of conspiracy. A further Act was legislated the following year, allowing the discussion of wages and conditions, although conspiracy charges could still apply if an actual wage claim was then made. Importantly, the Combination Act of 1825 also effectively legalized peaceful picketing, as it forbade any use of violence to persons or property, threats of molestation, intimidation, or obstruction in order to coerce the will of another. The legality of these practices had been unclear in law but were a frequent aspect of trade disputes, as strikers sought to prevent the undercutting of a strike by the importing of scab or “blackleg” workers (so-called for the coal dust that marked the trousers of miners who had been underground during strike action) who would destroy the solidarity of the action. That violence, intimidation, and so on had been forming a significant part of such disputes in the first half of the nineteenth century is indicated by evidence given to the 1838 Select Committee on Combinations. A. Alison, Esq., giving evidence on intimidation in the 1837 cotton-spinners dispute in Glasgow, reported: Large threatening crowds had assembled in the neighbourhood of Oak Bank Factory, a cotton-factory in the neighbourhood of Glasgow. . . . I saw a crowd of some 600 to 800 persons assembled in the road; the new hands at that time were leaving the work; it was four o’clock in the afternoon and I was informed by persons in the crowd that they had marched through Glasgow with music at their head, in military order. . . . I saw several persons come out wounded with blood streaming down their faces; upon their clothes; upon their waistcoat, and neckcloth, from wounds which, I was informed, had been inflicted by the crowd. . . . Every factory had from six to fifteen persons stationed as guards at the gates, to observe the new hands going out and in, to cajole them, and to get them to leave their employment; if necessary, to use violence to induce them, but by all means to get quit of them. (Quoted in Hollis, 1973, 184–5)

This account materializes a central aspect of the theatrical politics of the picket line: a spatial context makes visible the resistant action of a labor force acting collectively. The line of the picket marks the boundary or threshold of the workplace, forming a practical and symbolic dramaturgical image of the limits of labor. Work that takes place in dispersed locations such as individual dwellings or small manufactories does not of course preclude the possibility of action being taken against employers. Nevertheless, in terms of making visible to both the employers and the laborers themselves the workforce as a collective and unified group, the single location and the enacting of its boundary through the placing of bodies in space materializes both the practical relations of work and the abstract relations of labor, property, and rights: social relations taking concrete spatial form.

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line   93 Trade depression in the 1830s and 1840s, and the focusing of political attention on adjacent struggles such as Chartism, slowed the rise of trade union activism—and disputes—until the 1850s, although the power of the old Acts continued to be felt: the six agricultural trade unionists who came to be known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported to Australia in 1834 for swearing an illegal oath prohibited by the Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797, which had been passed in response to anxieties about resistant actions that might be inspired by the French Revolution. Attempts to organize trade unions on a larger scale resumed in the 1850s, with the extension of what Sidney and Beatrice Webb ([1920] 1950) called the “New Model Unions.” These organizations were for respectable, craft-based workers such as boilermakers, carpenters, and bricklayers (the 1851 Amalgamated Society of Engineers is such an example), in other words, reasonably well-remunerated trades able to sustain weekly subscriptions of one shilling per week. These subscriptions enabled the unions to protect members during periods of sickness or unemployment and also meant that strikes could be maintained from central strike funds if necessary. These unions also developed more centralized administrations, such as paid officials, and held conferences. Yet as unions gained in respectability and, arguably, in political traction, their ability to force the hands of employers (rather than sit with them at boards of arbitration) was still restricted in law. The right to peacefully picket was maintained in the Molestation of Workmen Act of 1859, and, as Charles Barrow (2002, 8) notes, it remained lawful under this Act to attempt to secure changes in wages or hours “peaceably and in a reasonable manner, and without threats or intimidation to persuade others to cease or abstain from work.” Yet evidently the courts responded to this with a very wide, and widely applied, interpretation of what “threats and intimidation” might mean, and the contradictions inherent in interpretation of the performative aspects of public behavior continued to cause diversity of application. I would note here the reliance of these pieces of legislation on vexed and indistinct offenses such as intimidation and watching and surveillance of workers not participating in any action. In effect, the “crime” itself could be understood as a sort of aggressive spectating: forcing the scab worker to recognize that they had been seen, that their comings and goings, their home and domestic situation had had attention paid to it by coworkers and members of their own community. This forms part of the affective theatrical work of the picket line. What is worth noting here is the invocation and implication of the work of the gaze itself—that to be scrutinized and observed, and to be forced to acknowledge that scrutiny, places part of the work of the picket line within a logic of visuality that is neither entirely performative nor entirely material. “ ‘In R vs. Druitt,’ ” continues Barrow, “ ‘black looks’ from a picket was sufficiently serious to be classified as ‘intimidatory’ conduct. . . . To call someone a ‘scab’ was an unlawful threat which also attracted criminal liability” (8). This is not of course to claim that there was no physical violence. A wave of violent outbreaks during trade disputes was typified by the so-called Sheffield Outrages in 1866, which included explosions and even murder. These incidents were described in the Anarchist in 1895: “Sheffield, then the capital of English trade unionism, was the only town where the decrees of the union were enforced by the blowing up of factories or shooting capitalists. . . . Like machine smashing or rick burning, they were an inheritance of the evil days of oppression and coercion” (Sheffield Libraries, 2016, 4). In response, a Royal Commission on Trade Unions was convened in 1866 and given extraordinary powers to pardon those who gave evidence and imprison those who refused to cooperate. A clampdown on union

94   Sophie Nield activity followed, but it was the more moderate minority report that was eventually to more closely inform the legislation passed by the new Liberal government under Gladstone in 1871. It was recognized that a larger industrial labor force required a reasonable way to be in negotiation with employers, mostly on the basis that a strong union, able to negotiate constructively, would mean less risk of workers taking strike action to seek redress for complaints. In 1871 two new pieces of legislation were enacted: the Trade Union Act and the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The Trade Union Act enabled trade unions to hold land, buildings, and property and act as a party in an action of law (rather than its officers carrying liability). As Sidney and Beatrice Webb ([1920] 1950, 276) explain, “No Trade Union, however wide its objects, was henceforth to be illegal merely because it was ‘in restraint of trade.’ Every Union was to be entitled to be registered, if its rules were not expressly in contravention of the criminal law. And, finally, the registration which gave the Unions complete protection for their funds was so devised as to leave untouched their internal organisation and arrangements, and to prevent their being sued or proceeded against in a court of law.” Yet the opening up of this space at the table for trade unions to organize and to function as interlocutors in trade disputes was still running at odds with the legalization of actions able to be taken in furtherance of trade disputes. The Criminal Law Amendment Act revived all the old, vague language of the Combination Acts, articulating offenses of molestation, obstruction, and intimidation—including persistently following a person, watching their premises, and hiding or depriving them of the use of their tools or clothes. As Richard Price (1980) points out, this was open to draconian interpretation and on occasion encompassed “unfriendly” looks, standing still in the street, posting strike notices, and even “some wives who said Bah! Bah! to blacklegs.” Effectively this Act removed the legalization of picketing extended in the 1859 Act and revived the offense of conspiracy (126–7). Clearly this situation could not endure, and the whole matter was revisited once again in 1875, as the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act repealed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the Master and Servant Act, and the residues of the old Combination Acts and, once again, explicitly legalized peaceful picketing. Being present at a place for the purpose of peacefully communicating information was to be lawful; the criminal offenses introduced were to apply only to picketing activity that went beyond this peaceful practice. Pursuing a trade dispute “in combination” was no longer to count as a conspiracy, and, as the Webbs ([1920] 1950, 291) observe, “the old words ‘coerce’ and ‘molest,’ which had, in the hands of prejudiced magistrates, proved such instruments of oppression, were omitted from the new law, and violence and intimidation were dealt with as part of the general criminal code. No act committed by a group of workmen was henceforth to be punishable unless the same act by an individual was itself a criminal offence.” The old Master and Servant laws were replaced with the Employer and Workmen Act. Although sounding like a simple change of nomenclature, this radically refigured the relationship of employer and employee away from the old gild model, as both became equal parties at law to a civil contract (291). This effectively placed issues of breach of contract under civil rather than criminal law. While this was a positive development, the dramaturgical, affective moment of any strike was still in the confrontation, in the moment at which a dispute manifested itself in time and space and created a line across which the issues were to be contested. Trade Union advocate Henry Crompton noted:

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line   95 Picketing is generally much misunderstood. It occurs in a strike when war has begun. The struggle, of course, consists in the employer trying to get fresh men, and the men on strike trying to prevent this. They naturally do their best to induce all others to join them. Very often the country is scoured by the employers, and the men brought long distances who never would have come if they had known there was a strike. Men do not wish to undersell their fellows. A man is posted as a picket, to give information of the grievances complained of, and to urge the fresh comers not to defeat the strike that is going on. Not only is this justifiable, but it is far better that this should be legal and practiced in full publicity than that it should be illegal and done secretly, for, if done secretly, then bad practices are sure to arise. . . . Those on strike naturally regard anyone acting contrary to the general interests of the trade with disfavour, just as an unpatriotic man is condemned by those imbued with a higher sense of national duty. Picketing is justified on these grounds by the workmen, but all physical molestation or intimidation is condemned. (Crompton, cited in Webb and Webb [1920] 1950, 278)

Crompton also mentions here an issue that was to become more critical as the century advanced: the fact that many industries now operating at scale could absorb vast numbers of laborers who had not required the apprenticeship and training to be admitted into a trade—Marx’s “reserve army” of labor. The capacity of employers to take on unskilled workers—and to bring those workers in from distant locations around the country—posed a significant risk to the potential for success of any local dispute. By the time of the national wave of disputes through 1889 and 1890, including gas stokers’ strikes and the dock strikes that halted the port of London and several other significant ports, the risk was large-scale blacklegging, exacerbated by the capacity of the railways to be deployed to bring in both scab labor and police forces from other districts to swell the ranks of “local” law enforcement. Eric Hobsbawm (1964, 139) notes, “Casual hiring led . . . to persistent under-employment, so that even at the peak period of winter a pool of unemployed stokers would persist. Strikers could therefore easily be replaced; especially as management organised the import of strike-breakers from all over the country: a Bristol strike was blacklegged from all over the West and from Liverpool; a Halifax strike from London, Burnley and York.” These arrangements were not without their own deliberate forms of theater: Clegg, Fox, and Thompson (1964, 69), writing on the 1890 gas strikes, assert that when men at the gasworks in Leeds resisted the Council’s attempts to bring in a four-month contract, the authorities imported “several hundred blacklegs, headed by cavalry, surrounded by a double file of police, and a file of military, and followed by the Mayor and magistrates. From a railway bridge, coal, sleepers, bricks, bottles and assorted missiles were hurled down by pickets and sympathisers upon the civic procession. . . . For several days the town was like an armed camp [and] hussars with drawn swords patrolled the streets.” Once again the broad parameters of the dispute were drawn into sharp focus at a particular staged moment of encounter—the start of a shift, the gates of a dock or gasworks—the processional theater of a parade of heavily guarded men being escorted past lines of striking or locked-out workers, and needless to say, the particular tensions played out here were often violent, as the increasingly large numbers of pickets required to maintain the integrity of the strike caused a parallel increase in police numbers, which of course increased the likelihood of a flashpoint. A series of cases continued to put the laws on picketing under pressure and to extend, test, and develop the legal frameworks governing labor relations and industrial disputes.3

96   Sophie Nield Yet as Clegg, Fox, and Thompson (1964, 207) point out, “the outcome of the conflict with the ‘new unions’ during 1889–91 had turned very largely on the ability of the employers to find substitute labour to replace strikers, and they were therefore vitally interested in the law related to picketing. What they wanted most of all was adequate police protection for their ‘free labour,’ and they were still trying to attack picketing through the criminal law.” Eventually an attempt was made to draw together and resolve these multiple strands of legal provisions. The 1906 Trade Disputes Act declared that unions should be exempt from being sued for damages incurred during a (legal) strike action and that, notably, “an act done in pursuance of an agreement or combination by two or more persons shall, if done in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute, not be actionable unless the act, if done without any such agreement or combination, would be actionable.” It was under these terms that the “great unrest” of 1911 took place, a year that saw transport strikes, railway disputes, and severe disruption to the ports of Hull, Liverpool, Cardiff, and London. Serious disruption and actions took place between June and August. Troops and police were mobilized on a large scale, often being moved around the country. In August there were 3,500 troops stationed in Liverpool, and gunboats were sent to the Humber and the Mersey. Attention was once more focused on managing the activities of pickets as the site of potential flashpoints within the management of a dispute. The Home Office (Lyddon and Smith 2007) sent a circular on dealing with pickets to all chief constables of police, restating the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act and its relation to provisions in the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. “Watching and besetting,” criminal under section 7 of the CPPA, was allowed if it conformed to the TDA’s ambit “picketing for the purpose of obtaining or communicating information, or of peacefully persuading any person to work or abstain from working” (2007, 217, original emphasis). If the number of pickets was disproportionate to the number that might be understood to be required for peaceful persuasion, then participants could be charged with watching and besetting. Some employers resisted altogether the notion of a peaceful picket; on September 5, the annual general meeting (AGM) of the Liverpool Steam Ship Owner’s Association noted, “Such a thing as peaceful picketing is not, and cannot be practiced in the actual progress of a strike. . . . [Pickets] are out to stop men working. . . . The power behind the picket by which its orders will be enforced is the violence of the mob” (quoted in Lyddon and Smith 2007, 224). The Spectator (1911) magazine also weighed in, making a gesture away from collective action altogether and moving back toward the right of the individual worker vis-à-vis their employer, arguing, “The right to strike is a necessary attribute of a free man. . . . Every workman must be left free to refuse to work on terms which he does not regard as satisfactory, and he must also be free to agree with his fellow-workmen to abstain from working. What the community has a right to say is that when a workman has agreed to accept particular terms of service he shall not break his bargain.” It was suggested that official pickets be “badged” to enable them to be identified by the police. The Spectator went further, suggesting that a “corps of counter-picketers” be mobilized, whose duty would be “to watch the picketers, and if they depart by a hair’s breadth from the strict letter of the law either to prosecute them or, in an emergency, to use physical force to prevent a breach of the peace. It is just as much the duty of ordinary citizens as of the police to use whatever physical force may be necessary to stop a felony from being committed under their eyes.” In fact, pickets themselves continued to maintain discipline through weight of numbers and the threat, or suggestion, of subsequent molestation, whether or not that was forthcoming.

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line   97 It was during the General Strike of 1926 that aspects of all these tensions at the gates extended across the nation, implicating the new, national, unions as well as police forces, soldiers, and workers from across the nation and, on occasion, beyond it. The task of strikes remained, as Margaret Morris (1976) states, the same: to sustain workers and their families in dispute and to organize pickets to prevent the undercutting of labor. Morris notes that, despite large-scale pickets and mobilization of police and troops to keep order, once again instances of actual rather than threatened violence remained relatively unusual. There were accounts of, for example, the greasing of rails to prevent trains getting through, of letting down bus tires, removing parts of the engines of delivery trucks, and (on one occasion in Bradford) the turning over of a tram (52–3). For the most part, however, relations were reported to be friendly, and Morris even details a football match that took place between strikers and police in Carstairs (56). Yet the increase in numbers of both pickets and police stimulated further dramaturgical displays. On May 8, at 4 a.m., Morris records, “a convoy of over a hundred lorries was assembled at Hyde Park and set off for the docks, accompanied by an escort from the 1st battalion of Grenadier Guards, and twenty armoured cars. Volunteers, described as young men, mainly students or clerks, some wearing the sweaters or scarves of well-known schools, then loaded the lorries with flour and the convoy returned to Hyde Park. The British Gazette described these proceedings as ‘raising the siege of the docks’ and ‘saving London from starvation.’ The British Worker said that it was ‘a ridiculous and unnecessary demonstration,’ aimed at making people afraid and creating the idea that the country faced a dangerous revolutionary situation.” (69). Of course, the presence of the police was not entirely demonstrative. Once they (or the army) were present in numbers, escalation was unsurprising. In Hull, troops with fixed bayonets were reported. When, on Victoria Docks Road, London, the presence of troop vans and police led to arguments and scuffles with truncheons deployed, the strikers turned up the next day carrying iron railings. These images, of police and picketers opposing each other, possibly violently, in public space spring readily to mind in consideration of some of the most infamous moments in labor disputes, such as Orgreave and the Liverpool Docks Strike of 1995–6. Nevertheless the actual relations in play are more complex than simply forces of order and forces of disorder. The late nineteenth century tracked an increasing respectability of labor: the theater of conflict produced by the performance parameters of the picket line often recast the otherwise respectable working man as a transgressor of the law. Furthermore, police personnel were very often drawn from the communities they policed. Yet as Clive Emsley (2009, 151) notes, “the police (were) required to enforce the complex and frequently revised law on picketing—a law which rarely worked in favour of strikers. Bobbies were called upon to protect the blackleg labour imported to break a strike and to protect bailiffs employed both to evict strikers and their families from company housing and to seize property from a worker’s home in payment of a debt or fine.” The resulting tensions, conflicts, and often highly dramatic moments of confrontation caused significant rifts within communities and families, some of which were never to be mended. Writing of the Grunwick dispute of the late 1970s, in which a group of predominantly South Asian women workers who struck work and began to unionize were supported by the wider trade union movement, Colin Crouch (1979, 137) noted: [The police] have come to be major actors in important strikes, often being used to provide sheer mass numbers to confront, sometimes physically, mass numbers of strikers and

98   Sophie Nield demonstrators. . . . The police appear unequivocally on the “side” of the establishment in a dispute. Since it is the strikers who are trying to interfere with the normal running of business activity, it is they who are likely to infringe the law by obstruction and similar offences. . . . The vivid portrayal of strikers fighting the police was used by the opponents of the unions to associate them with disorder, violence and the breakdown of the rule of law.

This, evidently, is in part a theatrical effect, in which the management of appearances produces the image of disorder and criminality. Yet there is a further regulation of action around picket lines which has little to do with the presence of law enforcement and is enacted, effectively, through community, affect, and identity: the refusal to cross a picket line. Ros Wynne-Jones in the Independent on September 20, 1997, wrote, “On 25 September 1995, 328 men who worked at the Torside gate of [Liverpool] docks formed a picket line after five men were sacked following an overtime dispute. Next day, others coming in to work, some of them the fathers of the Torside workers, refused to cross it. There was no strike ballot—they simply turned around and went home.” Without a ballot, the strike was not legal, and the men who had refused to cross the picket line lost their jobs. For Wynne-Jones, this was the result of “the power of culture, which on Merseyside transforms a picket into a barrier it is almost genetically impossible to cross. The men were sacked because they chose not to break a local sacred rule: in Liverpool you never cross a picket line. ‘It's in our blood,’ says Kevin Robinson, a shop steward. ‘Never cross a picket line. My father, his father, my two uncles fought for better conditions on the docks. Some men gave their lives. We can’t go and throw those hard-won rights away, sell out the future generations.’ ” Meanwhile Audrey Gillan (2004), writing in The Guardian on the twentieth anniversary of the 1984–5 miners’ strike, described the continuation of anger in local communities with those who did not support the strike: “In the Middlecliff Welfare, the hatred of scabs is as strong today as it was then. ‘I don't want to know scabs that went back to work. There were two or three of them in this village and we still don't talk to them,’ says one former miner. ‘When I went back to work, if one came along to work with me I stopped working.’ ” Gillan cites Mick Carter, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) branch delegate at Cortonwood, the first pit earmarked for closure, and the first to go on strike: “What the scabs didn’t understand, he says, is that the strike wasn’t about pay and conditions, it was for jobs and communities—they were trying to save a way of life. Now it is all but gone.” The picket line sits at the center of a matrix of relations—between law and (dis)order, between ownership and rights. It is simultaneously a material practice, enacted by bodies in space, and a representational form, implicating rights to labor and profit, the invisible bodies of the corporation and the trade union alike, and, ultimately, staging the boundaries of community. As with so many kinds of border, the picket line operates only in part as an actual line or threshold; rather, it seems to create a border zone—a liminal, indeterminate zone of operations within which relations and power are negotiated through performance, operating simultaneously as a symbolic space through which people negotiate and stage identities in relation to law, labor, and community. The theatrical indeterminacy of the border zone is what enables contradictions, claims, and counterclaims to appear. The encounter produces affects and behaviors carrying implications beyond the immediate point of conflict: Who owns labor? Who has the right to act collectively? Who holds responsibility for these issues? These issues remain central to debates around labor, conditions, contracts, and rights: the right to unionize, the effective return of zero-hours contracts, the destruction

Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line   99 of communities based in shared industries, and the lines of solidarity that emanate from that experience. All of these struggles continue to negotiate the heritage of over two hundred years of legislation around the rights to occupy public space and to make claims about conditions or labor. All of these are staged, enacted, and made visible on the picket line.

Notes 1. This is, of necessity, a somewhat gendered history. In a long history of labor that has seen competing poor and underrepresented groups pitted against each other for scarce work and resources, it is no surprise that the labor of women was often deployed to undercut the solidity of the collective actions of male workers and, of course, the possibilities for wider solidarities between men and women workers. There are a number of reasons why this might be the case: women’s labor was often undertaken separately from men’s labor, and so for the most part women did not unionize alongside men. There is some evidence of a lack of solidarity from male workers when women did strike—not least because structural inequalities were exploited by employers: women’s labor was not paid at the same rates and so could be, and frequently was, used to undercut men’s rates of pay. See Boston (1980). 2. There were in this period some efforts to establish large-scale trade unions, but without a great deal of success. The Grand General Union of All Spinners of the United Kingdom (1829) did not succeed, and the attempt in 1833–4 to establish a Grand National Consolidated Trades Union also collapsed. 3. See, for example, Curran v. Treleaven (1891); Temperton v. Russell (1893); Taff Vale Railway Co. v. ASRS (1901); Quinn v. Leathem (1901), cited in Barrow (2002, 12–13).

References Ashton, T. S. 1964. An Economic History of England: The 18th Century. London: Methuen. Barrow, Charles. 2002. Industrial Relations Law. 2nd ed. London: Cavendish. Boston, Sarah. 1980. Women Workers and the Trade Unions. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Clegg, H. A., Alan Fox, and A. F. Thompson. 1964. A History of British Trade Unions since 1889, vol. 1: 1889–1910. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cole, G. D. H, and Raymond Postgate. [1938] 1949. The Common People 1746–1946. 4th ed. London: Methuen. Crompton, Henry (1875) The Labour Law Commission London: H.W.Foster. Crouch, Colin. 1979. The Politics of Industrial Relations. London: Fontana. Curran v. Treleaven [1891] 2QB 545. Emsley, Clive. 2009. The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the 18th Century to the Present. London: Quercus. Gillan, Audrey. 2004. “Strikers’ Hatred and Mistrust Will Never Die.” Guardian, March 1. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1964. Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Hollis, Patricia, ed. 1973. Class and Conflict in Nineteenth Century England, 1815–1850. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lyddon, Dave and Paul Smith (2007) ‘The Home Office Circular on Picketing (1911) and Reports on Picketing and Intimidation in Liverpool (1911), Historical Studies in Industrial Relations. nos. 23–24 (Spring/Autumn): 207–32.

100   Sophie Nield Morris, Margaret. 1976. The General Strike. Middlesex, UK: Penguin. Price, Richard. 1980. Masters, Unions and Men: Work Control in the Building and the Rise of Labour 1830–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn v Leathem [1901] AC 495. Shaxby, W. J. 1897. The Case against Picketing. London: Liberty Review. Sheffield Libraries and Archives (2016) ‘Sources for the Study of the Sheffield Outrages’. Sheffield: Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information. Spectator. 1911. “Picketing and Counter-Picketing.” November 11. Taff Vale Rly Co v ASRS [1901] AC 426. Temperton v Russell [1893] QB 715. Tilly, Charles. 2010. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vallance, Edward. 2009. A Radical History of Britain. London: Abacus. Webb, Sidney, and Beatrice Webb. [1920] 1950. The History of Trade Unionism. London, New York and Toronto: Longman, Green and Co. Wynne-Jones, Ros (1997) “No Going Back at the Liverpool Docks” Independent September 21.

chapter 6

Protest a n d Per for m ati v it y Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga

Protests have been part and parcel of Mexican politics since postrevolutionary times. These protests routinely incorporate performative innovations into their repertoire in order to gain public support and have their demands met. Protests are contentious actions that pose claims to other parties. Protesters seek attention and voice or demand a third party do something or stop doing what is causing grievances and suffering to the protestors. There are four basic elements in protests: (1) the actors demanding something (the demanders); (2) actors who are the object of the demand (the demandees, who could be an individual, institution, business, or agency deemed responsible for doing or failing to do something); (3) the specific contents of the demand (the set of claims); and (4) an audience in which there are potential allies and sympathizers as well as opponents and detractors. Protestors raise claims for a range of reasons, material, legal (such as rights and protections), and symbolic. Often all the claimers want is to call the authorities’ attention to certain issues because their efforts to be listened to through regular means have received no attention. Sometimes the protestors want their values, interests, preferences, or identities to be acknowledged and taken into consideration by decision-makers. Protests may be onetime events with no follow-ups, but they usually involve regular interactions between the actors demanding, the demandees, and the audience’s responses. When protests are recurrent over a given period, they may turn into campaigns (clusters of protests demanding something to target authorities), and even turn into social movements (repeated campaigns over the same issues). Protests may be sudden reactions or carefully designed enactments, but still may be analyzed as performances in which one actor using a repertoire of protests makes a claim to a second part in front of an audience. Repertoires, for Tilly (1986, 390), comprise culturally informed ways of staging contentious action on shared interests: “These varieties of action constitute a repertoire in something like a theatrical or musical sense of the word; but the repertoire in question resembles that of commedia dell’arte or jazz more than that of a

102   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga strictly classical ensemble: people know the general rules of performance more or less well and vary the performance to meet the purpose at hand.” In contemporary societies, increasingly mediatized, global, and visual local protests compete for attention among many different kinds of events from all over the world. Thus, to attract media attention and reach distant publics, protests have become increasingly theatricalized and dramatized (Kershaw, 1997) and may be analyzed in terms of their performative intent and the effects they have on the audiences. Even more, protests may be analyzed in terms of synecdoche, in which part of the social (protests) are made to stand for the whole (society). The claim is that the changing forms of popular protests reveal the major social, political, and cultural changes of the time (Kershaw, 1997). Protests are public performances that display what Tilly called WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (Tilly and Wood, 2009). Thus protests may also be analyzed in terms of WUNC. Protesters’ demands are not just words or statements made in public gatherings or in texts; they involve public behavior aimed to enact these statements. People protesting and raising a claim aim to demonstrate to other publics that they represent a significant part of society which rightfully deserves what they demand. This is achieved through appearance (e.g., clothing) and behavior and the presence of allies who support their demands and certify they are worthy (clergy, intellectuals, victims of unfair treatment). Protesters want to display the fact that they are united, that their actions are agreed upon. They act as a single group, marching in unison, carrying banners and flags, voicing the same slogans and demands. Additionally, by filling the streets and squares, protesters claim that they represent a considerable proportion of society and, thus, not only have democratic legitimacy but also the strength and the power to disrupt the quotidian by performing marches, blockades, strikes, and stoppages and generating uncertainty about public order. Political actors know that those numbers may translate into votes in the upcoming election. Finally, protestors also want to show their commitment to the cause, as well as their disposition to defy different forms of social control and overcome the hurdles, costs, and risks of protesting. Thus, besides voicing a claim, protests are designed to disrupt other people’s activities and “the spectacle of hegemony” (Kershaw, 1999: 122), display the threat implied by their contentious actions, should they continue, and even escalate if they are ignored and their demands neglected. Theater studies consider protests as forms of symbolic action oriented to express some obvious message, with morality at its core. The protest’s objective may be to raise awareness, to show the workings or undesirable results of a problem, or to show the solution of a problem. It may be didactic, aimed to provide a new interpretation of a known problem, produce new meaning, or unveil injustice and abuse. Protests are designed to provoke in the onlookers a moral stand (Schechner, 1970) and can be looked at as a “broad spectrum” of human actions, which includes rituals, sports, theater, and everyday life (Schechner, 2002). Thus we understand performance as the enacting of a social process whose importance depends on how it is staged by the protestors and interpreted by the demandees and the audience. To authors such as Jeffrey Alexander (2007, 2011) and Michael Saward (2010, 2017), social actions are “performative” insofar as they communicate meaning to an audience in order to produce a significant reaction. Performance, in this sense, requires a “script” and an audience. Its success will depend on how it is enacted by the protestors and interpreted by the demandees and the public. Saward (2010) adds that political representation generally conveys a claim that may create a sense of identity and mobilize an audience.

Protest and Performativity   103 Since the mid-1980s there has been a growing consensus among social movement scholars that structural models cannot fully explain social movements and social change. Particularly influential was the concept of strategic framing of grievances (Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992; Snow et al., 1986), which enables us to examine empirically the social construction processes through which a situation is interpreted, defined, experienced, communicated, and acted upon (or not). Framing denotes “an active, process-derived phenomenon that implies agency and contention at the level of reality construction” (Snow and Benford, 1992, 136). Thus protests depend not only on the availability and deployment of tangible resources, as the resource mobilization theory would have it (Jenkins, 1983; McCarthy and Zald, 1973, 1977), the opening and closing of political opportunities (Eisinger, 1973; Kitschelt, 1986; McAdam, 1982; Perrow,  1979; Tilly,  1978,  1984), or a favorable cost-benefit calculus (Olson,  1965; Opp, 1999, 2009), but also on the way these variables are framed and the degree to which they resonate with targets of mobilization (Snow and Benford, 1988, 213). As they provide others with their interpretation of a given situation, performances play an important role in the process of reality construction. Following this perspective, McAdam (1996) makes a convincing case for giving more attention to the framing function of movement tactics—the way tactics are consciously designed to frame action, attract media attention, shape public opinion in ways favorable to the movement, provide meaning to the degree of threat embodied in the movement and its ability to disrupt public order. McAdam uses the term strategic dramaturgy to denote these kinds of framing efforts that are mindful of the messages and symbols encoded in movement actions and demands (348). The concept of strategic dramaturgy enables the analyst to recognize that movements, through performances, dramatically invoke values, basic moral principles, and beliefs to frame grievances, legitimate action, and sanction inaction. Authors such as Kershaw (1992), who have studied the political use of theater and its efficacy to convey demands and impact ideologies, underline the relation created between actors and audiences, not only through a good script but also through all the elements of the play staging, including the targeted audiences, the selected venue, and even the box office. Performative strategies are not conceived to convince target publics with impeccable and irrefutable arguments but to raise empathy, gain solidarity and support, and increase mobilization. Performance coded messages, says Kershaw (1992), are “decoded” and interpreted by audiences. Thus the performative perspective on protest connects nicely with recent scholarship on emotions (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, 2001; Jasper, 2018). Emotions have a mediating role in the communication and interpretation of dramatized forms of protest and their publics. The public’s response to representations of injustice and a movement’s capacity to provoke reactions in different target publics are mediated by the emotions that dramatic representations of conflict arouse. Sometimes those emotional responses are deliberately produced, but sometimes they are spontaneous and unexpected reactions of targets of protests and other publics. The emphasis in performance is clearly communicative, discursive, pragmatic, and actor-centered. Saward (2010) considers good choreography essential to performance effectiveness. Charisma, choreography, skills, imagination, good timing, and understanding of the others, as well as effective use of significant objects, songs, dancing, slogans, and other “means of symbolic action” (Alexander, 2007), are very important elements to produce the expected outcomes. Performance or strategic dramaturgy, from this point of view, has a historical dimension because the meaning communicated through collective performance

104   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga is related to cultural experiences and society background and, in turn, draws from and ­contributes to collective memory. Nowadays repertoires of protest are increasingly designed as performances to be photographed, videotaped, or tweeted, which enhances their effects and communicative power. Fuentes (2019) considers the use of the internet as a new public sphere, as a “digitally networked mobilization.”

Protests and Performance Mexican protests and movements in the second half of the twentieth century often started from motives that ranged from disgust with union leaders to low salaries and police violence, but frequently turned into large movements demanding civil and political rights. Successful practices, routines, and ritualistic elements were incorporated as part of a repertoire of protest that proved effective in making demands and gaining public sympathy. It included massive demonstrations, with much singing and shouting along main avenues, and large banners, street blockades, building closures, and, in some cases, clashes with police forces (Cadena-Roa, 2003). Many small protests started in different parts of the country, but since the Mexican state was an authoritarian presidential regime with a weak Congress and even weaker judiciary, protests often have been brought to the nation’s capital, Mexico City, and used its streets as the main stage of a dramatic mise-en-scène of WUNC, performed to get the president’s attention. The slow but irreversible change to a more democratic electoral system beginning in 1977 was a turning point in Mexican politics (Labastida and López Leyva, 2004). A more active and vigilant civil society gradually took the place of the politically subordinated unions and peasant organizations that sustained the postrevolutionary authoritarian regime. New ways for participation and presenting demands were developed, along with the limits to the strong presidential power which, until then, had been the main characteristic of the Mexican political system. In the past thirty years, some symbols and repertoires of action have persisted, but new ones have been created. Some established practices were partially brought back by recent movements, such as the Asamblea de Barrios in 1986, the Zapatista uprising in 1994, the anticrime movement for peace with justice in 2011, the youthful #Iam132 in 2012, the movement in 2014 demanding the forty-three Ayotzinapa students be shown to be alive, as well as by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA). All of them used the old repertoire of protest, but also contributed innovations to it. Although there have been thousands of protest events in Mexico in the past thirty years, we focus on these examples to illustrate the use of performativity to strategically frame grievances and claims, produce emotional resonance in their target publics, display WUNC, mobilize action, and criticize indifference. Protesters have grown increasingly conscious about the message encoded in their repertoires of protest. Disguises and masks, nonviolent behavior in the face of armored police forces, light humor, and expressive displays of contention that may be photographed, videotaped, and transmitted through social media have all been used to garner unpaid media attention in order to appeal to audiences and to urge authorities to react.

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New Trends in Protest On January 1, 1994, the very day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreement entered into force, a small army of indigenous people from the hills in Chiapas declared war on the Mexican state. President Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) sent the army, but civil society organizations demanded a peaceful solution together with social justice to the impoverished and marginalized Indian communities. The uprising was interpreted as a justified response to centuries of discrimination against ethnic groups. The government suspended the criminalization and repression of the Indians and promised to comply with their demands. In the following weeks, the movement acquired worldwide notoriety, much enhanced by the charismatic personality of Subcommander Marcos. Smoking a pipe through a hole in his ski mask, Marcos presented himself as a subcommander under the orders of the indigenous communities, the actual commanders. He was an enigmatic guerrilla fighter leading a mass of indigenous people fed up with abuse and neglect, an idealistic leader who communicated very well the unity, numbers, and commitment of the Indians’ claims for dignity. Analysts of the movement have emphasized a feature that was not anticipated by the movement: the rapid dissemination of information and images through the internet. This dissemination was driven by sympathizers who not only spread news about the actions but actually flocked to the remote mountain sites to show solidarity with the Indians. That provided the Zapatista movement with a strong and long-lasting period of attention that attracted students, local and foreign activists, movie actors, intellectuals and scholars, and celebrities such as Danielle Mitterrand, Oliver Stone, and José Saramago. In the following months there was a failed attempt to capture Marcos, followed by the negotiation of a peace accord, a bill of rights of the indigenous people, and in 2001 a march to Mexico City called The Earth’s Color March to speak before Congress in favor of a constitutional amendment on the rights of the indigenous people. Since the amendment was not passed in the exact terms it was agreed upon, the Zapatistas felt betrayed by the government, turned inward, and created several autonomous self-governing communities, which have been functioning in Chiapas until recently. The movement is still very much alive in the area and has thousands of sympathizers all over the country (Marcos and Le Bot, 1997; Montemayor, 2000; Jörgensen, 2004; Rubin, 2004). From a completely different social background, an important student movement started on May 11, 2012, when the presidential candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) Enrique Peña Nieto visited the Universidad Iberoamericana, a private Jesuit university with a long tradition of liberal education, to deliver a campaign speech. In the eyes of the students and other citizens, Peña Nieto was responsible as governor of his home state for gross human rights abuses against Atenco villagers. The students booed Peña Nieto, called him “murderer” and “coward,” and chanted “Atenco has not been forgotten.” Peña Nieto fled the campus. The evening news downplayed the incident, but his campaign managers, caught by surprise, reacted badly. They claimed the protesters were a small group of paid hackers sent by political rivals, not real students. In response, two days later 131 students posted a YouTube video stating their names, showing their university IDs, and making it clear that they really were university students, not partisan imposters or paid troublemakers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7XbocXsFkI).

106   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga Soon after, students from other private and public universities, as well as people from all walks of life, supported the protests through the Twitter hashtag #YoSoy132 (#Iam132) in solidarity with the slandered students, and denounced the undue influence that media monopolies had on the formation of public opinion. There were displays of WUNC that gave notoriety to the movement. The presidential candidates had agreed to hold two televised debates; the student movement called for a third. All the candidates attended except Peña Nieto, who claimed that the students wanted him to look unfit for office. The organizers left an empty chair to symbolize his refusal to attend their call. The PRI and its presidential candidate won the presidency, but nonetheless the movement’s influence persisted in a generation that came to political age during that time (Patán, 2012). AMLO and MORENA nicely illustrate how successful performativity may move from the streets to cyberspace, then to the party system, and finally into power. MORENA started in 2012 as a popular movement around its leader, AMLO, that later turned into a political party that ran him as the presidential candidate who won the 2018 elections. AMLO and MORENA have designed a resonant diagnostic frame that calls for decisive action at the cost of polarizing the electorate between those who support the “mafia in power” and those who support him and his anticorruption crusade. AMLO was a PRI member until he joined the Corriente Democrática, which split from the PRI and formed the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in 1989. He ran twice for the government of Tabasco, his home state, where he led several campaigns of protest demanding clean and fair elections, such as the Exodus for Democracy, with a clear religious undertone, a fifty-day-long march to protest electoral fraud in Tabasco. The march started with some two hundred people, most of them Chontal indigenous people, and entered Mexico City in January 1992 with around forty thousand who had joined along the eight hundred kilometers. In 1995 he called for the Caravan for Democracy, again from Tabasco to Mexico City. In 1996 he became president of the PRD and was elected mayor of Mexico City in 2000, where he demonstrated that, besides his abilities to lead protests, he also had administrative capacities. He had run for president twice before his final electoral triumph. The first time he had a harsh political showdown with President Vicente Fox (2000–6), who tried to derail his candidacy by accusing him of breaking the law. He lost the presidential election by a small margin, 0.58 percent of the vote, accused election officials of fraud, and staged a forty-seven-day sit-in, blocking Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues of Mexico City. When the electoral authorities declared the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon the winner, AMLO suspended the blockade and in a massive meeting in the Zócalo proclaimed himself the legitimate president and continued touring the country, keeping his movement alive. The second time he lost by a larger margin, but he cried fraud again. This time the PRD did not support his claim, as it had done in 2006. Shortly after, he split from PRD and created MORENA. (Morena means “dark-skinned one,” a reference to Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, the Morena Virgin). His presidential bid was supported by a wide spectrum of the electorate mobilized by AMLO’s populist discourse, the discrediting of all the other existing parties, and society’s disgust with the corruption, violence, and human rights abuses that had increased during the previous PRI and PAN governments. AMLO won the presidency in 2018 with 53 percent of the vote, and MORENA candidates won the majority in both chambers of Congress.

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Performative Strategies The Zapatista’s worldwide impact, the enthusiasm created in Mexico by the young people of #Iam132, and the triumph of MORENA in 2018 are examples of movements that successfully deployed old and new performative devices and political rituals to mobilize support to their causes. In this section we classify those devices that we feel have been particularly significant into five categories: (1) the indigenous claim, (2) the Zócalo, (3) masks and disguises, (4) a new narrative, and (5) the internet and social networks. Although we discuss these categories separately we retain the general notion that they are often combined in specific performances.

The Indigenous Claim Mexico has found contradictory ways to deal with the more than thirty-five ethnic groups living within its territory. Groups with different languages and their own cultural singularities have gradually adapted to the social and political system that was consolidated after the 1910 Revolution. On one side, this system has used indigenous people as a symbol of nationalism and their rise from oppression, and on the other, it has devoted important efforts to integrate them into one Spanish-speaking, mestizo society unified under the ideology of revolutionary nationalism. Mostly peasants, many of them were granted land but few resources to make it productive. Up to today many Indian communities share an experience of inequality and conditions of extreme poverty. The Zapatista movement lent a new dimension to the problem—the younger urban generations confronted a problem they had not acknowledged, the government had to reconsider its failed integration policies, and changes in the Constitution were introduced to recognize cultural diversity—although without changing significantly the material conditions in which the indigenous communities lived. The movement gave a sense of worthiness and dignity to other Indian communities to set up their main demands and complaints. In 1996 the National Indigenous Conference was created to represent all ethnic groups in the country. In 2001 they joined the Zapatistas marching to Mexico City, and the two have worked together since. Since the Zapatistas’ rise, social movements have endorsed indigenous demands for better living conditions, political autonomy, and respect for their language and traditions. To have even a small ethnic group with their colorful traditional costumes and the sound of dried cocoons, seashells, and drums in a protest march—no matter what it is about—confers respectability and legitimacy on the organizers. However, the great number of indigenous groups and local problems make it difficult to unify them into a single set of claims, and often their demands—for agricultural help, against mining or draining water from their towns—are fought for separately. At the same time, politicians’ claims to represent indigenous groups and needs have become an important legitimacy requisite. In the most recent campaign for the presidency, indigenous support was shown in colorful welcome gatherings, sometimes with music and dance, flower leis around the candidates’ necks (from all parties), and the presence of small groups in small town political meetings to present their needs to the candidate.

108   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga AMLO surely collected more flowers, songs, hugs, commanding batons, and handshakes from the indigenous communities than all the other candidates, but the Zapatistas and the Congreso Nacional Indígena did not endorse him. They see AMLO as being closer to a traditional PRI politician than to a real left-wing leader. Refusing to give him their vote, they instead ran their own candidate, Marichuy, a fifty-six-year-old Indian woman who has been a traditional medicine healer. She gained important support but had to withdraw from the presidential race due to insufficient campaign funds. In order to show that he embraced the Indian cause, AMLO relied on Indians from Oaxaca and Nayarit (on the other side of the country) and expected to receive endorsements from other indigenous organizations. On the day he was inaugurated president, before addressing a cheering crowd in the Zócalo, he performed an elaborate ceremony where he was given a command baton from a so-called governor of indigenous people. At the end of the brief and emotional ritual, after being “cleansed” of evil spirits with herbs and purifying copal smoke, AMLO knelt in front of two indigenous healers in traditional costumes and received a blessing speech that included nature elements and the Virgin of Guadalupe as protective forces against evil and possible obstacles to his labor as president. Even if several indigenous groups later denied allegiance to the “governor of the indigenous people” and severely criticized the ceremony, the dramatic effect had been achieved. A second ceremony was performed to support one of AMLO’s most cherished projects, the Maya Train, a railroad crossing the Yucatan Peninsula. It is an initiative that has had strong opposition from environmentalists, Zapatistas, and some Mayan groups who foresee dangers to their habitat and natural resources, which include the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve and the Bacalar Lagoon. To deal with the opposition to the train, AMLO held another elaborate ceremony in Palenque, an archaeological site, with the participation of Mayan communities who performed dances and prayers and granted the permission of Mother Earth to begin building the railroad. In both cases AMLO has made use of a folkloric, old-fashioned version of indigenous peoples to support his political claims. The purifying ceremony in the Zócalo and the Mother Earth ceremony in Palenque referred to a stereotyped image of the indigenous population very far from the organized Indian troops of the Zapatistas, Marichuy’s leadership, or the environmental groups fighting against mining and depredation in different parts of the country. However, these rituals had an emotional impact on AMLO’s followers and presented him as a champion of the pre-Columbian ethnic groups in the country.

The Zócalo The main square in Mexico City, the Zócalo, has been a favorite point of arrival for massive protests in Mexico. In a centralist country, the Zócalo is the center of the center. The essayist Carlos Monsiváis (2002) referred to it as “the agora of the family trips and the political gatherings, symbolic and real space from which crowds departed more than once, to found the rest of the city and of the Anahuac Valley.” Built on top of the main Aztec ceremonial site, the Zócalo has been the main stage of power: on one side lies the National Palace, seat of the executive branch of the government, and the Supreme Court; to the south side lies City Hall; to the north sits the Cathedral; and, to the west, facing the National Palace, the business district. Independence Day, September

Protest and Performativity   109 15, is celebrated there when the president calls for “Vivas!” to the national heroes and rings the Independence Bell. It is the place where massive demonstrations in support or against the government have taken place over decades in order for people to show their worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. Thus to reach the Zócalo, which may host more than 100,000 people, became the aim for major protests since the second half of the twentieth century. To get there strongly signified defiance to power and triumph over government opposition and police blockades. Three times in 1968 the student movement marched to the Zócalo and held memorable meetings. Elementary school teachers against regulations, the Gay Pride movement, the movement to protest the crimes in Ayotzinapa, and many others have arrived there after walking along the city streets to symbolize the culmination of a long struggle. When the PRI lost the presidency after a world record of seventy-one years of government tenure, the Zapatistas marched north from Chiapas to Mexico City. After thirty-seven days and six thousand kilometers they arrived at the Zócalo on March 11, 2001. People crowded the Zócalo to welcome and support them and shake hands and take pictures with them. As the supreme stage of all major protests and political performances in the country, the Zócalo was also a target for AMLO. After his defeat in the 2006 presidential election, he held a meeting there to present himself as the legitimate president of Mexico and appointed a shadow cabinet to supervise Calderon’s new government. Meetings and demonstrations by groups close to AMLO became so frequent in the Zócalo that most of the executive functions slowly moved from the National Palace to Los Pinos, the Presidential House in Chapultepec Park. Despite his electoral defeat, AMLO and the PRD, which ruled Mexico City, took over the Zócalo. AMLO’s announcements that he would run for the presidency in 2011 and 2016 and his major campaign meetings in 2012 and 2018 took place there. When AMLO’s electoral triumph was announced in July 2018, his supporters overflowed the Zócalo to wait for his winning speech, where he announced that the Presidential House and offices in Los Pinos would be closed and the seat of the executive would return to the National Palace in the Zócalo, where he would offer press conferences every morning at 7 a.m. Some days later he announced that he and his family would also move to live in the National Palace. Nowadays, resignifying its meaning as the seat of power, AMLO works and lives in the Zócalo, Mexico’s political heart.

Masks and Disguises The Zapatista movement denounced the marginalization and exclusion of the indigenous population, but the use of bandanas and ski masks covering their faces provided an im­por­ tant symbol of struggle, commitment, and collective identity. Some people thought the masks were intended to protect the rebels in case of persecution and repression, but the intended message was different. Some years before, a Mexico City hero used the mask not as a disguise but to stage strategic dramaturgy. After the 1985 earthquakes in Mexico City, a movement of earthquake victims emerged demanding the reconstruction of their dilapidated housing units and later organized the Neighborhood Assembly (AB, Asamblea de Barrios), which was one of the first popular organizations that distanced themselves from Marxist and old-left discourses and practices. Superbarrio, dressed as a professional wrestler, with a red and yellow mask,

110   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga red tights, a shirt emblazoned with the letters “SB,” yellow briefs, and matching boots and cape, stood as a symbol of the struggle. His presence transformed any city site into a symbolic field in which, drawing from the dramatic triad structure of wrestling, the public could easily interpret what was going on and why. In the jargon of the trade, he was the babyface: the athletic wrestler who follows the rules and wrestles clean and fair against the heel, the one who breaks the rules and gives illegal blows and kicks. The third part is the referee, who pretends to be impartial but clearly favors the heel and pretends he does not see his dirty tricks. In this narrative, the babyface stands for the popular movement that struggles not only to improve its condition but also to have the rules enforced against the cheating heel, who represents the landlords and the dirty tricks they routinely use against the popular movement. The referee represents the partial authorities who will not enforce the rules or concede anything just because people are entitled to it. Mexican government officials, undoubtedly literate in wrestling symbolism, could easily see their assigned role in Superbarrio’s performance as well as the challenge it represented to the dominant symbolic order. Dressed as a wrestler, Superbarrio stood against powerful lawbreakers who were helped by the police and top authorities. The attention aroused by the emotional dramaturgy of wrestling severely limited the possibilities of ignoring, neglecting, or silencing him or the organization he represented. At the same time, his popularity in Mexico and abroad discouraged authoritarian social control options (Cadena-Roa, 2002). “The mask—Superbarrio used to say—is not a disguise but a symbol. [It] represents the idea that our struggle is a collective one, which doesn’t belong to one individual” (Tobar 1989). Superbarrio was not a leader or spokesperson; he stood for a collective actor. Similarly, the Zapatistas wore masks to stress the idea that they were not individuals leading or following someone to attain a political goal but the collective indigenous communities in rebellion. Their covered faces added to an image that became known worldwide: the small but strongly built indigenous men and women with their short white trousers and heavy wool skirts and pullovers, marching. The military poise and the ammunition belt across their chest as a demonstration of their fire power and commitment created an appealing choreography. Wearing the mask aimed to dissolve the individual into the community. The Zapatistas did not act as individuals, Subcommander Marcos said: they represented the community and the mask works as a mirror where Mexicans may discover themselves (Marcos and Le Bot 1997). The masks provided a sense of mystique, identity, worthiness, and commitment to the actors, who used them to their advantage when they passed from an armed movement to a wide social mobilization. Even today, more than twenty-five years after the indigenous uprising, the Zapatistas will not uncover their faces for interviews or press visits or when negotiating with the authorities. Until recently Marcos has kept giving press conferences while smoking his pipe through the narrow hole opened in his ski mask. And Zapatistas have maintained social and political autonomy in the region. Other groups have adopted the mask as a way to give anonymity to radical actions, including groups of masked marchers form local “black blocks” in demonstrations. There are also small groups of so-called anarchists (some of them suspected of being government or antigovernment spies to undermine sympathy toward the protests), who cover their faces to crash store windows and paint walls during marches on their way to El Zócalo. More recently masks and hoods have been used by female students denouncing harassment and violence toward women on university campuses and in protests against budget cuts.

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A New Narrative In the past couple of decades, social movements have subtly changed the protest discourses based on the usual leftist terms, such as revolution, masses, and exploitation. Subcommander Marcos had a philosophical and literary background, much infused with anarchist readings which, mistrusting the state, called mostly for solidarity, cultural and political autonomy, and respect for differences. Poems, short stories, and humor were added to his political speeches and repeated by his supporters all over the world. However, his sharp criticism of capitalism and revolutionary nationalism focused both on neoliberal economic policies, including NAFTA, and on left-wing leaders who did not understand his political strategy and the society he was envisioning. On the other hand, the rise of civil society added new ideas and causes of unrest to the general script. Although there had been moments of collective action, civil society had remained silent until the 1985 earthquake. The earthquake not only changed the city’s physiognomy but also mobilized a civil society that ever since has expanded and grown increasingly vigilant for the shortcomings and poor performance of local and national governments. On that occasion the slow and ineffective government response, the use of the armed forces to keep order and prevent people from possible riots or looting, and the lack of information (among other shortcomings) were angrily confronted by hundreds of people who wanted to help by digging in fallen buildings for victims, carrying food and water for the working groups, and looking for shelter for those who had been left homeless. Many of them forced their participation onto the rescue efforts despite the army’s and police officials’ orders. After a few days dozens of social movement organizations were created to demand the rebuilding of damaged homes or the building of new homes, and new ways to fight for urgent needs were developed. From 1985 on, a new discourse made its presence in banners, slogans, and speeches— such as civil rights, environmental protection, media control, the right to make decisions about one’s body, respect for gender orientations, and claims of WUNC, slowly enhancing the protest vocabulary and the content of social struggles. Respect for ethnic identities and autonomy, the importance of the urban quality of life, and resistance to media manipulation were among the demands of an active and organized civil society. The #Iam132 movement introduced playfulness and irreverence through millennial speech that was full of youth slang which at the same time underlined the many social and political debates former generations had with the country. “We are the Mexican conscience,” they claimed. Diversity, tolerance, and unity were reinforced by a language that flowed through cell phones and networks during the following years. Changes in the protest script were strongly in evidence when, on September 19, 2017, exactly thirty-two years after the 1985 earthquakes, an earthquake again brought chaos and destruction to Mexico City. This time citizens knew exactly what to do. The immediate mobilizations brought together thousands of students and neighbors in order to rescue victims trapped under the fallen buildings. Unlike what happened in 1985, this time they were willing to cooperate with armed forces, whose commitment they often praised. Words, songs, hand signs acquired a new meaning during the rescue labors. Solidarity—a term that had been used by former PRI governments to distribute financial aid and build patron-client networks—was resuscitated by young people to express the pleasure of working together; in

112   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga the case of the 2017 earthquake mobilization, solidarity was extended to the soldiers who were working on the rescue teams. Silence during these missions was necessary to hear cries for help and traces of life under the rubble, so a closed fist, until then a symbol of dissidence and contestation, was resignified as a sign demanding silence and respect for life. Together with general discontent with Peña Nieto’s government, these symbols were later incorporated into a movement to search for changes in building rules, reparation for victims, and corruption charges for those who allowed the construction of unsafe buildings. In any case, the words, signs, slogans—with new meanings and related to new causes—established a new script for protest movements. Surprisingly MORENA did not adopt this new discourse but turned to the old nationalistic one based on official history. Schoolbook heroes from the three previous “transformations”—Independence, Reform, and Revolution—have been brought back in banners and official stationery and used as backdrops for a presidential project aimed at fighting corruption, recovering the Mexican oil industry (a symbol of Mexican nationalism), and providing for his poorest followers’ economic needs. The administration is trying to rewrite history, presenting itself as the carrier of a fourth transformation of Mexico, a claim that denies the democratic changes that made it possible for AMLO to win the 2018 election after two failed attempts. The new narrative sustains the claim that an honest, good-natured, people-oriented government has taken the place of the previous neoliberal, corrupt, and self-centered “power mafia” which somehow included a possibly right-wing civil society, now looked at with suspicion. In spite of strict austerity policies, often harsher that those applied in neoliberal times, neoliberalism has also been recovered as an important symbolic item: the term embraces anything between wrong and evil and is used to condemn and reject initiatives, programs, and critics who question the presidential project. Popular, colorful language was a very effective performative resource used by AMLO during the first six months of his term, later to be replaced by a more official tone. In his daily press conferences he still uses that close-to-the-people tone (like calling on mothers to spank drug-traffickers or repeating popular sayings) but combines it with a severe moral tone that reminds everybody their president is leading a difficult, contested transformation which requires commitment and incorruptible behavior from all Mexicans.

Social Networks AMLO often refers to the “blessed social networks,” the means of communicating with his followers and critics outside private media, some of which he finds too critical. Certainly the social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and the like) have become important venues of political communication. AMLO often distributes short videos and messages, and his early morning press conferences can be followed through them. He also uses two web pages whose name, Regeneración, comes from a newspaper dating from the 1910 Revolution. One of them publishes MORENA’s information about the movement and party (https://www.regeneracion.com/). The second is supposedly independent from MORENA and the government (https://regeneracion.mx/); it covers AMLO’s daily activities and has 750,000 followers on Facebook. There is also an army of Twitter followers who promote AMLO’s views and argue with and harass his critics.

Protest and Performativity   113 As in many other parts of the world, the growing use of the internet and social networks has introduced significant changes in the development of political communications and social movements. It has provided immediate communication among young, educated, and networked activists, a channel to spread information, build cooperation, and create a collective identity. This strategy worked well for the Zapatistas, who took advantage of the internet despite being in a remote area with poor communications. Fuentes (2019) has registered how skilled activists outside the movement amplified through “virtual sit-ins” the voice of the Indians and prevented intended government actions against them. It also worked for #Iam132, which started after a YouTube video and continued mobilizing in later events such as the 2017 earthquake, when some of them created Verificado19S to organize the distribution of aid where it was badly needed, using bike and motorcycle volunteers, who could reach some affected places faster than those in cars and trucks. Together with information, Verificado served as an electronic tool to reproduce slogans, gestures, and a sense of togetherness and solidarity. Many of those activists knew each other then, and now they constitute a submerged network that has been able to reactivate when and where there is an issue to address. Networks have become important channels for a civil society that does not feel part of the government’s project and has to look for alternative ways to reach public opinion.

Conclusions Performativity as an analytic perspective enlightens the many devices employed by social and political actors to gather attention and responsiveness to their claims, but it also helps to explain why people react to and embrace a cause. As the examples in this chapter have shown, many of these reasons may be consequences of a political or social empathy with the claim, but many others have an emotional resonance deeply related to identity, ritual, or symbolism. It is a deep-rooted sympathy with the ethnic outfit and the disheveled but strongly committed aspect of the masked indigenous Zapatistas that generates solidarity that persists after many years; it is identity in the face of disaster that links earthquake victims in a powerful movement for renewal and justice. We have found that use of performativity in protests may allow actors to succeed in their claims and even win elections. The case of AMLO shows how successfully performativity has moved from the streets to the party system, then into the presidency. Through a resonant diagnostic frame that identifies neoliberalism and corruption as the worst problems Mexico is facing, AMLO and MORENA have designed a complex and elaborate performance which includes the use of the Zócalo, the creation of new rituals (such as the press conference every morning), relations with the Indian communities, and the frequent accusations about the “mafia in power,” all of which help to create a sense of respect and solidarity with the president’s populist ruling style. Finally, cyberspace and networks have given a new dimension to performativity: the network society actors reach distant publics in seconds, and their performances remain available to be reproduced, distributed, and copied. Whether it is a protest or an act of power, communication technologies make of information and scene production an ongoing show

114   Jorge Cadena-Roa and Cristina Puga that can be retained, recycled, and renewed, lending a new dimension to the time and space of any performance and its political consequences.

References Alexander, Jeffrey. 2007. “Power and Performance: The War on Terror between the Sacred and the Profane.” RSCAS Distinguished Lectures. European University Institute: Florence. Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. Performance and Power. London: Polity. Cadena-Roa, Jorge. 2002. “Strategic Framing, Emotions, and Superbarrio—Mexico City’s Masked Crusader.” Mobilization 7, no. 2: 201–16. Cadena-Roa, Jorge. 2003. “State Pacts, Elites, and Social Movements in Mexico’s Transition to Democracy.” In States, Parties, and Social Movements, edited by Jack A. Goldstone, 107–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisinger, Peter K. 1973. “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities.” American Political Science Review 67: 11–28. Fuentes, Marcela. 2019. Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Goodwin, Jeff, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds. 2001. Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jasper, James M. 2018. The Emotions of Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jenkins, Craig J. 1983. “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology, 9, 527–53. Jörgensen, Beth E. 2004. “Making History: Subcomandante Marcos in the Mexican Chronicle.” In “Memory and Nation in Contemporary Mexico.” Special issue, South Central Review 21, no. 3 (Fall): 85–106. Kershaw, Baz. 1992. The Politics of Performance: Radical Theater as Cultural Intervention. London: Routledge. Kershaw, Baz. 1997. “Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968–1989.” New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 51: 255–76. Kershaw, Baz. 1999. The Radical in Performance. Between Brecht and Baudrillard. New York: Routledge. Kitschelt, Herbert. 1986. “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies.” British Journal of Political Science 16: 57–95. Labastida, Julio, and Miguel  A.  López Leyva. 2004. “México: Una transición prolongada (1988–1996/97).” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 64, no. 4: 749–806. Marcos, Subcomandante and Yvon Le Bot. 1997. El sueño zapatista. Barcelona: Anagrama. McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency: 1930–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McAdam, Doug. 1996. “The Framing Function of Movement Tactics: Strategic Dramaturgy in the American Civil Rights Movement.” In Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, edited by Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, 338–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, John  D., and Mayer  N.  Zald. 1973. The Trend of Social Movements in America: Professionalism and Resource Mobilization. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press. McCarthy, John D., and Mayer N. Zald. 1977. “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory.” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6: 1212–42.

Protest and Performativity   115 Monsiváis, Carlos. 2002. “El vigor de la agonía: La ciudad de México en los albores del siglo XXI.” Letras libres, August 31. https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/el-vigor-la-agonia-laciudad-mexico-en-los-albores-del-siglo-xxi. Montemayor, Carlos. 2000. Chiapas: La rebelión indígena en México. México City: Joaquín Mortiz. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Opp, Karl-Dieter. 1999. “Contending Conceptions of the Theory of Rational Action.” Journal of Theoretical Politics 11: 171–202. Opp, Karl-Dieter. 2009. “Explaining Contentious Politics: A Case Study of a Failed Theory of Development and a Proposal for a Rational Choice Alternative.” In Raymond Boudon: A Life in Sociology, edited by Mohamed Cherkaoui and Peter Hamilton, 303–17. Oxford: Bardwell Press. Patán, Julio. 2012. “¿Yo soy 132?” Letras Libres, August 2. Perrow, Charles. 1979. “The Sixties Observed.” In The Dynamics of Social Movements: Resource Mobilization, Social Control and Tactics, edited by Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, 192–211. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop. Rubin, Jeffrey W. 2004. “Meanings and Mobilizations: A Cultural Politics Approach to Social Movements and States.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 3: 106–42. Saward, Michael. 2010. The Representative Claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saward, Michael. 2017. “Performative Representation.” In Reclaiming Representation, edited by M. Brito Vieira, 75–94. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 1970. “Guerrilla Theatre: May 1970.” Drama Review 14, no. 3: 163–8. Schechner, Richard. 2002. Performance Studies New York: Routledge. Snow, David  A., and Robert Benford. 1988. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization.” In From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research across Cultures, edited by Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow, 197–217. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Snow, David A., and Robert Benford 1992. “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest.” In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller, 133–55. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Snow, David  A., E.  Burke Rochford Jr., Steven  K.  Worden, and Robert  D.  Benford. 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51 (4):464–81. Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, Charles. 1984. “Social Movements and National Politics.” In Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, edited by Charles Bright and Susan Harding, 297–317. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tilly, Charles. 1986. The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Lesley J. Wood. 2009. Social Movements, 1768–2008. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Tobar, Héctor. 1989. “Who Was That Masked Man? Ask the INS.” Los Angeles Times. February 25.

Chapter 7

R epr esen tation Jean-Pascal Daloz

The polysemic nature of the term representation is widely recognized: it may refer to (1) perceptions and conceptions, (2) mechanisms of delegation, and (3) performances, in the sense of “theatrical.” Crucially, there is a common denominator between the three meanings. What connects them is the process through which something that is not present in any real physical sense is made so through the action of an intermediary (an image, a spokesperson, or an actor, respectively). It can be held that concurrently taking the three into consideration may constitute a particularly fruitful field for research (Daloz, 2017). The argument here is that the very nature of this type of political relationship depends on how it is perceived by both the representatives and the represented. It is also the outcome of the way in which representatives defend the interest of the represented, as well as how they present themselves and those they claim to embody.1 Most representatives are expected to fulfill a function of expression of the represented group. As its visible face, they are a kind of living symbol. It is in this regard that the complementarity of the theatrical dimension, on which this chapter focuses, becomes clearly apparent. In this chapter I provide some preliminary reflections about the theatricality of politics and notably on the parallels that can be established between dramatic art and the staging of representation. I will then turn my attention to the issue of performativity, that is, to the efficacy of the process and its ability to achieve certain results. Finally, with a view to show concretely how a theatrical approach of representation (combined with the two other aspects) can yield rich findings, I will propose developments on the ways in which political actors deal with the opposing imperatives of eminence and nearness.

Political Representation and Theatricality In a volume edited by Weisberg and Patterson (1998), seventeen authors use a dramatic reading grid to study the US Congress as a “double political stage.” Their intention is not to argue that this type of approach should supplant more standard ones (as some writers have

118   Jean-Pascal Daloz done, e.g., Mount,  1972) but to highlight the contribution that the theatrical metaphor (involving theatrical staging but also “the theater of operations”) can make to political analysis. It includes developments based on the notions of casting, protagonists, and minor characters; the roles played by various actors consecutively and actors carrying out several roles concurrently; the degree to which audiences are well-informed or not; previous performances; prestigious and humble arenas; wings, rehearsals, plots, and tragedies; plays considered as a whole or in terms of successive acts; and, of course, representation. While it is illuminating in many ways, this approach, relying extensively on the use of analogy, raises the question of which type of theatrical legacy we are referring to. Quite evidently, there are considerable differences between the layout of, say, the early days of Greek tragedy and comedy, that of edifying medieval plays, the commedia dell’arte, courtly entertainment, enlightenment avant-garde, and nineteenth-century “bourgeois” styles up to contemporary “happenings.” The contrasts become even more striking once non-Western traditions are taken into consideration (the Japanese Noh, the Indonesian shadow theater, etc.), not to mention popular forms such as saturnalia and other carnivalesque expressions of theater. Unfortunately the rich diversity of models often seems to be overlooked by authors dealing with theatricality.2 For instance, to anticipate the discussion in the next section, when Balandier (1980) underlines the clear demarcation between actors who perform on a floodlit stage and spectators remaining in the dark in his essay on “Theatrocracy,” he forgets to take account of the historical nature of this arrangement, which is far from universal.3 Unless we remain at a very abstract level of reasoning and argue that theatricality can be reduced to structural, allegedly ubiquitous elements, it is important to recognize that cultural variations matter. Far from being a problem, this variety should be viewed positively by analysts, all the more so by comparativists, because it enriches our understanding of how theatrical representations may work. Constraints of space prevent me from attempting to provide here a systematic examination of the relationships between theatrical configurations and political practices. Two examples will, however, serve to illustrate the type of thinking I am suggesting. Let me start with the notion of stage. Works on the history and the sociology of theater give us a measure of just how diverse these settings can be, from those establishing a clear gap between the actors performing on a raised platform and the viewers, to amphitheaters sloping down to the stage. Some layouts seem designed to reinforce feelings of transcendent verticality, whereas others may be more conducive to processes of fusion and identification. There was a time when rich spectators could remain on the proscenium, while it is not uncommon nowadays to have actors appear suddenly in the middle of the audience, standing or sitting in a well-ordered way. In addition, the architectural setting of some playhouses is liable to emphasize differences of status between the spectators themselves (boxes affording more or less visibility, stalls). The most important lesson to draw here is not that various types of arrangements are apt to induce very different kinds of symbolic relations between actors and spectators but that analysis can very easily be applied to the realm of political representation. Indeed, one is immediately reminded of similar reflections regarding parliaments and the meaning of institutional architecture (see notably Goodsell’s excellent studies [e.g., 1988] on the diversity of spatial patterns: signaling “sacred superiority” or revealing more democratic conceptions of authority). However, when looking into this topic, the specialist of representation should adopt a broader conception of the stage, encompassing all the possible places where representatives are likely to appear and project a certain image.

Representation   119 This may include official buildings and all sorts of podiums, of course, but also TV studios, offices, the street, and even, at times, private residences (certain aspects of which may be purposefully displayed). The nature of the audiences addressed may also vary, depending on whether they are mainly composed of peers, associates, onlookers, or the general public. And while the context (national, international, or local; election campaign as opposed to more routine circumstances) will undoubtedly affect the nature of the interaction, it is still interesting to consider whether or not comparable stages lead to similar presentations. This brings us to another possible theme, that of repertoire. Most of the time theater actors perform existing plays that are intended for repetition (in the sense both of rehearsal and of multiple representations). Admittedly, the play’s interpretation will vary from one company to another and from one director to the next. Moreover, certain theatrical traditions may allow for a certain degree of improvisation. The fact remains, however, that unlike various other forms of show, such as sports games, what is performed remains largely predictable and expected. Hence the parallels to be drawn between the world of rituals studied by anthropologists and theater (Turner, 1982). Most important for what concerns us here, this type of approach opens up a significant area of research relating to political representation. Being able to rely on conventionalized repertoires may certainly be viewed as a resource and a factor of legitimacy for political actors. Yet attempts to differentiate oneself from predecessors and to increase one’s profile and visibility through a more original or alternative style might also prove to be a good strategy. In this respect, it is equally instructive to observe the extent to which speeches and attitudes are similar from one performance to the next, with expected punch lines, so to speak, or whether major adjustments are made instead according to the nature of the occasion and the type of audience. Seen from the spectators’ point of view, are we dealing with supporters who strongly identify with the representative and display enthusiastic approval, or with wary onlookers who silently and circumspectly judge a performance? Here what may be most revealing is the study of the interaction between the (political) actors and the public with regard to what is actually being said—possibly leading to soft or loud clapping, but also laughter, whistles, or booing.4 The theatrical metaphor, with its rich terminology (persona, backstage, etc.), can certainly prove fruitful from the perspective of political analysis and can be applied in very different ways. It would not be difficult to provide further instances where elements from the theatrical universe can shed helpful light on political representation. The most obvious one may well be the notion of role, frequently used in the literature by different schools of thought. It is essential to understand how, quite often, representatives concurrently hold several roles, are expected to perform on different stages, and are forced to address a wide array of audiences with assorted expectations. Nevertheless we have to remain conscious of the limits of the theatrical metaphor, or rather of the necessity to adapt it, if we are to apply it rigorously and effectively to the realm of political representation.

Performativity To the extent that scholarly works take account of the performative side of representation at all, it is more often than not to point out the purpose of producing particular effects intended. In other words, performativity is linked to the efficacy of representation(s) when it comes

120   Jean-Pascal Daloz to generating respect or to exalting identities. However, it is appropriate to establish a subdistinction between two major veins of thought. The first and older one, which is noticeable in anthropology, history, political science, and several other disciplines, has to do with spectacular politics. The aim of this type of reading has been to demonstrate how dramatic effects are deployed in order to foster or reinforce hierarchical relations. A second, more recent but equally important line concerned with representation and the achievement of effects is the one paying attention to the performative creation of sociopolitical realities in the tradition of Austin’s (1975) and Butler’s (1988) pioneering contributions. The discussion in the following pages is directed to examining these two perspectives. Many authors have been eager to analyze symbolic logics of ascendency designed to give a dignified representation of rulers at the head of polities and intimidate those below them. As anthropology amply demonstrates, awe-inspiring rituals intended to elicit deference featured prominently in most traditional settings. Many specialists have contributed to exposing the mechanisms involved and providing analysis of the matter, for example, Victor Turner’s approach in terms of “master symbols” or Georges Balandier’s vision of “theatrocracy,” already alluded to. In his essay, which also applies to modern societies, the latter develops a universalizing reading, according to which the intention of dominant actors is to signal distance from others and the often sacred quality of their status. Balandier uses numerous theatrical metaphors to bolster his argument. In Cohen (1981), another anthropological work, we find a similar reading in terms of “cults of eliteness,” the objective of which is to reinforce belief in the superiority of those who stand at the apex of the sociopolitical pyramid. Cohen’s central thesis is that the status of elites disappears as soon as populations lose faith in the exceptional nature of those elites’ qualities. Many lessons on the performativity of representation can equally be drawn from historical studies on topics such as ceremonial pomp or the grandiosity of court life in certain periods.5 Here we encounter issues relating to prestige goods, sumptuary laws conferring a monopoly on the use of particular signs of superiority, self-enhancing entourages, gestures and body language reflecting hierarchy, the vertical and horizontal organization of space, dialectics of ostentation and concealment, or aural dimensions of pageantry. Interestingly, some of these works do lay emphasis on the issue of representation. One has notably in mind Marin’s (2005) reading grid on the “representation of power” and the “power of representation” as regards Louis XIV’s Versailles. Finally, in political science, one comes across comparable perspectives on the symbolic uses of politics and manipulations (Edelman, 1988), as well as to observations on communication that vary in terms of their sophistication. However, within their respective disciplines, some scholars have questioned the validity of this type of analytical framework. The object of their criticism focuses on the question of the intelligibility of signs, codes, and elitist rituals from the standpoint of common spectators. More generally, what they also bring into play is the issue of the visibility of what is represented. In anthropology, Firth and Geertz stand out as the first authors to be discussed in this context. In a synthesis, Firth (1973, 85ff.) criticizes the previously mentioned approaches of Cohen and Turner. According to Firth, the analyses they develop based on the symbolics of power lead to a rigid form of theorization which presupposes that perceptions and reactions are highly uniform. In doing so, they overlook one of the most im­por­ tant questions to consider: the extent to which what is displayed is also understood. As much of the fieldwork shows, many spectators have only a partial grasp of the symbolic

Representation   121 displays they are subjected to; what makes sense to some may be thoroughly unintelligible to others. Geertz’s (1980) study of Balinese court rituals and mass ceremonials offers an implicit counterpoint to Balandier’s approach. Starting from an in-depth description of Negara (a notion that refers to the capital city, the palace, but also to the realm itself and to the “theater state”), he reaches the conclusion that, within this particular cultural context, the impressive display of splendor does not have a political goal but constitutes very much an end in itself. This idea is perfectly encapsulated in one of the book’s most famous formulas: “Power served pomp, not pomp power” (Geertz, 1980, 13). Geertz shows that exuberance and material abundance act to express not only the divine nature of the king but also the vitality of the kingdom, neither of which can be understood separately in this culture. The final chapter of the book takes aim at and criticizes the universalizing aspirations of theories that apply to every context the same interpretive grids based on ideological mystification and the quest for dominance. A similar line of criticism can be found in the works of various historians. For instance, the great specialist of Tudor-era sumptuosity, Sydney Anglo (1992), devoted an entire book to the fundamental question of what meaning the public could actually draw from the fastuous ceremonies of that particularly ostentatious period. In doing so he readily acknowledges the debt owed to a scholarly literature that has sought to decipher symbolics (a literature to which he himself contributed significantly at an earlier stage of his career). Understanding complex references to Antiquity, to the various dimensions of Christianity, to the universe of heraldry, or any other arcane allusion to dynastic symbols presents a real interest from an academic point of view. “But what did the passing spectators of the time make of them?” he also wonders throughout. Historians sometimes seem to forget that only a handful of highly cultured advisors in the immediate surrounding of these dignitaries would be likely to see things in such a calculated fashion. Anglo insists instead on the fact that the crowds most probably perceived such events as a form of recreation and a momentary distraction, providing brief interludes in the travails of their everyday life. The question of access to these representations also needs to be addressed. Certainly the great processions and solemn entrances offered occasional glimpses of the noble and mighty. But in reality only a small minority got anywhere close to them. The inside of palaces and most of these impressive displays remained out of reach for the ordinary population. Thus sophisticated analyses of the subtle symbolics of power (e.g., which portraits were hung in what rooms) must be limited in terms of their scope and supposed effect.6 In his provocatively titled work, Le simple corps du roi, Boureau (1988) provides a similar perspective, critical of approaches that overlook the issue of beliefs. The main danger, in his view, lies in interpreting grand ceremonies and major rituals from a timeless angle of political sacralization, while downplaying the importance of all sorts of symbolic rivalry and punctual tactics deployed by competing groups in order to display or enhance their status. In all likelihood, it is not absolutely necessary to make sense or even to be fully visible in order to impress, as Veyne (1988) points out regarding Trajan’s Column in Rome. While few people can understand what is depicted on the ascending spiral that bears the statue and the high spires of the sculpted frieze are virtually impossible to make out, all that matters is that the monument proclaims the greatness of the Roman emperor. In other words, we can be struck by certain forms of representation without a clear understanding or perception of them.7 On the debates surrounding intelligibility but also accessibility and visibility, Sabatier (1999) offers some stimulating insights in his book on Versailles, notably when considering

122   Jean-Pascal Daloz the role played by the famous Hall of Mirrors in terms of the effective performativity of allegories. As he points out, it was physically difficult for visitors to see what was displayed on many of the ceilings and their margins, let alone understand the symbols portrayed. Even if the question of symbolic reception cannot be settled once and for all by historians, it remains nonetheless a legitimate one. We know, however, that in many contexts a significant effort had to be made to inform and explain the meaning of representations, a task that often fell to advisors who had been involved in elaborating them. True, it is im­por­ tant to distinguish between codes that are easy to interpret (who precedes whom, stands above, or is more ornately dressed?—but even here things may be more complex than they first seem)8 and ones that require more esoteric knowledge. Still, this question of the transmission of meaning must be recognized as a far-from-trivial constraint for the actors themselves as for the learned officials in charge of the display of power. Let me also add that attending does not necessarily imply having a clear view of things. We can think, for example, of crowds in which it is difficult to distinguish anything, in contrast to the space given to high dignitaries, which afforded them the privilege to both see and be seen. Let us now turn to the second vein of thought, concerned with the issue of constitutive dimensions of representation. Political actors and their entourages are understood to be playing a key role when it comes to making representations of their constituencies, or the group they claim to speak for, and of themselves as representatives. The idea is that they construct in some measure the represented, or what needs to be represented, through images and verbal communication.9 With such a perspective we can clearly see how the various meanings of the word representation can merge. We are dealing with performative production in the sense of a construction of representations and that of an effective confirmation through the appearance of representatives. With the exception of a few important descriptive works,10 the question of the actual perceptions or figurations of the relation of representation used to be largely ignored. Particularly for authors motivated by normative convictions entailing teleological visions such a concrete angle was obviously deemed negligible. To consider this cognitive dimension certainly is progress, especially insofar as what is taken into account are not only deeply anchored representations conveyed by traditional institutions but also alternative ones possibly enacted via all sorts of media within the context of an explosion of representative claims (Saward, 2010). We know that the so-called constructivist turn has led to the production of many academic works in various disciplines. To come back to anthropology, many books titled Politics of Representation deal with the creation and imposition of certain identities. On their side, historians working on status interactions show how, in certain courts, physical quarrels over the right of precedence were related to the fact that, if spatial arrangements did reflect official rankings, effective jockeying for better positions could performatively contribute to set a precedent and redetermine logics of primacy (Sternberg, 2014; Cosandey, 2016). Moreover, there are countless titles of historical books purposely using the words invention of, creation of, fabrication of, etc., hinting at the fact that some representations we tend to take for granted are in fact the product of history. More generally speaking, following Foucault’s vision reducing basically everything to issues of discourse and power, the intention of many progressive authors is often to show how most constructions are arbitrary and can therefore be deconstructed and then reconstructed according to their ideals.

Representation   123 Within the field of critical sociology, when tackling the question of political representation proper, Bourdieu (1984) goes as far as to say that it is the spokesperson who creates the group, rather than the other way round, a process that he calls “le coup de force symbolique de la représentation” (i.e., the symbolic takeover of representation, seen as a specific mode of domination). This may prove to be true. We indeed sometimes witness cases where it is the very claim of being a representative that shapes the nature of the grouping for which one purports to act. Yet, to return to our central theme here, in many settings there are frequently severe constraints on representatives, who are expected to reproduce strictly the sociocultural representations and values of the community for which they stand. Only at this price are they empowered to act on their behalf. It is important to realize that communities or identities, as well as portrayals of “the others,” often exist prior to their evocation or constitution in politics.11 Political actors should not be considered as being systematically in a position to strongly influence perceptions. I argue that a nondogmatic analytical framework on the representations of representation (so to speak) thus involves considering them as both makers and receivers of representations. In my comparative work, I insist on the fact that it is crucial to take local meanings into account (e.g., Daloz, 2018). To conclude about performance, the question as to whether or not representatives are in a position to instrumentalize cultural repertoires or to (re)make representations of sociopolitical realities should remain an open one. The dangers of strictly adhering a priori to a systematic vision in terms of all-powerful representatives able to form and re-form mental maps, as conveyed in some quarters of critical political sociology, are obvious. In any case, the current inflation of discourses—which some analysts see as characteristic of the postmodern era—certainly comes to undermine voluntarist efforts to define and impose one “legitimate” vision. What is involved are fundamental interrogations about the perceptions of realities, involving not only constructions but also deeply ingrained cultural representations (in the anthropological sense) possibly compelling political elites themselves.

Concrete Perspectives: On Representation as Eminence and as Nearness Theoretical reflections on representation in relation to issues of theatricality and performativity are obviously crucial. Yet it is also quite possible to look at the symbolic processes involved under concrete conditions. In this respect and in order to give an idea of the line of reasoning suggested here, I will take the example of one particularly significant research theme. It concerns the tension between the necessity for representatives to show a certain amount of distinction as spokespersons (including in the eyes of their competitors) while not appearing excessively cut off from those for whom they claim to speak. Before presenting some empirical studies about how the opposing imperatives of eminence and nearness are experienced in different settings (and how political representatives may reconcile them), I would like to consider the ambiguities of each of these notions separately. I will then identify various scenarios from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective.

124   Jean-Pascal Daloz Table 7.1  The Ambiguities of References to Nearness Dimensions of Nearness

Top-Down Rhetorics of Legitimation

Sharing a crucial identity Social nearness Geographical nearness Patronage nearness Concrete nearness Modest nearness

I am one of you I am like you I live among you I can provide for you I am here; I am listening to you I do not pretend to stand over and above you

At first glance, the meaning of the word nearness seems obvious enough. The notion refers to closeness in spatial and affective terms as opposed to distance and aloofness. On second inspection, however, when it comes to sociopolitical and symbolic usages in relation to representation, an implicit confusion arises, as the notion may apply to relatively different things. I think it is important to distinguish analytically between various dimensions of nearness (table 7.1), even if these may partially overlap in concrete cases. When a polity is shaped by preexisting bonds of loyalty, nearness simply means sharing in a particular identity (ethnic, religious, etc.). However, in contexts where socioeconomic lines of divide have taken precedence over the more primordial ones, representation may imply championing a specific class, defending their values and promoting their objectives. Nearness here becomes a question of social authenticity, and the occupational background of the representative might prove to be a crucial factor of legitimacy. Despite the fact that identity is often closely related to local roots, it is also important to emphasize geographical nearness. We know of representatives who were not born locally but are successful because of their subsequent commitment to a certain constituency. What matters most is residing in the area one claims to represent and showing dedication to furthering its interests. There can also be nearness of a patronage kind. The interesting point here is that, in contrast to the other types, it does not include the fiction of formal equality. Instead, potential candidates may boast about the fact that they control resources that they are ready to place at the disposal of their followers. Furthermore, nearness may involve concrete proximity in the sense of accessibility. Last, consonant with the egalitarian ethos that prevails in some contexts, a certain degree of modest nearness may well be required. The eminence that representatives need to display is subject to no less ambiguity than the nearness required of them. Several types of eminence can be distinguished (table 7.2). There were periods in history when most of these elements were combined. In many contemporary settings the situation has become much more complicated because the basis of representatives’ legitimacy differs according to the sociopolitical environment. In some, upper-class origins or personal achievements are seen in a positive light, but this is by no means always the case. Competence constitutes an increasingly valuable resource as it signals eminence of a rational kind: it objectively confirms merit and indicates efficiency— which is important in a context where politics have become largely professionalized. As for exemplarity, representatives may try to distinguish themselves with claims of moral superiority, for instance. The next type—projecting an impression of substance—proves essential in situations where generous patrons can garner prestige by rewarding their supporters.

Representation   125 Table 7.2  Dimensions of Eminence Types of Eminence

Manifestations

Social eminence Competence Exemplarity Means and substance Display of signs of superiority

Renown, success, access to other strategic elites E.g., oratorical skills Incarnation of important values Redistribution, philanthropy Ostentation, decorum

Finally, earning legitimacy sometimes demands that representatives maintain a high profile, which notably involves the possession and wielding of striking prestige items. With a view to doing justice to the complexity of the meanings involved in the symbolic relationship between representatives and those they claim to represent, I will lay emphasis on this last element (i.e., the display of signs of superiority) in contrast with what was called “modest nearness” earlier. As we saw in the previous section, many scholars hastily interpret any intimidating style in terms of power symbols whose purpose is to induce submissiveness. However, the aim of such a style does not always consist in reaffirming the social order. Present-day decorum in Western democracies, for example, holds that pomp is legitimate insofar as it remains the preserve of the state and is not appropriated for and by the political elites themselves. Where these elites are temporary officeholders, the ostentation displayed in, say, the banquets they organize in their capital’s palace is perceived as a reflection of the polity’s standing, which it is sometimes necessary to project. Viewed from the standpoint of legitimation, a major contradiction arises between the requirement to represent a country or a city with dignity and the need for representatives not to appear aloof from those they represent. After all, in a democracy those acting at the top are supposed to do so in the name of the latter. Yet it is true that the theatrical aspects of representation are often highly ambiguous. When political actors, for instance, indulge in architectural follies, which are supposed to heighten the reputation of their respective region or country, are they contributing to a flattering impression of the community they represent? Are they not also trying to enhance their own image? This being said, various scenarios can be underlined. When observing the phenomenon of representation from a bottom-up perspective, we come across people aspiring to elevate themselves by identifying with representatives who embody higher ambitions. They appear anxious to gain a greater sense of dignity through association with someone whose function or image transcends their own. They may also believe that these actors are an incarnation of their ideals. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we find deep-seated suspicion of anyone whose profile is more distinguished than those he or she claims to represent. A remarkable case is that of French working-class organizations that proposed at the end of the nineteenth century to send to Parliament only the humblest among them, in the belief that they would better resist the temptation to betray fellow workers. Drawbacks related to their origins (particularly an inability to express themselves properly) were deemed to be secondary in light of the fact that these deputies could bear witness to the condition of their peers. One such deputy created a scandal when he appeared dressed in his working outfit, a gesture intended to remind everyone of his origins and obligations. With this illustration we clearly see how the three aspects (perceptions, delegation, theater of representation) are combined.

126   Jean-Pascal Daloz When looking instead from the top-down, we have, schematically speaking, at one extreme representatives who seek support by stressing their ordinariness in the hope that it will appeal to voters. For example, if accent and diction play an important part in the way politicians are assessed, they may be exploited in different ways. Indeed, some members of the Labour Party in Great Britain once became adept at using their working-class accent to differentiate themselves from members of the Conservative Party. Compassionate strategies may also prove effective. At the other end, we find representatives resorting to a wide variety of strategies intended to demonstrate eminence. Most cases fall somewhere between these extremes and contain more ambiguous logics of identification. This is manifestly true, for instance, in the United States, where, on the one hand, money talks and there is nothing objectionable about boasting about one’s personal success, while, on the other hand, political actors can be—at least from certain foreign viewpoints—astonishingly casual and familiar. I would like to underline the fact that nearness and eminence are far from exclusive notions. Indeed, professional politicians—I would be tempted to say professional representatives—learn how to play on both registers. Not only are the two imperatives compatible, but combining them may prove most effective as a source of legitimation. Festive moments such as sharing a meal or attending a sporting event allow for the affirmation of solidarities and the staging of differences (high table, VIP stand). Likewise, using a helicopter to visit a small town but then refusing to take the podium when addressing the audience may felicitously convey assorted feelings of power, munificence, and proximity. Moreover, thick descriptions about the way political actors reconcile the opposing imperatives of eminence and nearness, for instance, reveal striking cultural disparities. It can thus be shown that in a sub-Saharan country such as Nigeria it is necessary to advertise one’s powers of patronage if one is to attract followers. The credibility of political representatives relies heavily on the display of external signs of wealth that signal their ability to accrue and dispense resources to potential supporters. Remarkably enough, dependents basking in this reflected glory often partake in the same process of comparison at their own level and go as far as to draw vainglorious pride from the prestige goods enjoyed by their respective champions. In an altogether different culture, Scandinavian political representatives come under considerable pressure not to distinguish themselves from the average citizen. Showing even the slightest sign of superiority can trigger virulent media criticism and lead political careers to a rapid ruin. There it is what I call “conspicuous modesty” that is the norm, whereas the flaunting of previous success would be senseless and counterproductive. When assessing the extent to which expectations differ regarding symbolic distance between representatives and represented, we realize that even political communication and PR strategies are inherently constrained by cultural codes. However, in the course of my investigations I came across the case of prominent Swedish political actors who, when visiting a deprived neighborhood with media in tow, chose to travel by public transport. Within their cultural context, such an anti-elitist posture made perfect sense, and they thought it wise to approach the inhabitants of the area—mainly populated by Middle Eastern immigrants—in this modest fashion. The interesting outcome here is that the latter felt insulted by the fact that when official representatives came to visit them, they did so without the pomp they expected given their own cultural background. Beside such extreme cases, we encounter a whole spectrum of more ambiguous situations where political actors waver between contradictory codes. French representatives, for

Representation   127 instance, often find themselves torn between the opposite imperatives of what can be thought of as “majesty” and “proximity.” Possibly as a result of an enduring Versailles culture having been partly counterbalanced by an egalitarian ethos inherited from the revolutionary periods, success is frequently related to the ability to play on both registers. In a survey of the one thousand largest French cities and towns, mayors were asked to what extent they considered a company car indispensable for their activities, and further whether it generated increased deference toward them and possibly an impression of distance on their part. The responses I obtained revealed substantial contradictions and tensions. While some respondents presented their car as a useful “second office,” many betrayed a strong concern regarding effects on their image and the fear of giving the impression of enjoying an undue privilege. Consequently many mentioned that their vehicle was either old or small, that it was also used by other members of the local council, or that they would drive it themselves most of the time. What is important for my argument is that I gathered rather convoluted discourses, testifying that in the French case fulfilling the duties of representation seem to demand both proof of and transcendence of proximity.12 One of the most important conclusions to draw from this chapter is that to tackle political representation in a theatrical sense is heuristically valuable. A majority of specialists still mainly equate it with mechanisms of delegation and accountability, especially within the framework of representative democracy. The bulk of works thus tend to deal with either normative or technical issues relating to the eternal question of the autonomy of representatives, their legitimacy, their representativeness, and increasingly topics such as the “crisis of representation.” However, as has been shown, a comparative approach strongly emphasizing performative aspects is most likely to produce enlightening results.

Notes 1. Many examples could be adduced to illustrate how these three aspects blend together in practice and what fruitful results a multidimensional perspective of this kind can yield. For instance, regarding organicist representations of the past (with the king as the head of the corpus mysticum of the realm, the knighthood as the chest and arms, etc.), we have something that is at the same time a mental representation and an organizing principle that can be staged in a theatrical way (e.g., when it comes to the seating arrangements of representatives). 2. Compare, for example, Davis and Postlewait (2003) with Burns (1972) and Féral and Bermingham (2002). 3. In Europe, casting a shadow on the audience started in the eighteenth century. Full darkness was implemented at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris only at the end of the nineteenth century. 4. Atkinson’s ([1984] 1988) sophisticated analyses come to mind here. In his interesting study Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution, Friedland (2002, 268) shows how interferences from people in the galleries of the National Assembly could be seen by some as intolerable upstaging of the serious process of political representation, while others would consider the presence of active spectators an indispensable safeguard against the possible “tyranny of representatives.” 5. Cf., for instance, the studies of the American Ceremonialist school on royal coronations, entries, and funerals in France (e.g., Giesey, 1960).

128   Jean-Pascal Daloz 6. Except, maybe, at the level of intra-elite analysis. Koering (2013) develops an interesting thesis on two strategies of representation, one aimed at a cultivated elite with privileged access to the palace, and the second aimed at a much wider audience. 7. Furthermore, an element of mystery can paradoxically contribute to the impression made. One can refer here to the mass in Latin, to the mantras of Asian religions, and more generally to all sorts of arcane yet striking rituals. 8. Suffice it to think of the order of processions where the most important people may stand at the front, the middle, or the rear. 9. See the theoretical contributions from Alexander (2011), Rai (2014), and Saward (2017). 10. Cf. the remarkable studies by Fenno (e.g., [1978] 2003) from a top-down perspective. For a recent synthesis from a bottom-up perspective, also about the USA, see Lauermann (2014). 11. One has in mind here the dialogue of the deaf within African studies regarding ethnicity: between constructivists eager to denounce the often artificial character of such identities as well as their subsequent political instrumentalization, and other authors, often dubbed “culturalists,” who instead insist on the fact that such identities have rarely been created ex nihilo and remain extremely meaningful for many people. 12. The reader may refer here to Daloz (2002, 2007, 2008) on the Nigerian, Nordic, and French contexts, respectively.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2011. Performance and Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Anglo, Sidney. 1992. Images of Tudor Kingship. London: Seaby. Atkinson, Max. [1984] 1988. Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics. London: Routledge. Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Balandier, Georges. 1980. Le pouvoir sur scènes. Paris: Balland. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. “La délégation et le fétichisme politique.” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, nos. 52–53: 49–55. Boureau, Alain. 1988. Le simple corps du roi: L’impossible sacralité des souverains français XVe-XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Les Editions de Paris. Burns, Elizabeth. 1972. Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life. London: Longman. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. Cohen, Abner. 1981. The Politics of Elite Culture: Explorations in the Dramaturgy of Power in a Modern Society. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cosandey, Fanny. 2016. Le rang: Préséances et hiérarchies dans la France d’Ancien Régime. Paris: Gallimard. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2002. Elites et représentations politiques: La culture de l’échange inégal au Nigeria. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2007. “Political Elites and Conspicuous Modesty: Norway, Sweden, Finland in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Social Research 26: 173–212. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2008. “Between Majesty and Proximity: The Enduring Ambiguities of Political Representation in France.” French Politics 6, no. 3: 302–20.

Representation   129 Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2017. La représentation politique. Malakoff: Armand Colin. Daloz, Jean-Pascal. 2018. “Comparative Political Analysis and the Interpretation of Meaning” In Handbook of Political Anthropology, edited by Harald Wydra and Bjørn Thomassen, 177–90. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Davis, Tracy  C., and Thomas Postlewait, eds. 2003. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,. Edelman, Murray. 1988. Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fenno, Richard  F. [1978] 2003. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. New York: Longman. Féral, Josette, and Ronald  P.  Bermingham. 2002. “The Specificity of Theatrical Language.” Substance 31, nos. 2–3: 94–108. Firth, Raymond. 1973. Symbols, Public and Private. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedland, Paul. 2002. Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Giesey, Ralph. E. 1960. The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France. Geneva: Droz. Goodsell, Charles  T. 1988. The Social Meaning of Civic Space: Studying Political Authority through Architecture. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Koering, Jérémie. 2013. Le prince en représentation: Histoire des décors du palais ducal de Mantoue au XVIe siècle. Arles: Actes Sud. Lauermann, Robin M. 2014. Constituent Perceptions of Political Representation: How Citizens Evaluate Their Representatives. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. Marin, Louis. 2005. Politiques de la représentation. Paris: Kimé. Mount, Ferdinand. 1972. The Theatre of Politics. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson. Rai, Shirin M. 2014. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Sabatier, Gérard. 1999. Versailles ou la figure du roi. Paris: Albin Michel. Saward, Michael. 2010. The Representative Claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saward, Michael. 2017. “Performative Representation.” In Reclaiming Representation: Contemporary Advances in the Theory of Political Representation, edited by Monica Brito Vieira. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sternberg, Giora. 2014. Status Interaction during the Reign of Louis XIV. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ. Veyne, Paul. 1988. “Conduites sans croyances et œuvres d’art sans spectateurs.”, Diogène, 143: 3–22. Weisberg, Herbert  F., and Samuel  C.  Patterson, eds. 1998. Great Theatre: The American Congress in the 1990s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

pa rt i i

I DE N T I T I E S Part II addresses the elusive world of identities, affiliations, and allegiances. Identity ­politics as a mode of organizing a set of political philosophical positions has for some time been predominant in political life everywhere; race, gender, caste, religion, and sexualities have in particular been important modes of enactment of politics. While increasingly identity politics is also seen as deeply flawed in many ways and hopelessly outmoded, the problems that motivated identity political movements remain acutely relevant and in flux: violence against women, the precarious position of many indigenous populations in our unevenly connected world, a new class politics that has emerged from the 2008 economic crisis and subsequent public debate about economic inequalities. Scholars in this section place identity politics into their contemporary global contexts and take stock of the ways identity politics as a practice is animated by its performative dimensions. Identity is often invoked in politics, but what does it mean? Webster’s dictionary definition of identity includes (1) the fact of being who or what a person or thing is and (2) a close similarity or affinity. In both meanings, “showing doing” is important; recognition allows for affinity to be established, challenged, or undermined. The political processes of establishing solidarities necessarily hold the self and the other in tension. What such definitions do not engage with is the how of establishing these differences between the self and other. How do we recognize, identify, and consolidate our understanding of self and other? What does it mean to perform identity—in the theater, in the street, in institutions, in campaigns, and so on—in a moment when the politics of identity are placed into question constantly, even challenged as overwrought and inauthentic? It is here that politics and performance as a method becomes useful. From beards to caps, the color of the skin, language and accents, to cuisines and norms of hospitality and the rhetoric of the nation and the national—the performance of how individual and institutional representation of identities takes place, is received and responded to, is critically important in personal and political life. As Edgaras Klivis argues in his chapter, national identity takes shape in the performance of public rituals and artistic practices. This makes the theatrical stage, along with print, museums, and other media, critical to our understanding of

132   Identities “how imagined communities come into being and continue their existence into the global contemporary society.” Identity as performance has generated heated debates and violent politics, as well as ­solidarities that cut across differences. Scholars such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1995) view recognition as a matter of self-realization; others, such as Nancy Fraser (1995, 1998) and (arguably) Judith Butler (1998), mark it as a matter of justice. In the debate between Fraser and Butler, it is suggested that the claims to social justice are redistributive, while the politics of identity make for a justice claim of recognition. As Fraser (1998, 1) has argued, “In this new constellation, the two kinds of justice claims are often dissociated from one another. The result is a widespread decoupling of the cultural politics of difference from the social politics of equality. . . . The task is to understand the complex relations between class and status, economy and culture, in social contexts that are increasingly postindustrial, transnational, and multicultural.” While this debate between redistribution and recognition continues, perhaps a performative lens can help us move it forward productively. The how of performance is not just about performing but also about theatricality and performativity, which then open up space for teasing out the circulation and sedimentation of power and the resultant tensions as well as the new spaces of solidarity. Scholars in this section place identity politics into their contemporary global contexts and take stock of the ways in which identity politics as a practice is animated by its performative dimensions. Carole Spary examines different political performances of elected women representatives, in legislative contexts in India and elsewhere, to highlight how they experience and challenge misogyny, hold powerful vested interests to account (and in response face racist attacks), and how their shared “testimony” of gender-based violence and the effects of austerity policies can highlight the intersectional identities at play in political institutions. And yet, of course, some feminists have criticized the focus on women in representative politics as co-optive: governance feminism by Janet Halley et al. (2018) and feminism as the handmaid of capitalism by Fraser (2013). A performative approach to representation (Rai and Spary 2018) allows us to focus not only on the effect of women’s presence in politics but also on the affect that is created by “bodies out of place” (Puwar 2004; part III, this volume) and why their presence is not enough to challenge gendered political norms. Identity politics as a mode of organizing a set of political philosophical positions has undergone numerous attacks and may at times seem flawed and outmoded. This has led to countercurrents of political performance to challenge dominant identity-based discourses and consequent exclusions of marginalized groups. Ioana Szeman’s chapter examines the precarious status of migrant Roma in the EU and argues that it is predicated on the citizenship gap they experience. Her ethnographic research shows how the Roma continue living in difficult conditions, almost as refugees in a camp in their own countries. However, she also emphasizes how, through dance and activism, Roma negotiate and resist the discrimination and racism they encounter on a daily basis. Similarly, Yana Meerzon’s chapter examines how political theater helps in “rehumaniz[ing] . . . ‘figurative scapegoats’ ” such as exiles, and Katie Beswick’s chapter shows how we are often confronted by the impossibility for marginalized performance forms to bring about structural change. All these chapters underline how informal practices contribute to processes of change, which may not be inherently radical but nonetheless resist dominant framings of identities.

Identities   133

References Butler, Judith. 1998. “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review 1, no. 227: 33–44. (January–February). Fraser, Nancy. 1995. “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age.” New Left Review 1, no. 212: 68–93. Fraser, Nancy. 1998. “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition, Participation.” SSOAR. https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/12624/ ssoar-1998-fraser-social_justice_in_the_age.pdf?sequence=1&source=post_page. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—and How to Reclaim It. The Guardian, October 16. http://www.sacw.net/article5931.html. Halley, Janet, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché, and Hila Shamir. 2018. Governance Feminism: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by Joel Anderson. Cambridge: Polity Press. Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. London: Berg. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, 25–74. NJ: Princeton University Press.

chapter 8

Cl ass, R ace , a n d M a rgi na lit y Informal Street Performances in the City Katie Beswick

Introduction In April 2014 I took a long-planned trip to New York City with my mother. We stayed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and took the J Train into Manhattan most days. Unexpectedly— for I had little interest before my visit in reading up on the subway system, beyond tips on how best to use it—the underground was alive with arts and performance practice. The throbbing thwack of bucket drumming and the surprising copper crocodile1 that emerges from a manhole cover on the L Train platform at 14th Street and 8th Avenue were more thrilling to me than the iconic cultural scene above ground. As Susie Tanenbaum articulates in her 1995 ethnography of the subway music scene, Underground Harmonies, New York’s subway system has long been a space in which a heterogeneous range of amateur and professional artists hone their craft and seek to make a living. It is a space where the social and political structures of the city are reflected in the cultures, rituals, policing, legislation, and law enforcement practiced there. The rich music scene described by Tanenbaum still exists underground, but I was moved most profoundly by the subway dance culture. Two incidents from that trip have stayed with me. The first occurred as I changed trains at Union Square Station and came across a group of breakdancers setting up an amp on the mezzanine—an older gentleman, a woman, and three boys: two teenagers and one who was just three or four years old. As the music spiraled out of the speakers, they began dancing. It quickly became clear that the small boy was the star of the show, the moneymaker. He cocked his head with confident street attitude and took up the b-boy stance2 before beginning a routine that included a perfectly executed four-turn head-spin. A large crowd gathered, filming the scene on their mobile phones, before the group finished the routine and encouraged the crowd to donate.

136   Katie Beswick The second incident took place on the subway train itself. As we rode around—confused, navigating a system that seemed indifferent to tourists (What is an express train? Why is there more than one station called 103rd Street?), three teenage boys boarded the train and shouted “Showtime!” They pumped tinny, upbeat, digitally enhanced hip-hop from small speakers and took it in turns to perform gymnastic dance feats, including somersaults, backflips, and aerial contortion using the safety poles. “What is this?” I asked my mother. I was completely mesmerized by the vitality, skill, and exuberance of the performance, which seemed both designed for us as tourists and an utterly indulgent and joyous means of expression for the dancers themselves. I later learned the small boy I had seen on the mezzanine at Union Square was known as “Kid Break” and was self-taught by watching breakdance videos online. He was affiliated with WAFFLE, a crew of dancers mostly practicing a form of dance known as litefeet. WAFFLE regularly perform on subway trains, announcing their presence with the call “Showtime!” These incidents on the subway reminded me of the garage MCs and grime rappers who would recite their rhymes on the top decks of the London buses I used as a teenager, using public transport to practice and perfect emerging lyrical techniques that would also appear in music played on pirate radio stations, broadcast across London while I was growing up.3 I offer these anecdotes as a way of introducing what I call “informal street performance”—a term intended to encompass those unsanctioned, seemingly spontaneous performances that take place on the street or in other public spaces, or that emerge from so-called street culture, and that are often carried out by ethnically and economically marginalized groups. The informal street performance practices happening in London, New York, and elsewhere provide an interesting way in to thinking about how politics operates through space—and to understanding the relationship between class, race, and politics in the city. This chapter, then, takes as its starting point the assumption that acts that are ostensibly frivolous or destructive, including dancing, busking, graffiti, and even expressions of violence, nonetheless intervene in the social, cultural, and political life of the city. Like the practices Tim Cresswell (1996) calls “transgressive acts,” informal performances are defined by the marginalization of the groups performing them, as well as the spaces and places in which they occur. Although such practices may begin informally, they often become woven into formal culture (through commercial exploitation and in historical narratives) and come to shape how spaces and places within cities are understood. In both London and New York, cities I have come to know well as a resident and as a tourist and researcher, respectively, street expressions of performative creativity that cut across race and class, and responses to them by authorities, make visible structural inequalities and imbue perhaps unlikely spaces (the subway car, the sidewalk, the council estate, the bus) with the energy of revolution. Informal performance practices therefore play a significant role in both structuring and responding to the political organization of city spaces. In this chapter, I explore how we might understand cities as political, mapping the intersections between class, space, and marginality, before offering an overview of two modes of informal street performance in two cities: litefeet dance (New York) and grime music (London). These forms were both pioneered by young men of color in specific spatial contexts, and, as I discuss, they are useful examples of performance that help us to think about the city as a political space. I argue that these examples show us how the expression of “revolutionary” politics need not rely on total systemic change or ideological purity from

Class, Race, and Marginality   137 practitioners but on what the scholar Lisa McKenzie (2018) tentatively calls “a process,” in which revolution manifests as “a turning, a whirling, an about change from one position to the opposite position.” I refer to McKenzie’s position as tentative not because she expresses hesitation in her writing but because the blog post from which I quote here is tentative in its form; that is, it is an unworked-through idea that is expressed online in a nonscholarly publication. Nonetheless, drawing on a concept that is in the process of formation, existing at the margins of scholarly writing, seems apt in a chapter concerned with the political significance of informal practices. The work in this chapter draws on my studies of hip-hop and related cultures in London and New York, including periods of time shadowing both WAFFLE and the theater company Beats & Elements between 2014 and 2020. It reveals how we can use performance analysis to understand the ways those marginalized from mainstream cultural activity find connections within and to the city space—and even ways to (re)shape and change cities through performance. This relies on thinking about what the spatial philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1991) called “social space” as inherently political.

Space, Politics, and Injustice: Class, Race, and Marginality in the City The notion of politics that I articulate here moves beyond centering formal structures of governance as the site of the political and instead, drawing on Grant Tyler Peterson’s (2011, 386) definition, sees the “political” as “helpful in articulating the overarching arrangements of power.” Stephan Collini defines politics as “the important, inescapable, and difficult attempt to determine relations of power in a given space” (quoted in Kelleher 2009, 3); this quotation begins to suggest the ways that city “space” is not only a means through which we can understand relations of power but also a means through which we can actively challenge existing power structures. This is because, as the theater scholar Kim Solga (2019, 2) proposes, the spaces in which we live and perform both organize and are organized by existing formations of power. Space therefore is a paradoxically “abstract” and “concrete” entity that composes our worlds, physical and imaginary. Lefebvre (1991), one of the most influential figures to write about the relationship between space and politics in the twentieth century, described the spaces of interaction between individual bodies, and between bodies and objects, as “social space.” Clearly, the (human) body and its experience of the world is important in social space and in our experiences of the places in which we live; indeed, “it is through the body that one comes to know the world” (Beswick 2011, 428). But although this suggests that the experience of space is highly individual, the “social” in “social space” emphasizes that the internal individual experience is rooted in a shared external world (Peuquet 2002, 32). Importantly this shared externality is created as spaces are shaped by the forces of control and domination that we see operating in society and history in various ways. The idea of social space therefore relies on an understanding that politics is inherently spatial just as space is inherently political—and that individual human actors as well as overarching power structures create the spaces we live in and how we are able to live in them. Lefebvre, like many scholars seeking to analyze

138   Katie Beswick relations between power and injustice, draws on ideas rooted in Marxism, highlighting the injustices produced by social and economic inequality under capitalism. Such injustices, as Imogen Tyler (2013, 156) has argued, intersect across race, class, and gender to ensure that distinct groups of people (women, migrants, people of color) are far less likely to accumulate wealth and resources than other groups of people. Nowhere are the political injustices of social space under capitalism more visible than in our cities, where inequalities are played out in the street—not always noticed, though rarely hidden from view for those who care to look. In our city streets the lack of access to resources afforded to some groups sits directly alongside the obscene abundance of others. In New York City, for example, poverty moves alongside wealth outside Trump Tower, a fifty-eightstory skyscraper whose lobby is adorned with ostentatious gold finishings, representing the extreme riches hoarded by the Trump Organization, headed by US President Donald Trump (a neat illustration of the way space and power are intertwined). In the streets below the Tower and in Central Park, visible from the windows of the higher floors, those in extreme poverty and need, including the homeless, beg for money or work for wages that barely cover the cost of living as street cleaners, hot dog vendors, and subway attendants. Although it is important not to conflate London and New York, which are different places with different histories that produce distinct conditions of inequality (Wacquant 2009), it is the case that in both cities the crises of capitalism continue apace. In these cities too the raced nature of class injustice is often rendered most visible. The lowest paid jobs are often carried out by black, Hispanic, and Asian workers, who also struggle to find secure employment more frequently than their white counterparts (McGeehan  2012; Trust for London  2018), while rundown and underresourced neighborhoods are overwhelmingly occupied by people of color (Goldenberg 2018; Hanley 2017). In London (and other English cities) race inequality plays out in the vertical life of the city as well as on the streets, with black and Asian families far more likely to be allocated high-rise social housing, which is often poorly maintained, than white families (Hanley 2017). Although—as Trump Tower indicates—high-rise living, in terms of the luxury penthouse apartment, is also associated with wealth, high-rise social housing is frequently stigmatized and understood as producing crime, antisocial behavior, and ill health, pointing to how our understandings of space are socially (and politically) constructed in relation to how perceptions of wealth and power circulate in different types of spaces. This state of affairs indicates how class and race operate in conjunction with one another, in ways that often produce greater injustices for people of color as the injustices of their class position are compounded by racism. As Solga (2019, 14) argues, “Racism and White privilege depend upon the reproduction of certain normative spatial structures for their violent power.” This idea of normativity can be seen in the way injustices of class and race are reflected in the criminal justice system, where both the working class in general and the black working class in particular are overrepresented as criminals, portrayed as the natural occupiers of prisons and courthouses. The scholar Deirdre O’Neill (2017) illustrates how society is structured so as to produce the behavior of the working class as criminal and to suggest that this criminality is natural rather than the result of injustices that mean the working class are far more likely to experience “poverty, isolation, boredom, an inability to cope, drink problems and mental illness” (Farell quoted in O’Neill 2017, 27) and to have their behavior categorized as criminal (see also Kitossa 2012). As O’Neill points out, the criminalization of the working class is the result of a “system of historically embedded

Class, Race, and Marginality   139 beliefs and common sense rationalities” “that are drawn upon to justify and reinforce the apparatus of capitalism [and] serve to deflect attention away from the behavior of the rich and powerful” (O’Neill 2017, 27). Writing in 1967, Lefebvre pointed to the increasing commodification and commercialism of the city space under the capitalist regime in his essay The Right to the City (1968). As David Harvey (2013, x) points out, the idea of the “right to the city” was “both a cry and a demand”: “The cry was a response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand was really a command to look that crisis clearly in the eye and to create urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and playful but, as always with Lefebvre, conflictual and dialectical, open to becoming, to encounters (both fearful and pleasurable), and to the perpetual pursuit of unknowable novelty.” When we understand that our social spaces are structured in ways that marginalize and criminalize sections of the population, it can be easy to feel hopelessness or despair at the prevailing order. But even as capitalism accelerates into crisis, producing economic, ecological, and social chaos, we find those dwelling in the city’s marginal spaces clamoring to assert their right to city space. As bell hooks (1989) reminds us, just as it is a space of repression and pain, so too the “margin” occupied by those oppressed by the injustices of capitalism can be understood as a radical space of resistance. She writes of the dangers of pessimism about marginality, “If we only view the margin as a sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation, then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way” (21). For hooks, to stay located at the margins is a radical choice; she makes a “definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility” (23). In London, New York, and other cities structured by the capitalist system, the places, cultures, and ideas often marginalized by the dominant forces of capitalism become sites from which to speak back to power and through which citizens might assert their own power in the face of structural inequality. This is not to suggest that creative, informal street acts bring about wholesale change to the structures of the capitalist city; indeed, the impulses toward and means of resistance played out in informal street performance are often born of a need for survival. In conditions of abjection, poverty, and pain, to survive and to find ways to do so joyfully is also an act of resistance. So too it is often difficult to understand the kinds of performance I describe as entirely revolutionary in the radical sense, because the cultural forms expressed in street dance, rap, and other means of informal street expression are often in tension with and subject to co-optation by the capitalist system they exist within.4 Nonetheless, despite such tensions, these forms of expression can provide moments we might understand as revolutionary in the sense of what McKenzie (2018) describes as a “turning wheel,” where the toxicity of capitalism compels those oppressed by it to make movements toward change. McKenzie is not optimistic about the destination toward which this revolution in the face of toxic capitalism is traveling—and the tensions inherent in street performance forms suggest the difficulty of transcending the status quo entirely. Nonetheless her writing does encourage us to think about political struggles as they play out in the everyday lives and spaces of the working classes and to view acts that participate in the slow transformation of our societies as “revolutionary”—as having political potential. Here her argument, although tentative, offers us a frame for understanding informal practices that is perhaps more optimistic than Cresswell’s (1996) argument, in which transgressive acts risk being understood

140   Katie Beswick as “out of place” unless they effectively disrupt the current order. Litefeet, emerging from the streets and subways of New York, and grime, developed in East London’s tower blocks, provide examples of informal street performance practices that contribute to the revolutionary “wheel turning” compelled by late capitalism.

Hip-Hop and the City Litefeet and grime were propelled by hip-hop; indeed it is impossible to write about race, urban marginality, and informal performance without mentioning hip-hop, a now global cultural form that famously began in the impoverished inner-city neighborhoods (at that time, the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn) of New York City in the early 1970s. As Murray Forman (2002, 9) notes, “Hip-hop’s discourses have an impressive influence among North Americans . . . of all races and ethnicities, providing a distinctive understanding of the social terrains and conditions under which ‘real’ black cultural identities are formed and experienced.” Forman’s work—and the growing scholarship on hip-hop, now spanning a number of disciplinary fields—demonstrates how street practices are profoundly local and yet frequently co-opted, appropriated, and caught up within globalized economic systems and capitalist imperatives that complicate and blur the boundaries between the margins and the mainstream. This complication is compounded by the race and class politics that play out through hip-hop culture in the dominant cultural sphere, where the often working-class black, Asian, and ethnic minority practitioners of the form are frequently presented as “outward manifestations of an ‘outlaw culture’ that is perceived as dangerous, if not outrightly criminal” (Fatsis 2018, 1). This plays out in the evolution of litefeet, a practice that has been explicitly criminalized in city law. Litefeet is a dance and music form that began in Harlem in around 2006 and spread through the Bronx and elsewhere. Practitioners of the form describe it as “the reemergence of hip-hop through dance” (my interview with Andrew Saunders, 2015). It emerged as part of organized and spontaneous “battles,” where dancers as young as eleven or twelve and up to about thirty would gather on the streets, in the courtyards of housing projects, or in warehouses, studios, and gymnasiums and, moving away from the traditional b-boy, develop new and innovative moves in order to impress and, at organized battles, win kudos and respect from their peers. Signature moves include the Harlem Shake, Chicken Noodle Soup, and the Toe Wop (or Tone Wop), but it is probably most well known as the dance style performed on the subway trains of New York City. Groups of predominantly Hispanic and African American teenagers, often from housing projects and mostly low-income neighborhoods on the city’s edges, perform gymnastic feats using the walls, seats, poles, and floors of subway cars; they often form “crews” (groups) and dance to music produced by fellow crew members. In a research trip I took to the city in 2015, dancers from the WAFFLE crew explained to me that they began performing on trains to make the 10-dollar fee to attend battles but were soon earning between 100 and 150 dollars a day and contributing to their family’s household expenses. As most of the boys and men live in low-income housing and do not have recourse to family money or any disposable income, dancing quickly became a low-risk illegal way to make cash quickly. Panhandling (soliciting money from the public) has long been illegal on the subway system (the penalty was usually a fine), but in 2014, in response to the continued use of subway

Class, Race, and Marginality   141 trains as a platform for panhandling by litefeet dancers, New York City’s police commissioner, William Bratton, announced that dancers caught performing on trains would be charged with reckless endangerment, a Misdemeanor A offense that carries a penalty of up to a year in prison. It is difficult to see this move as divorced from the wider culture of classed and racialized criminalization of young black men in the USA, where black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites (Nellis 2016). The scholars Chris Richardson and Hans Skott-Myhre (2012) position hip-hop as a form of “cultural politics,” which, despite its co-optation by the forces of capital and its exploitation to naturalize the working-class (black) body as criminal, articulates resistance “against the forces of control and domination.” This is because, in hip-hop, “networks of self-production [are] no longer constrained by the axiomatic discipline of the dominant media, the state, or the market” (19). In other words, what Marx would call the “means of production” of hip-hop are readily available to those living at the margins and subject to systemic racism, compounded by their class position (see also Huq 2006; Kitwana 2005). Perhaps this is why, even as it becomes a capitalist product, in cities and towns all over the world hip-hop pushes against capitalist forces, shaping the cultural landscape produced by urban marginality. The paradox here is that even as hip-hop is co-opted by capitalism, it continues to find ways to resist. That is, hip-hop’s means of expression, including MCing (rapping), breakdance, graffiti, and DJing, continue to be adopted and developed by those struggling to overcome the hardships of late capitalism. As I argued earlier, both litefeet and grime are rooted in hip-hop traditions, although as I will trace later, they are also products of the specific spaces where they emerged. London and New York are very different places, where national histories, climate, and local laws, traditions, and cultural practices mean citizens come to experience and resist injustice in different ways. Litefeet and grime movements have some overlaps but in their specific iterations draw attention to the precise ways that inequality manifests in and is produced by distinct spaces. In other words, both reflect the distinct cultures of the cities where they began and the particular spaces through which they were given life, as well as speaking to the wider global context of (classed, raced) urban marginality.

Litefeet The pioneers of litefeet are primarily from Harlem and the Bronx. Much like first-wave hip-hop culture, litefeet is a grassroots practice that has evolved from an informal street practice to a mainstream movement co-opted, globally, by brands and prominent entertainers. Its signature moves (or “trends”), including the Harlem Shake, have gone viral, with videos shared online garnering views in the millions and high-profile entertainers reproducing trends in music videos. Dancers are regularly asked to perform at events such as New York Fashion Week and in commercials and at corporate events for global brands, including Nike and Red Bull. In 2019 members of the WAFFLE crew appeared on the ­popular entertainment show Ellen. Several documentaries about litefeet have been made, and the form has been the subject of articles in the Huffington Post, New York Magazine, and the Daily Mail. Litefeet is also known as “getting lite,” which signals its move away from some of the stereotypes of East Coast gangster hip-hop that dominated the mainstream in the late

142   Katie Beswick twentieth and early twenty-first century. Unlike b-boy, the traditional form of breakdancing, which makes virtuosic use of the floor and often sees practitioners adopt a confident street swagger epitomized by the “b-boy stance,” litefeet is comical and ostensibly flippant in style. Dancers often accompany moves with exaggerated facial expressions and make use of height. If breakdancing is known for floor work, litefeet is known for its aerial displays as dancers somersault, contort themselves using safety poles on subway cars as elevation, and carry out tricks using baseball caps and sneakers thrown into the air. This move toward lightness can be considered political—an attempt to overturn negative images of young black men that dominate commercial hip-hop culture (Rose 2008). Unlike the gangsta rap that sought to portray the harsh realities of life in the impoverished inner city, litefeet dancers use the lightness of form to draw attention to the positive and playful potentials of inner-city living. As the dancers tell viewers on a local Bronx news station interview that I watched them record, “Dance is positive.” This turn to liteness might itself be understood as a softening of the politics of hip-hop—and indeed there are tensions between the revolutionary nature of the litefeet form and the way it presents an acceptable, unthreatening version of black masculinity that is easily co-opted by brands, television shows, and other commercial interests. The dancers are clear that making money from their work is an aim: this is about survival not only through creative and emotional freedom but through “economic capital” (Bourdieu 1986) that allows financial freedom. It would be misleading, then, to suggest that litefeet dancers are motivated by an ideological socialist purity (indeed I saw no indication that they are socialist at all in any individual or collective sense) or that they are consciously Marxist in their attempts at disrupting power. Nonetheless dancers do use the form to contest their treatment by those in positions of power, particularly the police. Knafo and Kassie (2014) describe a dance sequence performed by WAFFLE’s Andrew “Goofy” Saunders, “running in place to the skittering beat of a typical litefeet track while repeatedly glancing over his shoulder, his eyes cartoonishly wide with fear. Anyone who dances on the trains would have grasped the reference. ‘Running from the cops,’ Saunders said, spelling it out. ‘That’s what’s cool about litefeet. You can put anything into it.’ ”

Indeed, litefeet dancers have been at the forefront of contesting the injustices that play out through subway space. When the law criminalizing subway dance was announced, WAFFLE staged a “last dance” protest to draw attention to the gross unfairness of this legislation. Documented in Scott Carthy’s 2014 short film Litefeet, the protest begins in the subway station as the crew walk slowly up the stairs toward the platform, the camera following them from behind. Kid Break is in front, dressed in sweatpants (tracksuit bottoms), his shirt off, suggesting the heat of a New York summer. In slow motion the crew move across the platform, laughing and stretching to warm up, while Saunders, in voice-over, describes the formation of WAFFLE and the misrepresentation of subway dancers in the political debate surrounding the form. A train pulls into the platform and the dancers board. They call “Showtime!” and begin, one by one, to perform. They tell the audience that this is their “last dance.” The camera is positioned low so as to capture the vertical planes of the dance form. Despite the somber tone of the film the dancers are upbeat and smiling, lighthearted for the camera.

Class, Race, and Marginality   143 Although the last dance wasn’t really the final dance WAFFLE dancers ever performed on the subway (they were still dancing on trains when I visited New York in 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2020), it was a symbolic gesture, drawing attention to the injustices of the reckless endangerment charge. The performance was followed by other tactics to resist the clampdown on dancing, including developing merchandise that allowed the public to show support for the dancers—most strikingly a T-shirt that riffs on the posters placed all over the subway system warning about the dangers of using the poles for dance. (“This pole is for my safety, not your latest dance routine,” the posters declare.) On the T-shirts the image from the poster is reprinted, the words changed to assert “This pole is for your safety and my latest dance routine.” In this way litefeet is not only a frivolous form but can serve as a means to address overarching systems of domination and control and to draw attention to injustices that structure the lives of working-class black men in the city, such as dealing with harassment from the police based on the way that black working-class bodies, as I described earlier, are naturalized as criminal in the capitalist system. One of the notable features of litefeet as a form is that, from its inception during street battles in New York’s housing projects to its current practice by professionals on reality television programs and in commercials and documentaries, it has been digitally documented. Indeed the evolution of the practice runs parallel to the rise of YouTube, where the founders of litefeet posted videos of battles and dance sessions—some of which were “branded” as individuals attempted to secure their place in history as authors of the form. Practitioners now use Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter to document and share their litefeet practice. Collectives such as the WAFFLE NYC crew have garnered significant local, national, and international attention through their social media activity. As Hector Postigo (2016, 333) argues in his examination of online gaming commentary, YouTube videos serve multiple functions for their users: “They are not only performances of expertise . . . but they also serve as performances of identity, community conflicts and allegiances, community values, economy and creativity.” In this way we can also understand the documentation of litefeet as intervening politically in spatial practice not only in its co-optation of street and subway space, where the bodies of those usually relegated to the margins assert themselves as virtuosic owners of space, but in its use of digital space as a means with which to make visible the lives and practices of the city’s margins to a global audience. Again, this use of commercial, digital space is not without its ­tensions; if there is revolution in working-class black men claiming ownership of their intellectual and creative contributions to urban dance, there is also a deeply unradical aspect to the choice of corporate social media as the platform through which to leverage this revolution. It is important, then, to understand that informal street performance forms often enact their politics inadvertently and in compromised ways. The necessity for survival, coupled with the lack of access to alternatives, means those using the street and other public space as the site for action must often make use of what is familiar, accessible, and freely available to them. The compromised nature of this politics illustrates McKenzie’s understanding of “revolution” as a process of turning rather than an immediate radical shift in practices or perspective. Although we can’t know where this turning will end, practitioners of informal practices assert themselves as visible subjects in the process of change, as actors with the ability to participate in revolution, if unable to control it.

144   Katie Beswick

Grime Grime is the term used to describe a distinctive, and distinctively English (White  2018), form of urban music. Developed in East London, particularly in the boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, grime draws on a range of music influences, including dancehall (which also influenced early hip-hop music), UK garage, jungle, and dub reggae (Collins and Rose  2016), and can also be understood as a UK development of hip-hop—despite recent writing about grime (particularly Dan Hancox’s [2018] Inner-City Pressure) downplaying the link with hip-hop culture. Examining grime as a form, the link with hip-hop is apparent in numerous ways: the primary means of vocal expression used in hip-hop (rapping over an instrumental beat) also distinguishes grime, and the semiotics of hip-hop music are utilized by grime musicians, who channel the “hood” style that has its roots in US hip-hop: wearing branded sportswear, especially trainers (or sneakers, in US parlance), baseball caps, and gold jewelry. So too grime musicians affiliate themselves with highly specific neighborhoods in the same way that hip-hop artists do, with music videos often filmed, or appearing to be filmed, in and around the homes of grime artists (see, e.g., Skepta’s Shut Down Video, and my commentary of it in Beswick 2019, 155). Like hip-hop the stories told through grime music are highly specific and often appear “ethnographic” (Barron 2013) in their narration of urban life. Lambros Fatsis (2018, 6) argues that this ethnography is politically inflected, allowing grime rappers to act as “public intellectuals” who “lay bare the violence of what is represented by their lyrics (disturbing images of social exclusion), while also hinting at the social and political violence done to those [often working-class people of color] who are represented in their lyrics.” While some of these links with hip-hop may seem superficial, they are important in understanding the way that hip-hop is leveraged as a global political movement. Through fashion and attitude and by drawing on hip-hop techniques, UK grime artists affiliate themselves with hip-hop culture and position themselves, in their specific local and national contexts, within a global movement. In this way those in London show solidarity with others living under capitalist systems that oppress them because of their class and race. As I argue elsewhere, “[Grime’s] origins in grass-roots hip-hop culture position it as a very obvious . . . articulation of the global hood, where modes of resistance and survival developed in the marginalized inner cities of North America are appropriated and articulated globally” (Beswick 2019, 155). The solidarity that runs through hip-hop and forms emerging from it is also political, and can also be seen in a variety of practices. Fatsis (2018) points to the political potential of the cipher, the sharing-circle in which practitioners of hip-hop across forms (including both grime and litefeet) come together to improvise, innovate, share, and listen. In the cipher, “space, place and culture . . . intertwine to form a public place of assembly where citizenship is exercised in an actively-involved, publicly-situated and ‘lived’ manner, not unlike the Pnyx in Ancient Athens or Speakers’ Corner in London” (8). Joy White (2018, 227) draws attention to the politics of the crew (seen in both grime and litefeet) as a means of seizing and sharing power, a model that operates outside of the capitalist drive for individual success: “Crew membership allows for a creative expression and performance firmly rooted in the black experience. Predominately male, a crew is a space that offers a number of opportunities to learn your craft as a musician as well as develop tacit knowledge about the scene and how it operates.” In Inner-City

Class, Race, and Marginality   145 Pressure Hancox (2018) describes how the artist Wiley, one of grime’s leading figures, repeatedly claims that his greatest achievement is the success of other artists he has mentored. An anathema to interviewers, this attitude reveals again the solidarity that underpins grime. Despite these roots in care, solidarity, and sharing, grime is nonetheless often characterized as being bound up with crime, particularly violence and drug taking. This belief, while perhaps rooted in the few high-profile crimes carried out by grime artists in the early days of the genre’s emergence (Fatsis 2018; Hancox 2018; White 2018), nonetheless draws on the kinds of reductive understandings of people marginalized by virtue of their class and race that I described earlier. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, Fatsis (2018, 13) describes the criminalization of grime music as a “form of cultural racism [that] has its roots in the belief that ‘Black’ cultural values should be suspected of promoting violent or criminal lifestyles and should therefore be responded to by tactics that have been described as ‘policing against black people.’ ” Like hip-hop, grime emerges from the margins of the inner city (in East and South London), as those people and places overlooked by mainstream culture become sites of creative revolution. In this way grime, like litefeet, can be understood as a spatial practice. If litefeet articulates its politics in the streets, subways, and digital sphere, we might understand the spatial politics of grime by thinking about its relationship with housing. Hancox (2018) describes how grime emerged from the council estates of East London, where many of the pioneers lived, made music, and in the early days of the genre broadcast music from illegal pirate radio stations that transmitted across the city. Grime is intimately intertwined with the culture of inner-city social housing, or council housing, itself a stigmatized space, bound up with notions of “street life,” that becomes an ideological container for the stigmas related to class and race (Beswick  2019, 12). The term grime, while of contested origin, is widely considered to describe the way the form both embodies the grimy, gritty quality of the estate and narrates and often celebrates in its lyrics the pressure of the marginalized inner city and its residents. Even the frenetic pace of the music (MCs rap at 140 bpm, significantly faster than most hip-hop tracks, which range from about 60 to 100 bpm), seems to comment on the relentless pace of city life, and practitioners’ will to survive in the face of it. A searing example of grime’s willingness to speak truth to power occurred at the 2018 Brit Awards, when the artist Stormzy used his performance to ask the government why the survivors of a horrific fire in Grenfell Tower, a high-rise tower block on the Lancaster West council estate in West London, had not been rehoused in the months since the tragedy. Turning accusations usually leveled at grime artists back on the government, he called the prime minister “criminal” and accused MPs of drug taking (“MPs sniff coke / we just smoke a bit of cannabis”). This performance drew attention not only to the gross negligence of those responsible for housing vulnerable people but also to the decadence and excess of the powerful, whose crimes go unnoticed and unpunished, while the harmless behavior (making music, dancing) of those at the margins is criminalized. This critique also drew on the space of the council estate, not only because Stormzy evoked Grenfell Tower but because, in his performance, he stood in front of a large three-tiered structure that resembled an estate (Beswick 2019) and which was populated by rows of backing performers dressed in tracksuits and balaclavas, a nod to the kind of clothing often symbolically associated with “black gangs” and “council estate crime” (see Bell 2013). Stormzy has also used social media platforms to maintain criticism of the government’s response to Grenfell. When, in November 2019, following the release of the first report from the public inquiry into the tragedy, the

146   Katie Beswick Conservative MP Jacob Reese Mogg suggested he would have escaped the fire by ignoring the advice of firefighters to stay inside the building, Stormzy launched an attack on this position, posted on Twitter and Facebook. His posts blasted politicians as “evil” and “wicked,” arguing that the fire was the fault of the British government: “their fault, and their fault alone”. Similarly, grime was used in the hip-hop theater performance High Rise eState of Mind (Beats & Elements, Battersea Arts Centre, 2019) as a means to contest the injustices of London’s housing crisis, where the Grenfell Tower tragedy has come to epitomize the wider structural violence toward the working classes, who are frequently expected to dwell in substandard accommodation and for whom a home in the city, where prices are driven to unaffordable levels by wealthy investors, becomes an impossibility. High Rise eState of Mind is an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High Rise. In the play characters compete to ascend to the top floor of the City Heights flats, where they will be granted luxury apartments and win the spoils offered to capitalism’s “winners.” In this performance, which weaves hip-hop, grime, and spoken word, the grime number “So Sick” is a critique of the ways capitalism compels a toxic drive to succeed that is ultimately a sickness for those who engage with its logic. The phrase so sick is both a diagnosis for Luke, a character struggling to succeed on the lower floors of City Heights, and a comment on the world outside the reality of the play, where those at the margins are made so sick by a toxic housing system driven by capitalist excesses.

Conclusion The cultural movements I outline are rooted in street practice in one way or another: they are forms that have developed and flourished at the margins of the cities where capital rules, where those black, Hispanic, working-class bodies are left out. This makes tracing the audiences for these kinds of work difficult. My own engagement with informal street performance forms has happened, in the first instance, as a byproduct of my practice of the city as a tourist and resident (and later in more structured ways, as I undertook research trips, shadowed crews, interviewed practitioners, and observed rehearsals as part of a research project exploring informal performances in city spaces). Views, likes, and comments on the social media profiles of litefeet dancers and grime artists alike attest to the wide appeal of these artists and of hip-hop forms in general, and similarly make it difficult to identify a demographic audience. Bakari Kitwana (2005) has argued that hip-hop’s mainstream appeal suggests how those from both sides of the racial and economic divide feel silenced and see hip-hop culture, with its proximity to the public sphere of the street, as a means of finding a political voice. While, as a scholar with secure employment and publication platform, I cannot claim to exist at a silenced margin, my engagement with hip-hop practices is driven by a sense of affiliation with, as opposed to difference from, the practitioners I have worked with. Certainly my experiences of litefeet and hip-hop culture, on the street, online, and via commercial means such as purchasing music and attending gigs, has been a source of joy and relief. In times that often feel unbearable, to see others move in joy or to hear public critiques of the systems through which you too are made to feel powerless become a means of finding meaning in life and reasons to live.

Class, Race, and Marginality   147 It should be clear from my accounts that grime and litefeet have not wrought total change in the overarching power structures that shape class and race inequality in our society: reckless endangerment remains the charge for subway dance at the time of writing, and although Stormzy’s engagement with Grenfell did appear to put pressure on the government to act (Vonberg 2018), Grenfell Tower survivors were not rehoused more quickly as a result of his performance. London’s housing market remains overinflated, and those who cannot afford to live in London are still forced to move elsewhere or dwell in unsafe and substandard accommodation. Nonetheless I maintain that the forms I’ve examined in this chapter push against the dominant order, manifesting their politics by participating in the process of unknowable change, drawing attention to the unfairness of city life under capitalism and revealing, often playfully and with great skill, the injustices of the ways things are and modeling how they might be different. In this way, although informal street practices may not succeed in upending the dominant order, they can help us find bearable ways to survive it.

Notes 1. A permanent sculpture, installed in the station as part of Life Underground (2011), an artwork by the sculptor Tom Otterness. It was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Art for Transit program (now known as MTA Arts & Design), a collection that includes more than three hundred public artworks made for subway and commuter rail stations. 2. B-boy is the breakdancing style developed as part of the hip-hop movement in the 1970s and 1980s; the b-boy stance is a starting move where the dancer stands with head back, as if resting on a wall, and arms crossed over the chest. 3. Coincidentally Showtime (2004) is the title of the second studio album by one of grime’s most prominent pioneers, Dizzee Rascal. 4. So too they often exclude women, a discussion I don’t have room for in this chapter. The issue of sexism is explored by Tricia Rose in her book The Hip Hop Wars (2008) for anyone wanting to begin thinking about this issue.

References Barron, Lee. 2013. “The Sound of Street Corner Society: UK Grime Music as Ethnography.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16: 5. Bell, Charlotte. 2013. “The Inner City and the ‘Hoodie.’ ” Wasafiri 28, no. 4: 38–44. Beswick, Katie. 2011. “A Place for Opportunity: The Block, Representing the Council Estate in a Youth Theatre Setting.” Journal of Applied Arts and Health 2, no. 3: 289–302. Beswick, Katie. 2019. Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage. London: Methuen Drama. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Richardson, J. Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport: Greenwood, 241–258. Collins, Hattie., and Olivia. Rose. 2016. This Is Grime. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

148   Katie Beswick Fatsis, Lambros. 2018. “Grime: Criminal Subculture or Public Counterculture? A Critical Investigation into the Criminalization of Black Musical Subcultures in the UK.” Crime and Media Culture, June 28: 1–15. Forman, Murray. 2002. The “Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip Hop. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Goldenberg, Sally. 2018. “50 Years After New Yorks Fair Housing Act, New Your City Still Struggles with Residential Segregation.” Politico, 23 April, https://www.politico.com/states/ new-york/albany/story/2018/04/23/50-years-after-fair-housing-act-new-york-city-stillstruggles-with-residential-segregation-376170. Hancox, Dan. 2018. Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. London: William Collins. Hanley, Lynsey. 2017. “Look at Grenfell Tower and See the Terrible Price of Britain’s Inequality.” Guardian, June 16. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/16/grenfelltower-price-britain-inequality-high-rise. Harvey, David. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to Urban Revolution. London: Verso. hooks, bell. 1989. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36: 15–23. Huq, Rupa. 2006. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. London: Routledge. Kelleher, Joe. 2009. Theatre and Politics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Kitossa, Tamari. 2012. “Habitus and Rethinking the Discourse of Youth Gangs, Crime, Violence and Ghetto Communities.” In Habitus of the Hood, edited by C. Richardson and H. A. Skott-Myhre, 123–42. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Kitwana, Bakari. 2005. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas. Knafo, Saki., and Emily. Kassie. 2014. “Smooth Criminals: How Subway Dancing Became a New York City Artform—and a Crime.” Huffington Post, October 28. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/10/28/subway-dancers-new-york_n_6043552.html. Lefebvre. Henri. 1968. Lef droit à la ville (The Right to the City). Paris: Anthropos. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D.  Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. McGeehan, Patrick. 2012. “Blacks Miss Out as Jobs Rebound in New York City.” New York Times, June 20. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/nyregion/blacks-miss-out-as-jobsrebound-in-new-york-city.html. McKenzie, Lisa. 2018. “We Are in Revolution: The Wheels They Are a Turning Like Arkwrights Mill in 1819.” A Working Class Academic, December 11. https://lisamckenzie1968.wixsite. com/website/blog/we-are-in-revolution-the-wheels-they-are-a-turning-like-arkwrightsmill-in-1819. Nellis, Ashley. 2016. “The Colour of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons”, The Sentencing Project, June 14. http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justiceracial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/ O’Neill, Deirdre. 2017. Film as a Radical Pedagogical Tool. London: Routledge. Peterson, Grant Tyler. 2011. “ ‘Playgrounds That Would Never Happen Now Because They’d Be Far Too Dangerous’: Risk, Childhood Development and Radical Sites of Theatre Practice.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 16 (3): 385–402. Peuquet, Donna J. 2002. Representations of Space and Time. New York: Guilford Press.

Class, Race, and Marginality   149 Postigo, Hector. 2016.“The Socio-Technical Architecture of Digital Labor: Converting Play into YouTube Money.” New Media & Society 18, no. 2: 332–49. Richardson, Chris, and Hans  A.  Skott-Myhre. 2012. Introduction to Habitus of the Hood, edited by C. Richardson and H. A. Skott-Myhre, 7–25. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hip Wars: What we talk about when we talk about hip hop and why it matters. New York: Basic Books. Solga, Kim. 2019. Theory for Theatre Studies: Space. London: Methuen Drama. Tanenbaum, Susie. J 1995. Underground Harmonies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Trust for London. 2018. “Low Pay by Ethnicity.” https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/data/ low-pay-ethnicity/. Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books. Vonberg, Judith. 2018. “Grenfell: Parliament Forced to Consider Demand for Theresa May Inquiry Action after Stormzy Pushes Petition Past 100,000 Signatures.” Independent, February 24. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-stormzypetition-theresa-may-inquiry-inquiry-debate-100000-signatures-latest-a8226431.html. White, Joy. 2018. “We Need to Talk about Newham: The East London Grime Scene as a Site of Emancipatory Disruption.” In Regeneration Songs, edited by A.  Duman, D.  Hancox, M. James, and A. Minton, 223–238. London: Repeater Books.

chapter 9

Gen der, Politics, Per for m a nce Embodiment and Representation in Political Institutions Carole Spary

Introduction As the women of Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in New Delhi, occupied their local space in opposition to the government’s passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, the importance of the performative was hard to miss. Around them emerged a village of protestors and their supporters, with graffiti, exhibitions, a library, and communal eating places. Artists opposed to the law came to entertain and educate the women as they kept a continuous vigil. Their refusal to go home inspired other women in different areas of New Delhi and in other parts of the country. Many Shaheen Baghs sprang up despite the government’s intimidation and rejection of their demands (Press Trust of India 2020).1 The performances in this protest were many-layered and remind us that political performances are infused with gendered scripts, intersecting with markers of race, ethnicity, class, caste, religion, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and more. These scripts are embedded in diverse ways in power-laden institutional contexts and both reflect and influence the everyday reproduction of institutional belonging and exclusion, and thus the possibilities for representation. Identity categories are politically generated and generative in that their reiterated performance reproduces or attempts to subvert dominant social hierarchies. This chapter focuses on the interplay of performance, politics, and gender, especially in formal spaces of democratic politics and political representation—parliamentary, other legislative, political party, and other electoral contexts. The chapter introduces the reader to selected frames that I have found valuable in my work on gender and political representation: embodiment, authenticity, and performative labor of (especially symbolic) representation. I explore these concepts primarily through

152   Carole Spary the scholarship of Nirmal Puwar, Mary Hawkesworth, Michael Saward, and Shirin Rai, all of whom have addressed the importance of performance and intersectionality for political analysis and the gendered nature of both. I then apply these frames to illustrate the dominant scripts of political representation and appeals to situated knowledge during claim-making in the Indian national parliament; the policing of gendered and religious behavioral scripts for authentic representation of minority women in Indian politics; salient intersections of caste, gender, and embodiment in the performance of symbolic representation in the election of India’s first female Speaker of Parliament; and more localized scripts of performing gender in party political spaces. Building on diverse legislative contexts, I curate prominent political performances by elected women representatives, often “space invaders” (Puwar 2004) in legislative contexts. These performances have highlighted misogyny in politics, performed accountability in the face of powerful vested interests (and in response faced racist attacks), and shared testimony of gender-based violence and the effects of austerity policies on working-class communities and the precariat. They have highlighted the women’s fight for more effective institutional responses to the challenges of combining work with reproductive and care labor within, but also beyond, legislative institutions, and they have disrupted these spaces—perhaps, in the process, helping to make them more democratic. I bring the performances together with the aim of illustrating the intellectual and practical merits of applying a performance-based approach to analyzing gender and politics.2

Framing Gender, Politics, Performance The concept of the performativity of gender is commonly attributed to the political ­philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler (e.g., 1990). West and Zimmerman’s (1987) article “Doing Gender” also pointed to repeated acts of construction, of iterative performances, or “doings.” Both question the classic distinction between sex and gender as sex-as-biologically-given, gender-as-cultural-construction. For Butler (1990, 191), performing gender involves the “stylization of the body . . . the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gender self.” This does not imply creative freedom and voluntarism; the performative repetition of gender entails “re-enactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation” (191). Social gender norms can be disciplining, restrictive: “as a survival strategy under compulsory systems, gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. . . . We regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right” (190). To “trouble” gender is to push against gender regimes, to disrupt and destabilize, including through nonrepetition or “parodic repetition,” such as drag (192), to reveal gender as a contingent construction and falsely naturalized. To understand the relationship between gender, politics, and performance, an intersectional approach is imperative, accounting for how gender intersects with race and ethnicity and other forms of inequality and marginalization embedded in class, caste, religion, sexuality, and dis/ability, to produce multiple, varied forms of exclusion not captured when considering single categories in isolation (Crenshaw  1989). This is exemplified in the following two

Gender, Politics, Performance   153 approaches to analyzing gender and race in political institutions which have influenced my own work on gender in the Indian Parliament.3 Nirmal Puwar (2004) and Mary Hawkesworth (2003) focus on similar institutional contexts (national legislatures, as well as the UK civil service in Puwar’s study) but different geographical contexts (the UK and the US, respectively). Both highlight embodiment, identity, race and gender hierarchies, and rich intra-institutional encounters with power and privilege, belonging and exclusion. In her study of British political institutions, including the Westminster Parliament, Puwar (2004, 8) argues that despite the legitimacy of their election, women and racialized minorities within legislative institutions are still deemed “space invaders”: “There is a connection between bodies and space, which is built, repeated and contested over time. While all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the ‘natural’ occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being ‘out of place.’ ” Puwar’s rich study identifies the myriad ways women and racialized minorities experience white-male-elite-dominated institutions of politics and governance, institutions imbued with historical legacies of colonialism and imperialism. As the somatic norm, white male elites go unmarked as universal, reproducing privilege and exclusion in raced (white-dominated) and gendered (male-dominated) terms, and women and racialized minorities are marked as different and dissonant, out of place, and experience these institutions as simultaneously insiders and outsiders. Institutions, and the elite members operating within them, shape opportunities for marked bodies to contribute, assigning universal topics to the unmarked somatic norm and particular topics to women and racialized minorities. Puwar (2004) identifies one such manifestation as the “burden of representation,” where women and ethnic minorities are designated with responsibilities to represent the “special interests” of their “group.” This can enable participation but in compartmentalized ways, constraining opportunities. Moreover, the “burden of doubt,” where women and ethnic minorities must work harder to prove their competence while being infantilized and seen as less capable, places women and racialized minorities under greater scrutiny, or “super-surveillance” (11), making them feel less like they belong. “Super-surveillance” can result in mistakes being disproportionately amplified, creating “double-edged visibility.” With the combined effects of super-surveillance and the burden of representation, women and racialized minorities may consequently engage in self-surveillance and self-censorship to avoid amplification of their comments as representative of their social group. The response to space invaders by those whose institutional dominance goes unquestioned ranges from discomfort to “a sense of terror and threat,” a perceived threat to organizational stability and integrity. Responses manifest in the undermining of compartmentalization of space invaders (as described earlier) or more explicit vilification or scapegoating, overstating the presence of dissonant bodies in an attempt to protect and preserve institutional hegemony. Like Puwar (2004), Hawkesworth’s (2003) theory of raced-gendered institutions focuses on how political institutions may play a role in (re)producing and sustaining raced-gendered hierarchies. She explores the marginalization of congresswomen of color in the US Congress: “Racing-gendering involves the production of difference, political asymmetries, and social hierarchies that simultaneously create the dominant and the subordinate. . . . The processes

154   Carole Spary that produce a white male, for example, will differ from, while being fully implicated in, the processes that produce a black man, a Latino, a Native American man, a white woman, a black woman, a Latina, an Asian American woman, or a Native American woman” (531). Hawkesworth points to the contradictory positioning experienced by congresswomen of color in institutional practices and interactions: invisibility and hypervisibility. Like Puwar’s term space invaders and drawing on terms coined by two black feminists, Patricia Hill Collins’s “outsider-within” and Audre Lorde’s “sister-outsider,” Hawkesworth argues “such racing-gendering practices symbolically situate Congresswomen of colour as ‘outsiders within’ the legislative body” (547). Nonetheless their presence as minorities enables the questioning of otherwise less visible institutional norms which underpin and reproduce institutional “internal exclusion” (Young 2000); “their arrival brings into clear relief what has been able to pass as the invisible, unmarked and undeclared somatic norm” (Puwar 2004, 8). I have found both Puwar’s and Hawkesworth’s approaches immensely useful as approaches concerned with how intra-institutional power relations interact with embodiment to shape the experiences of raced-gendered elected representatives within those institutions. In other words, while it is important to pay attention to what representatives do rather than who they are (Jayal 2006), there remains a sense in which embodiment and ascriptive identity still influence the performance, interpretation, reception, and experience of acts of deliberation and representation and associated legislative tasks. As space invaders, their performance as representatives may be marked by Othering processes; both Puwar and Hawkesworth discuss representatives assigned to committees marking their “special” knowledge as Others, or when representatives’ behavior is evaluated and explained by foregrounding their ascriptive identity. Practices that undermine the effectiveness of congresswomen of color and create inequalities between them and dominant white members include “silencing, excluding, marginalizing, segregating, discrediting, dismissing, discounting, insulting, stereotyping, and patronizing” (Hawkesworth  2003, 531). Congresswomen of color, Hawkesworth argues, are expected to assimilate into the institution but are prevented from doing so because they are marked as different, non-default; they cannot therefore be expected to substantively alter the agenda of dominant members (531–2). Further, their crucial legislative efforts are overlooked and go uncredited. This seriously affects not just individual experiences but also the content of public policies, especially “the substantive representation of . . . historically marginalised groups” (530). While Puwar and Hawkesworth are not focused on performance per se, Saward (2010) offers us a constructivist and explicitly performative approach to representation, through the “representative claim,” an approach that has been taken up enthusiastically by scholars of gender and political representation (discussed later). He theorizes that representation is not given or static but is performed, through a claim to represent something or someone, to intended or actual audiences and constituencies, which will then be received, judged, accepted, rejected, or ignored by constituencies and audiences under varying conditions and contexts (36). Representation is thus a “set of practices, of events—and in particular of claims, claims to be representative” (39). Claims need not be concealed as performances for audiences to accept them; they may be identified as performances yet acknowledged to be good and/or sincere performances (68). Saward argues that claims themselves can vary in form and scope, as singular or multiple, particular or general, implicit or explicit, formal or informal, and unidirectional or multidirectional (58–66). The challenge for the claim-maker

Gender, Politics, Performance   155 is making claims “stick” and be accepted by audiences (72). This may entail a great deal of creative agency but will be constrained by the cultural codes of any given historical moment and location (75); claims are partial and contingent (77–9). Compelling claims will “tap into familiar, or at least recognizable or emergent contextual frameworks” (46). But claim-makers are also vulnerable to the reinterpretation and “reading-back” of their claims by audiences and constituencies (54). However, the extent to which they will be able to do so will vary across contexts. Saward’s approach has provided new tools to analyze gender and the performance of political representation through representative claim-making. For example, scholars of gender and politics have employed his approach to move beyond the question of whether elected women represent women’s interests to better understand how the substantive representation of women takes shape (Pitkin 1967; Celis et al. 2008). Gender and politics scholars Lombardo and Meier (2016, 22) build on Hannah Pitkin’s tryptich of descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation to attend to Saward’s plea to move away from electoral contexts to foreground discursive performances and the process of constructing symbols of representation through discourse analysis as well as the analysis of corporeal, or somatic, qualities. This growing interest in performance and the performative allows us to develop new vocabularies of politics, which I have tried to adopt in my work. Rai’s (2015, 1181) approach puts the performance dimension of politics, particularly its materiality, front and center to understand better “how claims of representativeness are made by both institutions and individuals and with what effects.” She also places emphasis on affect as the mechanism through which audiences respond to representative claims. She offers an analytical framework by way of a four-by-four matrix; upon one axis sits markers of representation (body, space/place, words/script/speech, and performative labor), and upon the other axis is located the effects of performance (authenticity, mode, liminality, and resistance. Rai  2014,11). For example, on performative labor (discussed later), Rai (2015, 1185) reminds us that “performing in public comes more easily to some than others”; perfecting one’s performance requires training, rehearsal, and confidence. These resources may be more easily accessible to those who have enjoyed the class privilege of an elite education or gender privilege of those with fewer commitments of social reproductive labor like child care alongside a full-time public-facing role. Like Saward, Rai (2015, 1182) is also deeply interested in audience responses and the contestability of claims, but she shows greater interest in applying these analytical constructs to understand the effects of representative claim-making on specific political institutions and their deep embeddedness in their “long history of social relations,” particularly moments of political contestation and rupture but also moments that reproduce and uphold the status quo. In doing so, she brings the rich, power-laden, historically sedimented, “thick” institutional context central to Puwar’s and Hawkesworth’s work together with the focus on the performance of representative claim-making that Saward foregrounds, and shows how symbolic representation is not just discursive but also performative (Rai 2017). This can tell us more than just what is going on in representation; it can also provide clues as to why political change occurs at particular points in history, and it points us to new modes of and moments for analysis. Rai illustrates her approach with examples from the Indian Parliament, and elsewhere this framework is adjusted and more extensively applied to our study of women MPs performing representation in the Indian Parliament (Rai and Spary 2019; see also Spary 2010 for an ethno-linguistic focus).

156   Carole Spary

Gender and Political Performance in Indian Politics Here I illustrate the interpretive power of these approaches as applied to gender and politics in India, where I have carried out extensive field research in Parliament (see Rai and Spary 2019), focusing on formal political institutions, electoral politics, and political representation. Although a parliamentary democracy, Indian political institutions are largely male dominated. However, there is also a vibrant women’s movement that has consistently campaigned for gender equality and justice. The role of performance in the arena of electoral and party politics in India has also been much discussed and analyzed, including attention to its gendered inflections (see Hauser and Singer  1986, and Pandian  1992, for early studies, and Bedi 2016, more recently; Bedi is discussed later). A focus on gender and politics in India also responds to calls for greater representation of global scholarship and perspectives in the Anglo-American-dominated literature on gender and politics (Medie and Kang 2018).

Institutional Opportunities for Representative Claim-Making among Indian Women MPs Members of the Indian Parliament draw upon multiple mechanisms to perform representative claims. Individual MP website profiles are important for newcomer MPs to signal interests, experience, and representative priorities and for staking a claim to presence in the historical archive. Performing in parliamentary debates and asking parliamentary questions and engaging with constituencies through social media are other performative ways of claim-making. For example, among the several MPs with a sizable Twitter following, the late MP and former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj often responded to requests posted on Twitter for consular help relating to medical or other visa emergencies. Of course, social media trolling is deeply gendered; many women MPs in the UK have cited this as a reason for not continuing in political life. Women constitute a minority presence, less than 15 percent of MPs in the lower house, Lok Sabha, of the Indian Parliament (see Rai and Spary 2019). Women MPs in the Indian Parliament often make claims to represent women based on their situated knowledge as women and a sense of obligation and responsibility to represent women’s rights and interests. Witness parliamentary debates such the 2005 Domestic Violence Bill debate, when women were prominent speakers in a sparsely attended House, and the 2013 Criminal Law Amendment Bill debate following the nationally (and internationally) condemned Delhi gang rape in 2012. During the Domestic Violence Bill debate, women MPs self-identified as women and claimed a special empathy and a special interest in speaking on behalf of women on domestic violence prevention (Rai and Spary 2019). The stage upon which women MPs perform is also gendered; they get few chances to speak in parliamentary debates, partly because senior (male) party leaders exceed their party’s allotted time, particularly during spectacular debates in the liminal moments of

Gender, Politics, Performance   157 political crises. Gendered inclusion also underlines the marginality of women—on occasions such as International Women’s Day preference is given to women MPs by presiding officers to speak on a motion recognizing the special occasion, but even then, occasionally their male counterparts complain of few chances to speak on these days. Disruptions to parliamentary process and procedure are also gendered performances that mark out female MPs as “outsiders/insiders.” For example, the Women’s Reservation Bill debates on quotas for women in Parliament and state assemblies have seen women MPs surround the law minister as he introduced the bill in the chamber to prevent opposing MPs from ripping up the bill before it could be tabled. These episodes are dripping with corporeal and material performative significance. Women’s bodies became protective shields for a male minister, reversing paternalist gender norms and strategically heightening the costs of opposition because a physical attack would violate (upper-caste and class-specific) sensibilities related to ‘outraging the modesty of women.’ These present fraught moments for both parliamentary scripts of appropriate norms of debate and deliberation in the chamber, but the performance resonates because it uses moral registers embedded in broader public gender norms and gendered historical protest repertoires from the nonviolence movement against British colonial rule.

Embodiment and Symbolic Representation: Meira Kumar’s Election as the First Female Speaker in the Indian Parliament The case of Meira Kumar’s election as the first female Speaker of the Lok Sabha in 2009 provides an illustration of how symbolic representation must be performatively invoked by making hypervisible the significance of embodiment for representation. Her own corporeal significance is intertwined with the corporeal significance of the position of the Speaker as a symbolic embodiment of parliamentary democracy (Armitage, Johnson, and Spary 2014). In her case, her election was also employed as a mechanism by political parties and representatives to compensate for the broader invisibility and underrepresentation of women and of Dalits4 in political institutions. Kumar’s nomination for the Speakership reflected her party’s determination to position itself as the party that would promote women’s empowerment, and it is plausible that it was her party’s inability to pass gender quota legislation (reserved seats) for women in Parliament and state assemblies during their previous government term (2004–9) that, in part, encouraged their gesture of nomination of Kumar for the Speakership in 2009. It also exemplifies, in this case, the complex intersections of gender, class, and caste that underpin debates on women’s underrepresentation in electoral politics in India and elsewhere. As a woman, especially a Dalit woman, which places her at the intersection of both caste-based and gender-based discrimination, her identity provides her party with added symbolic capital, but she also belongs to a highly political family (her father was a cabinet minister for defense). Kumar’s election as Speaker took place in June 2009 following the 2009 General Election. A series of performative moments, prior to and during her election, saw claims made by MPs and party leaders about concerns for the (under)representation of low-caste women, which were central to legitimizing Kumar’s nomination and election. Crucially, her elevation to the office of the Speaker was portrayed by MPs as enabling the symbolic (and potentially substantive) representation of women, especially Dalit women.

158   Carole Spary In an interview Kumar stated, “The symbolism of the election cannot be ignored. It does send a positive message and it will have an effect on the way a certain section of our society [the Dalit] is seen. I also think that a woman could become a speaker because the country has progressed much in the last one decade. . . . There has been a gradual change in our society which has helped women in getting a better deal. Society is coming to accept women in high positions” (Bhattacharya 2009). But elsewhere, when asked whether she would bring a new perspective to Parliament as the first Dalit and first woman Speaker of Parliament, she agreed but clarified: “I have represented empowerment aspirations of the underprivileged sections throughout my political career. But my primary agenda as the presiding officer of the Lok Sabha would not be guided solely by gender- or community-specific parameters. The Lok Sabha is the House of the People. The issues of the people have to be addressed in their entirety here” (Ramakrishnan  2009). Reminiscent of Puwar’s concept of supersurveillance, Kumar was highly conscious of being assessed on gendered terms and the implications of her efficacy for other female politicians: “When I’m on the job, I’m on the job, I don’t really think that I’m a woman. But at the same time, I feel that, I’m conscious of the fact that many women who [may think] ‘she has to perform well or we’ll all be run down.’ Or I’m being very closely observed and assessed not as a Speaker per se but as a woman Speaker” (NDTV 2009). Similarly Kumar herself was conscious of how, despite an elite background, her Dalit identity remains salient to evaluations of her performance and status as Speaker: “When I sit on the speaker’s chair that is what is on everyone’s mind—‘She is a Dalit’! I need not say it, it is imprinted in everyone’s mind. That is the context in which I exist” (Bhattacharya 2009). Kumar’s election reminds us of the importance of analyzing performance in context and the embeddedness of symbolic resonances in particular political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. It illustrates how claims to symbolic representation, especially of marginalized groups, are extended beyond the individual to make claims about the broader democratic legitimacy and representativeness of institutions. It also speaks to how the staging of representative claims makes some claims possible and not others, through the carefully managed and highly scripted conventions around the nomination, selection, and election of the Speaker.

Embodying Representativeness: Authenticity and Its Contestation Gendered dress codes apply to both men and women active in Indian politics and are often inflected by caste, class, religion, age, marital status, and so on. Men wear both traditional Indian and Western clothes, while women wear only Indian dress. Clothes signal conformity to or transgression of dominant societal scripts and those scripts pertaining to the “field” of party politics. Traditional dress—saris, salwar-kamiz—for women evokes authenticity, some of which also applies to men, such as the pristine white cotton kurta-pyjama combination or, particularly in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the expectation that male MPs of the major regional party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham, carry a photograph of the (late) party leader Jayalalithaa in their shirt pocket.5 Western vs. Indian demarcations of dress styles are also politically invoked, particularly for women,

Gender, Politics, Performance   159 who are chastised more often than men for wearing Western clothing, as when Priyanka Gandhi, a member of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, is criticized by opponents for wearing denim jeans or when Indian politicians have in the past criticized women for having short hair and wearing lipstick (see later on the criticism of Nusrat Jahan). How a woman wears her sari—head covered or uncovered, the arrangement of the pleats, the material and woven patterns of the sari—can convey signs of class or wealth, region, consideration of honor and (conservative) social norms, and recognition of weaver communities, their livelihoods and production methods and materials (handloom, khadi, etc.). Conversely, women in politics have offered bangles to male opponents, which symbolize weakness and emasculation (Banerjee 2005). Some women MPs seek to negotiate these dress codes and others openly attempt to subvert; the image of the north Indian MP Ranjeet Ranjan arriving onto the Parliament estate on her Harley Davidson motorbike comes to mind (Rai and Spary 2019). Criticism over what was considered inappropriate dress featured as criticism of a woman’s candidacy during and after the Indian 2019 general election. The Bengali actress and recently elected MP Nusrat Jahan was accused of not being representative of Muslim women. In part, this criticism expressed the idea that a Muslim woman should behave and dress in a particular way; this was not the first instance of this type of negative campaigning experienced by Muslim women candidates in India (see Mustafa 2017). But the criticism also reflected a contestation of her Muslim authenticity and an implicit symbolic-embodied claim to represent Muslim voters in a highly competitive electoral context. Jahan and another woman MP and actor from West Bengal, Mimi Chakraborty, posted on Twitter a selfie together outside Parliament after they picked up their identity cards as newly elected MPs. The photograph showed them in Western dress—Chakraborty wearing a white shirt, jeans, and sports shoes, and Jahan wearing a peplum blouse and trousers with black flat sandals—both making a victory sign with their hands. Their selfie with their new Parliament IDs, akin to the expression “I made it!” and perhaps even “I belong here!,” was debated openly online by both critics and supporters, the latter rejecting critics’ judgments about the appropriateness of dress, posture, and behavior (all too familiar to many women) in the supposedly sacred (secular) site of Parliament, often referred to as India’s “temple of democracy” (Nair 2019; Duggal 2019). The two were also criticized for not wearing saris and lambasted for treating Parliament as a film set. Supporters declared the two MPs should wear whatever they wanted and that they represented young India, a significant constituency in a country where youth (fifteen to twenty-four years old) are estimated to represent a third of the 1.3 billion population. Only a few weeks passed before a conservative Muslim cleric again voiced criticism of Jahan, issuing a fatwa for her marrying a non-Muslim man, and because when she took the oath in Parliament days after her wedding, she was seen with sindhoor (vermillion) in her hair (usually practiced by Hindu women; India Today 2019a). In October 2019 she again drew the wrath of a Muslim cleric, this time for participating in Durga Puja, a key Hindu festival in West Bengal; the cleric claimed her participation went against Islam’s monotheistic beliefs and practices. He suggested she change her name to a non-Muslim one to avoid misrepresentation. She rejected his criticism and reasserted that she remained a Muslim and believed in “portraying harmony towards all religions” (NDTV 2019). The productive tensions evident in the multilayered criticism faced by Jahan illustrate the complexities of the performance of, and consequent questioning of, authenticity and

160   Carole Spary representativeness. Social media also allows us to gauge the reception of such claims and explore different modes of circulation, albeit skewed by elite user demographics and limited connectivity of the rural poor and the notoriously gender-hostile online sphere. If Parliament is a gendered space, so are political parties. In her study of women workers in a regional party based in western India, the Shiv Sena, Tarini Bedi (2016) explores how these women build and sustain their political careers in the party and exert influence in their local communities by developing their own networks, visibility, status, and political capital. Bedi’s ethnographic fieldwork and performative analytical lens provide insights into the modes of political participation of Shiv Sena women, crystalized around gendered performances of being “dashing”—reflecting bravery, aggression, and dynamism. These performances of women politicians as “dashing” help cultivate self-fashioning and self-confidence and skills in public speaking, community work, and a reputation for effective negotiation with local communities and authorities. These performances circulate among Shiv Sena women’s networks as folklore, generating their political identities, subjectivities, and agency. Shiv Sena women creatively exercise agency, negotiating, sometimes transgressing, almost as parody, gender norms in everyday and more high-profile public performances given the highly masculinist party environment. This requires a great deal of performative labor to generate and sustain local and intraparty visibility. The audience here is far removed from the glare of national media, whose gaze is positioned at parliamentarians. But though the political site is tangibly different it is no less exacting.

Global and Local Circulations of Gender and Political Representation Of course, this interplay of gender, politics, and performance in electoral and legislative contexts is found around the world. A successful and powerful parliamentary speech captures public attention not only nationally but internationally, and thanks to internet technology and social media it is increasingly possible to gauge public reaction. Perhaps the best-known recent example is the speech on misogyny in politics by the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard on October 9, 2012, when she lambasted the leader of the opposition Tony Abbott for his alleged hypocrisy in moving a motion that called out sexism and misogyny despite, she claimed, his own numerous examples of such behavior. The speech was reported on around the world (Lester 2012) and generated massive online attention, and eventually millions of views on YouTube. Gillard’s misogyny speech preempted the heavy sexism of the 2016 US presidential campaign in which former the senator and Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton went face to face with the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump, who labeled Clinton a “nasty woman” and called on the country to “lock her up.” The label was reclaimed by Clinton’s female supporters and women’s rights activists in the US and prominently featured in the US Women’s March subsequent to Trump’s election. Internet technology allows performances to circulate extensively, but online spaces and social media platforms can be highly toxic for women and ethnic minorities in politics. In the UK, one black woman MP, Diane Abbott, reportedly receives more racist and misogynist hate mail than all other UK female politicians; she recently commented that

Gender, Politics, Performance   161 the instances of hate have grown considerably, especially on Twitter (Gayle 2018). It does not help that political leaders themselves use social media platforms in toxic ways emboldening others, such as the aggressively masculine “twiplomacy” of US President Trump. We have also seen the recent power and popularity of performances of accountability within political institutions during these times of political polarization and ideologically generated wealth inequalities. In July 2015 Mhairi Black, a newly elected Scottish National Party MP, then the youngest MP at the age of twenty, made her maiden speech in the UK House of Commons, in which she criticized the Conservative government for its austerity policies. Her powerful narration demonstrated the cruelty of benefit sanctions and quoted the long-serving late Labour MP Tony Benn’s distinction between weathercocks and signposts, metaphors for principled vs. populist politics. Only days later the speech had been viewed online at least ten million times (BBC News 2015). Black’s speech was praised for its articulateness and maturity, especially given her age, but also its authenticity, which was further enhanced by its being by the elected representative from one of the most deprived areas in Scotland. In the US women of color elected representatives have also generated attention in successful performances of speaking truth to power. For example, in February 2019 clips from televised committee proceedings were widely circulated online of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning unethical but legal practices that are available to legislators and elected officials, particularly the relationship between legislators and industry in campaign financing, and the extent to which the same ethical safeguards apply to the president of the United States. Her powerful but simple and direct questioning resonated because of the efficacy with which she shone a light on to unethical and morally but not legally corrupt practices in US politics and the power of capital to influence political decisionmaking, as well as the significance of such practices in relation to any potential attempt at the impeachment of the US president. But such performances come at personal risk and cost, including death threats and rape threats. In July 2019 President Trump tweeted a racist attack, widely held to be targeted at Ocasio-Cortez and three of her left-wing Democratic Party colleagues, also women of color, known as “the Squad,” suggesting they “go back home” (Pengelly 2019). All four are American citizens, three of them born in the US. So “go back home” was an overtly racist assertion that America could not be “home” to people of color. In increasingly polarized times, these are especially dangerous words. The performance of testimony, particularly relating to personal loss, grief, and trauma, generates a powerful authenticity and affect, enabling credible claims to resonate. During the recently debated Domestic Violence Bill in October 2019, Westminster MP Rosie Duffield bravely recounted in the chamber her own experience of domestic abuse (Proctor  2019; BBC News  2019a). Such performances reduce the distance between representatives and who those representatives represent and how; they are not always or even necessarily the  dispassionate and objective agent representing others but are invested with feelings, experiences, and personal attachments and connections to the issues they (perform claims to) represent, sometimes at personal risk to themselves. However, as Puwar (2004. 66–7) points out, the flexibility to move between representing the universal and the particular may be less available to those who are not the somatic norm; women and minority MPs may be restricted to subjects aligning with prejudiced expectations of their “special interests” deriving from their “particular” race and/or gender. Ironically the “super-surveillance” or hyperscrutiny that comes with being assigned such

162   Carole Spary work may cause them to be overly cautious about what they say, such self-censoring resulting in a double silencing. Occasionally, however, the mask of the usually unmarked somatic norm slips to reveal and make explicit an excess of privilege. One recent Westminster example, which drew censure within the House of Commons, supplied by Jacob Rees-Mogg, recently appointed leader of the House of Commons, shown draped across the green frontbench. His posture encapsulated bourgeois-masculinist privilege, a level of comfort that reflected a sense of entitlement to occupy that space, to belong effortlessly (Chakelian, 2019, 21).

Toward Transformation? Parliamentarians’ Performative Labor for Baby-Friendly Legislatures and Beyond In recent years parliaments have faced increasing pressure to become more gender-sensitive (Inter-Parliamentary Union  2011; Wängnerud  2015; Childs  2016). In part, this includes making the legislature a more accessible place for MPs who are or aspire to be parents. Legislative chambers lend themselves well to visual performances, being heavily televised places of work. Parliamentarians have used the visual form to make demands about familyunfriendly working hours and the lack of child care for MPs, often bringing their children into the chamber. MPs sometimes have to stay in or around the chamber late into the night to be able to vote on a motion. In 2010 an Italian MEP, Licia Ronzulli, sat with her baby in the chamber during a debate on women’s employment to demonstrate the difficulties of combining child care and work (BBC News 2010). In 2016 a Spanish MP, Carolina Bescansa, breastfed her baby in the Spanish Parliament, having earlier taken her child with her when taking her oath (BBC News 2016); an Icelandic MP attracted international attention when doing the same in October 2016. That same year, the Australian Parliament passed rules to allow women to breastfeed in Parliament, and the following year the Australian senator Larissa Waters became the first MP to do so (BBC News 2017). In 2017 a Swedish MEP, Jytte Guteland, took her baby into the chamber to vote (an MEP must vote in person), making a plea for more child-friendly workplaces (Pasha-Robinson  2017). Not to be outdone by mothers, in August 2019 the Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament, Trevor Mallard, presided over the debate while cradling and bottle-feeding the baby of another male MP, Tamati Coffey, while Coffey made a speech, performatively signaling his support for transforming Parliament into a more family-friendly workplace (Roy 2019). The visuals circulated around the world, were featured in Time magazine in the US, and made “image of the day” for a prominent news journalist in India (India Today 2019b). The performance troubled and disrupted gendered caregiving stereotypes, more so as the MP father was in a gay relationship and the child had been born to a surrogate mother. Some performances have been received more warmly than others. Japanese politics is notoriously male-dominated (Dalton  2015), and Japanese government policy has been socially conservative on redistributing social reproductive labor such as child care, despite Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s “womenomics,” a policy that prescribes encouraging women back into the workforce in greater numbers to address sluggish economic growth. In 2017 a Japanese legislator, Yuka Ogata, brought her baby into the chamber of a municipal assembly to highlight the difficulties posed by a severe shortage of child care places not only in the assembly but more generally (McCurry 2017). Ogata was asked to leave the chamber by

Gender, Politics, Performance   163 the chairman and staff and had to leave her child with a friend in order to rejoin the debate. Her colleagues deemed the infant a visitor, meaning they would have to sit in the gallery. Ogata had reportedly tried to discuss the issue previously with the assembly secretariat, to no avail (McCurry 2017). Similar stories have been reported from Denmark and Kenya of legislators bringing babies into the chamber and being asked to leave (Guardian 2019; BBC News 2019b). These performances are effective because the visuals and corporeality generate affect, adding layers of significance to speech. In other words, they help to make a point, whether that is in relation to public policy on child care, caregiving roles in the economy, the barriers women particularly face to their participation in the formal workforce, or parliament as a place of work. They remind us of the competing commitments of performative and social reproductive labor of those in public life, at the same time requiring more and sometimes a different, disruptive kind of performative labor to be effective. They humanize the representative as a caregiver, providing some respite in a climate of skepticism toward the political class—ironic given the otherwise much-mocked relationship between politicians, babies, and media optics. But these performances can be read in multiple registers and have been performed by women across the political spectrum; breastfeeding women MPs have come from a left-wing party in Spain (Bescansa) and a right-wing party in Iceland (Konradsdottir). Indeed, in the latter case, the MP was making a case to constrain the rights of asylum seekers to appeal their cases, but it was the progressive optics of the breastfeeding performance that attracted international coverage (Arnadottir 2016). While drawing upon progressive attitudes to women’s right to breastfeed in public spaces (and the labor enabling such attitudes), highlighting women’s role as mothers can also appeal to gender-conservative sentiments, thus making this a performance malleable across the political-ideological spectrum. This demonstrates the complexity of simultaneous performative acts of representation which can either reinforce one another or signal multiple messages. Such symbolic performances have what Rai (2014) calls “liminal” potential: they can lead to changes to institutional rules, facilitating women’s participation in legislatures (with intended consequences for other workplaces) but also, as we have seen in the case of Japan, may not lead to change. In January 2019 in Westminster a pilot proxy-voting scheme for MPs during maternity/paternity leave was introduced, whereby those MPs would nominate another member to submit votes on their behalf. After years of campaigning by Harriet Harman, Jo Swinson, and other MPs and by feminist academics (see, e.g., Childs 2016), and discussion by various parliamentary bodies, the tipping point was the optics of a heavily pregnant MP, Tulip Siddique, being wheeled into the House of Commons chamber during a series of tight votes on Brexit (Childs 2019). Having just postponed her cesarean section after being refused a proxy vote, she had to vote in person (Syal 2019). This powerful example of the body “in/on view” (Rai 2015) performing polysemic claims to political representation brings into sharp relief the necessity of institutional change to enable a more inclusive democratic politics.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to illustrate how ideas about performance, politics, and gender (in intersectional terms) can be used to analyze electoral and parliamentary politics and legislative institutions and politics. The analysis is by no means exhaustive, but it underlines

164   Carole Spary the fruitfulness of a number of approaches to grappling with, understanding, and illustrating the gendered nature of institutions and spaces of electoral and legislative politics. These examples also demonstrate how political performances are embedded in deeper structural imperatives produced by historical forces, be they political or economic or both. Indeed, as Rai (2015, 1195) points out, one needs to understand these larger forces and trajectories to be able to interpret and make sense of contemporary political performances of representation, and why they do or do not resonate with audiences, why particular performative scripts and the presence of dominant elites endure over time and become sedimented within institutions, and how they enable the resistance of further efforts toward democratization and inclusion. This may make it a more challenging, but arguably much more rewarding, illuminating, and urgent endeavor.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Shirin Rai for this suggestion, and for her comments and the other editors’ and reviewers’ comments and suggestions that contributed greatly to improving this chapter. 2. This chapter is far from exhaustive of possible approaches to studying gender, performance, and politics. The terrain is vast and constitutes a rich interdisciplinary field; this chapter is deliberately confined to legislative and electoral politics in comparative national contexts. See, for example, performances of gendered nationalism and nationalist spectacles in Taylor (1997), diverse gendered performances of citizenship and belonging in Dutt, Reinelt, and Sahai (2017), and, on international feminist theater engaging with international relations and political economy, see Aston and Case (2007). 3. For a different but allied take on intersectionality, emphasizing the injury arising from conflicting rather compounded intersections of single-axis discrimination, see Ramachandran (2006). 4. In official terminology, the Scheduled Castes, a historically marginalized, oppressed, yet internally diverse group, positioned in Hinduism beneath the caste hierarchy and recognized by the Constitution as entitled to affirmative action to redress injustice and discrimination. 5. I am grateful to Andrew Wyatt for sharing this observation.

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chapter 10

Nationa l Iden tit y Edgaras Klivis

Identity defines the quality of an object with continuous sameness in time and space. In the political context, however, the term indicates something more, namely, selfidentification of a conscious individual with a particular group of other individuals able to distinguish themselves from other groups and to convey the group’s “distinctive character in words, gestures and practices, so as to reassure themselves that it should exist and that they have the reason to belong to it” (Scruton  1996, 249). National identity is one case (among others, including race, gender, class, subcultures) of such internalized sense of membership, and it is built around the key concept of nation. In contrast to the concept of race, nation rests less on the physical appearances of the individuals and instead involves culture, behavior, character, tradition, language, and territory as the major defining characteristics differentiating nations as groups of individuals from others. National identity may be almost synonymous with ethnicity; however, where ethnic identity is based on cultural customs, practices, and kinship, national identity is underpinned by the law and is often territorially bound and thus has geopolitical dimensions. Nation, as opposed to the ethnic group, is not just about speaking the same language or meeting each other in common religious practices: “A national culture is rarely content with merely its expression; it seeks out a political existence” (Grosby 2018, 589). Modern nationalism that gives rise to the political understanding of national identity can be regarded as an ideology among other ideologies of the modern era. It offers a certain worldview, an explanation of history and state of affairs, of human life and society at large through the concepts of national identity, nation-state, national character and culture, national product, internationalism, etc. As an ideological system of values nationalism attaches a special significance to the community of individuals speaking in related ­dialects and living in neighboring territories (as well as often sharing the same religion and religion-based traditions). It also presupposes certain beliefs, for example, that human beings can have only one nationality and should stay loyal to their national origins (referred to as metaphysical “roots” or “blood”), denying subordination to larger groups (imperial loyalties, cosmopolitanism, class, or gender), smaller groups (local or regional identities), or hybrid ethnic or linguistic groups. The true power of nationalism as a political ideology comes with nations seeking a state or, in other words, the principled right of nations to self-determination and sovereignty through an independent state with its own territory.

170   Edgaras Klivis This, however, gives rise to a number of issues: the modern principle of national sovereignty is incongruent with the actual diversity (and often overlapping character) of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious identities inherited from premodern historical states and empires. It is also difficult to harmonize the political order of sovereign nation-states and fixed citizenships with the contemporary global international division of labor and trade; there is no neutral way to establish how, by what selective mechanism, members of ethnic group(s) become recognized as citizens of a nation-state. These gaps in the argumentation for nationalist political reason testify, according to some researchers, that nationalism is not entirely an ideology. Nationalism lacks a systematic, rational set of arguments, relying rather on beliefs and preconceptions about reality, factors that (arguably) make it the conceptual neighbor of religion rather than of political theories and explain why artistic images, narratives, performances, and rhetoric are much more important to nationalism than to ideologies like liberalism or socialism. Nationalism seems to rely eventually on emotional intensities and practices that trigger a sense of its reality or presence rather than on firm reason and consistency of argument. It is, however, important not to downgrade nationalism as a political force: despite its quasi-religious, cultural, and artistic character (people singing together, children dancing in folk costumes, etc.), nationalism has political consequences and works as a major political force in the modern and contemporary world. It is not simply knowledge of being a member of a nation but rather the emotional significance of this knowledge that gives nationalism its particular power in the modern world. National belonging is first and foremost an emotional awareness of the relation between people living in the same territory and speaking the same language. As a (strong) feeling, national belonging is experienced not only by ardent nationalists; it is quite normal for an average citizen to have strong feelings when his or her national background is attacked or diminished. Also, as a sense or a feeling (a feeling of belonging) national identity is fluid; its intensity can change in accordance to objective social factors (e.g., in the face of international threats, warfare, occupation, economic crises, migration, etc.) or subjective perception: the majority of the people in everyday situations do not experience it intensively, but in certain situations it can be intensified—and such situations can be artificially constructed and forced. For the most part it is precisely the performative group activities (singing, rituals, moments of silence, sports events) that bring forward national identity as both a personal and a collectively experienced feeling. Nationalist rhetoric in this sense is thus often regarded as a manipulative tool, a mobilization instrument, a populist ground, as well as a deception, a masking, repressing or overshadowing real social processes, for example, the struggle to sustain power by a dominant social group, whereby performances and celebrations of national identity are spectacles of subjection and hegemony rather than outbreaks of a preexisting community bond. These different degrees of intensity and depth of the feeling (of belonging to the nation) do not mean that it is limited to exclusive occasions (like Independence Day celebrations or the victory of the national Olympic team). On the contrary, national identity has become a natural and commonplace reference, and it does affect our everyday choices, behaviors, and beliefs even when it is not at a high point of affective intensity. Although the celebration of national identity is most relevant in societies experiencing times of social insecurity, ethnic conflicts, threats from hostile neighbors, or the state of transition (e.g., postcolonial or post-Soviet), the established nations of the West are also reproduced by ideological

National Identity   171 habits and familiar symbols (that are easily overlooked), what Michael Billig (2004) calls “banal nationalism.” A conceptual divergence inside the studies of nationalism, namely the difference between primordialism and constructivism (also modernism and traditionalism or essentialism and postmodernism), offers two contrasting ways of explaining national identity in relation to how (and when) it came about historically, and consequently its social, moral, and political significance. The essentialist-primordialist point of view is that national identity is “fixed, based on ancestry, a common language, history, ethnicity and world views” (Verdugo and Milne 2016, 4), a natural continuum always already inscribed into the physical and mental structures of an individual by birth, which makes nations natural and historically legitimate bodies. The constructivists (e.g., Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner) contend that national identity is an intentional fabrication or construction, initiated from above by the dominant social groups for their own benefit (basically a form of political indoctrination). Constructivists thus interpret the rise of nations as a result of the distribution of power which took place at a certain moment in modern history and which will eventually lose its significance, giving way to other political constructions and historical subjectivities. The academic discussion between primordialists and constructivists is related to (but does not define entirely) a controversy inherent in a wide range of global political conflicts where the liberal standpoint, grounded on individualist international citizenship, intersects with conservative, communitarian, and identitarian positions. The latter positions claim that mere abstract rationality of universal democratic values has little of the power needed for political mobilization and that true political force lies in selfhood and self-assertion built around particular cultural identity. This mode of identity politics sees culture as the main driver of the political order and the medium through which this order can be changed. It defines a practice that acknowledges cultural factors like nationhood, ethnicity, history, and religion as political forces prior to ideology, or indeed replacing ideology in the contemporary world. Identity politics—maintaining a sense of selfhood, self-determination, and particularism—has been an important factor in anticolonial movements as a political alternative to empire and is still crucial for many non-Western former colonies in their opposition to Western hegemony as well as for questions of self-determination or autonomy for Kurds, Euzkadi (Basque country), Catalans, Scots, and Quebecois, as well as those in countries of the former Eastern bloc experiencing the restoration of Russian imperialism, like Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia (Grosby  2018). Especially after the Cold War as the defining fundamental competition of two opposing political ideologies—liberal capitalism and state socialism—appeared to be over, culture and cultural particularism developed into a new structuring principle of the political order. The opposite argument of global citizenship—claiming the need to deconstruct the overlapping of nationality and citizenship—points out that the argument, central to modern nationalism, that there are cultures that should be recognized as national (as opposed to local, indigenous, ethnic, minority, native, etc.), and that nations (defined by national cultures) should be granted a right to have their own states, is not only impossible but misrepresents cultural diversity in ways that may have serious negative consequences. As new nationstates are recognized (as in post-Soviet Europe) the minority cultures within and outside a particular state immediately demand recognition—and then so do the cultural minorities in these minorities. As Natividad Gutiérrez (2017, 3) puts it, “The popularization of the so-called ‘right to difference’ is one of the key factors supporting the construction, negotiation

172   Edgaras Klivis and reinterpretation of identities presumably repressed or excluded.” As national identity is always contestable, it tends to fragment and split and thus bring new demands for recognition. “There is no end or exception to this criss-crossing and overlapping of cultures in the world. The tragedy of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or of the Hutu, Twa and Tutsi of Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire and Tanzania in East Africa, are only recent examples of the policies and wars of repression, assimilation, exile, extermination and genocide that compose the long and abhorrent history of attempts to bring the overlapping cultural diversity of contemporary societies in line with the norm of one nation, one state” (Tully 1997, 10). Thus the contemporary world can be described by contradictory forces of “post-national citizenship,” where the “decoupling of rights and identity” mean that human rights are ensured by global rules and transnational institutions, while at the same time identities legitimized as one of those universal rights pull in the opposite direction of ethnoreligious particularism (Soysal 2016, 386).

Historical Performance in the Construction of National Identity Since the dawn of classical modernity (late eighteenth century), philosophical meditations on the state, democracy, civility, and civil identity have been linked to the predisposition of philosophers for theater. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the editor of the Encyclopédie and a civil humanist, along with Voltaire, Montesquieu, and other famed representatives of enlightened thought, supported theater as a place for education, for molding the tastes and delicacy of feelings, cultivating gentleness of spirit, and revitalizing citizen morality as preconditions of enlightened civil society. For them it was important that drama and theater address the individual mores and manners of different national societies as a means to achieve a conscious, law-based civility. (They argued that the laws should be written in accordance with the customs and usage of the people.) Correspondingly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, despite his hostility toward conventional theater, nonetheless proposed a number of theatrical practices reminiscient of Greek tragedy, like ritualistic celebrations under the open sky and rallies involving all the citizens, as a way of building their civil and political identity. Rousseau, however, goes further than his contemporaries in stressing the importance of cultural particularity. In “Considerations on the Government of Poland,” his last venture into political theory, completed in 1772, Rousseau (1772, 5) complains, “Today, no matter what people may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen: there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same manners, for no one has been shaped along national lines by peculiar institutions.” Opposing this abandonment of differences “along national lines” for enlightened yet uniform European civility, Rousseau suggests that state-building is not solely a juridical matter but also a spiritual task and thus has to involve emotional attachment to a particular community as a bulwark of a strong state. “There will never be a good and solid constitution unless the law reigns over the hearts of the citizens; as long as the power of legislation is insufficient to accomplish this, laws will always be evaded. But how can hearts be reached? That is a question to which our law reformer . . . pay[s] hardly any attention” (2). The heart,

National Identity   173 rather than merely political and legal loyalty, is at the center of national identity, and the significance that Rousseau attaches to it is political, thus initiating what we know as “identity politics,” political practices based on a sense of (national) identity. The institutions that, according to Rousseau, should take responsibility for the development of national spirit include performative practices, activities that remind us of “children’s games”: particular rites, ceremonies, games, festivals, spectacles, Greek tragedies, and solemn assemblies that, frivolous and superstitious as they may seem, function to establish fraternal bonds among the members of the nation and at the same time prevent them from mingling with others. As a congregation of citizens, theater should provide citizens with a spectacle that reminds them of the “history of their ancestors, their misfortunes, their virtues, their victories, touched their hearts, inflamed them with a lively spirit of emulation, and attached them strongly to their fatherland” (Rousseau 1772, 4). All of this should take place in the open air and in the presence of the whole body of the nation rather than in closed commercial theaters. Rousseau, in other words, acknowledges and embraces the power of the theatrical in establishing national identity so long as it is not split into active producers and passive consumers of the commercial stage but has a character of a civic assembly—rituals, parades, concerts, street parties, pageants, festivities, and commemorations—involving pres­ en­ta­tion and interaction with national symbols (e.g., flags and anthems). These public performances may involve stage representations (as they did in Ancient Greece), but it should first be a repeated common ritual, unproductive as it is (like a child’s game), but functioning for the emergence and persistence of national identity. In the ages to come, the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, national identity (or “shapes along national lines”) in Europe (and later also around the globe) became a major force, and identity politics took the leading position in the political agenda of modern nation-states. As Eric Hobsbawm (2000, 265) points out, in the process characterizing modern societies and states, namely the process of convergence of state, nation, and society, the rulers and dominant groups had to face an unprecedented problem: “how to maintain or even establish the obedience, loyalty and cooperation of [their] subjects.” In the late nineteenth century the early advice of Rousseau to “win the hearts” entered emerging mass politics as “rulers and middle-class observers rediscovered the importance of ‘irrational’ elements in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order” (268). National identity as a multidimensional collective phenomenon was primarily a sense of belonging to a geopolitical entity (Verdugo and Milne 2016, 2). The issues that regulated and reproduced this sense included ethnicity, symbolism, language, myth, rituals, memories, public performances, and artistic practices (Smith 1991, viii; Hroch 2015, 18). Referring to territory and ancestry as the basis of political community in the era of nation-states, national identity, Anthony D. Smith (1991, viii) claims, provided the most compelling identity myth in the modern world. Beginning in the late eighteenth century the German, Austrian, Scandinavian, and Eastern European theaters gradually moved toward a model of theater as a moral school and institution of enlightenment for middle-class citizens (rather than a venue for courtly entertainment). However, alongside this function of theater, a new, nationalist agenda flourished in Central and Eastern Europe, based on the idea of representing the particularity and individual character of a shared national culture as a basis for national identity. Individuality of culture and its representations on stage were defined by reference to the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder, a German disciple of Rousseau and Montesquieu,

174   Edgaras Klivis who then broke away from the rational and universal ideal of Enlightenment for the unique and the particular. For Herder, the human is not just an abstract individual, a rational ­subject, but always a someone who belongs to a particular cultural community. Thus, ­history is nothing more than an interplay of the variety of individual communities, Volks and nations, each of which represents a particular trait of humanity and is equally important (Dumont 1992, 113–30). Throughout the nineteenth century Herderian notions of history, culture, and nation were taken up by the new institutions of national theaters (often also representing new nation-states) or (in the cases of nations that didn’t have their own states) by amateur and professional troupes in the imperial and industrial centers, where the stagings of national drama and opera performed the function of representing the individuality of particular national communities. Thus, as Miroslav Hroch (2015, 200) puts it, the building of national cultures as instruments of mass mobilization in the era of nation-states “tended to start with literary and theatre productions.” First, they did so simply through “the specific role of spreading the knowledge of the standard language and also of its correct pronunciation” (211). Next they followed a “desire to identify the characteristics of a distinctly home-grown dramatic literature” (Luckhurst 2005, 41) following the early examples of German theaters with Lessing, Schiller, and Tieck as dramaturgs or literary managers. And eventually they took on representations of manners, lifestyle, clothing, beliefs, stereotypes, national history, heroes, and symbols that were invented and constructed on the stage as well as folk songs and dances often involving audience members after the performance. In Nations and Nationalism Ernst Gellner (1983) gives a vivid description of the typical “birth of the nation” in Eastern Europe of the nineteenth century and, building on it, a general reconstruction of a model-process of how this new identity came into being out of fragments of an earlier social world through the mediation of culture (and theatrical stage). Here the stage becomes the space where random pieces of the everyday peasant reality (a mix of relatively related local dialects, folk songs and dances, fragments of local customs and typical social confrontations), something that was always there, but like air that the peasants were breathing, had never been acknowledged as culture of any value and as the basis for association, was now put up there, on the stage, exposed and alienated in front of the audience. The stage-public gap worked as a necessary distance to turn the elements of the commonplace secular environment into signs of distinction, especially when such performances took place in a foreign setting, like imperial cities, metropolises, or industrial centers harboring immigrants with different ethnic backgrounds (Gellner  2006, 57–61). These signs of distinction are exactly what constitutes national identity as a combination of descent and dissent—a common place of historical origin and separation of “us” from the others—or, as Prasenjit Duara (1996) suggests, a discent. Gellner’s description of historical development demonstrates that national identity has a theatrical structure, as when something is drawn out of the natural environment and put on stage to become an object of contemplation for a group of people and that appeals to or even interpellates them (to use Althusser’s term), by calling them into being as a community and giving shape to their subjectivities. The primordialist position tends to trace the national theater back to archaic popular grassroots, like folk entertainments and festivals as a natural expression of the primordial identity that is then extended under modern conditions into professional, staged spectacles of the institutionalized theater and opera for urban audiences. The constructivists see it the

National Identity   175 other way around: it is not the “identity” that seeks the way out through common celebrations and artistic practices, but the artistic practices, including amateur and professional theater performances, that give rise to and shape national identity. In the eyes of constructivists, the images and narratives that from now on will be recognized as representing the nation are made of the bits and pieces that may have some historical facticity; however, the random and arbitrary way they are selected, arranged, and mixed with purely invented elements (like the “invented traditions” of Hobsbawm and Ranger) is a construction. The theater stage at this point is both an apparatus for the estrangement of familiar elements (familiar words, customs, dances) and the creative space for aggregation of the familiar with the invented, the historical with the new, the authentic with the borrowed, in building, maintaining, and reproducing national identity of and for the audience. The theatrical stage, where the constructed symbolical elements are exposed before the eyes of an audience sitting in the dark, works like any other frame: the glass case in a historical museum, a choir song in a folk music festival, a romantic landscape painting, or a movie. These are all media that construct images, the totality of which was summed up by Benedict Anderson (1991, 6), probably the most influential researcher of nationalism, in the concept of the “imagined community,” his definition of a nation as an association, the members of which “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Describing the ­ process of how imaginary communities were constructed through modern media, Anderson privileged the medium of print: imagined communities and national identities are the results of print languages, while novels and newspapers embody the standardization of v­ ernacular languages that results in common discourses that travel across boundaries of local communities to generate a modern national identity. Other researchers, however, argue that the “literature of nationalism” (important as it is) should not obscure musical performances, visual arts, urbanism, and architecture or archaeological excavations that forge and reproduce the nations and national sentiments and identities across the generations (Smith  2014, 21). According to Smith, another major figure in nationalism studies, the mass choreographies of public rites and celebrations indicate that the “ritual was just as important as any literary text, if not more so. For it was in and through the well rehearsed choreography that both participants and onlookers were enabled to ‘feel the nation’ ” (28). Loren Kruger (1992, 3) similarly points to something she calls “theatrical nationhood,” the image of national unity, representing and reflecting people in the theater as a major ingredient of the rise of mass national politics in the nineteenth century. The theatrical nationhood, the assembly of the members of the nation in the theater or a mass celebration, gives the imaginary community a body, a physical presence in a special, usually highly symbolic place (elaborate buildings of national theaters situated in the center of the capital city or places of historical memory). In the meantime the historical representations on the stage or emerging through symbolic rites and often historical locales of commemorations render this body a continuity in time, suggesting that the important things stay the same in a nonlinear cycle of (national) tradition (Fischer-Lichte 2005, 91). The significance of the assembly in Rousseau’s sense as part of a theatrical institution has not decreased in the past two hundred years. Celebratory and commemorative rites, “prescribed forms, liturgies and choreographies that are iterated at regular intervals and handed down the generations” (Smith 2014, 24) as a way of establishing a durable collective

176   Edgaras Klivis identity, as Erika Fischer-Lichte (2005, 90) points out, tend to increase as a reaction to a crisis of identity. For example, the political mass spectacles of the interwar period, from the Soviet assemblies to the German Thingspiel movement, can be seen as “the ‘rituals’ that were created in order to overcome such crises were characterized by countless mass demonstrations in public spaces. Public rituals of mass participation and communal self-discovery reawaken emotions like civic pride and brotherhood. However, reestablishing emotional bonds and breaking down social barriers is also a permanent need, since capitalist modernity is ­characterized by the disintegration of society. In this light, the crisis of identity is a ­permanent one. The physical involvement and “the excitement of the atmosphere, generated by the contrasting and interlocking movements” (Smith 2014, 28) of the citizens, which produces the “feeling” as the core of national identity, invariably combine elite organization and popular participation. It would be wrong to assume that national celebrations are symbolic stagings of nation performed by the masses themselves—they are financed, projected, and choreographed by elite interest groups. The extreme case of mass participation in a civic cult of the nation as choreographed movements of large numbers of ordinary members of a national community (Smith 2014) organized and directed by elites can be described as “mass ornaments,” to use the term coined by Siegfried Kracauer, as a form of modern mythological cult and therefore a major form of mass deception and manipulation.

National Theater vs. Public Theater Kruger’s (1992, 152) “theatrical nationhood” as an alternative to the focus on press media shows the importance of the bourgeois theater as autonomous art in the “creation of the audience with national aspirations out of diverse and sometimes antagonistic classes and ethnic groups.” It is most common for the institutions of national theaters since the nineteenth century to become “a cultural monument to hegemony” exclusively and focusing on national representations of the ruling bloc. It would be wrong to assume, though, that national theaters have only the option of reflecting the hegemonic manipulation of mass politics (7). As Kruger point out, “The impact of the carefully orchestrated mass spectacle is considerable, but it has historically not obliterated the persistently mixed reactions of a variety of audiences, whose multiple responses resist unilateral absorption into the trance of power” (7). Even if national theaters as well as national audiences are so crucial in the development and maintenance of national identity in a manipulative and hegemonic sense (theater as an agency of domination and an ideological state apparatus), one should not forget the other potentials of the theatrical machine. The theatrical apparatus consists not just in symbolic representations displayed in front of a speechless audience; it may also be used alternatively, against the logic of identity building, to trigger imagination that goes beyond cultural nationalism, to open up critical distance toward (and not just models for) political repres­ en­ta­tions or to function as a live and public debate among citizens rather than a ritualistic celebration of an ethnolinguistic community. The theatrical space, the physical coming together and the representations of common roots, or performative practices that help to construct (to depict, narrate, and dramatize) as

National Identity   177 well as to celebrate (to prompt a common emotional experience of) the collective identity, can be closed and static. However, (national) theater can also be a place for discussing the conflicting issues of national identity. In fact, nation-building in the theater often goes along with conflicts and negotiations. Hence the differences in the very understanding of national theater and its significance for national identity: besides the ethnolinguistic cultural nationalism (whether seen from the primordialist or the constructivist position) focused on cultural identity and community, there is also the concept of civic identity, accentuating the cycle of conflict, negotiation, and consensus. Theater in the case of civic identity works not as a network of emotional and symbolic community but rather as a public sphere, fostering democratic breaks in and disruptions of opinions and ­prevailing polemics. The different nationalist stereotypes and mythologies are established through repetition and circulation in traditional theater productions. Thus the political and geographical socialization is passed from generation to generation and becomes well-known from a young age. The repetition naturalizes claims and images, turns them into common sense and furthermore into a common identity, since they are never exposed to public discussions (Dijkink 1996, 2). On the contrary, theater that is oriented toward public discussion can still be focused on national identity, but it is not geared to the purpose of (re)constructing or reproducing it through repetition, but rather to contest and/or deconstruct it. The discussion of where the stress should fall in relation to state-supported theater institutions still regularly emerges: Is it the importance of theater space as part of the public sphere (or rather multiple alternative spheres), a place (among other similar places and sites) for debate and an opportunity for the citizens to discuss common relevant issues, or a place for symbolic and narrative representations of national identity and nation (re)building? In 2015, approaching the 250th anniversary of the first play performed in Polish in 1765 by the company of the ruler of Poland Stanisław August Poniatowski and for years considered to be the founding event of the Polish National Theater, a heated discussion took place concerning what exactly the celebration should honor: the public or the national character of the local theater. Whereas Polish theater scholars, critics, and artists, like Joanna Krakowska (2015), a Polish theater researcher and translator, put forward the opportunity to celebrate the courage of theater artists to play on conflict and antagonism as “a creative opportunity and a tool for social change” (12), the bid from the politicians for theater institutions was to care for the community “on the basis of clearly defined identity” and a call to support “art with a very strong element of destruction” only from private sources (11). The impossibility of determining absolutely the response of the audience within the apparatus of national theater institutions (Kruger  1992, 6) gives rise to the concept of theater as a public sphere, inviting negotiation of participations and exclusions of national identity as an important public issue. Janelle Reinelt (2008, 228) points out in her article “The Role of National Theatres in an Age of Globalization” that in spite of the ethnopluralism and transnationalism of the present moment, the “questions of national identity will continue to persist within and outside the National Theatre buildings.” Focusing not on the reproduction of homogeneous identity as a feeling of belonging or the ritualistic shaping “along national lines” from institutional powers but rather on critical public debates on what does it mean to be European, British, or Lithuanian, theaters will continue “furthering public examination and awareness of issues of inclusion, oppression, security and identity” (230).

178   Edgaras Klivis

Conflict, Resistance, Postcolonialism Another important observation concerning the constructivist concept of national identity as a result of modern media and cultural practices is that images of the nation and national identity are never complete. Since a national community is always forced to face new challenges on the international political and economic scale (global conflicts, world economy crises, new international alliances, global security issues, etc.), the production of symbols and identities is constant. The work of constructing identities can never be completed since it is impossible to fully satisfy the scale and complexity of social reality of global modernity. There is always a demand for change and innovation, sustaining national identity construction as an ongoing and open project. Looking at the history of European theater in this light, it is possible to interpret the movements of theatrical modernism as a source supplying this change. Although the avantgarde experimental theater of the twentieth century is often represented as a circulation of ideas between cultural capitals of Europe (as well as global centers of the art world) breaking through national boarders and local identities, it has simultaneously been involved in the opposite economy of symbols. For national cultures the modernist experimental styles of theater, opera, and dance brought about by local artists after their pilgrimages around European capitals functioned as a pool for the renovation of symbols and narratives of national identity. Often, new avant-garde forms, reverberating with the experiments in Paris or Moscow, would be used in the stage productions of national classical plays and epics, thus linking modernity (the challenges, e.g. migration, urbanization, industrialization, international unions and economy), modernism (European or global experimental styles and innovations), and national identity (reproduction of traditions, canonization of folk art, and historical legitimation) into one dynamic circuit of innovation and reproduction, of global (post)modernity and “reproductive heteronormativity” (Spivak  2010) of local national societies. Even viewed within this structure of renovation and upgrading, the identity of national community, artificial, changeable, and under constant reconstruction as it is, should not encourage a conclusion that this constructive openness is an invitation for everyone, that every artist has authorization to join freely and to rearrange the repertoire of national symbolism or that every member of the national community can bring into play his or her creativity in (re)constructing national identity. However open and dynamic the cultural (re)production and recoding of identity was, its representation in theater and elsewhere demands means, media, and apparatus that are never accessible to everyone and instead are characterized by rigid selection and control. Histories of national theaters can be read not only as a creative coordination of modernism and nationalism but also as a series of exclusions, rejections, conflicts, and contests for accessibility and negotiations among different groups, individuals, interests, and powers. To put it other way: as an economy encompassing the circulation of fantasies, national identity is always inscribed into arrangements and circulations of power that operates in an invisible self-naturalizing manner, as though incognito. Consequently it is important to remember that images or narratives of national identity are not just references to something that exists apart from them and is prior to them. It is important to ask who is generating

National Identity   179 stage narratives and imagery, representing national identity, for whom, for what audience are those images performed, and to what purpose? Identities, on the one hand, may be ascribed or forced upon underprivileged social groups by those in possession of power, technologies, or economic, military, or intellectual dominance, putting them in control of public representations. On the other hand, identities may be rearranged (fantasies redirected, symbols retrieved, narratives reinvented) to mobilize individuals against the oppressive power, and a new sense of selfhood may be built out of old elements to direct liberation. Postcolonial studies and theory offer several tools and perspectives to unravel the loops of identities, representations, and power. For the postcolonial critique of the practices of colonialism in historical empires, as well as contemporary neocolonialism—exploitation, repression, and misrepresentation of people, ethnic groups, and nations—seeking to expose the relations of power on the global scale and empower those at the weaker end, the concepts of nation and national identity appear to be ambiguous. It is seemingly impossible to deny outright the importance of national identity and identity politics in anti-imperialist, liberation, postcolonial, and antiracist political movements. At the same time, however, identitarianism is nothing but imperial inheritance as postcolonialists see distribution of fixed identities and nationalism as an ideological technology employed by empires to conquer, rule, and maintain the status quo of power relations between the metropolitan center and subjected people of colonized countries. National identity is then both a platform for liberation and a constricting framework. According to Edward W. Said (1991, 18), “Just as natives were considered to belong to a different category—racial or geographical—from that of the Western white man, it also became true that in the great anti-imperialist revolt represented by decolonization this same category was mobilized around and formed the resisting identity of the revolutionaries.” Postcolonial studies researches the ways of denigration of non-Western cultures, thus building the sense of superiority of Western identity; Said, for example, pointed out how “oriental” characters are shaped (in the scientific discourse) in contrast to what is perceived as Western virtues (rational, masculine, mature), representing thus the identity of ­millions of people as irrational, feminine, and childlike. Similarly in the Soviet Union, the different national societies and ethnic groups were represented or forced to represent themselves in accordance with Russo-Soviet imperialism as minor and underdeveloped peoples, historically provided by the great Russian spiritual culture and then liberated by the Soviet army into a new civilized state. The mass celebrations in Moscow, like the ten-day literature and art festivals, included theater, opera, dance, and folk performances of the kindred nations grateful for the great Russian socialist state. Practices of mass identity politics performed through festivals and parades or “staged nationalism” were developed after World War II in the cultural and sports festivals organized and initiated by Soviet authorities; these were often patterned on earlier mass festivals, but with a special emphasis on well-choreographed human ornaments (Davoliūtė 2013, 68). On the other hand, by taking these forced positions and identities, the underprivileged social or ethnic groups (or the subaltern) can dig their own holes inside the official repres­en­ta­tions, using a number of techniques analyzed by postcolonial researchers and described as mimicry, satire, parody, tricks, “hidden transcripts” (James C. Scott), or “disruptive inhabitations” (Jane M. Jacobs) and turning the literary, theatrical, performative, and ritualistic mass representations of national identity into sites of conflict and resistance.

180   Edgaras Klivis Or take another example of contemporary Western consumers’ concern for authenticity, nostalgic tourism, and exotification in contemporary cultural and tourist industries, as well as the desire of many local artists around the world to participate in the global cultural industry and to increase their economic value, which often results in twisted performances of local premodern identities that have nothing to do with the everyday economic reality of the people in global neoliberalist realities. In this sense identity becomes a performance whose dramaturgy is forced by contemporary economic demand. There are, however, critical performance practices, like the ones by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, that play around with exotic identities and stereotypes, pointing out the older racist and Eurocentric positions still lurking behind them, using the strategies of overidentification, deliberately overemphasizing the racial and national stereotypes thereby calling them into question. Said, along with Frantz Fanon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, generally saw national identity as a feasible force for spurring forward the anti-imperialist revolt and a platform for solidarity in the fight for liberation. However, he believed that national identity should be dropped or transformed the moment the liberation movement reaches its goal and the colonizers withdraw (Said 1991, 18). The continuation of nationalist involvement in subsequent periods, separated now from anti-imperialist liberation, does not offer a ­progressive program or vision any more. A set of empty signs and symbols (“you want to be named and considered for the sake of being named and considered”; Said 1991, 18) tends to become repressive, absolutist, isolationist, separatist, and exclusivist—in short, an ultimate betryal of liberationist ideal (Said 1994, 67). The new project therefore that should replace nationalist concerns about identity is the political focus on social consciousness, social justice, and redistribution (Said 1991, 18), resulting in a separation of nationalism and the state. By itself the assertion and reassertion of national identity condemns society to “an impoverishing politics of knowledge” and “ultimately uninteresting alternation of presence and absence” (18). Said’s (1995, 232) anti-identitarianism is based on his view of identity as always a result of power relations and most often as something enforced: “Identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity.” Concerning the theater, Said finds inspiration in the plays of Jean Genet in his quest to find the Absolute not as a form of identity but as something that will always escape incorporation or domestication by shifting identifications with other identities. In The Screens, the partisan fight of Algerians against French imperialism is eventually lit up by “deflagration” in an act of betrayal (where the protagonist betrays his comrades) that functions as “the apocalyptic purification of the loss of identity” that the audience of the staging is exposed to (231). Anti-identitarian logic, the negative identity, is revealed in Genet’s plays as a beauty and truth of refusal to be tied down, accountable, to belong. In contemporary theory, the concept of “postnational citizenship,” dismantling the congruence between territorial state and national community as well as national belonging as a source of individual and human rights, is being worked out, extending the rights beyond national identities to noncitizen immigrants, regional movements, or indigenous groups (Soysal 2016). Spivak (2010), for instance, speaking for a reinvention of the civic state “free of the baggage of nationalist identitarianism and inclining towards a critical regionalism, beyond the national boundaries” (48), calls on “the teachers of the humanities” to keep the civic structures of the state free of cultural nationalism and to undo the “truth-claims of national identity” by de-transcendentalizing nationalism (50–51).

National Identity   181 Spivak (2010) denounces nationalism as a deception, a political control in disguise, since it cunningly appropriates the private sphere in order to control the working and accessibility of the public sphere. In opposition to this “possessive spell” (40) of nationalist imagination she offers to cultivate an alternative—comparativist—imagination, “an imagination trained in the play of language(s) [that] may undo the truth-claims of national identity, thus unmooring the cultural nationalism that disguises the workings of the state” (50). Training imagination through inventive equivalence that Spivak relates to education in literary comparativism can find similar support from theatrical practices that are involved in “permanently probing the emergence, stabilization and destabilization of cultural identities” (Fischer-Lichte 2014, 11) and transferring their participants into states of in-betweeness and liminality. Consider, for example, the practices of “interweaving performance cultures” as conceptualized by the theater researcher Fischer-Lichte (2014) in opposition to the intercultural theater practices still attached to fixed cultural identities. In the face of traditionally opposed identities (Western and Oriental, metropolitan and colonial, etc.), theater can strive to interweave differences like threads are woven into cloth following the “as well as” logic of interconnectedness (Fischer-Lichte 2014).

References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Billig, Michael. 2004. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Davoliūtė, Violeta. 2013. The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War. London: Routledge. Dijink, Gertjan. 1996. National Identity and Geopolitical Vision: Maps of Pain and Pride. London: Routledge. Duara, Prasenjit. 1996. “Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When.” In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 150–77. New York: Oxford University Press. Dumont, Louis. 1992. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2005. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre. London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2014. “Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking ‘Intercultural Theatre’: Towards an Experience and Theory of Performance beyond Postcolonialism.” In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures: Beyond Postcolonialism, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 1–21. New York: Routledge. Gellner, Ernest. 2006. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grosby, Steven. 2018. “Nationalism.” In The Sage Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by William Outhwaite and Stephen P. Turner, 587–603. London: Sage. Gutiérrez, Natividad. 2017. “The Study of National Identity.” In Modern Roots: Studies of National Identity, edited by Alain Dieckhoff and Natividad Gutiérrez, 3–17. London: Routledge. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2000. “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914.” In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 263–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hroch, Miroslav. 2015. European Nations: Explaining Their Formations. London: Verso.

182   Edgaras Klivis Krakowska, Joanna. 2015. Teatr publiczny. Konflikt i konsens/Public Theatre: Conflict and Consensus. Bydgoszcz: Polska New Theatre. Kruger, Loren. 1992. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Luckhurst, M. 2005. Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reinelt, Janelle. 2008. “The Role of National Theatres in an Age of Globalization.” In National Theatres in a Changing Europe, edited by Stephen Elliot Wilmer, 228–38. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1772. “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Proposed Reformation.” International Relations and Security Network: Primary Resources in International Affairs. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125482/5016_Rousseau_Considerations_ on_the_Government_of_Poland.pdf. Said, Edward W. 1991. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Raritan Quarterly 11, no. 1: 17–31. Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Said, Edward W. 1995. “On Jean Genet’s Late Works.” In Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, 230–42. London: Routledge. Scruton, Roger 1996. A Dictionary of Political Thought. London: Pan MacMillan. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Smith, Anthony D. 2014. “The Rites of Nations: Elites, Masses and the Reenactment of the ‘Nation Past.’ ” In The Cultural Politics of Nationalism and Nation-Building, edited by Eric Taylor Woods and Rachel Tsang, 21–37. London: Routledge. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoğlu 2016. “Post-national Citizenship: Rights and Obligations of Individuality.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, edited by Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash, and Alan Scott, 383–96. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2010. Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books. Tully, James 1997. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Verdugo, Richard R., and Andrew Milne. 2016. “Introduction: National Identity. Theory and Practice.” In National Identity: Theory and Research, edited by Richard  R.  Verdugo and Andrew Milne, 1–21. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

chapter 11

Per for m a nce a n d Citizenship The Roma in Europe Ioana Szeman

In this chapter I argue that the concepts of performance and performativity allow us to grasp modes of citizenship that do not follow a verbal, logocentric interaction that may not be directly addressed to the state and state institutions and to follow the citizenship gap as it is experienced in people’s daily lives. The citizenship gap is the distance between legal citizenship and actual citizenship,1 which many legal citizens cannot access fully (Szeman 2018). Actual citizenship is the ability to take advantage of the citizenship rights that have been gained through legal citizenship but which, if “understood as private ‘liberties’ or ‘choices,’ are meaningless, especially for the poorest and most disenfranchised, without enabling conditions through which they can be realized” (Yuval-Davis 1997, 18).2 Actual citizenship encompasses both cultural citizenship, “the right to belong while being different” (Rosaldo 1994, 402)—with material and symbolic consequences—and basic citizenship rights, such as the right to medical facilities and running water.3 I focus on the Roma, one of the most disenfranchised minority populations in Europe, and most of my examples are from Romania. Roma face discrimination and abuses across East Central Europe, and many Roma lack access to public services, experience violence, and are denied basic human rights. Even though minority rights for Roma were high on the agenda of Eastern European countries’ EU accession negotiations, the situation of many Roma in these countries has not changed significantly. Furthermore, police violence against Roma in Western Europe, including the fingerprinting of Roma in Italy in 2008 and the expulsions of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma from France since 2010,4 have brought to light the struggles of Roma across Europe. The forced eviction of numerous Roma inside Romania and the expulsions and police violence targeting Roma in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe are state-sponsored attacks on local or migrant Roma, who are not treated as equal citizens by their governments (Brooks 2010). This chapter proposes the citizenship gap as a paradigm that connects the experiences of migrants and minorities who have legal citizenship but few de facto rights and brings scholarship on citizenship in conversation with research on migration and minorities. Scholarship

184   Ioana Szeman on migrants, including Roma migrants, and refugees discusses their treatment as noncitizens (De Genova 2002; Van Baar 2017, Sigona 2015, 2016; Hepworth 2015); there is significantly less work focused on the citizenship of indigenous marginalized communities (see Cox 2015; Sheller 2012; Harris-Perry 2013), of which Roma in Romania are one example. The citizenship gap is useful for discussing the experience of actual citizenship for ethnic minorities and indigenous people, for example African Americans and Native Americans in the Americas and Aborigines in Australia. The lack of cultural citizenship of Roma in Romania resonates in many ways with the experience of racialized minorities in multiple national contexts, from African Americans and Latinx in the US to African-Caribbean and Asian minorities in Britain. I argue that the citizenship gap captures the lack of cultural citizenship, which manifests both in terms of lack of belonging from the point of view of the state and everyday marginalization and racialization. My performance lens captures both the official recognition of Roma, and many other minorities, and their everyday experiences of racialization. Performance, understood as “making, not faking,”5 in its multiplicity of occurrences—from everyday life to the stage and screen—brings into focus the limitations and radical potential of the new visibility of Roma artists and artifacts. I argue that in Romania the state imposes a compulsory monoethnic performativity through state institutions that foster only certain ethnocultural identities, such as Romanian and Hungarian, but not Roma. Roma were officially recognized as an ethnic minority in Romania in 1991, after more than five decades of socialism, when they were denied an identity and were seen as lumpen proletariat and in need of assimilation. However, the citizenship gap for Roma has persisted because official recognition has not granted Roma the same status as other, “legitimate” minorities in Romania. I argue that the Romanian state has not changed its hegemonic definitions—which equate citizenship with ethnic Romanians and draw on ethnicity-based paradigms of citizenship, national culture, and history6—and has thus maintained the citizenship gap for Roma. All Roma experience a cultural citizenship gap, from the point of view of the state: in Romania, they are not seen to belong or to be part of the nation. Roma, other minorities, and migrants (including, for example, recent migrants from Syria in different European countries) share a fundamental commonality vis-à-vis their states (of birth, for Roma; of arrival, for migrants): the denial of their cultural citizenship. Roma in Romania are jettisoned as “not us,” a gesture that maintains the citizenship gap at the social and discursive levels for Roma, and the privilege of the majority through monoethnic paradigms of nation and citizenship. This jettisoning is also evident in the cultural representations and racialized hierarchies that assign low- and popular-culture roles to Roma artists and performers while maintaining their status as Other. Divergent or parallel definitions of culture—the Romanian state’s definition of national culture in exclusively ethnic terms, the authenticity criteria promulgated in EU definitions of Roma culture, the commodified versions of culture promoted in commercial media—constitute the grounds upon which Roma continue to be denied full citizenship, cultural and otherwise. Market expansion to the east, in the context of EU enlargement, and the corresponding import of civil society and democracy, including a focus on the Roma minority, have led to the recent ubiquity of Roma music and dance performances, both in the West and in Romania. The figure of the passionate Gypsy has become one of the latest sources of exoticism in the West. Marketed as timeless and exotic, Roma bands from Romania and other Balkan countries feature in international festivals; DJs play “Gypsy music”;7 Gypsy dress

Performance and Citizenship   185 parties have spread, from London and Paris to New York and Houston. In Romania, Roma dance and music groups have proliferated, while new TV soaps about Roma (acted by nonRoma) and reality shows featuring famous Roma musicians have become increasingly popular. However, the visibility of Roma music and dance performance has not translated into Roma being recognized as citizens, despite the fact that Roma express cultural citizenship through these media. The visibility of the Roma is a double-edged sword: they are invisible as citizens, yet hypervisible as Ţigani, constantly monitored by police, or seen as exotic performers, in the case of musicians and dancers. Other minorities and racialized populations elsewhere experience the same effects of hypermonitoring and erasure (see Jackson 2005; Johnson 2003; Conquergood 1997). I use performance paradigms and examine how different Roma have negotiated and resisted the citizenship gap, manifested in the discrimination and racism they encountered on a daily basis and which resulted in their treatment as noncitizens. My intersectional focus addresses different Roma voices and performances, some of which have become more prominent, such as those of Roma activists and artists.8 The appropriation and erasure of Roma culture has historical roots in definitions of the Romanian nation and in larger geopolitical realities; in the same way, today the situation of the Roma in Romania can be understood only in relation to the wider EU context. While the Romanian nation has always been marginal in relation to the West, Roma within Romania, as a nonterritorial, disenfranchised ethnic minority, have symbolically threatened national identity through abjection.9 Roma were slaves in the territories of today’s Romania until 1856, and this remains a little known historical background to the current marginalization of Roma and the persistence of the abject Ţigan stereotype. The Romanian nation is “not quite European” and is in danger of contagion, of becoming like its abject Other, the Ţigani. At work here are nesting relationships of marginality, with the Romanian nation being marginal in relation to the West, and the Roma threatening national identity through abjection.10 I define Romania’s state-sponsored multiculturalism (i.e. the official recognition of ­different ethnic minorities) as normative monoethnic performativity, which includes the cohabitation of separate, non-intersecting ethnocultures, as illustrated by the Hungarian minority’s successful lobbying for an autonomous education system and which we could say is framed by hostility and either-or and self-other dichotomies (see Vincze 2011). The dominant essentialist understandings of identity create a system of non-intersecting cultures and parallel worldviews modeled on monoethnic nationalism and favoring ethnocultures that are also nationalities, such as Hungarian and German; this system continues to appropriate and erase Roma culture, failing to treat it as equal to other ethnocultures. One becomes Romanian or Hungarian by attending monoethnically denominated Romanian or Hungarian schools and dance ensembles. Roma children continue to be stigmatized, and many attend special schools for students with learning disabilities, or otherwise they may be disciplined into compulsory monoethnic performativity if they pass as non-Roma. Roma students experience discrimination in the educational system in Romania as well as in most other East Central European countries (Miskovic  2009; Vincze  2011; Szalai 2011). The main encroachments on children’s rights include the enrollment of Roma children in schools for children with learning disabilities (so-called special schools); segregation in all-Roma schools or all-Roma classes; denial of enrollment in mainstream schools; and the generally inferior quality of education for Roma children (European Roma Rights

186   Ioana Szeman Center 2004). These practices continued after 1989 in Romania, in parallel with and despite the new quotas for Roma students in secondary schools and universities (Vincze  2011). While some Roma children did take advantage of the quotas, many of them experienced discrimination in primary and secondary school, as was the case with the poorest Roma children.11 As Michael Saward (2013) shows, theatrical metaphors can be found in many theorizations of citizenship, including Engin Isin’s (2013) acts of citizenship and Jacques Rancière’s (2005) discussion of visibility and the domain of the sensible, the latter assuming the concept of the script, of minor and major parts, etc. The use of theatrical metaphors in discussing Roma is problematic given the absence of the Roma from national theater in Romania, where Roma have been relegated to low-culture paradigms and are often seen to lack a legitimate culture. I follow the lead of scholars who have theorized vernacular citizenship as “citizenship from below” (Sheller 2012) and who have focused on the subjectivities of racialized minorities (Harris-Perry 2013; Cox 2015) and those who have used performance paradigms to illuminate the experience of citizenship (Joseph 1999; Nield 2006; Roxworthy 2008, Kim 2014). I use a performance-grounded methodology to open up what we may understand as acts of citizenship. Isin’s (2013) concept of “acts of citizenship” and the distinction he makes between active and activist citizenship are useful tools for opening up the continuum between citizens and noncitizens and for looking at how citizens fashion themselves in relation to the state’s imposed hierarchies and institutions. However, this model focuses mainly on acts of interaction with the state and state institutions, and thus identifies citizenship as centered around these interactions. Using a methodology grounded in participant observation, I follow the performative and everyday iterations and enactments of citizenship; some of these may be as simple as claiming one’s Romanian citizenship as a Roma activist on national television or refusing to be turned down from a hospital appointment or at a police station when seeking assistance. I draw on more than a decade (2001–12) of ethnographic research among Roma living in or touring cities in Romania and Western Europe, as a gadgi (non-Roma) and Romanian citizen of mixed Romanian-Hungarian descent. I look at the lived, everyday aspects of the citizenship gap as performative acts, and I use performance paradigms to highlight the racialization faced by Roma and other migrants or legal citizens experiencing the citizenship gap. I focus in particular on the voices and performances of citizenship of impoverished Roma in the squat settlement of Pod, Transylvania, Romania, including Roma young people who experienced discrimination and segregation in the state education system, many of whom attended schools for children with learning disabilities, despite not having disabilities.12 The experience of racialization is an everyday occurrence for many Roma in Romania and elsewhere and is imbricated with class and gender. I situate Roma performances (on the stage and screen) and performative acts in everyday interactions and also in the media, in the wider structural constraints, both socioeconomic and discursive or policy-related, and show how they confirm or challenge the citizenship gap. The concept of the public or audience in theorizations of citizenship needs to be reconfigured to include Roma, and other minorities and migrants more generally, and not only those whom the state regards as legitimate citizens (i.e., ethnic Romanians; middle-class, respectable minorities; not Ţigani, the Other of the Romanian Self). I focus on Roma audiences, including of popular television shows, and on the growing Roma counterpublic in Romania. Popular culture is an important terrain of Roma visibility and potential critique,

Performance and Citizenship   187 as well as the space of commodification and sedimentation of stereotypes. Roma reception of a variety of performances by and about Roma illuminates the existence of a Roma counterpublic that shares alternative views of citizenship and belonging in Romania and rejects the normativity of monoethnic nationalism. I focus here on the transformative potential of counterpublics, conveyed by Michael Warner’s (2002, 88) definition, as “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely.” Viewed in this way, Roma counterpublics resist the cultural citizenship gap and challenge the hegemony of monoethnic nationalism.13 I argue that Roma artists and activists claim cultural citizenship and belonging in dance, media, and the reception of commercial television programs, including the so-called “Gypsy soaps,” television soap operas purportedly about Roma and acted by non-Roma. In the next section I discuss Roma acts of resistance to the citizenship gap as performances of citizenship. In the subsequent two sections I turn to the dance practices of young Roma and non-Roma and to Roma readings of popular culture; I argue that both examples represent expressions of countercultural citizenship, which are at odds with hegemonic norms of cultural citizenship and belonging in Romania.

Everyday Acts of Resistance as Performances of Citizenship Since 2001 I have been conducting ethnographic research with a Roma community in Pod, a squat in Transylvania, Romania. Living in difficult conditions, without infrastructure or medical facilities and far away from schools, Roma in Pod could be mistaken for refugees in a camp, even though they were citizens of Romania. In 2001 there was no running water or electricity and virtually no medical facilities. Residents collected water from a broken pipe and powered electrical equipment with batteries. They had no access to healthcare, and many children either did not go to school or else attended special schools for children with disabilities, even though they did not have disabilities. In my discussion of resistance in Pod, here and elsewhere, I am mindful—following Foucault—that where there is power, there is resistance (1977). Some of the forms of resistance identified in this chapter were more productive than others, and I see these different forms of resistance on a continuum, as forms of expression of people’s subjectivities in relation to the citizenship gap they experienced in their daily lives. The Roma adults and young people I interviewed resisted the system in a variety of ways, which included low engagement at school and in some cases through refusal to be enrolled in “special schools” for children with learning disabilities. Other acts of resistance include a mother’s refusal to transfer her son to a special school, which I analyze as a performance of citizenship; I see this as a refusal to be pushed into the citizenship gap and a proactive claim for the actualization of one’s legal citizenship. In 2008 Roma students from Pod were still overrepresented in special schools, and only around 10 percent of the child population (of several hundred) attended a mainstream school. Many had started their first year in a mainstream school, but after a couple of years had transferred to a special school. Psychological and IQ tests took place in intimidating conditions, often without parents’ knowledge.14 The only way for a student to transfer back

188   Ioana Szeman from a special school to a mainstream school was for the parents to appeal the committee’s decision, but, given many Roma parents’ low expectations and lack of knowledge of how the school system worked, most were unlikely to appeal. Financial incentives also made many parents accept special schools more readily: the cost of clothes, supplies, and tuition was covered by the state in special schools, but not in mainstream schools; for this reason it was more difficult for some parents to support their children in supposedly free mainstream education. The primary school teacher of one boy from Pod, Giani, had attempted to transfer him to a special school in his first year, but he stayed in the mainstream school because of his mother’s intervention. Vanesa, Giani’s mother, described to me how she had to fight with the teacher to prevent her son from being transferred. Often, including in this case, teachers would suggest transfers for no reason other than that a child was Roma and from a disadvantaged background. Roma continue to be racialized on the basis of external markers, a process that perpetuates the citizenship gap. I treat Roma as an ethnicity, as no immutable signs mark one as Ţigan/Ţigancă or Roma, despite widespread misconceptions that all Roma have dark skin, for example. I also focus on racialization processes: while race as a classificatory term is a social construction that masquerades as truth and uses biology to do so, it is an important term that captures the reality of racism, which Roma continue to experience.15 Through performative processes of gendered and classed racialization and misrecognition, Roma fail to access actual citizenship, either materially or symbolically or both. Roma who are unmarked may pass as the majority, their Roma ethnicity erased, while Roma values are appropriated by the ethnic nation; others fail to pass; for example, Roma in Pod are classified as abject Ţigani, while Roma musicians and performers are seen as exotic Ţigani. Paraphrasing Stuart Hall (1980), I argue that poor Roma in Romania experience their class as race and are racialized into Ţigani.16 Some Roma are able to escape the racialization of poverty in some contexts but not in others (see Emigh and Szelenyi 2002; Stewart 2002; Ladányi and Szelényi  2006).17 There are, however, limits to the relative fluidity in the racialization of Roma; the markers of class can include an association with a specific location, such as Pod, in addition to external markers of low socioeconomic status, such as clothing and overall appearance or darker skin tone. The racialization of Roma is based as much on physical markers, such as darker skin tone, as it is on class or its visual markers, such as clothing. Collectively, the whole of Pod was racialized as a place where Ţigani lived, even though some individual residents sometimes escaped such labels when away from Pod. It was because the Roma children lived in Pod that teachers associated them with underachievement and proposed their transfer to special schools, to “clean up” the image of the school. Many non-Roma parents refused to send their children to schools attended by poor Roma children. Mira, another Roma mother from Pod, explained to me how many Roma children in Romania continued to be sent to special schools, just as they had been during socialism: MIRA: If they see you’re cleaner, they send you to the D school [mainstream school]. If they see you’re a little dirty, they say you won’t make it and they send you to the school on B road [special school].

Performance and Citizenship   189 She thus succinctly described the processes of racialization of poverty that underpinned how the citizenship gap for Roma children was maintained in schools that implemented the state’s compulsory monoethnic performativity. The school system would equate a child’s low social status with disability and prevent them from attending a mainstream school. The difference between 2008 and the years of communism, she pointed out, was that in those days “they would only take these kids to the special school.” Now some of them, the “cleaner-looking ones,” might actually be allowed to enroll in mainstream schools. School personnel assessed the public performances of the child and parent and racialized them as Mira described, playing an instrumental role in maintaining the citizenship gap for Roma in education. Giani, Vanesa’s son, reflected on Roma parents whose children attended special schools: GIANI: Even shoes, clothes, they received aid of that kind at those schools. I can’t say myself that I had great conditions. . . . But even so, I still preferred to go to the regular school.

Vanesa’s opposition to the teacher’s suggestion to send Giani to the special school was successful, and several years later Giani graduated from a mainstream secondary school. Intentionally or unintentionally, some Roma passed as non-Roma when they were wearing formal clothes or looking like professionals; some, like olive-skinned Armando, who was a Roma activist and school liaison officer, were taken for foreigners such as Arabs on the basis of class or status markers. Usually Roma are considered “swarthy,” but this is not a necessary marker of Roma identity. Olive skin can also signify someone from southern Romania, where a large percentage of the population—Roma or not—have this physical characteristic, while Roma can be fair-skinned. The suspicion of abjection, of being a Ţigan, can hang over anyone on the basis of a variety of factors: darker skin, shabby appearance, and address or place of origin. The racialization of perceived class indicators and/or skin tone was often unreliable, but it still led to experiences of discrimination and abuse in Roma people’s encounters with staff at state institutions. Another consequence of the specific nature of the racialization of the Roma, who are often indistinguishable from other ethnicities in Romania, is that professional and middle-class Roma are easily assimilated into the majority and their contribution thereby rendered invisible, unless they declare and promote their ethnicity. In parallel with acts of resistance as performances of citizenship, I identify “coming-out” performances, where middle-class Roma take off the mask of respectability and claim Roma identity. An example of performance of citizenship that claimed Roma identity and Romanian citizenship took place during the August 2010 edition of the weekly television program Roma Caravan, the only Roma-led television program in Romania, which on that day was dedicated to the expulsions of Roma from France. In this program, Daniel Vasile, vice president of the Roma Party for Europe, and George Răducanu, a Roma activist, accused both French and Romanian governments of racism and criticized the treatment of Roma Romanian citizens as second-class citizens. They spoke to a Roma counterpublic and pointed out that the forceful expulsions and evictions of Roma from France and Romania, respectively, reflected the French and Romanian governments’ similar attitudes toward Roma. This was one of the rare instances when unequivocal criticism of the expulsions was broadcast on Romanian television and media in general.

190   Ioana Szeman

Bollywood Dances as Performances of Countercultural Citizenship In this section I focus on the dance group Together, composed of Roma and non-Roma young people, some from Pod and some from the Transylvanian city nearby, and their intercultural and cosmopolitan dance practices, which included Roma, Romanian, and Bollywood-inspired dances. I see their dance practices as embodied expressions and performances of what I call “countercultural citizenship,” as they critique hegemonic monoethnic identity paradigms and propose new perspectives on what cultural citizenship means in Romania. I analyze Together’s dance practices as a response to the citizenship gap they experienced and the denial of their rights as children, including the right to education. Most of the boys in the group were Roma, including Giani, Tibi, Cosmin, Gabi, and Gelu, all from Pod. All but one of the girls were non-Roma and attended the same mainstream school as Giani and Tibi. Girls in Pod often had fewer opportunities to participate in activities such as dancing, as they looked after younger siblings when parents were at work. Giani and Tibi, who were sixteen and fourteen, respectively, in 2008, when I recorded most of my interviews with them, attended a mainstream school; Gabi, fourteen, and Cosmin, eighteen, attended or had attended segregated schools officially designed for poor Roma students, as well special schools for the disabled, which are attended by a disproportionate number of Roma students. Gelu, age six, had finished his first year in a mainstream primary school. Together was formed as a result of the success of Roma dance in and outside schools after the official recognition of Roma ethnicity. Roma students were encouraged to perform their culture in schools, even as that culture was defined in the problematic terms described earlier. The education system did not encourage intercultural exchanges among children from different backgrounds. Children who came from mixed backgrounds had to choose which ethnic identity to performatively endorse in their choice of school and dance. The normative monoethnic performativity pervasive in the curriculum was further reflected in the practice of ethnic and folk dance. In schools, Romanian students performed Romanian folk dances, Hungarian students performed Hungarian folk dances, and so on. Roma dances were not considered folk dances; they were simply Roma dances. Together departed from these essentialist dance practices and performed a variety of styles; their dances reflected the discrepancy between the version of Roma culture imposed through official discourse and the ways Roma young people thought of themselves and their culture. Inspired by their consumption of Bollywood films, Together’s Bollywood dances disrupted simplistic definitions of culture and ethnicity and displayed their affective transnational connections to a global Roma diaspora represented as India as an imagined place. Their Bollywood dance performances were a critical commentary on the citizenship gap they experienced, both materially and culturally, in their daily lives and in school, as well as an expression of belonging to Romania while claiming cultural capital through affective connections outside Romania. Their Bollywood performances opened up a space for the expression of their subjectivities, as they clearly did not perform officially recognized identities in Romania. Hegemonic

Performance and Citizenship   191 readings of their Bollywood dances reduced them to “ethnic chic,” a superficial and commercially driven endorsement of ethnocultural difference, but to a Roma counterpublic the dances spoke of sincere (in John L. Jackson’s sense) Roma self-identifications and invoked alternative views of citizenship. For Jackson (2005), sincerity as a concept disrupts the focus on authenticity in relation to ethnic minorities. Not unlike the African Americans Jackson discusses, Roma people have been subjected to similar ocularcentric regimes of hypervisibility and erasure, as I mentioned earlier. A conceptualization of Roma young people’s sincere identifications thus shifts the focus to their subjectivities. India, as reflected in Bollywood films, shaped the social imaginary of the young people in Together. While it commented on the erasure of Roma from the Romanian nation, their Bollywood dance also reflected a diasporic imaginary in the sense articulated by Aiwha Ong (1996, 25): “Alternative imaginaries can cast identities beyond the inscriptions and identifications made by states. The concept of imaginaries therefore conveys the agency of diaspora subjects, who, while being made by state and capitalist regimes of truth, can play with different cultural fragments in a way that allows them to segue from one discourse to another, experiment with alternative forms of identification, shrug in and out of identities, or evade imposed forms of identifications.” While the young people in Together were not de facto diasporic, members’ imaginary has diasporic characteristics that derived from their sense of disenfranchisement and lack of citizenship rights. Roma activists and scholars, including anthropologists and political scientists, see Roma as a global diaspora. Backed by linguistic evidence, the theory that Roma originated in India is widely accepted today (Hancock 1987; Matras 2002; Lemon 2000). Roma activists have used the connection with India, from where Roma migrated toward Europe as early as the twelfth century, to claim a unified Roma identity, without advocating a return to India. The young Roma people’s sense of kinship with India and Indian actors was enabled by popular culture and based on affective identification with the songs, dances, and spirit of Bollywood films and not on knowledge of actual India, where Gypsies are in fact discriminated against. For Together, India was a diasporic, transnational symbol that functioned as a way of thinking beyond the monoethnic nation and expressing countercultural citizenship. While it did not solve these young people’s experience of disenfranchisement, the diasporic imaginary disrupted the authenticity regimes of “coercive mimeticism” (Chow 2002), the recognizable identities that are imposed upon minorities. The young people’s affective connection with India and Bollywood can also be traced back to state policies. The consumption of Indian films by the parents of Together dancers during communism played a role in the young people’s predilection for India and Bollywood films. Giani watched the latest Bollywood films that he could get on legal or pirated DVDs. He was an avid fan of the Bollywood star Salman Khan, and his slicked-back hair and sartorial style channeled his idol. On one wall of his parents’ house he had created a mural, a black ink lithograph portrait of Khan. In 2006–7 his mobile phone screensaver was a portrait of Khan, later replaced with a picture of Giani himself in a pose emulating the actor. Together’s use of Bollywood therefore differed from the mainstream trend of ethnic chic in the Romanian media, which was evidenced in media phenomena such as Gypsy soaps on television and the consumption of Bollywood films and which glossed over material realities and fetishized difference, ultimately reinforcing hegemonic cultural norms. I turn to Gypsy soaps in the following section to discuss how for many Roma the soaps provided

192   Ioana Szeman opportunities for sincere identification with the characters, despite the commodified and stereotypical aspects of the soaps, a tension that reflects the lack of Roma-led representations of Roma in the media.

Reading the Gypsy Soaps through Roma Counterpublics Broadcast on private television channels, Gypsy soaps brought traditional and recognizable images of Roma onto television screens for the first time in Romania since before socialism. The passionate, extravagant singer and dancer Rodia (played by a non-Roma pop star, Loredana), the “free spirit of the community” who sang the “tortured soul of the Ţigan,”18 and Roza, the rebellious, hot-blooded daughter of State (pronounced Stahteh), the bulibasha (clan leader), are two examples of romantic stereotypes in the soap Gypsy Heart, which boasted famous ethnic Romanian actors on their cast lists and received top audience ratings. These soaps predated reality shows featuring Roma Gypsies in the UK and US, such as My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and American Gypsy. While the soaps represented the beginning of a wave of Romanian TV programs featuring Roma characters played by non-Roma, Roma had long been among the most popular entertainers in the Romanian music industry. “Gypsy chic,” as reflected in the Gypsy soaps, was the superficial endorsement of Roma cultural difference under the influence of Western capital, consumerism, and global media concomitant with Romania’s entry into global capital flows. The display of Gypsy chic and the focus on wealth in Gypsy soaps reinforced stereotypes that had been persistent during socialism about excessive Roma wealth and criminality—the flipside of the poor, abject Ţigan, the Other of the nation. Sara Ahmed’s (2000, 116) observation about the figure of the stranger as Other is particularly apt for understanding how the soaps exemplified the appropriation of Roma culture in the service of capital: “Consumer culture involves the production of the stranger as a commodity fetish through representations of difference. Differences are defined in terms of culture, and culture, as in the official discourses of multiculturalism . . . is restricted to the privatized and expressive domain of style.” Despite the obvious problematic presentation of Roma culture as Gypsy chic in the soaps, Roma readings of the soaps worked as modes of claiming countercultural citizenship in Romania and demonstrated belonging based on vernacular and oppositional cultural paradigms that did not follow the state-imposed compulsory monoethnic performativity. Many Roma in Pod and elsewhere accepted and/or identified with the images in the soaps, stereotypical though they were, and read them as positive representations of Roma. A critical reading of these soaps therefore needs to take into account Roma people’s investment in such images and their potential to stand as cultural signifiers in the continued absence of institutional cultural repositories for Roma. The appeal of positive or benign Roma stereotypes for Roma people should not be overlooked. Roma appeared on television screens in the soaps as Gypsies and foils for ethnic Romanians rather than as subjects of self-representation, but Roma spectators’ readings of the soaps reflected subject positions that did not endorse mainstream representations and their assumptions. My Roma interlocutors’ take on the soaps included a reading from a Roma

Performance and Citizenship   193 counterpublic’s perspective, which refused the hegemony of monoethnic nationalism and saw the Roma characters as examples of Roma success and struggles. For example, one young Rom suggested that the mixed-race child of a Roma woman was like “the Roma,” as he read beyond the Roma majority characters in the film and felt compassion for the child’s fate, who was a minority in the world of the soap. For many Roma, some visibility was better than none, and the profusion of Roma and Gypsy images and the presence of famous Romanian ethnic actors added to the cachet of the soaps. Others, however, ­critiqued them vigorously for appropriating Roma culture and not giving credit to Roma and for perpetuating stereotypes about Roma. Both these positionalities reveal subaltern, grassroots modes of identification and countercultural citizenship from the perspective of a Roma counterpublic. These subaltern, grassroots modes of identification through Roma counterpublics include the deployment of a diasporic imaginary and alternative, plural definitions of citizenship and belonging that refused the self-Other dichotomy. To return to Rancière’s (2005) realm of the sensible and his theatrical metaphors, a dominant public seeped in monoethnic nationalism might not see the performances of citizenship of Roma activists and performers, yet they are visible to a Roma counterpublic.

Performance and Citizenship: Toward an Embodied Epistemology In order to grasp modes of citizenship that are not limited to logocentric or hegemonic understandings of citizenship and belonging, I have proposed a participant-observation methodology that charts the everyday struggles with racism in state institutions and beyond, as well as shifting the focus onto the subjectivities of those who find themselves in the citizenship gap. The continuum of struggle for poor Roma, which resonates with marginalized communities elsewhere, needs to be seen as a battle to be recognized as citizens. Being treated as a citizen entails not only having one’s rights realized but also expressing belonging as a citizen, which in the case of the Roma in this chapter was possible only by expressing countercultural citizenship. The performance-based paradigms I have proposed in this chapter allow us to discuss citizenship as an everyday process, while asking who is doing the seeing and hearing in relation to acts of citizenship. Roma rarely have access to the means of cultural production, whether in state or commercial media, despite being featured onstage and on the screen. A performance-focused approach to citizenship can begin to account for (counter)cultural citizenship as equally important as social rights in the process of gaining actual citizenship for those who, like the Roma, experience the citizenship gap on a daily basis, despite having legal citizenship.

Notes Sections of this chapter have previously been published in Szeman, Ioana. 2018. Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.

194   Ioana Szeman 1. See Delanty (1997) for one of the first articulations of the difference between legal and actual citizenship. 2. See Ruth Lister (1997) on gender and citizenship. 3. While a large number of Roma live in poverty, all Roma experience the citizenship gap at the level of cultural citizenship, and this has real, material consequences in their everyday lives. 4. In the summer of 2010 the French government initiated a virulent expulsion campaign that targeted over three hundred settlements on the outskirts of cities, with thousands of Roma migrants forced to return to Romania or Bulgaria. 5. This phrase was coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner (1982, 93). 6. See Étienne Balibar’s (2004, 8) definition of demos as the collective subject of representation, decision-making, and rights, and ethnos as the historical communities based on ethnic belonging. 7. I use the terms Rom and Roma (masculine singular and plural), Romni and Romnja (feminine singular and plural) to denote individuals from this ethnic minority, and I also employ Roma as an adjective. I use Gypsy to discuss stereotypes in and from the West; Gypsy does not necessarily denote a stereotype, in the UK, for example (see Okely 1983). Thenouns Ţigan/ca (singular), Ţigani/Ţiganici (plural) denote local stereotypes and how some Roma in Romania identify. 8. For examples of scholarship on Roma in East Central Europe and beyond, see Stewart 1997; Lemon 2000; Engebrigtsen 2007, Silverman 2012; Szeman 2009, 2010, 2017, 2018; Seeman 2019; Sigona and Trehan 2009; Magyari-Vincze 2007; Oprea 2005; Kocze et al. 2018, Tremlett 2013, Imre 2005. 9. Julia Kristeva (1982) defines the abject Other as that which is expelled from the self in order to define the self. 10. See Susan Gal (1991) on nesting East-West dichotomies in Hungary; also Szeman (2013). 11. See Vincze 2011. 12. As mentioned earlier, discrimination against Roma children in schools is still common across East Central Europe. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that there was discrimination against Roma children in the Czech Republic (European Roma Rights Center 2007). 13. Warner’s (2002) focus on the transformative possibilities of counterpublics signals their radical potential. 14. As the 2004 European Roma Rights Center report on Roma children’s education and other reports highlighted, testing methods that determined children’s enrollment in special schools were often culturally biased and did not take into account many Roma children’s bilingualism. 15. See Gunaratnam (2003) for a discussion of race paradigms. 16. Stuart Hall (1980) argues that blacks in Britain experienced racial discrimination through class. 17. Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman (1998) made similar observations about the relationship between race and class in Brazil. 18. http://www.inimadetigan.ro/personaj/loredana, accessed March 1, 2012.

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Performance and Citizenship   195 Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brooks, Ethel. 2010. “Stop This State Persecution of Roma.” Guardian, August 18. http://www. guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/aug/18/persecution-roma-must-stop. Cox, Meredith Aimee. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chow, Rey. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Logic of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 1997. “Street Literacy.” In Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the Communicative and Visual Arts, edited by James Flood, Shirley Brice Heath, and Diane Lapp, 354–75. New York: Macmillan. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 419–47. Delanty, Gerard. 1997. “Models of Citizenship: Defining European Identity and Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 1, no. 3: 285–303. Emigh, J. R., and I. Szelényi, eds. 2002. Poverty, Ethnicity, and Gender in Eastern Europe during the Market Transition. Westport, CT: Praeger. Engebrigtsen, Ada. 2007. Exploring Gypsiness: Power, Change and Interdependence in a Transylvanian Village. New York: Berghahn Books. European Roma Rights Center. 2004. “Stigmata: Segregated Schooling of Roma in Eastern and Central Europe.” Budapest. http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=1892. European Roma Rights Center. 2007. “Europe’s Highest Court Finds Racial Discrimination in Czech Schools.” Budapest. http://www.errc.org/cikk.php?cikk=2866. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books. Gal, Susan. 1991. “Bartók’s Funeral: Representations of Europe in Hungarian Political Rhetoric.” American Ethnologist 18: 440–58. Gunaratnam, Yasmin. 2003. Researching “Race” and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge, Power. London: Sage. Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Race Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, 305–345. Hancock, Ian. 1987. The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma. Harris-Perry, Melissa V. 2013. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hepworth, Kate. 2015. At the Edges of Citizenship. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Imre, Anikó. 2005. “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, the End of Race.” In APostcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, edited by J. Lopez, 79–102. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Isin, Engin  F. 2013. “Claiming European Citizenship.” In Enacting European Citizenship, edited by Engin F. Isin and Michael Saward, 19–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, John  L. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, E. Patrick. 2003. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Joseph, May. 1999. Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

196   Ioana Szeman Kim, Suk-Young. 2014. DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship across the Korean Border. New York: Columbia University Press. Kocze, Angela, et al., eds. 2018. The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L.  S.  Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Ladányi, János, and Iván Szelényi. 2006. Patterns of Exclusion: Constructing Gypsy Ethnicity and the Making of an Underclass in Transitional Societies of Europe. New York: Columbia University Press. Lemon, Alaina. 2000. Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lister, Ruth. 1997. Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. New York: NYU Press. Magyari-Vincze, Eniko. 2007. “Reproducing Inequalities through Reproductive Control: The Case of Romani Women from Romania.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 25: 108–21. Matras, Yaron. 2002. Romani: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miskovic, Maja. 2009. “Roma Education in Europe: In Support of the Discourse of Race.” Pedagogy, Culture and Society 17: 201–20. Nield, Sophie. 2006. “On the Border as Theatrical Space: Appearance, Dis-location and the Production of the Refugee.” In Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion, edited by Joe Kelleher and Nick Ridout, 61–72. London: Routledge. Okely, Judith. 1983. The Traveller-Gypsies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, Aihwa, ed. 1996. Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. Florence, KY: Routledge. Oprea, Alexandra. 2005. “The Arranged Marriage of Ana Maria Cioaba, Intra-Community Oppression and Romani Feminist Ideals: Transcending the ‘Primitive Culture’ Argument.” European Journal of Women Studies 12: 133–48. Rancière, Jacques. 2005. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury. Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3: 402–11. Roxworthy, Emily. 2008. The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʽi Press. Saward, Michael. 2013. “Enacting Citizenship and Democracy in Europe.” In Enacting European Citizenship, edited by Engin  F.  Isin and Michael Saward, 220–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Daniel Hoffman. 1998. “Brazilian Apartheid: Street Kids and the Struggle for Urban Space.” in Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, 352–88. Berkeley: University of California Press. Seeman, Sonia Tamar. 2019. Sounding Roman: Performing Social Identity in Western Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2012. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press. Sigona, Nando. 2015. “Campenization: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space.” Citizenship Studies 19, no. 1: 1–15. Sigona, Nando. 2016. “Everyday Statelessness: Status, Rights and Camps.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 2: 263–79.

Performance and Citizenship   197 Sigona, Nando, and Nidhi Trehan, eds. 2009. Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization and the Neoliberal Order. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Silverman, Carol. 2012. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in the Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Michael. 1997. The Time of the Gypsies. London: Westview Press. Stewart, Michael. 2002. “Deprivation, the Roma and ‘the Underclass.’ ” In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, edited by Chris Hann, 133–55. London: Routledge. Szalai, Julia. 2011. Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects for Urban Youth in an Enlarged Europe. Budapest: EDUMIGROM Summary Findings. Szeman, Ioana. 2009. “ ‘Gypsy Music’ and Deejays: Orientalism, Balkanism and Romani Musicians.” TDR: The Drama Review 53: 98–116. Szeman, Ioana. 2010. “Collecting Tears: Remembering the Romani Holocaust.” Performance Research 15: 54–9. Szeman, Ioana. 2013. “ ‘Playing with Fire’ and Playing It Safe: With(out) Roma at the Eurovision Song Contest.” in Performing the “New” Europe: Identities, Feelings, and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, edited by Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic, 125–41. Studies in International Performance Series. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Szeman, Ioana. 2017. “ ‘Black and White Are One’: Anti-Amalgamation Laws, Roma Slaves and the Romanian Nation on the Mid-Nineteenth Century Moldavian Stage.” In The Transnational Histories of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova, 165–191. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Szeman, Ioana. 2018. Staging Citizenship: Roma, Performance and Belonging in EU Romania. New York: Berghahn Books. Tremlett, Annabel. 2013. “Why Must Roma Minorities Be Always Seen on the Stage and Never in the Audience? Children’s Opinions of Reality Roma TV.” In Popular Television in Eastern Europe during and since Socialism, edited by Anikó Imre, Timothy Havens, and Katalin Lustyik, 241–58. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ. Van Baar, Huub. 2017. “Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe.” Antipode 49: 212–30. Vincze, Eniko. 2011. Social Inclusion through Education in Romania: Policy Recommendation. Budapest: EDUMIGROM Policy Recommendations. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14, no. 1: 49–90. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. “Women, Citizenship and Difference.” Feminist Review 57: 4–27.

chapter 12

From Ex il e to Migr ation Staging (the) Face of the Human Waste Yana Meerzon

In his 1987 address “The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh,” Joseph Brodsky (1995), a Russian poet and Noble Prize laureate, who at the time lived in the USA as a political exile, elegantly distinguished between migration as a multitude of displaced people seeking refuge in a place different from their home place and exile as a psychological, philosophical, and existential condition that defines this experience as displacement, loss, and homelessness. Brodsky recognized as ethically problematic comparing the misery of migrants and his own plight as a writer in exile. But he also saw similarity between a political refugee and an exilic intellectual, forced to flee one’s home and seek asylum elsewhere, someone who is ultimately “running away from the worse toward the better” (24). Brodsky insisted on speaking of exile as the “ultimate lesson” in humility (25). To him, “the truth of the matter is that from a tyranny one can be exiled only to a democracy” (24). And so exile bears a life-changing power; not only does it have an inherited political dimension, but also it teaches you “to put down your vanity” (25). The gaze of someone in exile is turned simultaneously into their past and their future, so the condition of exile might carry a shadow of privilege, essentialism, and metaphor. However, many prominent scholars of exile (Svetlana Boym 2001; Julia Kristeva 1991; Eva Hoffman 1990; Zigmunt Bauman 2004, 2011; George Lamming 1992) warned their readers against romanticizing this condition. As Edward Said (2000, 137) famously wrote, “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” This sense of “the unhealable rift” between one’s self and one’s native place and language constitutes the core of exilic experience. Today the number of international migrants—a term that refers to a person “living in a country other than his or her country of birth” (United Nations 2017, 3)—has reached 272 million. Such a monumental exodus of people, both as a psychophysical and a legal experience as well as a historical condition, reaches beyond the “sorrow of estrangement” that the

200   Yana Meerzon condition of exile nurtures (Said  2000, 137). However, not all international migrants are created equal. Among these millions there are the so-called jet setters or privileged travelers, whose status in the power geometry of global mobility is defined by their wealth and power (Massey  2014, 62), and refugees and asylum seekers, whose movement across the timespace continuum is forced and precarious. This type of underprivilege destroys people’s individuality; it turns exile into “a faceless category that fails to capture the personal and political complexities of their individual journeys and their collective impact on our world” (Depner  2018, 41). Forced to seek protection in lands and languages foreign to them, stateless migrants fall victims to bureaucratic systems, which control their movement. And because they “cannot be included in the modern economy as workers or consumers” (Bauman 2004, 73), stateless migrants are frequently seen as a burden on the economy and thus turn into what Bauman calls “wasted lives” (73). Many international laws and conventions regulate the legal vocabulary of movement and practices of asylum seeking, including (among others) the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the 2000 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and the 2016 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants1. The word exile, unlike in its historical usages that go back as far as ancient Greece, does not bear legal connotations; it is such terms as migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker that get to be featured in the language of Western jurisprudence. Their use and application present “the result of state policies, introduced in response to political and economic goals and public attitudes” (Castles 2000, 270). Still, many refugees and asylum seekers continue to be unable to effectively function within these regulations. The reason for this failure and the key contested point in the legal debates concerning migration are that the formulas voluntary = economic migrants and forced = refugees or trafficked persons are extremely simplistic (Bakewell 2008; Crosby 2006; Karatani 2005). This terminology does not account for the multitude of complex situations of individual exile that mass migration creates. With its inhumane conditions, border controls, and hostility of legal procedures, migration dehumanizes people; it turns individuals—the subjects and the agents of their own destiny—into nameless bodies moving across water and land, numbers and application files. In this scheme, migrants emerge as national abjects (Tyler 2013, 9), defined within the “discursive strategy of the stereotype” and “the fabrication of a ‘false image’ that becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practice” (Bhabha  1986, 18). Migrants become a “surplus population,” which is “systematically ignored by states, because it consists of people whose position is a by-product of impersonal global processes” (Spijkerboer 2017, 73). These scapegoating practices reflect migrants’ “visibility and categorization” and add to their “immobilization within systems of bureaucracy and penal control” (Tyler 2013, 12). Imogen Tyler (2013, 76–80) advocates affect as a critical response to the practice of social and national abjection, recognizing it as a device of countermapping of migration. Countermapping can “produce alternative ways of looking” at migrants, however “partial, depressed, reactive and liminal the ensuing knowledge might be” (76). Political theater, I demonstrate, is well positioned to practice strategies of critical and social countermapping. Using a variety of artistic devices, such as immersion, embodiment, and affect, it can rehumanize migrants as “figurative scapegoats” (9).

From Exile to Migration   201

Political Theater and Migration: Toward a Methodology of the Craft Performance arts have a special power to stage the uniqueness of one’s journey and individual story. Political theater can provide voice and return dignity to a victim. Telling stories about migration and confronting the bodies of the performers with the bodies of the spectators in the immediacy of a live performance, it can turn a nameless migrant into a proper individual, someone who possesses their own personal history, memory, agency, and identity. Bringing stories of migration to the homes of those people who see global movement as something dangerous and fearful and to those who practice mixophobia, “a drive towards islands of similarity and sameness amidst the sea of variety and difference” (Bauman 2011, 63), reflected in the infamous power of “a collective we,” political theater can make the stranger relatable. It can educate its audiences about “the other” and help them realize that this other is already within us (Beck 2011). It can also serve as a useful tool for identifying the otherness of the stranger as the otherness in oneself (Ahmed 2000, 5), and it can stipulate that human migration is not a temporarily crisis, which can be dealt with on the territory of a single country or even a continent, but a permanent phenomenon of global economy and transnational politics. In its artistic forms, political theater can be documentary and autobiographical. It can be based on poetry and rooted in mythology. It can use the high forms of tragedy and it can borrow from popular genres, such as comedy and melodrama. It can invite refugee artists to share their stories of survival and testify to the injustices of asylum seeking, and give them a chance to speak the horrible truth of their experiences. This theater can also rebuild hope. Moreover, staging a theatrical encounter between the migrant bodies on the stage and their hosts in the audience, political theater can engage in the act of “Brechtian distancing that asks spectators to simultaneously understand the theatrical, the real, and the simulated, each as its own form of truth” (Martin 2006, 12). At the same time, political theater can seek experimental forms: it can use devised and movement-based work, speak in many languages, and stage performance interventions. Although these multiple languages of political performance might not necessarily help migrants to overcome the constraints of the legal systems they often fight, as the power of a bureaucratic speech act always takes over that of literature and metaphor (Jeffers 2013), it can evoke sympathy and emotion related to spectators’ personal experiences and collective memory of oppression. Thus political theater can help the host confront their own fears of the unknown migrant, and it can attempt to write a new history. Understood as an existential and performative act, political theater can turn the migrant into someone “capable of creativity and decision-making” (Berg 1996, 4). In his book Performing Statelessness in Europe, which examines the political, social, cultural, and symbolic roles theater can play in seeking new methods and discourses through which the difficult nexus between migration and the state is communicated, S. E. Wilmer (2018) describes a variety of political performances that aim to rehumanize the figure of the refugee. Artists and activists, Wilmer states, “have been using performance to intervene in the political arena to offer insight and new perspectives” on political fiascos and legal cul-de-sacs

202   Yana Meerzon that refer to many First World countries’ inability or refusal to effectively address the outcomes of global migration (2). Performance arts have already confronted and will “continue to challenge nationalistic and xenophobic attitudes, empower themselves by actions of solidarity in overcoming restrictive practices, provide support and pathways for the dispossessed and inform audiences about their responsibility to find solutions” (211). Political theater has already begun and will continue to resist the authoritarian myths of homogeneity fostered by nation-states (209), specifically as they reemerge today. Casting refugees as its leading characters, political theater can reveal systematic and systemic abuse of human rights and so elicit sympathy (51). At the same time, Wilmer (2018) reminds us, when constructing a migrant character one must pay special attention to its complexity. A migrant is someone who has endured suffering and can be of high moral stature, but also someone who is not completely faultless (55–56). In its dramaturgical functions, the migrant acts as a tragic character of the age of global migration and so reminds us of Arthur Miller’s (1949) “common man.” Willy Loman’s dramatic flaws and ordeals, as Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman demonstrates and in which Loman is the tragic protagonist, have been caused by the commodification of people in modern capitalism. Miller compared Willy Loman to the biblical Job, who “could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission.” In the very action of confronting the gods, Miller’s common man gained tragic “stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he ha[d] into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.” Similarly, theater about migration or made by artists-migrants can acquire this status of modern tragedy: such plays as Elfriede Jelinek’s Charges (The Supplicants) and Olivier Kemeid’s The Aeneid present contemporary migration as myth and recognize the anonymity of mass exodus, which casts individuals as reluctant heroes of our time. Furthermore, using devices of Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching play, political theater can offer its audiences new methodologies for solidarity (Wilmer 2018, 51–55). It can refocus today’s tragedy as a conflict between the individual and the state (Lehmann  2011, 35). Inviting migrant artists to tell their stories of displacement on stage, political theater can turn them into hyper-historians (Rokem 2000, 13–15), witnesses and narrators of the past, who can channel the energy of their flight into an auditorium. At the same time, it can turn their spectators into the so called addressable you (Levine 2006, 4–6), silent observers of the history of exile, willing to listen to the story of injustice and allow a testimony to be heard, so the act of testimony is completed. This testimonial aspect of political theater allows a migrant survivor to break the silence; it permits the witness to reexperience the horror of the flight as living history. Finally, political theater of migration enables Levinas’s (1998) ethical theory of precarious being, in which the concept of a face stands as a metonym for both a divine entity and a human being. The language of exile, which Levinas adopts, can serve political theater of migration as a “condition for humanization” of a refugee (Butler 2004, 141). Proposed by Judith Butler, the condition for humanization refers to an effort we must make to grieve the victims unknown to us or removed from our daily experiences (141). Similarly, in telling individual stories of migration political theater can reinforce this emotional and intellectual effort that we make when thinking of the plight of a refugee. It can attribute the quality of a human entity to an object, and thus it can rehumanize a story of migration as a unique and nonreproducible experience, which resists representation. Most importantly, political theater can capitalize on the idea that “the public is not a passive consumer, but shapes the

From Exile to Migration   203 meaning of the past and contributes to its performance” in the present (Dean, Meerzon, and Prince 2015, 4). * * * Theater scholars have been looking into the questions of migration and performance for more than two decades. At the 2018 world congress of the International Federation of Theatre Research in Belgrade, entitled Theatre, Nation and Identity: Between Migration and Stasis, Silvija Jestrovic (2018) in her keynote speech “The Eternal Immigrant and Aesthetics of Solidarity” suggested that the time has come to recognize the theater of migration as a separate field of theater and performance studies, comparable in its importance to the fields of postcolonial studies and gender studies. The year 2002 can be named as this field’s starting point, as it refers to the first international conference on this topic, Theatre and Exile, organized by a group of professors and graduate students at the then Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto, and a subsequent publication of the special issue of the journal Modern Drama based on that gathering (Ambros et al. 2003). Since that time numerous books and edited collections related to this subject have been published. These publications discuss ethical, artistic, economic, and political questions of displacement and its representation, and hence have been persistently advancing the practice of political theater and its scholarship. Today this field of theater and migration is vibrant but not homogeneous, as it reflects and embraces rapid changes in material circumstances and the legal as well as media languages used to describe and examine global movements. Several works have focused on the concept of exile as a marker of displacement and exilic experiences in the way they influence philosophical and artistic inquiry in political theaters of today: the collection Performance, Exile and “America,” which I coedited with Silvija Jestrovic (2009); Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies, edited by Judith Rudakoff (2017); Jestrovic’s (2013) monograph Performance, Space, Utopia. Cities of War, Cities of Exile; and my own book Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film (Meerzon  2012). Emma Cox’s (2014) book Theatre and Migration opened a series of scholarly inquiries focused on the concept of migration, connecting theater and performance work on displacement to the legal and media-based language of mass movements, global wars, and climate change (Fleishman 2015; Cox 2014; Cox and Wake 2018, to name a few). Within this larger field of theater and migration, a set of studies dedicated to the performance of and work with refugees emerged, with Michael Balfour’s (2013) book Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters and Alison Jeffers’s (2013) study Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities pioneering this approach. At the same time, theater and migration embraces a newer work in intercultural theater practice and theory. Such volumes as Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism by Charlotte McIvor (2016), Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia by Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo (2007), and Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism by Royona Mitra (2015) spearheaded the conversations of aesthetics and the politics of making performance. These conversations emerged as the result of different displacements and cultural encounters, the experiences that can take place between peoples and groups but also within an individual artist’s self. Questions of aesthetics, such as multilingualism (Nolette and Babayants 2017; Meerzon and Pewny 2019), and the ethics of transcultural encounter (Musca 2019) are the leading points that continue to be examined in the field of theater and migration.

204   Yana Meerzon Most importantly, migration poses questions of belonging and citizenship; it forces individuals and states to rethink definitions and practices of a nation-state vis-à-vis its guests and those seeking its protection (Marschall 2018; Valluvan 2019). These issues are discussed at length both on the stages of political theater and within its scholarship, as exemplified by Performing Statelessness in Europe by S.  E.  Wilmer (2018); “Theatre and Statelessness in Europe,” a special issue of the journal Critical Stages edited by Wilmer and Sharifi (2016); and “Theatre and Mobility,” a focus of the Journal of Contemporary Drama in English coedited by Schmidt and Aghoro (2017). All these everyday practices of movement as well as scholarly debates around them challenge artistic mechanisms of making political theater. In the following, I will examine the play The Jungle, written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (2017),2 as an example of political theater that reflects many complex if not controversial artistic and ethical questions in staging displacement today.

The Jungle: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee Using dramaturgy of assembly, Murphy and Robertson’s The Jungle tells a story of the building and destruction of a refugee camp in Calais, on the border between France and the UK, where thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have lived together, seeking a chance to escape into the promised safety of the British islands. An artistic summation of the artists’ seven months’ stay at the Calais camp, The Jungle focuses on personal stories of migration as differently experienced by both the refugees, including the “hot-headed Afghan Norullah (Mohammad Amiri) and cold-tempered Sudanese Okot (John Pfumojena),” and the English volunteers, such as the Etonian Sam (Alex Lawther), who “moves from treating the place like a geography field trip to cutting covert allegiances with French civil servants” (Trueman  2017). The play investigates the anthropological and economic processes that make up migrant communities, and it aims to turn the tables on its audiences. “Written by two white boys who went to Oxford,” The Jungle presents the Calais camp as the epitome of the impossible and also wishes to bring together “people from different backgrounds” both on stage and in the auditorium (Ahmad quoted in Gill 2019). In this play, the Jungle is simultaneously a space of human despair, a place of “illegality and abjection,” and a makeshift community “where migrants reveal their resourcefulness in navigating increasingly difficult border restrictions” (Rygiel 2011, 10). It is also a home—a Hope Town or a new Babylon (Murphy and Robertson 2017, 51)—where people of different cultural backgrounds, languages, and religious beliefs negotiate their differences. Turning a space of temporary rest into a place of habitat, The Jungle argues, migrants can resist the dehumanizing power of social and national abjection. Claiming the camp as home, they can even hope to reacquire a face (Levinas 1998). At the same time, the residents of the Jungle constantly face moral and ethical dilemmas. Safi (played by Ammar Haj Ahmad), “an English literature graduate from Aleppo,” the play’s narrator and its consciousness, must make a choice: “A Kurdish people smuggler who has a soft spot for [Safi] wants to get him to the UK. . . . But to do so [Safi] will have to take

From Exile to Migration   205 the place of a young man from Sudan’s Darfur region, who is more vulnerable and has suffered more than he has, facing death and torture to make it to northern France” (Gill 2019). When he strikes a deal for his escape, Safi compromises his position as an objective observer of the action. By turning Safi into an unreliable storyteller, Murphy and Robertson approximate The Jungle to Brecht’s teaching play, in which moral goodness serves as a testing ground for making theater political. However, it is not only Safi who must make a difficult moral choice; there are also English volunteers who visit and stay in the camp and who fight its eviction together with the refugees. Sam comes to the Jungle to help people build shelters, but as the action progresses it becomes clear that he constantly plays a double game and even strikes a business deal with the French authorities. Knowing when and what part of the camp will be destroyed, Sam carefully chooses what part of the camp’s infrastructure he will invest in (Murphy and Robertson 2017, 100). Sam is guilty for giving the refugees false hope and for not assuming responsibility for their future. In his hubris, his character also echoes Brecht’s theater of moral choices. Like Mother Courage, he is defined by a double-edged agenda of help and profit, which often marks the economic practices of global moves. Murphy and Robertson (2017, 102–3) continue asking Brechtian questions about making moral choices when Derek, another English volunteer and a representative of the disillusioned generation of 1960s–70s British liberals, declares the camp a city of refuge and a utopia of social equality: “The paradox in the heart of the Jungle is that the refugees are running in one direction and the volunteers are running in another. We have met here, in this middle ground, but we are running towards the same thing! We’re building an image of Britain that doesn’t exist! That’s never existed! Certainly not in Britain. It exists in our dreams only. But I see the beginnings of it in this place. . . . Of course, there are challenges. But we are facing them together. We can solve them.” In Derek’s monologue, Murphy and Robertson challenge one of the foundational myths of the British state, which tells a story of the country’s “ancient and proud history of granting asylum to foreign nationals fleeing religious or political persecution” (Tyler 2013, 79–80). The play evokes the so-called invasion complex, which characterizes how the British nation looks at the foreigner, someone who appears within the national consciousness of the empire as “a catastrophic natural disaster, a fetid torrent of diseased bodies overwhelming the borders of the national body” (81). The invasion discourse, which has shaped and is still present in UK immigration policies, rests with this view of the stranger as danger (Ahmed 2000). It reflects “the ubiquitous presence of strangers, constantly within sight and reach” of their hosts (Bauman 2011, 60). Strangers “provide a convenient . . . outlet for our inborn fear of the unknown, the uncertain and the unpredictable” (60). In this context, the fact that the Calais camp emerged partially in response to the UK’s system of asylum seeking makes the irony and the false premise of the myth even more troubling. Mohammed, a refugee from Sudan, confronts Derek’s utopian vision of the camp as a model for the new Britain. “We could have our own currency,” he says, or “start taxing people!” He proposes introducing “passports and borders,” even a “Jungle army” (Murphy and Robertson 2017, 103). Mohammed’s lines suggest the irony of the situation and the mistrust refugees feel toward the British volunteers. They also reveal the sad truth about the only communal action the UK and their former colonial subjects can perform together: despite the democratic forms of self-governance (such as dialogue and consultation by which the camp is run), the only future the Jungle can have is eventually turning into another site of

206   Yana Meerzon the nation-state. This play, in other words, teaches us that understanding the camp requires a special language of citizenship, as those “banned from the political community or polis (the city or city-state) find themselves living in a ‘state of exception,’ but one that becomes permanent through [its] spatial organization” (Rygiel 2011, 3). An exceptional space of habitat, a refugee camp operates under “the normal order” and so constitutes a political community (3). It emerges as the result of autonomous migration, when refugees find themselves forced to settle and so use their enforced mobility as a resource to change their conditions of citizenship (3–5). Sitting in and protecting their camp allows refugees to act as politically viable “citizen-subjects” (6); the language of citizenship and the governing set of rules ­practiced in the social setup of the camp can invoke migrants’ agency, specifically when they are frequently depicted in the popular imagination, media, and government policy as  being something other than political beings (e.g. as victims, criminals, or simply ­rendered in dehumanized terms as unwanted or dangerous masses or floods). The lens of citizenship draws attention to the ways in which migrants assert themselves as political subjects by making claims against certain perceived injustices and inequalities and through collective action, articulating a vision of a different future (often in the name of equality or justice)” (6). By analogy, in its aspirations to create an alternative to the nation-state, The Jungle brings to mind Derrida’s City of Refuge, which can “welcome and protect those innocents who sought refuge from . . . bloody vengeance” (Derrida and Dufourmantelle  2000, 17). Conditioned by “universal hospitality” (19), right for reflection “on the questions of asylum and hospitality,” and as a space for “a new order of law and a democracy to come to be put to the test” (23), City of Refuge enables urban cosmopolitanism. Similarly, in a refugee camp modeled on traditional communities designed to teach individuals civic responsibilities (Landry 2017, 35), these individuals and groups negotiate their differences and seek each other for support. In the play, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Africans come together to work, to pray, and to celebrate their differences. This way The Jungle generates performative encounters of relation, characterized by “the production of sociality,” “communal forms of collaboration,” and establishing the atmosphere of sharing (Kunst 2015, 53–55). But most importantly, it does not take sides. In its techniques of building the fictional community of the Jungle camp, the play references the actual working of a refugee camp’s social infrastructure as it was invented and practiced by the Calais inhabitants (Sanyal  2017). By transforming a traditional theater space into an immersive environment, the play puts its spectators into the story, both as its witnesses and as its accomplices. By challenging conditions of theatrical reception, The Jungle offers a possible response to the major question the politically engaged theater asks: What value—apart from pure entertainment—can performing arts provide? * * * Set as a semi-immersive performative experience within the Afghan Café run by the character Salar (Ben Turner), The Jungle transforms London’s Playhouse Theatre—its stage and auditorium, its backstage and halls—into a refugee camp. Several youngsters, the inhabitants of the camp, offer spectators hot chai, while an older man hands out pamphlets with scribblings in languages many audience members do not speak. Seated around and in close proximity to the action space and each other, the public of The Jungle do not necessarily interact with the play itself. They serve as the subjects of the action, observing it from

From Exile to Migration   207 without, but also as the objects of surveillance, the targets of Foucault’s punishing gaze cast upon them by the characters and by fellow audience members. This spatial dramaturgy enables “an intelligent satire of how the Calais Jungle became . . . a repository for the utopian scheming, hapless curiosity, adventurous instincts and need for escape of the many British people who flocked there to ‘help’ ” (Saville 2018). It also rehumanizes the face of the wasted life and concretizes the collectivity of the migratory experience. According to the Syrian actor Ammar Haj Ahmad, who played Safi, The Jungle also tried to rewrite “the rulebook on how theatre is done in London’s West End. Forty percent of tickets have been kept below £25 ($32)—cheap by West End standards—and some have been reserved for refugees and their families” (quoted in Gill 2019). Keeping the cost of tickets somewhat accessible, Haj Ahmad states, the producers signaled that political theater “can bring [together] people from so many cultures, so many languages”; it can “create an incredible experience” (quoted in Gill 2019).3 Making its privileged audiences confront the reality of global migration by telling them one concrete story from the life of refugees and using actors-refugees as its major narrators, The Jungle sought to activate our sense of responsibility and make us ready to start working toward “social change rather than [feel] deactivated through a traditional cathartic moment” (Gammon 2012, 16). By trying to “dismantle the Cartesian theatrical dichotomy of actor and spectator” (Lewicki 2017, 276), The Jungle wished to turn the audiences of the West End into Rancière’s (2009) emancipated spectators. It invited us to critically examine the role the bystanders, the sympathizers, and the volunteers play in the tale of European migration. Although it did not imagine its public actively interfering with the action, The Jungle did evoke Augusto Boal’s spect-actor, a politically and socially engaged audience member, ready to “experiment, converse, and experience problem solving for problems and issues that are directly relevant to them” (Gammon 2012, 16). This desire for social relationality, one could argue, also dictates the play’s dramatis personae: The Jungle features the residents of the Calais establishment (the refugees), the French authorities (their nemeses), and the UK volunteers, who come to the camp driven by the failures of the asylum system in the UK, their personal sense of guilt as silent supporters of the government’s actions, and general disillusionment with the liberal agenda of Western democracies. In fact, focusing both on migrants and their hosts, The Jungle raises questions specific to the current political crisis in Europe. It links the figures of national abjection to the politics of the neoliberal state unable and unwilling to embrace the problem of the other as its new reality, not a nuisance to be easily ignored and dismissed. Theater has the power to resist these practices—unlike other performative media, it relies on the communality and liveness of reception, and it appeals to the metaphorical work of the live art and its affectual mechanisms to confront the figure of settlement with the figure of the migrant. Using the mechanisms of tragic ethos—from fear to catharsis, from shock to irony, and from distancing to affect—it can appeal to the receiver’s empathy. It can remind its spectators that although “every single body has a certain right to food and shelter” (Butler 2015, 129), individual bodies are dependent on other bodies and “networks of support” (130), as each body is defined “by the relations that make its own life and action possible” (130). Collectivity is essentially relational—it implicates vulnerable and nonvulnerable into its own making (132), and it has equal power to dehumanize a refugee and to bring an individual into focus.

208   Yana Meerzon At the same time, excessive representation risks “evacuat[ing] the face” as well as performing “its own dehumanization” (Butler 2004, 141). In such a performance, the body of a performer-refugee can cross into the symbolism of the sacred, when the intensity of the performative truth-seeking takes over its ethics. Operating on the basis of good intentions, paradoxically it can also initiate the tactics of overrepresentation, specifically if its subject matter is the victimized or the suffering, so the face of the other risks becoming “defaced” (143). The excessiveness of representation, Butler argues, can lead not to acknowledgment of the precariousness of life but to numbness of our reception, which in turn can produce undermining of the face and so undermining of humanity (141). It can also mobilize the onlooker’s empathy, the emotion often prone to manipulation, and it can capitalize on the workings of a gaze: “We see [the] migrant as a victim; we sympathize, we empathize” (Cox and Zarouila 2016, 148). The excessiveness of representation runs the risk of turning the migrant’s body into an object once again, defined by Susan Sontag (2003, 97–98) as a form of pornography, as seeking pleasure in identifying with the victim. Staging the body of suffering or of victimization, it is the artist’s and the spectator’s vulnerability that the image must address, and so it must point at our profound ignorance of what the pain of the other means or entails and what unimaginable marker of grief it leaves on the body and the soul of its victim (98). These tensions find an interesting echo in today’s political performance: on one side of this representational spectrum are the works that stage the collectivity of migration; on the other are those that emphasize individual experiences of the flight. The Jungle goes further and tests its audiences’ ethical standing. By providing spectators with several points of identification, it stages the age of migration, in which nobody can linger as a disengaged onlooker or a passerby. The size and the inevitability of the global movement have already implicated each of the characters and thus each of the play’s spectators into its ever growing streams of power. The destruction of the Calais camp—the opening and the closing image of the play—leaves the ending open and so forces spectators to debate these moral dilemmas as well. By reenacting the events that led to the destruction of the camp, The Jungle foregrounds an individual within the collectivity of modern tragedy. It makes the character (a migrant) and the spectator (a bystander) equally implicated in the making and experiencing of global movements. This power of performance is not necessarily producing ­sociality, as Kunst (2015, 53–55) states, but is providing its viewers with a chance to encounter their own experience of the everyday and so reflect upon their place in this world. In this scenario, theater can oppose grasping the “global as a singularity” (Rae 2006, 22), and it can produce the highly personalized moments of aesthetic experience, often driven by social and ethical awareness of the artist. * * * To summarize: the work of politically inclined artists, who think monumentally, globally, and transhistorically, can serve as an example of how we can start approaching staging migration today. As Bauman (2011) insists, it is only the form of dialogic interaction and respect that can return the value of human life to that of human waste. With the global migration that underpins the lack of communication and trust between peoples, it is only a “fusion of horizons” that can “become the new ‘perpetuum mobile’ dominant among the patterns of human cohabitation. That transformation will have no victims—only beneficiaries” (71). Theater and performance arts are uniquely positioned to mobilize this act of

From Exile to Migration   209 communication: by involving and implicating the audience in energy exchange, performance arts can enable rehumanizing the face of the other, and it can serve as a training ground for the new relational sociality. “Although with the sharpening and entrenching of human differences in almost every contemporary human settlement and every neighborhood, a well-disposed and respectful dialogue between diasporas is becoming an ever more important, indeed crucial, condition of our shared planetary survival, it is also . . . more difficult to attain and defend against present and future forces” (71). The Jungle—an example of performative engagement with the consequences of global migration—offers useful devices (concretizing the collectivity of the flight through the act of its personalization and also turning the tables on the audience) to rehumanize the face and to commemorate and restore the wasted life to the realm of the living. In fact, it underlines the uniqueness of every migratory experience, and it turns the impersonality of global migration into concrete and tangible stories of exilic beings.

Notes 1. A Guide to International Refugee Protection and Building State Asylum Systems. (Handbook for Parliamentarians N° 27, 2017) names a set of international laws, conventions and organizations that have been created to protect refugees and asylum seekers. 2. The Jungle was written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson and directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. It featured Raphael Acloque, Ammar Haj Ahmad, Aliya Ali, Mohammad Amiri, Bruk Kumelay, Alyssa Denise D’Souza, Elham Ehsas, Trevor Fox, Moein Ghobsheh, Michael Gould, Ansu Kabia, Alex Lawther, Jo McInnes, John Pfumojena, Rachel Redford, Rachid Sabitri, Mohamed Sarrar, Ben Turner, and Nahel Tzegai. It was presented by the National Theatre and the Young Vic in London, in coproduction with Good Chance Theatre. 3. Although I personally benefited from this rule and paid only £15 per my ticket in July 2018, this production’s economic and artistic politics raised a number of controversies, well documented by Lamont (2019).

References A Guide to International Refugee Protection and Building State Asylum Systems. (Handbook for Parliamentarians N° 27, 2017). https://www.unhcr.org/publications/legal/3d4aba564/ refugee-protection-guide-international-refugee-law-handbook-parliamentarians.html Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge. Ambros, Veronika, Daniel Couture, Silvija Jestrovic, Jane Mackay-Bennett, and Yana Meerzon, eds. 2003. “Theatre and Exile.” Special issue, Modern Drama 46, no. 1. Bakewell, Oliver. 2008. “Research beyond the Categories: The Importance of Policy Irrelevant Research into Forced Migration.” Journal of Refugee Studies 21, no. 4: 432–53. Balfour, Michael, ed. 2013. Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters. Bristol, UK: Intellect. Bauman, Zigmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bauman, Zigmunt. 2011. Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2011. “Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk.” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 10: 1346–61.

210   Yana Meerzon Berg, Nancy. 1996. Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq. New York: SUNY Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1986. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” Screen 24, no. 6: 18–36. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. “The Condition We Call Exile.” In On Grief and Reason: Essays, 22–35. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Castles, Stephen. 2000. “International Migration at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” International Social Science Journal 165 (September): 269–81. Cox, Emma. 2014. Theater and Migration. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Cox, Emma, and Caroline Wake. 2018. “Envisioning Asylum/Engendering Crisis: or, Performance and Forced Migration 10 Years On.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23, no. 2: 137–47. Cox, Emma, and Marilena Zaroulia. 2016. “Mare Nostrum, or On Water Matters.” Performance Research 21, no. 2: 141–9. Crosby, Alison. 2006. “The Boundaries of Belonging: Reflections on Migration Policies into the 21st Century.” Inter Pares Occasional Paper, June 7. http://www.statewatch.org/news/ 2006/jul/boundaries-of-belonging.pdf. Dean, David, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince. 2015. Introduction to History, Memory, Performance, edited by David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince, 1–18. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Depner, Wolfgang. 2018. “Mapping Migrant Patterns.” Diplomat: International Canada 29, no. 2: 40–54. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fleishman, Mark, ed. 2015. Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Gammon, Emily Elaine. 2012. “Student, Player, Spect-Actor: Learning from Viola Spolin and Augusto Boal: Theatre Practice as Non-Traditional Pedagogy.” Theatre and Dance Graduate Theses & Dissertations 15. https://scholar.colorado.edu/thtr_gradetds/15. Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. 2007. Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Gill, Joe. 2019. “From the Jungle to the West End: ‘It’s Not about Refugees, It’s about Humans.’ ” Middle East Eye, January 29. https://www.middleeasteye.net/features/jungle-west-end-itsnot-about-refugees-its-about-humans. Hoffman, Eva. 1990. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin Books. Jeffers, Alison. 2013. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Jestrovic, Silvija, and Yana, Meerzon (eds). 2009. Performance, Exile and “America”. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2013. Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2018. “The Eternal Immigrant and Aesthetics of Solidarity.” Keynote, IFTR 2018, Belgrade.

From Exile to Migration   211 Karatani, Rieko. 2005. “How History Separated Refugee and Migrant Regimes: In Search of Their Institutional Origins.” International Journal of Refugee Law 17, no. 3: 517–41. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Washington, DC: Zero Books. Lamming, George. 1992. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Lamont Bishop, O. (2019). “Four Thoughts on Place and The Jungle.” Performing Ethos, no. 9: 105–10. Landry, Charles. 2017. The Civic City in a Nomadic World. New York: NAI010. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2011. “Postdramatic Theatre: A Decade Later.” In Dramatic and Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After, edited by Ivan Medenica, 31–47. Anthology of Essays by Faculty of Dramatic Arts 20, Belgrade. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1998. Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press. Levine, Michael  G. 2006. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lewicki, Aleksandra. 2017. “ ‘The Dead Are Coming’: Acts of Citizenship at Europe’s Borders.” Citizenship Studies 21, no. 3: 275–90. Marschall, Anika. 2018. “What Can Theatre Do about the Refugee Crisis? Enacting Commitment and Navigating Complicity in Performative Interventions.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23, no. 2: 148–66. Martin, Carol. 2006. “Bodies of Evidence.” Drama Review 50, no. 3: 8–15. Massey, Dorren. 2014. “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, edited by John Bird et al., 60–70. London: Routledge. McIvor, Charlotte. 2016. Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland: Towards a New Interculturalism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile—Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Meerzon, Yana, and Katharina Pewny, eds. 2019. Dramaturgy of Migration: Staging Multilingual Encounters in Contemporary Theatre. London: Routledge. Miller, Arthur. 1949. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” New York Times, February 27. http:// movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html. Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Murphy, Joe, and Joe Robertson. 2017 . The Jungle. New York: Faber & Faber. Musca, Szabolcs, ed. 2019. Special issue, Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre 9. Nolette, Nicole, and Art Babayants, eds. 2017. Special issue, Theatre Research in Canada / Recherches théâtrales au Canada 38, no. 2. Rae, Paul. 2006. “Where Is the Cosmopolitan Stage?” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 1: 8–22. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Rudakoff, Judith, ed. 2017. Performing Exile: Foreign Bodies. Bristol, UK: Intellect.

212   Yana Meerzon Rygiel, Kim. 2011. “Bordering Solidarities: Migrant Activism and the Politics of Movement and Camps at Calais.” Citizenship Studies 15, no. 1: 1–19. Said, Edward. 2000. “Reflections on Exile.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 137–49. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanyal, Debarati. 2017. “Calais’s ‘Jungle’: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance.” Representations 139, no. 1: 1–33. Saville, Alice. 2018. “ ‘The Jungle’ Review.” Timeout London, July 6. https://www.timeout.com/ london/theatre/the-jungle-review. Schmidt, Kerstin, and Nathalie Aghoro, eds. 2017. “Theatre and Mobility.” Special issue, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 5, no. 1. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Verso. Spijkerboer, Thomas. 2017. “Wasted Lives. Borders and the Right to Life of People Crossing Them.” Nordic Journal of International Law 86: 1–29. Trueman, Matt. 2017. “London Theatre Review: ‘The Jungle.’ ” Variety, December 21. https:// variety.com/2017/legit/reviews/the-jungle-review-play-london-1202647131/. Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. United Nations. 2017. “International Migration Report.” 2017. https://www.un.org/en/ development/desa/population/migration/publications/migrationreport/docs/Migration Report2017_Highlights.pdf. Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2019. The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-FirstCentury Britain. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Wilmer, Steve. 2018. Performing Statelessness in Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Wilmer, Steve, and Azadeh Sharifi. 2016. “Theatre and Statelessness in Europe.” Special issue, Critical Stages 14.

pa rt i i i

SI T E S The uprisings that have been taking place on the global political scene since the end of 2010—the massive encampment in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the anti-austerity protests in Syntagma Square in Athens, Occupy Wall Street in New York City, and the 2019–20 popular protests in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere—while highly diverse in their aspirations, practices, and historical specificities, have drawn particular attention to what Judith Butler (2015) calls (after Arendt) “spaces of appearance.” Taking as a point of departure this insight into the importance of space for politics as well as theater and performance studies, part III brings together work on the backdrop, the stage, the symbols, the entry and exit points that shape the kind of politics that is performed, the shifts and struggles that take place—who constructs, reflects, claims, and polices the space of politics. It also examines how the performance brings the sites and stages of politics into being—borders, virtual spaces, institutions, spaces of exchange, memorials, and city streets. Space is infused with power, and performance often plays a key role in the making and unmaking of spatial politics. The essays featured in this part of the Handbook address both the materiality and the abstractness of space. Variously they echo, reference, and/or put a new slant on the concepts that have been rehearsed in cross-disciplinary negotiations, from Foucault’s (1997) heterotopia as a space that contains and juxtaposes other spaces (e.g., graveyard, theater, library, prison, etc.) to Joanne Tompkins’s (2007) notion of polytopic representational space that emerges from bringing disparate locations into dialogue. Read against the backdrop of seminal works of urban geography, from Henri Lefebvre (1991) and Edward Soja’s (2002) concepts of space to Una Chaudhuri’s (1995) notion geopathology, the contributions address the dialectics of space from a variety of perspectives. Lefebvre’s (1991, 33) model distinguishes between spatial practice, the way space is used and navigated through everyday activities; representation of space, where power and authority are located and reinforced (e.g., parliaments, banks, government edifices); and representational space that is linked to a “clandestine or underground side of social life, as also to

214   Sites art.” Soja (2002) points out that heterotopic space is indeed produced through action, whether physical, conceptual, or symbolic. He defines his version of the concept, ThirdSpace, as a “strategic meeting place for fostering collective political action against all forms of human oppression” (22) and also as a “distinctive way of looking at, interpreting, and acting to change the spatiality of human life” (21). Soja’s ThirdSpace is an open and inclusive space of action and intervention. Inspired by Foucault and Soja, Chaudhuri (1995, 15) coins the neologism geopathology in the context of theater and drama to theorize the notion of place as a problem that “unfolds as an incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home and homelessness.” The chapters by Emma Cox, Matt Davies, and Catharine Chiniara Charrett explore the tensions between represtentaion of space through which power is reinforced and representational space (ThirdSpace) through which this power becomes subverted. For all three authors, the space of intervention and resistance emerges through art forms. Cox considers new border formations, marked by prolonged encounters with prohibitive migration laws, that transform borders from instruments of passing into tools of impasse. Considering the border as both a physical and a symbolic site, Cox analyzes how punitive laws concerning forced migration, on the one hand, and the artistic interventions of people subjected to these laws, on the other, produce the space differently—resulting in what she calls the “thickening” of the border. Her case study—two documentary films made clandestinely by the Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who was held for several years at Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea—emerges as an example of intervention to counteract this border regime. Charrett views empire in spatial terms as a frontier, physical and embodied, upon which the violence of imperial expansion and acceleration has been performed. Her chapter considers the Gaza Strip as a physical site that embodies both resistance and settler colonialism in global politics. She sees in the diplomatic and financial sanctioning of Hamas profound consequences for Palestinian governance and a means of framing the Gaza Strip as an imperial frontier through which violence against Palestinians comes to be legitimized. For Charrett, as for Cox, art-making becomes a subversive operation of counteracting the imperial representation of space. In the performances of Tania El Khoury, Charrett sees a formation of a cultural frontier—a site of opposition to the violence of global politics. Davies explores the social stratification of Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2016 Olympic Games and how the performance of the everyday becomes a political gesture. Drawing from the work of Lefebvre, Mike Pearson, and Augusto Boal’s (2000) method of invisible theater, this contribution is rooted in the performance-as-research project The Other City, which explores artistically and dialectically the relationship between the city as an aesthetic subject and as a spatial practice in its capacity to both reinforce and counteract urban stratification. All the examples of artistic practices described in these chapters— Boochani’s detention center documentaries, El Khoury’s performance responses to imperial violence, and Davies’s project of performing the “other” city—reflect both a form of geopathology as a sense of fraught relationship to place and an impulse for intervention, a desire to perform a ThirdSpace possibility into being. Nirmal Puwar and Kimberly Wedeven Segall continue to explore the dialectics of space and possibilities of intervention by looking at the relationship between site and gender. Puwar shows how normative sites of politics are produced through favoring a certain kind of body and certain racial and gender configurations. She sees women as “space invaders”

Sites   215 of Westminster—as those who are not deemed normative figures within institutional domains, but also as those whose performativity erodes the dominant somatic norm. Segall foregrounds media as a site of representation and as a representational site that frames gendered bodies and shapes their performativity. She distinguishes mainstream media from its vernacular forms. The latter are seen as different sites of political contestation and performance that enable resilience, redefine citizenship, and revive racial solidarities. In both Puwar’s and Segall’s chapters, sites not only produce performing bodies but in their turn construct somatic norms and their actors—sometimes confirming the existing power dynamics, and at other times subverting normative configurations of gender and race. Matthew Watson, Anna Leander, and Charlotte Heath-Kelly explore how abstract spaces, rhetorical and symbolic, produce physical sites. Watson historicizes “the market,” almost echoing the spatial geography of representational and practiced space. He points out that the market of abstract economic theory is not the same as the market of everyday experience. He proposes the notion of the market as a rhetorical façade for a series of practices that prioritize exchange relations over alternative forms of organizing economic life. In other words, the market is understood as rhetorical space performed into being and made to materialize through various practices. Leander explores one such site that came into being through neoliberal economic practices and rhetoric both verbal and visual. She takes Victor Turner’s (1974) notion of ritual and liminality out of its usual discursive context of performance studies, where it often has positive epistemological connotations, to propose trade fairs as a form of neoliberal ordering ritual. She renegotiates these conceptual frameworks by highlighting trade fairs as sites of institutionalized liminality, whose ambiguity serves to reinforce the hierarchy of a conservative order. Heath-Kelly connects different architectural sites of memory, nation, and state that commemorate the War on Terror. Focusing on the spatial and temporal grammars through which postterrorist commemoration is staged, she explores how symbolic sites, spatially marked through architecture, materialize as tourist sites. In this process, the trauma site and its symbolic rhetoric acquire cultural value through which the representational rhetoric produces new forms of spatial practice that enable economic regeneration. These chapters, both individually and in dialogue with one another, extend and enrich some of the key concepts concerning the politics and performance of space. (1) The idea of a rhetorical site conjured into being (“the market” but also, for example, the border and even the memorial site and Parliament) is similar to the concept of symbolic representational space, but not exactly the same. The rhetorical site can be understood as an intersection between representational and practical space. Rhetorical sites are not only materialized through practice, but the practice might even unfold in the opposite direction of the rhetoric. (2) The often-invoked notion of liminality has been further enriched here through the idea of thickening of space (e.g., of the border) that complicates the inherent ambiguity of the liminal, and through the notion of institutionalized liminality that appropriates the formal character of the liminal in a form of neoliberal ritualization (e.g., trade fairs). (3) Artistic forms and practices, as well as nonnormative and subversive forms of embodiment, representation, and racial and gender configurations (parliaments, media, detention centers, frontiers, and cities), are seen as modes of intervention—adding to Soja’s list of actions that create the possibility of the ThirdSpace.

216   Sites

References Boal, Augusto. 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. 3rd edition. London: Pluto. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Chaudhuri, Una. 1995. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “Of Other Space: Utopias and Heterotopias.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by Neil Leach, 350–6. London: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Soja, Edward. 2002. “Thirdspace: Expending the Scope of the Geographical Imagination.” Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday. Tompkins, Joanne. 2007. Unsettling Space: Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre. London: Palgrave. Turner, Victor. 1974. Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology. Rice University Studies.

chapter 13

Isl a n d I mpasse Refugee Detention and the Thickening Border Emma Cox

This section of the book addresses sites, a designation that in the context of performance implicates locations as crucibles of a kind that fundamentally shape the political possibilities of events or enactments. Borders, the subject of this chapter, are foremost sites defined by their capacity to mark or to mandate entries and exits. The political borders of sovereign states, in particular, are some of the most patently authoritarian sites we can encounter. Borders also materialize a process: they demand some form of negotiation, they must be met, if their political function is to have any meaning. But while borders are formally sites of lineation—distinguishing there from here—the legal contrivances they undergird can, as this discussion aims to show, expose the messy unfeasibility of linear logic, both in terms of how sovereign territory is defined and in terms of how borders categorize bodies. When a sovereign state’s reach can be extraterritorial and the bodies it controls may be cast into an in-between zone, it becomes necessary to comprehend the border just as much in terms of dwelling as passing. The analysis presented here considers what it might mean for a border to “thicken,” in a territorial, political, and aesthetic sense. It builds upon existing scholarship to help us think through what “bordering” (this term refers to the border in its administered sense: the border plus human agencies) consists of in the present moment. I employ the term thickening in order to describe an emergent condition of the border, brought into being by punitive laws concerning forced migration and by the artistic interventions of people subjected to these laws. This chapter focuses on refugees, a demographic whose border encounters are among today’s most fraught, and on mechanisms of bordering in the context of the state’s severest biopolitical architecture: the detention camp. My case study derives from Australia’s resolute use of indefinite offshore detention for all maritime asylum seekers and artistic-activist practice within one of its controversial offshore sites, the recently closed Manus Island detention camp in northern Papua New Guinea (PNG). Specifically, I examine the work and activities of Behrouz Boochani, an internationally recognized Iranian Kurdish writer, journalist, and activist held in various locations on Manus Island since mid-2013. With its deep economic and ideological investment in the exertion of extraterritorial sovereignty and the prevention of resettlement for offshore refugees, Australia’s border work projects

218   Emma Cox itself into imagined futures: most recently, the government has sought repeatedly to pass legislation that would impose lifetime bans on refugees resettled elsewhere who have ever attempted to enter Australia by boat (Murphy 2018). The Australian model is of international importance, as it becomes increasingly clear that its uncompromising ethos is a precursor for refugee policy in other liberal democracies. A series of questions lays the ground for this chapter’s inquiry: What might the visible absences of an empty chair at a literary awards ceremony, a video-recorded acceptance speech, and a film director’s enforced nonattendance at a festival screening say about the work of bordering alongside the work of the arts? What are the political and technological frameworks that make it possible for a person’s artistic practice to flourish, circulate, and be recognized by peers, even as their freedom of movement is curtailed? How do prolonged encounters with prohibitory migration laws construct new formations of the border, and what can detained refugee artists tell us about the experience of subjugation to this novelty? And not least: when do prolonged border encounters transform borders from instruments of passing into tools of impasse? Each of these questions speaks to the concept of a thickening border, and this chapter develops responses to them with reference to technology and the clandestine, evidentiary work, aesthetics of time and space, transnational collaboration, and structural oppression. In its expansion since the 1990s beyond the disciplines of geography and political science, scholarship on borders has been advanced by arts and humanities perspectives that have emphasized the embodied and spectatorial consequences of political borders, wherein appearance is uniquely charged by the high stakes of attempted crossing, and the nuances of self-representation are scrutinized alongside the schematics of the passport and its cognates (Nield 2008; Stonor Saunders 2016). Moreover, work on borders has confirmed the processual or spatiotemporal qualities of bordering by considering the ways mobility is negotiated in and through bureaucracies (Salter 2006), camps and activism within them (Pugliese 2002; Rygiel 2011), the media and the arts (Amoore and Hall 2010), political pronouncements (Williams 2008), and the precarity of undocumented life (Hepworth 2014). Such theorizations have had the dual effect of shaping notions of political borders as performative and informing the identification of analogous modes of bordering away from political borderlines. Meanwhile, virtual infrastructures are enabling ever more comprehensive surveillance practices, even as they demand new conceptions of “digital passages” (Latonero and Kift 2018). This chapter is a beneficiary of the opening up of border studies but also takes seriously Corey Johnson and Reece Jones’s observation that while an “expansive understanding of borders and boundaries in recent scholarship has enriched border studies . . . it has also obscured what a border is” (Johnson et al. 2011, 61). The normalization of state-mandated refugee and migrant detention in liberal democracies depends in part upon the effective (though it can never be total) banishment of detained peoples from sight, both direct and mediated. When migrant detention, particularly ad hoc practices, provokes an eruption of a state’s visual regime, as occurred in 2018 during the US government’s detainment of migrant children at the southern border, and in 2015 at the height of the European refugee crisis—both intensively mediatized events—the political fallout can be vociferous, leading to renewed civic interrogation of humanitarian obligation and the rights of states to aggressively police borders. But instead of curtailing the most punitive of governmental measures, recent eruptions have further polarized relationships between state and citizen and between citizens, not least on the question of how borders

Island Impasse   219 should function in the face of the most vulnerable. Certainly, material resistance to hard-line state practices has found little traction in the years since Giorgio Agamben ([2003] 2005, 14) observed in State of Exception that “in all of the Western democracies” we are seeing the “generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.” Agamben’s statement is repeatedly borne out in the current era. In a similar vein, Rogier Van Reekum (2016, 339) identifies the intractability of what he calls the “routinised emergency” produced in and through the heavily policed Mediterranean zone, where response to crisis is itself a normalizing technique: “As the construct of ‘migration crisis’ has entered public parlance, we are—once again—confronted with the duplicity of ‘crisis.’ At first, the term begs for a change of routines, a governmental breakthrough of some sort. Remarkably, yet predictably, what ends up being proposed in response to ‘crisis’ is more of the same” (336). In such a context, the defining power of the political border to prevent entry and enforce exit must not, in this time of its unprecedented instrumentalization, recede from view. Behrouz Boochani was among a group of asylum seekers intercepted in July 2013 by the Australian navy en route to the Australian external territory of Christmas Island (which, along with the island of Nauru, is another of Australia’s offshore detention sites). It was Boochani’s second entry attempt, and it came just days after a policy announcement by Australia’s center-left prime minister Kevin Rudd that all boat arrivals would be transferred to PNG and would “never” be considered for resettlement in Australia (quoted in Hall and Swan 2013). Boochani was sent to Manus the following month. Of Boochani’s many endeavors, this chapter focuses on the feature-length documentary film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), written and directed by Boochani and an Iranian Dutch filmmaker, Arash Kamali Sarvestani. Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time was filmed surreptitiously on Boochani’s mobile phone in Manus and sent in digital fragments to Sarvestani via the messaging platform WhatsApp. The film renders an affective conception of border politics wherein processing has halted, and refugee identity is characterized not by transit but by radical stasis. In this capacity, Chauka becomes illustrative of what borders can mean in an era marked by widespread state-sanctioned immigration detention, a practice Australia instigated early and continues to prioritize. It is perhaps unsurprising that as Australia has solidified a reputation for hard-line border enforcement, opposition to it has become both inventive and emboldened. For his part, out of a situation of prolongment, Boochani has developed a reputation as a significant and eloquent artist-activist voice, co-creating a film, a play, and an oral history project and writing a number of articles for international media outlets, as well as maintaining regular, often scathing commentary on Twitter and Facebook. He has participated in discussions via weblink and been interviewed worldwide (for example, by the New York Times and Al Jazeera). Boochani was the winner in the Print/Online/ Multimedia category at the 2017 Amnesty International Australia (2017) Media Awards, and in 2018 he won the Anna Politkovskaya Investigative Journalism Award, granted by the Italian magazine Internazionale (Zhou 2018). Boochani’s (2018b) book No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison was awarded both the nonfiction prize and the prestigious Victorian Prize for Literature at Australia’s 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Accepted in absentia, such accolades have the effect of underscoring the oppressive conditions in which he remains held, but in his prerecorded speech for the Victorian Premier’s awards, Boochani spoke of his years of determination to create a self-image as an imprisoned novelist, to resist daily humiliations “in opposition to the image created by the system” (Guardian 2019).

220   Emma Cox Boochani’s artistic and activist activities would not be possible without the professional and affective involvement of international collaborators, many of them Australian but also drawn from the Iranian diaspora. As I shall discuss, supporters’ acts of citizenship are the necessary counterparts to Boochani’s clandestine acts of resistance. And yet the same social media–saturated climate that saw the Saudi teen Rahaf al-Qunun’s extraordinary live tweeting of her refugee claim precipitate the swift granting of asylum by Canada (BBC News 2019) has had no such leveraging effect for Boochani, who continues to face the state’s impenetrable “routinised emergency” (Van Reekum 2016, 339). That Boochani’s collaborations have been possible to such a sustained extent, amplifying his predicament via intensive co-creative effort, all while he remains subject to authoritarian bordering, shows up a stark power disjunction. It also evidences the ambivalence of the cause célèbre and of the visible. Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is the product of opposing but mutually informing forces: the separation, on the one hand, between refugee and citizen via Australia’s practice of offshore detention, and the accelerated growth, at the same time, of online platforms that facilitate detainees’ insistent and often immediate digital communication. Boochani’s clandestine register is, in this regard, a synergistic result of prohibition and aesthetic-technological innovation. Like the rest of his output, the clandestine register of Chauka is an explicit part of the work’s promotion, with public interest inevitably linked to it. As a lucid interpreter of his own work and on the politics of its reception, Boochani rejects the normative affective relation of supportive citizen–grateful refugee. In his virtual public engagements with audiences and hosting agents (cinemas, theaters, festivals, cultural and educational institutions, prize-awarding bodies), he challenges audiences’ humanitarian complacencies, and his critiques can be unforgiving. At a book launch for No Friend but the Mountains at Sydney’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), an event he joined via weblink, Boochani expressed his disappointment that screenings of Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time have invariably been followed by audience questions about the political status quo and various apologetic sentiments rather than engagement with the artistic or technical elements of the film. He contended that a widespread inability to receive refugees’ cultural production as art constitutes a form of colonial thinking (UNSW Arts & Social Sciences 2018). Chauka’s surreptitious and painstaking creation coexists with the open secret that is Boochani’s activities. The curiously public kind of secrecy of his practice prompts the question of why the activist critique intrinsic to his clandestine register does not appear to perturb the Australian government, whose human rights records he repeatedly assails. The fact that Chauka could be made at all—that, for example, detainees’ testimonies of abuse by guards could be delivered, undisguised, to the camera—implies a certain ideological complacency on the part of the state that implements mandatory detention. The impression that emerges is paradoxical: Manus Island as site of surveillance and of abandonment; the film as both clandestine and brazen. Boochani’s notoriety is not merely, I contend, an inevitable consequence of the digital revolution—though that is clearly of great practical importance; it also signals a developmental stage in the tortured dialectic between Australian authority and unauthorized (mostly boat-arriving) asylum seekers. Since 2001 the foundations have been laid for the emergence of someone like Boochani, prepared to unleash a sustained intellectual and creative critique of the state whose power bears down upon him. For the first few years of this century, artistic and activist responses to Australian refugee politics were linked to the

Island Impasse   221 dramatic way in which boat-arriving asylum seekers were established in the national consciousness. Although Australia had used limited immigration detention since 1992, the year 2001 marks an escalation point in terms of hard-line policy and the engendering of widespread public suspicion of unauthorized entry, concurrent with the tightening of security measures worldwide after September 11. That year several events brought maritime refugee transit to the forefront of national debate in Australia: the Tampa scandal (when the government refused 438 rescued asylum seekers entry into Australian waters); the Children Overboard Affair (involving a government misrepresentation of the treatment of children at sea by their parents); and the SIEV X boat tragedy (in which 353 asylum seekers drowned in waters between Indonesia and Australia).1 With reference to the contemporary Hungarian context, Céline Cantat and Prem Kumar Rajaram (2019) point out that representations of migrant crises function inwardly as well as outwardly, serving the state’s legislative purposes and shaping public perceptions in specific ways. In relation to the latter, they note, “Outwardly, the framing of migrant movement as crisis creates an abstracted understanding of complex situations that allows for policymakers and commentators to treat migration as exceptional ‘events,’ distinct from the political norms and in need of rectification through (often brutal) interventions”. The events of 2001 created a context for tougher Australian asylum laws and showed that, among advocates and adversaries alike, the idea of the “illegal noncitizen” became difficult to disconnect from prevailing notions of what sovereignty— and Australianness itself—meant. In the intervening years, Australia’s treatment of unauthorized asylum seekers has been no less combative under left-leaning governments than under right. What has gradually changed is the way the state orchestrates visibility. The Rudd government’s policy measures of 2013, to which I referred, were integrated into a regional framework introduced later that year by the newly elected center-right government, under Prime Minister Tony Abbott, labeled Operation Sovereign Borders. Part of its enforcement strategy consists of militaryled “pushbacks” of smuggling vessels, accompanied by the state’s recourse to its own obscurantist version of a clandestine register: a policy of not commenting on “on water matters” (Peter Dutton quoted in Hurst 2015). Just as the closure of most mainland detention centers ended the dramatic on-site protests involving refugees and citizen supporters that marked the start of the 2000s, the elimination from view of maritime passage represents a shift in Australia’s visual regime, subsequent to the image-saturated Tampa and the Children Overboard Affair. Today Australia’s use of near-comprehensive offshore encampment, coupled with stringent media restrictions and militarization of maritime zones, withdraws refugees from sight. Two decades’ experience of punitive policy response to a perceived refugee crisis has seen Australia prefigure, and lately to move beyond, the climate of hypervisibility into which North American and especially European refugee politics has been plunged. Of course, the way forced migrants became present en masse in Europe during the most recent crisis, and were photographed incessantly for multiform media, is anathema to the Australian context, where asylum seekers do not enter the public sphere in an embodied way. The disappearance from view of people detained by Australia would be totalizing were it not for the tools—intellectual, artistic, and technological—mobilized by those like Boochani, who, faced with an authoritarian cloaking of their lives, a form of oblivion, insist upon communicating what secretive, indefinite detention looks and feels like.

222   Emma Cox

Constructing Manus Prison The prison site depicted in Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, now closed, signifies as a cinematic remain of sorts, or trace. The Manus Regional Processing Centre that we see in the film—or “Manus Prison,” as Boochani determinedly calls it—was operated by various corporate contractors to detain asylum seekers at the behest of the Australian government briefly from 2001, but most intensively from 2013, before the PNG Supreme Court ruled in April 2016 that the site was “illegal and unconstitutional.” The site is a palimpsest of neocolonial infrastructure: most recently a PNG naval base, Lombrum, but originally US and then Australian naval bases. Following the detention center’s closure in October 2017, Manus’s function as a carceral island for refugees did not cease: several hundred detainees were moved to three different sites, and the Australian government, while still funding the detention operation (Davidson and Knaus 2019), declared the refugees the responsibility of PNG. Boochani was among a group of more than 350 men2 who resisted the relocation, and he was briefly arrested. In the context of an always uneven and now fractured relationship between the prosperous nation of Australia and its economically deprived northern neighbor, PNG, the detainees still remaining on Manus occupy a position of profound ambiguity in terms of where responsibility for their future lies.3 They are contending with the ossification of Manus as a prison island, an offshore arm of the Australian border, at which they have arrived but from which they may not depart. In this way, an excessive implementation of the imperative of border protection has resulted in a malfunctioning of the political border, if the political border is to be understood as a mechanism of administrated passage. Any discussion of Boochani inevitably provokes a thinking through of the kind of place Manus (island and former center) has become, territorially, politically, and aesthetically. First, as a place to which Australia’s contractors imported a rotating workforce of guards and officials and employ PNG locals, the Manus detention center evidenced a continuity between bordering and neocolonialism in a region that has long been subject to Australian administrative domination. The territories now known as PNG are former Australian dependencies, starting with the Territory of Papua (possession being transferred from Britain in 1902, following Australian federation); then New Guinea (assigned to Australia after the transfer of German territories in 1919); and then the union of Papua and New Guinea (1949–75). Administrative withdrawal did not dissolve economic enmeshments; as Alison Mountz (2011, 121) observes in the context of enforcement on islands, “detention becomes a form of economic development, a residual material haunting through neo-colonial control.” As a location where the geopolitical work of blocking entry is carried out through the continual deferment of humanitarian arrival, Manus testifies to the Australian border’s transnational systematization. This is part of a political organization of space that is global, as Mountz notes: “Peripheral geographies prompt reconfiguration of traditional landscapes of sovereign territory as state authorities and social movements traverse and connect margin and center in new ways” (120). Finally, and of utmost importance for this discussion, Manus Island has, in aesthetic terms, become a place of creative practice whose vanguard is its strategies of circulation. In every regard—territorial, political, and aesthetic—Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time instantiates a thickening of the offshore border. As far as territorial politics are concerned, Manus has become Australia’s testing ground for the gradual mutation from passage to

Island Impasse   223 impasse in the bordering of maritime refugee transit. Out of this impasse—literally, nonpassage—thickening also describes the cumulative representational effect of Boochani’s multiform practice, which politicizes and aestheticizes the Manus Regional Processing Centre as a durational, time-stilling border, subject to legislative force but malfunctioning in its purported role of processing under law. Boochani is one of several refugees to have made work from Manus, and while he is certainly the most prominent among them, the interventions, with their globally dispersed digital tendrils, construct the island through layered and collaborative representational acts.4 Thickening, then, encompasses resistant, ongoing creative practices as well as a globalized reception of work that, by virtue of its origin, can never not be a representation of the border. Manus is, in this conception, subject to the cumulative “thick description”—to borrow the term popularized by Clifford Geertz (1973)—of its refugee inhabitants and to a widely dispersed public reception.

Clandestine Acts: Evidentiary Work The opening intertitle of Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time identifies the filmmaker’s unconventional mode, stating, “This film was shot clandestine with a mobile phone at Manus detention centre in Papua New Guinea.” Some sections of the film are in English, but for the most part words have been translated into English subtitles by Amir Kamali Sarvestani and Boochani’s regular translator, Omid Tofighian. The film’s title contains multiple referents: the chauka is the native bird that heralds the dawn, telling locals the time; it is symbolic to the province, appearing in silhouetted flight on the Manus flag; and it is the name given by Australian guards to a notorious part of the detention center, a site, as several detainees testify in the film, of particular violence and cruelty by staff. The film opens to the sound of a tolling bell, hinting at once at the passing of time and subtly insisting on moral—and perhaps religious—coordinates. In what becomes the film’s recurring synthetic musical refrain, a xylophone’s light peal gives way to a somber piano and cello score. The detention site itself, Chauka shows us, materializes a contradiction: crude prefab, architecture of the temporary, for detention that is indefinite. To a significant extent this visual document is deeply concerned with the work of gathering oral and written records: the film is narratively propelled by Boochani’s determination to mobilize others, eliciting accounts of abuse in the detention center. He talks to fellow detainees about writing a report, of gathering and photographing documents and recording testimonies. Several incidents are uncovered, from the petty cruelty of a guard spitting in a detainee’s tea to grave assault by a guard who cut a detainee’s throat. A cornerstone testimony is an eyewitness account of the 2014 murder of an Iranian detainee, Reza Barati, an incident that received extensive Australasian news coverage and prompted civic acts of remembrance in Australia and Iran. Boochani’s interlocutor unflinchingly implicates Australian and New Zealand guards as well as local PNG employees in Barati’s death. Chauka is structured in a way that underscores how central the building up of evidence is to Boochani’s hybrid role as filmmaker-refugee-journalist. It is a concern that dominates fragments of phone conversation—audible only at one end—with an unnamed Australian journalist: we hear her voice down the line, distant, reiterating the need for a comprehensively investigated, evidenced story, including descriptions and coordinates of the chauka

224   Emma Cox isolation cell. Such are the kinds of fine-grained details that are demanded of evidential testimony to violation, and as the Australian journalist reminds Boochani, without them, her editor won’t run the story. In turn, Boochani’s urging of detainees to offer their testimonies and his painstaking work to organize and disseminate them positions him in a role that he continues to this day: an imprisoned journalist, speaking with and on behalf of others, as much as for himself. However, as Gillian Whitlock (2018) duly notes, “there is an element of belatedness” to the film’s reportage: “The documentary does not reveal but returns to incidents already reported by journalists, that have been the subject of complaints to the Australian Federal Police, dismissed by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and reported to the United Nations human rights authorities. . . . This is a story about the impotence of media witnessing as a tool of human rights activism, and what remains in the aftermath when the news cycle moves on.”5 The film is also a testament of sorts to the very act of bearing witness, again and again; as it draws to its final moments, Chauka presents a tightly framed montage of papers being gathered, envelopes sealed, this part of what Whitlock describes as the film’s “stylized dramatisations” of testimonial work, where Boochani’s co-detainees are depicted “ritually gathering together the necessary documentation required as juridical and historical proof ” (2018) of the damage done to human lives over several years of border existence on Manus. As well as gathering accounts, Boochani contributes the evidentiary perspective of his own eyewitnessing, with the inclusion of two incidents of emergency response. Both sequences deploy a more obviously clandestine aesthetic of filming in extremis. Occurring at night, both involve suicide attempts by detainees. In the first event, present-tense subtitles explain that a man has gone on hunger strike and cut his stomach with a knife. He is carried out on a stretcher, the grim scene lit frantically by the emergency vehicle’s flashing lights. The second incident occurs at the very end of the film. Boochani’s usually still camerawork takes on a handheld appearance, the image coming in and out of focus, the injured refugee partially obscured by the bodies of onlookers. This is both a visual technique, its use well established in social realist and documentary filmmaking, and presumably also, in these instances, a necessity. The film’s preoccupation with the accumulation of textual, aural, and visual evidence transfers ownership over the border work of record keeping to its subaltern subjects, and even in its belatedness this renders Chauka itself an evidentiary document.

Time, Space, and the Border Alongside the evidentiary information the film conveys through documentary acts are the narratives and images that convey the affective, sensorial dimensions of indefinite detention, and foremost the experience of a duration of empty time—what Boochani describes in promotional materials as “coarsening banality and repetition.” Time in Chauka is measured against intimate referents, such as how old someone’s child would be now and how old the child was when a detainee last saw them. Boochani’s eye for small details and his use of lingering, unmoving shots show us what dilated carceral time might feel like: a young man, crouching as he smokes, picks distractedly at a flower bud; communal and recreational spaces are unused; fans whir incessantly in the somnolent heat, often the only thing moving in a shot. The manipulation of detainees’ experience of time via prolonged embodied

Island Impasse   225 restriction is shown by Boochani to be at the heart of Australia’s arsenal insofar as border deterrence is concerned. The film’s use of recurring sequences and images establishes detainees as living in enforced circularity. Phone communication via limited landline access emerges as a source of regularized anxiety: one young man’s fraught phone conversations with family members rehash the same unhappy script, constituting a kind of linguistic and performative throughline for the film. Recurrence in Chauka also takes the form of visual motifs, which, as Whitlock (2018) notes, offer a framework of “rhythms and forms” that locate the film within a lineage of “performative and poetic documentary” making, wherein the filmmaker’s subjective stake is an integrated rather than concealed component of the work. Boochani’s repeated use of images of the beach with ocean birds darting and local children playing look at first like idyllic establishing shots, until his camera pans back to show that the scene is being filmed from behind a high fence. The device works the first time as a reveal and thereafter as a reminder. In other shots Boochani appears in profile, sitting on a plastic chair, his feet propped up against an inner perimeter fence, ankles crossed in mock-leisure. When the image recurs, the fence remains the same, but the flip-flops change, a variation taunting in its banality. In a similar shot, Boochani portrays a fellow detainee from a long angle, a perimeter fence stretching in a straight line toward a vanishing point—this emphasis on imprisoning lines another recurring device. Boochani’s camera watches the daily tasks of detention center employees. The most striking is a process repeated in different locations throughout the center: a PNG worker, clad in protective gasmask and earmuffs, wields a handheld defumigation device, its irritating buzz puncturing the silence as plumes of pale gray residue billow and disperse, obscuring whatever Boochani is filming. This visual trope encapsulates the detainees’ reduction to objects of biological management and their removal from view. In such ways, the film encodes stillness and repetition (sometimes both together) as signifiers of empty time and indeed of lost time, thereby showing us the kind of political border Manus has become: one that absorbs undifferentiated time at the interstices between national and international law. The way time is represented in Chauka offers a politics of the senses in terms of what it means for a border to operate spatiotemporally. By aestheticizing life on Manus via his clandestine filmmaking, Boochani presents this border zone of indefinite detention as thickened in terms of both temporal expansion—duration without known end—and density, as a space of bureaucratic miring. A related sense, inextricably linked to time, in which the Manus border zone should be understood to be thickened is in terms of detainees’ brutalization by a carceral logic of interlocking bordered spaces; we learn of a concealed space within the detention space, which is itself encircled by the Manusian public sphere. The character of concealment within an already confined site takes shape through Boochani’s investigation of the center’s notorious isolation cell, nicknamed chauka, which is beyond the reach of his camera phone. Clarifying the layered semantics of the film’s title, Boochani hears a detainee’s allegations of abuse in the chauka cell, painful recollections that are integrated with what the detainee refers to as an “uncanny” experience, when, during his confinement, a chauka bird landed on a tree opposite the cell and sang for several minutes. The man describes the moment’s strange time-magnifying affect: it was “as if nothing else existed for me in this world.” Meanwhile, across several conversations and intercut with scenes from within the detention center, the Australian writer and activist Janet Galbraith talks to two Manusian men, uncovering a local perspective on the relationship between the bird and its prison namesake.

226   Emma Cox While these sections of the film have a semiscripted and slightly stilted quality, valuable insights nevertheless emerge into how the detention center has impacted local and national identity, as refracted through perceived international reputation. The conversations delve into the symbolism of the chauka bird, the names of adjacent islands, Japanese and American military occupations and their resonance as touchstones for cultural memory and local identity. When asked by Galbraith about the chauka cell, the elder man speaks at length of his frustration that the bird has been associated with abuse: “I think they’re abusing that name, chauka.” Like the film’s visual reminders, in the form of church choirs and outdoor services, of the centrality of Christianity to PNG, these conversations situate Australia’s detention practices in continuity with successive colonial and military impositions, building a picture of PNG as a nation whose self-determination has never (yet) materialized. Moreover, both the Galbraith-led conversations and Boochani’s images of island life build up a cumulative picture of a Manusian public sphere. The relationship between public and carceral here is complicated: as filmmaker, Boochani’s capacity to walk the streets of the island, to film choral groups, dances, and other communal scenes, demonstrates his freedom to leave the center’s perimeter, if not the island’s topographical limits. Boochani’s images of life outside the detention center feature almost no nonindigenous people. Manus has scant tourist infrastructure and does not share the heterotopic quality that Joseph Pugliese (2009, 673) identifies of two other island detention sites, Italy’s Lampedusa and Australia’s Christmas Island, both of which, he observes, “signify as paradisiacal tourist destinations, with luxury resorts and, in the case of Christmas Island, even a casino.” Setting out a Foucauldian analysis of the violence of these overlapping zones, Pugliese highlights the obliterating quality of touristic sites on the islands: “the absolutely other space, the penal colony, becomes invisibilized and unintelligible within the enframing discourse of Western tourism” (673). Pugliese adds that the time-space of bordering in this context is total, even when opposed categories of humanity are visible to one another: “On Lampedusa and Christmas Island, these violently disjunctive heterochronies (interminably suspended carceral time versus festival or vacation time) unfold across violently disjunctive heterotopias, the space of the prison/resort. These two incompatible orders of space-time fold silently, invisibly, one into the other yet never breach their respective borders” (673). Chauka shows us that, paradoxically, in the absence of a capitalist spatial paradigm—which, as Sophie Nield (2006, 61) observes, “produces space precisely by cutting it up, marking it with borders and controlling and regulating movement”—resistances to the separation of refugee and local may become spatialized in interesting ways. Faced with the discursive flattening of the signifier Manus as denoting both island and center(s) in an Australian and (increasingly) global public imaginary, an important part of Boochani’s achievement in Chauka is to envision Manus as prison and Manus as public space, and moreover, to posit himself as an artist-prisoner who manages (though we never learn precisely how or on what terms) to move between the two, seeing and being seen. In this he is able to interrupt a dominant conception of Manus as a uniform zone occupied only by faceless employees and forced residents, wholly overseen by the detention center’s privatized carceral paradigm. Chauka, then, records and funnels Boochani’s own resistant engagements with bordered spaces: his stillness, when he films it, is an aesthetic practice; his walking on the island, when he films it, is purposeful; his repeated acts of digital communication, in the context of his clandestine filmmaking, are accretive rather than repetitious, building a viable artistic product that moves over and above borders. In this Boochani undertakes a strategically

Island Impasse   227 similar, though contextually distinct, resistance of the kind Nield (2006, 61) posits in relation to anticapitalist protests, which, as she argues, can “intervene in the illusory homogeneity of abstract space, expose its weaknesses and contradictions, and materialise an alternative space, for however temporary a moment.”

Collaboration and Transnationalism: Acts of Citizenship When, at the start of 2018, the renowned Irish photographer Richard Mosse presented his refugee-themed video installation Incoming (first shown at London’s Barbican) at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, he turned to Boochani to proffer a critique of Australia’s refugee detention system and to protest, along with other artists, the gallery’s relationship with Wilson Security, a former contractor for the detention centers on Manus and Nauru. Mosse incorporated text and voice message from Boochani into his installation, stating, “It is not acceptable that an art organisation like NGV has signed a contract with a company whose hands are so bloody.” By February 2018 the National Gallery of Victoria had canceled its contract with Wilson Security. But before he became a prominent voice of and for Manus refugees, Boochani had struggled to convince potential collaborators of the value of his digital testimony and artistry (and, by implication, of its public interest). In an interview with Boochani, the writer Arnold Zable (2017) points out that prior to teaming up with Sarvestani, “Boochani had sent many images and information to journalists, often with little or no acknowledgment. He was overjoyed in finding a collaborative partner offering to work with him on an equal footing.” Evident here is how capricious the convergence can be between the urgency of a situation and interlocutors willing to listen and respond, but more important, how critical collaboration is to the thickening of the Manus border. Today, of course, professional collaboration is integral to Boochani’s clandestine creative methodology, with an international network of creative, intellectual, and political co-practitioners having formed not just in Australia but also Europe and Iran. Indeed Boochani’s prominence shows up just how far Australia’s border regime implicates a globalized constituency concerned with refugees, the arts, and human rights. The people with whom Boochani works—all using digital methodologies—may be understood to be engaging in a kind of decentralized border resistance in the vein of what Engin F. Isin (2008) theorizes as “acts of citizenship.” These can be understood, Isin explains, as “fundamental ways of being with others” (19) that have, moreover, “transcendental qualities” as “acts” that entail “a rupture in the given” (25). Boochani’s core collaborators, who include Sarvestani, Galbraith, and Zable, as well as the translators Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi and the Iranian playwright Nazanin Sahamizadeh, have all committed sustained periods of time and varying degrees of personal and economic cost in their work with Boochani. Indeed the “transcendental” dimensions of being with others in acts of citizenship should not imply congeniality or ease. For his part, Sarvestani, as Boochani’s co-director and co-writer on Chauka, has spoken about the long depression brought about by the film project and the distress associated with promoting a work whose co-creator remains detained (BFI London 2017). Whatever their costs, Boochani’s close collaborations have been extraordinarily

228   Emma Cox productive. Most renowned is his book, No Friend but the Mountains—whose title borrows a Kurdish expression—a multiform work of more than four hundred pages, composed by Boochani in a series of WhatsApp messages to Mansoubi before being translated by Tofighian.6 Boochani has contributed to other projects, including Sahamizadeh’s play Manus, which had a two-month run in Iran in 2017. In each of these projects, Boochani has been a partner rather than an object of benevolence, and in this way he represents a unique example of collaborative co-agency brokered from a context of immigration detention.

Uneven Mobilities and the Kyriarchal System A striking photograph published in the Walkley Magazine in 2018 (Doherty 2018) encapsulates the contradictions to which Boochani’s life and work are subject. It depicts Boochani filming on his mobile phone just outside Manus detention center’s perimeter, standing on the shoreline, arms outstretched as he focuses on the middle distance. He is watched by other detainees, some behind the center’s fences and others outside them. The photograph was taken by Brian Cassey, an Australian photojournalist who evidently navigated the labyrinthine and exorbitant access routes to Manus for members of the media. His image clearly situates Boochani as artist and, not insignificantly, as subject to some degree of physical liberty within the island’s confines. But we know Boochani cannot leave. The circulation of Chauka instantiates very real differences between the mobility of the art object and the artist in the context of asylum: in its capacity as a mobile visual document it has moved out from its site of origin to prestigious cinematic events and venues such as, indicatively, the BFI London Film Festival, the CCA Glasgow, the Gothenburg Film Festival, the Berliner Festspiele, the Sydney Film Festival, and Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The film, as generated in and through (or more precisely, because of the dynamics built into) an oppressive, static regime, offers a case in point of the artistic exigencies at work in the way differentials of mobility can play out between artist, subject, and artistic product, not to mention between citizen and noncitizen artist. The film’s profile has been heightened as a result of its circulation at major metropolitan arts events, where it is always marketed as a piece of clandestine filmmaking. The disjunction between the traveling artistic product—available for worldwide download via Vimeo—and its still restricted co-creator is inevitably at the fore in terms of what the work is and what it represents. What does the fact of Boochani’s ongoing detention suggest about his work’s material impact? The answer is, of course, sobering. While Boochani’s first mobile phone was confiscated (Zable 2018), he has been in possession of a phone for almost all of his incarceration. There is currently a push for greater control in this area, with the Australian government introducing a bill in 2017 that would define “prohibited things” in detention facilities;7 the federal court ruled in June 2018 to reject it. But Boochani’s concerns about confiscation predate the proposed legislation, indicating that confiscation can occur at any moment. At Boochani’s book launch at UNSW, Mansoubi remarked that Boochani hid his second phone (following the first’s confiscation) inside his mattress. And yet even with his growing

Island Impasse   229 prominence, Boochani has not been a target for repeat confiscation. While this has meant he’s been able to create, advocate, and mobilize from Manus, sending thousands of texts and voice messages and hours of footage to his collaborators, it also seems to signify just how little the Australian government is concerned by his activism. Interventions by opposition politicians have had no material impact: Boochani’s case was raised in Australia’s House of Representatives in February 2017 by Australian Greens senator Adam Bandt,8 and a letter to the foreign minister and the immigration minister requesting permission for Boochani to attend the London Film Festival was signed by four independent and minority politicians, to no avail.9 At a Q&A following a London Film Festival screening in 2017, Sarvestani ventured that a lack of international diplomatic pressure on Australia may partly explain the film’s political inefficacy (BFI London 2017). It is difficult to deny the imperviousness of the governing class to revelations about its systematic border abuse and that Boochani is having an artistic, cultural, and ideological impact, without being commensurately impacted in the practical terms of his liberty. One way that Boochani seems to intellectualize this reality is by situating his own predicament in the context of wider, intersecting oppressions. In an essay in the Saturday Paper where he sets out the core idea and objectives of his book, No Friend but the Mountains, Boochani writes, “One of my main stylistic objectives . . . was to render Manus prison as a complex and twisted phenomenon and introduce a new discourse I call ‘Manus Prison Theory.’ ” Central to this theorization is the kyriarchal system, a concept Boochani borrows from feminist discourse to identify the way bureaucratic oppressions—“rules and regulations of micro-control and macro-control”—wear Manus prisoners down by psychological torture. As Boochani (2018a) explains, “Imprisoned refugees are absorbed into a highly mechanized system—the all-powerful kyriarchal system—and they begin to experience the deterioration of their human identities.” Widening his conceptual aperture, Boochani contends that Manus exemplifies power dynamics that operate in contemporary industrialized societies generally: the “way in which Manus prison has its own life within Australia, the way in which it exists throughout Western society.” Such a theorization complicates the question of where in a territorial sense border violence occurs, and implies that it need not always coincide with territorial division as such. But while there is something productive in perceiving the infiltration of carceral modes of administrative oppression into society at large, I would hesitate to universalize the specific brutality of border politics that a place like Manus administers, and its very real difference from oppressions experienced by non-imprisoned citizens in Australia, Europe, or elsewhere. This, I would argue, is a difference of category and not just of extremity. In other words, Boochani’s “Manus Prison Theory” seems to offer the prospect of an undifferentiated borderland, even as its conceptualization is rooted in the profoundly limited horizons of island detention. As a place at the outer reaches of Australia’s extraterritorial sovereignty, Manus Island is an adjuvant topographical fringe; as a containment site for excluded non-Australians, it reifies Australian citizenship as a protected category and, moreover, mobility as a privilege. It is the ultradurational nature—specifically, the unknown end point—of forced habitation at the Manus detention center (former and current) that demands a recasting of what bordering means for the temporalization of human lives. The work being produced by Boochani and others on Manus Island makes artistic, activist, and historical documents of prolonged detainment’s retemporalizing effect, showing how coercive space is lived (or endured).

230   Emma Cox At the start of this discussion, I characterized Boochani as engaged in the politicizing and aestheticizing of Manus Prison as a durational, time-stilling border that is not functioning according to a legal framework of delineation, of the administration of entry and of exit. Undoubtedly Boochani is correct when he states that Manus refugees present “philosophical and political” subjects for comprehending “how a human, in this case a refugee, is forced to live between the law and a situation without laws” (quoted in Chan, Perera, and Pugliese 2018). In the context of authoritarian bordering, it is precisely here where “we,” a generalized, transnational cohort of audiences to refugees’ communication, need to pay most attention, because perhaps Manus is not a malfunctioning border but rather an exemplar of the border as terminus: a thickened site that mandates the end points of journeys and yet will not administer passage. Until this situation changes, Boochani and his co-detainees can do no more and no less than offer themselves as case studies for our comprehension.

Coda In November 2019 news emerged that Behrouz Boochani had arrived in New Zealand on a one-month visitor’s visa, as a guest at a literary festival in Christchurch. The faultlines between Australian and New Zealand refugee politics, particularly with regard to offshore detention, materialized upon Boochani’s arrival to a mayoral reception and indigenous welcome performed by local Maori (Doherty 2019). While his liberty did not constitute a formal release, Boochani vowed that he would never return to Manus Island. In July 2020 he was granted refugee status in New Zealand.

Notes 1. See Cox (2015), particularly chapter 1, for further details of these events. 2. Manus Island’s detention facilities are male-only. 3. For a discussion of legal responsibility for the PNG refugees, see McDonnell 2018. 4. A Sudanese asylum seeker named Abdul Aziz Muhamat has attracted interest with The Messenger, a podcast series made up of thousands of WhatsApp messages to the Australian journalist Michael Green. The podcast is a cornerstone of the wider activities by an Australian oral history and advocacy collective, Behind the Wire. The oral documents were produced in written form in the book They Cannot Take the Sky, coedited by Michael Green, Andre Dao, Angelica Neville, Dana Affleck, and Sienna Merope (2017). Muhamat, Boochani, and others contributed. An affiliate project of Behind the Wire is the Manus Recording Project Collective’s durational sound project “How Are You Today,” which was part of a 2018 exhibition, Eavesdropping, at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne. Eavesdropping explored the politics of listening by inviting Manus detainees to make a sound recording each day, which were uploaded to the gallery. 5. I extend my thanks to Gillian Whitlock (2018) for generous permission to cite her unpublished work in this chapter. 6. Omid Tofighian (2018) characterizes the book as “an anti-genre” work that “resists classification,” fusing Boochani’s journalism with “psychological analysis, philosophical interpretation, sentimental observation, myth, epic and folklore.”

Island Impasse   231 7. This is the Migration Amendment (Prohibiting Items in Immigration Detention Facilities) Bill (Parliament of Australia 2017). 8. Open Australia 2017. 9. Signatories included Senators Nick Xenophon, Derryn Hinch, and Nick McKim and MP Cathy McGowan.

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chapter 14

M edi a Site s Political Revivals of American Muslim Women Kimberly Wedeven Segall

Ilhan Omar decided to wear her headscarf as a statement of “open identity.” —Sheryl Stolberg, New York Times, December 31, 2018 I need that PayPal, PayPal, PayPal, if you want education. —Mona Haydar, Hijabi, hip-hop hit of 2017

As crowds gather to resist bans on immigration or veiling, mass media has filmed women in hijab as part of these protests. Evident within photographs of veiled bodies, recorded voices, interpreted speech, edited perspectives, tracked sales, and monitored popular hits on internet news stories, outlets of mass media respond to these local protests within a twofold format: their external cues (expectations of audience) and internal codes (their cues for their product and its production). Within mainstream media, this interwoven process— producing narratives, constructing audience—suggests performance elements. Although their ideas about minority groups, such as Arab American women, have not been static within mainstream outlets, their emotional images and repeated narratives flow within greater waves of recent legal bans on immigration. In fact, even if a relatively positive news article, for instance, writing on the protests of American Muslim women, nestles beside a photo of marginalization, this mass media site performs a public insult, even if unintended, what I call a social microaggression. Further failing to understand how these political protests are part of a new political consciousness—what I am calling a revivalist movement and aesthetic—these media have implications for and create ambivalence within marginalized audience members. This chapter looks at mass media as political performance in the sense that selected bodies, images, and voices are part of a production with an intended audience. Alternative media offers different political performances in the sense that small-scale productions of marginalized communities use personal voices to interrupt dominant structures. This chapter offers extended examples of the latter in particular, such as music videos and filmed performances. In my study of the personal aspects of protest as an interruption

236   Kimberly Wedeven Segall of dominant meanings—what I call a social intervention in this digital era—my methodology shows how alternative sites disrupt the smooth narrative of the political, a form of resiliency within their small-scale media networks and communities. Distinguishing between mainstream press and its vernacular forms, I suggest how alternative media performs a distinct psychological and political function—enacting resiliencies, redefining citizenship, reviving racialized-religious solidarities. Contextualizing how mass media needs to be interpreted not for its neutrality but as a site of performance and politics offers a new lens on women and their protests.

Terms and Concepts: Media Sites as Political Performances Mass media circulate images that depict various identities. But how does this process work? Imagine for a moment a portrait of a woman, based on an original piece of art, then changed into multiple copies. When surrounded by thousands of its replicated image, a powerful “aura” develops around the original face of art, provoking a longing for the original (Benjamin 1968). When you see this copy, you know that there may be others who have seen the same image. Similar to reading a newspaper, all of these copies reinforce an idea, not of the individual but of a larger audience, an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991). This face is always suggestive, since it must navigate among other faces, printed long before, like footprints that wear a path over time, with politicized meanings around racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies. Thus an image becomes a piece in a larger fabric, part of a cultural apparatus, to use Adorno’s terms, wherein its visual qualities are fashioned for purchase by the masses. These copies create a new set of meanings and practices—performing identities. Given mass media’s visual fashioning of images and identities, we must rethink the neutrality of news, even though articles may support or resist dominant economic or political norms, because what gets “produced” and purchased is also part of “commercial media industries” (Herman and Chomsky. 1998, xii). Using “incentives, pressures, and constraints,” media determine what is “newsworthy,” hiring editors with similar priorities that fit within the practices of the institution. Mass media favors the social interests of the powerful, given pressures of advertising sources and those who “control and finance” media (xi). These relationships—between those who produce the news and owners of products—have power to limit and expand on certain meanings, in effect, manufacturing consent. As dominant media produce and reproduce certain values and standards, their “conventions” are shaping “economic, cultural, political, and personal worlds” (Dines et al. 2018, xi). When we consider this process, moving from production to product to consumption, we can see distinct ­conventions and norms—a performance, in effect, of identity. Of course, there is not a singular representation nor response to mass media but rather a range of responses to these sites, since individuals might be accepting or rejecting these imagined bodies, or even “remaking them in their own image” (de Certeau  1984, 68). Despite this range of responses, it is important to make visible the ways that individuals are not only “socially embedded” but part of a public identification that has “political effects” (Rai 2015, 1179). There are distinct markers of meaning coded within the body, space, or

Media Sites   237 speech. Although parts of mass media may adhere to or resist certain values, their responses illuminate a set of body codes and norms. These identities, suggests Rai, are difficult to “stabilize”;” they must be “instituted” through various actions. As these repeated actions normalize “gender orders,” as in performance theories by Judith Butler power “reproduces itself ” (Rai 1181). Thus, when identities are performed in public (or published in mass media), it is a type of “cultural production” that can also achieve an “action” (Manning 2014, 190). Suggesting that mass and alternative media sites embody political action, my approach contrasts dangerous inclinations to equate news with neutrality, or connect all cyberspace as disembodied forms, unconnected to time, or, more idealistically, to assert that all are purely democratic expressions. Mass media “propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism,” what Lisa Nakamura (2002, 3) calls “cyber-typing.” Even as marginalized subjects enact certain racial formations, they are subjected to ways that technologies display them, since “women and people of color are both subjects and objects of interactivity” (Nakamura 2008, 16). Identities are shifting because of the internet, claims Sherry Turkle (1995, 9), with a changing relationship between a person and their presence on a computer, a “second self.” But even while racial identities are being constructed within cyberspace, others mistake mass media as completely credible and color-blind, part of a “post-racial” society (Nilsen and Turner.  2014, 1). Given uneven access to technology, education, and vocation, it is critical to trace how alternative media is used by minority women, forming new types of gender capital within performances of status and value.

Mass Media’s Performance of Microaggressions Overall, for American Muslims, incidents of bias increased in the last quarter of 2018 by 83 percent, and the number of hate crimes increased 21 percent (Hooper 2018). In over one thousand reports of bias, 57 percent were clearly linked to racial bias, while 43 percent displayed blatant religious bias, often reported by women who chose to wear hijab. While lines of religious and racial discrimination are often blurred for American Muslims, these incidents of microaggressions are part of a “system of oppression” (Sue 2010, 3). These insults can come in everyday forms that are verbalized, in physical body language, or in social structures, communicating “hostile, derogatory or negative messages to target persons” (3). Demeaning marginalized groups, microaggressions imply that certain people do not belong or fit within the collective majority. This structure of oppression has a “powerful impact” not only on mental health but also access to healthcare, education, and employment. Rising from these “contradictory meta-communications” (3), this widespread oppression constitutes an attack, and mass media forms part of this trauma—what I call media microaggressions—with unintended marginalization or overt verbalizations. It is important to recognize mass media as part of this oppressive assault when analyzing identifications. Given rising numbers of American Muslims reporting discrimination, there is surprisingly “little known or written about their experiences with psychological well-being” and “identity development” (Nadal et al. 2012, 26). What is also needed is more understanding of “individual and group processes of dealing” with these attacks (Nadal et al. 2010, 305).

238   Kimberly Wedeven Segall By studying alternative media as a form of coping, my psychological and political study fills an important gap, suggesting resilience through alternate performance sites.

Mass Media and American Muslim Women Racialized bodies have long been economically exploited (McClintock 1995). These images filter into our “ways of seeing,” because “history always constitutes the relation between a present and its past” (Berger 1972: 11). For American Muslim women, mass media strictures meaning, especially within their protests, by framing these groups within dual contexts, such as the Arab Spring, a description of uprisings in hope of democracy, alongside former and current wars in the Middle East. Even though protests could be viewed as positive points toward democratic agency, protests by Muslims have been shrouded by fears in mass media that any revival, ultimately, turns into an extremist religious revival. When such an event is recorded, as in a filmed protest on the streets of Syria, the audience has a sense of participating, feeling affected by the event, entering a “vicarious relationship” with the protesters (Auslander 2008, 110). But while the experience feels “live,” it is what Philip Auslander calls “decentered experiences of liveness” within mass media (111). But this decentering of experience, as the journalist Rania Abouzeid (2018 358) explains, exists because certain memories, histories, and gendered perspectives are not published in mass media. Indeed women’s political and religious revivals, as in Syria during this time of violent expulsion, remain relatively unexplored by mass media. Journalists “see Syrians for a moment in time”—in a portrait, say, of a child refugee on the beach—but “we don’t know what really happened before they got on the beach,” Abouzeid contends (Slen 2018). There have been three decades of misreporting on the Middle East, claims Michael Rubin (2009, 47) in his chapter from the edited book Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion, because mass media focuses on the fighting among religions, or even sects, while missing the complexities of the conflict. Thus, while the Western press captures moments of protest and scenes of violence amid the ghost-like ruins of shattered buildings, absent are religious nuance, ramshackled memories, and their own changing political affiliations. These blind spots in mass media are transferred to American Muslim sites of identity, especially for veiled women. This graphing has two parts: the “surveyor,” who sees these images, and the “surveyed,” who recognizes that these (politicized) images are supposed to relate to one’s self (Berger 1972, 46). Within this “survey,” how a woman appears to others within mass media is “wrapped up in ideas of material or vocational success” (46). Mass media surveys individuals, and in the case of the female Muslim body it turns the veiled woman into a watched object, mistaken (almost always) as somewhat extreme. This gaze splits identities of Muslim women: between marginalized images (microaggressive) and the women’s own refusal of these images (resiliencies). Thus, even while considering that mainstream press in the United States can encourage protest—a negotiation of laws and responses by people (Ridout 2008, 12)—Jean Baudrillard’s (2008) model asks how far the press can or even should break free from our own structures of class, power, and racialized images. With its numerous images, mass media can work as a way to unify, according to Guy Debord (2006), a collective understanding of a group, a nationalizing form; however, its necessarily limited form can control or even deceive members of a population. Obscuring women’s political consciousness

Media Sites   239 by filming a spectacle may seem, at first glance, like a minor matter, yet given the ethnic eradication and economic “brutality” (Sassen 4, 2014) following our closed borders, these modern economic states, reified within these images, affirm themselves. In terms of reception, when we choose to click on a site, open a link, purchase a product, join a network, these choices are not random, since we are influenced by class, gender, ethnic structures that shape us—part of the power of our habitat, what Bourdieu (1977) terms habitus. As mass media stage certain meanings with repeated acts that may resist or conform to privilege, these formations are part of a marketing of goods and identities, a society formed around spectacle (Debord 2006). Mass media film protest as part of the stories that society tells about “itself—about its origin, challenges and destiny” (Taylor 1997, 21). Even while disrupting current politics, filming a spectacle of protest suggests certain group identities and restricted memories. For instance, a camera exposed her blue bra when police brutalized a veiled female protestor in Cairo; Western media showed this image, but not Ghada Kamal’s name nor her story (Kraidy 2016, 177). In effect, while filming communal dissent, this limited footage mediates against certain types of remembrances. What remains a challenge within such representations of Muslims is that any image that does not specifically work at deconstructing stereotypes may unintentionally reinforce them. Never alone, these images circulate as ways of coding the Muslim body, tracing not only to the earliest films and colonial travel writing but to a “terrorist body,” viewed as potentially violent and sexually pathologized (Puar 2007, xiii). Similarly political action by Muslim communities continues to be filtered through an exotic lens (Said 1994) or Western distrust (S. Ahmed 2015). Perpetrating typologies of oppressed women strangled by their religion—what Lyotard (1984) theorizes as a political structure to interpret our lives and our era—mass media continue to ignore medieval representations of Muslim women as cunning negotiators of political power (Kahf 1999, 4). Therefore, Western anxiety over Muslim identity, itself a metanarrative in the United States, continually surfaces in distorted angles of images, a type of subtle mapmaking, a code for how we read people and places.

Using Performance Methods: Revivals and Reciprocities Before considering a larger framework of mass and alternative media, it is important to begin with my own journey, since these protests filter through the voice of the researcher. My first political rally was in 1993 in Iraq, in an event that was filmed then played on a Kurdish news station. Khadija, my landlady, took me by the arm and walked me down to the procession. Although I was clearly an outsider, working with a Swiss relief project, after the First Gulf War, I was seen as an interested witness who had things to learn—an in-between position. Later in the night, the women, watching the rally on television and handing out gold-rimmed glasses of tea, were the most vocal, speaking with pride of “Kurdistan.” Watching footage on the local news of the procession of cars and crowds—all this in a time before Facebook—was not yet in either my political or feminist vocabulary. So, for me, Muslim women are activists, powerful and sure. As my experiences developed, so too my methodology, the personal voice, included my perspective and relationship with others.

240   Kimberly Wedeven Segall The personal voice as a strategy—neither an insider to Islam nor pretending to be the detached outsider—intervenes in between the assumed objectivity of mass media’s lens. But perhaps mass media can never do justice to the wide range of nuanced individual narratives, evident in research on performance workshops and public events. In collaboration with two Arab American women, Khawla Hadi and Marwa al-Mtowaq, I facilitated a series of workshops and public venues from 2003 to 2013, sharing ideas, stories, and collective bonds. Khawla and Marwa selected pieces of poetry to read in Arabic, then in English, and then expanded on the poems in order to tell their own stories. Describing painful religious microaggressions they had experienced, especially after 9/11, they have followed pathways of political revival. Speaking of early exile as an Iraqi, then later as an American visiting Baghdad, they currently proclaim their American affinities. After these workshops, I returned to northern Iraq, completing my book on performing democracy, and began working in 2019 in collaboration with Aneelah Afzali, the director of the American Muslim Empowerment Network, in another forum in the States. At a coffee shop in Seattle, she asked me to facilitate a “Telling Our Stories” workshop over a series of three months. Aneelah recruited a group of thirty women who came to various portions of the workshop. In a room at one of the largest mosques and centers in Washington (the Muslim Association of Puget Sound), I asked them, “What story would you like to tell?” (figure 14.1)

figure 14.1.  Workshop for American Muslim Empowerment Network. Nashwa Zafar, Suad Farole, Miyase Katircioglu, Fetiya Omer, Amenah Stewart, Theresa Crecelius, Shama Farag, Kimberly Segall, Rokaih Vansot, Dina Al-Bassyiouni, Aneelah Afzali. Muslim Association of Puget Sound, Washington, 2019. Photo by Abigail Austin. Used with Permission.

Media Sites   241 Table 14.1  Aneelah’s Framework: A Chart of Public Issues and their Implicit Bias Public Issues

Implicit Bias

1. Women’s rights in Islam 2. Jihad 3. Shariah 4. Other faith traditions

Assumes that Islam oppresses women Assumes that Islam is violent Assumes loyalty to religious principals over US Constitution Assumes antagonism to Christianity or Judaism

Building their stories in community, they received specific feedback from their ­ irector, Aneelah, on which parts of their stories got “stuck in the mud.” This mire d implies to me various microaggressive topics about women’s rights and Islam. Aneelah structured this quagmire of painful questions (and racist assumptions) in four categories (table 14.1). In their thirty responses, most of the American Muslim women noted micro-attacks on their religious identity as women; I call these gendered aggressions. Only category 1 was mentioned. But all of the women discussed their experiences when asked, “Where are you really from?” When Aneelah described being born in a refugee camp in Afghanistan, she recalled verbal attacks, such as “We’re going to bomb your country back into the stone ages.”1 As a child she was fairly secular, but these series of attacks alongside reductive images in mass media influenced her own revival. The first in her family to attend college, then law school, Aneelah described a Harvard Law professor who connected an Islamic threat to Israel with his Muslim students. Giving up her law practice in 2013, she felt called to her “path” of activism. Her family was quite anxious about her spiritual revival and her sudden departure from her legal practice. But Aneelah, in her lawyer’s suit with matching pink scarf, proclaimed “women’s rights and empowerment in Islam” as a key reason for her own spiritual revival. Unlike mass media’s spectacular view of protest, Aneelah is quite clear: she “had a spir­it­ ual transformation” after reading through the Koran, she said, and cited her favorite verse, also etched in a sign at Harvard Law School, about the importance of “justice” over all else. Reflecting on her own path, she asked the group to discuss “a powerful transformation in [their] life.” All of the women discussed the trauma of microaggressive attacks (and one hate crime) along with their resulting spiritual and political transformations. Many narrated their recent choice to wear the veil; others spoke of their decision to join this empowerment group or to protest with Black Lives Matter. At each of the public panels (at the university or mosque), Aneelah selected participants across the color line—Arab, Afghan, African American Muslim women—to show their interracial solidarity. Embodied in workshops, public panels, filmed versions, advertisements on Facebook, notices on Instagram, these women performed their political revivals. This solidarity contrasts with the more spectacular images and political ideas within the mainstream media. The dominant press embodies religious awakenings as a source of global alarm, especially as any revival—including demonstrations of female piety alongside renewed social and political claims—is viewed by many Westerners as extremist. Haroon Ullah (2017, xxiii), in a recent study, argues that it is social media that recruits these so-called

242   Kimberly Wedeven Segall extremists; however, what is easily passed over in his work Digital World War is the shifting identifications of Islamists, whose views are not fixed. Then, too, Ullah notes how media have also been used by moderates to gather supporters, often far from the political center (xiii). In effect, what is being neglected is the way that mass media is used not only to capture facts but to stage bodies, images, and voices, selling to an envisioned audience—that is, as a performance mode. Filming not a performance of a revivalist consciousness but rather mass media spectacles of dissent, they seek what Tarek El-Ariss (2019) calls a simple “political agenda” (9), missing how bodies perform “affective force” on the streets and “political anxieties” on new digital stages (4). Although dominant structures perform both negative and positive ideas of Muslim protest, Aneelah’s group embodies more nuanced, religiously founded, political consciousness through alternative circuits, public stages, digital webs. Given women’s distinct desires within religious activism, religious subjectivities are not fixed, argues Sherine Hafez (2011, 5 ). Muslim women cannot be boxed or chained to a “single paradigm” (5)—a mythic, uninterrupted process—blind to forces of history and society (4). Although Western media has filmed veiled women as part of protests, as in the Arab Spring movement after 2011, their protesting voices and actions are stifled by convention, a limited performance. What further remains unembodied are political responses, what ethnographers trace as a “resurgence” of Islamism, an increase in veiling (L.  Ahmed 2011, 4). Overlooked or dismissively labeled fundamentalist, mass media miscues this new consciousness with its artistic and affective force—part of what I call a revivalist aesthetic. This “awakening” is part of a larger idea that “being Muslim is not enough,” that one must commit to a more “just society” (Mahmood 2005, 9). Indeed, female practices, such as veiling, as forms of agency suggest that the wearing of the veil, a form of cultural work, acts as an unspoken contract, akin to Austin’s (1975) and Butler’s (2015) elaborations of a “speech act.” As women in the da’wa, or piety movement in Cairo, performing a powerful “personhood and politics,” find empowerment within practices of religion, this does not require a liberal feminism, since the “cultivation of submission” produces “transformative” effects (Mahmood 2005, xi). These revivals, then, emerging out of the ruins of political violence, extend beyond veiling, since internal beliefs, alongside practices of devotion, form part of one’s very self. These subtle ethnographies of religion have been largely ignored by mass media, and performances of revival are not necessarily the same within the United States. Although ethnographies chart current religious dynamics, what is still needed, further extending this approach, is analysis of how Afghan American and Arab American women are actively navigating identities through public performances of their political revivals. Within this performance lens, the personal voice of participants and facilitator must remain active, not hidden in the supposed objectivity of the ethnographer’s gaze. Unlike mass media’ spectacles, this revivalist movement needs attention, not just circulating in diverse forms but protesting political bans and rapping against white supremacy, calling forth a new perspective on performing memory, resilient nationalism, and interracial solidarity. Ideally, media should avoid cropping pictures of Muslim women and their hijabs, restraining visions of politics, pulsating instead within the body of spiritual ideals and political ideas—a protest of expulsions, a performance of resistance, a revival breaking (unexpectedly) from its frame.

Media Sites   243

Veil (W)rapping: Alternative Media Even after establishing that the mass media performs its peculiar reenactment of the past in news media—its particular claims in its own unique location, its own separate identity—it is not all-powerful. What we are witnessing in alternative media are perforations of identities, oscillating within cultural forms, offering unexpected claims of religion and racialized belonging, as in a rap video, a revivalist activism. Responses to these forms, however, are not necessarily standardized across generations, as with Zara, a twenty-year-old, loving the protest against white supremacists: “So even if you hate it, I still (w)rap my hijab.” Meanwhile her mother whispered to me, “If you’re going to sing about hijab, don’t wear bright lipstick and rub your pregnant belly.” Unlike her daughter, this mother’s identity related to her political response after 9/11, fighting for her sons, who were bullied at school, then targeted by the police. Her political fervor—part of “polymorphic” forms of revival (Husain 2003, 55)— varies from the envisioned community of her daughter. Revival rap videos offer alternative communities. Mona Haydar’s rap video begins with three women, frozen like statues in a still frame of a harem, only to disrupt these images with the singing of an expectant mother, Haydar herself, and then with dancing. This spectacle, followed by a disassembling of exoticism, shows these women in public spaces—in hallways or rooms—in a series of poses that resemble a portrait, a harem envisioned by a European painter, wherein “you only see Oriental,” as the rap critique croons (Haydar 2017). But this vibrant protest of the veiled singers and dancers, the hijabis, simultaneously replicating and rejecting their exoticized framework, is starkly contrasted to the set—three immobile white European beauties, loosely clothed. Interrupting their silhouette, moving to the rhythm, these dancing hijabis produce an alternative site of identity. But in this media performance, wrapping and rapping are not only actions with political effects, but also locations of a revival. Veiling works as a speech act. It is a contract of belonging: the individual identity of the first person, the I, performs amid a larger group of multiethnic women—the group identification of American Muslim women in their veils. They (w)rap. This action of veiling, then, lays claim to an identity, to belonging in a network of women. In this performative, “I wrap” reminds us of Austin’s claim that the contract in marriage is enacted by saying “I do.” Not merely words, both statements form a bond, becoming not only an act but also an action. By investing in their action of wrapping their hijab, both as a form of agency and as a location of belonging, while performing selected identities in fashionable hijab styles, these women embody their nationalism, gender, religion, and resistance. Gazing with agency at the camera, as strong subjects, having selected clothing that reinforces their individuality and diversity—pinks, prints, stripes, folds, colors—are multicultural women who do not manage to appear as a group on CNN and Fox. It is, rather, an alternative medium, like blogs and music videos, circulating also in online magazines and postings on Facebook that formulate sites of political performance. At the same time, this rap video, “Hijabi” on YouTube, refashions ideas of black re­sist­ ance. In an interview Haydar tells Tsafi Saar (2017) that she used social media to gather several Muslim black women for her video, that shows numerous forms of wrapping the  hijab, including the “hoodjab,” where the scarf wraps one’s hair with a bun in back (Khabeer 2016, 15). Naming this style in such a fashion unveils how “blackness” becomes

244   Kimberly Wedeven Segall incorporated not as “bad hijab” but as “pious fashion” (Bucar 2017, 51), part of American Muslim women’s practices of music through hip-hop. Although only two of the women in the video have wrapped their hijab in the style of the African diaspora, the brown scarf wrapped back, the tan scarf woven up higher, the multiple ways of wrapping the hijab suggest the complex ways that veiling becomes part of an “aesthetics of self-making” with “blackness” as part of this “blueprint” (Khabeer 2016, 115). Naming a number of groups— Sufis, Sunnis, Shiites, Sudanis, Iraqis, Canadians, Palestinians, Americans—Haydar (2010) pushes for a women’s revival that protests “white supremacy.” At the same time, this rap video suggests that “blackness and Muslimness merge to challenge and reconstitute U.S. racial hierarchies” (Khabeer 2016, 25). But this racial-religious solidarity also performs a revival aesthetic. Within revival rap this frame of black alterity refutes the stereotype of Muslim women as “foreign” threats, since their style of music, their many shades of blackness, and their American-accented English provide an irrevocable claim of belonging, even as the song on racial microaggressions shatters any color-blind lens that suggests the United States is a “postracial utopia” (Khabeer 2016, 25). It comes as no surprise, then, to discover that when Haydar, who quotes the black Muslim activist Malcolm X on her website, confronts the camera in her speech “My Hijab, My Choice,” just over her shoulder hangs a poster of her hero also facing the camera (Fusion Media Group 2017). This network of “social and symbolic links,” where “shared interests” and “expectations” create attachment—what Stefano Allievi (2003, 8) terms “neo-communities”—is, in this case, a vision of female revival. But here it is blackness that is the site of struggle. Mirroring a larger revival, this rap music rejects microaggressions and appeals to varied audiences. Garnering over five million hits on YouTube “Hijabi” is one of the Top Ten Protest Songs of 2017 in Billboard’s rankings (Stubblebine 2017). As represented by the large numbers of black participants in this video, African Americans are about 40 percent of the American Muslim population (L.  Ahmed  2011, 11–2). Uniting black women and various ethnicities in their common practice of wearing the hijab, Haydar’s protest video rejects inquiries by the dominant culture: “What does your hair look like?” Does that scarf “make you sweat?” The video becomes a political act, playing a role in producing “social selves” (Butler 2015, 2). While Islamist revivals are often conceived as originating in the Middle East and spreading outward, there are unexpected revivals that do not follow this model, probing, localizing, networking instead. After all, why should revivals flow down only one geographic incline? What ethnographic slopes do we assume in these women’s revivals? Within local networking, further spreading this alternative lens of a rap video, pulses the beat of social microaggressions, but this time they are named, coped with, and altered within resilient performances. Aesthetic approaches can also become a “way of thinking,” a way to understand the world, marking out a current “crisis,” enacting an “intervention” (Jestrovic  2006, 11). Embodied in this video, Haydar’s solidarity gathers within a revival movement. “I know Muslim women who started wearing a hijab because they want to be in solidarity with their sisters,” she argues (Chowdhury  2017). And in fact, veiling has increased in the United States, for while very few wore hijab in the 1990s, women have begun to wear it as “justice for minorities” (L. Ahmed 2011, 8). This revival of American Islam seeks a society of justice based on a quest of faith and politics, and it is the women, as this video indicates, leading the way in a surprising revival not just of religious roots but for the light-skinned rapper, as

Media Sites   245 a construction of alternative citizenships through minority justice. Not only a piece of clothing, the hijab claims solidarity within a sisterhood of the marginalized. Although she acknowledges a few cases where women are forced to wear the hijab, overall Haydar contends that wearing the veil is a choice (Chowdhury 2017); indeed, in her religious resistance against white hegemony, her choice of veiling and filming enacts “strength in unity,” a powerful bond (w)rapping through the hijab.

Mass Media Case Study: Performing Social Microaggressions True, mass media do focus, at times, on protest, highlighting how one of the first two Muslim women elected in Congress, Ilhan Omar, led the charge to allow head coverings on the floor of the House of Representatives. However, in her New York Times article, Sheryl Stolberg (2018, A5) reports that after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Omar decided to start wearing the headscarf as a statement of “open identity.” This open identity, part of a new revivalist consciousness, is neither explained nor expanded upon in the article. Similarly, in a second example in the New York Times, only a single line hints at a growing revival in the protest against a ban on the face veil in Europe (Sorensen and Specia 2018). While a lone young Muslim woman, Sabina, is quoted, there is no commentary on her words. Wearing the veil, claims Sabina, represents a “spiritual choice” that has become a “sign of protest.” Thus this law will inspire women to “stick more firmly to [their] faith and niqab and encourage more women to wear it.” Buried in this article, like precious shards in the ruins of politics, glimmer Islamic faith and protest and veiling. In this case, more veiling, not less, speaks of resistance. But the focus by the two journalists, Martin Sorensen and Megan Specia, is not on increased veiling but on bans on hijabs—part of a larger trend, they note, following Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and parts of Switzerland, all being upheld by the European Courts of Human Rights. While their report traces the growing trend of banning the veil, what is less remarked upon are growing trends of women’s resistance—a revival in veiling as an expression of dissent. A photo accompanying the article, taken after the face veil was banned, shows protestors gathered in Copenhagen, but the image also inflicts micro-insults (Figure 14.2). The closest image, slightly blurred, is of a woman with her niqab beneath her eyes. Nearby a woman with a hijab looks into the distance. But staring directly at the viewer, hand on hip, further back in the crowd, a white woman in a sleeveless shirt wears a loosely wrapped blue paisley scarf that does not fully cover her hair and symbolizes neither her faith nor her piety. Yet it is her appropriation that serves as a symbol of resistance to the government in Denmark. The rest of the women serve as her framework. But why this photo? Of the many pictures taken of the event, why did the New York Times select this photo to speak for these women? Analysis of media must begin with a simple understanding. Media does more than replicate events; of necessity it focuses on certain bodies. In this photograph, the only woman confronting the camera, with her serious expression and glasses, is very young and very white. Captured by Mads Rasmussen and selected by the New York Times, it is she who is the object of our gaze, the center of our attention. The

246   Kimberly Wedeven Segall

figure 14.2.  Photo by Mads Claus Rasmussen via Reuters. With permission from Reuters, 2019.

camera is part of a system of mediation, feeding the consumption of news, and this appeals to white readers in particular—a frequent trend of Western media. So even as this media realigns citizenship in multiethnic terms and encourages its readers to protest legislative bans against Muslims, accomplishing important political work, it simultaneously limits the kinds of political understandings so that the press may unintentionally filter how we view Muslim women. In their critique of how mass media depicts Muslims after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, academics have analyzed “when the press fails” (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007). These critics have accused mass media of failing to represent Islamic regions and peoples, because perceptions that were published sought to “culturally” resonate with a Western audience (12). Even as such images seek to resist recent legislative bans on immigration, it is ironic that these very forms of mediation serve as the “lapdog of government” (8). While the Rasmussen photo highlights the need for resistance, refusing the ban on the bodies of Muslims, the Muslim women in this shot form a rather silent, blurred framework. Marginalized. Therefore, even as the rights of the press need to be embraced, these types of mediation must be analyzed. We must continually sharpen the shot, hone the pen, to provide critical coverage of the growing revival of women’s activism in and beyond the United States. Even as mainstream media conforms to certain norms in society, embodying and claiming expectations set up by others as a type of discipline (Foucault 1995), these dominant circuits should not diminish hope in alternative sites of mediation: creative resistance of gendered

Media Sites   247 and religious affiliation. Hopeful too as bodies gather, they “construct public space” (Baker and Blaagaard.  2016, 3), and their actions, part of how they perform themselves and their ideas, address public issues. But these protests reside in physicality, and mass media is its own location, which is not the same as the initial location. In effect, these dominant outlets offer a second, separate site. Thus, even as microaggressions in mass media are part of a “social formation,” not part of an individual’s “idea,” mass media does not block out change, since ideas transform within a “collective process and practice, not an individual one” (Hall 2018, 90). Unfolding in this era of immigration and veiling bans, these alternative media sites spread their resilient wings in tropes of transformation—a performance of political revival.

Note 1. Author interview with Aneelah Afzali, Seattle, WA, November 13, 2019.

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chapter 15

The Force of th e Som atic Nor m Women as Space Invaders in the UK Parliament Nirmal Puwar

Political space constitutes a range of sites, from the street, the square, and the home to different types of institutions. This chapter uses theorizations of performativity and space to analyze one of the most formal sites of politics, national representative parliaments, specifically Westminster. The phrase “mother of all parliaments” relays both the colonial global scope as well as the gendered symbolism of Westminster as a political site. This discussion builds on feminist and critical race and postcolonial studies to reflect on how the “ideal” figure of political leadership has been conceptually and historically constituted both in European political thought and in political structures. Space and performance are essential elements of this chapter and are treated relationally, as being co-constituted. Space can, for instance, be a framing device, while the contours of spatiality can be opened up and the barriers pushed further through the bodies in performance in space. At the same time space is not simply a container; it has dynamic properties, which enable it to be multidimensional and sedimented. Thus parliaments across the world with the same architectural shape can be performed in very different ways, due to the bodies, customs, rituals, and contests that appear within them (Rai 2010). Concern with diversity in parliamentary institutions is often preoccupied with counting how many different types of bodies—women and minority ethnic, for instance—are in the upper layers of organizations. What is often overlooked are the very conditions of coexistence. The analysis of women and racialized minorities in the UK parliament points to the importance of looking beyond easy notions of diversity that focus on counting heads. Having interviewed and observed women and minority ethnic bodies in senior positions in the state, both in Parliament and in the senior civil service, I have been able to identify several processes that indicate how the white masculine figure continues to be the often invisible somatic norm of representative leadership against which “others” are measured.

252   Nirmal Puwar Since the start of the twentieth century there has been a historic increase in the presence of women in spaces of authority in the public realm, positions that have previously been predominantly occupied by (white) masculinities. The gendered shift is uneven across organizations and sectors. A glass ceiling has nevertheless been cracked quite significantly with respect to gender. The cultural landscape of the public sphere has thus been the site of a change that warrants close attention. Surveying across space and time, the feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 185) notes the changed dynamics of being a “space invader”: I can remember very clearly a sight which often used to strike me when I was nine or ten years old. I lived then on the outskirts of Manchester, and “Going into Town” was a relatively big occasion; it took over half an hour and we went on the top deck of a bus. On the way into town we would cross the wide shallow valley of the River Mersey, and my memory is of dank, muddy fields spreading away into a cold, misty distance. And all of it—all of these acres of Manchester—was divided up into football pitches and rugby pitches. And on Saturdays, which was when we went into Town, the whole vast area would be covered with hundreds of little people, all running around after balls, as far as the eye could see. (It seemed from the top of the bus like a vast, animated Lowry painting, with all the little people in rather brighter colours than Lowry used to paint them, and with cold red legs.) I remember all this very sharply. And I remember, too, it striking me very clearly—even as a puzzled, slightly thoughtful little girl—that all this huge stretch of the Mersey flood plain had been entirely given over to boys. I did not go to those playing fields—they seemed barred, another world (though today, with more nerve and some consciousness of being a space-invader, I do stand on football terraces—and love it).

To be of and in a space, while at the same time not quite belonging to it, is an experience closely applicable to women in elite spaces in political organizations. The sheer maleness of particular public spaces and women’s experience of increasingly occupying them, while still being conscious of being “space invaders,” even as they enjoy these places is vividly captured by Massey. Thinking more broadly in terms of organizations, women have been taking up positions that have historically and conceptually not included them, presenting us with the phenomenon of hitherto outsiders becoming insiders. This is a tenuous location within which processes of invisibility and visibility ensue. Intersectionality involves tools of analysis that enable us to be attentive to simultaneous modes of inclusion and exclusion. There is a complex configuration of existence, with privileges and processes of marginality layering each other. There is both change and sedimentation occurring when we consider women in Parliament. Women have been slowly entering the (political) house that was built for men. In the UK general election of 2017, 208 women were elected to Westminster, an increase from the 191 elected in 2015. Proportionally women now constitute 29 percent of members of Parliament. There are considerable party differences; at the 2017 election, there were 119 Labour Party women MPs and 67 from the Conservative Party. No longer are women outsiders fighting to be allowed in. Still, though, the weight of the past is not yet past. Legally both Houses were built for men of specific masculinities. Even as women are in the process of becoming the norm, what Dahlerup (2014) dubbed a substantive “critical mass,” they are still performatively donning a political lion skin, as described by Carole Pateman (1995), which has been designed for men. Thus, since the political lion skin is perceived to be

The Force of the Somatic Norm   253 “ill-fitting” for women, they are not quite the ideal occupants. When women wear the male lion skin they are considered to be unbecoming in that skin. And this is precisely the case as there is an undeclared somatic norm upon which the universal figure of leadership is premised. As Pateman mentions, the civil body is “fashioned after only one of the two bodies of humankind” (34). The universal political individual is declared to be disembodied. The public sphere continues to be beset by the binary dichotomies civilized/uncivilized, mind/body, nature/culture, and reason/emotion, which impact who comes to be a naturalized figure of leadership. Women and racialized others are heavily associated with the body and uncivility, as well as sites of the body, such as the domestic sphere and “natural” states of existence globally, in the colonies, for instance. There is a fantasy that some masculine figures can rise above the uncivility of bodies and the domestic sphere to become rational leaders of civility. Speaking of the body in the work of the grandfathers of parliamentary representation, especially Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Elizabeth Grosz (1995, 106) highlights the morphological dimensions in the constitution of the body politic: The state parallels the body; artifice mirrors nature. The correspondence between the body and the body politic is more or less exact and codified: the King usually represents the Head of the State; the populace is usually represented as the body. The law has been compared to the body’s nerves; the military to its arms, commerce to its legs or stomach, and so on. The exact correspondences vary from text to text. However, if there is a morphological correspondence between the artificial commonwealth (the Leviathan) and the human body in this pervasive metaphor of the body politic, the body is rarely attributed a sex. What, one might ask, takes on the metaphoric function of the genitals in the body politic? What kind of genitals are they? Does the body politic have a sex?

The body politic and the masculine realm generally are modeled on phantasmatic constructions of the male body. Moira Gatens (1996, 25) writes, “The modern body politic is based on an image of a masculine body which reflects fantasies about the value and capacities of that body.” Anne Phillips (1993, 62) states that “conventional political thought has offered us men in a gender-free guise, and that all talk of universal rights or citizenship or rules has taken one sex alone as the standard, leaving the other one out in the cold.” Any discussion of men in the public realm also needs to be alert to heterogeneous and competing forms of masculinities, as well as femininities. The type of fraternal relations that dwell in the House of Commons or in fact in any organization are not given but are produced. The architecture, timing, leisure activities, working procedures, political priorities, and bodily performances make each institution the type of gendered and racialized place it is. Connell (1995) mentions that, although the hegemonic masculinity of the men in state legislatures has changed over time, older hegemonic forms continue to overlay the new. Situating the specificity of masculinities within the state, Connell contends, “Gentry masculinity was closely integrated with the state. . . . The history of European/American masculinity over the last two hundred years can broadly be understood as the splitting of gentry masculinity, its gradual displacement by new hegemonic forms, and the emergence of an array of subordinated and marginalized masculinities” (190–1). To keep the notion of women’s exclusion in historical context we need to remember that women have not been the only ones to be excluded from the fraternal social contract. Gatens (1996, 23) makes this point clearly when she says, “At different times, different kinds of beings have been excluded from the pact, often simply by virtue of their corporeal specificity. Slaves, foreigners, women, the

254   Nirmal Puwar conquered, children, the working classes have all been excluded from political participation, at one time or another, by their bodily specificity.” While feminists have criticized political theorists for overlooking and concealing the masculine image upon which the body politic and hypothetical debates of the body politic are based, there are also racial exclusions that underpin notions of humanity, democracy and the political subject, which have not always been acknowledged within feminist scholarship. Charles Mills (1997), along with other scholars, has stressed that race was a “central shaping constituent” of Western Enlightenment ideals (14) and that from its actual genesis “the polity was in fact a racial one” (57). He notes, “There are bodies impolitic whose owners are judged incapable of forming or fully entering into a body politic” (53). One could argue that racialized bodies of color are perceived to be even more “impolitic” or ill-fitted for political leadership than white female bodies. Barack Obama, for instance, was consistently and continually treated as an anomaly, a space invader, a body out of place and not quite fitting for the role of president. When he visited Westminster for the first time, which was at the height of his popularity globally, he was received as a slick, “black cool” celebrity political figure (Puwar and Sharma 2013). Although Obama donned the political lion skin, he continued to be treated rather like Homi Bhabha’s (1994) figure of the Indian in the British Civil Service, who articulates the right “civilised” words but whose legitimate tone is considered to be coming out of a body that is not quite right (for political leadership). Interestingly Donald Trump has none of the intellectual or oratory qualities Obama has, far from it. Yet he is still able to trail-blaze as a global figure of the Stars and Stripes of North America. In fact, his specific white masculinity grants him political immunity from all his political eruptions and blunders. The same can be said for Boris Johnson, as the British Prime Minister who has overseen the disastrous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. There is an ontological security attached to their masculinity and whiteness that is absolutely tenuous for racialized as well as gendered figures of political leadership. Over time Westminster has been very slowly changing so that the ideal figure of citizenship has been amended beyond the human shape granted to leaders and citizens by political theorists of democracy such as Locke, Rousseau, and J. S. Mill (Goldberg 2002) to include the hitherto excluded. Now women, ethnic and racialized minorities, and the disabled enter these institutions as legitimate representatives. Nevertheless the infinitesimal modes of measurement are such that the historical and conceptual weight of the ideal figure of leadership still pervades the allocation of authority and judgment. Legitimacy is not only a legal category; it is also a social category, especially with respect to who has the legitimate right to belong, represent, and lead. Some bodies are still considered to be a more natural fit than other bodies. Particular processes illuminate how women and racialized bodies are not the ideal occupants due the ways in which both spaces and bodies have been historically figured. Their presence can’t be taken for granted, as they are in the tenuous location of being both insiders and outsiders. In fact, rhetorically speaking, they are space invaders (Puwar 2004; Massey  1994). Newcomers may enter the public domain, but they are still not the somatic norm. They arrive and take up space, but their occupation of space is still contradictory and tenuous. Not being the somatic norm, they are thought to not quite belong, their presence bringing on a series of processes that illustrate insider and outsider locations. The rest of this chapter explains, in summary form, the processes that ensue when historical “outsiders” enter the “insides” of institutions (Puwar 2004).

The Force of the Somatic Norm   255

Disorientation The first process to note is disorientation; it is incredibly telling of the historical mismatch between bodies and spaces, which continues to have conceptual residue. To offer a clear example of disorientation, I will start in 1919, when Lady Astor became the first woman to take a seat in Parliament. In 2019 a statue of Lady Astor was unveiled; it would be interesting to place the following information next to it, as it captures how she was received as a body out of place in Westminster. When asked how he felt about her entrance into the House, Winston Churchill remarked, “I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge” (cited in Vallance 1979, 23). The implications for an assumed masculine territory was disturbed by a female presence. One can sense the ontological anxiety experienced when the private, intimate nature of the public space of democracy became unsettled by the arrival and presence of one alien body in a sea of men. The sense of exposure contained within the highly lauded humorous political wit of Churchill as a national figure beckons one to consider how bodies establish ontological security in the elite zones of the public sphere. His response is incredibly telling of how particular fraternities (Pateman 1988) are constitutive of the very ways in which the public sphere is lived and defined as a space of belonging. The cathexis of an exclusive masculine habitual zone betrays uneasiness when the hall of mirrors that reflect masculinities in the higher echelons in organizations is disturbed by the arrival of one outsider. The arrival of women MPs in the space today clearly does not cause the same proportion of aftershock as the presence of Lady Astor did in 1919. The situation today is nowhere near as stark; nonetheless there can still be a mismatch between bodies and spaces precisely because of how spaces are framed and bodies are received. When Pateman (1988) states that the political lion skin is a costume for men and one that is seen to be exceedingly ill-fitting and unbecoming for women, she is making an explicit link to how the political realm has been assumed for a masculine body. The histories of our positions of leadership within the public realm have been such that we have witnessed the convergence of gendered and occupational scripts. Power, authority, rationality, and the public have historically been associated with an undeclared masculine figure. The female body is an awkward and conspicuous form in relation to the (masculine) somatic norm. This is precisely why for women the political costume is seen to be ill-fitting and unbecoming. Grosz (1995, 92) discusses how we live and move in space as bodies in relation to other bodies. Or, as Henri Lefebvre (2002, 170) puts it, each living “body “produces itself in space and it also produces that space.” There is thus, as Grosz (2001, 9) notes, the “ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation.” Simultaneously, female and racialized bodies still have to work against the grain of both how their bodies and the spaces they move in are defined. Bernie Grant was one of four black minority ethnic MPs elected in 1984. When I interviewed him, he recalled that initially, before the service staff got to know him, he was told to not enter the members-only elevator. The political lion skin is not only gendered, as Pateman asserts; it is also racialized (Mills 1997; Pateman and Mills 2007). Staff were disoriented upon seeing a black male body in a members-only zone because members are not naturalized as black. The process of disorientation points to how the political scripts for

256   Nirmal Puwar elite spaces are scripted in racialized ways that exclude how black bodies have been framed in limited ways. In 2016 the black MP Dawn Butler (2008) publicly remarked on an almost identical incident of disorientation. Butler said that when she was in the members’ lift an MP told her, “This lift really isn’t for cleaners.” Relaying another incident of very obvious disorientation because of the ways in which particular racialized bodies jolt presumptions of both bodies and spaces, Butler described how a former senior Tory minister, David Heathcote-Amory, confronted her in the members’ section of the terrace and said, “What are you doing here? This is for Members only.” He then asked her, “Are you a member?” When she said she was, he turned around and told his colleague, “They’re letting anybody in nowadays.” Butler underlines, “This man could not equate the image he saw in front of him with that of an MP” (33).

Infantalization There are particular molds within which leadership has been imagined over time. Some bodies fit the mold; others are, to different degrees, seen to be ill-fitting. Due to the difficulties of seeing women and racialized bodes in specific roles they can be infantalized, whereby they are often seen to be more junior than they are: secretaries, assistants, or researchers rather than as MPs. The dynamics of infantilization operate across sectors and institutions. When analyzing the body politic, instead of locating gender and the role of MPs in two independent structures (legislatures and gender) we need to think of them as being in-built. Both of these scripts are fused. Genders are simultaneously produced and reenacted through the rituals within the higher echelons of the body politic—as they are in other organizations (cf. Rai 2010; Spary 2014; Gherardi 1995; Acker 1990). Shirin Rai and Carole Spary (2019) have considered the performance of gender in state legistlatures globally. The routine ritualistic enactment of the script of an MP simultaneously involves a performative repetition of gendered scripts. The two are interwoven. The body is central to the way they are synchronized. We become gendered bodies “through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (Butler 1997, 406). Although these gendered acts are not natural, in the sense of being expressive of some inner self, continuous repetition of these acts over time, often years, makes them appear natural, giving us the “illusion of an abiding gendered self,” amounting to a set of “cultural fictions” of what is a real man or a real woman (402). The force of these cultural fictions should not be underestimated. They result in what Judith Butler refers to as “the deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence” (407). Bringing the theatrical analogy to the fore in her understanding of sedimented gendered acts, Butler remarks, “Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives” (410). While Butler emphasizes the force of directive norms in the repetition of gender acts, she also stresses that these norms are not fixed and determinate. Because the structural reproduction of these directives requires them to be ritualistically repeated by individuals, it is this very requirement that leaves the space open for their disruption, for “the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive

The Force of the Somatic Norm   257 repetition of that style” (407). Thus, “the act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as the script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. The complex components that go into the act must be distinguished in order to understand the kind of acting in concert and acting in accord which acting one’s gender invariably is” (409). The scripting of gender or MP bears specific forms of masculine accomplishments. The sedimented styles of bonding, social organization, and bodily enactment place women MPs in a tenuous position that presents them with possibilities and paradoxes at the same time. Accepting that “style is never fully self-styled, for living styles have a history, and that history conditions and limits its possibilities” (Butler 1997, 40), the performative style of an occupational position has to be placed in historical context. Connell’s (1995) analysis of changing hegemonic masculinities can be of great assistance for understanding the different configurations of male styles of power and leadership. A historical view of the masculinized image of the body politic reveals notable shifts in the forms of masculinity that have congregated in Parliament over time. With the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the extension of the franchise to all men and women, the composition of the members changed with respect to class and power. The ritualistic remnants of these masculine tensions are architecturally and performatively coded. Parliament is the place where the feuding gentry have undertaken the symbolic gesture of putting their arms to rest, with the two opposing sides of the House literally being two sword lengths and a foot apart, for the voice of reason. But while physical violence is replaced by rational verbal communication in the formation of the bourgeois state, the combination of violence, sexuality, and political power remains in the rituals (Brown 1988; Pitkin 1984). Only now it is bureaucratically and theatrically institutionalized. In spite of the bourgeois representation of political debate characterized as disembodied reason and outside of bodily and affective particularity, theorists of embodiment, particularly feminists, have argued that the body and affectivity are actually integral to political speech and debate. As strangers to the political scene, bodies have to undergo affective labor to perform in spaces where they are not the norm (Rai  2014). Joan Landes (1998, 144) reminds us that “style and decorum are not incidental traits but constitutive features of the way in which embodied, speaking subjects establish claims of the universal in politics.” The speech, voice, style, and decorum of the bodies who utter Parliamentary speech are heavily masculinized. In fact the bodily gestures, movements, and enactments reveal strong traces of gentrified heroic masculinity. Despite the claims of bourgeois rationality, aggression continues to play a huge role in the performance of public debate. One could see the Chamber as a theater where displays of aggression are, as one of my interviewees put it, “cloaked in fine-sounding words” (Interviewee 19, Labour MP) for a spectatorial public performance (cf. Huet 1982). The two sword lengths and a foot apart architectural structure of the Chamber is itself combative. (Interestingly, there is still a rifle range in the House.) Furthermore, it is a theatricalized public sphere scripted for male performances. Tough, ruthless, aggressive behavior is admired. Those who are able to humiliate their opponents through highly articulate performances that reenact the violence and theatrical force found in the law courts are especially applauded. Verbal displays are accompanied by aggressive gestures, postures, and movements. The whole body is propelled into this performance, where finger pointing, the

258   Nirmal Puwar stern folding of the arms, hands on hips, and the thrusting of chests are all called upon. Such masculine bodily displays of aggression are of course not confined to the House of Commons; they can also be found in other male arenas (Roper 1993; McDowell 1997). Women MPs have to partake in this political theater. This is in a context where a fraternal cathexis of networks endorses and produces relations. Competitive displays of heroic masculinity are combined with a territorial, hierarchical, and deferential form of fraternal cathexis. This interesting psychic mixture was characterized by a woman MP in the Conservative Party as constituting a “gang-like” mentality. It underscores the part of politics rooted in wars, gangs, and leagues, which have an intensely homosocial nature (Ortega y Gasset 1961). Thus it is important to emphasize that there are different and competing fraternities in the House. The cathexis that is forged overlaps with fraternal networks in other male-dominated places. Parliament is a monument whose architectural and theatrical style of embodiment is mirrored across a network of places, such as the debating chambers in Oxbridge and public schools. Together these institutional spaces form a physical, social, and pyschic web of “archi-textures” (Puwar 2010). If we accept that the body has a memory, for those MPs who have moved in these interconnected webs of spaces the performative movements of their arms, legs, chests, and shoulders in Parliament bear memories which take them back to the intimately familiar. Keeping in mind Butler’s reflections on gender acts, we could say these acts are part of a series of gender and MP acts renewed, revised, and consolidated through time, amounting to a legacy of sedimented acts. There is an interpenetration and superimposition of bodily acts from interwoven social spaces. Furthermore, social relations and networks forged in these related sites are carried over into Parliament, just as they are into elite positions in other occupations. Thus some MPs are putting their theatrical performances into action among long-standing peers. The social capital they bear is part and parcel of their political activities. Having an overwhelming majority of male members who bring with them a range of interconnected, largely fraternal associations contributes to the nature of clubbiness in the House. As men move between various male spaces, creating layers upon layers of overlapping networks, an “all boys together” atmosphere is forged, which builds on familiar forms of cathexis. Within such a system, members earn respect through performative displays of  oratory violence toward opponents, but they obtain supporters by affirming their “brothers” in displays of deference. These are the gang-like terms of promotion and political mobilization. The Chamber is a place where aggressive debates are conducted, with one side of the benches vocally attacking the other. This is the performative norm. There is a display of deference through particular rituals and speech acts. The display of overt conflict across the Chamber may actually be a masquerade that mystifies the level of agreement and convergence in the actual politics of the different parties. What is distinctive about the insertion of women into this violent political theater is that women’s bodies are visible in a way that the men’s bodies are not. This means that the attack on women MPs can often be mediated through their bodies, with their bodies being used as an additional source of fuel during the exchange of political fire. Women of all political parties mentioned that abusive comments about women’s bodies are made “in a way that no one would ever comment on the men as sort of sexual objects as they are standing up and speaking. I mean it just doesn’t cross your mind, you know. But the women’s sexuality is with them all the time; it’s a difference, inappropriately with them. But that’s how they look at women. Whereas when a

The Force of the Somatic Norm   259 man is getting up and making his speech you don’t even think about his body” (Interviewee 30, Labour MP). As women represent the social sphere that has historically been excluded from the state, they often have to struggle to be heard in the Chamber. Their speech is not automatically given as much recognition and space as the men’s. There is not a “natural” congruence between women’s bodies and intellectual technical competence (Burris 1996). And in fact the super-exposure of women’s bodies could be seen to be a case of what Gatens (1996, 24) describes as a strategy to silence them. This involves the speaker either being animalized or being reduced to her sex: “Women who step outside their allotted place in the body politic are frequently abused with terms like harpy, virago, vixen, bitch, shrew; terms that make it clear that if she attempts to speak from the political body, about the political body, her speech is not recognized as human speech.” Women MPs I interviewed noted various ways in which women’s speech is not given as much recognition as that of the men. When the House is pressed for time the assumption is often made that women “will naturally give way to a man” (Interviewee 19, Labour MP). During the course of an MP’s speech it is normal for the opposition to undermine the argument by intervening. This intervention is dependent upon the MP who is holding the floor noticing the other MP—bobbing up and down—and giving way. Some of the women MPs mentioned that male MPs are much less likely to give way to a woman. This is especially the case when women’s intervention is aimed at widening the terms of the political agenda to include questions of gender. Just as attacks on women’s bodies are much more likely to happen if they discuss specific issues, like abortion, ­pornography, or Pap tests, for instance, women’s attempts at participation in the debate are also much more likely to be resisted if they try to broaden the framework of traditional parliamentary subjects, such as the budget, to those of gender. While on the one hand there is resistance to accepting serious talk of women’s bodies and gender in this male space, at the same time the subjects are highly gendered. There has historically been a propensity, which is slowly changing, to allocate women the “soft” subjects, such as the caring fields of education, health, pensions, and aid, which lack the weight that bears upon “hard” subjects such as foreign policy and economic and defense matters, which are prized. The latter subjects are viewed as the real subjects. Home affairs often deal with volatile subjects, which are very often given to women and minority ethnic figures. In these instances towing the line becomes a testing ground for resilience and national loyalty. The die-hard hostile immigration rhetoric and policies of Home Secretary of Priti Patel is one such instance. She is on an exposed cliff hanger, one which she will no doubt fall from with great vitriolic vile, even as she has crafted herself as the defender of British borders.

Burden of Doubt The somatic norm to leadership positions this transpires in a number of ways. Some bodies are seen to embody the appropriate capacities, whereas others are considered not quite up to the mark, they are on testing ground. Often specific kinds of masculinities are defined as a safe pair of hands. Thus when women do take up positions of leadership they often endure a burden of doubt attached to their skills and competencies because they don’t quite fit the

260   Nirmal Puwar somatic norm. People are often uncertain of their capacities to deliver and perform. There is an element of suspicion in the air. Due to the convergence of gender and occupational performative scripts, historically the core qualities of leadership are seen to be classically male. The struggle exists in trying to show that the required qualities can exist in bodies that are not classically expected to embody the relevant competences. Because women are not expected to have certain abilities, there is always an element of doubt, even if it is temporary, concerning their capability to do the job well. Although the doubt may dissipate as people get to know them and see them doing the job, there is always the initial hurdle that women have to overcome. Again, this involves women undertaking the labor of undoing gender perceptions. One woman MPs said, “We have to prove ourselves constantly” (Interviewee 26, Labour MP). Wherever there is a burden of doubt, there is a burden of representation: I think that you have always got at the back of your mind that if you don’t do your job well, people will sort of say, “She’s not doing as well because she’s a woman.” (Interviewee 20, Labour MP) I think there is a responsibility when there are only a few of us to make a good job of what we did because if we didn’t people are going to say, “Look at her, there is no point in having more, you know, she’s made a mess of it.” And that is the added responsibility and I think it is with other women in other jobs. . . . People are going to say, you know, watch carefully. (Interviewee 5, Conservative)

When women are given portfolios considered to be classically male, the burden of doubt and representation pressures are further intensified. Women feel that they have to be careful of making mistakes: “Because they’d love to say ‘Well, you can’t do the job, you know, this is not traditional” (Interviewee 26, Labour MP). Some women MPs stressed that when they are given the opportunity to undertake roles that they are not expected to be in, they “must excel” to show that they can do nontraditional jobs and that they do have the core qualities of leadership required for these posts.

Super-Surveillance and the Burden of Representation The flip side to being noticed and being called to speak is that female MPs are in the spotlight. Because they are out of place, women MPs could be said to be under a form of super-surveillance. Any mistakes they make are likely to be picked up. The gaze of the public and other MPs is all too often ready to notice any small error. Though invisible in the sense that they are not automatically seen in a position of leadership, they are simultaneously in the spotlight and are hypervisible. While men are illuminated for what they are imagined to be capable of, women are illuminated for being rare in number, in some cases as a novelty, and for what they might be incapable of. Being conspicuous, it is much more difficult for the average woman to be as mediocre as the average man. Margaret Thatcher was often mentioned as proof of the fact that “women have to be somehow very special or

The Force of the Somatic Norm   261 far more capable than a man to actually get into that position and I think that we will have succeeded in getting equality for women when women can be as mediocre as men” (Interviewee 21, Labour MP). This was affirmed by an MP in the same party as Thatcher who made the following contradictory statement: “I don’t think there are barriers as such. After all, we have had the first woman prime minister. . . . But I do think that to get anywhere as a woman you really do have to be better managed, harder working. You have even got to be more able than a man to get up that ladder. . . . You’ve got to be absolutely outstanding” (Interviewee 6, Conservative). Historical sedimentation has enabled the presence of white men to go unremarked and unnoticed. Women are highly visible as not quite the norm, so any mistakes they make are less likely to be overlooked or pardoned. In fact mistakes may be amplified. Women’s capacity to perform the parts of the organization that have hitherto been largely played by men is continuously under scrutiny. Those who judge are less likely to be forgiving of women than they are of men. Continuous visibility can be wearing and a hazard that makes the authority of women an especially unsteady condition that can all too easily be in jeopardy: “Men are just more invisible in this place. They can get away with more” (Ann Campbell MP, cited in McDougall 1998, 50). As there is less of a margin for mistakes the “average standard of the women in this place is higher than the average standard of the men in this place” (Interviewee 30, Labour MP). The gaze that accompanies the burden of doubt puts women and other relative outsiders under a spotlight. They are watched for the most minor of mistakes. Hence any errors or minor mishaps are amplified. This adds to the suspicion that authority is misplaced in these bodies. The most minor error can be used to confirm the need to displace a woman from a position of authority. The gendered dynamics are such that the same mistakes in men are either not noticed or they don’t become an issue to the same degree. They are not picked up in quite the same way. Once the woman comes under attack, a collective attempt to displace her can emerge. At that point the criticism can become especially personal and vitriolic. It can be extremely interesting to observe how personalities and institutions almost form a territorial pack of attackers, using organizational mobilizations to publicly oust women. Some of the harshest gender dynamics become illuminated when the going gets tough and a leader is considered to be wanting. Those who are out of place are likely to experience much more personalized and vicious critique than the somatic norm. This process can be observed across institutions and indeed globally. White masculine figures are also most likely to benefit from the diplomatic immunity of post-truth politics. Lies don’t stick so easily to the universal somatic norm. Political and personal blunders don’t stick to them to the same extent. It is almost an interesting litmus test for political immunity to consider how long the masculine somatic norm can hold on to power in the face of a political storm. ‘Space invaders’ are not able to weather a storm in the same way and are likely to be under pressure to resign much faster. The burden of doubt generates a burden of representation whereby outsiders feel they have to do well, otherwise they will be letting the team down. Even though MPs are elected to represent their constituencies and political parties, women and racialized minorities are also seen to represent the capacities of a group, for example, of all women. If they are not doing the job well they are letting the team down, not showing women in a good light. This can close down or limit opportunities for other women. This is especially the case for racialized MPs, who are considered to represent all black or Asian people, in addition to their

262   Nirmal Puwar constituencies. Black and Asian people across the country, far beyond their constituency, get in touch with them with concerns, which also increases their workload.

Habitus, Networks, and Becoming Insiders It is certainly too simplistic to define people in terms of their marginality, whether gender, race, or class. Women MPs are not soley outsiders. They are also, to different degrees, insiders. As space invaders they certainly occupy the tenuous space of being both. It is important to appreciate the processes involved in becoming insiders, as well as how women too partake in these. People are located in structures of opportunity and are at the same time invested in professions, skills, and places. Attention to their spaces of possibility is just as important for understanding their context as is an awareness of spaces of impossibility. Class trajectories, in terms of family and education, have a huge bearing upon what one becomes. Class is not only an element of wealth, property, and income. It is also embodied in the ways we carry ourselves, how we talk, and the tastes we have (Bourdieu 1992). In the work of both Frantz Fanon (1986) and Pierre Bourdieu, we can see how speaking the imperial, legitimate language carries symbolic power. Our tastes and cultural knowledge, depending on where they are derived from, accrues cultural capital. Educationally speaking, elite schools and universities accrue cultural capital. Not every MP has taken these routes, though certainly for women and racialized minorities they are very important routes for outsiders to become insiders, as are the attributes acquired and carried through these trajectories. Educational choices can offer carriage and strong bearing. Additionally, networks of influence and friendships impact who becomes an insider, as well as how one becomes an insider. In parliamentary politics networks exist in parties, unions, clubs, universities, schools, and families. There are masculine fraternities at play, impacting who is noticed and trusted. Women may be in some of these networks, though they are often at the edges of the  fraternities. Endorsements are a central feature of networks. Depending on who the endorsements are from they carry weight and are a central feature of opportunity structures in politics. Thus if one wants to understand how women and minority ethnic MPs have come to be where they are, it is highly relevant to examine the processes of endorsement. This is the case for everyone, since these are the ways in which spaces are produced and bodies enter the inside of the beast of different institutions and organizations.

Conclusion There are two operations in motion when considering women and racialized minorities in Parliament. Westminster has historically and conceptually been made in the image of particular types of masculinities, a somatic norm that has been repeated again and again, often unthinkingly. When women and other outsiders enter and occupy the space, they disturb the space and the performatively naturalized linkages between masculinities and institutions.

The Force of the Somatic Norm   263 At the same time, the presence of what I have termed space invaders highlights the tensions posed by their arrival in the form of disorientation, infantalization, super-surveillance, burden of doubt, and burden of representation. This illuminates how they are still not the somatic norm as MPs. While negotiating these tensions women also become invested in political institutions. In the very process of becoming MPs they illuminate what the conditions of becoming are for all MPs. Trajectories, habitus, networks, and endorsements all come into view. Still, though, the force of the somatic norm (of the masculine white figure) prevails as the historically constituted centrifugal figure to be measured against. The spotlight shines on the space invaders, with mistakes and warts easily noticed as signs of misplaced authority. In the current context of global politics, white masculinities are loudly and proudly claiming an expansive sense of whiteness. Nationalistic and exclusionary voices are performatively flouting historical struggles to open political spaces to bodies conceptually deemed to be illegitimate carriers of political authority.

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264   Nirmal Puwar Massey, Doreen 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Oxford: Polity Press. McDougall, Linda. 1998. Westminster Women. London: Vintage. McDowell, Lina. 1997. Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City. Oxford: Blackwell. Mills, Charles W. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1961. “The Sportive Origin of the State.” In History as a System and Other Essays toward a Philosophy of History, 13–42. New York: Norton. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Pateman, Carole. 1995. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Pateman, Carole, and Charles Mills. 2007. Contract and Domination. Oxford: Polity Press. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1984. Fortune Is a Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Puwar, Nirmal. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg. Puwar, Nirmal. 2010. “The Archi-texture of Parliament: Flaneur as Method in Westminster.” Journal of Legislative Studies 16, no. 3: 298–312. Puwar, Nirmal, and Sanjay Sharma. 2013. “The Im/possibility of Barack Hussein Obama.” In Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial Obama, edited by Mark Ledwidge, Kevern Verney, and Inderjeet Parmar, 189–203. New York: Routledge. Rai, Shirin M. 2010. “Analysing Ceremony and Ritual.” Journal of Legislative Studies 16, no. 3: 284–97. Rai, Shirin M. 2014. “Political Perfomance: A Framework for Analyzing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Rai, Shirin M., and Carole  Spary. 2019. Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roper, Michael. 1993. Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spary, Carole. 2014. “Disruptive Democracy: Analysing Legislative Protest.” Democratization 20, no. 3: 392–416. Vallance, Elizabeth. 1979. Women in the House: A Study of Women Members of Parliament. London: Athlone Press.

Chapter 16

The M a r k et Eighteenth-Century Insights into the Performance of Market Practices Matthew Watson

Introduction Even though we so frequently hear it being portrayed politically in such a way, the market is not a thing that can do anything untoward to us if we fail to heed its cautions. Even the notion of an “it” is wholly misplaced. Political uses of the phrase “the market” are typically a rhetorical façade for a series of practices that prioritize exchange relations over alternative forms of organizing economic life. These practices constantly have to be performed into being. Without the presence of people who know how to read the relevant economic script and who are willing to abide by the established rules of performance, market practices could never be sustained. An important distinction underpins such a claim. The market of abstract economic theory is not the same as the market of everyday experience, with quite distinct ideological appeals to “the market” as an all-seeing, all-knowing economic entity merely adding to the confusion. The market of abstract economic theory, in its most elegant contemporary general equilibrium formulation, produces hypothetical conditions of equilibrium by manipulating set-theoretical relationships on topological surfaces to show that demand can equal supply in every market for every good that can be imagined both now and in the future. In other words, it is a mathematical solution to a mathematical problem and need contain no recognizable everyday economic content whatsoever. If you were to ask someone to perform themselves economically in line with a Brouwer fixed point theorem, a separating hyperplane, or, indeed, any of the topological conditions that are essential to this all-encompassing idea of equilibrium, then you are likely to be met at most with a shrug of incomprehension. This account of the market can only possibly be a formal abstraction, which means that the object of interest is a mathematical model of the economy rather than actually experienced economic relations. However, if you were instead to ask someone to perform themselves as an intuitive element of market demand or market supply, for most

266   Matthew Watson people this would be much less likely to take them definitively out of their comfort zone despite the fact that the wording of the request is still likely to come across as being somewhat unusual. For anyone who interacts with market institutions as part of their everyday experience, it is essential that they learn how to perform themselves as consumer, producer, or any other market-relevant actor. The success of their strategies as a functioning economic agent demands nothing less. The interesting issue in this regard is the relationship between these two distinct articulations of what is meant when using the phrase, “the market.” How might the market of formal abstract economic theory, with its internal dynamics mapped by mathematical structures that are so complex that even very few economists really understand them, nonetheless still inform how we might all be called upon to perform ourselves in relation to the market that bounds our everyday economic experiences? In Michel Callon’s (1998, 2007) terms, how might economics perform the economy, despite its increasingly ethereal appearance? This section of the Handbook focuses on sites of performance in the politics that help to shape the modern world. The economy is clearly one such site, because in the absence of actors knowing which role to play—whether choosing voluntarily or being actively required to do so—it would be impossible for economic relations to begin to display the logic of “the market” as that idea is used in political discourse. Yet how might this be so if only a vanishingly small number of people have anything other than highly restricted access to the thought patterns of cutting-edge economic theory? Performativity theory clearly has something to say on the matter, but it points in multiple directions simultaneously. Donald MacKenzie (2006) has pioneered analyses showing how the use of economic theory to inform trading strategies in asset markets has enabled actual financial prices to converge in practice on the prices predicted by an abstract financial theory couched, once again, in purely mathematical terms. This is performativity of the most direct variety, which has led to a tendency to treat the whole field as the study of how economic models become “true” in a material sense (Braun 2016, 261). However, it is clear that prices are not the only aspect of the market economy that have to be performed into existence. Callon’s most basic point is that the whole economy has increasingly come to rely on a Homo economicus construction that was first rendered familiar only because of its prominence in abstract economy theory. That is, for economic institutions to function in a manner consistent with their underlying design features, basic exchange relationships must mirror at least to some degree fundamental demand-and-supply dynamics. According to Judith Butler (2006), performativity is most obviously in evidence when individuals reflect on the economic roles they believe they are destined to undertake and then act upon themselves to create a commensurable identity. Exchange relations governed by ostensible market logics might therefore be nothing more than an aggregation of individual role-playing, where—in Callon’s terms at least—the script is provided by an economic theory that very few people would admit to understanding in its own terms. Another important distinction is evident. MacKenzie’s use of performativity theory focuses on outcomes: prices are performed in line with the predictions of economic theory in certain special cases. Callon and Butler focus instead on processes: elements of economic theory are brought into being through the constant attempts of individuals to constitute particular economic identities. I want to concentrate in what follows specifically on the processes of performance through which market actors create for public display a particular

The Market   267 sense of their selves. These are the selves that they put on show as one tiny part of a massively more extensive market system, enacting something that is instantly recognizable in character— to both themselves and their counterparties in exchange—from what most people will be able to tell you they know about the laws of demand and supply. The Handbook asks the provocative question of whether we could be said today to be living within a performance society. Insofar as our economic conduct is shaped by market norms we can definitely be said to live within a performance economy. Indeed two of the very earliest accounts of what is required of individuals if they are to flourish within the market of everyday experience make much of the dynamics that today we might think of as performance. I wish to illustrate my argument in relation to two Anglophone theorists whose contributions to the understanding of the nascent institutions of the market economy span much of the eighteenth century. This was a time before the development of modern abstract economic theories of the market, so what they said needed performing could not have been the Homo economicus on which Callon concentrates. Yet they were nonetheless still describing the apparent ubiquity of performances within the context of early market institutions. In Butler’s terms they were isolating those moments in which the social institution of the market became feasible through the production of particular market-based agential characteristics. The discussion first focuses on Daniel Defoe, better known today for other things but in the early eighteenth century an important theorist of the economic role-playing that underpinned the exchange relation. It then turns to Adam Smith, who was still reflecting fifty years later on the nature of the performance that was required if market practices were to deliver the exchange of money for goods that market institutions presuppose.

Defoe and the Performance of Market Agency Defoe was perhaps uniquely well placed to have written about the characteristics of ­performance that underpinned merchants’ self-presentation within society. His Complete English Tradesman was written in 1726, after his brief but meteoric career as a novelist, and further still after first establishing himself as a prolific journalist and author of copious political and economic pamphlets. He began as a writer of didactic treatises extolling the virtues of trade and placing on a political pedestal the figure of the merchant. He then spread his wings significantly to produce what are often viewed today as the first modern novels in the English language. All of these books were constructed as morality tales, with his heroes typically finding stability in their life only after having come to terms with the merchant’s worldview. The dividing line between economic theory and literary characterization was therefore never strongly drawn in Defoe’s work. The fact that he had an economic theory based on actors performing carefully scripted roles might therefore not come as too much of a surprise. However, such roles might not be entirely straightforward when described by Defoe. His own political career appears to have been one long indulgence of his desire for subterfuge and play-acting (Furbank and Owens 1988, 142), to the point at

268   Matthew Watson which he happily justified lying in public if it served the ends of a larger political truth (Damrosch 1973, 154). Tensions galore adorn his work in this regard. His alter ego of Mr Review, whom Defoe created in his journalistic work, vowed fire and brimstone for anyone who was guilty of saying one thing but, in doing another, showed that they were not who they said they were (Curtis  1984, 34). Yet at the same time his preferred method of fictional representation, allusive allegory, relies on a technique wherein the real meaning of the story is hidden from plain sight and is revealed only if the reader can inhabit Defoe’s way of thinking to piece together all of the allusions in his text in the same way he would have done. This requires his characters to be something other than could have been known from their own utterances in exactly the manner that Mr Review denounced (Ayers 1967, 400). It is difficult to think of any of Defoe’s fictional heroes who achieve self-realization under anything other than a false name. His fictional narrators typically sign their accounts in names other than those by which they were known in the text (Brown 1971, 563). It is as if serial subjectivity in the form of multiple names is an indispensable part of the psychological fortifications that his heroes construct to know themselves better. Mary Butler (1990, 378) has written about his characters’ “onomaphobia,” their fear of being named—in particular, their fear of being named correctly—as they seek personal and maybe even spiritual redemption through reinvention. Their real selves—whatever that may mean—are much less important than the selves that they want to act out in public as they gradually come to exhibit the merchant’s worldview. Consequently they are forever cloaked in multiple layers of disguise (Karl 1973, 88). False names compete with the absence of names to tell us much about Defoe’s general approach to issues of subjectivity. If secrecy is thus the general key to self-revelation for Defoe we should expect there to be an important element of dissimulation in how his market agents perform themselves. Statements of this nature are easy to find in his Complete English Tradesman. The passage that has most caught the eye of specialist Defoe scholars comes when he is describing what today would be called the merchant’s efforts toward emotional labor, or what happens when people’s ability to control their feelings is priced into a commercial relationship for private gain. Merchants in Defoe’s day tended to operate out of shops that doubled as their home, with an accompanying “front-stage area” in which commercial activities took place and a “back-stage area” for family life. (This terminology is not Defoe’s, but comes from Goffman 1959.) Merchants put on display a persona who instinctively accepts that customers are always right (Wall  1998, 178). This is about affecting the correct countenance to prevent customers from having to ask themselves awkward questions about the appropriateness of their own behavior. But this is hard work, as is demonstrated only too vividly by more recent studies of using for commercial gain something other than the genuinely felt emotion (e.g., Wharton  1993; Weeks  2007; Theodosius  2008). The need to suppress the true emotional state comes complete with often significant psychological costs. Merchants make markets from which they can gain monetarily, then, but only by allowing potentially harmful incursions into their sense of authenticity. “[H]ere you see,” wrote Defoe ([1726] 1839, 26): and I could give many examples very like this, how, and in what manner, a shopkeeper is to behave himself in the way of his business—what impertinences, what taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things, he must bear in his business, and must not show the least return, or the

The Market   269 least signal of disgust—he must have no passions, no fire in his temper—he must be all soft and smooth: nay, if his real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must show none of it in his shop—he must be a perfect complete hypocrite, if he will be a complete tradesman.

The text of the Complete English Tradesman speaks to the reader in two ways at once. It is simultaneously a fairly standard guidebook for how to succeed in business and a conduct book for the aspiring businessperson (Young 1999, 19; Sherman 1996, 103). In its latter passages it was very much of its time, because throughout the eighteenth century a whole genre flourished within what can usefully be described as the manners industry. Merchants made markets most obviously by having something to sell that someone else wanted to buy. Yet as a maturing institutional arrangement in eighteenth-century Europe, the market also relied on an increasingly important philosophical commitment to politeness. It is all too common to see the origins of market institutions being attributed to the innate capacity for reasoned self-interest, where the initial inspiration for such a way of thinking is traced back to a single quote in Smith’s Wealth of Nations. But Smith was himself a sentimentalist philosopher who emphasized the role of manners in the development of functioning economic relations. In this, despite nowhere providing an account of his sentimentalist commitments, Defoe beat Smith to the punch by at least half a century. Commercial relations required people to speak with one another, and it is interesting to note that Defoe never made language acquisition an impediment to trade. Whenever the opportunity to trade is visited upon the heroes of his novels, wherever in the world they happen to find themselves they are always able to converse with one another. Defoe spent much of the Complete English Tradesman championing his fellow nationals, believing them to be considerably superior at trade when compared to any of their counterparts from other countries (Gregg  2009, 23). Perhaps inevitably, then, the common language that propels cross-national commitments to trade in his novels always seems to be English. More than that, though, in substantive terms the common language is consistently that of contract, the cornerstone of English legal underpinnings of its nascent market society. In the absence of a fully fleshed-out theory of sentimentalist philosophy Defoe substituted his own very obvious preference for economic relations governed by contract. That same preference was firmly implanted in all of his fictional characters. Even Crusoe, far from using his twenty-eight years on the island to refashion himself as the modern Homo economicus of neoclassical economics, never forgot that he was first and foremost an Englishman steeped in the economic traditions of contract law. When his life is saved early in the novel by a Portuguese ship, his initial instinct is to tie the captain of that ship to a contract that respected his right to property (Defoe [1719] 1985, 53–5). Nearly three decades later, when safe voyage back home is finally within his grasp on an English ship, his instinct to require its captain to swear by the norms of contract law burns as brightly as ever (267–9). There is a famous mistake in Defoe’s text at this point. Having earlier in the novel bemoaned the fact that he had run out of the ink he had salvaged from the shipwreck that deposited him on the island, a fresh stock suddenly materializes without explanation when a contract has to be signed. Crusoe should probably not have been overly concerned on this score, though, because as Defoe ([1726] 1839, 55) repeatedly made clear in the Complete English Tradesman, merchants’ words should always be considered their bonds. Yet here is where the problems arise for the people whom Defoe considered to be the archetypal market actors. Their required performances, it seems, necessarily pulled them

270   Matthew Watson in two different directions at the same time. The merchants of his day were the living embodiment of the tension that runs throughout Defoe’s work: that between Christian morality and natural law (see Novak 1964, 668). The helping hand of Providence always appears to be able to intervene when one of Defoe’s characters displays sufficient piety, but it does so to guide them to the secular path of self-orientation as laid down in the seventeenth-century natural law tradition. Defoe adopted a specifically English conception of natural law suited to embedding the values of its burgeoning commercial society in preference to the state’s existing positive law (Dickey  1995, 87). Whatever might be done to enrich the individual, then, could hardly be considered a sin. The Defoe who moralizes in puritanical fashion never exists in his own text beyond the reaches of the economically self-interested Defoe, and often is forced to give way to what he seems to have thought was the virtue in economic pragmatism. But still we learn that there is virtue in personal integrity, and monetizable virtue at that. For the sake of successful market-making, Defoe argued, merchants must be scrupulously honest in their dealings (Brantlinger 1996, 77). Those who are known to willfully deceive cannot go beyond striking one-off exchanges to establishing a genuine market for their goods. As Leo Abse (2006, 42) has noted, Defoe had the perfect role model for this conception of the ideal merchant: his own father, James, appears repeatedly in abstract form in the text of the Complete English Tradesman. James also appears in Defoe’s fiction as Robinson Crusoe’s father, whose pleas for his son to accept the limitations of a steady trade are ignored until it is too late. The didactic effects of a suitably canonized impression of his own father are difficult to miss, but the real message of the Complete English Tradesman seems to be that nobody should be too down on themselves if they fail to match the puritanical ideal. Who can be blamed, he asked, if the “pragmatic” route to bettering one’s own material conditions of existence wins out over the desire to enact a pristine moral character (Young 1999, 19)? Mary Poovey (1998, 169) has charted what, for Defoe, seems to be the necessary lapse into deceit merely from having to accommodate oneself to operating within a context bounded by market institutions. “[D]on’t speak of the trouble,” Defoe ([1726] 1839, 26) has his typical merchant say to a particularly demanding customer, “for that is the duty of our trade; we must never think our business a trouble.” The proximate cause of this descent focuses on the illusions that merchants have to enact through their speech if they are to harness the market to their interests. They have to put on the airs of “the utmost civility and good manners” (25) if they are to create the necessary aesthetic effect to convince consumers that they are purchasing a desirable lifestyle in addition to purchasing the product itself. To do so they have to continually exaggerate the quality of what they really know are often quite shoddy goods. The moral fall they inevitably experience in this deliberate ambiguity contrasts sharply with the scrupulously honest merchant of the Complete English Tradesman (see Scheuermann 1987, 315). The image of James Defoe proves only to be a mirage. Literary critics are therefore pretty much unanimous in their judgment on the Complete English Tradesman. Sandra Sherman (1996, 102) argues that, on Defoe’s account, “the Tradesman is forced to adopt a persona he cannot sustain”; John Richetti (2005, 156) that “the glories of trade are set against its enormous stresses and personal as well as moral costs”; Leopold Damrosch (1973, 158) that “the commercial ethics imposes inhumanity upon men.” The performances of the market in everyday practices therefore appear to be anything but a wholesome element of modern life in Defoe’s telling.

The Market   271

Smith and the Performance of Market Agency Fast-forward half a century and we find Adam Smith still arguing on much the same intellectual territory as that staked out by Defoe. The key to explaining market agency was still to be discovered in the economic relationship between merchants and customers and, in particular, in the specifics of how that relationship was performed into practice. The key to explaining morally sustainable market agency, moreover, continued to revolve around the tenor of the emotions that surrounded the economic act of commodity exchange. Yet here we see some differences emerging. Defoe’s economic writings tend to cast his puritanical urgings aside to allow him to speak in a pragmatic voice which seems largely to accept the world as he found it. The ensuing warts-and-all account harnesses eighteenth-century sentimentalism merely to chart the descent into secularly condoned practices of deceit. We lie through the words we speak, Defoe seems to have been saying, but also through the emotional displays we produce for the purpose of monetizing the exchange relation. By contrast, Smith’s more thoroughgoing sentimentalism was invoked in an attempt to imagine utopian circumstances in which market agency could proceed at no obvious psychological cost to the participants in the exchange relation. Crucially for Smith, economic transactions were facilitated through control of the boundaries of the self being placed on public display to enable economic transactions. This is what, following Arlie Russell Hochschild ([1983]  2012, 68), we would today tend to call “emotion work.” For Defoe the success of market-based transactions depended on the willingness of merchants to give in to their customers’ demands for spectacle to accompany their purchases and, therefore, to consciously exaggerate their emotional state in the moment of making the deal. For Smith the success of market-based transactions was rather about the ability to suppress genuinely felt emotions so that the economy could become a subset of the wider objective of nurturing pristine moral agency. Maybe unsurprisingly in this context Smith’s explanation of how the market of everyday experience might be performed into being without posing a threat to the integrity of society as a whole is contained within his earlier philosophical treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759/1790] 1982), and not his later economic treatise, The Wealth of Nations ([1776/1784] 1981). Perhaps it is still necessary to start with The Wealth of Nations, though, because there we find arguably the best-known passage in all of Smith’s work, one that is conventionally understood as having distilled the essence of market relations. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner,” he argued, “but from their regard to their own interest” (Smith [1759/1790] 1981, I.ii.2). The clause “but from their regard to their own interest” has become a near universally accepted gateway into saying that, for Smith, market institutions operate to an internal logic which both promotes and rewards self-interest. There is no sense, then, of having to think about how best to perform the act of commodity exchange; the required actions are produced mechanically as a response to the laws of self-interest. Yet it is possible to understand Smith’s argument in such a way only if the “butcher, brewer, baker” quote is taken in isolation and the wider passage in which it is embedded is ignored.

272   Matthew Watson The wider passage is quickly revealed to be a study in the art of persuasion (McKenna 2006, 134). Merchants might well be performing an element of self-interest in the price that they ask for their goods as market-making agents. Smith’s famous quote makes it clear that nobody can be expected to put themselves out of business simply to provide their customers with the best possible deal. Customers likewise are also likely to perform an element of self-interest in agreeing to pay the price that ultimately allows the transaction to be made and the impression of an innate market logic to be realized. There is, after all, nothing to force them to make the purchase, and they can always choose to refrain. However, the broader “butcher, brewer, baker” passage emphasizes the importance of performance to the process by which pricing dynamics might come to regulate the act of commodity exchange. Smith ([1776/1784] 1981, I.ii.2) said that for anyone engaged in commercial exchange, “[h]e will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them.” This captures neatly the way in which acts of commercial exchange require agents who are set on persuading. Even though it is not laid out explicitly as such, what we see is actually a double dynamic of persuasion. One aspect is persuasion of the other regarding where the reasonable outer limits of the pricing structure are to be situated. The other is persuasion of the self to only ever ask of the other what could be judged as being reasonable from their perspective. Performing an element of self-interest in becoming a market agent therefore revolves around performing the limits to self-interest as a mode of more general social integration. Smith wrote extensively on this issue in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. What made for a functioning market was identical for him in moral terms to what made for a functioning society. Both were grounded in individuals’ capacity for moral learning and their associated desire, wherever possible, to display the characteristics of pristine moral agency. The double dynamics of persuasion that dominate Smith’s thoughts in the text surrounding the “butcher, brewer, baker” quote is merely one example of a much more general trend in his work toward identifying what today typically goes by the name of the relational self (Weinstein 2006, 4). Here we see the essential difference between Defoe’s and Smith’s thinking which results from the fact that Smith’s conception of market-making was based on a fully worked through sentimentalist philosophy, but Defoe’s only hinted in that vague direction. Defoe’s merchants were forced into emotional deceit in the face of their customers’ constant whining about what they expected when they were shopping if they were to be satisfied. “The trouble, madam, is nothing,” Defoe ([1726] 1839, 26) had a representative merchant say, “it is my misfortune not to please you; but, as to trouble, my business is to oblige the ladies, my customers.” Smith’s merchants, by contrast, could always hope to have customers who had worked hard on their moral conduct and who would therefore enact the “self-command” necessary not to turn their own problems into difficulties for the merchants (Brown 2002, 66). Defoe’s markets were thus much more the realm of unrestricted self-interest than were Smith’s. The relational self of Smithian moral psychology acts simultaneously in all social contexts as both an empirical and an ideal spectator of the circumstances in which they find themselves (Boltanski 1999, 40). “I divide myself,” wrote Smith ([1759/1790] 1982, III.i.6), “as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.” The empirical side of the relational self ’s spectatorial capacities observes what is going on around them to feed this information back to the ideal spectator, becoming the witness to an event on which the latter is required to pass moral judgment. In relation to the process of market-making

The Market   273 this is likely to be observing from a position further back in the queue the conversation between the merchant and the customer which might lead to a deal being struck and a purchase being made at a given price. The ideal side of the relational self ’s spectatorial capacities has an altogether different role. They have to ensure that by the time it is their turn to be personally involved as a direct participant in the event—in this example, when they have made it to the front of the queue—they are comfortable with the constraints they need to impose upon their own actions if they are to conduct themselves with a desirable degree of moral propriety. The process of moral learning that Smith traced was for people first to understand better how to pass judgments on others (here, back-of-the-queue actions), so that this can be used to better understand how they themselves should behave (front-ofthe-queue actions). When our moral faculties are well honed, according to this theory, we have the ability to foresee through preemptive self-judgment how others are most likely to judge our behavior when it is ultimately enacted, and we will appeal to our internal self-command to avoid acting in ways that would provoke others’ disapprobation. The moral standards of self-command are thus very exacting. There is an important degree of equivocation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments about how far we should expect to see these standards being applied in practice. There is an aspirational voice that appears frequently within the text, and when Smith used this voice he seems to have been saying that the perfect pitch of self-command is a goal to which every member of society can orient themselves. However, in an echo of the tension in Defoe between Christian morality and natural law, this aspirational voice vies for ultimate control of the text with a much more pragmatic voice. In this latter guise Smith ([1759/1790] 1982, IV.1.8) appears to have limited self-command in its most complete form to the man—and when he says a “man” he means literally that—who has made his money, is now more than comfortably off, and can use the privileges that wealth will buy him to sit back and reflect deeply on the nature of the good life. Access to the exalted status of self-command would therefore seem to be highly gendered. Moreover, the pragmatic Smith provided no account of the path that the man of self-command must travel if he is to amass the wealth that allows him the time to reflect on what it might take to remake himself in the sole image of moral virtue. Presumably this would have entailed myriad attempts to enter market institutions and to make money out of the act of commodity exchange. The aspirational Smith might well have depicted the relationship between back-of-the-queue and front-of-the-queue actions as one in which self-command can always flourish. Yet the more pragmatic Smith seems to have suggested that this same relationship has to be enacted countless times before the point can be reached where a person can reflect at leisure on how their younger self could have been a more pristine moral agent. We might also consider who merchants deal with if they are to progress from a life of commercial hustle and bustle to one of philosophical contemplation. The constantly whining customers who forced Defoe’s merchants into constant deception were always women. Smith’s customers are generally better behaved, but they too are almost always women. However, if self-command is to be understood as a specifically masculine virtue (see Vivenza 2001, 60), then presumably it has to be absent in the more pragmatic telling of the market-making process. Defoe’s merchants put on their show of exaggerated politeness for fear of replicating the essential effeminacy of the housewife’s complaints about her daily struggles with meager funds simply to get by (Gregg 2009, 21). Yet the “complete hypocrite”

274   Matthew Watson he perfects to ensure that his own source of income is not endangered by impoliteness behind the shop counter also has a deeply worrying underside. According to Defoe ([1726] 1839, 27), he cannot be expected to maintain this equable countenance forever, and when he is “provoked by the impertinence of the customers, beyond what his temper could bear,” he is likely to temporarily leave his shop counter for his own back-stage area, where he will proceed to “beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes as a man chained down in Bedlam.” Smith’s account is only somewhat less chilling. If Defoe’s is all about the psychological costs that are entailed in performing market-making actions, then Smith appears to have been operating in an analogous register. The perfect pitch of self-command might follow if a person is fully at ease with moderating their emotions so that they might receive favorable judgment from other people. But can merchants really afford such emotional control when describing their products unless they do not have to worry about them remaining unsold? Does the act of commodity exchange not usually involve the purchase of a lifestyle choice in addition to the purchase of the product? And is lifestyle imagery not all about the exaggeration of an emotional state in the hope that this will draw the unwary customer in? The most likely answers to these questions point in exactly the opposite direction from how The Theory of Moral Sentiments suggests we can begin to live the good life. This is about playing down how we really feel so that other people might be able to use their imaginations to enter into our feelings. The cracks in Smith’s utopian account of the pristine market agent therefore open up into something potentially much larger. In his aspirational voice he spoke about the conditions for pristine market agency being the same as those for pristine moral agency. Yet the encroachment of the pragmatic voice into his text suggests that the demands that have to be met for pristine moral agency to be enacted are so exacting that pristine market agency might be an impossibility in everyday practice.

Conclusion The instantiation of a market system passes through an incalculably high number of individual performances. As the preceding analysis has shown, this much was already known— if not yet described precisely in those terms—by commentators on the market as long ago as the eighteenth century. It is thus something of a surprise that economic theory since that time has generally progressed in a manner that excludes performance from the discussion. The conventional approach to economics today is to treat the market as an allocation mechanism that provides the means of economic efficiency, but where the ends of allocation are displaced to a political realm that is external to the market. By contrast, in showing us how the market might alternatively be conceived as implying performance all the way down, Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments politicize every aspect of market-based relationships. These early texts, written at a time when economic institutions in Europe were first assuming a distinctively modern form, demonstrate that there is no innate market logic existing prior to the politics of performing the market into being. There is no originary moment that bequeaths an institutional essence into which people are simply slotted as ready-made carriers of market laws of demand and supply.

The Market   275 Each party to every market-based exchange needs to perform themselves, but this notion of the self is far from straightforward. The arguments reviewed in the preceding pages make it clear that everyone has to learn how to present themselves if they are to stand the best possible chance of making a deal through the market. Yet at no stage will being a market agent exhaust a person’s identity. They will simultaneously be learning more broadly about themselves as a person. The performance of self-interest that they might allow to encroach upon their behavior within market-based dynamics might always be difficult to reconcile with the broader sense of self that they wish to put on public display. It is impossible to read the work of Defoe and of Smith and not be struck by the degree of psychological harm they believe follows from accommodating oneself to market norms. Defoe provides no potential antidote to this situation, Smith only that attempts to live the good life might serve to lessen the costs. Even here, though, there is plenty of evidence within the pages of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to suggest that access to this type of virtue is restricted to the small minority of people—perhaps more accurately the small minority of men and their immediate dependants—who have released themselves from the demands of the market. Resetting the theory of the market within the context of performance provides some crucial political insights into how a democratic society might want to organize its economy. Orthodox economic theory today suggests that the ultimate ends of the allocation of available resources is determined outside the market arena, with market mechanisms being seen as politically neutral. However, the market of everyday experience is the aggregation of myriad moments of commodity exchange, and the perspective developed here demonstrates that every one of these moments is alive with political implications. What matters most in this regard is what happens to people as they prepare themselves for the roles that help them to become anonymous elements of orthodox economic theory’s market demand and market supply curves. They might well be anonymous in orthodox economic theory, but only there; they are certainly not anonymous to themselves. They have to act upon themselves to perform the roles that make commodity exchange possible, yet they would seem to do so at the direct expense of their own psychological ease and moral virtue. The image of the market as the physical embodiment of the necessary laws of the economy is perhaps too well embedded today for there to be widespread knowledge of how performing the market is also to perform harm on the self. Very different worlds can be imagined, though, when bringing these multiple performances to the forefront of discussions.

References Abse, Leo. 2006. The Bi-Sexuality of Daniel Defoe: A Psychoanalytic Survey of the Man and His Works. London: Karnac. Ayers, Robert. 1967. “Robinson Crusoe: ‘Allusive Allegorick History.’ ” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 82, no. 5: 399–407. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brantlinger, Patrick. 1996. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Braun, Benjamin. 2016. “From Performativity to Political Economy: Index Investing, ETFs and Asset Manager Capitalism.” New Political Economy 21, no. 3: 257–73.

276   Matthew Watson Brown, Homer. 1971. “The Displaced Self in the Novels of Daniel Defoe.” English Literary History 38, no. 4: 562–90. Brown, Vivien. 2002. Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Butler, Mary. 1990. “ ‘Onomaphobia’ and Personal Identity in Moll Flanders.” Studies in the Novel 22, no. 4: 377–91. Callon, Michel. 1998. “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics.” In The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon, 1–57. London: Routledge. Callon, Michel. 2007. “What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?” In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, 311–57. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Curtis, Laura. 1984. The Elusive Daniel Defoe. Totowa: Barnes and Noble. Damrosch, Leopold. 1973. “Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator.” Modern Philology 71, no. 2: 153–9. Defoe, Daniel. [1719] 1985. Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin. Defoe, Daniel. [1726] 1839. The Complete English Tradesman. Edinburgh: Chambers. Dickey, Laurence. 1995. “Power, Commerce, and Natural Law in Daniel Defoe’s Political Writings 1698–1707.” In A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, edited by John Robertson, 63–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Furbank, P.  N., and W.  R.  Owens. 1988. The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Gregg, Stephen. 2009. Defoe’s Writings and Manliness: Contrary Men. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. [1983] 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Karl, Frederick. 1973. “Moll’s Many-Colored Coat: Veil and Disguise in the Fiction of Defoe.” Studies in the Novel 5, no. 1: 86–97. MacKenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge: MIT Press. McKenna, Steven. 2006. Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety. Albany: State University of New York Press. Novak, Maximillian. 1964. “Defoe’s Theory of Fiction.” English Literary History 61, no. 4: 650–68. Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Richetti, John. 2005. The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Scheuermann, Mona. 1987. “Women and Money in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 19, no. 3: 311–22. Sherman, Sandra. 1996. Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Adam. [1759/1790] 1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Smith, Adam. [1776/1784] 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Theodosius, Catherine. 2008. Emotional Labor in Health Care: The Unmanaged Heart of Nursing. London: Routledge.

The Market   277 Vivenza, Gloria. 2001. Adam Smith and the Classics: The Classical Heritage in Adam Smith’s Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wall, Cynthia. 1998. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weeks, Kathi. 2007. “Life within and against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7, no. 1: 233–49. Weinstein, Jack Russell. 2006. “Sympathy, Difference, and Education: Social Unity in the Work of Adam Smith,” Economics and Philosophy 22, no. 1: 1–33. Wharton, Amy. 1993. “The Affective Consequences of Service Work: Managing Emotions on the Job.” Work and Occupations 20, no. 2: 205–32. Young, Arlene. 1999. Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 17

Stagi ng M emor i a liz ation Performing the War on Terror and Resilient Nationalism Charlotte Heath-Kelly

Introduction Memorials commissioned by state authorities are political statements. They are sculpted by artists and architects rather than spoken at podiums, but these objects still represent hegemonic speech acts. These monuments underline, reformulate, and rearticulate conceptions of nationalism, sacrifice, and identity for the citizenry. But more important than what the memorial says, which is often banal, is the timing with which it says it. As Jenny Edkins (2003) points out, states defend and reassert their claims to political authority through commemorative architecture. When they interpret that their grip on allegiance is slipping, hypersignified monuments are created to deflect and absorb grief and discontent. As such, the history of state-commissioned memorials can be read as responses to the wars, violence, and trauma that pose disruption to the recognition of sovereign authority. Memorials are markers to the renegotiation of political authority against that which it can’t control: specifically, grief (Edkins 2003; Heath-Kelly 2017). This chapter explores how contemporary memorials intervene into the relationship between audiences, the nation, and the state. The chapter presents findings from a five-year study of memorialization in the War on Terror,1 focusing on the spatial and temporal grammars through which post-terrorist commemoration is staged. After outlining how architecture is designed to perform resilient nationalism on sites of terrorist attack, the chapter focuses on the simultaneous off-staging of other affected terrain into the realm of economic regeneration. The chapter reflects upon the spatial staging of 9/11 recovery in Manhattan which demarcated the sacred zone of reflection from that of business-as-usual.

280   Charlotte Heath-Kelly While audiences are invited to gaze upon the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the vast economic rescue packages aimed at regenerating Lower Manhattan after 9/11 are off-staged. This backstage terrain enabled and contextualizes the commemorative performance but is often silenced in analysis of 9/11 commemoration. Beyond these spatial divisions in the staging of terrorism memory, memorials also conceive of audiences in radically distinct temporal zones. Design teams are presented with briefs that identify their audiences in the contemporary moment but also 100, 150, and even 250 years into the future. The memorial is expected to perform the disaster event, to educate an audience of whom we have no knowledge. The chapter deconstructs this temporal leap, questioning the performative relationship between the design and an audience several generations hence. What effects upon them are expected? By addressing a future audience, the terrorism memorial situates us as the object of future beings’ gaze. It inverts the staging of monuments so that the contemporary audience of the memorial becomes that which is gazed upon by a future audience. This ritualized address to the future is transferred from burial necrogeography. Where burial makes an appeal to future generations to recognize the bereaved and their family, the terrorism memorial appropriates this performance for the nation. By considering how architects and planners stage (and off-stage) post-terrorist recovery, and how future audiences are imagined for commemorative cityscapes, a performance studies perspective enables us to witness the staging of post-terrorist memory. This matters politically because it emphasizes which communities are sidelined by such processes. These include the families of victims and survivors of terrorist attacks, who are often overruled by considerations of land value as well as the financial longevity of commemorative sites. Furthermore, the education of current future generations is sidelined by the design process, which sidesteps political complexity in favor of depoliticized renderings of victims attacked seemingly without reason. Front-staging concern for the ideal-type victims while off-staging the primacy of economic regeneration for states after terrorism allows questions of foreign policy and economic justice to be silenced in narrations of terrorist attacks.

Staging the Resilient Recovery The memorial to national tragedy is where we are supposed to be looking. It is supposed to draw our attention, to attract our interpretations, to soothe our angst, even to channel our frustrations. Administrations commission public memorials to interpolate citizens, tourists, and other passers-by into their depictions of sacrifice and resilient nationalism (Brading 2003; Johnson 1995; Nora 1989). Memorials constitute us as an audience of national projections and fantasies. The post-terrorist memorial is also a staged, hypersignified object. After addressing literature on the symbolism and affective communication of such objects, I will explore what is off-staged as invisible or non-sacred space by architects and city planners responding to terrorist attacks. What are we not supposed to be looking at in the staging of War on Terror memory and resilient nationalism? These off-stage dimensions of recovery planning are the zones designated for economic rather than architectural responses to terrorist attacks. What

Staging Memorialization   281 does it mean to off-stage the economic measures designed to ensure resilient nationalism and urbanity, while front-staging commemorative architecture? How should we consider the staging, and off-staging, of memorial performance? I draw from Shirin Rai’s (2015) framework for analyzing political performance to reconsider post-terrorist memorialization. Rai’s framework enables researchers to systematically study the rituals, cultures, and contexts through which political communication succeeds— or fails. Her discourse analysis focuses not on texts or spoken words, as so many others do, but on the contextual structures (parliamentary, theatrical, ritual) that constitute and shape political communication. In other work, this approach has been spoken of as the “grammar” of political performance (Rai and Reinelt 2015). This chapter makes use of their discussions of staging and audience to analyze the political work of post-terrorism memorials. Memorials are overtly staged performances, often of statehood and nationalism, occupying prime city-center locations and parks to address their audiences. Indeed it has become possible to talk of “memorial mania” in the United States and Europe. Thousands of new memorials have been constructed across the United States in the past few decades, to conquerors, liberators, and innocent bystanders, at federal as well as local levels (Doss 2010). Some statues glorifying confederate generals are now being taken down, after the Black Lives Matter protests highlighted the problematic nature of this commemoration (Reeves & Heath-Kelly 2020). ’Memorial mania’ can also be noted in Europe. Both Erika Doss and Andreas Huyssen situate this mania for the public monument as the resurgence of the “statue boom” that gripped the same continents across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between the 1870s and 1920s thousands of statues to the glorious dead of military battles took positions in public squares. Their presence is interpreted by sociologists as symptomatic of the radical social changes that afflicted those decades—specifically the rapid advance of modernism, immigration, and “mass culture” (Doss 2010, 27; Huyssen 1999, 200). These commemorative cultures and public monuments were aimed at evoking affective ties between publics and their nation-states, binding together the social group that had expanded to behemoth size and whose members could never all meet each other (Anderson [1983] 1991). The “imagined community” of the nation required symbolic devices to bind it together under conditions of modernity. As Pierre Nora (1989), a prominent sociologist of sites of memory, explained, the traditional structures and rhythms that organized village life, and everyone’s place within it, were disappearing by the late nineteenth century, and commemorative devices – ‘sites of memory’ - took their place. For Nora, the resort to historical symbols and architecture is indicative of an age in which ‘calls out for memory, because it has abandoned it’ (Nora 1989: 12). Without everyday ritual embedded in people’s lives, public statues, museums and memorials are resorted to as historical devices – but the nostalgia of these ‘devotional institutions’ leaves them ‘beleaguered and cold’ (Ibid). These seminal sociological studies of memorialization describe the memorial urge through functionalism. But contemporary literatures are beginning to incorporate performance and performativity to monuments and commemorative public actions. Spontaneous commemoration (the laying of tributes, the organization of solemn processions, the mobilization of symbols) are analyzed as collective actions and performances (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011; Santino 2006), while analytical frames drawn from affect theory are now applied to memorial objects and museums. These applications of affect theory to heritage sites implicitly address commemoration as a performative display that impacts an

282   Charlotte Heath-Kelly audience. Auto-ethnographic studies of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum focus on how the museum uses light, sloping floors, and sound to interpolate and disorient the visitor—prompting a strong emotional identification with the victims contra “the terrorists” (Micieli-Voutsinas 2017). As Micieli-Voutsinas shows, the Museum exposes visitors to voice recordings of victims’ last phone calls from the towers, before leading them into a “breathing room”—so called because visitors exhale audibly when moving to the new space, expelling their high levels of stress. They are simultaneously provided with perpetrator storyboards at which to direct their anxiety and anger. The audience’s affective, bodily reactions are curated through exposure to high levels of stress and then a space of relief, serving the purpose of inducing identification with the victims and consolidating the binary distinction between victims and terrorists in the international imaginary of the War on Terror. Audrey Reeves (2018) has provided another analysis of heritage sites as performative actors, focusing on the choreographed movement of the visitor to Israel’s Yad Vashem museum. The architecture of the Holocaust museum interpolates visitors into a performance of Israeli national identity, beginning by staging disorientation and enforced immobility through a 183-meter tunnel entrance the museum. This tunnel, Reeves argues, makes visitors physically experience impediments to mobility by planting obstacles in their path, while they contemplate images of book burnings, border closures, and the intensification of the Nazi genocidal campaign. Like the National September 11 Museum, Yad Vashem utilizes architecture to provoke an affective response to history and to facilitate acceptance of certain subject positions and political judgments. But few of these studies of hegemonic monuments explicitly integrate performance theory into their analyses. And performance studies scholarship on memory often focuses on innovative and embodied commemorative installations (Carlson 2006; Widrich 2014), the emergence of architectural discourses such as site-specificity (Kwon 2002), and the intersection of architecture, performance, and urban space in the performance of the city (Whybrow 2014). To situate post-terrorist memorial architecture in studies of performance and politics, I focus on the geographical distinctions made in urban recovery efforts between that which should be made visible (the memorial design) and that which is offstaged. Because, as performance theorists insist, the backstage of any production is essential to “the show.” As Erving Goffman (1959, 69–70) famously stated: A back region or backstage may be defined as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. . . . It is here that the capacity of a performance to express something beyond itself may be painstakingly fabricated; it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed. . . . Here costumes and other parts of personal front may be adjusted and scrutinized for flaws. Here the team can run through its performance, checking for offending expressions when no one is present to be affronted by them; here poor members of the team, who are expressively inept, can be schooled or dropped from the performance. Here the performer can relax; he can drop his front, forgo speaking his lines, and step out of character.

By focusing on the backstage area of the memorial, the chapter asks: What aren’t we supposed to see behind the staging of resilient nationalism? And what is the relationship of the backstage area to the front-stage performance?

Staging Memorialization   283

Off-Staging the Economic Recovery While we are distracted by the fetish of the post-terrorist memorial design, we do not notice how the boundaries of the sacred area (the stage) have been negotiated. After particularly devastating attacks, like the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11 or the Manchester bombing of 1996, significant portions of the city are damaged and even destroyed. The Manchester bomb destroyed fifty-seven thousand square meters of office space, while the 9/11 attacks affected more than sixteen acres. However, subsequent commemoration activities do not occupy these entire areas. Not all the affected space is deemed sacred or requiring of commemoration. City planners and officials drive for economic regeneration in the majority of affected urban space (Heath-Kelly 2017, 58), with memorialization confined to the epicenter of the bomb or structural collapse. This zoning activity is, in effect, how the staging of recovery manifests. The epicenter is chosen as the location for staging the aesthetic commemoration of the disaster, while the rest of the damaged area is off-staged for business-as-usual. The reconstruction of Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks provides an ideal demonstration of this staging activity by city planning. In the aftermath of the attacks, biblical power struggles took place between Larry Silverstein (the landowner), various mayors and governors of New York, the Port Authority, business interest groups, and the newly founded Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation to define the site masterplan for reconstruction (Sagalyn 2016). Almost immediately public debate raged about whether building-back-bigger was a better response to the attacks than leaving the site empty as a tribute to the dead, and planners agonized over the clashing legal and ethical entitlements of landowners, authorities, and bereaved families to the site. The selection of Daniel Libeskind’s Memory Foundations in 2003 presented a masterplan that articulated how memorialization, commercial towers, cultural buildings, and a new transportation center could all fit within the sixteen-acre site. While each stakeholder contested aspects of the site plan for years to come, and the cultural building was later scrapped (Sagalyn 2016), some aspects stuck. In particular, Libeskind’s prescription that the commemorative zone would be fixed around the footprints of the Twin Towers has continued to guide the construction of the site.2 With the memorial zone fixed around the footprints of the Towers, the rest of the site was freed up for commercial reconstruction and the upgrading of transport infrastructure. It is off-staged from the performance of 9/11 memory. And yet this backstage area was deemed overwhelmingly important to the recovery of New York by government agencies and officials, rather than commemoration. While not often discussed publicly, the off-staged story of economic regeneration in Lower Manhattan demonstrates a profound securitization narrative wherein it was feared that residential and commercial blight could fester, bringing the city into a permanent state of decline. Preventing this economic festering was the top priority of federal, state, and city officials, as I will describe here. These efforts to secure the backstage area to the memorial are relatively unknown and rarely connected to the staging of 9/11 memory in academic literature. But they were integral to staging New York as resilient—and prized far higher by governmental bodies than artistic commemoration. The speed of the economic securitization of Lower Manhattan was impressive. While local, national, and global audiences were entranced by towers burning and bodies falling,

284   Charlotte Heath-Kelly the city’s economic agencies began anticipating the financial consequences of 9/11. Executives of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESD) realized their responsibility for economic regeneration as the second plane struck, and by 4 p.m. their staff had pulled comprehensive spatial records of occupancy in the WTC offices (Mt. Auburn Associates 2005, 16). In their own words, “ESD, together with a host of partners, immediately began to identify and coordinate resources and to design and implement programs aimed at fostering business recovery” (vi). These economic agencies of New York were not contemplating the horrific spectacle visited upon denizens; they were focused on a future, slow-burning threat to the area. Their own reports on the activities of that day show they worked to assess the “economic injury” suffered by the city’s financial district, its future effects, and the potential of commerce to fester. Despite their proximity to massive human suffering, these agencies securitized the threat of “blight” and “economic injury” to the commercial future of Lower Manhattan. In the ESD’s report, the victims of the 9/11 attacks are conceived as the small, midsize, and large companies that would face disruption in the weeks after the attacks due to the severing of communications technologies, the destruction of millions of square feet of office space, and the reduction in foot traffic during the closure of the area. ESD immediately created crisis response intervention teams and a call center that would take calls not from families unable to locate missing persons but from companies concerned about their revenue and operations (Mt. Auburn Associates  2005, vii). The report presents an idiosyncratic securitization narrative of the 9/11 attacks, where the threat posed to New York was of corporate relocation “to competing jurisdictions of New Jersey and Connecticut” if companies could not find sufficient office space in the city (viii). The threat was considered so severe that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani held staff meetings of the ESD twice daily in the weeks following 9/11, focusing on the restoration of the circulation technologies so important to commerce (transport links and telecommunications). Within forty-eight hours of 9/11, a full database of companies impacted by the attacks and their likely needs for office space had been completed. Rectifying the “economic injury” to the city was the ESD’s primary (self-appointed) mission. Before the US Congress could agree on the sums to be awarded to Lower Manhattan, the ESD even developed its own economic stimulus packages. Using $20 million from the state of New York and $20 million from New Jersey, the ESD began to transfer public money into the hands of private businesses. “Retail recovery grant programs” made compensatory funds available to retailers south of Houston Street, up to a maximum of $10,000 per award. The ESD also offered “bridging loans” to commercial organizations to keep them afloat, prior to the receipt of more substantial disaster recovery funds from the government (Mt. Auburn Associates 2005, viii). This $40 million paled into insignificance once the federal government authorized disaster recovery funds for the area. In early November 2001 the city had negotiated $700 million in business recovery funds from Congress—an amount separate from the $2 billion awarded to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, tasked with rebuilding Lower Manhattan. That $700 million of public money went directly into private hands, as businesses were understood to be the victims of disruption and a continuing threat of “urban blight” was feared if they should leave Lower Manhattan. The ESD described the injection of funds as allowing it to move from “short term stabilization measures to longer term retention incentives” (Mt. Auburn Associates 2005, ix). Threat was identified in the future,

Staging Memorialization   285 potential consequences of 9/11—through the conceptual device of “disruption”—and companies were paid with public money to stay in New York City: “Economic recovery means a lot more than simply addressing the immediate losses of individual business. Attention must be focused on the longer-term economic environment—what can be done to encourage the resumption of commerce and economic activity in the impacted area. This means addressing the overall economic competitiveness of core industries in the impacted area to ensure that businesses are willing to reinvest and rebuild. It also means rebuilding the market by making sure that customers are willing to return” (xiii, my emphasis). Here the famously neoliberal and laissez-faire US economic doctrine swerved toward intervention to correct the problems of “the market”: $13.6 million was awarded to compensate firms under the Retail Recovery Grant Program; $33.4 million was awarded to firms under the Bridging Loan program; $556 million was awarded to small businesses under the Business Recovery Grant Program, for “physical damage, business interruption and loss of customers.” The recipients amounted to 70 percent of all small businesses in Lower Manhattan. Vast sums of money were also transferred to firms to aid job creation and retention, small firm attraction and retention, technical assistance programs, and employee training (ix–x). The Lower Manhattan Development Company also transferred congressional funds into private residential hands to stave off “blight.” One-third of Battery Park residents did not return to their homes following the 9/11 attacks, provoking a 30 percent decrease in rental prices there and a 16 to 21 percent drop in residential rental prices in the Financial District. Identifying this as a crisis in the market requiring governmental response, public money was used to pay residents to stay in the area—and to encourage others to take up tenancies adjacent to the disaster zone. Residential Location Incentive Grants totaling $28.5 million were allocated to residents, up to a maximum of 30 percent of their monthly rent or mortgage, for a period of two years (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation 2002). These economic recovery programs are fundamental to the staging of 9/11 precisely because they are off-staged. While backstage, they constituted the rebuilt environment for aesthetic and affective design and performance. When distracted by Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence design we do not notice the federal funding that was transferred into the hands of private residents and businesses in the name of ending the slow burn of “economic injury.” Similarly, we rarely notice the intense lobbying to replicate Lower Manhattan’s office space capacity on-site, as well as the banal replication of real estate geography in the segmented site masterplan (Nobel  2005, 125–6). In Nobel’s powerful critique of the WTC rebuilding process, he notes the tedious reappearance of “trains below, cubicles above, memorial in the footprints, and shopping everywhere around” in the planning for the site (150). Crucially for our discussion of staging, Nobel also shows how criticisms of the banal site plan led the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation running the show to appropriate the cultural discourse of the architectural genius—running an international design competition so that a “star architect might prettify the developer’s numbers” (150). This leads us to a particular understanding of the politics of curating terrorism on the WTC site. In Lower Manhattan the curation of 9/11 through the National September 11 Memorial and Museum is the visual staging that obscures the vast efforts made to reassert the market on the site. The memorialization process serves to distract from global capitalism’s protection and consolidation through business grants, bridging loans, and payments to residents which enticed them to remain in the area. While Arad’s Reflecting Absence design attracts the attention is rightly deserves, it is where we are supposed to be looking when we

286   Charlotte Heath-Kelly visit Lower Manhattan. It is the staged performance of grief and resilient nationalism. But around the edges of that design, the stage itself has been constructed from billions of dollars of financial recovery packages, the promised return of Lower Manhattan’s office space capacity, and a brand new transport hub to replace the inefficiencies of the old destroyed network connecting New York and New Jersey (Mt. Auburn Associates 2005). Vast efforts are made to compensate businesses and residents in the aftermath of disaster, to prevent slow-burning consequences of further economic damage. And while this work is off-staged, the memorial is cynically placed centrally to attract attention and interpolate audiences into its performance of grief and resilience. But what is the political significance of this staging work? The front-staging of memorials and the off-staging of economic recovery mechanisms demonstrate an unpublicized attitude within governmental departments that the most significant risk posed by terrorism is economic disruption. Indeed all major terrorist attacks are followed immediately by “economic impact assessments” that frame financial markets and commercial interests as the victims (Johnston and Nedelescu 2005). Backstage, states commission economists to tally the costs of lost business, compared to projections of alternate realities where consumers were not scared to travel into urban centers. The report of the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2005) into the economic impact of the 2005 bombings recommended introducing free bus travel in the capital on Saturdays (to stimulate travel to the West End) and, more controversially, offering rewards to citizens for reporting terrorist conspiracies. Read in this light, the curation of memorial monuments is part of the retrospective securing of the political and economic system after terrorism. Governments are keenly aware of their nation’s economic vulnerability to terrorism but do not want to appear callous and unfeeling before a public concerned with the human casualties. The staging of commemorative architecture then takes place, drawing attention away from economic recovery efforts that occur off-stage. But as Goffman (1959, 69–70) teaches us, the backstage is integral to the performance. It is here that the capacity of the performance to conjure “something beyond itself ” is made.

Staging for Future Generations: Inverting the Relationship between Audiences So far we have discussed the physical staging of memorial objects and surrounding urban geography as the matter of the performance, with visitors as the intended audience. The city has been the stage, while the urban population and tourists are constituted as the audience of the commemorative performance. But the memorialization of terrorism has another hidden dynamic that radically overturns this relationship between performative device and audience. The memorial’s audience are not just those in the present but also future generations not yet born. I reflect here on the briefs given to designers by governmental bodies which articulate the future audience. By imagining these future audiences, the memorial places our

Staging Memorialization   287 generation on the stage as an object of inquiry from future people. It changes contemporary audiences into objects gazed upon by future audiences, inverting their place in the performance. Why, and how? In the course of this research, I have spoken to designers of post-terrorist memorials to major events of the early twenty-first century. Most designers clearly articulated that their design briefs identified future generations as their primary audience. Peter Walker, a partner at PWP Landscape Architecture who collaborated with Arad on Manhattan’s 9/11 memorial landscape, explained to me that their design brief projected forward eighty to one hundred years into the future.3 This led to significant complications with the arboreal landscapes that surround Reflecting Absence, as the tough New York conditions significantly impact on the lifespan of trees. To solve the clash between the short lifespan of the trees, and the intended hundred-year lifespan of the design, Walker explained, the trees were fed intravenously with nutrients to extend their lives—and the life of the design (Heath-Kelly 2018). At the time I did not realize the significance of his invocation of the future audience in the memorial brief, until it reappeared in conversations with other design professionals. This imagination of a distant future audience for the 9/11 memorial site was confirmed by Steve Davis of David Brody Bond Architecture, the team responsible for designing the September 11 Museum on-site. He spoke at length about the challenges of anticipating future generations that will have no direct memory of the events of 9/11, and designing the Museum with them in mind. In this complicated relationship between performance and audience, where no prior knowledge of the events can be assumed, the Museum became quite didactic in its narration, using a chronological structure in certain rooms to convey the timeline of events. But Davis also explained how the team compensated for the lack of direct memory (in the future) by using dynamics of “cultural memory, authenticity, scale and emotion.”4 Preserving the authenticity of the site became a central feature in the Museum, which is built on the bedrock underneath the site of the former Towers. According to Davis, “In one hundred years it will just be images presented in media and other kinds of things. . . . The authenticity of the site is a really critical element of the design. So the pools are perfectly aligned with the footprints beneath them—to the millimeter. There was a two-year fight over that because it was too inconvenient to do it. . . . The Trade Center was really big so the scale was unaltered. So we have these really grand spaces but that’s what we inherited. It’s not a four-fifths-scale thing. The scale is unpunished.” The entire September 11 Museum design concept is built for future audiences—not contemporary visitors, or even the families of those lost. Bearing this performativity of authenticity in mind, and its manipulation for future audiences, we can understand the curation of museological artifacts there anew. The curation of 9/11 memory in the Museum has been analyzed at length, often with a focus on the use of wreckage from the attacks in the displays and the centralization of the “slurry wall” to communicate the devastation of that day (Heath-Kelly 2017). Maria Sturken (2016) provides an excellent account of the co-optation of objects from the Towers in the performance of a resilient nationalism, where materiality is redeployed in service of the state’s self-image. But by speaking to the designer about the intended future audience, we can see that authenticity, wreckage, and scale are deployed in a conversation with the future. This fundamentally alters the staging of 9/11: the intended audience is the future invited to gaze upon the event and ourselves, as we become projected into their historical memory.

288   Charlotte Heath-Kelly In other cases of post-terrorism commemoration, the hundred-year threshold for design relevance was even exceeded. The UK’s Department for Culture Media and Sport awarded the contract to memorialize the July 2005 bombings (7/7) of London to Carmody Groarke Architects. Andy Groarke, a partner at the firm, told me that the 7/7 design brief set a 250-year window of communication, so that the architects had to solve the problem of communicating the impact of the bombings to very distant future generations: The only reason for the memorial’s being at all (it has none of the normal functions of architecture, it has none of the comfort or shelter), is to stop people forgetting. That’s it. And so we need to project ourselves 250 years into the future—which was the design life of the memorial, as the brief said. So our client is generations to come! Unfortunately, we’ll never stop [the bereaved] forgetting, and so that’s not the purpose of this memorial. [They] have [their] own private memorial for [their] loved one, and the purpose of this memorial is not a surrogate grave. It’s a place of collective consciousness or making sense of our times collectively, as well as individually. And that’s for generations to come so that people do not start forgetting.5

If memorials aren’t directed at the traumatized witnesses of violence but to future generations, their purpose is to prevent the erasure of the present generation, and its tragedies, from the memories of those to come (Heath-Kelly 2018). As we have seen in the statements of these prominent architects, post-terrorist memorialization involves a temporal shift that displaces the audience hundreds of years hence. This is a fascinating displacement that transforms denizens living alongside the site of attacks into the intended object of the future’s gaze. The memorial is a device that positions us as an object of potential concern from the future. It is spectacularly arrogant in this regard. The direction of the performance to an unknown future audience is a dramatic adaptation of performance logics. How can the effects of the performance be realized? What are the intended effects? Performance theory understands the effects of the performance as being generated from the interaction between performers and audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998). In theatrical contexts, the audience is present in the same building or location as the performers. But not all performances involve physical proximity. The political performance undertaken by parliamentarians is witnessed by their colleagues, but is also directed at distant constituents through the media, as Rai (2015) has shown. To balance these multiple audiences and distance, parliamentary performers replicate familiar grammars of concern to their electorate, relying on the calibration of the message. But the audience 250 years hence is much more abstracted than one living in the same era as the performer. So can the performance attempt to communicate with its audience, and with what shared grammar? While the attempt to engender an emotional response from distant generations to our tragedies is hubristic, there are certain identifiable grammars in which designers encode their messages to the future. First, it is common for memorial designers to engrave their monuments with the names of the deceased. The designer relies on the commemorative grammar that individualizes each victim through their name. Perhaps the future audience member will glance upon a name similar to their own, or to someone they know, and be affected by the knowledge of an individual now lost. Second, designers commonly reproduce the “garden cemetery” grammar in their memorial landscapes in the hope of calibrating their message. The garden cemetery aesthetic dates from the early nineteenth century, when overcrowded European cemeteries were moved from city-center locations into leafy suburbs (for health and sanitation reasons).

Staging Memorialization   289 Landscape design was then thought paramount to encouraging city dwellers to visit their dead and the aesthetic enjoyment of nature fused with duties to tend the graves of loved ones (Tarlow 2000). Borrowing the aesthetic, contemporary memorial designs deploy lush sylvan landscapes to soften the invocation of tragedy and mortality. By replicating this grammar, the architecture might convey a reflective aesthetic to future audiences. And yet, while these grammars can be identified, the performance of tragedy to a distant future audience is still radically abstract. It relies on the hubristic assumption that someone in the distant future will notice the marker, and care. But this arrogant supposition that the future might care about our tragedies has a long heritage. What is the gravestone, apart from someone’s vainglorious refusal to vanish from the earth upon death? In an effort to not be forgotten, the deceased, and their relatives, use burial markers to hold a place in the attention of the future. Burial markers are performances addressed to future unknown audiences, just like the memorials to terrorist attacks. By analyzing the staging of memory for a future audience, performance theory allows us to reconceptualize the memorial as a device intended to counteract human finitude. It continues the grammar of burial rituals. Robert Pogue Harrison (2003) has considered at length the centrality of burial to human place-making and politics. Human place-making, he argues, is predicated upon the earth’s capacity to retain and disintegrate corpses and affect a separation between past, present, and future. Human societies housed their dead long before they housed themselves, he shows, demonstrating the significance afforded the concealment of bodily remains. Pogue Harrison’s argument is that burial rites are performative of linear time, creating layers of past, present, and future. The corpse is deposited into the past (and removed from the present) upon its entry into the soil; the present remains above ground; and future generations are anticipated through the placing of markers above the place of the corpse (Heath-Kelly  2018). As we can see, addressing the post-terrorism memorial to future audiences also constitutes the experience of linear time—invoking a future for which we are a historical object. This linear time is not neutral. The memorial consolidates the temporality that emerged with, and underwrites, the modern political project of Western states and their international order (Hom 2010). It is an appeal to a future that might recognize us, staged through the grammar of standardized, linear time.

Conclusion: Who Is Doing the Staging? This chapter has explored the staging of post-terrorist memory through architecture, focusing on its relationship with multiple audiences over time as well as the off-staging of the vast economic stimulus packages that accompany such designs. But the question remains: What politics do such commemorative performances deploy, and how can the performance lens aid our inquiries? The stylized performance of grief and resilience at post-terrorist sites depoliticizes violence in service of state narratives of barbaric carnage visited upon innocent civilians. Memorial performances are staged as sacred tributes and, as such, silence political discussion of the geopolitical factors that contextualize terrorist violence against imperial states. The grammar of commemoration renders such political discussion tasteless and dishonorable.

290   Charlotte Heath-Kelly

figure 17.1.  Defaced image of Anders Breivik at his trial, displayed in the July 22 Memorial Centre, Oslo. Photo by author.

Frequently, images of perpetrators are forbidden from museum displays at the request of families and are defaced if they do appear. For example, the sole image of Anders Behring Breivik in the July 22 Memorial Centre in Oslo is shielded by protective plastic but is repeatedly defaced by scratching nevertheless (see figure 17.1). By deploying a grammar of commemorative tribute to the victims of terrorist attacks, the memorial performance cannot—and does not—engage with the politics of violence. Instead such memorials and museums frame victims as ideal-type figures, targeted randomly by barbaric evildoers. Murder may be despicable, but presenting the targeting as random underplays the careful selection of symbolic sites and populations as victims of performative violence. There are staging logics behind terrorist violence; it is meant to be broadcast and seen. But the staging logics of memorialization suppress those of terrorist groups, tending instead toward the “any man,” ideal-type victim. This silencing plays into broader securitizing projects, like the War on Terror, which maintain that we are all constantly at threat from random slaughter by terrorists and which silence the geopolitical factors that contribute to political violence. The staging of the memorial to terrorism directly counterbalances the staging of terrorist violence itself. A performance lens allows us to focus on the staging of post-terrorist memorials, enabling us to see beyond the aesthetics of resilient nationalism directly used in their designs. By adopting performance theory insights around staging and the grammars of communication with a distant audience, we can engage with the normalization of urban space around securitized, “sacred” zones—and the inversion of audience relationships when memorials are addressed to generations hundreds of years hence. For all the securitized hyperbole of the War on Terror, the key concerns of planners and administrators are the

Staging Memorialization   291 resumption of economic activities (the lifeblood of the state) and effacing the grief and death anxiety that threaten relationships of sovereignty and subjectivity (Heath-Kelly 2017).

Notes 1. The author gratefully acknowledges the British Academy for funding the original pilot study (SG121055) and the Economic and Social Research Council for funding most of the research described here (ES/N002407/1). 2. Although Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial was brought up to ground level, from its originally intended position at bedrock. 3. Author interview, Peter Walker, August 14, 2014. 4. Author interview, Steve Davis, July 29, 2014. 5. Author interview, Andy Groarke, July 5, 2016.

References Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. 1998. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage. Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Brading, David  A. 2003. “Monuments and Nationalism in Modern Mexico.” Nations and Nationalism 7, no. 4: 521–31. Carlson, Marla. 2006. “Looking, Listening and Remembering: Ways to Walk New York after 9/11.” Theatre Journal 58, no. 3: 395–416. Doss, Erika. 2010. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Doubleday. Heath-Kelly, Charlotte. 2017. Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Heath-Kelly, Charlotte. 2018. “Survivor Trees and Memorial Groves: Vegetal Commemoration of Victims of Terrorism in Europe and the United States.” Political Geography 64: 63–72. Hom, Andy. 2010. “Hegemonic Metronome: The Ascendency of Western Standard Time.” Review of International Studies 36, no. 4: 1145–70. Huyssen, Andreas. 1999. “Monumental Seduction.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan V. Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 191–207. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Johnson, Nuala. 1995. “Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and Nationalism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 1: 51–65. Johnston, R.  Barry, and Oana M Nedelescu. 2005. “The Impact of Terrorism on Financial Markets.” IMF Working Paper WP/05/60. International Monetary Fund. https://www.imf. org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2005/wp0560.pdf. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

292   Charlotte Heath-Kelly London Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 2005. The Economic Effects of Terrorism on London—Experiences of Firms in London’s Business Community. London: London Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. 2002. “HUD/CPD/DRGR—Action Plan & Activities: Plan Listing.” http://renewnyc.com/FundingInitiatives/HUD_PAP_2003-1030_submitted.htm, accessed January 2, 2018. Margry, Peter Jan, and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero, eds. 2011. Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorialising Traumatic Death. New York: Berghahn. Micieli-Voutsinas, Jacque. 2017. “An Absent Presence: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum.” Emotion, Space and Society 24 (August): 93–104. Mt. Auburn Associates. 2005. “World Trade Center Economic Recovery: Rebuilding the Economy of Lower Manhattan: A Report to Empire State Development.” https://cdn.esd. ny.gov/Resources/WTCFinalReportOctober6th.pdf, accessed December 31, 2018. Nobel, Philip. 2005. Sixteen Acres: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site. London: Granta. Nora, Pierre. 1989. Les Lieux de Memoires. Paris: Gallimard. Pogue Harrison, Robert. 2003. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rai, Shirin. 2015. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Rai, Shirin, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. 2015. The Grammar of Politics and Performance. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Reeves, Audrey. 2018. “Mobilising Bodies: Narrating Security. Tourist Choreographies at Jerusalem’s Holocaust History Museum.” Mobilities 13, no. 2: 216–30. Reeves, Audrey & Charlotte Heath-Kelly (2020) ‘Curating Conflict: Political Violence in Museums, Memorials & Exhibitions’, Critical Military Studies, online first: https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23337486.2020.1797328 Sagalyn, Lynne B. 2016. Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Santino, Jack, ed. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialisation of Death. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Sturken, Maria. 2016. “The Objects That Lived: The 9/11 Museum and Material Transformation.” Memory Studies 9, no. 1: 13–26. Tarlow, Sarah. 2000. “Landscapes of Memory: The Nineteenth Century Garden Cemetery.” European Journal of Archaeology 3, no. 2: 217–39. Whybrow, Nicholas, ed. 2014. Performing Cities. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Widrich, Mechtild. 2014. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Chapter 18

U r ba n Site s of th e Ev ery day a n d th e I n ter nationa l The Other City and the Aesthetic Subject Matt Davies

Introduction In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière (2009, 19) writes, “That is what the word ‘emancipation’ means: the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.” This assertion condenses very old theoretical debates regarding the relations between theatrical performance as an aesthetic concern, relations between individuals and communities as a political concern, and, with the questioning of boundaries, a concern with space. Both ancient and modern terms for the presumed space for politics and for performance (polis, public) indicate a kind of commonsense intertwining of performance, politics, and space, all of which generate a deep bond between each and the site of the city. The city stages politics. But Rancière’s invocation of the concept of emancipation also points to the ways that this common sense might restrict the aesthetic and political possibilities of this intertwining: common sense characterizes the givenness, the correctness, the propriety of who, what, and where the public is. The city distributes bodies in space. At the same time that the city enables performance, aesthetic experience, public speech, or political demonstration, it tells us where these must take place, who has access to these places, and what an aesthetic experience must be—and what politics must be. In telling us these things, the city performs what Rancière (2010, 36–37) calls the “police order,” a governing mentality that partitions and distributes the sensible: both that which can be perceived and how things can be perceived. The city is not only, as Whybrow (2011, 7) says, a “new body”; it is also a political and aesthetic subject. However, as a subject (and not merely an object), the city exceeds the function of spatially manifesting the police order. How can we apprehend this excess? Can we perceive the city as an aesthetic subject?

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Mapping the Field Aesthetically researching cities has already engendered a rich field of scholarship and art. A key statement of the importance of this field came from Hopkins, Orr, and Solga’s (2009) introduction to their volume Performance and the City, which began with the assertion that around 2006, the world entered a phase when more people lived in cities than not. They build a series of arguments on this claim, demonstrating the transformations of cultural and political life linking globalization and urbanization. These ideas are shared by a good deal of the research around global cities across a wide range of critical and conventional research (e.g., Castells 2000; Sassen 2001; Taylor 2004; Curtis 2016). A core theoretical premise behind many of these approaches derives from Henri Lefebvre’s argument that space is not an ontologically given container for social and political life but is produced (Lefebvre 1991a) and that the production of urban space thus lies at the heart of contemporary political struggles (Lefebvre  1996,  2003). Crucially, Lefebvre understands space as manifold and contradictory, not an objective “thing” but a set of relations between conceptions or plans, perceptions, and lived practices. The representation of space is not necessarily congruent with, and in determined circumstances it attempts to dominate, spatial practices, and these practices do not exhaust the emergence of spaces of representation where “space is directly lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 1991a, 39). This noncoherence of space suggests numerous possibilities for understanding how space for politics can be inaugurated (Tedesco 2012; Dikeç 2016). Lefebvre’s insistence on the fractures and disconnections between conceiving, perceiving, and living resonates with the ways Rancière (2010) links politics and aesthetics as “distribution of the sensible.” To see urban sites as spaces where creative and artistic practices intertwine with resistance (Amoore and Hall 2010; Hofman and Atanasovski 2017), sensibilities (Closs-Stephens  2015; Wohl  2018), or domination (Ghertner  2015) highlights the plurality of urban space: no particular model of the urban serves as a standard for what a city might be, and no particular site in a city can be reduced to its conceived or practiced meanings. More orthodox political economic readings of cities, such as in the global cities literature, have tended to regard urban transformations in overly homogeneous or singular terms—as a model that might be imposed from above—missing out on these pluralities (Robinson 2006; Brenner 2014; see also McLean 2017 for a feminist critique, and Kipfer 2018 for an anticolonial critique). Here is where aesthetic research into cities makes a critical contribution: cities are indeed produced space, as political economy would have it, and they are also performed (Hopkins, Orr, and Solga 2009; Hopkins and Solga 2013; Whybrow 2014) and thus contingent temporally on their specific performances. Cities therefore are extremely rich sites for exploring the connections and divisions that afford various hierarchical distributions—performer versus spectator, aesthetic versus political, international versus everyday—and not merely “the mise-en-scène of the built environment” (Whybrow 2014, 1). Cities can present the opportunities for disputing and disrupting such hierarchies because the site of the city is such a plural, manifold space. Discovering, or at least encountering and experiencing, these multiplicities has a long pedigree in aesthetic research: thus Baudelaire’s (2010) embodying of the nineteenth-century Parisian flaneur, taken up by Walter Benjamin (1978a,  1978b) and his experimental methods for

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International   295 researching cities (Buck-Morss 1986) and problematized through the figure of the flâneuse (Scalway  2002; Rose  2015; Elkin  2016). Indeed researching the city as “the continuous, aggregated movement of diverse bodies in, around and through urban space” (Whybrow 2014, 1) produced the Situationists’ radical critiques of urbanism in the tactic of the dérive and the field of psychogeography (Bonnett 2017; Lavery 2018; for work by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, see Knabb 2006; see also the essays collected in Richardson 2015). Walking as a method for uncovering and problematizing urban space informs both political critique (Solnit 2002; Phillips and Montes 2018) and aesthetic disruptions, such as in the performance art of Cardiff and Miller (see, e.g., http://cardiffmiller.com/artworks/ walks/index.html). This plurality and mobility make the idea of the city notoriously difficult to define objectively: What are the spatial limits of a city? What size of population or area distinguishes a city from other forms of human settlement? What social, political, economic, or cultural functions are specific to cities? But if the city is difficult to specify as an aesthetic object, how can we perceive it as an aesthetic subject, that is, not only a site of decision and action but also an act of imagination (Jestrovic 2014)? Michael Shapiro (2013) posits the idea of an aesthetic subject as a catalyst for transdisciplinary political analysis. He asserts a conception of subjectivity that refutes the reductions and reifications of the “psychological subject” for which identity is a static property of individual humans. Unlike psychological subjects, “aesthetic subjects are those who, through artistic genres, articulate and mobilize thinking” (11). Shifting the focus to cities as subjects allows political analyses that avoid the objectifications, reductions, and reifications that can obscure the political possibilities emergent in given spaces. Theatrical performance can reveal the city that discloses its subjectivity. I started to think about cities in relation to “inquiry as mobilized thinking” (Shapiro 2013, 22) through theatrical performance while working with Brad McCormick and Katy Vanden Hehir from Cap-a-pie, a theater and performing company in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. They led a civic engagement initiative at Newcastle University on “performing research,” helping academic staff to find different ways to communicate our research to wider, especially nonacademic, publics. I was also interested in thinking about how research itself might be understood as performance and what researchers might learn about the research process from thinking about performance. My research agenda explores everyday life in relation to international political economy (e.g., Davies and Neimann 2002; Davies 2016). In our commonsense understandings of these terms, each refers to phenomena at very different scales: the everyday or mundane is lived intimately; the international is experienced rather remotely and at a much grander scale. Finding sites or spaces where these scales intersect, overlap, confront, or connect with each other is an initial research problem. At the time I started work with Cap-a-pie, Rio de Janeiro was preparing for the 2016 Olympic Games—a grandiose global theatrical performance—and the city was undergoing serious social and economic upheavals from the urban regeneration policies put in place to prepare for the megaevent. It became clear to me that the city was precisely the kind of space where these two scales confront each other. Taking the perspective of the international regarding this confrontation contributes to the appearance of the city as an object and a police order: its features fixed in time and space, the city becomes a target for interventions and manipulations through planning and policy. Such a perspective produces the city as abstract space, situating the international and the agents that are enabled to act at the international scale on a superior, dominant

296   Matt Davies plane. This separation of the international renders the urban everyday, a space of inhabitants and users of space, as subordinate and denies the fundamental equality of subjects by distributing them into these separated levels. In order to inquire into the aesthetic and political effects of the artifice of this separation, and therefore in order to inquire into the equality of these subjects, my work with Cap-a-pie approached the city through a method of performance as research. Because performance specifically mobilizes the body in the articulation of this intertwining of the everyday and the international, it makes a crucial methodological intervention in the aesthetic transdisciplinary analysis of urban politics.

Method Linking practices of performance to questions of method is not new: Hulton (2014) documents debates in the field regarding theater practice as research dating back to the 1960s, and Trimingham (2002) explores the methodological connections to the wider debates on action research. The breadth of the sources that these methodological debates draw on extends their relevance beyond questions concerning disciplinary methods for performance studies (Kershaw and Nicholson 2011) into performance as method (Haseman 2010). Augusto Boal’s (2008) Theatre of the Oppressed adopted Paulo Freire’s literacy training methods to his own theatrical practice to develop forms of political engagement. These experiences influenced Boal to experiment in “legislative theatre” (Boal 1998), employing his notion of spectator-actors, “spect-actors,” to enable city residents to legislate their social demands, notably while Boal was serving as a city councillor for Rio de Janeiro. Boal’s dramaturgy influenced various explorations of the use of performance in participatory action research. As Raynor (2018, 4) notes, “Given an emphasis on action, inclusion, and emotion, it is no surprise that amongst a broad range of creative methods, social scientists have deployed theatre practice for their participatory potentialities.” Mike Pearson (2012) and Ruth Raynor (2018) explicitly link performance with the practical development of research methods. Pearson’s drama Raindogs investigates the temporality of the city by inscribing both mundane images and sounds from the city and short texts, poetic and philosophical, onto the black-box space in which the play is performed. Raynor worked with a group of single, precariously employed women in the Northeast of England using performance techniques and games to develop a play about their lived experiences. In both of these cases, the method of research enacts: in Pearson’s case, it enacts the city; in Raynor’s it enacts these lived experiences. Such methods illustrate Aradau and Huysmans’s (2014) conception of methods as devices. For Aradau and Huysmans, method is not a neutral instrument logically linking observation, epistemology, and theory. Rather, methods as devices are messy and probing, bringing into being the very worlds they set out to understand. As devices enacting worlds, methods are by their practice performative (Haseman 2010, 150). Methods interfere in the world and must be assessed politically in terms of the competing powers and knowledges they enact. This political enacting opens a second aspect to their conception of method: methods as acts are disruptive. As device, the form of the method (quantitative or qualitative) is less important to its politics than the nature of the world it brings into being. As acts, the disruption in method is political inasmuch as this enacted world embodies excluded,

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International   297 subordinated aspects that trouble ordered and orderly worlds. Pearson’s Raindogs is a performative method for uncovering the disruptive elements of everyday life in cities. Raynor’s research through performance reveals—to both researchers and performers—the everyday tactics of women surviving austerity in Britain. Raynor’s work with the women in her group employed performance games and techniques to generate ideas for a play that the women themselves performed. Their play as method is disruptive, in Aradau and Huysmans’ sense, as it brings these women’s subordinated and marginalized experiences into a discussion about austerity. Pearson’s Raindogs is similarly disruptive, mobilizing texts and images in performance that highlight the framing of urban experience and bringing into view those elements that lie at the margins or beyond the frame. Both, however, present results of their research in plays, performed on stage or, in the case of Raindogs, in a black-box studio. Pearson (2012, 65) argues that such a space is not depoliticizing, against the assertion that no body politic can be placed on view; whatever the merits of Pearson’s argument here, in both of these cases an audience is presented with materials chosen and designed for them to draw attention to those subordinated experiences and material relations that the authors have discovered through their performance-as-method research. This raises a question about the relationship between the authors-players-actors, on the one hand, and the audience or public on the other. Whether the political intent of these plays is to raise consciousness or to provoke action, in both cases something is discovered through the production of the play that is to be transmitted to an audience. The practices of equality that inform the methods in the production of the plays can themselves be obscured if the later practice of performance is performance as transmission. The implications of Aradau and Huysmans’ argument that disruptions are political insofar as they trouble an orderly world by mobilizing subordinated experiences or material recall Rancière’s (2009) insistence on equality as a premise: this subordination is a denial of equality, not an inequality to be rectified by the transmitter. The hierarchy that emerges between the allocation of the labor of conceiving and transmitting knowledge of an inequality or of a wrong to a supposedly receptive audience is cognate to the hierarchy that allocates conception, planning, and design to technocrats over the supposed receptiveness of dwellers, or of the realpolitik of the international system over the contingency of the everyday. The global cities debates have highlighted the ways that urban planning has come to be more homogeneous, increasingly orientated toward singular ends determined from an abstract, technocratic position outside of particular city spaces. A globalizing or planetary view of cities looks at the ways cities have become centers for decision and action, nodes in networks of flows of capital, of information, of bodies in migration, etc., and seeks to implement those qualities that seem to characterize privileged, “alpha” spaces in these global networks. Cities, from this globalized perspective, are inert matter to be shaped according to the designs and desires of investors, international institutions and agencies, academic researchers, and technocrats and planners. Lefebvre prefigured such a view very clearly in his theory of the production of space, discussed earlier. Notably, he also posits these contentious epistemological splits between conceiving, perceiving, and living in his theory of everyday life. For Lefebvre, everyday life, alongside urbanism, is a product of modernity. With everyday life, the intensification of mental-manual divisions of labor in modernity and in capitalism separates “higher” activities of thought and reflection from the mundane, banal existence of the everyday: higher

298   Matt Davies activities entail truth without reality; everyday life entails reality without truth. The concentration of the planning, command, and control functions of mental labor in urban spaces links the historical process of separation that defines everyday life with urbanization. In his theory of space—through his trinity of representations of space, spatial practice, and spaces of representation—the first entails concepts without practices and the second entails the practices as derived from those concepts. The third space, then, the space of representation, is where politics emerges, where concepts and their programmed practices are contested. Everyday life in a city, then, is hidden in plain view. It is the gestes répétées of social reproduction, the social, cultural, and infrastructural qualities that take place beneath conscious attention in order to make life in the city possible. But because these are both indispensable and invisible, the separation of these everyday activities from higher activities also renders the latter less then fully perceivable. Noticing and registering a “reality without truth” is as incomplete as registering the “truth without reality” (Lefebvre 1984, 14). The methodological implications of Pearson’s and Raynor’s work suggest that the truths hidden in banal realities can be revealed in the theater, similarly to the interventions of street performance troupes such as Générik Vapeur, by making “everyday sights and sounds of a city strange” (Jestrovic 2005, 362–3). However, on an immediate experiential level, performing a city could also be a method for contesting the denial of equality. By bringing together thoughtful reflections on life in a city with the banal gestes répétées of everyday life themselves, performing becomes an ordinary way of bridging the gap between conscious planning and reflection and everyday life that does not rely on a division of labor between the researcher who discovers the truth and an audience whose role would be to receive it.

The Other City In their work at Newcastle University, Cap-a-pie would hold weekly sessions with researchers across various academic disciplines at various stages of their careers to develop small plays to publicize research done by University staff, communicating it in accessible terms to the local community. Before they began working with me, Cap-a-pie had been involved with previous projects on performing urbanism, for example, a play titled The Town Meeting developed with Paul Cowie (McCormick et al. 2015). Cap-a-pie produced a children’s play based on puppetry to tell the story of a migratory bird who gets diverted and tries to settle in Rio, bringing my interest in urbanism together with Richard Bevan’s research on migratory birds. On the back of this, we began work on a new performance, titled The Other City (McCormick 2019). The Other City is an audio play available as a downloadable podcast. The voice in the recording is an artist in Rio de Janeiro whose project is to engage with the listener in their own city, the city where the listener is performing The Other City, by explaining some things about life in Rio. This is a gesture toward a comparative urbanism (Robinson 2016): the idea is that cities are distinct on various levels but that those differences might illuminate things about how cities produce space, how they are inserted into wider spaces, and how the notion of urbanization might be changing.

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International   299 The listener-performer downloads audio files to a phone or other mobile device to listen to the play and, within their comfort range, goes out to the streets to perform a series of experiments or tasks to get a sense of the city. The tasks were designed to expose the listener to everyday aspects of urban life that might otherwise go unnoticed, akin to psychogeography, to help the listener to engage with the rhythms and flows of the urban. Some of these tasks involved mapping, others listening, others moving through spaces deliberately, and still others visualizations of the space. Performers of The Other City are hidden in plain sight; wearing headphones, moving through the city with other people, performing prosaic tasks likely to go unnoticed by other pedestrians, the performers of The Other City are also just a part of the urban landscape. They may find themselves confronting through their observations, their listenings, or their notes urban problems or harms the city does, but this depends largely on how they realize their own performance and the urban circumstances in which they perform. The Other City asks its performers to become urban subjects; only potentially do they become political subjects. The name of the narrator of The Other City is Gabriela. She is an artist who lives in a favela and who shares important details about Rio de Janeiro with the listener. However, the play is not about Rio; rather, the city is also a character in the play. Gabriela leads the listener through a series of movements and tasks designed to ask them to engage with their experience of their own city, using Rio as a kind of catalyst to provoke these engagements. The play is broken into several chapters, each of which takes up an assertion about cities or about Rio that might be controversial or might be common sense. In the performance, it is less important to agree or disagree with the arguments of the narrator than to engage them in the context of the performance. For example, the initial claim that people are not supposed to live in cities is less important to the play as a kind of hypothesis about urbanism; it works instead as a provocation to take a standpoint to enable observations of how people in the performers’ vicinity are moving, to take in their rhythms, their pace, and the evidence of their affective orientations. The play points out the complexity and density of urban experience and encourages the performer to self-consciously remove the filters of ordinary experience in order to take in this complexity. The play initially directs the performer to look, to engage with the city visually. The direction, however, also insists on the freedom, and on the safety and comfort, of the performer. This underscores the first-person location of the research method written into the play (Parker-Starbuck and Mock 2011, 223). It insists on the embodiment of the observing eye: it is this performer, in this particular space, experiencing these particular people and sights. The play also expands this sensorium. A later scene asks what the city sounds like, expanding the focus from eyes to ears. Parts of the soundtrack are built from sound recordings of Rio’s streets, its metro, its music, etc. Listening to the soundtrack while sitting or moving through a city in some ways mimics the way using headphones allows a pedestrian to design their own soundtrack, thus disengaging with the sonic landscape of their immediate surroundings. However, the soundtrack as part of the performance can also disrupt the expectations of what the city of the performance is supposed to sound like. This difference thus produces the occasion for the kinds of comparisons between the specific local experience and the image of Rio the play deploys. Part 2 of The Other City expands the sensorium further by asking the performer to feel the ground. This touching places the performer in relation to two more aspects of the city:

300   Matt Davies first, the relation between the built environment and the green spaces that are preserved or constructed, such as parks, and those that emerge through the cracks of the pavement, which helps to emphasize the ways that the city is dynamic, not fixed in time and space. Second, by getting the performer to notice this dynamism, the play provides an opening to the play’s—and possibly the city’s—most overtly political aspects. In touching the ground, the performer is asked to imagine what lies below and then to continue to construct an imaginary or an image of the city from above. This imagined view from above, placing the view of the performer outside of the intimate experience of the ground, allows the performer to imagine rewriting or redrawing the image of the city, which the play then connects to the policy of forced removals of favelas in Rio in the preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Here the role of the method of comparison in the play is very clear: while not all political struggles over space will be as sharply, or bitterly, contested as those over Rio’s forced removals, confronting the imagining of the city from above with the lived space on the ground highlights the politics underpinning how all urban space is produced. The play can then end with this question: You have been deciding how to move in your city as you perform the play, but in these conversations (or confrontations) between the local and the global, what decisions have already been taken for you? Who is deciding? As noted, The Other City is not a play about Rio de Janeiro. Instead, alongside the narrator Gabriela and, ultimately, the performer, Rio is a character in the play, acting on and with Gabriela and the listener-performer, provoking and shaping perceptions and responses. The role—or part—that Rio plays in The Other City affords the listener-performer an aesthetic rather than a conceptual engagement with the space in which they are performing. Rio thus also appears as an aesthetic scene, that is, an imaginary space to provoke awareness of the lived space of the city in which The Other City is performed.

When the Ordinary Becomes Political In Rio the implementation of policies to prepare for the 2016 Olympics involved regenerating urban space without consulting the dwellers in that space. These people were more often than not dwellers in Rio’s favelas. Favelas such as Rocinha, Vidigal, and Cidade de Deus are iconic and highly visible, made internationally famous not only by their representations in film but also through tourism, fashion, and design (Kertzer 2014). Rio has over a thousand favelas, and these are very diverse. On the one hand, then, as marginalized zones where the Rio’s poor are segregated, favelas are represented as a kind of different city, separated from the wealthier asfalto. On the other hand, though, as sites for more affordable housing, as residences for many working people in Rio, and as international icons for Rio’s culture and image, they are tightly integrated into the fabric of Rio’s urban space. Rio’s favelas are distinctive in many ways and for complex historical and geographical reasons. They contribute to the uniqueness of Rio, its difference from other cities not only globally but also in Brazil. Generic global policies for urbanization and gentrification could be implemented only by intervening and disrupting these concrete, specific, existing spaces. In Rio such interventions take the form of forced displacements of whole neighborhoods, noisy and polluting construction projects, disruptions to the mobility of favela residents, and even military occupations of communities. If the Olympics are viewed as a performance

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International   301 and the urban regeneration preceding them as a way of setting a stage for this, then in Rio this performance appears as harm or a tort committed against the favela residents. In contrast to Brazil’s federal law asserting a right to the city—established in the City Statute, Law 10.257, passed in 2001—the preparations for the Olympics were wrongs of the city. People—and thus the city—were wronged because the very gestes répétées of everyday life were disregarded or disrupted, breaking the social and material infrastructures that supported people’s lives in the city. Resisting these wrongs often took the form of spectacular events, such as the mass demonstrations that began in 2013, but the claims against these wrongs also took everyday forms, such as residents refusing to move away from neighborhoods like Vila Autódromo while continuing to commute to work, to go to church and school, and generally resisting and refusing to accept the disruptions planned for them. For the favela dwellers who resisted by persisting with their daily lives, performance of everyday gestures ultimately put the state in a position where it escalated its use of force, from cutting off power supplies and street lights to ceasing to collect garbage, damaging homes “incidentally” when removing residents who had agreed to leave, and more direct police repression such as beatings. In the context of the pressures and violence of the state, then, performing everyday life became a political act, a means of enacting the litigations and claims against the remotely conceived plans imposed on the space of the favelas. Political subjectivity was thus not a constitutionally given characteristic of an abstract agent, such as a citizen; political subjectivity emerged from the performances of everyday activities that disrupted plans to insert Rio’s urban space into global circuits of capital flows, land speculation, and consumption of media spectacles. Favela dwellers who had no place in the plans for land that would be developed for the Olympic village, for spaces for museums and amusements for tourists refigured both the plans and their own everyday lives by insisting on living those lives. The city thus revealed itself to be a subject, not only in the sense of the experience of being a center for decision and action but also in the aesthetic sense of making these collective decisions and actions perceivable through mobilities and mobilizations. By sharing her experiences of her Rio de Janeiro, the narrator Gabriela invites the performers of The Other City to examine their experiences of their city, opening dialogue and inquiry not only between the performers but also between the cities. Performers of The Other City will encounter their city as composed of different, possibly opposed forms of space that can illuminate local and global hierarchies. However, the heterogeneity of urban space may obscure, rather than disclose, the subjectivity of the city. As both listener and performer, the audience for the play is already disrupting the stratified hierarchy that distributes given parts to authors, performers, and audiences. Taking part in The Other City produces a messy, disordered performance, one without a given message or moral but instead where the message is created in the movement of the listener-performer’s body in urban space. The play is an occasion when, through the subjective encounter of the performer’s body with urban space, the city discloses its subjectivity. This disclosure is not only an opportunity to disrupt the distribution of parts between authors, performers, and audiences, but also, in revealing equality as the condition for their subjectivity, it brings into question the subjective inequalities that sustain the stratified hierarchies of the local and the global. It is thus also worth considering, especially from the perspective of international relations, the obstacles to becoming a political subject. The Other City is not necessarily a lesson in

302   Matt Davies international relations and how the international system has historically invested sovereignty in the territorial national state. Indeed each of these categories, when considered in relation to everyday life, appears distinct from the city—again, operating at a different scale or a higher level. Nevertheless The Other City asks the performer to explore the fabric of the urban environment by performing particular tasks that illuminate the production of the city in everyday life. Producing the space of the city in this way also produces the related scales of the national territory and the international system. The resistance of Rio’s favelas to forced removals made the performance of everyday, banal tasks into forms of countersovereignty, claims to authority outside of the resort to violence that is supposed to be the legitimating foundation of state sovereignty. Brazil’s subsequent political history revolves in part around the defeat of these struggles. Vila Autódromo, to take just one example, was a decades-old favela on the site where the Olympic Park was built in Barra, a western suburb of Rio. It became an iconic site of resistance to the city authorities’ plans for urban regeneration through removal of the favelas. Although the struggles to resist removal helped catalyze other efforts across the city to resist evictions and removals, hundreds of homes in Vila Autódromo were ultimately demolished and the residents relocated; only about twenty families were able to remain in the newly built show homes in the area. This history of resisting developers, land speculators, urban planning bureaucrats, and bulldozers through performing everyday acts highlighted how performance need not be spectacular to be political. Indeed these were very much acts against the spectacle.

Conclusions The planning and policies for urban regeneration in preparation for the World Cup and for the Rio Olympics presented a specific inscription of globalizing urbanism onto the site of Rio de Janeiro. This context set the stage where the performance of mundane everyday acts became political, in the sense that such acts ceased to be invisible and instead became political claims, forms of litigation against the wrongs done to people who would have no part in the conceived Olympic village. Because the early performances of The Other City took place in Newcastle and Sheffield, urban contexts very different from Rio’s, there was no guarantee that performing The Other City in different contexts could have the political charge that resisting removals had for Rio. When the higher activity or conceived space springs from the insertion of a city into the international political economy, the gaps between conception, perception, and living begin to open space for politics. In Rio’s case, this space was produced through the performances of everyday life in resistance to the forced removals planned for the residents of favelas; in The Other City, the performances of Rio, of Gabriela, and of the listener-performer afford the chance for this different urban experience to reveal similar gaps in the daily routines of dwellers in any city. The city shows itself to be both the object of external interventions— plans—and a kind of collective subjectivity that emerges in the intertwining of the local and the global, the international and the everyday. This both/and does not deny the power relations of the stratified hierarchies that order cites—as well as performances—but it does

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International   303 help reveal the artifice behind them, the hidden but fundamental equality of subjects that the distribution of roles into these hierarchies obscures. Performance, then, can be both a method for research into the politics of the confrontations between the international and the everyday and a political gesture in itself. As a research method, performance bridges the gaps between prosaic lived space and the conceptions that inform the design and practices of that space. By conscientiously confronting, reflecting on, and responding to the gestes répétées through which social relations are reproduced, performing can make the conceptions that inhabit these gestures begin to speak and be brought into conversation with the higher concepts that live in the globalized spaces of capital mobility, governance, and spectacle. As a political gesture, however, performance cannot know in advance how a subject is supposed to become political or what politics will emerge from the subject’s becoming. These, rather, depend on the performer and the settings of the performance.

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Chapter 19

The Politics of N eoliber a l R itua l s Performing the Institutionalization of Liminality at Trade Fairs Anna Leander

The AI for Good Global Summit is THE leading United Nations platform for global and inclusive dialogue on AI. The Summit is hosted each year in Geneva by the ITU. —AI for Good Global Summit website, https://aiforgood.itu.int/

The third AI for Good Summit took place in Geneva on May 28–31, 2019. The program featured keynote speeches, workshops, and plenaries that were interlaced with panels organized into streams on specialized topics with titles such as “Scaling AI for Good,” “AI for Space,” and “AI Education and Learning.” It also offered training workshops and social events, including a musical performance by artists working with AI in the UN General Assembly. In the exhibition space, thematically grouped stands presented projects, objects, and ideas. The stage in the exhibition space had a full program of lectures, most of which were exposés by representatives from the stands. At the far end of the fair there was an art space curated by the Berlin STATE Studio—Science Art Gallery.1 A driverless car parked in the center of the exhibition space was a favored background for selfies and group photographs. A place to take a picture of yourself with the AI for Good logo boot located right behind it was mostly ignored. Perhaps characteristically for a context where knowledge is provisional, in need of updating and improvement, there was never a printed (or pdf) version of the program, the participant list, or the floor map. Instead an app, updated real time, was at work during the summit. A selective web archive with snippets from the conference is now available on the site advertising the next AI for Good summit, in 2020.2 The AI for Good (AIfG) had much in common with trade fairs generally, including the military and security fairs that I spend considerable time at.3 Just as there, companies and private actors were omnipresent. The main sponsor of the ITU summit was XPrize, a foundation that distributes awards primarily aimed to encourage technological innovation

308   Anna Leander in a range of areas.4 The opening keynote speakers were from Microsoft and Siemens. Many panels had speakers from the private sector. PWC and Deloitte had stands presenting their respective projects on AI, including their ethical guidelines for organizational integration of AI. Furthermore, the AIfG was organized in a manner analogous to the trade fairs. The types of multilayered, interlaced activities, the proclaimed inclusivity and globality, the arrangement of the space, and the presentation of the event as “THE leading” and most important, recurring, “each year” event of its genre would be characteristic of any trade fair. This would be true even if—as the 2019 AIfG—they were only the third of their kind. These similarities between military and security trade fairs and the AIfG Summit organized by the ITU are not surprising. Rather, the basic traits of the trade fair recur across multistakeholder events, summits, and conferences that exert a “discreet power” in global governance (Garsten and Sörbom 2018). The trade fair has become a political governance ritual of sorts. Trade fairs are spaces in which politics is performed. As this chapter will explore, trade fairs play a crucial role in generating and enshrining the legitimacy and authority of decentralized, distributed, market-based orders. They are neoliberal ordering “rituals” (discussed in the first section). They are all the more effective as the sacred and magical and the affective and embodied anchor order not only broadly but deeply and individually (second section). The result of this ordering is a form of institutionalized liminality that, contrary to the hopes of Victor Turner, is anything but progressive (third section). As the chapter concludes, precisely because the trade fair rituals are an increasingly common form of governance, recognizing the ways they build inegalitarian instability into our societies is of the essence. It is a condition for transforming neoliberal politics and for governing otherwise.

Trade Fairs: Neoliberal Ordering Rituals In her overview of ritual theory, Catherine Bell (1998, chapter 5) argues that what unites ritual-like activities is their formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule governance, sacral symbolism, and that they are performances. On that account, trade fairs are rituals. Like religious celebrations, parliamentary openings, or mundane morning tooth-brushing, trade fairs convene the participants in a trade at specified repeated intervals in specific spaces. They follow a range of rules involving a set of specific rites encompassing the body and material props. While there are many sides to these performances, for the purpose of this chapter I am interested in one aspect, namely their politics and the way they contribute to social integration and ordering. I argue that trade fair rituals play an important role in negotiating order, order of the specific, neoliberal, kind.

Ritual Ordering Many other sociologists and anthropologists see rituals as essential for stabilizing order, not because rituals are necessarily conservative, enforcing and reproducing orders in an unchanging fashion. Rather more interestingly, rituals are crucuial precisely because they

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals   309 provide space for transforming and reimagining orders (e.g., Collins 2014; Lukes 1975; Rai 2010). For example, from Turner’s perspective, in rites of passage for girls becoming women and boys men, or when addressing the consequences of drought, illness, or war, rituals were crucial for dealing with the inescapable instability of life, with the conflicts, contradictions, and clashes that make social life inherently uncertain and indeterminate. He therefore embraces and affirms Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoffs’ (1977) understanding of the place of law as a “secular ritual” that stabilizes order. As they put it, “Ritual is a declaration of form against indeterminacy, therefore indeterminacy is always present in the background of any analysis of ritual. Indeed there is no doubt that any analysis of social life must take account of the dynamic relation between the formed and the ‘indeterminate’ ” (cited in Turner 1988, 94, original emphasis). Trade fairs are an analogous declaration of form against the indeterminacy of the market order. Who is a legitimate participant in these markets? Where are (or should be) the boundaries of what can legitimately be bought and sold? Who is responsible for regulating, and what shape should the regulation take? Are there overarching values or norms that can and should inform the answers? These questions are central to any market order. They are particularly pressing in security markets. Commercial military services are the product of markets, not mercenaries (Chesterman and Lehnardt 2007), and the state monopoly on the legitimate use of force is losing its practical significance (Leander 2019). Yet it is uncertain what has taken its place. It is tempting to formalistically affirm that nothing significant is changing (Leander 2014, 2015–6). The massive growth of security and military markets (and the enormous spending, competence, and money that flows into them) nonetheless feeds an uncertainty about whether or not this is true. Trade fairs alleviate this uncertainty. They confirm that even if order may be transforming, it is legitimate and orderly. Participating companies that produce arms or provide conventional intelligence studies are joined by universities presenting research projects, public institutions such as NATO or the public police, as well as a range of perhaps unexpected characters such as travel agents or companies specializing in flying drones for filming or in managing crowds in supermarkets. By bringing them together, the trade fairs provide a sense of who actually is in the field. In so doing they also open up for shifting and (re)negotiating the hierarchies, rules, and values in the field. In the talk among the participants, in the selection and persuasiveness of the keynotes, in the success of the stands, and in the informal discussions and the off-venue events, the understanding of what the field is, where it is heading, what really matters in it, and what rules and regulations pertain shift and evolve. The trade fairs, like the Grammy Awards (Anand and Watson, 2004), function as “tournament rituals” of sorts. They “distribute prestige in ‘situated’ performances”; “enact a highly charged ceremonial form designed to attract the collective attention of a field”; they serve as “a medium for surfacing and resolving conflicts about the legitimacy of field participants”; and they “tighten the horizontal linkages within the field” (59). Except that trade fairs do so in a characteristically commercial, decentralized, and provisional fashion.

Ordering Indeterminacy Unlike the tournament ritual or rites of passage, the performances taking place in the trade fair create no univocal, singular outcome or order. There is not even one clear competition,

310   Anna Leander taking place on one stage, evaluated by one jury, and resulting in one award winner, or one for each of the categories of the tournament, as there is for Grammy Awards. Rather, in the trade fair (and at the AIfG) everything is plural; the stages, the juries, and the winners are multiple and contested. Trade fairs affirm a commodified commercial open order. Commercial orders must allow for competition and constant innovation and change. The cult of creativity in contemporary society is intimately connected to neoliberalism. It locates innovation at the core of governance (Reckwitz 2012). Innovation and change become ends in and of themselves. “Whatever is pronounced ‘outdated’ or relegated to the ‘past’ is no longer recoverable” (Wolin 2008, 97). Innovation also becomes associated with what we, with Harmut Rosa (2013), might term “social acceleration,” with the fact that innovation and change have to come at an ever more rapid pace. Unsurprisingly, therefore, at trade fairs, as in the AIfG, emphasis is placed on the value of openness, on the adaptability of the goods and services on offer. A logical extension of this is the emphasis placed on the possibility of not only adjusting to and solving any problem a customer might have but also on integrating their ideas and ambitions in an effort to co-create and steer innovation. Advertising generally—and advertising of tracking technologies specifically—is consequently replete with appeals to the possibility of working with and developing the imagination of all involved (Leander 2013, 2019). This is as true of the advertising of blockchain technologies at the Future of Enterprise Technology FET in London as it is of the presentations about possible uses of AI at the AIfG in Geneva.5 The innovations and technologies turn into any kind of application, applicable to anybody’s needs, anywhere and at any time. This malleable “any-” tending to transform itself into an expanding, shapeshifting “every-” is omnipresent in trade fairs. It grows out of a competition that lends its dynamics to the commercial, neoliberal order. As such it is not surprising or in any way unexpected. However, it clearly matters for the kind of order established and for the rituals establishing it. Trade fairs do not perform a fixed and determinate order, not even temporarily. They enact the legitimacy of the indeterminacy and disorder at the core of neoliberal governance. The order enshrined by the trade fairs revolves around potentiality. The Hitachi stand at the FET in Amsterdam captures it well: a table full of little red plastic ducks with the text “inspire the next” printed on their breasts (figure 19.1) was next to a space for experimenting with virtual-reality equipment. Hitachi, a tech giant with deep roots in Japan, is focusing ahead and on its customers.6 Who could possibly know where the next important innovation and creative move will lead? To accommodate and embrace a future unknown, necessarily different from the present, requires accepting and encouraging the appearance of new actors, rules, and values that will reshuffle and perhaps destroy the hierarchy of existing ones. For Hitachi this might not be so difficult. The company representative laughs when I ask if “inspiring the next” might displace Hitachi or make the company disappear altogether. The thought is simply too far off. More surprising is how the representative of FACTOM, a “blockchain innovations company,”7 unprompted, tells me that of course they cannot be sure that they, or indeed the branch of FACTOM they represent at the fair, will still be around next year. They promptly proceed to tell me that this is how things should and must be if the FACTOM protocol is to remain open to development and transformation, which is not only desirable but necessary for it to retain its usefulness.8 In sum, trade fairs are rituals for negotiating and transforming order. They are “field configuring events” in which the “relations between positions” are negotiated and firmed up and the rules, regulations, and values associated with these positions are affirmed and

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figure 19.1.  Hitachi Stand (Detail) in Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, Amsterdam 19–20 June 2019.

312   Anna Leander legitimized (Moeran 2011, 86). However, the orders the trade fairs institute are orders of indeterminacy, disorder, and openness. The organization of the trade fairs reflects this. The rules and rationales of the fairs are renegotiated from year to year. The floor arrangement is never quite the same. The thematic streams, workshops, and seminars shift, as do keynotes. Moreover, since many trade fairs compete, there is an instability in which fair matters to whom. For example, whereas the Security and Counter Terror Expo (SCTX) had large cybersecurity sections up to 2016, after that the sections shrank as specialized cybersecurity fairs attracted the professional visitors. At the same time, crowd management moved into the SCTX and became a subtheme or stream in its own right, engaging a new range of exhibitors, rules, and values to be negotiated at the fair. The foundational categories around which the trade fairs revolve, as well as the details of what and whom they involve and how, are, in other words, themselves up for grabs as the fairs turn their own logic of ritually ordering indeterminacy upon themselves. They, just as the orders they institute and legitimize, are a perpetuum mobile (Moeran 2011, 86; see also Delacour and Leca 2011). Before discussing the political significance of this, the next section insists that focusing on how is analytically crucial for understanding the firm grip on the political orders they establish.

Performing Sacred and Affective Trade Fair Rites References to rituals invoke more than simply negotiating orders. The term ritual is a pointer also to the magical and the affective or embodied involved in performing order (Rai 2014). It would be easy—indeed comfortable and comforting—to dispense with this and go with the view that has become common sense, namely that markets and the orders associated with them are instrumentally rational, a quintessential expression of the disenchanted capture of the modern subject in the Weberian iron cage of rationality. Invoking rituals questions this common sense. It connects to the long tradition—from Kant at least—that takes critique beyond the sociological, directing attention to the place of the aesthetic and affective in generating practices (e.g., Honneth  2007; Boltanski and Chiapello  2005, chapter 6). Tending to the magical and affective aspects in the context of reflection on the place of trade fairs in enacting a commercial, neoliberal ordering is all the more appropriate as it takes substantial effort to miss their significance at trade fairs.

Reinstating the Magic of Capitalism Susan Strange (1999) saw the current political order (she was mostly interested in global finance) as expressing a market civilization whereby companies were gods and the managers were their high priests. It is useful to take this reference to religion and its magic more literally than Strange intended it and to explore in more detail the place of religious magic in the enactment of that order. Focusing on the magic rites of the ordering rituals at trade fairs is a way of doing so and directing attention to what the Comaroffs (1999, 281) term “the effervescent new spirit” of contemporary capitalism. The “forces at once spirited and

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals   313 ostensibly arcane” that the Comaroffs (2018, 296) describe as “vibrant actants” in the occult economies of contemporary South Africa also have a central role at the enlightened trade fairs of Western Europe. By way of illustration, consider the magic performed in the rite of speeches in the context of any trade fair. When Jean-Philippe Courtois of Microsoft gives his opening keynote at the AIfG, he is completing a rite that is part of most trade fairs. His speech is part of the opening, setting the tone for the fair to come. An assistant fit for the Grammy Awards introduces him. In a glamorous purple dress, she walks into a flashing light show with music. In his speech, Courtois argues for a specific understanding of the AI order and the values associated with it. True to form and context, his speech is multimedia, mixing film, music, and a simultaneous on-screen transcription of the words spoken. In his performance, the Microsoft representative9 is affirming a specific order. He outlines the “opportunities” of an “AI already there,” a “principled approach” and an “ethical decision framework” for handling it. He outlines some of the Microsoft educational initiatives, including the DigiGirlz, the BlackGirlsCode, the YouthSpark, and the AI Business School.10 As he does this, he is creating the rules, the values, and the community of this order, the community that he represents. He performs “the magic of ministry,” the fascinating process by which the minister is creating the community he represents in the process of representing it (Bourdieu 1992, 2000; Wacquant 2005). The magic Courtois performs instates the order, rules, values, and community his company stands for. However, it is also a rite extending beyond the boundaries of Microsoft. For this to succeed, the rite depends not only on his performance but also on the film he shows, the flashy assistant, and the setting of the stage that makes his audience identify with the performance that can hence work its “re-fusing” magic (Alexander 2004, 527; Rai 2015). It also of course depends on the event organizers who allowed him to be there and on the willing participants. Whether or not the rite works its magic, the presence of Courtois as an opening keynote is an affirmation of the authority he enjoys. Opening speeches are one of many rites that recur across trade fairs. Trade fairs also usually have a range of smaller stages where parallel speeches and events take place. They also include workshops, seminar sessions, and social events. Each is a rite on its own merits. Each follows its own set of rules, including rules that define who has access and on what terms. Each also performs an ordering magic similar to that of the keynote speech of Courtois but on a different scale. The rites in the main exhibition area are an important part of the whole. Facts and fetishes merge into “factishes” (Latour 2010) as the stands provide information, images, and objects that help us grasp the significance on what is on offer. These factishes reenchant the trade fair. They convey the magic of ledger (blockchain) technologies, data management consultants, or certifications from the British Standards Institute at the FET in London or AI at the AIfG in Geneva. Factishes are not to be questioned but to be believed. When I ask questions about exactly what difference blockchain technology would make to sustainable coffee production, how I should understand the import of this consultancy specifically, or precisely how the BSI standard would make a difference, answers are either invariably evasive or deflecting.11 I am disturbing the magic work done by the factishes I am looking at. Rites do not always work. Just as the shaman will not always heal, ensure passage, or bring forth rain, at the trade fair the magic of ministry may fail to create a community just as the factishes may be unsuccessful in conveying the magic of the things they are associated with. Sometimes visitors to a stand or an opening speech will leave unpersuaded. The talking

314   Anna Leander around and commenting on the various events and stands are part and parcel of the ordering ritual, a way of firming and durably inscribing the magic of the rites. This includes dismissing some representatives as unserious, ineffectual, charlatans, or impostors and the things they represent as useless or even harmful. Rather than make the untenable point that trade fair rites necessarily work their magic, I am making the more limited claim that they are indeed rites invoking magic. They are instances of “society casting spells on itself ” (Taussig 2010, 136), spells of the capitalist neoliberal kind located at the core of the effervescent new spirit of capitalism.

Affecting the Bodily Senses beyond Language The rites at the trade fairs engage the body beyond language. The body is enacting the rites and the enactment anchors the magical neoliberal order deeply in the body. Like other ritual performances, trade fair rituals work with and on the body. Although this rarely involves the kind of dancing, dressing, masking, painting, paining, and inscribing central to the imaginary surrounding rituals, a close observation of trade fairs leaves little doubt about the centrality of the bodily senses. Trade fairs most definitely share “the most subtle and central quality of those actions we tend to call ritual . . . [namely] the primacy of the body moving about within a specially constructed space, simultaneously defining (imposing) and experiencing (receiving) the values ordering the environment” (Bell 1998, 82; see also Collins 2014, 53–8). The fair indeed has traditionally meant noise, tumult, music, popular rejoicing, the world turned upside down. The senses are engaged. This is also true of economic rituals, including at the security, military, and technology trade fairs I look at here. Observed closely, these fairs are also replete with rites involving the embodied and affective. The stands at security, military, and technology trade fairs are also full of little gifts for visitors, including, for example—as offered by the Mimecast12 and Bitglass13 stands—pens, blocks, usb sticks with information about the company, bottle openers, camera covers, and plastic balls for the beach (see figure 19.2). To follow Mauss and analyze the gift exchange around them could be the object of an essay in its own right. Here I just want to highlight the ways in which these little gifts appeal to the senses beyond language and indeed beyond vision. So, very schematically: Trade fairs have taste. Quality food is served in the VIP areas. Exhibitors often offer coffee, beer, drinks, pretzels, nuts, cookies, or sweets, such as the Mimecast licorice. Most visitors will not eat any of these; however, their presence flavors the product. Mints are the staple in tradefairs. Also Mimecast offers them. perhaps mints are so common because they speak to the olfactory? Perhaps these are an expression of the anxiety around bad breath in this talking and walking context of the trade fair? An expression of the “deodorizing trajectory” of Western culture that might eventually be abandoned to follow the trend and be replaced with an obsession “with experiencing smells intensely, from incense to herbal pot-pourris to perfume and aromatherapy,” as a way of generating authenticity, “a slice of the real” (Banes and Lepecki 2012, 35)? Perhaps security and tech fairs will soon smell like labs, optic cables, or secured compounds. Certainly the many objects on display are there to create authenticity. They are to be lifted, examined, and touched, providing a feel of the real thing. Representatives invite those visiting a stand to pick up a product; they pat it or point to it when expounding on its qualities. In yet another instance of magic, exhibitors also tend to give the intangible and untouchable physical shape. The Hitachi bathtub duck “inspiring the next” is a case in

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figure 19.2.  Bitglass stand (Detail) in Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, Amsterdam 19–20 June 2019. point. The little blue fluffy balls produced by Cyberark, marketing itself as “#1 in privileged access security,” is another (figure 19.3). The balls were all over the stand, and the representative explained to me that they spent the first day of the fair tagging them to visitors. They stopped. The effort to touch or invoke touch amused the representatives. It annoyed the visitors. The discussions around the fluffy balls certainly fed into the buzzing sound of the trade fair, its acoustic appeal. Some stands leave their own trace. They may have headphones that allow you to watch a video and listen to the sound in isolation. More often, they will have a video with music and text, mostly discreetly tucked away in a corner of the stand, but sometimes very loudly covering the space and designed to attract visitors, as, for instance, the film that made up the entire display of ArmaInstruments at the Amsterdam FET.14 Trade fair rites, in sum, involve more than the “monstrous text organ” Western culture tends to posit at its center (Howes 2003, 21).15 They engage other sensory faculties. In so doing they anchor the magic of these rites in the insides, in our bodies and in the parts of these that do not engage us in reflection. They connect directly to our affects, our emotions, perhaps also therefore making us part of the rite, and perhaps even transforming us through it. Perhaps the red Hitachi bathtub duck “inspiring the next” or the blue Cyberarch fluffy ball sticking to our clothes manages to bring our affective selves into the rite. Perhaps not. Perhaps they trigger a mimesis in which we are not only part of the magic rites of a ritual that enacts a neoliberal order but become those rituals in that we embody and mimic them. Perhaps we do so durably, also beyond the space of the trade fair (Mitchell and Bull 2015, 33).

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figure 19.3.  Cyberark stand (Detail) in Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, Amsterdam 19–20 June 2019. The affordances of technical mediation ease such mimesis. Cameras, heat, and noise sensors generate visualizations that not only locate the visitor in the fair but merge the commodified order of the fair with the visitor, including me (figure 19.4). Whether or not the trade fair does become a mimetic experience, trade fair rites are designed to make it one. They contribute to a ritual that invokes and enacts the magical, sacred, and embodied. Acknowledging these aspects of the trade fair rites is a condition for grasping and grappling with the deep grip of the neoliberal ordering performed at them.

The Politics of Institutionalizing Liminality at Trade Fairs Can we say more about the politics of the ordering performed at the trade fair? More about the people, objects, or technologies empowered by it, more about the rules, norms, forms, and facts it conjures, and more about the kinds of values it enacts? Can we go beyond the observation already made that the trade fair is a ritual instituting an order based on disorder and indeterminacy, and that it is a magical, affective, and embodied order that engages beyond rational reasoning in language?

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figure 19.4.  Mediated merging of visitor and the display in Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, Amsterdam 19–20 June 2019.

Victor Turner’s Hope Trade fairs as just described are liminal spaces of sorts where order is transformed and renegotiated. The orders they enact are liminal orders in that they are uncertain, constantly transforming. But what is the politics of such liminality? For Victor Turner there was little doubt that liminality was the most interesting and creative aspect of rituals.16 Initially he took an interest in it mainly as a heuristic device for understanding societal orders. It was a photographic negative of sorts. By looking at what was allowed or choreographed in the betwixt and between liminal space, one could, Turner thought, also observe the hierarchies, rules, taboos, and values in ordinary life that this space was detached from. Liminal spaces, as he puts it, are “antistructural breathing spaces for everything that cannot be captured by routines. They generate new models, often fantastic ones. . . . The antistructural liminality provided in the cores of ritual and aesthetic forms represents the reflexivity of the social process, wherein society becomes at once subject and direct object; it represents also its subjunctive mood, where suppositions, desires, hypotheses, possibilities, and so forth, all become legitimate” (Turner 1977, vii). As the emphasis on the generative force of the liminal space as a site for reflexivity underscores, liminality also had another important role that became ever more prominent in Turner’s work. It came to epitomize the possibility of imagining and enacting social change (Thomassen 2009). For Turner, the creative potential of an “antistructural” and “antitemporal” liminal space was where hope for progressive politics, for the prospect that order could be renegotiated

318   Anna Leander but also, rather more strongly, reinvented and moved in a more progressive direction was located. Even more strongly, Turner believed that “institutionalized liminality” might make such progressive politics permanent, locating it at the heart of a specific form of community he termed communitas (Turner 1977, 145).

Inscribing Commercial Forms of Liminal Politics Trade fairs are rituals that institutionalize liminality. They institute an inherently indeterminate order. They are antistructural and set up to negotiate and transform the roles, rules, and values of society. Central to this process is the performance of magic and embodied rites that rely on what one might, with Turner, term a pedagogics of liminality. However, the politics of these trade fair rituals bear little resemblance to the politics Turner hoped the institutionalization of liminality would bring. Nurturing a commercial order based on competition presupposes an openness about the rules and limits of the (un)acceptable. New products and services cannot emerge and gain significance if rules, regulations, and ethical conceptions are too tight. Bureaucratic red tape and the absence of positive, plural imaginations are therefore negative reference points. Even more striking is the persuasion that rules should be soft, malleable, and attuned to process. This seems to be the commonsense truth among those interested in, e.g., the (ethical or legal) rules governing, e.g., hacking and penetration, the use of ledger technologies or automated management. As the representative of one of the biggest contemporary consulting companies explained to me, only through a process orientation is it possible to retain context sensitivity and avoid “blueprints that backfire.”17 The intention is for rules to be adjustable to the context. Everyone, including small companies, needs to be able to adjust and change them to be able to work with them in the markets. Rules must of course exist, but they have to remain malleable, subject to revision to keep any hierarchical and exclusionary effect in check. Despite this ostensible attachment to nonhierarchical and egalitarian openness, its practice at the market trade fair is never entirely persuasive. Traces of hierarchy and structure are pervasive. The Microsoft stand might be the smallest, but it still attracts a constant flow of visitors. Its speech may be set at one of the side stages, but it still draws a far bigger audience than most of the other speeches.18 Moreover, the differences in standing and position of participants and exhibitors constantly shines through in innumerable details, such as the kind of badge they wear, their access to the VIP areas, the flagging of their sponsorship level, the design of the stands, the way they dress, and their approach to other participants. Similarly, rules are not indefinitely malleable, nonhierarchical, and open. The law matters. Finally, amid creativity, innovation, and imagination, conventional and hierarchical values make their appearance. They are not contestable, negotiable, redesignable—at least in the specific context of their appearance. Militarized masculinity, solidarity with the unit or the profession, and nationalism are as common reference points among organizations linked to the security professions as are efficiency, competitiveness, ambition, and profitability among those with roots in financial risk analysis. Most significant, the market itself stands untouched. These hierarchies of actors, rules, and values, and most centrally the attachment to market logics, are neither crystal clear nor universally agreed upon. Specific aspects of markets can

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals   319 be questioned. However, they leave pervasive traces of structure in the antistructural space of the trade fair. They sap the tempting amnesia that relegates the hierarchy and inequality underpinning commercial orders to oblivion. Overlooked—not invisible—hierarchy and inequality therefore continue to throw a long shadow over the emphasis on potential and possibility, lending ambivalence to the ordering performances in trade fairs. This ambivalence wreaks havoc with Turner’s hope. Despite institutionalizing a liminality of sorts, the trade fairs are not progressive in the egalitarian way he had envisaged. They are tournaments of values conservatively skewed to reenact the commercial order. The participants, the rules and values of the fields they are concerned with are equal—but then they also are not. They can be shifted, redesigned, and reinvented—but within limits. The antistructural space of the trade fairs bears the imprint of structures that impose themselves, however hard those in the space strive to ignore, forget, or obscure them.

Conclusion: Building in Inegalitarian Instability If the argument in this chapter is correct, trade fairs have become a neoliberal ordering ritual of sorts. Opening conversations about their politics, and more specifically about the institutionalization of liminality, is therefore crucial. So is building alliances to work with this politics. The ambivalence surrounding this politics does little to challenge, let alone change, its contribution to a hierarchical and ultimately conservative order. Nor does it diminish the importance of the institutionalization of liminality in masking the politics. The ordering rituals designed to frame disorder, to encourage a never-ending process of emergence and transformation makes it too easy to overlook the stickiness of structure, context, language, and things. Instead the rites that confirm and enact the embodied, affective magic of this order deepen its grip. They place it beyond language by involving the wider sense-making and mimetic abilities of those involved. The rituals and rites of the trade fairs are also always already and continuously digitally mediated. Invitations and registration are online. The trade fair space and the rites in it are mediated. The networked community (of shifting nature with porous boundaries) is reproduced through a scanning of badges and an avalanche of follow-up communications. The neoliberal ordering rituals, the rites associated with them, and their substantive politics are part of what we with Donatella Della Ratta (2018) might term the onlife of contemporary politics. The trade fair rituals deepen the hierarchical grip of neoliberal orderings by anchoring them in magic and bodily affect and in the affordance of technological mediations that extend them to the onlife. One might think of these rituals as formatting instability and inequality into the dense sociobiological unruly technical infrastructural maze underpinning the neoliberal order. In this chapter, I have discussed the role of trade fair rituals as a form of governance, drawing analogies between commercial technology fairs and the ITU yearly AI for Good Summit. The ITU is an international organization, not a company. The analogy has severed to underscore that trade fairs, or trade fair–like rituals, are occupying an ever more central role in governance, including governance involving public institutions such as the ITU. The Davos World Economic Forum is an obvious case in point. So are the Munich Security

320   Anna Leander Conference and the UN Climate Change Conferences. Even the academic conferences governing the ‘market for ideas’ increasingly take the form of the trade fair rituals, as is perhaps most evident in the case of the Academic Economic Association but true more generally. Perhaps most disconcerting, initiatives expressly intent on countering neoliberal governance—such as social fora or hacking events—have come to resemble trade fairs. We are witnessing a trade-fairization of governance. Tending to the politics of this process is consequently crucial. This chapter has done precisely this, showing that trade fairs are ordering rituals of sorts that stabilize inegaliatrian instability, making them part of our political infrastructure. However, tending to the politics of trade-fairization is an ongoing project (as is the neoliberal one). Most of the work lies ahead. This chapter is an invitation to take this work further by exploring the politics of performance in the context of trade fairs.

Notes 1. State Studio, accessed July 1, 2017, https://state-studio.com/, emphases and capitalization in the original. 2. AI for Good Global Summit emphases and capitalization in the original. 3. In this chapter I draw mainly on fieldwork done in the SCTX (Security and Counter Terror Expo, London, March 6–7, 2018) and in the FET (Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, London, April 25–6, 2019, and Amsterdam June 19–20, 2019) and in the AIfG (Geneva, May 28–31, 2019). 4. XPrize, accessed July 1, 2017, https://www.xprize.org/, emphases and capitalization in the original. 5. Based on my fieldwork at The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, London, April 25–6, 2019; AI for Good Global Summit, Geneva, May 28–31, 2019. 6. For an introduction to the company, see https://www.hitachi.com/, accessed July 8, 2019. 7. Factom, accessed July 8, 2019, https://www.factom.com/. 8. Based on my fieldwork at The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, Amsterdam, June 19–20, 2019. 9. Jean-Philippe Courtois, Executive VP and President, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations from Microsoft. 10. Based on my fieldwork at AI for Good Global Summit, Geneva, May 28–31, 2019. 11. Fieldwork, The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity& Cloud, AI & Big Data, London, April 25–6, 2019. 12. Mimecast, accessed July 14, 2019, https://www.mimecast.com/. 13. Bitglass, accessed July 14, 2019, https://www.bitglass.com/. 14. ArmaInstruments, accessed July 14, 2019, https://armainstruments.com/; fieldwork, The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, Amsterdam, June 19–20, 2019. 15. Obviously sense-making and affect are central not only to trade fairs but to economic action and agency more generally, as argued many times including, for example by Bourdieu (2005) for the housing markets in France and Appadurai (2015) for banking. 16. Turner’s interest in liminality, as is well known, derived from his interest in Van Gennep’s work dividing rites of passage into different stages, including the detachment from society,

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals   321 the liminal betwixt and between, and the reinsertion into society of those transiting from one state of being to another. 17. Fieldwork, The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, London, April 25–6, 2019. 18. Fieldwork, The Future of Enterprise Technology: IoT Tech, Blockchain, CyberSecurity&Cloud, AI & Big Data, Amsterdam, June 19–20, 2019.

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322   Anna Leander Howes, David. 2003. Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Leander, Anna. 2013. “Marketing Security Matters: Undermining De-Securitization through Acts of Citizenship.” In Security and Citizenship: The Constitution of Political Being, edited by Xavier Guillaume and Jef Huysmans, 97–113. London: Routledge. Leander, Anna. 2014. “Understanding  U.S.  National Intelligence: Analyzing Practices to Capture the Chimera.” In The Return of the Public in Global Governance, edited by Jacqueline Best and Alexandra Gheicu, 197–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leander, Anna. 2015–6. “Mercados Transgresores de Seguridad: Una Mercancía en Disputa y Sus Prácticas de Mercado|Transgressive Security Markets: A Contested Commodity and Its Market Practices.” Relaciones Internacionales, no. 30: 117–37. Leander, Anna. 2019. “Making Markets Responsible: Revisiting the State Monopoly on the Legitimate Use of Force.” In Sociology, Privatization, Global Conflicts edited by Tom Crosbie and Ori Swed, 137–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Leander, Anna. 2019. “Sticky Politics: Composing Security by Advertising Tracking Devices.” European Journal of International Security 4, no. 3: 322–44. Lukes, Steven. 1975. “Political Ritual and Social Integration.” Sociology 9, no. 2: 289–308. Mälksoo, Maria. 2012. “The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory.” Review of International Studies 38, no. 2: 481–94. Mitchell, Jon  P., and Michael Bull. 2015. Ritual, Performance and the Senses. London: Bloomsbury. Moeran, Brian. 2011. “Trade Fairs, Markets and Fields: Framing Imagined as Real Communities.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 36, no. 3 (137): 79–98. Moore, Sally Falk and Barbara G Myerhoff. (1977) “Introduction Secular Ritual: Forms and Meaning.” In Secular Ritual, edited by Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G Myerhoff, 3–25. Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum & Comp. Pignarre, Philippe, and Isabelle Stengers. 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rai, Shirin. 2010. “Analysing Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament. Journal of Legislative Studies 16, no. 3: 284–97. Rai, Shirin. 2015. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2012. Die Erfindung der Kreativität: Zum Prozess Gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp. Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Strange, Susan. 1999. “Corporate Managers in World Politics.” In Individualism and World Politics, edited by Michel Girard, 145–60. London: Macmillan. Szakolczai, Arpad. 2009. “Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events.” International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1: 141–72. Taussig, Michael T. 2010. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomassen, Bjørn. 2009. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1: 5–27. Turner, Victor (1977) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

The Politics of Neoliberal Rituals   323 Turner, Victor. 1977. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, Victor. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Wacquant, Loïc. 2005. Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics: The Mystery of Ministry. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Wolin, Sheldon  S. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 20

Empir e A Performative Approach to Imperial Frontiers and Formations in Palestine Catherine Chiniara Charrett

Introduction This chapter explores imperial discourses that performatively work to manage and code il/legitimate violence at the frontier sites of empire. Frontiers, both geographic and bodily, are productive of imperialism’s discursive legitimation over the right to use violence and to code the violence used to resist it as illegitimate. A performative approach to imperial formations explores where, when, and how the discourses that justify imperial violence take place. This adjudication generates institutions, mechanisms, and profit, contributing to attempts to crush resistance against imperial expansion. I investigate the performativity of imperial discourses by examining the proscription of Hamas following its success in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. I argue that the delegitimization or criminalization of Hamas and their actions is performative of imperial discourses that seek to justify the use of violence and a civilizing mission. The labeling of Hamas and their actions as terrorists and terrorism, respectively, is a political move that “the world’s politico-military elites routinely dispense . . . while absolving their own violence, and that of their allies, from such labelling” (Mustafa et al.,  2013: 1111–2). At the frontiers of empire, the performative discourses of empire display fissures and tension points, which generate a violent acceleration and intensification in the reproduction of coding of il/legitimate violence. The frontiers of empire also function as a meeting place where the discourses of imperial violence are performed and are performative imperial subjects. Performances on the frontiers of empire are constitutive of subject and subjectivities with regard to contemporary and global uses of violence. Subjects at the frontiers of empire are constituted by regimes of permissible violence. McKenzie (2001) argues that performance can be understood as an oscillation between mechanisms for enforcing conforming behavior and mechanisms for transforming social norms. The conforming dynamics of performance can be understood as the attraction of socialization (Durkheim 1912 [2001]),

326   Catherine Chiniara Charrett market and institutional pressures (McKenzie 2001), and technological seduction (Marcuse 1964,  1988). Marcuse’s writings alert us to the power to create docile, subjugated agents, working in the service of empire.1 Marcuse was concerned with the repression of desires and pleasure and the restrictions on self-reflection by the demand to perform. “In societies stratified by the performance principle, individuals work and live only to enact performances dictated by others; performances normalized according to the dictates of expediency and efficiency” (McKenzie  2001, 160). Subjects are always performing for various audiences, present, ghostly, or imagined (Rai 2015), or performing for themselves as a way of reiterating their subjective positions back to themselves. Turner (1986 13) reminds us that “if man [a person] is a sapient animal, a tool making animal, a self-making animal, a symbol-using animal, [they are] no less performing animals . . . in the sense that [they are] a self-performing animal—their performances, are reflexive.” Butler (1988) argues that the public dimension of performances puts pressure on social animals to conform, and these pressures discipline the possible configuration of subjects and their desire. Performance, however, is also an opportunity to enact agency and transform the contours of subjects and subjective positions. In popular understandings, cultural and theatrical performances, for example, are sites for experimentation, the avant-garde, and radical critique. This understanding of performance alerts us to the opportunities for the possibility of experimenting and challenging conforming behavior that works to legitimize imperial violence. Butler (1990, 1993, 1997) in particular argues that because social norms must be performed in order to endure, actors and analysts should not be confined by hegemonic forces. She writes, “Precisely because I am committed to a hegemonic transformation of this horizon, I continue to regard this horizon as a historically variable schema or episteme, one that is transformed by the emergence of the non-representable within its terms, one that’s compelled to reorientate itself by virtue of the radical challenges to its transcendentality presented by ‘impossible’ figures at the borders and fissures of its surface” (Butler 2010, 149). Barkawi and Laffey (2002) argue that imperialism is a way of theorizing the uneven and hierarchical relations of the international system. More than foreign conquest, imperialism is “a distinct space of social interaction—a space within which processes of mutual constitution are productive of entities which populate the international system” (Barkawi and Laffey  2002, 111). Edward Said (1979) demanded that we address how European and American imperialism is enacted through cultural and political discourses that legitimize the conquest of foreign lands. This legitimization continues today; rather than regarding empire as a finished epoch, imperial formations, as elucidated by Stoler, continue to structure international relations: “In working with the concept of imperial formation rather than empire, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials, to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule—sliding and contested scales of differential rights. Imperial formations are defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations. Unlike empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things” (Stoler cited in Thomas 2012, 7). Imperial formations have created a commonsense regime with regard to legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence associated with the interests and desires of hegemonic rule. This common sense involves the unceasing processes of contestation and (re)negotiation between various social forces, which, however, do not operate on a level playing field (Gramsci cited in Richter-Montpetit 2007, 41). Standing armies or technologically advanced forms of warfare are performed in popular imaginations as more legitimate than nonstate

Empire   327 violence or technologically simple forms of warfare (Charrett  2012). State violence is endowed with a special sanctity, and nonstate violence is either ignored or is invested with a unique danger. “The production of terrorism by the state in fact protects the identity of particular states and the state system as a whole” (Neocleous 2003, 416). “States define terrorism according to their own interests, and the predominate interests are necessarily those of the hegemonic forces” (417). The reiteration of nonstate violence as illegitimate serves hegemonic interests. These interests include the discursive legitimation of imperial violence and the economies that emerge from this. Imperialism is also constitutive of subjects and subjectivities with regard to contemporary and global uses of violence. Imperialist discourses and practices are performative of periphery and metropole subjects and their ability to frame their actions. The performativity of imperial discourses allows us to explore the regimes of intelligibility that fashion the possible recognition of political action and political subjects, such as the coding of il/illegitimate violence. The matrix of intelligibility is performative of subjects; it governs how subjects may recognize themselves and others within a particular social and temporal space. “The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations” (Fanon 1963 [2001], 29). Here Fanon makes clear that the frontiers of empire are sites of increased political violence and also sites that are productive of new technologies and infrastructures of violence. The frontiers of empire are particularly lucrative and viciously productive sites for the continued discursive reproduction of il/legitimate violence but also in the monetary value produced and redirected at these sites. The frontiers of empire are marked by spectacular and excessive uses of force and the struggle over the meaning of that force. Historians and social theorists of empire address how policing technologies emerge from imperialist responses to resistance against empire (Breckenridge 2014; Feigenbaum 2017; Khalili 2010, 2012; Mitchell 1991, 2002; Thomas 2012). Laleh Khalili (2010,  2012) traces the vertical and horizontal movement of counterinsurgency technologies in empires’ management of violence, and Palestine has been at the fore of these transnational movements of technologies of managing resistance. Frontiers are understood as both physical borders and identity borders, which emerge as sites that are productive of imperial power: the ‘legitimate’ and ‘il/legitimate’ use of violence. This chapter is interested in the kind of work, the kind of negotiations that take place at the frontier sites of empire in order to maintain the justification and reproduction of ‘legitimate’ imperial violence. According to Gilmore’s (2002) understanding of place, sites are multiscalar. I explore the sites of imperial production “as intimate as the body, and as abstract, yet distinctive, as a productive region or a nation-state” (Smith cited in Gilmore 2002, 15). This multiscalar approach to the performance sites of empire allows us to explore how the imaginative geographies of geopolitics are carried out in intimate conversations and encounters. As Etienne Balibar has noted, a “frontier locates a site both of enclosure and contact and of observed passage and exchange. When coupled with the word interior, frontier carries the sense of internal distinctions within a territory (or empire); at the level of the individual, frontier marks the moral predicates by which a subject retains his or her national identity despite location outside the national frontier and despite heterogeneity within the nation-state” (cited in Cooper and Stoler  1997, 199). This chapter takes a turn toward a different kind of frontier. It presents cultural frontiers, such as theater, performance art, literature, and cinema as alternative frontiers where the negotiations and battles over legit-

328   Catherine Chiniara Charrett imate right to violence take place. First, I outline Palestine as an imperial frontier, the European performance of Palestine and of Hamas, and in the last section present the work of Tania El Khoury, which brings geopolitical debates and imperialist oppressions into intimate scenes that I suggest reorder the regimes of intelligible violence.

The Politics of Empire and Settler Colonialism The Occupation of Palestine is an imperial frontier of European military expansion and foreign conquest. Geographically it is one of the most recent outposts of European settler-colonialism. “Throughout the last century, Palestine has been a crucial node [of] . . . transmission, owing to its geostrategic significance, the ongoing struggle of Palestinians against colonization, and the position of Palestine’s colonizers in global hierarchies of power” (Khalili  2010, 414). Discursively it occupies significant space in international institutions and negotiations over the interpretations of violence in this territory. It has dominated public discourses in the United States and in Europe over the legitimate forms of resistance. Israel’s colonization of the West Bank is also being used as a training ground for American and European counterinsurgencies (Graham 2011), and Gaza continues to be used as a site for new military hardware and surveillance technologies (Li 2006). The election of Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) emerged as a frontier site, where Hamas was declared illegitimate, serving to justify violence against the Palestinians and ignore the Occupation of Palestine more generally. This coding was performed through the imposition of conditionality (Representatives of the Quartet  2006), which stipulated that unless Hamas’s political party, Change and Reform, abides by three broad conditions2 it would be sanctioned and boycotted. While the election of Hamas in transparent and internationally monitored elections (European Union Election Observation Mission 2006) provided an opportunity for the European Union, as part of the Quartet, to engage in constructive diplomatic dialogue with the movement, the EU’s political practice closed down such opportunities.3 Hamas members4 and external analysts argued that the EU missed an opportunity to “get to know” the movement (Khalidi 2007; Rifkind 2006) and instead facilitated conditions in which its members could be targeted (Crooke 2009). Bhunagalia (2012) disclosed how the marking of the Gaza Strip as hostile meant that citizens could more easily be targeted without reproach. The reiteration of Hamas in the OPTs is essential to the reproduction of imperial discourses and economies; Hamas is constructed as the violent Other, which the European discourse uses to justify interference ‘for’ the Palestinians. At the frontiers of empire the necessity to reproduce and maintain this hold on the classification of violence is accentuated. The constitution of the enemy as the terrorist Other is essential for the coherence of the discursive imperial script and for the exploitation of this coding of the Other. Frontiers are unstable and as such manifest as sites, on land and body, where empire is produced with a particular force. The detailed exploration of European-Palestinian relations around the 2006 Palestinian elections identifies some of the dimensions and characteristics of this performance of empire at the frontiers. Hamas, labeled by the EU and the US

Empire   329 as a terrorist movement, won a democratic mandate, and as such should enter into diplomatic relations with the EU. The contradictions of the European response to this mandate are made evident here, where the celebration of democracy is coupled with its dissolution. In these meeting places the Other interrogates the discursive ordering of imperial violence. The chapter emerges from my interviews with representatives from Hamas and the EU conducted between 2012 and 2013. In these conversations I asked Hamas representatives “What did it mean and how did it feel to be marked as a terrorist movement?” As such, I invoked a curiosity and critical position on what it means to be interpellated as a terrorist movement by hegemonic forces. In these conversations Hamas leaders and representatives identify the difficulties they faced in having to maneuver around this encompassing performative discourse. My conversations with EU representatives who had been involved in monitoring the 2006 Palestinian elections or who had been involved in enacting the EU’s diplomatic position toward Palestinian politics at this time reveal tensions within their own position. Most interviewees found it very difficult to defend the EU’s position; in our intimate, private conversations the defense of apparent geostrategic interests did not seem so convincing.

The Performativity of Empire: Palestinian Elections and the Legitimate Use of Violence at the Frontier The EU, from the Council to Parliament, expressed and acted in support of the 2006 Palestinian elections and in tacit support of Hamas’s participation (EU Council of Ministers  2005). The EU financed the elections and sent two monitoring bodies to the OPTs. An initial monitoring body, comprising 182 members, was followed by an ad hoc European Parliament monitoring team, headed by the European Parliament president Edward Macmillan Scott (2006), who arrived days before the election. Richard Chambers,5 director of the EU Elections Monitoring Mission for the West Bank and Gaza, explained that at first there were doubts whether the monitoring mission would be allowed to meet with Hamas members. However, the European Council passed a special resolution allowing the mission to do so. In 2006 Hamas participated in the Palestinian legislative elections, which gave the movement an opportunity to reorient its position on institutional politics in the OPTs. While the movement had previously boycotted legislative elections, seeing them as a result of the Oslo Accords, which it considered to be unjust, in 2005 it formed a political party, Change and Reform, and decided that it would participate in the elections. Many Hamas members did not think the party would win, but they concluded that their participation would improve their legitimacy on the international stage and highlight the corruption within the Fatah political party (Tamimi 2007). Change and Reform won the popular vote and a much larger number of seats in the Palestinian legislative assembly. External observers and former negotiators thought that it would have been easier had Hamas lost the elections (Malley and Agha 2006). That way, the movement would have emerged as a political force within the Palestinian legislative assembly while also maintaining their position of resistance. However,

330   Catherine Chiniara Charrett Hamas won the elections and was therefore responsible for forming the next government in the OPTs. The success of Hamas came as a surprise to EU diplomats and bureaucrats. A research paper prepared by the House of Commons Library reports the following on responses to the elections: “The international community is faced with a dilemma. It provides crucial financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority and has supported free and fair elections in Palestine, but is now faced with the prospect that Hamas, a movement that both the EU and the US view as a terrorist group, will play a major role in the next Palestinian government” (Youngs 2006, 16). The tensions that emerged from this “entirely new development” “had to be” reordered and managed. As European Commissioner Christopher Patten notes, the EU “lost no time” in “painting Hamas into a corner” and stating that it would not “deal with people who had been involved in terrorism and violence.”6 Only five days after the elections the EU and the US government stipulated that Hamas must abide by three conditions in order to be recognized as the legitimate government and to avoid sanction. These are: (Representatives of the Quartet 2006). After Hamas’s victory was announced, Ismail Haniyeh, the new prime minister designate, was mobbed at his home in Gaza. Scores of journalists and well-wishers crammed into his home in the Shatti refugee camp (Milton-Edwards and Farrell 20010, 260). It is not usual for an elected government to be located in a refugee camp. The aesthetics at the frontiers of empire are messy and incoherent. Hamas is defiant and unruly but had just won European-monitored elections. While many external analysts and diplomats regarded the event as an opportunity to engage diplomatically with the movement, the performativity of empire outlawed this option. Weber (2016) explores how sovereign knowledge systems assume and perform singular, coherent, and unified subjects. Through a queer critique, Weber emphasizes the either/or logic that is produced by this system of ordering, which ignores the possibility of the and/or: that something or someone can be both things at once. Prime Minister Haniyeh responded defiantly to the three conditions: “The Americans and the Europeans say to Hamas: either you have weapons or you enter the legislative council. We say weapons and the legislative council. There is no contradiction between the two” (cited in Milton-Edwards and Farrell 2010, 262). However, Hamas could not be left in this ambiguous discursive space as both government and resistance movement. Instead the European political practice reiterated Hamas as an illegitimate movement and the EU as a democratic voice; it therefore underlined its hierarchical position as adjudicator over Hamas. Said (1994, xxvi) explains that imperial discourses and imperialist persons view those who are forcibly colonized with a “combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty.” The management of legitimate subjects at the frontier is performative of the metropole’s ability and right to decide. “The crafting of a singular ‘sovereign man’ for the ‘European Community’ functions through a traditional understanding of sovereignty as a ‘complex practice of authorization, a practice through which specific agencies are enabled to draw a line’ between who can legitimately be included and excluded from the political community this ‘European sovereign man’ grounds” (Weber 2016, 144). The system of ordering is further performative of emergent techniques and tools of governing the Other. Lisa Hajjar (2006) maps how Israeli and American discourses perform Palestine and Palestinians’ expressions of life and resistance as outside the purview of existing legal matters. The frontiers of imperial formation are performative of the apparent

Empire   331 necessity to invent laws, circumvent laws, and ignore laws. Hamas, which emerges as a troubling subject after the elections, is constituted as an opportunity to invent a justification for killing civilians as part of human shields (Gordon and Penguini 2017). All relations with Hamas became contingent on whether it could abide by the three stipulated conditions of the Quartet, and European resources shifted to managing this recognition of the Palestinian political body. “From the moment after the elections,” explains MEP Richard Howitt, “all attention turned to whether Hamas could fulfil the conditions or not. To use a religious metaphor, those principles became like the bible, you could not question them. And Hamas either agreed with the principles or we wouldn’t talk to them. And that [is] what everyone said over and over again.”7 A senior EU representative to the Quartet Special Envoy explained that, “immediately after the elections American officials could be seen making their rounds,” pressuring EU officials on how they should respond to Hamas’s success.8 A senior representative with the EU Commission told me, “Basically, the US was carrying with them Israeli Foreign Minister [Avigdor] Lieberman’s policy and was pushing this on European officials.”9 Crooke (2011) observes that many European leaders wished to develop a less militarized position toward Hamas, which would have allowed them to engage diplomatically with the movement. But the message from the Americans and the British was clear: “The Islamic resistance in Palestine was to be neutralised, and psychologically defeated. [. . .] The Palestinian conflict was seen not as a problem in its own right, but as a subset of a war against ‘extremism,’ and Hamas was regarded as a virus to be eradicated” Crooke 2012. Critics at the time argued that the conditions were in fundamental opposition to many of the reasons the Palestinians voted in Hamas and so it could not completely conform to the conditions. I argue, however, that the conditions were never meant for Hamas to conform to; rather, they functioned to reproduce Hamas, and the wider resistance movement in Palestine, as illegitimate. Senior EU representatives explained that the conditions were nonoperationalizable because EU representatives were not allowed to meet with Hamas members in order to discern any compromise on the conditions. “There were no benchmarks,” said an EU representative from the European External Action Service. “It was very difficult to judge Hamas’s position because we were not allowed to speak with them. We couldn’t tell if Hamas was changing or not because we didn’t have the opportunity to talk with any of its Ministers. Diplomatically we should have kept communication channels open with Hamas.”10

Terrorist Bodies as Frontiers of Imperial Formations This section addresses how subjects on the frontiers of imperial formations must negotiate the discursive structures imposed upon them. Hamas emerges in the postelection period with the need to maneuver from outside, within, and beneath this imperial regime of intelligibility, which reproduces it as a terrorist movement. Said (1979, 1994) and later Barkawi and Laffey (1999,  2002) point out the hierarchical performative power of postimperial discursive structures. Hamas must refute its interpellation as a terrorist organization; this codification demarcates room for maneuverability in global politics. The hierarchy of

332   Catherine Chiniara Charrett knowledge production does not allude to those subjects it claims to know. Rather, Hamas members are aware of how they are undone by performative imperial landscapes that cast aside their claims to resistance, land, and life. The Hamas leader and minister of prisoners Atallah Abu al-Sebah explained in an interview, “Europe refuses political Islam and they got the idea that it’s terrorism. I think it’s because they were affected by the Zionism propaganda and it’s a very sad thing. They were supposed to know Hamas through Hamas itself, not through the media. And if they would do that they will see how much our movement respects truth, rights, and democracy, they’ll see that we’re not terrorists, we’re a civilized society, we’re well educated and this country is not a terrorist. Let me ask you how long you’ve been here in Gaza? Did you see any terrorism?”11 Here I emphasize Hamas members’ observations and discussions of the permissible violence waged against them. Public imaginaries since 2006, especially in the West, have reiterated a monstrous view of Hamas. As a symbol and performative utterance Hamas has been used to close down constructive conversations on the legitimacy of Palestinian anticolonial resistance. Puar and Rai (2002) address how the terrorist is produced as a particular monstrous subject that is made intelligible through a performative grid that imprints its supposed challenge to civilizational progress upon it. Through this interpellation, the claims of the subject are strategically displaced. As such, the continuous invocation of Hamas in Western discourses shifts blame onto its actions both for the failure of supposed peace talks and for Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. The BBC reran a headline during the protests of the Long March in 2018 that shows the perceived impossibility of Israelis’ responsibility for the violence they wage against the Palestinians (figure 20.1). Instead the BBC managed the imperial matrix of intelligibility through a reordering of responsibility. To rid Israel of blame for its war, the headline used “improbable syntax” and the invention of grammar to maintain the “proper” codification of violence and “responsibility.” The BBC thus had to invent a language in order to portray this event for not what it was. At the frontiers of imperial formations varying discourses meet and negotiate the use of violence. The EU performs a kind of anxiety and rage toward that which discloses ­fissures in its discursive control over events in the postcolonial. Hamas performs a kind of

figure 20.1.  BBC Headlines on Israeli attacks on Gaza, Palestine August 2018.

Empire   333 disappointment and sadness; while defiant, the movement knows the powers around which it must maneuver. Khalil al-Haya, one of Hamas’s founding members and a member of the Palestinian legislative council, offers the following observations of EU action toward the Palestinians: “There are those [Europeans] that really know the justice of our cause. Who doesn’t know that Britain gave Palestine to the Jews, that they created a country in a land not for them? So they are inside, but they are really cheating—cheating with themselves, cheating with government, cheating with Israelis. They know the truth but don’t want to implement anything. They know the truth—but they do nothing. They know that we have thousands of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails they don’t move and don’t talk about it.”12 The EU’s enforcement of the conditioning of Hamas’s illegitimacy on the frontiers of empire takes an extreme form, whereby EU policy actively works to further discredit Hamas and splinter Palestinian governance structures. The EU barred all funding to Hamas-related projects and diverted existing EU funds through a temporary emergency mechanism to Fatah-controlled elements of the Palestinian Authority. The EU refused to pay the salary of any civil servant who would work in a Hamas government; employees who had been working for the Palestinian Authority were told to stay home and refuse to work for the newly elected government. They continued to receive their salaries over a decade later for refusing to serve in the Hamas government. The implications of this are manifold. These actions aggravated the split between Fatah and Hamas and led to the increased deterioration of the economy in the Gaza Strip. Hamas had to fund its projects and its government through other means. This meant seeking out new funding mechanisms, but also being forced to use methods such as sneaking money in briefcases through the tunnels that run between Egypt and Gaza. These actions become further performative of Hamas as an illegitimate subject, having to maneuver around imperial legalistic rules and boundaries. Moreover, existing European projects in the Gaza Strip came to an end, as well as projects initiated by the Quartet. In the negotiations over the discursive constitution of Hamas, external analysts and former negotiators asked for a more measured and pragmatic response from the EU. Khalidi (2007, 22) explains, “I would like to see the EU engaging with Hamas . . . and be willing perhaps even to take some risky actions in this domain, because the pay-off, in my opinion, is very big.” A spokesperson for Hamas referred to similar expectations for a more pragmatic response from its European interlocutors. I expected them to deal with us normally [sad voice] as an elected government. This would have encouraged us to move forward, to make changes. In Gaza, we spent 30 years under siege, under blockade. We are not in touch with the world, so we expected these people to come and educate. Give us experience, to help us to achieve democracy, prosperity. But really the situation got worse. On the other side, it was really bad. We felt that these people are just supporting the policy of Israel and they don’t want to see Islamists in the government. We were upset and frustrated.”13

At this point, the EU contributed to the collective punishment of the Palestinians. Butler (2004) addresses the dangers of being recognized as less than human by liberal categorizations. Postcolonial and critical race scholars have long since addressed how the racialization of some humans is constitutive of their supposed disposability. To be racialized through discourses of imperial expansion means that you are performed as expendable and killable (Mbembe  2001,  2003). “Most crucially, race has firmly defined the ‘extrahuman,’ those

334   Catherine Chiniara Charrett excluded from the frames of the human and therefore excluded from norms of ethical treatment” (Tilley and Shilliam 2018, 538). Certain lives are livable, and others are produced as disposable. The successful performance of the conditions deemed the Hamas life expendable. Crooke (2009, 231) writes, “Office-holders and parliamentarians can be abducted and interned without a murmur; members of ‘barbarian’ movements can be arrested and taken away for imprisonment and torture in other countries; and barbarian leaders, whether or not legitimately elected, can be assassinated at the pleasure of western leaders.”

Cultural Frontiers in the Reproduction of Imperial Formations This chapter has shed light on geographical and bodily frontiers of imperial formations. It has addressed how expressions of political identities and authorities that trouble imperial interests emerge as sites where the performativity of empire is put under strain. At these fissures, the efforts to reiterate the legitimation of imperial violence accelerates and intensifies. The remainder of this chapter presents cultural sites where the performativity of imperial scripts is countered. These sites contribute to renegotiations of imperial discourses. Live performance, street theater, the visual arts emerge as potential countergeographies to imperial discourses (Gregory 2010, cited in Mustafa et al,  2013, 1123). Poore (2016, 8) argues “that theatre is one of the few places where sustained reflection is possible on what an empire is—and inevitably, whether we’re still caught in an imperial moment today.” Through performance postcolonial subjects take over the position of the storyteller. They foreground the violences of history that are frequently forgotten or forbidden, providing a counternarrative or establishing a context for the articulation of counterdiscursive versions of the past (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996, 111). Postcolonial dramas reclaim notions of time from the officialdom of empire, which reproduce the indigenous as premodern or antimodern, static and permanent in time, as if the native can be known and rendered once and for all (Mbembe 2001). Performance art can interrogate the coherence of imperial scripts by making present what is excluded and suppressed in order to legitimize domination and violence. In what follows, I present the work of a Lebanese performance artist, Tania El Khoury, who uses intimate scenes and audience interactivity to foreground the pain and oppression of imperial violence while subverting its script. I will discuss the pieces Jarideh (2010) and Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better (2011). In these pieces the frontiers of empire, the sites of negotiation over permissible violence are enacted through intimate encounters within the performance space. The participants are given the opportunity to reflect on the disciplining boundaries over the permissible violence of empire. In Jarideh, which means “newspaper” in Arabic, El Khoury disrupts the discourses and practices, both cultural and legal, which perform the contemporary terrorist. The performance piece, explains El Khoury, is about “how ridiculous the police is” and was inspired by a workshop given by London’s Metropolitan Police on “how to spot a terrorist” to the employees of a cinema where El Khoury was working. The performance is set in a busy café where the audience (a single member) is instructed through wireless headphones to pick up and read the Arabic newspaper in front of them. Inside El Khoury

Empire   335

figure 20.2.  Screen shot from Jarideh performance archive. Available at http://taniaelkhoury. com/jarideh/ accessed 4 August 2019. Reprinted with permission from the performer. has put the London’s Met’s instructions on how to spot a terrorist. Reading an Arabic newspaper in public (at a time when people have been removed from airplanes for speaking Arabic, says El Khoury  2010) makes the audience both target and vigilante. El Khoury’s work, I propose, undoes some of the layers of permissible violence invoked in discourses of terrorism and what it means to resist imperial force. Jarideh includes in the newspaper testimonies from female Lebanese resistance fighters, which El Khoury says disrupt the Met’s dominating logic of who is a militant (figure 20.2). The women’s testimonies, in print before the audience member, describe the Lebanese female fighters “playing a role” and “hiding guns in mini-skirts.” The performance then provocatively asks the audience member to record their responses to the following questions: What will you fight for? Would you take up arms? These questions open up the policing of permissible violence, encouraging audience members (who live in European postimperial safety and probably never had to consider such questions) to interrogate whether they would consider taking up arms, and for what. El Khoury’s (2011a) piece Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better presents the “speaking back” of the oppressed and performs the potentially subversive maneuverability of those subjects interpellated by hegemonic forms. In the description of the show, El Khoury states, “My role, while seemingly submissive, is to try to make every show my own. As Paulo Freire beautifully explains, being oppressed is a stronger position because it is a struggle for liberation.” Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better involves one male

336   Catherine Chiniara Charrett audience member and one female performer. The interactive performance takes place between the street level and a second-story window. The audience member stares out the window and hears a female voice. She tells him to look out into the street: “Somewhere, among the dozens of passers-by, you will find a woman who will obey your every move.” El Khoury says, “During the performance, the audience member decides what I do, effectively choreographing me. I am in the street, while he is in an adjacent building overlooking the street through a window. He dictates my movements while talking into a Dictaphone, and I hear him through the use of wireless headphones.” The following segments are from various recordings of the performance in 2011–2: Female voice: “You are about to see me passing by. I want to give you the perfect vision of a woman passing by beneath your window. It will be metaphorical, magical, cinematic, poetic, just like an Iranian film.” Male voice: “Stop. Turn around. Turn around.” Male voice: “I want you to be menacing.” This performance piece makes obvious the relationship of oppression between the male and female. In El Khoury’s (2011b) blog she writes, “The piece ended up being more of a critique of oppression in general. Oppressors are everywhere. They use history, science, the law of nature, the will of God, the criteria of art, as well as language and media ‘to legitimize their superiority and to ignore or minimize the identity of the oppressed’ (Paulo Freire).” Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better performs this relationship of oppression through an overt interactive exchange. This cultural frontier is marked by negotiations over il/legitimate violence and the kinds of scripting it takes to defend the violence of empire. The performance tells the story of oppression. But it also mocks it. The oppressor is mocked through the ridiculousness of his position. The exchange reminds us of the distortion of reality that surrounds the oppressor. Up there in the window he is surrounded by his own power but unaware of what is happening in the street below.

Conclusion In all of my meetings with Hamas leaders, the “martyred son” is a permanent image, a permanent picture hanging on the wall. And more sons have been killed since my conversations in 2012. In my research I interrogated what it meant to be cast as one who could be killed. He looks at me and explains that friends of his were killed by Israeli forces. He looks at me and tells me that the son of the son of his sister was killed by the occupying forces. He looks at me and tells me that his neighbor has been killed. He looks at me and tells me . . . He looks at me . . . He looks at . . . (figure 20.3). This chapter discussed the management of justifications for the use of violence at the frontiers of imperial formations. It explored frontiers as sites of tension within imperial formations, which Stoler suggests were the ongoing imperial technologies that conferred “gradated sovereignty,” (Stoler 2013, 8) “sliding and contested scales of differential rights.” Frontiers, both geographical and identity borders, emerge as sites where negotiations over the right to violence take place. Hegemonic imperial discourses are performative of regimes

Empire   337

figure 20.3.  Hamas leader and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mamoud al-Azar in his family home. Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territories, 5 December 2012. Photographed by the author. of legitimate and illegitimate violence; this management performs an idea that the violence enacted by those in the service of empire is not violence at all (Khalili 2013). The actions of nonstate actors are reproduced as illegitimate by state powers, which is generative of military-industrial complexes in counterinsurgency and urban security industries. Hamas’s election in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections emerged as a frontier in the discursive reproduction of imperial formations. Palestine is a geographic and discursive frontier where negotiations over the legitimate and illegitimate use violence take place. The coding of Hamas as a terrorist organization is part of Israel’s defense of its right to wage war on Gaza and the Palestinians more generally. After the elections, the EU had an opportunity to engage in diplomatic arrangements with Hamas, but my discussions with Hamas and EU representatives showed how these opportunities were rapidly closed down. The election of Hamas emerged as a fissure in the performative reproduction of imperial discourses. It showed contradictions in the EU’s democratization project, and American and Israeli actors move to enforce a militaristic reproduction of Hamas. While the frontier itself may be disorienting and messy, Hamas’s success was quickly reordered into a knowable terrorist subject. While Hamas attempted to negotiate the terms of its recognition, the force of imperial interpellation meant that Hamas and Gaza were marked as hostile and killable. The frontiers of imperial formations are violently disciplined, and the European response to Hamas’s success in democratic elections helped to usher in a new wave of violence against the Gaza Strip.

338   Catherine Chiniara Charrett

Notes 1. In his investigation of the Third Reich, Marcuse argued that performance is tied to modern technology and technical systems and language. He discusses the violence of technological rationality and the mechanics of conformity that spread from the technological to the social order (cited in McKenzie  2001, 160). Marcuse regarded the power of these systems as totalitarian projects that limited the possibility for self-reflection. 2. The Quartet is a multilateral institution that emerged after the failure of the Oslo Accords to develop yet another avenue for negotiations. The Quartet includes the UN, the US, Russia, and the EU. They stipulated a policy of conditionality on January 30, 2006, which argued that in order to avoid sanctions Hamas must the renounce v­ iolence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all agreements signed by the PLO and Israel. Hamas compromised on these conditions in significant ways; however, the Quartet and the EU specifically did not offer any clear benchmarks on the conditions; Author interview with European External Action Service, Middle East Desk, Brussels, 18 June 2013. 3. Different Palestinian organizations have been moved on and off European and American terrorist lists for decades. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was removed from European terrorist lists after the Oslo negotiations, in which the PLO agreed to the recognition of the state of Israel and renounced the use of violence. The Oslo Accords have now been regarded as a widespread failure for Palestinian sovereignty (Mansour  2001; Roy 2002). Israel did not offer Palestinians the same recognition of statehood and instead continued to colonize Palestinian lands. 4. Author interview with A.  Yousuf, advisor to Prime Minister Ismail Hanyieh, Hamas Member of Parliament, Gaza, November 8, 2012. 5. Author interview with Richard Chambers, deputy chief observer of the EU Election Observation Mission, West Bank and Gaza, Aberystwyth, April 25, 2012. 6. Author interview with Lord Christopher Patten of Barnes, European commissioner for external relations (1999–2004), London, May 20, 2013. 7. Author interview with R. Howitt, European member of Parliament, Election Observation Mission for the West Bank and Gaza, Brussels, June 18, 2013. 8. Author interview with senior official, EU’s representative to the Quartet Special Envoy, Brussels, June 21, 2013. 9. Author interview with senior representative, European Commission, Brussels, June 19, 2013. 10. Author interview with senior official, EU’s office in the West Bank and Gaza, European External Action Service, Brussels, June 22, 2013. 11. Author interview with Atallah Abu al-Sebah, former Hamas minister of culture, Hamas minister of prisoners, Gaza, October 21 2012. 12. Author interview with Khalil Al-Haya, Hamas founder, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Gaza, December 12, 2012. 13. Author interview with G. Hamad, former spokesperson for Hamas, vice minister of foreign affairs, Gaza, October 18, 2012.

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Empire   341 Stoler, Ann Laura (editor). 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham: Duke University Press. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey. 1999. “The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization.” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4: 403–34. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey. 2002. “Retrieving the Imperial: Empire and International Relations.” Millennium Journal of International Relations 31, no. 1: 109–27. Tamimi, Azzam. 2007. Hamas: Unwritten Chapters: London: Hurst. Thomas, Martin. 2012. Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, Lisa, and Robbie  Shilliam. 2018. “Raced Markets: An Introduction.” New Political Economy 23, no. 5: 534–43. Turner, Victor W. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ. Weber, Cynthia. 2016. Queer International Relations: Sovereignty, Sexuality and the Will to Knowledge Oxford: Oxford University Press. Youngs, Tim. 2006. “The Palestinian Parliamentary Election and the Rise of Hamas.” Research Paper 07/17. House of Commons Library, International Defence Section. March 15: 9.

pa rt i v

SCRIPTS Political scripts take different forms: declarations by the state, recognizable norms that are performed in different contexts differently, claims of authority, accountability, legitimacy, power, and representation. Scripts are central to political life, and political performances enact or reveal scripts, for example through ceremony and ritual, leadership styles, and constitutional and legal frameworks. This section of the Handbook focuses on how these submerged or visible scripts are performed in and through political practice and what are their effects on our public life. Stuart Elden’s essay in this section of the Handbook interrogates the concept and practice of ceremony historically and theoretically. After discussing some of the historical lineages of the modern concept and practice of ceremony, Elden examines what he calls the “systematic structure” of ceremony addressing multiple registers: gesture, choreography, clothing, and objects; the texts or liturgy of ceremony; and the temporality and spatiality of ceremony. He offers some reflections on political theater, as both a way of describing political performance generally and theater that is political. Elden’s insight that work on political ceremony is part of a wider concern with the relation between politics and performance is amply demonstrated in Julia Strauss’s chapter. Looking at “the script as both written text and mutually constituted social role that attempts to reinforce legitimacy,” Strauss compares the political performances of Xi Jinping—and his optimistic and unifying “China Dream” in the increasingly authoritarian People’s Republic of China—with the divisive, antitechnocratic performances of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the United States and the United Kingdom. Addressing both the political aspects of performance and the performative aspects of politics in these three cases, she concludes that “in other political contexts the substance of political performance scripts, the ways in which scripts engage audiences, and how they are modified over time are likely to vary, but do so in patterned ways.” Strauss’s insights into performance in politics across different political and cultural environments resonate closely with John Uhr’s chapter on the politics and performance of public leadership, where public leadership refers not only to governmental but also to civil society forms of leadership. Uhr identifies a “modernist model” of leadership performance,

344   Scripts while highlighting issues of importance to the political theory of contemporary (or “modernized”) public leadership. Willmar Sauter explores the aesthetic, affective, and political properties of “liveness/ immersion” through a contemporary trilogy of plays performed as Women in Science, in which various communicative strategies and techniques are employed. He argues that the spectator’s immersion has a close affinity to political activities. Desiree Lewis shifts our attention to a different medium, exploring the nexus of performance, politics, and photography. Lewis explores the pivotal role of photographs in giving a sense of substance to racialized identities in the form of nativism. Engaging postcolonial scholars’ deployment of the term nativism, she critically assesses its articulations from early ethnographic photographs in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to contemporary work by South African artist Muholi, showing how this artist both subverts and enlists modes of signification that confirm nativism. Two chapters in this section focus on pedagogy (Erzsébet Strausz) and what accounts for theater’s absence from ecocritical discourse, indeed from the environmental movement (Vicky Angelaki). As Wendy Brown (2015, 177) writes in her Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, the corporatization of higher education, which is sweeping the world, has created a situation in which “knowledge, thought, and training are valued and desired almost exclusively for their contribution to capital enhancement.” In other words, under the model of rationality known as neoliberalism, knowledge is conceived almost exclusively as property, commodity, and a measurable commercial asset rather than as something sought “for developing the capacities of citizens, sustaining culture, knowing the world, or envisioning and crafting different ways of life in common” (177–8). Strausz’s essay addresses this theme by engaging the transformational potential of pedagogical practice in the classroom and beyond as both performance and “misperformance.” It focuses on the ways in which institutional scripts—in this instance, the disciplinary expectations of the academic field of international relations—and the logic of the market shape and condition modes of ­subjectivization in the contemporary university, and more broadly in everyday social performance. Recent years have seen a radical call for the decolonization of the university and a new era of education: subverting curricula, promoting diversity, and destroying old boundaries. Walter Mignolo (2014, 589) has argued that knowledge can be decolonized by acknowledging its sources and geopolitical locations, while at the same time resituating knowledges (and ways of knowing) that have been silenced, suppressed, or disavowed as a result of the epistemological dominance of particular forms. This implies calling into question the naturalization of the Western foundations of knowledge, as well as acknowledging the diversity of knowledge and ways of knowing on the planet that have been colonized and appropriated by Western languages, institutions, actors, and categories of thought based in Greek and Latin (and not in Arabic, for example). Thus, according to Mignolo, the possibility of a new geopolitics of knowledge rests upon a worldwide revival of “genealogies of thoughts, experiences and feelings, issues that cannot be confronted by expanding the social sciences to the non-Western world” (595). Gurminder Bhambra (2014, 149) elaborates, following Mignolo, “This means deconstructing the standard narratives based upon the universalization of parochial European histories and reconstructing global narratives on the basis of the empirical connections forged through histories of colonialism, enslavement, dispossession and appropriation.”

Scripts   345 The issue of pedagogical canons is also at the heart of these debates. Angelaki explores a related theme, the “greening” of the Western dramatic canon, encouraging a sense of responsibility toward the environment. This is a timely reflection given the unevenness that shapes the past, present, and projected future of climate injustice, where the effects of carbon emissions by the industrial North will be felt disproportionately by those in the Global South. Believing that critical ecological perspectives can illuminate theater’s participation in our ecological culture, Angelaki explores strategies for greening the theater by applying ecocriticism to a prominent work in the dramatic canon, Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Arguing that theater’s emphasis on community, intimacy, and reciprocity makes it a natural partner for environmental causes, Angelaki offers a rich reading of Ian Rickson’s staging of Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of this classic at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London (2019) as exemplary of how the greening of the canon can work in practice. Along with Erika Munk (1994, 5), Angelaki argues that when ecocriticism moves from page to stage, scholars may discover a “vast open field” of “histories to be re-written, styles to re-discuss, contexts to re-perceive.”

References Bhambra, Gurminder. 2014. Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Mignolo, Walter. 2014. “Spirit Out of Bounds Returns to the East: The Closing of the Social Sciences and the Opening of Independent Thoughts.” Current Sociology 62, no. 4: 584–602. Munk, Erika. 1994. “A Beginning and End.” Theater 25, no. 1: 5–6.

chapter 21

Nati v ism African Bodies and Photographic Performance Desiree Lewis

Introduction Although the terms native and nativism have a variety of meanings, their use by radical African scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani (2001) and Charles Ngwena (2018) identify their place in colonial categorization and, later, their use in postcolonial identification. Mamdani argues that the category native became an ethnicized identity mobilized to create African subjects of colonial administration. Explaining the shift from direct to indirect rule throughout Africa, he shows that ethnic divisions were more effective foundations for colonial administration than racial separation: “Instead of treating the colonized as a single racialized mass, indirect rule sliced them over . . . into so many separate ethnicities. . . the plural legal order among the colonised not only produced plural political identities—as ethnicities—it also claimed that they in turn reflected just as many preexisting cultural identities” (Mamdani 2001, 25). Africans were natives not only because they were seen to belong to a distinct race but also because they were categorized as members of ethnic groups with distinctively primordial customs. The nativist understanding of African identities in terms of colonial categorization has persisted in the postcolonial context. Evidence of this includes the mobilization of Africans on the basis of ethnic loyalties and deployment of these affiliations by political leaders and parties. Mamdani (2001) explores this in the case of the Rwandan genocide, while scholars such as Hylton White (2012) and Andrew Ainslie and Thembela Kepe (2016) have analyzed more recent South African examples. These include the galvanizing of a sense of Zulu ­ethnicity by the former president Jacob Zuma, as well as the resurgence of traditional authorities able to garner strong popular support. These identities have their origins in colonialism’s ossification of unchanging ethnic groups and cultures, as well as in colonial stereotypes, such as the stereotype of Zulu men being especially gladiatorial and hypermasculine. As such, they appear to demonstrate an ennobling and agential sense of Africanness in the face of colonial hierachies, yet confirm a “phenotype and a pre-constituted self . . . which rules out the possibility of an identity that is continuously unfolding, proliferating or is the outcome

348   Desiree Lewis figure 21.1.  Source: https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/7333017/Jacob-Zumaprepares-for-tea-at-Buckingham-Palace. html.

of multiple ancestries” (Ngwena 2018, 7). At the same time, these expressions of identity demonstrate the resonance of an ethnic belonging that marshals powerful emotions, fantasies of affinity, and memories of security. Figure 21.1, capturing Zuma in traditional Zulu attire, exemplifies his theatrical enactment of ethnic belonging and affiliation with a past world. Mamdani’s (2001) discussion of nativism focuses on how and why civilian agency in Rwanda escalated to the levels of violence that it did in the 1990s. His explanation situates this agency in its political and historical context, demonstrating that while the Rwandan genocide might be seen to be irrational, it is still “thinkable” by virtue of its historical origins in colonial strategies of administering Africans by reifying their ethnic differences as belonging to immutable cultures. For Mamdani, then, it is possible to understand the political choices and identities mobilized during the Hutu-Tsutsi violence by tracing these to systems of colonial rule that instilled a deep identitarian sense that drove certain political actions. This is a valuable framework for understanding what the naming of Africans meant under colonialism and continues to mean in the postcolonial context. But Mamdani’s understanding of nativism as a political identity does not address how the naming of Africans is embedded in a totalizing system where “Africans are seen to have an originary identity and are moulded from the same clay—racially, culturally and sexually, and in other identitarian ways” (Ngwena  2018, 60). Ngwena’s study, subtitled Contesting Nativism in Race, Culture and Sexualities, partly addresses the gaps in Mamdani’s explanation. Ngwena argues that the fixing and stereotyping of ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and a sense of Africans’ static cultures (41–192) have all been pivotal to the evolution of nativism and both past and present definitions of Africanness. The constituent categories of sexuality, race, culture, and gender in naming Africanness are not a list of characteristics that simply come to exist in people’s minds or are represented in written accounts or visual images. They acquire meaning and force relationally and

Nativism   349 performatively. As demonstrated in the growing scholarship on politics and performance, ­performances involving particular subjects and events can provide stories, tropes, and memories that are central to individuals’ acquisition of a sense of self and to political identities mobilized in social struggles. Consequently, what certain bodies do and are seen to do, how they are dressed and behave, what they look like and how they are treated are often central, though seemingly insignificant, expressions of and sites for the acquisition of social subjects’ sense of self. It is for this reason that photography seems to me to be such an important medium in the analysis of identities, especially of nativism. Since the rapid growth of photography coincided with the colonial system that first categorized Africans racially, culturally, and in terms of phenotypes, the technology facilitated the (mass) construction of blatant stereotypes, while also conveying an impression of their absolute veracity. The photograph is also a medium suited to the mass production of images of bodies and the characteristics that they are seen to imply. As revealed by the upsurge of photography alongside science in the late nineteenth century, the photograph was a persuasive medium for generalizing about certain body types and structuring humanity in terms of hierarchies linked to racial, gendered, classed, and regional difference. This chapter explores the valence of nativism by drawing on the understanding within postcolonial studies that the “categories and affective schemes that used to be the vectors of a colonial rule of difference” (White 2012, 402) resonate in postcolonial public life. A more specific objective is to show how analyzing photographic representation and performance can help to explain how and why nativism generates such strong emotions and imagined attachments and, therefore, also drives powerful political identities and action. I turn to the work of a globally celebrated South African photographer Zanele Muholi to explore this photographic signification. As I show, Muholi’s recent self-portraits encourage a retrospective reading of the colonial visual archive as well as the potency of this archive in imagining African identities in the present. I start by exploring the performative force of photographs of African bodies. Then I focus on Muholi’s work, concentrating both on her use of particular signifiers and codes in representing “nativism” as well as on viewers’ responses to these.

Photographing African Bodies In a review essay dealing with works by three performance studies scholars, Laura Levin (2009, 327) discusses the “performative force of photography” and usefully describes the range of ways in which performance studies has recently dovetailed with analysis of photography. Levin shows that the meanings of photographs revolve around what and how they represent and that “the ontology of photography is intrinsically linked to performance” (328). Photographs acquire meaning by virtue of their role as communicative acts, their function as spectacle involving affect, their citationality, as well as their performativity in destabilizing essentialized identities (Butler  1988). Photographs have powerful affective functions in that they encourage emotional and visceral responses. They also acquire meaning on the basis of their viewers’ prior knowledge or memory of other visual repertoires. And they can be performative in the sense of destabilizing fixed meanings or encouraging the viewer’s recognition of the construction rather than the facticity of social identities and

350   Desiree Lewis actual bodies. These diverse understandings of performance inform my discussion of photographs of African bodies, especially the work of Muholi, whose oeuvre seeks to reimagine black bodies burdened by a legacy of violent representation. The representation of African others in southern African colonial photography has been extensively explored by critics of colonial discourse. Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (2002), for example, locate the production of colonial photographs in an administrative regime, arguing that the photographic categorization of African subjects furthered the ­politics of indirect rule. Under colonialism and apartheid, for example, the association of the Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, and other ethnic groups with distinct territories and, later, “homelands” justified the spatial regulation of Africans and supported apartheid rule through “separate development.” Photographs of these ethnic groups for anthropological, ethnographic, and administrative purposes were central to their definition as distinct and real categories. Visual codifications of black subjects with distinct customs therefore rationalized their ethnic categorization and regulation as diverse ethnic subjects. In The Colonising Camera, Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes (1998) demonstrate how ethnographic photographs of African bodies—later used in postcards—circulated stereotypical perceptions among Europeans in scholarly and ethnographic projects as well as in popular communication. One reason the photograph has played such a central role in stereotyping Africans is that the invention of photography in the 1800s coincided with the genesis of colonialism as an administrative and categorizing system. During the nineteenth century, essentialist understandings of race through classifying body types buttressed colonial expansion and gov­ern­ ance. Both academic and popular knowledge linked constructed and distinct aspects of African bodies to innate characteristics, with different knowledge-making forms being fueled by the political and economic imperatives of colonialism. Hierarchical distinctions between the racial subhumanity of Africans and the civility of Europeans rapidly became hegemonic in justifying colonial expansion as well as atrocities against blacks in the name of colonial order. In the early and mid-1800s, depictions of African bodies relied on drawings and paintings. Such pictorial depictions of African primitivism were exemplified in the case of Sarah Baartman, exhibited in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” and the subject of numerous drawings and cartoons.1 From the latter half of the century, however, travelers, colonial administrators, illustrators, and, later, a thriving postcard industry were able to rely on a text that promised the viewer a lifelike depiction: the photograph. Portraits of Africans were especially significant since these seemed to convey the essence of the subject’s character to the viewer. Representations of faces, as the boundary between exteriority and interiority, explicitly functioned within racial optics. Patricia Hayes (2007) has shown that these portraits had a didactic effect, often conveying to both whites and blacks the rightful place of the black body in, for example, linear ideas about progress or relationships around work, land, and ownership. African bodies were frequently depicted as passive bodies suited to labor, close to nature, and innately incapable of independent development or learning. Hayes states that these portraits were sometimes polysemous, and their ambiguity could convey ennobling meanings at odds with the overt racial denigration of Africans. But what the portraits assumed was that facial expression, corporeality (especially sexuality), and dress were crucial markers of the essential (racialized) backwardness of African peoples. Sander Gilman (1985) describes the use of images of bodies and faces in nineteenth-century

Nativism   351 medicine, explaining their role in creating taxonomies for supporting both racial and class hierarchies. Black figures such as Baartman were represented in ways that exaggerated their alleged abnormality and, therefore, racial inferiority. Similarly, by attaching characteristics such as moral weakness to the physiognomy of subjects photographed as prostitutes or criminals, the classed colonial order could justify the exploitation and brutalizing of these groups. By the mid-1900s, a stage when the photograph was being widely used alongside text and manipulated in color, these ascribed meanings had permeated popular culture. The explosion of postcard, textbook, and coffee-table book industry depicting tribal or traditional Africans “succeeded in generating a sedimented discourse of disparaging African alterity that remains with us” (Ngwena 2018, 49). However, these depictions persist in the present; as Ngwena argues, “Today, in their mundane use, the concepts of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’ come to us already ensconced in sedimented discourses that speak to a constructed homogeneity” (50). This is illustrated in many present-day advertisements and images used in newspaper reporting on sub-Saharan Africa. The colonial production and representation of Africans need to be distinguished from more general processes of othering described by, for example, Edward Said (1978). V. Y. Mudimbe (1988) and Ngwena (2018) state that the naming of Africans must be understood as marking a climactic moment in the enunciation of European modernity. For Ngwena (2018, 60), Europe is performatively created when “Africa and Africans were ­constructed as recipients of the globalization of European historical time in which the ­discourse of European modernity was on a grand unstoppable march, including epochal transformation of notions of differences between communities that were once seen as geographical but could now be understood as simply differences in arriving in history.” Ideas about the stasis of African societies, Africans’ atavistic embeddedness in pastness, and the hypercorporeality of black bodies therefore cohered in the invention of the African as antithetical to European industriousness, modernity, and civility. In photography, meanings are ascribed to sexuality, dress, and facial expression in established codes for recognizing the African body. The use of the term native, and its visual and performative substantiation, were integral to this coding. As Mamdani (2001) has shown, black inhabitants of Africa were categorized in terms of their primordial and atavistic behavior and tribalism. Apart from rationalizing colonial juridical power over tribal peoples, nativism locked Africans into an evolutionary model of backwardness. In claiming an African essence that is uncontaminated by Westernity and colonialism, for example, certain African leaders and other public figures have worn dress or made pronouncements that echo the anthropological view of tribal Africa. The enactment of ethnicity by Jacob Zuma in figure 21.1 illustrates this. Revealing the signifying power of the body and body’s surface, the photograph also indicates that dress and the body’s appearance and movement inflect tradition as gendered. Postcolonial feminist critics have shown that women’s bodies are often markers of static tradition, whereas male bodies define agency and the move toward (nationalist) modernity. Ann McClintock (1991) discusses this in the case of gendered images and symbols in South Africa, while Shirin Rai (2014, 31) examines gendered dress in Indian parliamentary rituals that “mark both men and women differently” in a bifurcated modernity. However, in some male enactments of tradition (and Zuma’s performance of Zulu-ness is an example), celebrations of the authentically virile male body are meant to challenge the colonial denial of the black subject’s masculine agency. Paradoxically this hypermasculinized identity reinforces

352   Desiree Lewis colonial stereotypes about the African male body being suited only for labor or mindless aggression. Moreover, the fact that traditional dress is often arbitrarily constructed out of fragments that have little historical connection to precolonial lifestyles is irrelevant. What matters most is the idea of such exotic dress being a marker of a static identity that—for nationalists—is under threat by Western modernity, but that is in actual fact a construct of that very modernity. The hypersexualization of black bodies was also key to the construction of an anthropological view of the African. In fact the fascination with the genitalia and sexuality of newly subjected peoples in South Africa spoke volumes about a colonial obsession with discovering an alterity that would construe (bestial, sexual, and often near-naked) black bodies as being diametrically different from (human, asexual, and clothed) white bodies. Historians such as Yvette Abrahams (2000) have shown that the initial fascination was with the male body, believed at some point to have abnormal genitalia. The projection of sexual deviance onto black men also involved their definition as rapacious, promiscuous, and aggressive, a move that obviously justified the violent colonial control of the black male body. Further exploration and discovery led increasingly to a fixation with the black female body. And with the figure of Baartman, a vast scientific and discursive industry, extending from the colonies to several countries in Europe, scripted black and female sexuality in terms of tropes of excess, promiscuity, and degeneracy. As revealed by the early fixation with the genitals of black men, and later the bodies and genitalia of black women, black sexualized subjects were pivotal projected fantasies for white viewers. In contemporary public life, these fantasies about African sexuality continue to circulate photographically. Commenting on this in mass media culture, Nadia Sanger (2008, 275) writes that “women's magazines with a dominant white female readership, sexualize black femininities for the consumption of white female readers in ways reminiscent of white male colonial obsession with black bodies. . . . Hyper(hetero)feminine performances are racialized with few exceptions—white femininities are depicted as normative, and black femininities as different and exotic.”

Muholi and African Nativism Zanele Muholi began their career as a documentary photographer and activist for the Forum for the Empowerment of Women, an organization established by and for black lesbians. Their rise to fame has been meteoric, and they are currently acclaimed as a photographer both nationally and globally. Since starting their career as an activist whose documentary photography supported black lesbian struggles, they have had solo exhibitions hosted by Casa África in Las Palmas, Spain; Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena in Italy; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2017); Museo de Arte moderno de Buenos Aires (2018); and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Muholi has also been the recipient of prestigious ­fellowships. However, an article in The Guardian (2020) indicates that they are often still publicized in terms of racial, sexual, and classed marginality. Yet Muholi’s material success and popularity are at the moment considerable. Despite the description of their recent work as realistic responses to homophobic violence, racism, and gender discrimination, their photography has clearly shifted away in recent years from a more documentary style, evident, for example, in early depiction of survivors of

Nativism   353 homophobic violence, to the studied portraits of posed subjects, from lifelike realism and a concern with the moment to a fascination with staged representations. Their well-known recent projects are in the “Faces and Phases” series, portraits of black lesbians and genderqueer people, and a self-portrait series involving photographing themselves each day. Despite an early-career focus on documentation, Muholi has long been fascinated by the force of theatrical spectacle and the body’s performative role in meaning-making. When they were taking and exhibiting documentary photographs, They often attended public events wearing a domestic worker’s uniform. Recently They have extended this preoccupation with performance in self-portraits and portraits of others posing in elaborate dress and postures. Explicitly drawing attention to the idea of a mask or event staged at a particular moment and brought into an intersubjective exchange between the subject and the viewer, they often exploits Butler’s (1997) ideas about performativity, suggesting that the visible identity of the subject is always performed and never has any essence. Muholi’s performance in domestic worker’s dress drew attention to their ascribed identity as poor and black, with the ironically performed message being that the camera-carrying subject was not the body they appeared to represent. More recent stagings involving portraits and self-portraits configure more complex communication. The image freezes the subject as spectacle, and self-portraits configure subjects whose performance is not tethered to the different gaze of the photographer. In a sense, the photographic and the subject’s gaze coincide. This performance is in sync with the many laudatory interpretations of most of Muholi’s critics (see Gqola 2006; Salley 2012; Thomas 2013). As these have insisted, her photographs unravel and upend heteronormative, colonial, and racist legacies, often using irony and engaging intertextually with various archives. Some of Muholi’s early portraits, for example, revisit colonial traditions of portraiture in which black South Africans are hypersexualized and reduced to cyphers. Describing one, Rael Jero Salley (2012, 59) writes that it “subverts dominant paradigms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by visualizing people in ways that destroy dominant framings.” As he states, then, Muholi’s work uncovers subjectivities that are usually eroded. Generally Muholi’s photographs are celebrated for dislodging stereotypical representations of black South African sexualities and gender performances. Yet rarely is their work explored in ways that reveal it as simultaneously disentangling as well as falling back on established codes for reading the black body in terms of nativism. The interpretation of their work as either subverting or echoing previous codes may seem to rely on “the intentional fallacy,” an assumption made about artists’ intentions that many critics correctly see as offering little value to explanations of their artworks’ meanings. However, it is possible to explore the meanings of Muholi’s work by reflecting on how it is situated within an archive of meanings about the black body, nativism, sexuality, gender, and culture. As many of their photographs reveal, there is often unevenness in the way that Muholi affirms the dignity, autonomy, or defiance of their black participants, and this unevenness echoes the paradoxes of certain postcolonial identities that recuperate colonial stereotypes. There is evidence of this ambiguity in many of the “Faces and Phases” photographs, a series of portraits of black lesbians and transmen. These portraits clearly seek to portray the dignity and courage of certain lesbians and transmen and also make a marginalized community visible in a heterosexist and racist public sphere. Dignity and visibility, however, are sometimes construed in ways that—deliberately or not—reinvoke previous codes for marking the nativist stasis or excess of black bodies.

354   Desiree Lewis Consequently many of Muholi’s photos make sense within a scopic regime2 that assumes the alterity of African bodies, both explicitly represented and unconsciously imagined in terms of the regressive, the instinctual, and the primitive. This sense-making becomes apparent when we consider the immensity of their appeal globally and the way in which they have been taken up in the international global art market. Often it is not simply or primarily the aesthetic or conceptual irony of their work that is applauded; instead what seems to appeal is the power of their work in providing access to a different world fetishized and fantasized about as the surface of the black body. Figure 21.2 offers an example. The glimpsed nakedness of the participant conjures up echoes of the surfeit of flesh that so horrified and fascinated audiences of Baartman’s display centuries ago, with the connotations of the black female body signifying the antithesis of modernity and civility. As one reviewer puts it, photographs such as these carry the “risk of hearing, seeing and crossing to this . . . unfamiliar territory” (Ngcobo 2006, 5). The portrait also encourages an eroticized encounter: the viewer’s gaze is directed at the provocatively tilted head, the nakedness of the body beneath the stole, and the flamboyant stole itself. This photograph gestures to a racist fantasy by fetishizing the black female body even as it also critically talks back to stereotypes and taboos that police black women’s ­sexuality. Viewers are therefore invited to recognize the agency and public visibility of the subject in ways similar to how earlier audiences were encouraged to see and categorize the bodies of native South African women: the hypervisible subject is recognizable as a creature of sex. Related forms of stereotyping surface in Muholi’s representation of masculine gender performance in her portraits of butch lesbians and transmen. Muholi clearly represents

figure 21.2. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of  Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam and Yancey Richardson, New York.

Nativism   355 figure 21.3. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of  Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam and Yancey Richardson, New York.

subjects who choose particular performances of butch identities. Significant too, however, is the fact that the photographer poses and represents their participants in distinct ways—as revealed in figure 21.3. In this photograph, the prominent focus on the lowered head and facial features echo the fixation with physiognomy in colonial and apartheid ethnophotography. Again, whether or not this is ironic, Muholi’s attention to facial features enlists codes that link anatomical signifiers to character and personality. In this case, the expression references a threatening masculinity that is the antithesis of rational modernity. While Muholi might question the inevitability of the connection between sexed bodies and gender performance, the masculine performance she represents here also gestures toward a familiar one of untamed and threatening native manhood. The fixation with analyzing facial features in order to access inner character originates in a nineteenth-century scopic regime when physiognomy and phrenology were newly emerging sciences. Within these discplines the profile and anatomy of the head were considered especially important in analyzing individual character. Such analysis was intended to predict or explain individuals’ propensity toward sexual promiscuity, crime, or various other behaviors that were deemed antisocial, as well as intelligence and cognitive ability. As Gilman (1985) emphasizes in his work on drawn and photographed bodies and faces, the scientific categorization of human subjects according to what their bodies revealed (rather than what their representation conveyed) worked to confirm social and geopolitical hierarchies. Muholi can therefore be seen to respond critically to an archive that pathologizes black lesbian subjects or dehumanizes African bodies, while continuing to enlist modes of signification that echo racial optics. I offer these interpretations not as definitive interpretations of Muholi’s oeuvre but to draw attention to how reading their work must take into account the complex continuities

356   Desiree Lewis and alliances with past legacies for imagining African bodies. As I stated at the start of this chapter, the viewer responds to a photograph while also responding to codes that precede it and that it repeats. This is in fact what strongly influences the affective communication of photographs for their interlocutors. The argument here is not that Muholi should or could transcend these prior codes to invent new ones but that they can and do for many viewers conjure up associations of the unconscious and repressed, the primitive and socially forbidden. What many of Muholi’s critics applaud is their successful representation of new subjectivities; what they consequently neglect are the complex continuities and alliances with past legacies of imagining African bodies. Muholi’s photos establish an intersubjective pact with viewers, assuming their knowledge or premonition of a fantasized primordial alterity projected onto the black body.

Performing Nativism in Photographic Portraits The anthropological gaze evident in “Faces and Phases” also filters into Muholi’s recent autobiographical photos from 2014. A fruitful pathway into understanding their performative power is offered by Michael Adams’s (1996) psychoanalytical study of race and the unconscious. Critiquing Freudian analysis of the determinacy of universal sexual meanings in the unconscious, Adams draws attention to the contextual and social content of the unconscious. By arguing that “ ‘race’ and racism—and inquiries into whiteness and blackness—have hardly been issues of central concern in psychoanalysis” (xx), he foregrounds the extent to which unconscious desires, fears, and fantasies are racialized, often with reference to images of the black body, skin, and hair. He therefore argues that it is necessary to address racism not in terms of sensitization but in terms of the workings of the unconscious and the association of socially taboo desires and feelings with primitivism. Adams’s view of primitivism complements the definition of nativism provided by Mamdani (2001) and Ngwena (2018) by drawing attention to how nativism is associated with the unconscious. In his psychoanalytical explanation, anxieties about race are embedded in the unconscious: “ ‘Going black’ is . . . ‘going primitive.’ . . . The expression has both temporal and spatial connotations. . . . To go black is to return to a before and a beneath, to a state or stage that the civilized white European . . . has presumably superseded” (Adams 1996, 51–2). In what follows, I explore what three of Muholi’s self-portraits can reveal about nativism as spectacle, fantasy, and project. One striking feature of many of the self-portraits is the subject’s appearance in something like blackface. The makeup in figure 21.4 as well as the lighting reinforcing the skin’s darkness convey a sense of the radical difference of African bodies in one of the most emphatic signifiers of racial difference. Skin in this photograph functions similarly to the face, as the boundary between inside and outside and seeming to reveal something essential about the subject. But the impression of realism (the usual form for the ethnographic image in colonial ethnography, postcards, and cultural nationalist essentialism) is subverted in this obviously performative use of skin. Skin here is far from realistic or naturalistic. It is worked-on skin, fabricated and manufactured to “look black.” It is worth stressing that

Nativism   357 figure 21.4. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam and Yancey Richardson, New York.

this obviously worked-on skin speaks back to ideas about skin as a physiological feature that defines character. Fixations with skin color and race in South Africa have been pronounced: with apartheid categorization, skin was a defining marker of belonging to different “pure” or “impure” black “races,” as well as the superior “white race.”3 By representing manipulated skin through photographic techniques and the preparation for this posed photo, Muholi is performatively uncovering the separation of the actual body from the signifier, black skin, a move that is similar to splitting the biologically marked gendered body from its performance of gender. As is the case with this disjuncture in the queer appropriation of the performative, Muholi overtly performs blackness and defies the idea of a knowable body being linked to a knowable essence. The unsettling of the idea of the known African body and a foundation of the naming of African bodies are also conveyed in the subject’s facial expression. The angled head and expression in this image is a very carefully staged one—wholly at odds with the posture of guilelessness, sloth, ignorance, or emptiness so often conveyed in colonial photography and its antecedents in the present. The subject’s gaze is clearly directed down at the viewer, their painted and prominent lids and their reflective and contemptuous expression conveying a depth (the power to observe, to interpret, and to comment on) that is diametrically at odds with the archetypal vacuity conveyed in conventional images of natives. Muholi’s self-portrait depicts them wearing a headwrap that has globally come to signify the identity of women of African descent. Apart from skin, dress—as is often the case with photographs of African nativism—functions performatively and ironically. Paradoxically the headwrap, made from cotton cloth, has origins in civilizing missions, the colonial trade of humans as commodities, and the violent circulation of material goods and human bodies between the US and Africa. The cloth for the headwrap—made from the products of slave

358   Desiree Lewis labor on plantations—has a direct connection to the violence of colonialism globally. Although the headwrap is often used as a form of dress that signifies an assertive African identity, it has traveled along routes of colonization, mediation, and contamination and can therefore not yield a singular meaning of authenticity. The blatant theatricality and artificiality of the headwrap in this image gestures toward these entangled histories; like the other visible clothing, it is clearly composed of some industrial material that is far from traditional or authentic. Moreover the clothing around the torso conveys an impression of the subject being chained, invoking the history of black bodies and disturbing the impression of the colonial myth of the native, close to nature and in need of civilization, rather than the black body as brutalized by the civilizing mission. Even as the history of the violence done to black bodies is conjured up, the relentless gaze of the subject pierces the usual avenue for communicating stereotypical meanings about the native female body; the subject here is clearly not merely a body to which things are done, but a subject with agency and power. Hayes (2007) has remarked on the ambiguity of ethnographic photos, whereby the reproduction of stereotypes in portraits is sometimes unsettled—inadvertently—by the glimpsed agency and interiority of subjects. These subjects are not entirely “trapped in the white gaze.” Compared to the photographs in the “Faces and Phases” series, figure 21.5, also from Muholi’s recent series of self-portraits, seems to mirror the pose of female subjects in nativist photographs. The lowered eyes do not encounter the viewer, and the subject seems to be caught by the photographer’s gaze. This notion of entrapment is reinforced by the impression of chains wound around the left side of their body, only partially concealing the nipple on one breast. The prominence of bared breasts also warrants attention. The visual representation of the naked breasts of sub-Saharan women was central to conveying an idea of their innate

figure 21.5.  © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of  Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam and Yancey Richardson, New York.

Nativism   359 primitivism. It is revealing that in South Africa under apartheid, the naked breasts of white and modernized black women were taboo in newspapers and magazines, and when they did appear they were blocked out. In contrast, the naked breasts of young black women were commonplace in the photographs of many postcards, ethnographic studies, travel guides, and coffee-table books. The viewer confronts the image in figure 21.5 with the knowledge that Muholi is the photographer, and there is irony about the queer black body (with recognizably female traits) photographing the black female body. This knowledge redefines the meaning of this image as an echo of a colonial and racist fantasy; in other words, it appropriates a prior mode of representing the African female body in nature in a performance that subverts this representation. At the same time, I find this image far more complex and uneven. It does not clearly convey the irony that the previous photograph does and suggests something about the recuperated fantasy meaning attached to the black female body and the transman in figure  21.3. What the photographer intended with this image would be the subject of speculation. Suffice it to say that with this photo there is far less evidence of performative iterability, and more is left to the viewer to decide about its referentiality. To a greater extent than the previous images above, figure 21.6 ironically connects the body to consumer tourism and the contemporary colonial gaze. The stool bizarrely placed on the subject’s head, a popular item in tourist arts and crafts, is often sold in South Africa and other African countries as a typically traditional artifact. At one level, traditional dress, especially headdress, is a prominent and frequently used signifier of black women’s primitivism in nativist photography. The outrageousness of the stool on their head is a reminder of more familiar and “readable” associations between the bodies of African women and their dress in the signification of their traditionalism. Muholi’s own remarks

figure 21.6. © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg/ Amsterdam and Yancey Richardson, New York.

360   Desiree Lewis about the meaningfulness of objects in their work is significant. In an interview with the magazine LensCulture they declared, “What people call a prop, I call material. The viewer is forced to rethink how they think about the materials—and their history” (Muholi 2017). The pose in this photo also exaggerates the seductive expression of the gendered subjects of pornography and eroticized advertising. The widened eyes and pout together with the head tilting up seem to offer the subject’s body for appropriation. This pose and these conventions for portraying the female body are features of modernity, and a sense of different (but also very similar) periods for depicting the black female body unsettles the smooth viewing of the photo. As is the case with the previous photograph, the rope around the subject’s upper body conveys fetishized tribal clothing, while at the same time gesturing toward bondage and slavery. This photo seems to revel in its combining confusing codes and signifiers, speaking back to several traditions of othering in photography, and encouraging the viewer to dissect previous photographic traditions of black women’s bodies.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to explore what drives and gives substance to identities that are socially recognized as African. The construction of African political identities has been the subject of thriving scholarship by historians, cultural theorists, and anthropologists (see Mamdani  2001; Mudimbe  1988: Appiah  2005: Mbembe  2001). This work often enlists Platonic arguments to explain behavior and cognition as rational (though politically troubling or reactionary) political responses with political effects. What might it mean, however, to reflect on performances, understandings, or representations of identity as amalgamations of emotions, psychology, performance, and politics, as well as assemblages that affect both conscious thought and action and unconscious associations and desires? Partly because their invention coincided with colonial expansion in Africa during the late nineteenth century, photographs have played a pivotal role in giving a sense of substance to racialized identities in the form of nativism. Yet photographs’ meanings do not reside simply in their content. They have affective dimensions and so may help to explain the power and complexity of verbal, written, or obviously political expressions. Moreover, they often establish compelling connections between represented bodies and characteristics, such as aggression, or temporal states, such as premodernity. As also indicated, photographs of nativism represent bodies that are sexualized and gendered. These bodies are racialized and simultaneously ethnicized, being bound to a sense of pastness that is intelligible because of signification in earlier visual archives. This is evident in the articulations of nativism ranging from early ethnographic photographs in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries or postcards and travel books in the twentieth century to media images explored by critics like Sanger or the celebrated work of Muholi as one of South Africa’s best-known contemporary photographers. I agree with Salley (2012, 60) when he celebrates “Muholi’s artworks because of the sense of belonging they invoke . . . reveal[ing] a dynamic process of visualizing yet-to-be fulfilled possibilities in human relations.” At the same time, I am struck by the way the photographs assume viewers’ readings of other remembered or seen images. This reverberation not only involves the photographer’s in­gen­ ious retort to colonial photography by, for example, creating portraits of African women in

Nativism   361 ways that Salley celebrates. It also entails a less intentional investment in dominant framings of black bodies. The popularity of Muholi’s work in the global art market is not necessarily the result of the appreciation of its subversive power on the part of auction houses, galleries, biennales, and art fairs. One other reason for their global prominence concerns the opacity of aesthetic standards in a globalized art market under neoliberalism, one in which artists are often randomly selected (or dropped) according to the caprices of buyers and sellers who trade artworks as commodities. Another is that the global art market is rooted in a conceptual world that continues to compartmentalize modernity and its antithesis, with the black body featuring—as it does in the mass media—as the repository of a threatening, even though often titillating, alterity.

Notes 1. See especially Gilman (1985). 2. The term scopic regime conveys how certain dominant ways of seeing the world and human subjects limit what the photographer, or any viewer (located within this regime), tries to do or see. 3. The Population Registrations Act required that every South African should be classified and registered according to his or her racial characteristics.

References Abrahams, Yvette. 2000. “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture.” PhD diss., University of Cape Town. Adams, Michael. 1996. The Multicultural Imagination: “Race”, Color and the Unconscious. London and New York: Routledge. Ainslie, Andrew. and Kepe, Themebla. 2016. “Understanding the Resurgence of Traditional Authorities in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 42, no. 1: 19–33. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. Gqola, Pumla. 2006. “Through Zanele Muholi’s Eyes: Re/Imagining Ways of Seeing Black Lesbians.” In Zanele Muholi: Only Half the Picture, edited by S. Perryer, 82–9. Johannesburg: STE. Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1: 204–42. Hartmann, Wolfram, Jeremy Silvester, and Patricia Hayes. 1998. The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. ‪Hayes, Patricia. 2007. “Power, Secrecy, Proximity: A Short History of South African Photography.” Kronos 33: 139–62. Landau, Paul, and Deborah Kaspin. 2002. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levin, Laura. 2009. “The Performative Force of Photography.” Photography and Culture 2, no. 3: 327–36.

362   Desiree Lewis Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. McClintock, Anne. 1991. “No Longer in a Future Heaven: Women and Nationalism in South Africa.” Transition, no. 51:104–23. Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, James Currey. Muholi, Zanele. 2017. “Brave Beauties.” LensCulture, March. https://www.lensculture.com/ articles/zanele-muholi-brave-beauties-zanele-muholi-on-self-portraiture. Ngcobo, Gabi. Introduction. In Zanele Muholi: Only Half the Picture, edited by Sophie Perryer. Johannesburg: STE, 2006. 4–5. Ngwena, Charles. 2018. What Is Africanness? Contesting Nativism in Race, Culture and Sexualities. Pretoria: Pretoria University Law Press. Rai, Shirin  M.. 2014. “Representing Democracy: Ceremony and Ritual in the Indian Parliament.” In Democracy in Practice, edited by Shirin M. Rai and R. E. Johnson. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. Pantheon. Salley, R Rael Jero. 2012. “Zanele Muholi’s ‘Elements of Survival.’ ” African Arts 45, no. 4: 58–69. Sanger, Nadia. 2008. “ ‘There's Got to Be a Man in There’: Reading Intersections between Gender, Race and Sexuality in South African Magazines.” African Identities 6, no. 2: 275–91. Thomas, Kylie. 2013. “Zanele Muholi’s Intimate Archive: Photography and Post-Apartheid Lesbian Lives.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 11, no. 4: 421–36. White, Hylton. 2012. “A Post-Fordist Ethnicity: Insecurity, Authority, and Identity in South Africa.” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 2: 397–427.

chapter 22

I m m ersion Willmar Sauter

Most regular theatergoers share two extreme experiences. One relates to situations when an accident or something else happens on stage or in the auditorium that brings the performance to a halt. All of a sudden the spectator’s attention rises to the maximum. A feeling of presence instantaneously captures the audience. The other situation points in the opposite direction: the spectator gets bored, loses interest, thinks of private matters, and, in the worst case, dozes off. The spectator is clearly absent, and the performance continues in a vacuum. The first situation indicates that there are several levels of attention, while the second one proves that the physical copresence of performer and spectator provides no guarantee that any communication between stage and auditorium takes place. A theatrical event can be alive or dead. The question is: What keeps a performative event alive, and how can the audience’s attention be described? In this chapter I present various kinds of immersion, in which terms such as presence, participation, curiosity, and reflection are relevant aspects of public communication. To begin with, I reconsider some traditional schemes of communication and their applications in theater and performance studies. I extend my argument to aesthetic theories that underline the position of the beholder. To make my ideas of the spectator’s immersive involvement as concrete as possible, I refer to a contemporary trilogy of plays performed as Women in Science, in which various communicative strategies and techniques were employed. The attention is directed toward the watching B(eholder) as constitutive of theatrical communication, while the performing A(gent) can assume a wide variety of shapes. The beholder’s immersion has a close affinity to political activities.

Linear Concepts of Communication Hardly any contemporary scholar would approve of the traditional scheme of sender → medium → receiver as a satisfying model of communication. This basic image was developed by two American mathematicians, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, in the late 1940s for the Bell Telephone

364   Willmar Sauter Company. While the caller transmits his or her message by way of a telephone line, it is assumed that the receiver is capable of understanding it, provided some general conditions exist, such as audibility, a common language, etc. This might be a reasonable simplification of human communication for the purpose of telephone techniques, but is this model also applicable to such complex matters as theatrical communication? The immediate answer would be no, because theater and performance are far too complicated to fit into such a simple scheme. In practice, however, theater and performance scholars have in great measure subscribed to more sophisticated but still linear models of sender, medium, and receiver. Theater scholars’ view of theater resembles very much the way in which theater traditionally is produced. At the beginning of the production process is a writer and a drama, which is chosen by a director. Together with set and costume designers, a composer, a choreographer, and other artists, the director develops a concept for the production. Performers are engaged and rehearsals run for some weeks. When the production is ready it will be presented to an audience. This linear process follows very closely Bell’s scheme of communication: the director, who usually is privileged in academic theater studies, is the sender; the performance, including the performers, is the message; and the spectators are the receivers. Any theater library or book catalog will confirm this impression. Books about directors are legion. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, the director as the main creator of theatrical performances has dominated both the practice in playhouses and the writing of theater histories. Choreographers in dance and conductors in opera hold the same position. Only dramatists and composers are considered to be of similar importance, although their work is mainly dealt with in literary studies and musicology. Books on scenography appear less frequently on the shelves, while costume and makeup artists receive only marginal attention. All these artists can be considered the senders of theatrical productions. At least since the introduction of semiotics, theater performances, as the very medium of theatrical communication, have attracted increasing attention. Performance analysis has become a particular field of theater studies. Semiotics has been replaced by or combined with hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, intermediality, or phenomenology. In many texts, the study of a director is interwoven with performance analyses of major productions. The receiver, finally, has rarely been of interest to theater academics. When the audience is considered at all, the spectators are counted according to their demographic characteristics, but their actual reception of a performance is mostly dealt with in theoretical terms (e.g., Bennet 1990; Fischer-Lichte 1997). The intended or even the ideal spectator is sometimes mentioned (Iser 1972), and sociological or psychological models have been developed and applied in reception studies (European Committee for Reception and Audience Research 1986–92). There is quite a broad knowledge of audience behavior and preferences, responses of individual spectators, and collective spectatorship, but theater scholars remain focused on the sender’s side of the message.

Circular Concepts of Communication When spectators evaluate a theater performance, their overall estimation stays always slightly under the marks given to the principal performers, whereas the appreciation of all other elements on stage varies independently of the overall judgement (Sauter 2000a). This

Immersion   365 is true for all types of performances and for all kinds of spectators. The only exceptions are very young audiences and classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas. For all other genres this means that the drama is never better than the performers. These statistically secured results are not entirely new. Almost five hundred years ago the Italian theater director Leone de Sommi ([1927] 1966, 251) wrote, “It is far more essential to get good actors than a good play. To prove the truth of this it is only necessary to call to your minds the number of times we have seen a poor drama succeed and give much pleasure to the audience because it was well acted; and how often a fine play has failed on stage because of the poor performance.” Obviously there is a kind of communication going on in the theater, a direct communication between performers and spectators that has not been highlighted in the sender-receiver model. This intricate encounter between actors and actresses, singers and dancers, on the one hand, and the audience as well as the individual spectator, on the other, takes place simultaneously on several levels, which can briefly be described in the following way (Sauter 2000b, 6–11). When a performer enters the stage in front of an audience, he or she appears at once as a person, an artist, and a role. The spectator responds differently to each of these interweaving levels. On the sensory level, spectators regard the physical as well as the mental status of the person in front them. Is the performer tall or short, heavy or thin, old or young, a man or a woman, etc.? Is the person nervous, shy, impressive, and, most important, does the person attract the spectator’s attention? Other thoughts might occur, such as recognizing the performer from other productions, knowing him or her personally, having particular expectations, or other similar observations. So far, an actor or actress are no different from other personalities that B observes in public life: politicians, pastors, players of football or other games are all perceived and judged on the sensory level of communication. Then these performers (as well as the politicians, pastors, etc.) are also artists who know how to perform in a particular genre of performance. On the artistic level the spectator realizes and evaluates the skills and the perfection of the performer, how well he or she dances, sings, or speaks. On this level, earlier experiences of the spectator come into play since appreciation mainly builds on comparison. Similarly to the sensory level, the artistic level of communication activates the spectator. The image of a passive audience just sitting in the darkened auditorium is a myth created by avant-garde artists and scholars to denounce traditional performances. All spectators have to be active participants in theatrical communication unless they have fallen asleep. Again, this scheme can also be applied to other performers than those appearing on a theatrical stage. The control of their voices, whether their costumes are appropriate for the particular occasion, their techniques to attract attention—these requirements are equally essential for actors and politicians. On the level that I call the symbolic level, which in the theater could be called the representative or fictional level, the activity of the spectator is particularly necessary. In a regular theater performance, the performer creates a role, i.e., a fictional character. Using the skills described on the artistic level, such as a special tone of voice, making appropriate movements, dressing in a proper costume and with fitting makeup, the performer presents indications of a person who he or she is not. The spectator knows this! There is no Hamlet or Tosca on stage—it’s just a performer. Only in the mind of the beholder can the fictional character take shape, which is modeled upon the appearance of the performer. Fiction is created in the intersection between the performer’s presentation and the spectator’s perception. Without the interpretation of the spectator, no character will appear and no theatrical

366   Willmar Sauter communication can take place. The performer “becomes” the intended fictional person only when the spectator is immersed in the fictional universe. This immersion is also at work when contemporary performances are not representing any fiction at all. Still, spectators want to make sense out of what is presented in front of them. Even without a plot or recognizable characters, there are symbolic values to be discovered, and the artistic forms may provoke responses, from adoration to disgust. But the immersion is of a different kind compared to the construction of a fictional world. This will be discussed in a later section of the chapter. Right now it might suffice to point to the varying ambitions of, say, a politician, who will attempt to create an authentic impression of himself or herself as sincere. Still, the requirements are very much the same as the actor’s, but the aim of what is transmitted symbolically to the beholder is completely different.

Aesthetic Experience From an aesthetic point of view, it is the B who creates and forms the aesthetic experience. This has been stated from the very beginning of aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century. In the philosophical aesthetics of the time, much emphasis was put on the balance between the agent (A) and the beholder (B).1 Only during the era of romanticism, through writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and E.  T.  A.  Hoffmann, was more and more dominance placed on A: the value of a piece of art is considered to be absolute, and it is up to B to learn how to best appreciate high art, as distinguished from low art, which everybody can understand immediately. Also during the remainder of the nineteenth century, B was a secondary figure in aesthetics. In the twentieth century, various attempts were made to redirect aesthetic attention to the beholder B rather than the agent A, now often understood as the artist and the work. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method ([1960] 1975) and Martin Seel’s (2000, 2006) Aesthetics of Appearing can be mentioned here. Gadamer ([1960] 1975, 103) elevates the beholder to the very reason for art to exist. Playing can be an activity among participants, but in the moment the playing is observed by B, it has the potential of becoming art: “All playing carries the possibility of a playing for someone. Since this possibility can be realized, it constitutes the specific playing culture of the arts.”2 Thus art is created as much by the beholder as by the artist, a philosophical statement with far-reaching consequences. What Gadamer claims is nothing less than the beholder’s constituting function in the arts. Without B, the painting, singing, and dancing of A remain an oil-stained canvas, high-pitched shouting, and more or less unnatural movements. But just to observe these outputs of A is not enough because B needs to get involved in the artistic production, interpret what can be heard or seen, become immersed in what is beyond the mere display. Inspired by Gadamer and the pioneers of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, I have developed the three levels of the model of theatrical communication. The German philosopher of aesthetics Martin Seel took the ambiguity between A and B one step further. He distinguished between appearance (Erscheinung) and appearing (Erscheinen). Appearance describes the piece of art “as it is,” which is almost impossible to accomplish. For a painting, this would mean its size, colors, techniques, signature, its motive in general terms—in other words, more or less the information one would find in an auction catalog. The qualities of the painting are only “appearing” in B’s perception. Appearing

Immersion   367 thus means the impression the painting or any other artwork makes on the beholder, an impression that will always contain a great measure of subjectivity. Even here it is B’s immersion in the painting, the piece of music, or the performance on stage that transforms material matters into aesthetic experiences. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004, 77) states frankly in his book Production of Presence, “the concept of presence, which I have tried to identify . . . is the point of convergence between different contemporary reflections that try to go beyond a metaphysical epistemology and an exclusively meaning-based relationship to the world.” Jens Roselt (2008, 363) agrees when, in his seminal work, Phänomenologie des Theaters, he devotes an entire chapter to “the art of watching.” In Multimedia Performance, Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer (2012) describe plenty of examples of strong and lasting experiences provoked by high-tech installations and artworks in which no performers are visible to the audience. In other words, the question of communication in theatrical performances deserves an expanded view and a variety of theoretical approaches. The authors mentioned here provide some new perspectives for the analysis of moments of intensity, immersion, and aesthetic perception that prove to be fruitful when encountering technically and conceptually advanced performances. The term immersion derives from the Medieval Latin word immersio and was first documented in the late fifteenth century. The word signified mostly the complete immersion in water, for instance during baptism, but also the mental process of identification with a material or spiritual phenomenon. When the term is used in the following way, it refers primarily to the emotional attachment with which B engages in the presentations of A. It includes notions such as curiosity, intensity, involvement, and also responsiveness, attention, associations, and contextualization. The examples of the three plays in the series “Women in Science” will show how the spectators engaged aesthetically and politically in the stories. The digital technologies that were applied in these performances not only supported and strengthened the aesthetic accessibility of the plays but also underlined the political significance that the beholders experienced. As part of aesthetic experiences, three kinds of immersion will be distinguished, which became main factors for the outcome of these productions.

Women in Science The trilogy Women in Science (2013) portrays three pioneers in the field of scientific research, invention, and discovery. For each play, different digital techniques were applied in order to convey an adequate picture of each of the women. Thus the artistic approach to the various portrayals reflected the particular themes that emanated from the stories of these female scholars in a male-dominated world of science. The plays were written by Lovisa Milles, directed by Rebecca Forsberg and presented by Rats Teater of Stockholm in 2012 and 2013. All three women were performed by the same actress, Linda Lönnerfelt.3

Lise & Otto The first play, called Lise & Otto, deals with the discovery of nuclear fission, which the physicist Lise Meitner solved theoretically and the chemist Otto Hahn experimented with empirically.

368   Willmar Sauter This happened in 1938, when Lise Meitner lived in Sweden, a Jewish refugee, while Hahn remained in his laboratories in Berlin. In 1944 Hahn received the Nobel Prize for his discovery, and in December 1946 he went to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, where he again met his collaborator Lise Meitner. This meeting is what the play is about, although with a number of retrospective moments. The performance was presented on two stages connected by fiber optic cables. While Hahn appeared on a stage in Kista Science Tower, a tall building in the heart of the district of digital development industries, Lise Meitner was performed in the immigrant-dense suburb of Husby. Each audience had one of the actors in front of them—in the flesh, so to speak—while the other performer appeared only on a screen. For the spectators, the cleavage of the locations created a particular yearning for the missing half, an exceptional experience that distinguishes this production from both theater and television performances.

Ada The next woman in science to be portrayed was Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who was an eminent mathematician but, according to the norms of the 1830s, was tied down to her husband, home, and children. The play Ada was performed in a television studio by a single actress who represented Ada Lovelace and told her story. In comments to a translation concerning Charles Babbage’s analytical calculating machine, she developed the principles of a computer language more than a hundred years before any computers existed. Some sequences of the performance were prerecorded, but the main play was performed live, so audiences could watch the performance on big screens in public libraries, university auditoriums, and museums. One could also see the performance individually on computers or mobile phones. The spectators had the opportunity to interact with Ada Lovelace by answering questions that were displayed on the screen after each scene. The answers were sent as text messages that almost immediately became visible on the screens during the performance.

Maryam The last play in this series concerned Maryam Al-Jiliya, who lived in the tenth century in Aleppo in Syria. Based on her observations of the stars and her mathematical talent, she invented an astrolabium, a device that travelers could put in their pockets. With this useful little brass instrument, one could see when the sun would rise, one’s exact location, and the direction in which one moved. In the play Maryam, the audience hear this young woman explaining her desire to be included in a scholarly world that was reserved for men only. Her speech is interspersed with comforting as well as demanding remarks by her father. As seems to be appropriate to Maryam’s invention, a GPS map guided the participants of this performance around the city to find the location for the next scene of the play. Each listener is captivated by his or her own earphones but walks collectively from place to place. At the end of the performance is the only question asked in the play: “What are you dreaming about?” Once the answer is sent, it becomes a star on the display of the phone among many other stars representing responses of other participants, which are displayed by a touch of

Immersion   369 the finger. This production has been performed in many cities since it is not related to a particular place. Rather one could say that any cityscape can be transformed from its everyday familiarity to a backdrop of faraway times and places.

Presence and Participation The aspect of presence in regard to the spectators is similar to regular theater performances. Audiences gather in a place at a certain hour and share a theatrical experience. The importance of the collective presence of a group of spectators should not be underestimated, neither in traditional auditoriums nor in the various locations in which “Women in Science” could be seen. The collective watching of a performance creates a community that helps to focus on the performance and keeps out distractions. The density of this community is enhanced in the case of Women in Science by the fact that people in the audience are doing something together and thus contribute to the overall event. However, the agents of these performances are not physically present. In Lise & Otto, only half of the players were in front of half of the audience, whereas the other half appeared in mediated form. In Ada, the actress performed in real time, but not in the places where the audience was located. In Maryam, the performers prerecorded the voices and were physically absent in both time and place. This lack of physically present performers was counterbalanced by the activation of the spectators within the performances. The active participation of the spectator is different from what traditional theater offers. While it is irritating, to say the least, when regular audiences send text messages during performances, the use of SMS techniques were highly desirable in both Ada and Maryam. The frequent questions emanating from Ada’s life story stimulated the spectators—­ especially the young ones—to enthusiastically respond to questions about anger, freedom, longing, etc. Not only were these possibilities of interacting with the screen eagerly made use of, but the appearance of the messages on the screen created great enjoyment for the senders. These participatory options prepared the audience for an intensive sense of presence. In Maryam the spectators’ participation in sending messages was limited to the very end of the performance. In return, the message became a flickering star in Maryam’s heaven. In this heaven one could also retrieve messages from other participants by clicking on any other stars, and all these stars together were displayed on a huge screen in the foyer of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. Another aspect of participation consisted of the tour to the six locations by following the GPS on one’s own mobile phone. Secluded from the ordinary world by the voices and music in the earphones, one was invited to immerse completely in the fictional world despite the fact that one walked in well-known streets and squares. This immersive quality of multimedia performances deserves some attention. Every fictional narrative has the potential to immerse its reader, listener, or spectator. The interactive devices that today’s technologies provide for performances, such as the ones of Women in Science, involve the beholder in physical as well as intellectual activities that affect his or her emotional participation in the event. Comparable to the immersion experienced by players of computer games, even these quite limited invitations to interact with Ada and Maryam had a strong impact, at least on some of the audience.

370   Willmar Sauter The plays of Women in Science used a great number of elements from various media. They were theatrical performances in the traditional sense, though in one case with only half of the actors and spectators present. Ada’s performance in the studio without an audience worked like television theater in the 1960s, when it was performed and sent at the same time directly from the studio. The green-screen technique of Lise & Otto was also borrowed from television. Radio drama has already been mentioned, and the big screens functioned as in movie theaters. Above all, the digital communication devices allowed for new contacts between production and audience. GPS, finally, was an essential part of Maryam’s way through our own urban environment. Each of the three productions used several of the devices mentioned here and thus assumed a multimedia position that allowed for new ways of communication.

From Involvement to Immersion Our surveys of the audiences, the collected text messages, my own observations—I saw each production several times—and comments from colleagues and artists confirmed that the spectators were strongly engaged in the performances. Each production contained what Gumbrecht calls “moments of intensity,” while Roselt speaks of “striking moments” (markante Momente), which Scheer refers to as “immersion.” Immersion can thus be described as the spectator’s involvement in a performance. In Edward Scheer’s words, “Immersion is a key characteristic in understanding the efficacy of intermedial, post-dramatic, and virtual theatre, as well as new media installations” (Klich and Scheer 2012, 127). Traditionally, immersion has been related to the spectator’s possible absorption into a fictional world. Scheer and others call this form “cognitive immersion,” which of course applies not only to representational art forms such as live theater on stage but also to various kinds of virtual realities, whether these are created in two or three dimensions and are computer-generated or performed by actors. In contrast to cognitive immersion, Scheer suggests there is “sensory immersion”: “Performance and new media installations have the potential to immerse the audience sensually, not in an artificial world, but within the immediate, real space of the performance” (Klich and Scheer 2012, 131). He explains the difference between these two kinds of immersion: “Cognitive immersion is the effect established through the presence of a fictional reality, whereas sensory immersion can be created through the corporeal and material dimensions of performance. While the former requires the dislocation of materiality, and involves immersion in an imagined space founded on patterns of textual information, the latter forges the material and virtual to create an embodied experience of pattern and presence within real space” (132). These two modes of mental and physical involvement that audiences may experience are not mutually exclusive. As the productions of the Rats Teater indicated, their combination can be particularly fruitful. While audiences easily accept the voices of historical women brought to them by the actress, they experience the sensory presence of the city streets (Maryam) or the sensory absence of Lise (& Otto). The physical involvement becomes an equally important aspect of aesthetic experience as the mental participation in the fictional story.

Immersion   371 At this point I want to add a third kind of immersion that I call “reflective immersion,” which is neither cognitively directed toward a fictional world, nor is it based on the beholder’s physical involvement. What I am referring to are the moments when the beholder begins to reflect upon his or her own relationship to the theatrical situation. The beholder’s reflective activities can be expressed in many ways both during and after a performance, be it in text messages, theater talks, or quotidian situations. Reflective immersion was also vital for the productions of the Rats Teater. One could even claim that the reflective involvement of the participants was the very purpose of these performances. The Rats Teater collaborated closely with the Department of Computer and System Science at Stockholm University. The reason for the department to engage in theatrical productions is based on its research interest in human-computer interaction and e-government. The latter refers to a program that investigates the possibilities of utilizing digital technologies in civil society, in particular for the active engagement of citizens. “A democratic process for participatory decision-making should be transparent, encouraging participation and enabling a rational treatment of the information delivered through a multitude of participation channels. More specifically, the process must support formations of opinions and agendas, and facilitate communication and the mapping of interests among stakeholders” (Ekenberg, Forsberg, and Sauter 2016). This programmatic description of the aims of the research project by Love Ekenberg at the Department of Computer and System Science was the political basis for the collaboration with the Rats Teater. The outcome of the interactive involvement of the participants in the theatrical performances served as a test bed of how citizens, especially young ones, can be stimulated to engage in questions of concern. One example would be city planning: instead of having blueprints and maps displayed in an official community building, digital three-dimensional versions of buildings can be displayed on mobile telephone screens while the young stakeholders walk around the construction site where their future apartments are being built and can send in their ideas about the proposed plan immediately, while they are still in situ. The means for achieving such engagement are closely related to what I have described as reflective immersion.

Producing Immersion Obviously each performance of Women in Science made use of a variety of production modes, which supported each other and had a favorable influence on the physical and mental engagement of spectators. In a more systematic way, four parameters can be identified as essential conditions for immersion to take place. Production: In the performances three media were used: stage, radio, and television or film. These media are far from being new, but of course it is also possible to employ so-called new media, including computer games, Facebook, etc. However, even traditional media work in this direction when combined with other devices, not least in the case of the split stage of Lise & Otto.

372   Willmar Sauter Perception: As I have emphasized, time-specificity seems to be of utmost importance. Not only is there a crowd that has come to a certain place at a certain time to collectively watch the performance, but the strong impact of time is also confirmed by the immediate visibility of sent text messages. The delight of seeing one’s own words in a public display has had an immensely stimulating effect, especially on young people. One could say that production and perception are closely linked to each other through time. Place: In all the performances the question of place was of great importance. This is partly because the streets, houses, parks, etc. were essential for the walks, and partly because the suburb or the city as such was the necessary environment for the plays. Even for Ada the question of place made a difference: when Ada moved out of the television studio and was performed live on one of the small stages at the National Theatre, most spectators in the auditorium were unwilling to use their mobile phones and to send text messages (Sauter 2014). Playing: There were elements of play in all performances, when direct interaction via mobile phones was offered. But also the walking in the city streets invited a certain playfulness from the participants. Playing concerns not only physical activities; mental challenges too can be experienced as playful. The idea of imagining Aleppo or Baghdad while strolling in one’s own city was often talked about.4 Place and playing are thus linked to each other through the space of the performance. These four parameters can be represented as a square model; at the intersection of the diagonal links of time and space, I would locate immersion (figure 22.1). This scheme suggests some further considerations. The axis between Production and Perception has been characterized by its time-specificity, while Place and Playfulness are related to each other by site-specificity. In more general terms the combination of parameters in this model is a helpful tool for the analysis of immersive moments that create strong feelings of presence in a performance. In the examples used here to illustrate the combined effects of multimedia performances, the results are confirmed by the audience surveys (Ceratto-Pargman, Rositto, and Barkhuus 2014). The multiplicity of relations between production, perception, place, and playing indicates that there are many ways of achieving immersive effects. Certainly the model can also be applied to traditional theater and contemporary dance performance, to conceptual art projects as well as to political situations, such as public speeches, demonstrations, rallies, parliamentary debates, etc. Not least, this scheme might be applicable to political theater, for example to Bertolt Brecht’s non-Aristotelian aesthetics.

figure 22.1.  A simple model of cognitive, sensitive, and reflective immersion.

Place

Production

cognitive sensitive IMMERSION reflective Playing

Perception

Immersion   373

Immersion, Verfremdung, and the Political At first sight, the combination of Brecht’s concept of Verfremdung, in English often referred to as “alienation effect,” and the idea of immersion sounds like a contradiction. How could immersion work within a framework of alienation? Was not the explicit purpose of Verfremdung to prevent spectators from immersing in the fiction, from being carried away by the story told on stage? This was certainly Brecht’s intention, but this concerned only what Scheer and others call “cognitive immersion.” Looking at the schematic quadrangle of parameters in the model of immersion from a Brechtian perspective discloses a number of strategies that add up to reflective immersion. From today’s perspective, the Brechtian theater as it developed during the 1920s in Berlin and was resumed there in the 1950s looks like traditional theater. Whatever was new then belongs to standard aesthetics now. It is not likely that anybody would describe Brecht’s productions of his own plays as multimedia performances. Nevertheless there are traces of multimediality in the German theater of the 1920s, including by directors such as Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt. Brecht combined a number of production modes in performances such as The Three Penny Opera, Man as Man, and later Mother Courage, in which the performers speak and perform songs, the orchestra plays live on stage, the lighting changes to mark the songs, and signboards are brought on stage, on which the audience can read various kinds of information. This mixture of media was of course inspired by the powerful cabaret and varieté tradition of the Weimar Republic, and Brecht made full use of it. In terms of perception one notices certain contrasts between Brecht’s ideals and the reality of Berlin audiences. Brecht wished that the spectators would lean back, smoke a cigar, and critically watch the proceedings on stage. He wished that theatergoers had the same expertise and engagement as crowds watching sports events, especially that working-class spectators would engage critically in the performances—so Brecht hoped. However, the audiences that actually attended his plays were the regular theater patrons and the intellectual elite rather than workers coming straight from the factories. This made Brecht extremely aware of the importance of place. After the great success of The Three Penny Opera in 1928, and the lesser success of Mahagonny, Brecht turned directly to working-class organizations and started to write the Lehrstücke. The idea of these didactic plays was that the workers would stage them, and during the rehearsals they would learn from the political themes of the pieces. Instead of regular theaters, performances should be and actually were shown in assembly halls and other public places to which workers had free access. In the 1950s Brecht returned to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, where The Three Penny Opera had its original success. In this theater, Brecht staged his now classic productions. He was extremely sensitive to establish the place for the Brechtian theater, and Europe’s theater elite made pilgrimages to the Schiffbauerdamm, even decades after Brecht’s death in 1956. Brecht had no means to activate audiences physically, but he definitely tried to stimulate their mental participation. Playing meant for Brecht that the spectator had the opportunity to be involved, not (only) in the fictional plot but by taking a personal stance toward the

374   Willmar Sauter issues that the performances addressed. The method of Verfremdung, which Fredric Jameson (1998, passim) has translated as “estrangement,” served to break cognitive immersion at certain points in order to make the spectators reflect on how the plot concerned their own world. The aesthetic means that Brecht used were songs, poems, and written information that moved away from the story, commented on the plot, and even questioned the characters. The characters didn’t sing, for example, but the performers did—an important aspect of the alienation effect. Summarizing Brecht’s method of alienation, it seems obvious that more nuance has to be observed. His plays have a strong immersive power, in the same sense that Hannah Arendt ([1974] 2012, 265; 1968) described Brecht’s poetry: they suck the reader into the contradictions of the verse and at the same time force the reader to reflect upon the construction of the poetic method. Thus was Mother Courage performed by the intense actress Helene Weigel, who sucked the spectators into the story and at the same time forced them to reflect upon whether her actions were politically and humanly responsible—cognitive immersion was counterbalanced by reflective immersion. Although Brecht had clear political aims with his theater, his method was almost contrary to real politicians’ ways of communicating with audiences. A look at their strategies through the lens of the communicative levels mentioned earlier can illuminate the difference. For Brecht and Weigel, it was important to distinguish as much as possible between the actress, i.e., Weigel on the sensory level, and the role of Mother Courage as a product on the symbolic level; for the spectator it was made clear that Weigel was not Courage, which stimulated reflections. The politicians’ ambition is mostly to blur the difference between the sensory and the symbolic, because they want us to believe that the person we meet is the authentic politician; they do not want us to reflect upon the difference between the private person and the image he or she projects in public. There are well-known pictures of Adolf Hitler shaking hands with small girls in folkish dresses, thus demonstrating the dictator as a man of the people. And just like Hitler learned his gestures and pronunciation from an actor, actors imitate politicians to make points about society. Are the similarities between the Brechtian theater’s politicized reflective immersion and the socially engaged immersion of the Rats Teater only a lucky coincidence? Or can it be argued that the Rats is a continuation by other means of Brecht’s sociopolitical ambitions? In my opinion, the latter is the case. Brecht’s aim was to engage the citizen to think about the political, economic, and social implications that his plays brought to the fore. For that purpose he invented the method of Verfremdung in order to stimulate the individual spectator to take a stand, to get angry about societal injustice, to contribute to a change of system. In the 1960s and 1970s many free theater groups in the Western world were inspired by Brecht’s political view on theater. They imitated his aesthetics and invented new ways to interact with their audiences. One generation later, the Rats Teater has access to a whole new range of technologies, from fiber optic cables to mobile telephones with built-in GPS. The Rats does not fully share Brecht’s political goals; rather it can be described as part of a democratic movement striving for broader political engagement from the public. The point is to move decision-making out of the hands of experts and bureaucrats and find ways of involving marginalized groups by using the devices they already carry in their pockets. Despite political differences, the vision of Brecht’s and the Rats’s theater audiences is very close, so close that I can see continuity within the political theater of the past hundred years.

Immersion   375 This political theater has always had its focus on the audience and their involvement. The aesthetic discourses of the eighteenth century point to the beholder as the raison d’être of art. Seen through the model of circular communication, the beholder’s experience not only completes but also creates the work of art. At the same time, it is through the immersive power of the artwork that the beholder can be drawn into the intersection between production and perception, on the one side, and place and playing on the other: cognitive, sensory, and reflective immersions at the crossroads between artistic and political time and space.

Notes 1. Sauter (forthcoming) deals with eighteenth-century aesthetics, in particular Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, and Rousseau. 2. For Gadamer’s relation to theater studies, see Sauter (2008). 3. Rats Teater, https://ratsteater.se/download-the-digital-version-of-the-women-in-sciencebook/. 4. At the time of the performances, Aleppo in Syria was not yet destroyed by the bombs of its own government. Today the political aspect would certainly have influenced some spectators’ reflective immersion.

References Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. 1968. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Arendt, Hannah. [1974] 2012. “Bertolt Brecht.” In Menschen in finsteren Zeiten, edited by Ursula Lutz. München: Piper. Bennet, Susan. 1990. Theatre Audiences. A Theory of Production and Reception. London: Routledge. Ceratto-Pargman, Teresa, Ciara Rositto, and Louise Barkhuus. 2014. Understanding Audience Participation in an Interactive Performance. Helsinki: NordiChi. de Sommi Leone. [1927] 1966. “Four Dialogues on Theatre.” In The Development of the Theatre: A Study of Theatrical Art from the Beginning to the Present Day, edited by Allardyce Nicoll. London: George G. Harrap. Ekenberg, Love, Rebecca Forsberg, and Willmar Sauter. 2016. “Antigone’s Diary—A Model for Democratic Decision Making in Suburban Stockholm.” Contemporary Theatre Review 26, no. 2. doi:10.1080/10486801.2015.1078325. European Committee for Reception and Audience Research. 1986–92. Advances in Reception and Audience Research. Amsterdam: European Committee for Reception and Audience Research. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 1997. Die Entdeckung des Zuschauers [sic!]: Paradigmenwechsel auf dem Theater des 20. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Francke. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. [1960] 1975. Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. 4th edition. Edited by Paul Siebeck. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1972. Der implizierte Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. München: Wilhelm Fink.

376   Willmar Sauter Jameson, Fredric. 1998. Brecht and Method. London: Verso. Klich, Rosemary, and Edward Scheer. 2012. Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Roselt, Jens. 2008. Phänomenologie des Theaters. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Sauter, Willmar. 2000a. “Theatre Talks: How to Find Out What the Spectator Thinks.” In The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception, 174–86. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sauter, Willmar. 2000b. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Sauter, Willmar. 2008. Eventness: A Concept of the Theatrical Event. Stockholm: Stuts. Sauter, Willmar. 2010. “Thirty Years of Reception Research: Empirical, Methodological and Theoretical Advances.” About Performance 10, no. 1: 241–63. Sauter, Willmar. 2014. “The Presence of the Actor in Time-Specific Performance.” In Acting Reconsidered: New Approaches to Actor’s Work, edited by Ramune Baleviciute, 47–57. Vilnius: Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Sauter, Willmar. Forthcoming. Aesthetics of Presence. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Seel, Martin. 2000. Ästhetik des Erscheinens. München: Hanser. Seel, Martin. 2006. Aesthetics of Appearance. Translated by John Farrell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Women in Science: A Trilogy about Ada, Maryam and Lise. 2013. Stockholm: Styx.

chapter 23

Cer emon y, Gen ea l ogy, Politica l Theol ogy Stuart Elden

Introduction While ceremonies are sometimes part of everyday life, for most people they mark specific and significant moments in a life course. These might include baptism or christening, or other ceremonies marking birth or dedication; Bar and Bat Mitzvah, confirmation, comingof-age or other entry into adulthood; marriage, perhaps retirement, and funerals. Some of these are explicitly religious; others may be secular replacements. There are ceremonies associated with changes of season, such as the summer and winter solstice, or with feasts, saints’ days, or other religious festivals. Graduation ceremonies frequently mark the end of a period of education. For those in some professions or types of life, ordination, investiture, or awards come with their own specific ceremonies. The administration of justice has its ceremonial aspects, from the trial to imprisonment and, in some cases, execution or other corporeal punishment. Annual events such as Memorial Day, Armistice Day, marches to commemorate significant battles, and religious days of atonement or fasting have ceremonial aspects. Major sporting events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games have elaborate opening and closing ceremonies. Ceremony is sometimes used to describe ritual processes, such as the Japanese tea ceremony. Political systems also come with ceremonial aspects—they are an explicitly performative aspect of politics. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, the majesty of political power is most explicit in events such as the state opening of Parliament. The speech, which initiates a session of Parliament, usually of one year, is the moment when the three constituent parts of Parliament meet in a single place, the House of Lords. The Queen reads a speech prepared by her government, attended by members of the House of Commons. She is crowned and robed and delivers the speech from a throne, having processed from Buckingham Palace to the Palace of Westminster in a golden horse-drawn carriage and escorted by the Household Cavalry. There are several ritual elements with a long history in

378   Stuart Elden this ceremony, from the speech written on goatskin parchment paper (no longer on actual vellum) to the summoning of the members of the Commons by the House of Lords official known as “Black Rod.” The doors of the Commons are shut in his or her face and reopened only after three knocks, to symbolize the independence of the Commons from the monarchy, a practice dating to the seventeenth-century English Civil War.1 At other times, a ceremonial mace is present in the House of Commons as a symbol of the authority of the absent sovereign. Parliament cannot sit, debate, or vote without this mace being present. Even in polities without a royal remnant, such as in the United States, there are still important ceremonial aspects. The inauguration of a new or second-term president is one significant ceremony in the political calendar. The oath of office is the only part of this event mandated by the Constitution, but there are other elements that have become established practice. Another significant political ceremony in the United States is the State of the Union Address, given to a joint session of Congress in the House of Representatives, usually on a yearly basis except in the first year of a term, though the Constitution stipulates that “information of the State of the Union” shall merely be “from time to time.”2 Yet the title “State of the Union Address” formally dates only from 1946; before this it was generally known as the Annual Message.3 Many of the established aspects are based on tradition and become sedimented over time rather than enshrined in law. One interesting aspect is the “designated survivor,” a high-ranking cabinet member who does not attend the inauguration ceremony but is guarded in a secure location. This is to provide continuity of government in the event of a major incident, such as a terrorist attack, given the large number of people present at this single event. Since 2005 some members of Congress have been similarly absent to constitute a rump legislature if required. In dictatorships, quasi-religious symbolism regularly accompanies the leader, from parades to iconography. Some ceremonies with a significant political purpose might be a more everyday event. Discussing the pledge of allegiance held every day in US schools, Michael Billig (1995, 50) suggests that “the ceremony is a ritual display of national unity.” Here, one might have thought, is a ritual which would have been studied and re-studied endlessly by American sociologists and social psychologists. They should be delighted to have on their doorsteps such a Durkheimian ceremony. Moreover, the ceremony appears with the repeatability of a laboratory experiment, so that micro-processes of gesture, intonation and stance can be repeatedly examined in their controlled conditions. It should be a godsend for functionalists, role-theorists and micro-sociologists, let alone anthropologists, who can do their fieldwork and still return home for lunch. In point of fact, academic interest has been negligible. Anthropologists have headed for the reservations of the native Americans rather than the school-rooms of middle Iowa.  (50)

The anthropological work on world societies will not be explored here, and most of the material discussed will draw on a Western European, Christian tradition. Much could be done with similar questions in a range of other societies, through Asia from Japan to China and India and through the continents of Africa and South America.4 Additionally, the focus will tend to be on the extraordinary ceremony rather than regular, daily rituals like the pledge of allegiance or customary religious services. However, it is worth stressing that this is not to reduce their importance. As Billig (1995, 51) further argues, “The significance of the ceremony is not diminished if it is treated as routine, rather than as an intense experience. If anything, the significance is enhanced: the sacral has become part of everyday life, instead

Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology   379 of being confined to a special place of worship or particular day of celebration.” The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1968) recognized a century ago that ritualized behavior like this is one of the means by which social coherence and order can be established and maintained. Equally, in the nineteenth century Walter Bagehot (2001) argued that the English Constitution operated by means of two kinds of institutions: the dignified and the efficient. The dignified, the more theatrical aspects, of which ceremonies were part, and the monarchy, the most immediate symbol, were there to impress and command obedience, the efficient ones to govern. More recently there has been a return to themes around the question of ceremony and its contemporary political instantiations (Crewe and Müller 2006; Rai 2011; Rai and Johnson  2014; Coakley and Rafter  2014). This recent work builds upon writings such as Emma Crewe’s (2005) anthropological study of the British House of Lords and Kertzer’s (1989) more general anthropology of political ritual. Work on political ceremony is part of a wider concern with the relation between politics and performance (see, e.g., Goodman and De Gay 2000; Edkins and Kear 2013; Rai 2014; Rai and Reinelt 2015). Rai (2014, 1180) suggests that “political performance is critical to our reading of politics itself.” Deliberately talking of the “politics of performance” can be read in two ways: as either subjective or objective genitive. This means that there is an examination of the political aspects of performance and the performative aspects of politics. Both are significant to the question of ceremony. Although the terms ritual and ceremony are often used interchangeably, politically it seems helpful to distinguish between them by stating that ritual is often a part of ceremony, in that ceremonies contain rituals, while rituals might be a sequence of structured actions conducted outside of them. As Rai (2010, 288) puts it, “Ceremony means an activity that is infused with ritual significance, performed on a special occasion, while ritual means the hyper-visibility of ceremony and routinisation of ritualised performance.” In Shakespeare’s play King Henry V, before the battle of Agincourt, the King reflects on his role and its duties: “And what are thou, thou idol ceremony?” (Act IV, scene I, 237).5 The King considers how the role requires greater duties and less privacy, enormous privilege but greater anxiety and responsibility. Is ceremony more than “place, degree and form / Creating awe and fear in other men?” (Act IV, scene I, 243–44). Ceremony is marked by trappings such as anointing balm, the orb and scepter, ceremonial weapons, a throne, robes and the crown, but cannot be reduced to these. These trappings, titles, and rituals are mere display. They might be necessary but they are not sufficient to the attribution of a role. There are good questions raised here, and this chapter begins the work of interrogating the concept and practice of ceremony historically and theoretically.

From Etymology to Political Theology Ceremony is an intriguing word, deriving from Old French ceremonie and Latin caerimonia and meaning the ritual observances and sacred rituals of a religious service. A ceremony could also be “a portent, omen” (Oxford English Dictionary). The Latin term caerimonia, meaning “sacredness” or “reverence,” is of disputed etymology. Michiel de Vaan (2008, 81) says that the Roman belief that the prefix came from the Etruscan town Caere was a “folk-etymology.” Instead he believes that it is probably “derived from an adj[ective]. *caerus

380   Stuart Elden which also formed the second member of the cp. [compound] sin-cērus ‘whole, sound.’ ” The term caerus may relate to the Sanskrit term kárman—action, work, or deed—or karma. The suffix -monium or -monia is more straightforward, signifying the legal status or obligation of something, being the root of the terms including acrimony, parsimony, patrimony, matrimony, sanctimony, and testimony. To speak of a “religious ceremony” is thus a pleonasm because all ceremonies have at least the trace of a religious lineage in the word itself, as well as perhaps in specificities, even if they appear to be for purely secular purposes. This relation can of course be seen in practice rather than merely in the lineage of the word. As such, work on ceremony necessarily builds on the field of political theology, which has long looked at religious roots of secular politics. We owe the term political theology in a positive sense to the jurist Carl Schmitt, notorious for his membership in the Nazi Party and support for the regime around questions of emergency powers and expansionism. Schmitt (1985) first used the term in his 1922 book Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Mikhail Bakunin (1973) had previously used the term in 1871 to mockingly describe the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini (see Moltmann 2015, 7). Spinoza’s (2007) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, originally published anonymously in 1670, is a perhaps still earlier antecedent, though this is really a treatise on theological politics.6 In the opening lines of the essay that gives his book its title, Schmitt (1985, 36, translation modified; 2009, 43) makes a claim which is often quoted but generally read in a reductive way: All central concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts. This is not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of those concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

All too often this is read for the first sentence alone. The “not only” of the second sentence is important, though it is the “but also” that is more challenging and arguably significant. As Jacques Derrida (2017, 249) points out, the first element of Schmitt’s formulation suggests the need for a historical, genealogical investigation, but that the second part is that of a “systematic logician.” While the historical lineages of the modern concept and practice of ceremony are significant, it is also important to look at the “systematic structure” of ceremony. Schmitt’s point was to expose the myth of a truly secular politics, free from religious aspects. However, he did not explore explicitly theological material in detail in the book, and often he seems to be using the term theology interchangeably with metaphysics. In a 1935 monograph the theologian Erik Peterson (2011) acknowledged Schmitt’s use of the idea but noted that “his brief arguments at that time were not systematic.” He added that his own essay on monotheism in the Roman Empire was an attempt to “show by a concrete example the theological impossibility of a ‘political theology’ ” (233–34n168). Schmitt’s response, which came many years later, in 1970, a decade after Petersen’s death, denied that a single case study could be used to discredit the notion universally, but more important, returned to his earlier argument that deciding what was or was not political was itself a political decision. Thus theology could not simultaneously claim to be outside politics and also close off a political question (Schmitt 2008, 113, 122; see 2007).7 As Adam Kotsko (2013, 107) notes, “The field of political theology has not yet been rigorously defined. It is more a field of affinities than a clearly delineated disciplinary

Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology   381 space—a kind of ‘zone of indistinction’ between theology and political theory where the terms of debate are still very much up for grabs” (see Hovey and Phillips 2015). For Hammill and Lupton (2012a, 1), political theology can be used “to identify the exchanges, pacts, and contests that obtain between religious and political life, especially the use of sacred narratives, motifs, and liturgical forms to establish, legitimate, and reflect upon the sovereignty of monarchs, corporations, and parliaments.” Whether or not there is such a thing as a political theology, and irrespective of how it is defined, there is a theology in politics. That is to say, a whole range of aspects of contemporary politics relate to earlier theological constructs. The modern notion of sovereignty over territory, for example, has a lineage from the idea of temporal power in the Christian Middle Ages. Temporal power, as well as being limited by the spiritual power of the papacy, was also spatially circumscribed (see Elden 2013). This lineage to theology is even more explicit in the question of political ceremony, as many authors have demonstrated. Ernst Kantorowicz is a crucial figure in the development of studies of political theology. Best known in Anglophone debates for his 1957 book The King’s Two Bodies, he was also the author of a major biographical study of the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II (1927, translated as 1931a, 1931b, untranslated). The King’s Two Bodies examines the ways that the medieval king was understood to have both a physical, mortal body and an immortal, eternal body politic that endured past his own death. The latter was the foundation for the notion of the realm, kingdom, and, later, the state. The proclamation “The King is dead, long live the King” is one indication of the continuation of this eternal sovereignty, but it endures into republican politics as well. Kantorowicz’s sources were varied but included art, coins, legal texts, theological texts, and histories, as well as the writings of Dante and Shakespeare, especially King Richard II. Kantorowicz provides examples showing not only the religious lineage of modern ceremonies but also their structural relation. Kantorowicz (1957, 227) indicates, for example, that the ceremonial procedures of the English Parliament parallel those of the celebration of a mass, just as its threefold structure compares to the Trinity. Similarly, just as Christ is wedded to the church, so too is a ruler mystically married to their kingdom. Coronation ceremonies therefore sometimes parallel the service of a wedding (Kantorowicz 1957, 221–3; see Rust 2014, 112; Woolley 1915). The King’s Two Bodies should be read alongside Kantorowicz’s (1946) earlier study Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship. There he stresses the importance of studying liturgy not only for the “theologian and church historian” but also for the medievalist generally, looking at the “political, institutional, or cultural history of the Middle Ages” (vii). Focusing on the liturgical chant of the Laudes Regiae, the royal praises, a specific acclamation of the Caesar, Kantorowicz shows how “seemingly insignificant changes in the texts of the laudes, traced here from the eighth to the thirteenth century, reflect the various changes in theocratic concepts of secular and spiritual rulership” (ix). The opening line of the Laudes Regiae was the motto Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat—Christ conquers, reigns, and commands—and Kantorowicz explores how this was transferred to apply to rulers, especially the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, but also the kings of Western Europe (see also Angelov and Herrin 2012). It is a development of a key theme of his earlier biography of Friedrich II. In relation to England, Kantorowicz (1946, 180) writes that it is “at least a symbolic coincidence that the Christus vincit is mentioned, for the last time, in a marginal note to the Coronation Order of Richard II with whom a period of kingship came to an end.” He ends the book noting that the laudes was reintroduced in the Fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (186), a good example of

382   Stuart Elden the political appropriation of aspects of religious ceremony. It is still used in the Catholic Church, especially for the inauguration of a pope. Yet elements of the chant can be dated to before Christ, when Roman generals and emperors reentered the city. The most significant thinker in the recent use of the term political theology has probably been Giorgio Agamben, especially in the later volumes of his Homo Sacer series. While the initial books of this series explore ideas of bare life, sovereignty, and the camp, the later published volumes explore monastic rules and poverty and provide archaeologies of the oath, duty, and office, which link theological, ceremonial, and political themes (Agamben 2010, 2013a, 2013b). But it is in The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (2011) that he provides his most sustained study in the series. As Dean (2012, 145–6) points out, the Italian term regno, used in the book’s title, means “reign” as well as “kingdom,” and Agamben is concerned with the modalities of political power. He discusses the use of acclamations in Nazi Germany, including “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil,” along with the salute, and the motto “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer” (Santner 2018, 95). If we add the pageantry of flags, uniforms, and military parades, this demonstrates the ceremonial aspects common to dictatorships of the left as well as the right. For Kotsko (2013, 107), following Agamben, political ceremony is “an echo of the acclamation that calls divinity into being.” In the wider literature, the term political theology has been used to examine specific figures in theology such as St. Paul (Taubes 2003) and Jean Calvin (Tuininga 2017); philosophers including Hegel (Shanks 1991) and Schelling (Brata Das 2017); Shakespeare and other writers (Shuger  2001; Haverkamp  2004; Lupton  2005; Rust  2009); and topics such as European integration (Royce 2017) and the question of the neighbor (Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard 2005). In recent years some scholars have worked in dialogue with Agamben’s arguments to examine the theological aspects of modern economy and management (Mondzain 2004; Esposito 2015; Leshem 2016; Diamantides and Schütz 2017; Heron 2018; Santner 2018). These are only an indicative sample of a widespread use of the term, in which the question of ceremony is a recurrent theme.

Histories of Ceremony There is also extensive work that examines specific ceremonial practices in different historical periods. This would include studies of Classical Rome (Sumi 2005), in particular the triumph held to hail conquering military leaders (Beard  2007), and of the Holy Roman Empire (Coy, Marschke, and Sabean 2010, especially section 3). Kantorowicz’s (1946, 1957) important work on medieval Europe has already been mentioned (see Hanawalt 2017), and there is work developing these themes in relation to the Renaissance and Early Modern France (Bryant 1986, 2010; Giesey 1960), England (Duncan 2012; Cole 1999), and Europe in this period more generally (Hammill and Lupton  2012b; Mulryne, Aliverti, and Testaverde 2015; Rutledge 1996). The relation of royal majesty and religious ordination is significant here, but even republics worked with comparable ceremony. After the execution of King Charles I—an event with its own ceremonial aspects—interregnum England under Oliver Cromwell had significant rituals and ceremonies (Knoppers 2000). The theme of ceremony has been discussed in relation to Shakespeare’s plays (e.g., La Guardia  1966; Sisk  1978; George  2010; Elden  2017). The famous speech reflecting on

Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology   383 c­ eremony by King Henry V was mentioned earlier. But one of the striking things about Shakespeare’s uses of ceremony is that they are often disrupted, denied, refused, or parodied. King Richard II, for example, puts excessive stress on symbolism and ceremony, only to have these challenged by the more forceful Henry Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV), and ultimately Richard has his ceremonial status rescinded when he is uncrowned and deposed. King Henry V suggests that, “his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man” (Act IV scene I, 105–6). While still known as Prince Hal he had mocked ceremony in a London tavern (2002, Act II, scene iv, 366–468), with his friend Falstaff suggesting he could play King Henry IV: “This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre and this cushion my crown” (Act II scene iv, 368–9). Henry IV, of course, utters the famous words “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (2016, Act III, scene I, 31); like his son he recognizes the  duties that come with the symbol—the work to be done after the ceremony is over. Coriolanus refuses the ceremonial display of his wounds to the people as part of his election to consul and is banished from Rome for breaking with the people and the tribunes. Cordelia refuses to go along with King Lear’s wish for a ceremonial recitation of filial devotion; King John has to perform his coronation several times, in part because of his weakness as a ruler and his deference to Rome. Yet Shakespeare’s plays do not simply portray, and at times parody, the ceremonial aspects of politics. As Michel Foucault (2003, 174; see 2007, 265) has argued, seventeenth-century “tragedy was one of the great ritual forms in which public right was displayed and its problems were discussed.” He has in mind both Shakespeare and French dramatists such as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In other words, as well as political ceremony being theatrical, theater can itself be a political ceremony. In terms of the project of this collection, the relation between politics and performance works both ways: performance is political, and the political is performative. Shakespeare used historical material as sources for many of his tragedies and history plays, but many of the themes they treat found contemporary parallels, which would not have been lost on his audience. King Richard II is a particularly striking example. Queen Elizabeth thought herself the equivalent of that deposed king, as she worried about her own deposition. A performance of the play at the Globe theater the night before the Earl of Essex’s failed uprising in 1601 made the comparison striking. As Foucault (2003, 174) suggests, Shakespearean plays frequently focus “on the wound, on the repeated injury that is inflicted on the body of the kingdom when kings die violent deaths and when illegitimate sovereigns come to the throne.” Looking outside Shakespeare’s time to a different period of English history, Foucault (2006, 20) asserts that the removal of the mad King George III by his doctors was itself “basically, a ceremony, a ceremony of deposition, a sort of reverse coronation.” As I have argued elsewhere, Foucault finds the replacement of sovereign power by a different kind of power more interesting than the replacement of a king by another king. Nonetheless the question of the ceremony in the display of political power at various periods long fascinated him.8

Aspects of Ceremony These historical examinations indicate the number of ways in which religious rites are still embedded in modern, secular politics. A key aspect is the endurance of royal, corporeal elements in modern republics. Eric Santner (2018), for example, shows that the distinction

384   Stuart Elden Kantorowicz traces between the King’s two bodies did not disappear in modern polities but continued in the notion of the “people.” The “glorious body” of the King was not merely a fictional, symbolic cloak but a “virtually real supplement to his empirical, mortal body” (23). In his study The Royal Remains, Santner (2011) explores the enduring corporeal nature of popular sovereignty, a notion he explores as the flesh. Philip Manow (2010) has similarly shown the endurance of the body politic in modern democracies, looking at parliamentary seating plans and other spatial arrangements, art and other imagery, the notion of political representation and mythology, and the media obsession with the physical bodies of rulers. Ceremony is important as a means of a polity stressing its continuity, with prime ministers, presidents, and parliaments able to trace a lineage back to the founding of the republic or other political system. It is also significant in terms of cementing a specifically national identity, and for that national polity to be seen as formally equal to others. Many newly independent states continue rituals and ceremonies from former colonial powers, while others adopt or adapt those from states they wish to emulate. Ceremonial aspects may stress a belief in a more universal order, of which the state wishes to be a part. Additionally, the ritualistic elements aim at a connection with abstract ideas, such as freedom or democracy, hard to visualize in themselves. Even nonnational political actors, such as the United Nations and the European Union, adapt many aspects of national politics for their positions, legal texts, rituals, ceremonies, and accessories, from flags to procedures. However, some ceremonies, or the rituals attached to them, are not nearly as old as implied. The investigation of political ceremony can thus learn from work on the invention of tradition and banal nationalism (Hobsbawn and Ranger  1983; Anderson  1983; Billig  1995), which shows the dubious lineage of some of these practices. It also provides a challenge to some of the uncritical assumptions of Durkheim and those who have followed his approach. Ceremonies are rich with significant interrelations between bodies in motion, at both small and larger scale, from coordinated movement to gesture:9 bowing, kneeling, hands raised or laid on another’s head, the kissing of feet or an ornate ring. Military aspects of marching, saluting, drill requirements, and the use of horses or other trained animals add to the spectacle. As Rai (2010, 284, 288) points out, ceremonies are always gendered, a perspective indebted to Judith Butler’s (1990) work on the performative aspects of gender. Work on dance and movement may be of use to further analysis of these political choreographies. Ceremonies are also filled with instances of the interrelation of those bodies with material things, from clothing and personal accouterments to larger objects like flags, scepters, crowns, thrones, maces, oils, bells, bibles, etc. Indeed an obsolete sense of the word ceremony pertains to “an external accessory or symbolical attribute of worship, state, or pomp” (Oxford English Dictionary). Some work has looked at the texts used in ceremonies and their historical lineage. The spoken words and physical gestures are often understood as part of a liturgy. More might be done with this, as well as analysis of music or other sounds accompanying the spectacle, such as bells or gun or cannon shots. The speech directions are important as well as the specific words, just as in religious services. Equally, just as in the theater, the script here is not just the words said but directions for staging or performance. Work on semiotics and iconography, as well as textual analysis, is therefore important. The temporality of ceremony can take several forms. Its temporality might be in terms of chronology, with some linear succession of events—the birth announcement, christening, marriage, investiture, coronation, and funeral of a monarch, for example. Some of these

Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology   385 directly relate to specific sacraments of the Catholic Church: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist or communion, reconciliation (penance or confession), matrimony, Holy Orders, and the anointing of the sick. Temporality might be cyclical, as in the ceremonial aspects of the State of the Union Address, the oath of office, or the state opening of Parliament. Its temporality might be repetitive, happening multiple times, and rhythm is frequently significant. Equally, ceremony has important spatial aspects. Some ceremonies always occur in the same place, and that location and its architecture are part of the ritual. But there are some ceremonies whose location is deliberately changed so there is a repetition for a different audience. Examples include Queen Elizabeth I’s royal progress and the repetition of King John’s coronation in different locations. Linking back to an earlier theme, some ceremonies make use of processional elements, i.e., movement through space, as part of their ritual. These mark the spread of political, religious, or royal power beyond its usual location into other spaces, blurring easy distinctions between public and private space, as well as lines drawn between secular and spiritual, state and civil society, the everyday and the ceremonial (see Howe 2007, 11). Royal entry into towns paralleled Christ’s entry into Jerusalem or the entrance of a victorious Roman military commander. The spatial arrangement of bodies and props is significant and provides another link to the theatrical. Combining the temporal and spatial aspects is the question of synchronicity, where ceremonies occur at the same time in multiple locations, such as church services or those of remembrance. Equally, spaces used for one purpose on a day-to-day basis are recoded when used for a ceremonial purpose. Horse Guards Parade, for example, was formerly used for tournaments but has become a popular tourist destination, the site of the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony, and was used in the 2012 Olympics to host beach volleyball.

Conclusion Ceremony, then, is an important notion in the relation between politics and performance. As Rai (2014) has suggested, the elements of performance—the body; the space, place, or stage; words, scripts, speech, and voice; and performing and performative labor—need to be tabulated with aspects of reception or audience: authenticity of representation, mode of representation, representative liminality, and resistance to representation. This provides a grid with which we can begin to analyze political performance generally, of which ceremony would be an important subsection (1190). Themes around body, voice, and gesture and audience are discussed in more detail in other parts of this Handbook. Historically, much of what we know about ceremonies comes from the extant textual record. As Howe (2007, 3) indicates, this is unfortunate, in that they “were intended to do their work and acquire meaning beyond the textual realm.” Modern ceremonies can be analyzed anthropologically for their corporeal, temporal, spatial, and symbolic aspects; historical ceremonies can be investigated only on the basis of textual descriptions and whatever other sources remain—artifacts, buildings or their plans (see also Hanawalt 2017, 6). Nonetheless the historical record provides rich material for a study of specific ceremonies and the wider, genealogical question of what a ceremony does in politics. A ceremony is intended, in part, to bridge the divide between the embodied life of the participants and the abstract principles they are being connected to. The idea of kingship,

386   Stuart Elden for example, lays fictitious claim to an unbroken lineage, a set of principles, entitlements, and duties, and perhaps a claim to divine right. The rituals as part of the ceremony are intended to symbolize and connect to these precepts. Imitation of previous ceremonies is a significant part of creating this lineage, one reason it is important for them to follow strictly defined procedures. This means that a ceremony is not simply taking place in the present moment and location but connects to something seen as eternal and universal (see Howe 2007, 1–2). In so doing ceremonies create a link back to the past but also establish the precedent for an imagined future. An explicit instance of the relation between politics and performance, the question of ceremony is one that would benefit from further attention.

Notes 1. “State Opening of Parliament,” https://www.parliament.uk/stateopening. 2. The Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 3, https://www.archives.gov/ founding-docs/constitution-transcript. 3. US House of Representatives, “State of the Union Address,” https://history.house.gov/ Institution/SOTU/State-of-the-Union/. 4. For examples of work that look at ceremony outside of a Latin, Christian tradition, see Harrison (2000); Rai (2011, 2014). 5. I have used the 1995 Arden edition. This speech (Act IV, scene I, 233–63) comes from the Folio text; it does not appear in the earlier Quarto version of the play. 6. There may be still earlier uses. For a brief discussion and references, see Heron  2018, 143–4n4. 7. For a discussion, see Hollerich (2011, xxv–xxvi), and a 1979 letter sent by the Jewish theologian Jacob Taubes to Schmitt, in Taubes 2013, 27–31. 8. A striking discussion of political power and ceremony, organized as a play of five acts, appears in his 1971–2 course at the Collège de France and a related lecture in Minneapolis (both in Foucault  2015). For a fuller discussion of these themes see Elden  (2017) and Akbalik  (2017). Many of these readings of Shakespeare’s plays are further developed in Elden 2018. 9. On gesture, see Agamben (2000); on the body in political performance, see Rai (2014).

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Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology   389 Kantorowicz, Ernst  H. 1931a. Frederick the Second 1194–1250. Translated by E.  O.  Lorimer. New York: Frederick Ungar. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1931b. Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite. Vol. 2. Berlin: Georg Bondi. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1946. Laudes Regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kertzer, David I. 1989. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. 2000. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kotsko, Adam. 2013. “Genealogy and Political Theology: On Method in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory.” Political Theology 14, no. 1: 107–14. La Guardia, Eric. 1966. “Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry V.” In Pacific Studies in Shakespeare, edited by Waldo  F.  McNeir and Thelma  N. Greenfield, 68–88. Eugene: University of Oregon Press. Leshem, Dotan. 2016. The Origins of Neoliberalism: Modelling the Economy from Jesus to Foucault. New York: Columbia University Press. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2005. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manow, Philip. 2010. In the King’s Shadow: The Political Anatomy of Democratic Representation. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Moltmann, Jürgen. 2015. “European Political Theology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology, edited by Craig Hovey and Elizabeth Phillips, 1–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mondzain, Marie-José. 2004. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Translated by Rico Franses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mulryne, J. R., with Maria Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde, eds. 2015. Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Peterson, Erik. 2011. “Monotheism as a Political Problem: A Contribution to the History of Political Theology in the Roman Empire.” In Theological Tractates, edited and translated by Michael J. Hollerich, 68–105. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rai, Shirin  M. 2010. “Analysing Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament.” Journal of Legislative Studies 16, no. 3: 284–97. Rai, Shirin M., ed. 2011. Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament. London: Routledge. Rai, Shirin M. 2014. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Rai, Shirin M., and Rachel E. Johnson, eds. 2014. Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rai, Shirin  M., and Janelle Reinelt, eds. 2015. The Grammar of Politics and Performance. London: Routledge. Royce, Mark R. 2017. The Political Theology of European Integration. London: Palgrave. Rust, Jennifer R. 2009. “Political Theology and Shakespeare Studies.” Literature Compass 6, no. 1: 175–90. Rust, Jennifer R. 2014. The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Reformation England. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rutledge, Douglas F., ed. 1996. Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance. Plainsboro Township, NJ: Associated University Presses.

390   Stuart Elden Santner, Eric  L. 2011. The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Santner, Eric L. 2018. The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy. With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter  E.  Gordon, and Hent de Vries. Edited by Kevis Goodman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2008. Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology. Translated by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2009. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Shakespeare, William. 1995. King Henry V. Edited by T. W. Craik. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, William. 2002. King Henry IV, Part I. Edited by David Scott Kastan. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, William. 2016. King Henry IV, Part II. Edited by James  C.  Bulman. London: Arden Shakespeare. Shanks, Andrew. 1991. Hegel’s Political Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuger, Deborah Kuller. 2001. Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Sisk, John  P. 1978. “Ceremony and Civilization in Shakespeare.” Sewanee Review 86, no. 3: 396–405. Spinoza, Benedict de. 2007. Theological-Political Treatise. Edited by Jonathan Israel. Translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sumi, Geoffrey S. 2005. Ceremony and Power: Performing Politics in Rome between Republic and Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2003. The Political Theology of Paul. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taubes, Jacob. 2013. To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Tuininga, Matthew J. 2017. Calvin’s Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Christ’s Two Kingdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolley, Reginald Maxwell. 1915. Coronation Rites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Žižek, Slavoj, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2005. The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 24

Pedag ogy (Mis)Performing the Contemporary University Erzsébet Strausz

(Mis)Performing: A Possibility Participant C: “We’ve been joking about how this course itself was . . . a misperformance [group laughs a little and agrees]. Teacher-student roles and the like . . . personally, in the beginning I had to adapt to this mode of teaching. Not that I ever felt uncomfortable, sometimes I was just, you know, trying to make sense of why she is doing this, or how is this . . .  I don’t know [laughs] . . . justified, how this fits this whole university or this whole environment that we are sitting in, and it was never making me uncomfortable or anything else, but . . . I don’t know, we can call it challenging in the beginning, you know, to totally lose myself in this classroom.”1 At the intersections of personal experience, pedagogical practice, and institutional politics, this is how I envisioned (un)learning would take place, for all participants of the Master of Arts module (Mis)Performing World Politics, including myself, that I taught at Central European University. One of the main aims and perhaps less explicit learning outcomes of the course was to enable experiences of displacement and reflection on everyday social performances as embodied practice. Regardless of academic focus and disciplinary norms, by staging encounters in the space of the classroom I sought to cultivate a moment-to-moment awareness of how we—the participants of the course—are involved, immersed, embedded in what we do and often enact in a routine-like, unconscious manner. In order to engage social performance and the possibility of transformation as lived experience I wanted to direct attention to the micro level of interactions so that we are able to observe in the first place how we have been wired as “knowing subjects” and socialized into roles and rituals within the structures of higher education and in the academic discipline of international relations as an ongoing process. Cultivating a sensitivity for the scripts that we live by and which shape, mold, and channel our exchanges was meant to open up new horizons of reflection where we could also reflect on ourselves as citizen-subjects of a performance society. Rendering familiar knowledge practices as “acts of knowing” (Cowden and Singh

392   Erzsébet Strausz 2013) promised to take us beyond these layers of formation, to a terrain of strangeness, uncertainty, and unease, marking out a space of possibility where, transgressing the limiting frames of “teacher” and “student,” participation could be experienced differently. Departing from the actuality of pedagogical relationships—the scheduled time-space coordinates of the curriculum and how we may inhabit them individually and as a group—my ambition was to make accessible that zone of not-knowing where the usual social and institutional scripts no longer hold, where, even for a fragment of a second, there may be a possibility to do, feel, be otherwise. I offered the course for the first time at Central European University in the academic year 2018–9 upon my return as new faculty. I was coming back to an American Hungarian institution in Budapest with a diverse international community and a strong liberal arts ethos that once turned me into a recognizable academic subject in the discipline of international relations and set me up to continue my studies in the West on a scholarship. Being a CEU student came with enormous privileges, such as the opportunity to complete a prestigious American postgraduate degree in the region on at least a partial tuition waiver. These conditions haven’t changed significantly since, though perhaps the field of applicants has become more global, with a fainter mark of Central Europeanness. I was fully aware that I was arriving in a liminal space and at a time of transition. The university was and still currently is in the process of relocating its teaching activities to Vienna after a year and a half of attempted dialogue, negotiation, acts of protest and solidarity for academic freedom as living, existing, actual practice. I designed (Mis)Performing World Politics as an experimental class, bringing together the pedagogical innovations, musings, sparks, and unfinished ideas that emerged in and through my making as an academic in British higher education. My aspiration there was to counter and creatively transform what I perceived as the imprints of neoliberal government in professional and pedagogical relationships. I was working to subvert the rationality that rendered knowledge—for those who have access to higher education—increasingly in economic terms, “almost exclusively as property, commodity and a measurable commercial asset” (Bala et al. 2017, 2). I wanted to cut through those tacit registers of normalization and instrumentalization—of “structures of feeling” (Anderson 2016, 748), ways of speaking, modes of expression and self-making—that emptied interactions of their aliveness and serendipity. I wondered how much of this would be relevant in a different location, for a gradually marketizing, hybrid institution with a pronounced social mission and a politically engaged student cohort that, among other initiatives, gave rise to the grassroots movement Szabad Egyetem (Free University) in response to the government’s actions. Naeem Inayatullah’s (2013) account of his own formation as a teacher equipped me with some newfound resources for thinking these personal, political, international, and, before anything else, pedagogical relations. The narration of the trials, errors, and movements of the “misperforming teaching body” helped me reconnect with experiences of uncertainty and insecurity that fundamentally shaped what it has meant to me to learn, within and beyond academia. “In confessing my misperformances,” he writes, “I want to suggest that risking mistakes turns the classroom into a living, breathing, experimental, experience-filled place” (156). In fact, “every performance is a misperformance” (157). This made me realize that as I teach, before anything, I learn about learning and that through our physical presence we are in constant motion, searching, never fully following, always reinventing the script.

Pedagogy   393 Turning what may appear as failure into a site of curiosity and possibility made me more at ease with navigating the terrains of research and teaching as an early career academic in the UK. In my old-new intellectual home in Budapest, “learning about learning” shifted from challenging commodification to a more explicit and hands-on engagement with authority and alternative social imaginations of knowledge, power, selfhood, and community. The focus, however, remained the same: the recognition and unmaking of social performances as performance as a point of departure for other ways of sensing and sense-making. For a class of twenty participants from four continents and with varying degrees of disciplinary background, a key site of exploration and experimentation where alternative modalities of sense perception could be encouraged turned out to be the skill of listening. Directing attention away from speech—and with that, the logocentrism of class discussions and the performance pressure to contribute—gave rise to a gradual shift in exchanges, to the “feel” of the module, developing our own practice of “slow scholarship” (Mountz et al. 2015; Berg and Seeber 2016). Inspired by Rancière’s (1991) figure of “the ignorant schoolmaster” who verifies everyone’s equal ability to make their own sense, we practiced a peer-to-peer listening exercise at the beginning of each class. The power of listening, as we found out, came from exposure to the actual practice of translation: how someone being listened to was free to give an account of their intellectual journey in a space of nonjudgmental, active presence and witnessing. As Rancière (2011, 10) writes, “From the ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work—an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it.” Equality—the practice of freedom and ownership of sense-making—threaded through the twelve weeks of (un)learning-together in visible acts and often as fleeting, momentary glimpses of an intensity. One form of expression that was inspired by these exchanges is the writing of this chapter: as misperforming academic text and a continuing critical practice of crafting a more accommodating, more creative and diverse habitability within the contemporary university (see Strausz  2018). The vignettes of this chapter unfold as snapshots of a transition across institutional cultures and a shared journey with a group of students who had the courage to re-enter the academic study of world politics through the lens of misperformance and trusted the process, which often took them (and me) to uncharted territories at the edges of our making as knowing subjects. Working with lived experiences at the junction of personal lives, academic worlds, and different manifestations of (neoliberal) government—from the University of Warwick to CEU and within the constantly evolving pedagogical paradigm of (Mis)Performing World Politics—is yet an unfinished matter of telling, rewriting, writing anew. Jenny Edkins (2013, 289) notes that “stories can work through and establish diverse temporalities and produce different visions of the subject or personhood,” and their transformational potential lies with this capacity to undo fixed identities and familiar structures. They bring back and re-affirm the aliveness that the often instrumental, emptied-out modes of acting seem to have long forgotten in the name of efficiency and professionalism. Stories also couch and foreground those acts of translation, of working things out through the medium of language, where intelligence is exercised on its own, equal terms. These moments—the making and

394   Erzsébet Strausz holding space for different modes of expression—are political, since, as Sarah Amsler (2015, 23) writes, we are “always prefiguring the future in the ways we engage with the undecided matter (and matters) of the present.” This chapter—as both an account of a pedagogical experiment and a creative practice— takes reader and writer on a journey of negotiating scripts and pressures within the marketizing structures of the contemporary university as a process of learning about learning and its transformational enactment in the course (Mis)Performing World Politics. Illustrated by an iterated listening exercise, it offers this Handbook a view into the undoing and remaking of everyday social performances in a higher education setting with a potential to throw light on and creatively subvert the operation of some of the broader social structures of performance society.

Neoliberal Acting Last night I bought a ticket for a girl who hopped on the last bus leaving from the University of Warwick campus. She was grateful to the moon and back that I helped her out with some small change. She wanted to find out who I was so that she could give the money back later. “Are you on Facebook?” There was this lightness and genuineness about the situation—we were both enthralled in the joy that now she was safely on her way home—until she found out that I wasn’t a student. In that moment something froze—it all became serious and a bit awkward. Until that moment, though, my body, my gestures, the way I talked to her hadn’t given me away. In the classroom, on the face of it at least, there are hardly ever such surprises: relationships of power and institutional identity are all clearly established. Architectural design makes the teacher visible, marks out their appropriate place in the front region, surrounded by technology and equipment and the lines of attention that have been carefully channeled in that direction. The stage is set for the enactment of already familiar roles (Preves and Stephenson  2009, 245–6) traversed by invisible scripts that animate movement, speech, even silence in the interactions. The everyday, normalized dramaturgies of pedagogical relationships, as well as the lived experiences of teaching and being taught, take on specific features within the neoliberal university. Neoliberal reason renders all aspects of existence in economic terms and turns citizen-subjects into “self-investing human capital” (Brown  2015, 17, 177). The university emerges as “service provider” and the student as “customer” through an increasingly dense network of corporate managerial practices that foreground efficiency, productivity, and objectified, measurable forms of expression. “Student satisfaction,” a key marker of this marketized relationship, is calculated on the basis of a specific set of outcome-focused criteria and metrics, which enables further increase in tuition fees and establishes an Olympic medal–style rating system for competing university brands in the UK. What may appear to be a system driven by excellence and democratic participation encloses students in the cycle of a largely uncritical, overly submissive mode of being: the more satisfied they are with their degree program, quite literally, the more valuable the degree itself and their investments become in economic terms.

Pedagogy   395 This end-driven market model of the individual in higher education that seeks to shape people into “economic unit[s] of use in a market economy” (Davies 2006, 436) gives rise to particular regimes of performance at all registers of university life. Inhabiting the space of the university requires becoming a recognizable academic subject that, on the one hand, fulfills the expectations of “a performing, optimal individual in and for a performing institution” (Morrissey 2015, 615), verifiable in reviews and feedback forms, and on the other, crafts an academic self that—however insecure or ambivalent it may be—is capable of presenting themselves in such terms and performing “academicity” on a daily basis (Brunila 2016). Stephen Ball (2015, 259) writes that as academics, “we are constantly expected to draw on the skills of presentation and of inflation to write ourselves and fabricate ourselves in ever lengthier and more sophisticated CVs, annual reviews and performance management audits, which give an account of our ‘contribution’ to research and teaching and administration and the community.” Striving to embody the holograms of “teacher,” “student,” “academic,” the affective and psychosocial aspects of life and journeys within academia (Gill 2017, 211), what it actually takes to enact these roles at a personal level, often remain neglected, even by the participants themselves. Anxiety—a “socially manufactured intensity” (Brunila and Valero 2018)—is an all-pervasive experience that is not only attached to meeting professional standards (Berg, Huijbens, and Larsen 2016) and the condition of labor precarity but is also present in how students mold themselves vis-à-vis the universal threat of insufficiency, of not being “good enough” (and as such, not being worthy of their own and their family’s investments). Rosalind Gill (2017, 210) explains that “the way in which these new regimes get inside us, shape our sense of self, produce particular affects and subjectivities (e.g., shame or anxiety), erode collectivity and collaboration, promote competition” is what calls for attention. That is, the micropolitics of everyday academic life works through and manifests itself as divisions across roles, in relation to others, and within ourselves as we continue to perform in the classroom, in the bus stop, on the edges of campus, and beyond.

(Mis)Performing Bodies “I have read Agamben and I don’t like his politics.” One of my students stops me on the corridor as I am rushing to a lecture. It is Week 3 at CEU. “What makes you think that?” I ask him in haste. “There is this darkness and heaviness about it. Even though he makes some space for resistance, it feels as if there was really no way out.” “Have your read his book The Coming Community? You will find that there is more hope in that one.” I speed up my steps, and just before I enter the classroom, the thought passes through my mind, in slow motion, just like a contrail moves in the sky long after the airplane is gone: “Who am I wanting to save?” Where our life forces are directed is what will grow, flourish, and expand. This can yield a perfectly polished academic self that constantly strives to fit the frames of success in the higher education sector. This can also give rise to something less spectacular, less visible, and recognizable but perhaps more radical and more potent when it comes to political imagination and the day-to-day processing and remaking of experience. Teaching and

396   Erzsébet Strausz pedagogical relationships remain distinguished sites of change, transformation, resistance; in bell hooks’s (1994, 12) words, the classroom is still “the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” For Moten and Harney (2004, 102) the “subversive intellectual” is fundamentally an educator, who is “in” but not “of ” the neoliberal university. While she may be unprofessional, uncollegial, and disloyal in the grip of management structures and regimes of “excellence,” she is also a dreamer who is passionate about being in the world and “making the world anew” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Beyond what is captured by institutional markers and the language of measurement there is “the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching” (Moten and Harney 2004, 102) that could nurture a social capacity that outgrows lifeless framings and may help us develop a different sensibility to and for teaching, one that is more egalitarian and more caring toward everyone involved in the project of education as a project of empowerment. Perhaps in actual practice there is already more ambiguity and messiness in these carefully staged interactions. Inayatullah (2013, 153) writes, “We teach with our moving bodies and little else.” Abstract categories are narrated into life by a speaking, moving, sensing body. The body of the instructor conveys the content, often accompanied with some unintended yet present and effective commentary on the subject matter. Beyond the vehicle of words, all gestures, silences, and pauses are read, perceived, and received in incalculable, unpredictable ways. Yet these misperformances and the risk of mistakes, discomfort, awkwardness inherent in the actual, lived experience of teaching are generative of potentially transformational experiences for everyone involved, not of “a smooth utopia, not a terra nullius absent of rifts, but a place where the already riven can be recognized, addressed and performed upon” (156). It is not perfection but rather the impossibility of a pure, unobstructed delivery of the subject matter that can give rise to moments of rupture in the usual dramaturgy of a lecture or a seminar. In lieu of grand solutions to the most pressing issues of world politics there is space for learning that is about and for the actual, living relations to others and ourselves within and beyond state borders, not yet filtered through the lenses of international relations, not yet “disciplined.” The world, as we know and don’t know it yet, is unfolding through the continuous performance and misperformance of I/international R/relations where students and teachers can re-emerge? to themselves and each other as p ­ eople. The misperforming body, hooks (1994, 193) asserts, is simultaneously an erotic body with undisciplined aliveness. Embodied pedagogy goes beyond bringing the body back to the space of education as a site of social struggle and a situated source of knowledge marked by the power relationships of race, gender, class, ableism, coloniality. The body is the gateway to entering the classroom “whole,” not as the “disembodied spirit” of critical theory (193). The body is home to the life force that moves us beyond skills and learning outcomes and animates individual, singular journeys in, through, before, and after one’s involvement in the structures of formal education. Embracing eros makes space for emotional learning and opens relationships up to qualities and purposes that find their points of reference in life, in what brings people there, what drives and motivates them more holistically, and how higher education may be able to positively serve and support these ambitions. This attentive, vivid presence authorizes a range of feelings, including love and care, in institutional spaces. Our efforts to be self-actualizing requires constant nourishment of the affective landscapes of learning: of curiosity, imagination, and their limits into limitlessness. In the corridors, in between the lines, in communities already existing and yet to come.

Pedagogy   397

(Un)Learning How to Learn I am on Skype with a friend and former colleague from the UK. We are catching up on my old-new life in Budapest. “You are teaching what you taught before, right?” “No, I am teaching three new courses this year.” “Aren’t you just reworking what you taught before? I mean, three new courses, is that at all possible? How new can a course ever be?” This catches me completely off guard. What I thought was a doable task all of a sudden loses its doability. It feels like I am staring into some kind of an abyss. In the next moment, though, I hear myself respond, “This is what I am going to let myself find out.” I have no choice but to believe that voice. To become a teacher, let alone a “self-realized” one, in hooks’s pedagogical vision, requires unlearning what we have been taught about knowledge and teaching and that we constantly re-invent pedagogical practice for context, purpose, and audience. Heidegger (2004, 15) writes, “Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than—learning.” To take teaching seriously, which, in this sense, is something entirely different from aspirations to expertise, leadership, or external recognition, calls for a specific investment into our relationships to ourselves. I have pondered the “learn nothing” aspect for a long time before (Mis)Performing World Politics, and in relation to what it might mean for me to “be capable of being more teachable” than my students (15). I asked myself: If my aim is not to transfer the knowledge I have (not least because it would be both impossible and oppressive [Freire 1956]), what would it mean to learn and teach how to learn beyond the familiar scripts of learning? Rancière’s (1991) figure and ethos of “the ignorant schoolmaster” captures something fundamental in this regard. Joseph Jacotot, a schoolteacher, taught French literature to Flemish students who didn’t know French without his knowing any Flemish himself. What was needed was a “thing in common,” in this case a bilingual edition of Télémaque, through which students taught themselves French with the aid of the Flemish translation. By looking for correspondence with what they already knew, they worked out what they didn’t without someone’s mediation between these two terrains. What started as a chance experiment uncovered something deeply philosophical about the process of learning as such: that everyone was capable of making sense of what was unknown to them autonomously, without reliance on the teacher’s knowledge or explanation. The ignorant schoolmaster’s pedagogical practice enacts a radical rupture into the “old master’s explicative order and the economy of education” (Rancière 1991, 8), where an imaginary distinction is introduced between “knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid” (6–8). This pedagogical fiction necessitates a continuous practice of explication—telling the student what they do not know and how they can improve—and as such, knowledge is corrected in infinite regress. Yet what is forgotten is that this “incapability” is not mitigated but constructed in the very process: “To explain something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it by himself ” (6). The ignorant schoolmaster departs from the assumption of the equality of all intelligences, that is, that people are already capable of working things out for themselves, as evidenced by everyone’s track record of having learned a foreign language in childhood:

398   Erzsébet Strausz their mother tongue. Through the oldest “method” of observation and comparison that proceeds by making judgments in relation to what one knows and doesn’t know, free from the demarcations of arbitrarily installed distances, what becomes manifest is that “there is only one power, that of saying and speaking, of paying attention to what one sees and says” (Rancière 1991, 26). Refusing the hierarchy between “ignorant” and “knowledgeable,” the aim of Jacotot’s “universal teaching” is to “reveal an intelligence to itself ” (28). The ignorant schoolmaster’s job is to “verify” the same intelligence at work in the writing and reading of texts: it is the same “will to express” that puts words onto the page and engages with their meaning as an act of “translation” (10). The ignorant schoolmaster’s classroom interactions revolve around the “method” of the student in making sense of the world (Rancière 1991, 14), which turns education into an emancipatory practice. “Mastery” is no longer about “knowledge” but about one’s ability to embark on an intellectual journey. In this order of discovery the student is a “seeker” and the teacher is “first of all a person who speaks to another, who tells stories, and returns the authority of knowledge to the poetic condition of all spoken interaction” (Bingham, Biesta, and Rancière 2010, 6). Students addressed as people respond as people, as equals in a person-to-person relation, not as subordinates of a higher authority under constant examination or supervision (Rancière 1991, 11). What is verified is the “fact of work,” the investment of attention in the student’s own research, into what they do and say, with the aid of a “third object,” for instance a book that none of them knows. One may then ask the other to tell what they did and how in their search for understanding with reference to the shared object. “What do you see? What do you think about it? What do you make of it?” (23). What the teacher is concerned with are the ways in which the student works with their attention—the very process of finding out—instead of the acquisition of any substantive knowledge of a given subject matter. In Rancière’s words, “whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. And whoever emancipates doesn’t have to worry about what the emancipated person learns. He will learn what he wants, nothing maybe” (18). The emphasis is on how someone may emerge as a “thinking subject,” within and outside of the education system, who is aware of themselves through their own actions as they translate (and through that, transform) what is yet unknown to them (see 54). Emancipation is “seized,” writes Rancière, when, “even against the scholars, . . . one teaches oneself ” (99). To be able to enable this freedom in others, I learned that I had to practice empowerment in myself. This was perhaps the most important new element of the three new modules, even though the readings indeed might have resonated with, even repeated what I included in my syllabi before.

(Mis)Performing World Politics “This is the latest I am able to accept coursework. No extension will be given, unless there is a medical emergency. Please make sure to submit your term papers by the deadline as I will only have a few days to publish your grades.” Someone from the group intervenes: “Last term didn’t you submit our grades a bit later? I mean we found out the results for other modules sooner?” “Well, yes, I might have been a day late.”

Pedagogy   399 “So maybe now you could be a bit late as well and give us more time?” “No, that’s a university deadline, I can’t do that!” “Misperform?” Critical learning that is capable of subverting and rewriting social structures, says Henry Giroux (2014, 21), is enabled by pedagogies that “unsettle common sense, make power accountable, and connect classroom knowledge to larger civic issues.” For Paulo Freire the ultimate purpose of education is to rehumanize politics, ourselves, and the other (Paras 2013). Amsler (2011, 281–5) embraces “pedagogies of possibility” that make space for becoming, “generous forms of encounter with others and otherness” through creative, affective, embodied learning, with all the challenge and discomfort it may bring. I kept these notions as placeholders in my mind as I devised the syllabus for (Mis)Performing World Politics, also as an ethos and mode of engagement for the group as a whole, including my own position as teacher. Inspired by Rancière’s figure of the ignorant schoolmaster, first and foremost, I wanted to refocus on the movement of attention and energy—intellectual, affective, embodied—in the classroom, enabling an experience of our exchanges as international relations unfolding in actual time, at the micro sites of communication and physical presence. My intention was to make accessible “the work of attention” as the vehicle through which “sense” is made. What may be uttered in words already comes from a place, from within a “field of experience” that is predetermined by regimes of visibility and audibility (Rancière 1991, 99) and how these inscriptions are carried within us, in our bodies. I understood that this could happen only by slowing things down—allowing silence and space for observation, even if it came with some confusion and awkwardness—so that the usual dramaturgy of conversations may not only be disrupted but also exposed as habit, as the operation of particular scripts upon us that condition what we may notice and encounter. While slowing down decolonizes time—it dissociates the body from a colonial notion of time as a marker of rationality, productivity, of “being civilized and modern” (Shahjahan  2015, 498)—it is also here that the instrumental value of speaking can be reworked. Instead of being a necessity (and a coping mechanism of performance pressure), “to speak” may become an invitation (Vansieleghem and Masschelein  2012). This meant that I also had to retrain myself to recognize and appreciate silence as a potential enabler (Haskins 2010), as an opportunity to be still and present, without forcing a structure on the group or, even more so, silencing them. Occasionally there were long stretches of silence in the classroom when no one said a word. These experiences, for me, brought to the fore the powers of the misperforming teaching body that “re-performs, searching” (Inayatullah 2013, 157), even more, becoming more aware of how I inhabit the hologram of institutional scripts and expectations on a daily basis as I perform my role, searching for both recognizability and freedom. My other aim was to facilitate modes of reflection in the classroom through which sense perception could be reconfigured—how and what we can see, what we may be able to hear—so that a different sensibility may emerge with regard not only to our weekly themes but to how we participate in the intellectual, affective, experiential processing and making of world politics. I kept the syllabus open as a democratic gesture so that it could adapt to the flow of class discussions. Key themes and readings were set with flexibility; the end points of the module (including its learning outcomes) were not already determined. This required staying in a state of constant reflection and awareness, and also the courage to let

400   Erzsébet Strausz go of the safety net of a roadmap and decide on matters of content in an improvised, spontaneous fashion. Besides changing the default dramaturgy of course delivery, I also used specific exercises to retrain the senses themselves so that they can reach beyond the normalized regimes of perception and give bodies, voices, gestures a new sensibility. Listening took on a distinguished role in this regard. Institutions may hear a preselected, appropriately channeled pool of voices, but they do not listen. Lucia Farinati and Claudia Firth (2017, 16–7) point out that listening is different from the phenomenon of hearing and the instrumental use of senses that neoliberal government encourages. By learning how to listen—that is, to hear attentively and voluntarily—and, equally, how to be listened to, an ethical relationship can be cultivated that simultaneously engages both parties beyond already institutionalized frames, creating a space where solidarity and disagreement do not have to be opposing categories. Inspired by a practice Firth conducted at a workshop at the University of Warwick, I introduced a listening exercise into the structure of seminars that we repeated every week. The prompt was simple:

1. Arrange yourselves into pairs. Make sure to sit face to face with each other. 2. Decide who is going to speak first. 3. Take a moment to tune into the task, connect with your body. Observe the feelings, thoughts, sensations that may come to you. 4a. The one who is listening: give your full, undivided attention to the other (without responding or interjecting, even nodding or smiling). 4b. The one who is sharing: share anything that may come to you regarding what you read, how you made sense of it academically and at a personal level. 5. After four minutes (indicated by the instructor) draw your reflection to a close. Stay present for one minute and ponder what you have learned through the other by ­listening to them or the opportunity of having been listened to. 6. Change roles. 7. After four minutes take another minute of silence to process and integrate what you experienced. 8. Thank each other for sharing and listening, for all the points of reflection that this brief encounter made possible. 9. Continue the conversation freely for another ten minutes to respond to what you heard (if you wish), and finish the lines of thought that the timekeeping may have interrupted.

This exercise was meant to facilitate an insight into the work of attention through cultivating a skill of listening. All forms of expression were embraced—academic knowledge, observations, personal experience, stories heard from and narrated through others—including remaining silent. Being present to how the other made sense of the third object of the assigned texts, how they read themselves into someone else’s account not only opened up more personal and diverse ways to experience what it may mean to learn, but the act of witnessing, of holding space for whatever reflections may surface also brought us much closer to seeing, feeling the contemporary university’s quiet registers of normalization gently shift.

Pedagogy   401

Learning Nothing “So we did this listening exercise several times already. What do you make of it? What are you taking from it?” [Silence.] “To be honest, for some time I didn’t know what the whole purpose was. I wasn’t used to so much attention and I didn’t know what to do with it. It felt pretty uncomfortable, I must say, especially when I had nothing to say but the other was still there, looking at me! But then just a couple of days ago as I was chatting with friends I realized that they weren’t really paying attention. No one really did. They kept interrupting me and each other—and all of a sudden I missed being listened to. That’s when I understood why we were doing this in class and how normal it was that we just speak and don’t otherwise listen.” “Great. Do you want to do it one more time?” [Silence.] [Some of them slowly begin to arrange themselves into pairs.] The focus groups, I learned, intuitively continued the spirit of classes. When I read through the transcript—annotated by the leader of the groups who was a participant in the module—I was curious to find out what misperformance might have meant individually and collectively. Almost everyone commented on “the feeling, the facing the silence,” that in giving attention to the other “one minute always seemed . . . super long, not one minute but one hour,” but also that “nothing happens if there is silence,” even if in the beginning it may have been more challenging: Participant A: I’m freaking out when somebody is silent and just looking at me! Or even in class [group laughter] I could feel this pressure like please, somebody say something or I’m gonna run out of the room. I started appreciating it and sensing what she was trying to transfer, transmit to us with this theory of . . . slowness and how silence is appreciable. And I think as we discussed in class this way, it not only created a more calm, less competitive classroom atmosphere, but also made us more calm, not stressing, not arriving in class stressed, not like “oh my god, if [I] don’t say anything in this class, I’m gonna get a bad attendance grade.” . . . You could enter and sit down and not freak out and be sure you’re gonna hear something that is going to be interesting, but even if not, it’s not a problem.  [Everyone agrees.]

Social anxiety and performance pressure, that “everyone is expected to perform, to sound smart,” has tangibly lessened. Participant D said, “It felt like a burden was lifted from my shoulders [since] in some classes I really just think about what I am going to say literally for the entire class, just waiting for the right moment to say exactly what was in my mind.” Others felt something genuinely personal could unfold in this way, unlike in “other classes where it was mentioned ‘you can bring your personal experiences’ and ‘you know, you don’t have to stick too much to the literature,’ but I never felt that those comments were welcomed at all.” Participant B described their learning of the political implications of the practice in the following way: It really highlighted how people in a political sense are not given voice or the opportunity to express themselves, and how when there is a space to voice their thoughts, it can be

402   Erzsébet Strausz very . . . empowering. And it doesn’t have to be a theory or a hyper-theorized notion of “giving space” but it can be just, you know, listening to someone. . . . It was something I will take away for the rest of my life and I will make sure to give space to people and to listen to them and not to interrupt or silence them. . . . I think it connects to a lot of “power of representation” and “knowledge” and all these theoretical phrases. And . . . it’s just a very simple act, which we learnt via this practice.

And then I came across this eye-opening exchange: participant g:   In the end . . . “misperforming world politics” made much more sense. . . . Now

we experience ourselves and the surroundings of our lives in a different way. And seeing this as politics, seeing, understanding or getting different understanding of a politics, even like world politics, which is such a huge, bold word. participant h :  I’m sorry, that’s not you, but it still sounds quite vague to me. It’s a bit overall . . . would you please repeat the statement? participant g :  Yeah, like what is “world politics,” what do we study for international relations, what can we grasp in world politics . . . can we grasp politics? Actually? And I felt in this sense the course gave us a new perspective. How to see politics. To see even minor things of our daily lives as parts, as objects, subjects of politics. participant h :  So even minor parts of our daily lives, they matter, they are somehow politics. participant g : Yeah. participant h : So? participant g : Yeah. participant h :  So? [group laughs] I mean [raises voice, trying to explain themselves], what I want to say, the theory, it’s different—realism, states are the actors, anarchic system, blah blah . . . We can have a whole logical pathway. But now it seems like . . . yeah, little things in our daily life matter. And then? participant f :  You have to question everything about politics and you understand how you really can’t comprehend politics at all, ’cause there is always something that you have to question and to look at. participant h :  Yeah, you can question everything, right? Then it’s too general. Which means it’s nothing. participant f :  I think it’s not! participant h :  Like everything is politics? participant g :  I mean if theories would explain everything in the world to us, then we would not need to study them anymore. Then you can take them and use them to explain whatever you have. participant h :  Like everything is related to politics or every tiny thing in our daily life—it’s politics, it matters to politics—can explain what? participant g :  I just think if a theory or if several theories are not enough to make sense or explain some things. participant h :  Of course. participant g :  And I think in this sense if theory always tries to simplify something, Erzsébet’s course tried to make everything more complicated. For me it showed this complexity of . . . the world. And even minor things, they are part of the huge complexities. participant h :  So somehow she doesn’t ask for theories. participant g :  Hmmm, I don’t think so. Do you? Theories?

Pedagogy   403 On the surface of it, maybe Participant H hasn’t learned anything substantive during the whole module. At another register, I could barely contain my gratitude and joy at having seen proof, outside the classroom, beyond my control and authority, of how they taught each other and themselves. In a space of not-knowing (and some frustration), the work of attention gave rise to some new translations.

Note 1. (Mis)Performing World Politics (INTR5062) was first offered in the Department of International Relations at Central European University in the winter term of the academic year 2018–9. At the end of the module two focus groups were conducted with nine ­participants (of twenty registered students) whose feedback and reflections inform the “(Mis)Performing World Politics” and “Learning Nothing” sections of this chapter.

References Amsler, Sarah S. 2015. The Education of Radical Democracy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Anderson, Ben 2016. “Neoliberal Affects.” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 6: 734–53. Bala, Sruti, Milija Gluhovic, Hanna Korsberg, and Kati Röttger, eds. 2017. International Performance Research Pedagogies: Towards an Unconditional Discipline? Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ball, Stephen J. 2015. “Living the Neo-liberal University.” European Journal of Education 50, no. 3: 258–61. Berg, Maggie and Barbara K. Seeber. 2016. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Berg, Lawrence D., Edward H. Huijbens, and Henrik G. Larsen. 2016. “Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University.” Canadian Geographer 60, no. 2: 168–80. Bingham, Charles, Gert Biesta, with Jacques Rancière. 2010. Jacques Rancière: Education, Truth, Emancipation. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Brunila, Kristiina. 2016. “The Ambivalences of Becoming a Professor in Neoliberal Academia.” Qualitative Inquiry 22, no. 5: 386–94. Brunila, Kristiina, and Paola Valero. 2018. “Anxiety and the Making of Research(ing) Subjects in Neoliberal Academia.” Subjectivity 11, no. 1: 74–89. Cowden, Stephen, and Gurnam Singh, eds. 2013. Acts of Knowing: Critical Pedagogy in, against and beyond the University. London: Bloomsbury. Davies, Bronwyn. 2006. “Subjectification: The Relevance of Butler’s Analysis for Education.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27, no. 4: 425–38. Edkins, Jenny. 2013. “Novel Writing in International Relations: Openings for a Creative Practice.” Security Dialogue 44, no. 4: 281–97. Farinati, Lucia, and Claudia Firth. 2017. The Force of Listening. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press. Freire, Paulo. 1956. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. Gill, Rosalind. 2017. “Beyond Individualism: The Psychosocial Life of the Neoliberal University.” In Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, 193–216. Regina: University of Regina Press.

404   Erzsébet Strausz Giroux, Henry A. 2014. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Halberstam, Jack. 2013. “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons.” In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, 2-12. New York: Minor Compositions. Haskins, Cathleen. 2010. “Integrating Silence Practices into the Classroom: The Value of Quiet.” Encounter 23, no. 3: 15–20. Heidegger, Martin. 2004. What Is Called Thinking? Translated by G.  G.  Gray. New York: Harper Perennial. hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Inayatullah, Naeem. 2013. “Impossibilities: Generative Misperformance and the Movements of the Teaching Body.” In International Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice, edited by Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear, 150–7. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Lewis, Tyson E. 2012. The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière and Paulo Freire. New York: Continuum. Morrissey, John. 2015. “Regimes of Performance: Practices of the Normalised Self in the Neoliberal University.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 36, no. 4: 614–34. Moten, Fred, and Stephano Harney. 2004. “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text 22: 101–15. Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Withson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran. 2015. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4: 1235–59. Paras, Andrea. 2013. “Global Literacy and Reflections on What It Means to Learn.” Critical Studies on Security 1, no. 3: 365–7. Preves, Sharon, and Denise Stephenson. 2009. “The Classroom as Stage: Impression Management in Collaborative Teaching.” Teaching Sociology 37, no. 3: 245–56. Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2011. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso. Shahjahan, Riyad A. 2015. “Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 47, no. 5: 488–501. Strausz, Erzsébet. 2018. Writing the Self and Transforming Knowledge in International Relations: Towards a Politics of Liminality. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Vansieleghem, Nancy, and Jan Masschelein. 2012. “Education as Invitation to Speak: On the Teacher Who Does Not Speak.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 46, no. 1: 85–99.

Chapter 25

Scr ipts, Au thor it y, a n d Legiti m acy The View from China and Beyond Julia C. Strauss

It is a truism that performance permeates politics. Indeed one could argue that p ­ erformance exists in an ever fluctuating ratio with the more transactional, procedural, or bureaucratic aspects of politics: the more transactional, procedural, and bureaucratic, the less room there is for performance, and yet even these more transactional, procedural, and bureaucratic elements of politics are often softened, legitimated, or contested in terms of public performances. (The tax code that is applied when one pays one’s annual income tax is anything but performative, but the political contestation over the fairness of that code often will be.) Given how omnipresent performance is in politics, how to conceptualize its core elements has remained maddeningly elusive. Part of this murkiness simply reflects the overlapping and contested ways in which the concept has been understood by different academic networks. In the realm of political philosophy and semiotics, performance comes down to speech acts that “perform” an outcome (Austin 1975), which is closely related to discursive performativity (Butler 1997). This notion of performance is fundamentally different from the ways in which performance has been understood in anthropology and sociology, where it is tied to questions of ritual, the state, and meaning-making (Goffman 1967; Collins 2004; Turner 1969, 1980; Geertz 1980; Schechner 1985, 1993) or as an undertaking that projects culture and meaning between performer and audience (Alexander 2011). Those who focus on social movements and legislatures consider performance to be claim-making (Tilly 2006, 2008; Rai 2014), the generation of emotion (Polletta 2006), or improvisation (Esherick and Wasserstrom 1990). Empirically there are rich studies on the dramaturgy of the state (Berezin  2006), the specific dramas of elections (Alexander 2010; Fell  2007; Foucher 2007), and the assorted kinds of trial put on by the state (Cole 2009; Strauss 2020). Despite these differences in empirical subject matter, the anthropological and sociological traditions do converge broadly on the following understandings: performance in politics is a method of communication and meaning-making between political performer(s) and target audience(s); it is embodied in the person of the performer(s), saturated with symbols,

406   Julia C. Strauss dependent on a shared set of understandings between performer and audience for mutual intelligibility, and rife with risk. Performances can and do go badly; performers can be stiff and ill at ease; audiences can be bored, tune out, reject the performance with mockery and derision, or be moved to stage their own counterperformances. Rai (2014) suggests a framework in which authenticity and modes of representation framed in recognizable cultural narratives and symbols is what makes for effective and legitimate performances. But if it were that easy to pull off, most performances would be judged successful by their audiences, and in the real world most performances are at best average. What makes for effective political performance and why some work well in some contexts and fall flat in others are questions that for the most part remain unasked; it often seems that the best we can do is to focus on a particular performance, institution, or actors and analyze how and why a particular performer or performance did or did not work well (Alexander 2010). Even here much of the ongoing analysis is ceded to journalists (Marks 2019a, 2019b, 2019c; Knight 2018). Political performances, like their nonpolitical cousins in the world of theater, encompass both backstage and onstage action. Stages need to be prepared, scripts written, rehearsals conducted, lighting organized, audiences drawn in and seated and managed, costumes chosen and adjusted. The visible aspects of performance are embodied in the individual or group, engaging the voices, gestures, movement, and delivery of lines that constitute the specific performance. The key element that links the backstage to the performance onstage is the script. Script is an ambiguous term that in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary encompasses both the physical and transmitted “written text of a play, film, or broadcast” and the “social role or behaviour appropriate to particular situations that an individual absorbs through cultural influences and association with others.” Thus the script may be either a prepared core text or a mutually constituted set of assumptions between audience and performer. Often it is both, indicated by (variously) an arc of progression, a legitimating narrative, and a set of common assumptions between performer and audience that are signaled by references, visual cues, and the enacting of particular stories. Through the interplay of narrative and common assumptions, the political performance script condenses and simplifies complex realities into a contemporary version of a morality play that attempts to generate legitimacy as it makes claims on audiences to engender sympathy and agreement. Repeated and amplified through print, televisual, and social media, the reservoir of potential scripts is among society’s most potent sources of socialization and group identification: the narratives and meaning-making reified by families, subethnic groups, religious communities, schools, workplaces, and associational networks. The content of scripts is extremely variable, as the legitimating narratives and expectations that underpin them can and do differ by state, region, historical experience, culture, generation, class, and reference group. This leads to a thorny problem for analysis of political performance: if the stories, references, and assumptions shared by performer and audience are so inextricably bound up with their specific histories, cultures, and expectations, can scholars suggest framings that are illuminating beyond the empirics of the case in question? Scholars of theater and performance have usefully engaged examples of transnational cultural production, the impact of global phenomena such as neoliberalism on specific performances and the performative elements of violence (Wickstrom 2012; Anderson and Menon 2009), while social scientists and historians working on political performance have tended to bifurcate between abstract theory and deep analysis of individual cases. Are there ways to engage in comparison

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   407 of politics and performance scripts that yield generalizable insights without doing undue violence to the rich and context specifics that give us our best examples? While this is a tall order, for the remainder of this chapter I will suggest a taxonomy that lays out how it might be possible to think more systematically about how scripts draw from fundamentally different sources of legitimation and, further, how scripts attempt, with varying degrees of success, to appeal to different kinds of audiences. In so doing, I draw upon material drawn from world regions and political traditions of “maximal difference”: the contemporary People’s Republic of China, a one-party communist state under the increasingly authoritarian domination of Xi Jinping, and two of the world’s oldest, putatively best institutionalized industrial democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom. Perhaps unusually, I focus primarily on China while placing the UK and the USA together, because despite their very real differences, they have a great deal in common with each other when compared to China in terms of political performances. Politics and performance are integral to political leaders’ legitimacy claims in systems as divergent as the Chinese and Anglo-American. This is clearly so for representative democracies, as, after all, politicians must on a regular basis put on political performances convincing enough to persuade large numbers of people to vote for them, or at least refrain from voting for someone else. It is not nearly as obvious for an authoritarian system like China’s, under single-party domination, where legislatures are rubber-stamp affairs, elections are not contested, and what is permissible in terms of speech and action is increasingly heavily monitored and controlled. It is, however, worth remembering that China is the world’s oldest extant state, with a tradition of (authoritarian) governance that goes back thousands of years, with enough systemic resilience that it has repeatedly reintegrated as recognizably Chinese even after centuries-long periods of political fragmentation. Over the many dynastic incarnations of the imperial Chinese state in the past two millennia, questions of ritual and state dramaturgy, supported by a baseline assumption that if rulers ruled properly, “the people” would comply, have been at the heart of what the state did. In late imperial China, there was no more important state office than the Board of Rites, no more important state ritual than the emperor’s conduct of the annual rites at the Temple of Heaven to reassert the natural order of the cosmos and a good harvest to guarantee the people’s welfare and subsistence. Even today, common colloquialisms in Chinese use dramaturgic imagery. An individual assuming political power shang tai (mounts the stage) in an explicit reference to the raised platforms that emperors sat on. A different, slightly cynical expression creates distance from the external manifestations of political performance—that political leaders simply zuoxiu (put on a show), the homophone xiu replicating the English word “show.” (Fell  2007) If metaphors of political performance continue to so permeate common speech, political performances clearly matter. In order to comparatively analyze scripts in politics and performance in political systems this different, I suggest that we address the following two sets of general questions by laying out the typologies in tables 25.1 and 25.2. The first focuses on the script itself and the second on what the script attempts to effect in terms of its target audience(s). When we consider the script itself, there are two subsidiary organizing questions. First, does the script tell a fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic story? For example, does the script invoke heroic triumph over adversity due to hard work, fate, or the cleverness of the protagonist? To use the neo-Jungian classification system of The Seven Basic Plots (Booker 2004), is the underlying plot one of rags to riches, journey and return, or the quest? Or is the underlying story

408   Julia C. Strauss Table 25.1  Typology 1: The Script Itself Script Exposition The Story

Reason and “science”

Emotion and “the heart”

Optimistic Pessimistic

Enlightenment and progress Dystopia

Melodrama, triumph over adversity Decline and fall

Table 25.2  Typology 2: Script and Audience Intent of Script Type of Script

Unity

Division

Closed Open

Formal speeches, legal rulings Mass demonstrations

Partisan rallies Violent counterdemonstrations

one of pessimism—a jeremiad that harps on decline and fall (Anker  2014)? The second question focuses on how the script conveys the story: Is the script developed through recourse to facts, logic, reason, and the power of science and technology, or does it aim to speak directly to “the heart” by engaging the emotions, invoking moral virtue, and possibly tipping into melodramatic excess (Gledhill 2018)? The second typology turns to the ways in which the script is imbricated with its target audience(s). Is the script integrative, seeking to unify the largest possible number of an imagined audience? Or does it aim to stiffen resolve within a select audience of likely supporters by exacerbating social fissures and dividing prospective larger audiences? The second element considers whether the script is closed, with audiences in the passive position of receiving the script, or whether it lends itself to improvisational openness, amendment from participatory audiences, and as such to the possible emergence of counterscripts.

Optimistic Stories and Unifying Scripts: The “China Dream” At first blush, it would seem that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China would not be nearly as exercised about the performative elements of politics as are politicians in democracies, who are subject to relentless media scrutiny and are tasked with performing for nearly nonstop electoral cycles. This view, however, would be incorrect: the very lack of open political contention, critical journalism, and contested elections that appear to indicate regime stability may in practice simply drive criticism underground and deprive political leaders of important feedback. This in turn leads the Chinese Communist Party to obsessively focus on regime stability, which can be guaranteed only by finding ways to generate legitimacy and connect with the people while suppressing the open expression of different interests. Chinese political leaders care about

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   409 convincing scripts and political performances at least as much as do those in the industrial democracies. Indeed they might well care more, as the stakes are not merely winning or losing an election but the Chinese Communist Party’s continued monopoly on political power and the potential stability of the system itself. In order to generate the necessary scripts to legitimate itself and its continued iron grip on a one-party political system, the Chinese Communist Party characteristically grounds itself in a long accepted historical discourse of victimhood and humiliation while holding out the promise of far better, with rising domestic standards of living. The victim discourse that juxtaposes pride in China’s great civilization and five-thousand-year history with the shame engendered by “One Hundred Years of Humiliation” at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialists is encoded into the foundational DNA of the People’s Republic of China. One of Mao Zedong’s (1949) most famous political performances inscribed this moment in perpetuity, when he stood at the symbolic center of the country, Tiananmen, the front entrance to the imperial Forbidden City, to proclaim the establishment of “New China” with the stirring invocation that China had finally “stood up” (see also Wang 2008). The sharp revolutionary break with the past that “standing up” presumes is of course predicated on the assumption that China was previously “lying down” and that it is only due to the superior capacity of the Chinese Communist Party to speak for and embody national aspiration that movement from defeated prostration could be transformed into proud verticality. “Standing up” in addition quickly developed a set of connotations that went beyond casting off past weaknesses. Once the People’s Republic had recovered from the Korean War (when, much to the world’s astonishment for a state that had been so weak for so long, it fought the world’s then one and only superpower to a standstill, thus putting a definitive end to the “Century of National Humiliation”), it began to develop a set of claims to take its place in the world as a leading power regionally and internationally—a China that does things differently, and possibly better, than other leader countries.. While Mao and the early leaders of New China in the 1950s and 1960s might have focused on the domestic transition to socialism and the achievement of revolutionary communism rather than rapid development through participating in a capitalist world economy on the basis of comparative advantage, there is no doubting the continuity of this set of legitimating claims: we are separate, we do it better, and we will take our rightful place in leadership in world socialism based on the example of what we have done domestically in our adaptation of Marxism-Leninism (Strauss 2009). Thus in the Mao era, national rejuvenation was predicated on the achievement of revolutionary socialism, but—crucially—China’s claims to international leadership in the communist and the nonaligned world were explicitly linked to what China modeled domestically and claimed to achieve successfully. Then as now China’s domestic successes and its claims to be a model nation and international leader were two sides of the same coin. Forty years on, China’s domestic and international contexts have changed beyond recognition. Far from being the impoverished, insecure, and internationally isolated country of the 1960s and 1970s, China is now at the beating heart of the world’s capitalist system; its rapid development has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty, its borders are more secure than they have been at any time in the past 150 years, and it has emerged as a significant development actor in its own right. Amid these profound changes, the Chinese Communist Party has contained, at times shakily, as was the case in 1989, the emergence of any credible alternative to its dominance of state and society. And, given the inevitable social tensions that have arisen in the headlong rush to rapid and highly unequal development, it has been faced with having to generate support from a younger generation that has no memory of the political chaos and deprivations of the prerevolutionary era. By the mid-2000s

410   Julia C. Strauss even Party theoreticians occasionally openly admitted that the old rhetoric of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” caused many to tune out, requiring new narratives to inspire younger generations (Ferdinand 2016). This has been done by repackaging the foundational legitimating claim that the Chinese Communist Party is the guarantor of material prosperity and the reemergence of the Chinese nation with the notion of the “ChinaDream.1” Dream imagery is, of course, pervasive in neoliberal mass culture; it is part and parcel of individual advancement, hard work, self-actualization and/or success, and as such it ties in neatly with rags-to-riches and quest scripts, from the exhortations that secondary school students receive to the official slogans of widely televised talent shows, to the popular designation of the children of non-legal immigrants who have grown up in the United States as “Dreamers”. Dreams equally exclude the majority who aren’t quite lucky enough, quite well-resourced enough, or quite well-connected enough. Or, in the case of the 2019 Eurovision song contest held in Israel, Palestinians were not recognized as having their own national state, and were therefore excluded from the “Dream”.. The Dream in China is constructed quite differently, and it so pervades China’s official discourse and is so intimately linked to the person of Xi Jinping as China’s paramount leader that it is worth considering the rhetorical ground it has staked out as an essential part of regularly performed scripts. The Dream that has since become part of the signature rhetoric of the People’s Republic of China was first articulated by Xi very shortly after he was confirmed as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the People’s Republic of China in 2012, when he mused publicly about the “great renewal [fuxing] and ‘Dream’ [meng] of the Chinese nation.” While much of the Western commentary focuses on the vagueness, impracticality, or internal tensions within the Dream (Garrick and Bennett 2018; Fallows  2013; Economist 2013), I suggest that the Chinese variant of the Dream is both consistent and derives considerable legitimacy from a set of antecedents that are not only venerable by the standards of the Chinese Communist Party but in fact transcend the Party. There are two ways in which Xi’s earliest statements on the Dream draw upon legitimating rhetorics that reach back to well before the establishment of the People’s Republic. The modernizing discourse of fuxing (“renewal” or “rejuvenation”) has been used by a wide range of political figures, from the far right to the far left, since the time of Sun Yat-sen, and with minor linguistic alterations has been an important part of reform-era China’s official discourse since the 1980s (Wang 2014). The second lies in the “dreamworld” of the early years of Marxist-Leninist experiment in the Soviet Union, whose notions of mass utopianism that so influenced the early generation of the Chinese Communist Party (Buck-Morss 2000) are now being rebooted under the very different conditions of twenty-first-century globalization. The contemporary core of the Dream lies in its elision between the interests and aspirations of individuals for a materially secure and better life and the interests of the collective nation as defined by the Chinese Communist Party. While this might seem to be nothing more or less than the self- justification of an authoritarian regime (It would say that, wouldn’t it?), this statist, top-down assumption inverts an idea that came into circulation a century ago, during the liberal May Fourth period of the late 1910s and early 1920s, when student-led mass protests in 1919 demonstrated against weak, corrupt, unresponsive republican-era warlord governments that sold out the country to foreign interests with secret deals. At this juncture, young liberal intellectuals assumed that the “enlightenment” of the individual would necessarily lead

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   411 to the “enlightenment” of the nation (Chow 1960). Things turned out to not be nearly that straightforward, and ultimately a combination of civil war, imperial encroachment, and the continued weakness of China’s warlord governments led to the rise of the monocratic, didactic party-state in the republican-era Guomindang of the 1930s and the infinitely stronger Chinese Communist Party–state after 1949. It also exemplifies well the fundamental difference in the starting points of political philosophy in China and Anglo-America. Chinese politicians have long assumed that individual and familial preferences and goals necessarily align with the collectivity of the nation (as well as the government and single party that claim to rule on behalf of same). Centrist and right-wing American politicians, on the other hand, posit quite the opposite: that individual and familial interests can be guaranteed only by strong civil liberties and lack of interference by the state. In the words of one official summary, the “Dream” “embod[ies] achieving prosperity for the country, renewal of the nation and happiness for the citizens [as] . . .only when the country is doing well, can the nation and people do well . . . emphasiz[ing] that the Chinese Dream in essence means the dream of the people. The Chinese Dream is to let people enjoy better education, more stable employment, higher incomes, a greater degree of social security, better medical and health care, improved housing conditions and a better environment. It is to let our children grow up well, have satisfactory jobs and live better lives” (China Daily 2014, emphasis added). Subsequent elaborations of the China Dream have linked it firmly to older rhetorics that assert China’s distinctive position in the family of nations. Textbooks for cadre political study situate the China Dream within a multiplicity of other national “dreams,” but close readings of these texts make clear that lurking not too far below the surface obeisance to different “splendid national dreams” is the “conviction that the Chinese one is superior” (Ferdinand 2016, 948). Thus the China Dream draws on a range of tropes as old as China’s attempts to modernize and as recent as the Chinese Communist Party’s current insistence on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “becoming a moderately well-off society” by the year 2021. Specific as the Dream appears to be, it is also an exemplar of a much more capacious and general genre—that of triumph over adversity, which is often encapsulated in a rags-toriches narrative. Western, and particularly American, versions of triumph over adversity are enormously influenced by the Horatio Alger narratives that begin and end with the poor, self-reliant, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, hardworking, (male) individual who, as long as he worked hard enough and exhibited the right kind of moral character, would, with a little bit of well-timed luck, triumph over adversity and get rich. In the Chinese variant the efforts and hard work of the individual (and typically his family) are metaphorically aggregated into that of the nation, which is represented and led by the Chinese Communist Party. Nevertheless the underlying scripts follow the same optimistic arc of rags to riches, undergirded by a resolute belief that hard work and sacrifice in the here and now will result in a better, more secure and respectable future. Consider the following quotes, taken from an editorial in the Chinese Communist Party’s flagship ­theoretical journal, Qiushi (2013): The victory of the people’s revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party thoroughly concluded the miserable history of China’s domestic troubles and foreign invasion and its long-standing weakness of extreme poverty, thoroughly changed the future and fate of the

412   Julia C. Strauss Chinese people and the Chinese nation, and opened up the Chinese nation’s incessant development and expansion, and its historic march towards a magnificent rejuvenation. Realizing the Chinese dream requires arduous work and struggle. Observations of historical countries and families shows that success comes from hard work and thrift, while destruction comes from luxury and extravagance. . . . The basic national condition of being in the primary stage of Socialism, the difference between GDP per capita and average global levels, the position of being a developing country, all require our arduous work and struggle.

Nor has the notion of the China Dream abated in the six years since it was first articulated by Xi.; The theme of the 2017 National Party Congress, which lays out the Chinese Communist Party’s program for the next five years, was “Remain true to our original aspiration and keep our mission firmly in mind, hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, secure a decisive victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, strive for the great success of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era, and work tirelessly to realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation” (Xinhua  2017, emphasis added). When we look to how the Dream is embodied in performance rather than invoked and elaborated as a written script, what the Chinese state permits to come into public view is extremely limited. There are two kinds of performances that the state puts on, and despite their differences in staging, costuming, and form, both are heavily scripted. The first type is the closed and formal performance that takes place during the major meetings of China’s formal party and state organizations: the Chinese Communist Party (through the National Party Congress once every five years), the ostensible supreme legislature (the National People’s Congress [NPC], annually), and the state’s recognized consultative body (the National People’s Political Consultative Congress, which meets in tandem with the NPC). These bodies are fractally replicated at the provincial, municipal, and county levels of government. Even though in principle the NPC has the power to change the Constitution and is the supreme organ of lawmaking for the nation, in practice its agenda and the legislation brought before it are completely controlled by the Standing Committee of the NPC, which is staffed entirely by leading figures in the Chinese Communist Party. No legislation is drawn up by any other body than the Chinese Communist Party, no legislation put to it does not pass, and the greatest power the NPC has is to withhold active support through abstention. The proceedings at the NPC are to an unusual degree little other than a performance of legitimacy: the Chinese Communist Party and the NPC act in concert in the pretense that its activities are consequential. But precisely because the performance is what there is at the NPC, and because this annual meeting receives widespread media coverage, its style and substance matter. Xi’s (2018a) closing speech to the NPC in March 2018, recorded by China Global Television Network and posted to YouTube, complete with a simultaneous English translation, is typical of this kind of formal performance of the Chinese Communist Party. The venue in which the NPC convenes is enormous, a clear architectural descendent both of the high Stalinism of the 1950s and a much lengthier tradition of the awe-inspiring scale of imperial capitals, most importantly in the Forbidden City, just across the sacred political space of Tiananmen Square from the Great Hall of the People. Even when they zoom out to the maximum possible extent, the television cameras cannot take in the sheer size of the

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   413 interior. Slow pans from left to right and sweeps from near the stage to the back of the hall convey only part of the scale. The several efforts made by the camera operators to capture the entirety of the interior in one shot are awkward (the two top tiers of the hall are omitted entirely) and reduce the size of the delegates to amorphous blobs. The delegates—nearly three thousand of them—are fixed and immobile in their seats, a captured audience whose role is to receive instruction from the podium and to clap in unison at demarcated break points in the speech. It is unclear whether there are signals from the stage when clapping should commence and cease, or whether the delegates are simply attuned to the cue of breaks in the speechifying, but the sheer decibel level of three thousand pairs of hands clapping drowns out everything else, and, remarkably, it ends in unison. The delegates are overwhelmingly male, middle-aged, and dressed as Xi is, in nondescript gray suits. (There is an occasional woman and a sprinkling of non-Han-minority delegates, often female, who stand out in their colourful traditional costumes.) Apart from the necessary clapping at the right points, the audience is close to inert. As the camera zooms in and pans across the lower tier of the hall, many delegates are captured on camera looking down at their desks, possibly at a written version of the speech. Others appear to be struggling to stay awake. Still others are taking notes. None appears to be moved or animated by either the content or the delivery of what is being said. But movement and animation are quite beside the point: this is a performance of asserted legitimacy and compliance with those assertions. Xi himself is the focal point of the entire proceeding. Wearing a featureless gray suit and backed by celebratory and revolutionary bright red, he speaks in ponderous platitudes, most of which would have been closely studied by the delegates before and during the meeting. The key points will be reviewed in the media coverage of the event, and it is likely that the entirety of the speech will be published for later political study. There are no surprises in either the content and delivery of the speech or the reactions of the delegates. The speech invokes China’s proud history, its past glorious scientific achievements, the fundamental unity of the nation, the aspirations of its hardworking people, the importance of the individual and national China Dream, and the Chinese Communist Party’s continued role in creating a moderately well-off society in which everyone enjoys a good standard of living (Xi 2018a). This is a performance that reasserts the authority of the Chinese Communist Party in what is by now a comfortable script of guaranteeing the Dream for the Chinese people and nation. It is also closed in every respect. The Great Hall of the People is closed to the public: only those vetted and chosen by the Chinese Communist Party as delegates (along with the wings of the state in charge of backstage organization and media dissemination) are permitted inside. The speech has been written far in advance and merely needs to be read. The individuals in the audience have only two functions: to receive the speech quietly and to clap on cue in unison. There are no interviews, no questions, no contention. Even those who have clearly tuned out or are falling asleep do so unobstrusively. The formality of this venue and the completely closed nature of the proceedings stand in juxtaposition with the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt, as part of a growing cult of personality around Xi, to present him as a more accessible figure through his inspection tours at various venues throughout China, accompanied by cameras, photo ops, and setpiece speeches among the people. Typical is Xi’s (2018b) tour of China’s most important technological “triumph over nature,” the Three Gorges Dam, in the spring of 2018. The Three Gorges Dam is a high-modernist Party-state project to showcase its engineering

414   Julia C. Strauss prowess and domination of nature. When internal controversies were permitted in China in a period of unusual political openness in the late 1980s, the creation of the Three Gorges Dam was also a subject of bitter contention and debate because of adverse environmental impacts and doubts about the longevity and safety of the dam itself. Unsurprisingly, there is no whisper of this background in Xi’s carefully stage-managed walkabout of 2018. The first frame shows a shot of Xi, attired in a casual dark blue zip-up jacket of the sort that middle-class, middle-aged men wear to avoid standing out while keeping comfortable. The camera stays steady as Xi raises his binoculars slowly to take in a scene right out of a traditional landscape painting: the misty beauty of the still lake water with mountains in the far distance. The film then cuts to the elongated rectangle of the gray power station, which is enlivened with a large splash of red from the national flag. The action moves back to Xi, who is standing in the middle of a circle of dam workers and holding a microphone. His speech is delivered in plain language that emphasizes China’s self-reliance in innovation to become a world leader in technology and the implied moral virtue in “overcoming all difficulties on our own.” Xi links pride in the country (for making such an achievement possible) with his pride in these individual workers (for making such an achievement possible) to “work together in the same spirit” with “more than 1.3 billion Chinese working together to achieve the China Dream.” In marked contrast to the depersonalized mass delegates in the closedoff inside space of the Great Hall of the People, this is a speech that takes place in the semi-outdoor space of a partially covered courtyard. The workers are dressed in blue safety coveralls, suggesting a workforce that gets its hands dirty, but the camera is close enough to them to focus on individual faces and small groups. Arranged in a loose semicircle around Xi, some seem to be leaning in, and many break out in broad smiles, with relaxed body language and nodding heads as Xi speaks. The applause that breaks out when Xi concludes appears to be spontaneous and genuine. The video concludes with overhead pans of the dam itself and the five-level ship lock to the sound of swelling strings. In this obviously edited performance, the setting and the form are clearly different from the Great Hall of the People, with its nearly immobile seated thousands and Xi reading from a perfectly prepared physical script. However, the key markers of the underlying psychological script are identical. The achievements and aspirations of individuals (in this case technical workers and engineers at the dam) are conflated with the Chinese nation, and both are identified with the Chinese Communist Party as embodied by Xi in the China Dream. In this script the narrative is an optimistic one with a tinge of melodramatic excess in its insistence on unity, progress, and triumph. The moral importance of hard work and sacrifice is again underscored, as is faith in self-reliance and technological achievements to solve all problems in a vision that is highly integrative. Individuals integrate with nation, nation with state, state with Party, Party with Paramount Leader, and all with science, technology, and modernity through hard work and sacrifice. There is no room here for the articulation of contention, organized interests, or dissent. Even the less formal setting of the Three Gorges Dam courtyard allows no opening for improvisation. Contention, argument, disquiet, disagreement about goals and the ways to meet them must inevitably occur backstage. The very consistency of the script and the political performances that embody the script in public space simultaneously presume and demand an imagined unity of individual, nation, party, and state.

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   415

Contrasting Scripts: Jeremiad, Division, and Improvisation in Anglo-American Political Performance In the political settings of the United States and the United Kingdom, the confluence of an open press, social media, and electoral cycles, with a president (Donald Trump) and prime minister (Boris Johnson) who are both aggressive and avowed convention-busters combine to produce virtually nonstop political performances. Although the political settings of the United Kingdom and the United States differ, in terms of political performances they have significantly more in common with each other than either does with authoritarian, unity-minded China: the US Congress and the UK Parliament provide venues that allow for, and even invite, robust counterperformances that are widely reported and televised live. Alternative scripts of legitimating appeal play out in a variety of public venues, from talk shows to mass demonstrations, and in aggregate the free press continues to critique and satirize political performances. Despite their differences in personal presentation as the self-made successful businessman (Trump) and the clever jolly maverick (Johnson), and the different institutional settings of a presidential and a parliamentary system, the scripts that Trump and Johnson invoke in their public political performances are striking in their taxonomic similarities with each other and their differences with Xi’s. Trump and Johnson are both openly contemptuous of any notion of technocracy, the legitimating claims that scientific facts or expertise might have, or even evidence in plain sight that reveals a reality different from the one they wish to promote. Trump continues to insist that the crowds at his inauguration were “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary; as of this writing, Johnson’s stage-managed tour of a National Health Service hospital ended in disaster when he was confronted by an irate parent over NHS waiting times and denied that the press was present despite the clear presence of BBC cameras by his side (Robertson and Farley 2017; Mason and Weaver  2019). Both resort to a jeremiad script of current decline that needs urgent rectification through exclusion of the foreign and the Other and stark division between their supporters as the authentic (who are going to lead to national rejuvenation) and their opponents, who are really more foreign than authentic. Both deploy condensed, evocative slogans. Johnson’s (2019) mantra of “taking back control” of national sovereignty and invoking a Churchillian “battle cry for Britain” against the “doubters and doomsters” who question his methods in leaving the European Union call explicitly on a national myth of Britain standing alone during World War II. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is even more condensed and evocative. Indeed it doesn’t even need a slogan: simply donning a squarish red baseball cap or tweeting a photoshopped picture of leading Democrats in a hijab or turban suffices (Sargent  2020). Despite their respective personal privilege and wealth, both have represented themselves as outsiders ready to shake up the Establishment, and both are keenly attuned to the politics of grievance and mass populism. Both pursue electoral advantage (in which winner-takes-all at the constituency or state level can and does result in electoral success without a majority of votes) with a script of division: outsiders

416   Julia C. Strauss (foreigners, liberals, the “naysayers” and “Remoaners,” and all those with differing views of what community is constituted of) vs. a pure “us”; political opponents, judges, and unfavorable news outlets as “enemies of the people” in which “we” speak for “the people.” Both are deeply polarizing, cheerfully ignore long-held norms of restraint and reciprocity in governance, and have proven willing to push the boundaries of executive privilege further than has any peacetime president or prime minister in recent memory. In combination with fragmented oppositions, winner-take-all political systems, voter apathy, and (in the United States) gerrymandering and voter suppression, these scripts of division, exclusion, and imagined national purity have done surprisingly well in their goals of winning and retaining power. What neither has managed to do, however, is establish and maintain a script that either crowds out other, contending scripts or contains raucous pushback from public demonstrations and mockery. In the United States the day after Trump’s inauguration, the largest demonstration in US history occurred on the same spot, with close to half a million marchers wearing pink “pussy hats,” symbolizing a riposte to Trump’s earlier comments about women (Chenowith and Pressman 2017). And in the United Kingdom, abetted by a sympathetic Speaker, the House of Commons responded to Johnson’s provocative prorogation of Parliament by pushing through extraordinary legislation to prevent the executive from crashing out of the EU without its explicit agreement. Rowdy scenes erupted when opposition MPs sought to prevent the Speaker from leaving his chair, deliberately reenacting a high point in the struggle between Parliament and the executive in the run-up to the Civil War of the seventeenth century, when parliamentarians sat on the Speaker to prevent the closure of Parliament (Lyons and Proctor 2019). Thus, try as they might, the noisy pluralism of open contention in the United Kingdom and the United States prevents prime ministers and presidents from imposing a unitary and integrative script. Since public appearances can, by definition, never be fully closed off, there is always the potential for loud demonstrators to disrupt the smooth flow of outdoor speeches. Public walkabouts, no matter how well stage-managed, always run the risk of cameras capturing politicians off guard in the presence of angry members of the public who speak uncomfortable truths to power.

Scripts, Authority and Legitimacy: Different Stories, Varied Intents The contrast between these scripts—both real and metaphorical—in China and AngloAmerica is stark. Both systems produce leaders who wish to stay in power and connect with the people, but they do so with profoundly different scripts: optimistic rags-to-riches vs. jeremiad decline, faith in technology vs. denial of facts, and assumptions of linked unity and integration vs. division between “ins” and “outs.” The Chinese script(s) are closed even when they are performed in different venues with different staging and characters; the Anglo-American ones are much more open and contended, most pointedly when a prime minister’s televised address is disrupted by the clear chants of demonstrators just off camera. This lack of control over a unified script has led to a president and a prime minister who assume a jeremiad decline and a promised better future that is realizable only by the current incumbent on the basis of exclusion and division. When we turn to other venues—elsewhere in Europe, in the developing countries of Africa, or in societies with strong traditions of leftist populism in Latin America—we might ask how their scripts align: are they more

Scripts, Authority, and Legitimacy   417 like the Chinese, more like the Anglo-American, or do they exhibit a different mix of traits entirely? The substance of the scripts, the type of narrative assumptions embedded in the scripts, the ways in which the scripts engage with their prospective audiences, and how the scripts are modified over time are likely to differ, but differ in broadly patterned ways. Future investigation into these specifics might well be the way forward for better understanding of legitimacy and political performance in comparative context.

Note 1. The term in Chinese is “Zhongguo Meng”, which is translated into English as either “the China Dream” or “the Chinese Dream”. I prefer “the China Dream” to “the Chinese dream” because the latter implies the dream of all those of Chinese ethnicity, while the latter suggests restriction to the People’s Republic of China.

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Chapter 26

Politica l L ea dership “Saving the Show” John Uhr

Political leadership is an established research field with considerable recent interest in several aspects of leadership performance, usually relying on research categories relating to the public rhetoric of political leaders (see, e.g., Uhr 2014, 2015, 2018). The academic field of performance studies includes many significant examinations of leadership performance, often relying on more specific aspects of the stagecraft and dramaturgy evident in widespread social roles, including many nongovernmental roles external or even opposed to established political authority (see, e.g., Schechner 2003, 2006). Neither field has an established political theory about leadership performance, despite the important role of political performers in “saving the show”—to use Goffman’s (1971, 207) revealing phrase. This chapter draws on both fields to frame an unusual political theory about the nature of leadership performance in contemporary political societies. I recover neglected themes about leadership performance originally articulated by two political thinkers deeply interested in the role of public performance by political leaders: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Walter Bagehot. Despite the relative absence of either theorist in contemporary studies of political performance, both can help strengthen contemporary appraisals of leadership performance. The two thinkers evaluate leadership performance quite differently, using different performance standards. The eighteenth-century philosopher Rousseau devised a moral critique of modern liberalism, including a detailed evaluation of underdeveloped modes of leadership performance typical of modern liberal political regimes. Rousseau’s (1978) alternative leadership morality sketched in On the Social Contract remains a powerful source for contemporary analysis of the limits of liberalism and of the options for more egalitarian, republican alternatives. The nineteenth-century British reformer Walter Bagehot (1963) effectively responds with a political theory in The English Constitution, defending and justifying the progressive morality of leadership performance required by liberal regimes as they modernize beyond their conservative traditions—while at the same time rejecting republican opposition, with all its supposedly unruly performances by egalitarian political critics of the established regime. Those studying leadership performance can greatly enrich their theoretical understanding by reflecting on the frameworks of Rousseau, the external critic of liberal modernity, and

422   John Uhr Bagehot, the internal modernizer of Britain as an exemplar of modern liberalism. Both are modernizers of systems of political leadership: Rousseau looking beyond conventional liberalism for missing types of political performance; Bagehot more cautiously nudging British political leaders toward more progressive forms of liberal politics.

Performance Frameworks Western political theory begins, as it were, with a strong focus on the public performance of political leaders. Thucydides’s influential History is an outstanding example, with many case studies of the public presence and behavior of leaders responding to conflicting community demands about competing public interests. Leaders work within the constraints of their political communities. Even outstanding leaders like Pericles manage burdens of public accountability, reflecting the force of active citizens who can expand or confine leaders’ public authority. Pericles’s funeral oration marks out a leader’s expansive self-understanding of his public role (see History, 2, 34–46). The people’s later attempt to impeach Pericles illustrates the surprising performance of citizens in limiting the power of their political leaders (see History, 2, 59–65). Within contemporary political theory, many of the most insightful accounts of performance relationships between political leaders and citizens relate to classical theories of politics and philosophy. An outstanding example is J. Peter Euben (1939–2018), who wrote often on “democracy, ancient and modern,” including in such edited works as Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, which contains important studies of the role of political performance on display in classical Greek drama, as well as Euben’s (1986, 1-42; see also Euben 1993, 2002) lengthy introductory essay. Arlene Saxonhouse (2019), who has written extensively on Thucydides and many Greek dramatists, argues that scholars like Euben “bring philosophy into the streets” by using political and literary resources “from which they might develop a radical perspective on the present.” Euben’s approach to political theory was “to read philosophy as literature” so that apparently static texts like those of Plato revealed dynamic dramas among competing characters resembling those portrayed by Thucydides (Saxonhouse 2019, 3–5). Contemporary performance studies often draw on more recent sources when examining leadership performance. Richard Schechner (2003) cites the US sociologist Erving Goffman (1922–1982) as one of the primary drivers for the rise of current forms of performance studies. Goffman’s (1971, 28–82, 203–30, 232) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is an important contribution to “everyday” dramaturgy—understood by Goffman as “the arts of impression management” shaping the range of “performances” we engage in when relating to those “audiences” or “observers” we, “in our Anglo-American society,” want or have to face. Goffman’s relevance to studies of leadership comes from his recognition that most social actors attempt to take the lead in structuring relationships with their key audiences: “performances” devised by social actors are means to promote the style of their form of “impression management.” Goffman uses political examples of leadership like the “sadly enlightened showmen such as Marcus Aurelius or Hsun Tzu” or senior civil servants who act as “statesmen in disguise” (29, 33–4, 61–2, 237–8). Goffman defines a “performance” as that activity or “front” which influences audiences or observers (26, 32–4). Leaders in all

Political Leadership   423 walks of life employ “a kind of ‘rhetoric of training’ ” to enable them to take their part in managing whatever “ceremony” or “celebration” they help lead through a “mask of manner” (45, 55, 65). Of special importance is Goffman’s (1971, 56) claim that many social leaders exercise their power through forms of mismanagement: such deceptive leaders can mislead when they promote a belief to audiences that they are “related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case.” The study of leadership performance has to acknowledge that some examples of leadership, including political leadership, are effective even though they are deceptive. Goffman’s initial chapter on performances includes a long section on misrepresentation, examining where audiences are “duped and misled”—often skillfully by leaders who “dissemble, deceive, or defraud” their followers (65–73). This theme of misleading allows Goffman to reflect at some length on “the moral connection” that, in his professional view, ought to feature prominently in studies of leadership so that analysts can help their own audiences discern differences between socially responsible and socially irresponsible types of leadership (e.g., 24, 67, 233, 241–3). His case studies help readers learn to see strengths and weaknesses in a “participant’s dramaturgical problems of presenting . . . before others” through their “stage-craft and stage management” (26). The title of my chapter comes from Goffman’s concluding scheme of the “arts of impression management” which help in “saving the show”: a scheme that is broad enough to account for arts employed by audiences as well as performers to promote “the performers’ show,” even by having audiences redirect or rescript ineffective yet improvable performers. The important point here is that studies of leadership performance should include studies of audiences or observers capable of reforming the performance of their supposed leaders, as well as the conventional or commonplace studies of leaders whose performance “influences” or “impresses” their relevant audiences (Goffman 1971, 207–30). Leadership studies by political scientists often lack the elan of leadership as studied by representative scholars of performance studies. Three brief examples can illustrate the comparable merit of theater-derived studies of political leadership. First, Diana Taylor’s (2003) remarkably astute article “Bush’s Happy Performative” shows many of the ways that students of leadership performance can use “the performative” (“language that acts”), as originally formulated by the philosopher J.  L.  Austin (1962)—with “happy” performatives carrying through successfully and “unhappy” performatives failing through procedural error. Taylor’s (2003, 5–8) grim account of US President George W. Bush’s public addresses relating to the 2003 Iraq War notes how successful such claims for war can be: “The whole Shock and Awe package is clearly a performative, intended to produce the very intimidation it announces.” Yet Taylor also asserts that this presidential performer did not necessarily win over all of the audience, and she hopes that many of her sympathizers would strive “to de-authorize Bush’s performative.” Taylor’s engaged writing invites readers to share her campaign to “answer power’s smug and self-referencing performative with a more popular and truly democratic performative of our own” (Taylor, 2003, 7). Second, Schechner (2003, 2008) has made a number of incisive contributions to the field of leadership performance. A good example is “America’s Leading Actor at Work,” which is a critique of US President Ronald Reagan (Schechner 1986). Schechner sees Reagan as “the director as well as the principal actor in the presentation” of his policies, which “are staged rather than debated.” As a “master of rhetoric,” Reagan illustrates that this form of public persuasion is “an ancient theatrical art that, like all tools, can be used for good or ill.”

424   John Uhr Schechner quotes extensively from Aristotle’s Rhetoric to support his case that the practice of rhetoric remains the game of making audiences (quoting Aristotle) “believe a thing apart from any proof of it.” Reagan “makes himself look dumb, like just another regular guy, so that he can slip out of the really hard questions.” He is thus “the quietest demagog in American history” (Schechner 1986, 5–8). A third example is the research of Christopher Balme (2014), who sees theater itself as a form of public leadership facilitating either regime support or political opposition according to the preferences and skill of those participating in “the theatrical public sphere” of the modern West. If conventional politics is a form of theater, then so too mainstream theater can be a form of politics, where those performing as writers, directors, and actors can have impacts on the political understanding of their audiences. Balme’s critical history of modern stagecraft highlights the political dimensions of civil society and the place of theatrical performances in shaping public opinion. The study of political leadership can thus reach beyond the stilted theatrics of representative assemblies to the wider public sphere, with its diverse range of theatrical activities—including agonistic (i.e., contestatory) spectacles with subversive political potential. Balme’s account of “an agonistic public sphere” helps us see how modern Western theater experiences can reflect classical Greek tendencies, making the theater “deeply imbricated in the wider complexities of the polis”—with the understanding that “an agon generates and reformulates publicity” by shaping and reshaping “forms of citizen participation in the state” (29, 31). Also important is Balme’s (2014, 36) close attention to Rousseau’s “anti-theatrical tract . . . which questioned the very institution of theatre.” Rousseau’s (1960) public letter to D’Alembert on the theater circulated in the late 1750s; I suggest it is a precursor to Rousseau’s later Social Contract, in which he formulated his revised theory of leadership performance (see also Hubner  1992, 180–6; Woodruff  2008, 230–1). Balme urges readers to pay close attention to Rousseau’s critique of theater because this work reframes liberal perspectives on appropriate civic performance by outlining an alternative approach that is intended to recover republican civic virtues threatened by permissive liberal tolerance of theatrically entertaining examples of individual and civic vice. The introduction by Bloom (1960) in his translation notes Rousseau’s deep interest in the political education of modern citizens and the role Rousseau carved out in his attempt to challenge the leadership of those thinkers promoting styles of civic performance unlikely to cultivate the demanding norms of civic virtue called for by modern advocates of a republican regime.

Two New Frameworks This chapter examines styles of performance in liberal and republican theories of political leadership. A prevailing political theory in Western systems of government is modern liberalism; an important minority critical theory is republicanism. Liberal here refers to the historical mainstream political system often described in terms of the civics of “possessive individualism,” promoting liberal individualist values. By contrast, republican refers to a political theory promoting civic equality, with alternative strategies of leadership performance to promote egalitarian social justice.

Political Leadership   425 Rousseau’s pioneering republican theory from the eighteenth century tracks defects in the system of leadership performance emerging in modern liberal regimes. Rousseau provides a negative perspective on liberal leadership performance that remains influential in contemporary republican opposition to liberal democracy (Masters 1968; Shklar  1964; Cameron 1984). Bagehot’s nineteenth-century liberal reformulation of political leadership seeks to modernize the stagecraft of British parliamentary government. His model of leadership performance illustrates the conventional wisdom of many contemporary liberal democracies, especially those with parliamentary systems of government. As we will see, Bagehot provides an enthusiastically positive perspective on neglected or misunderstood elements of liberal leadership performance. Both theories can help contemporary students of performance and politics understand ways of analyzing political leadership. This chapter compares these two portraits of political performance to help readers analyze discouraged (or so contends Rousseau) and disguised (so argues Bagehot) forms of leadership performance that might make or break liberal systems of government. Research on political leadership ignores Bagehot and marginalizes Rousseau. We suspect that this inattention is driven by a lack of curiosity many leadership researchers have about the role of performance in leadership. Both thinkers reveal an interest in performative leadership that anticipates recent research in political rhetoric used by public leaders when performing and enacting roles expected of them on the public stage—before audiences of citizens whose trust matters greatly for the continued performance leaders seek. A model of this type of leadership analysis is by a US pioneer of cultural sociology, Jeffrey Alexander (e.g., 2004, 2016, 2017). Not surprisingly, Alexander has published in The Drama Review, following in part the type of analysis of leadership performance published by Taylor, noted earlier. Recent work by Masters and Uhr (2017) examines case studies of Australian public leaders against a framework of rhetorical performance derived from the British philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon. The two renditions of leadership performance in this chapter illustrate alternative accounts of the public sphere, with leaders expected to perform according to the norms of publicity associated with different frameworks of the public sphere. Liberalism, either originally in grand theorists like John Locke or later in reformers like Bagehot, expected political leaders to perform as stage managers of civic diversity—constructing deep social agreement on public space to tolerate civic disagreement on many political issues. Alternatively, republicanism expected leaders to perform as promoters of an agenda of equal citizenship, supporting a civic virtue free of the cultivated individualist values attributed to bourgeois or commercial liberalism. Contemporary republicans often follow Rousseau’s approach when devising schemes to bring new levels of performance to outdated liberal forms of leadership. Rousseau’s pre-Marxian themes of oppression and alienation reveal underlying aspects of liberalism that have been elaborated by subsequent republican theorists—making Rousseau an important figure in the genealogy of liberalism’s radical successors (Masters 1968, 430–8; Orwin 1998, 182–5). Bagehot displays much about the constitutional spirit of modern liberalism; in particular, he notes how the serving political elite who increasingly dominate the House of Commons tend to disguise their growing power relative to traditional rulers, such as the monarch and the House of Lords. Bagehot represents a progressive movement welcoming wider forms of

426   John Uhr democratic participation as liberalism moves toward liberal democracy. But he also ­represents elite caution about potential mass distrust of progressive tendencies moving too far away from the established orthodoxies of religion, government, and class. Even progressive elites can disguise their underlying reformist intentions. One point of this disguise was to consolidate popular opinion around confidence in the crown, which, despite continuing public respect, was losing democratic legitimacy compared to the rising power of elected ministries. Bagehot invites readers to explore how and why the truly “efficient” (i.e., powerful) parts of the British polity disguise their power as subservient to the “dignified” (i.e., traditional) parts such as crown and lords. Bagehot’s (1963) The English Constitution not only reveals but also justifies liberal political elitism by showcasing the carefully cultivated theatrical prestige given to the crown and lords—who are losing power steadily to the people’s chosen parliamentary representatives. For Bagehot, political leaders are expected to manage popular will by disguising ruling power within a theatrical landscape of traditional leadership institutions eliciting popular deference and respect. Bagehot’s apparent conservatism flatters but also disengages the public from active political activity. This style of political reflection protects the hidden power of political leaders (the hidden elite) who shape liberal democracy along the lines sponsored by modern liberalism. Bagehot’s lengthy comparisons between Parliament and the US presidency attracted support from later US political leaders like Woodrow Wilson (1898; 1965, 30, 193, 196, 202), who did so much to promote “the rhetorical presidency” now central to debates over US political leadership (Tulis 1987, 117–61). Bagehot might today be discounted as constructing a cleverly elitist defense of political inequality shrouded in deceptive theatricality for the benefit of established parliamentary interests. Bagehot (1963, 247–51) explicitly acknowledged the rule of elites and “the rule of the cultivated few” when explaining the tendency of “the mass” to defer to “the theatrical show of society” managed by undiscerned, possibly “secreted,” elites.

Bagehot’s Leadership Framework The English Constitution (originally a series of journal articles) was published in 1867, when the British franchise was substantially extended toward manhood suffrage. Bagehot (1963, 279–86) saw himself as “a theoretical writer” fearful of the newly enfranchised electorate but somewhat removed from the twin elite forces dominating British politics: the “plutocracy” regulating the House of Commons and the “aristocracy” in the Lords. England (or more properly Great Britain) had rarely been described as having a constitution, which term is carefully used by Bagehot to refer to the regime of representative government symbolized by the widening franchise used for elections of the House of Commons, where so much of the theatricality of politics is managed—by governing political parties careful to nurture a supporting public following. The notable introduction by a former British minister, R. H. S. Crossman (1963, 1), claims that the book was “out of date” when it was first published—left behind by the 1867 reforms of the franchise. Yet Crossman also found Bagehot’s book to be “the best introduction” to the “workings of British politics” (Crossman1). This term workings helps us appreciate the nature of Bagehot’s real achievement, which was to reveal the spirit of the British “constitution”

Political Leadership   427 shielded by the deceptive formalities of the parliamentary process—often termed by Bagehot “the literary view” of the constitution, portraying more power to established institutions like crown and lords than either really maintain. In Bagehot’s (1963, 72–4, 152) analysis, efficient institutions like the House of Commons educate the nation through the orchestration of parliamentary debate. The implication for us is that this function of political education works best when performed on a stage framed by dignified traditionalism, such as the opening of a parliamentary session by a monarch or the later revision of government legislation by a scrutinizing House of Lords. Call this “the lyrical function” of Parliament (177). The project of democratic elitism promoted by Bagehot is deliberately theatrical, with the critic calling on party leaders to sponsor something of a public play of constitutional monarchy. The hope is that the working classes will be able to vote, but their political views will be directed toward the dignity of the monarchy—distracting them from the more valuable leadership of the efficiency of party government exercised by the prime minister and cabinet. The ruling few exercise their power through their canny ability to hold what Bagehot calls the imagination, the habits, the fancies, and customs of the many who are ruled (250–51). In Bagehot’s (1963, 123) revealing language, “what a theorist would desire has in fact turned up.” Revealing the “play of mind” exercised by traditional authorities, Bagehot notes that modernizing Britain could never nurture respect for bureaucratic officials from ordinary citizens, given that citizens can so easily turn their respect toward a body like the House of Lords, despite its steadily diminishing political power as very much “a retarding” or “second chamber” (121–4, 135). The “theatrical part of life” looks for consoling stories of the role of the great and the good, and so welcomes a body like the House of Lords, even though many of the serving lords are not well-suited to the hard grind of everyday politics. Theatrical elements appeal to “the mass of men” because of the “reverence” elicited from them by surprisingly useless institutions oddly attractive to “the senses” which often “take the multitude” (143, 64–5). Traditional institutions like the monarchy act “as a disguise,” protecting the people from knowing too much about transitions in the ranks of “our real rulers” who manage efficiently this system of “double Government”—reflecting the two complementary powers of the very visible crown and reclusive Downing Street. Bagehot nicely captures the regime change as a new type of ruling class of elected representatives steal effective power from established rulers who are comforted by the generous publicity they retain as procedural guardians of the state (97, 263, 266). Bagehot’s imagined constitution regulates the due process of politics: quietly elevating elected representatives while not so quietly minimizing the effective power of the dignified remnants of the traditional political order. Elsewhere Bagehot identifies a sketch of a perfect political forum and a sketch of a perfect political leader. The ideal forum is Parliament reconstituted as “a polity of discussion” designed to promote political deliberation and to weaken the will “to act promptly”—as is so valued by executive governments. The ideal leader is in fact an actual political leader often found offensive by Queen Victoria: Prime Minister William Gladstone, who performs as a model of “animated moderation.” Gladstone emerges as Bagehot’s (1915a,  1915b) best example of “our greatest statesman,” whose best performance is his repeated ability to “move the House of Commons” as an effective deliberative assembly (on Gladstone’s leadership, see also Uhr 2015, 160–4). The events of British politics relating to Brexit in 2019 provide a contrasting story about the limits of parliamentary performance when no Gladstone is present to nourish and maintain support so essential

428   John Uhr for “saving the show,” again to use Goffman’s pithy phrase describing what political ­performances can achieve.

Rousseau’s Critique of Liberalism Rousseau’s most extensive assault on liberal individuality comes in his Second Discourse examining inequality (Strauss 1953, 264–76). His opening praise of the virtuous leaders of his home city, Geneva, is soon contrasted with his critique of the civic culture of civilized society exemplified by France and Britain. The preface explores Rousseau’s (1964, 91–7) doubts about the belief in progress held by “the moderns” and the first stages of his alternative perspective on the natural standard outside of civil society—in the state of nature or perhaps more precisely the primitive state of “original man.” The major part of the text of the Second Discourse compares the conventional view of the state of nature held by philosophers, with its so-called progressive picture of competitive and corrupting vice, and Rousseau’s alternative view of the state as enjoyed by “savage man.” Hobbes is the original theorist of what was later termed “possessive individualism,” and Rousseau charges that Hobbes has mistakenly confused man’s natural condition with the apparently civilized but actually corrupted or degenerated condition in British civil society (see, e.g., Rousseau 1964, 107, 128–31; Orwin 1998). The foundation for Rousseau’s (1978, 76–77) close interest in leadership performance is his unusual system of social regulation through law (Shklar 1964, 922–5). There are political laws regulating the type of polity citizens share; there are civil laws through which the state does what it can to create “the freedom of its members”; there are criminal laws to punish civil disobedience; and finally there are “the most important of all,” laws engraved not on stone but “in the hearts of the citizens,” “which is the true constitution of the State.” A people is only “a people” to the extent that some authority is at work to preserve them as one people “in the spirit of its institution”: instituted as a people through the remarkable authority of a founder or legislator who “attends in secret” to the establishment of “mores, customs, and especially of opinion” in ways unknown to “our political theorists” (Rousseau 1978, 77).

Rousseau on Leadership Performance Even if Rousseau (1985) was not reaching out toward leading political office, he was writing to help others (e.g., Polish patriots) rethink leadership performance. It is possible that he wrote some of his more solidly political works in order to help readers move beyond liberal forms of politics toward a richer form of republican politics with greater respect for civic equality. The test of Rousseau’s writing about politics then becomes his ability to help readers perform better as republican citizens—perhaps by making readers think more deeply about modes of performance missing or minimized in conventional politics. Our task is to try to locate what those missing elements of leadership performance might be in a book that even Rousseau (1978, 75) admitted could be read as “a speculative fantasy.”

Political Leadership   429 This fascinating work is On the Social Contract (1762), the very title of which refers to one of the central doctrines of modern liberalism. This work was signed by the author as a “citizen of Geneva,” so it presents itself as an applied commentary of political theory to incompletely developed modern political practices. Remarkably, this work contains many of Rousseau’s most puzzling institutional ideals, which most students of applied politics find uneasy to adapt or apply to liberal constitutional orders. One of these puzzling theoretical ideals is “the general will” (Rousseau 1978, 61–62, 108–9; Gildin 1983, 29–66). This important republican concept of popular sovereignty looms large in later political discussions, even though most commentators admit that it remains far from clear how Rousseau would want us to apply “the general will” to reform or revitalize everyday politics. Social Contract is rich in its examination of themes of representation in politics, with detailed attention to voting and elections. But the work appears somewhat unreal, more a warning about areas of lost leadership than a map of a new constitutional order. The lesson is that Rousseau’s Social Contract is not really a map of an idealized polity waiting to be understood and applied by critics of conventional liberalism; it is instead one of Rousseau’s great achievements to identify a range of institutional devices with leadership potential—such as the legislator, the tribunate, the dictatorship, and even civil religion—to help readers think more carefully about liberal constitutionalism (Cameron 1984, 397–408; Kelly 1997b). Each of these “leadership deficits” highlights an aspect of politics where leadership performance requires extraordinary political prudence. Normal “human prudence” falls short of the elevated prudence on offer to the outstanding “legislator” drawing on “the immortals” (Rousseau  1978, 69–70; Rousseau  1997, 313–4). This somewhat surprising virtue of political prudence is managed by Rousseau to help readers see how imprudent and limited is conventional leadership performance. The grand theme of the “general will” is central to the Social Contract mainly because most often conventional representation reflects any number of particular wills, the most important of which is the particularized will of those who govern the state. Rousseau’s argument is that liberal representation mismanages the social contract, with the result that the government is less general and more particular than should be the case. The task now in the Social Contract is to correct this bad political performance. The solution is with the gallery of leadership types Rousseau identifies as potentially capable of restoring or rebuilding leadership performance—or of simply showing readers how deceptive conventional leadership performance really is (Orwin 1998). The evidence is in the examples presented by Rousseau. The “general will” is a doctrine about the foundational republican principle of popular sovereignty: the examples highlight distances between popular and ruling sovereignty that limit or erode republicanism. Rousseau does not hide his own view about deficiencies in popular will, which often falls short of the “general will,” given the potential the people have to be fooled—even when not corrupted. Private interests often displace “the common interest” through the misplaced political performance of “factions” and “partial associations” (Rousseau  1978, 61–2). The issue then is what nurtures or shapes the “general will” so that popular sovereignty is represented by political sovereigns exercising generalized rather than particular leadership in ruling offices. The first example used by Rousseau of a missing ideal of leadership performance is “the legislator” (Rousseau 1978, 67–70; Strauss 1953, 286–9). Rousseau’s legislator does not hold an office in the practical system of republican government examined in the Social Contract (Masters 1968, 354–73; Gildin 1983, 67–91). He refers to Plato on the concept of “the civil or royal man” to convey his idea that this legislator is an

430   John Uhr example of “a superior intelligence,” possibly even “a great prince”not usually found in conventional political office. He then poses something of a puzzle with his reference to Montesquieu’s belief about leaders (“chefs”): “leaders of republics” found the institutional regimes that later “form the leaders of republics” (Rousseau 1978, 68). On the one hand, it could be that Rousseau himself illustrates the role of the regime founder who forms later leaders. On the other hand, the legislator is something of a founder because “his function” is “not magistracy . . . not sovereignty.” Instead, the legislator constitutes the republic but “does not enter its constitution”; he therefore lacks everyday political authority. Calvin emerges as an example of a legislator (or at least “great man”) for the republic of Geneva. Legislative authority rests with the “free vote of the people.” The legislator cannot resume any of this directly popular legislative authority. Oddly, the legislator has “an authority that amounts to nothing.” The legislator is in fact “unable to user either force or reasoning,” so Rousseau makes the remarkable move to enable the legislator to “persuade without convincing.” What does the legislator persuade the people to accept? The answer appears to be “the social spirit,” which is the deepest spirit of the laws and the foundations of “the yoke of public felicity.” The legislator attributes whatever wisdom is possessed “to the Gods,” which strengthens the legislator’s valuable public authority. In very unusual language drawing explicitly on Machiavelli, Rousseau says that “the true political theorist” cannot but admire “the great men” who in their capacity as “legislators” have founded long-lasting polities (Rousseau 1978, 69–70; Rousseau 1985, 5–9; Cameron 1984, 414–9).

Implications for Leadership Performance The implication for us today is that leadership performance begins with this extraordinary function of having the republic shaped (or even reshaped) by a legislator who lacks ordinary constitutional or political authority. Liberal constitutional theorists like Hobbes and Locke feared the existence of external authority capable of directing a sovereign people— especially in the absence of a constitutional mandate. Rousseau’s alternative model might seem religious in character on account of the “interpreter” drawing on “the immortals” when shaping “the social spirit” (Shklar 1964, 923–5). But Rousseau’s curious examples are human rather than divine: Caligula, Plato, Montesquieu, Lycurgus, Calvin, and ancient shapers of the “Jewish law.” Who now fits in their company ready to perform their function? One answer is that existing liberal polities are living on borrowed time, and the only promising implication is that new republics will have to be formed through reliance on this legislator’s function. In the centuries since Rousseau, the world has seen the establishment of many new republics, some of which might well have followed his advice in trying to satisfy this foundational function. To give but one important example, students of US President Abraham Lincoln acknowledge that he effectively refounded the United States through his revolutionary reliance on the preconstitutional doctrine of “the social spirit” contained in the Declaration of Independence. Of course, Lincoln was an elected officeholder and not external to the constitutional order, but his rededication of the US republic to foundational principles declared before the establishment of the constituted polity reinforces Rousseau’s brief comments on the constructive use of civil wars for founding effectively new political entities (Rousseau 1978, 70–1; Tulis 1987, 79–83).

Political Leadership   431 Rousseau’s expectation is that “the commands of leaders” (“chefs”) can pass for the expression of the general will only if “the sovereign” does not oppose them. The leaders of government exercise their public authority from their role in the system of government. Rousseau balances the potentially competing powers of the operational government and the sovereign people. The type of leadership performance examined in sections of the Social Contract on the tribunal and the dictatorship resemble the type of leadership performed by the legislator. The legislator makes the people fit and proper to act as sovereign; these other, more subordinate leaders defend the sovereign against badly performing government. Thus the approach to leadership performance adopted by Rousseau is leadership that helps the sovereign perform in that core capacity when threatened by poorly performing leaders of government (Rousseau 1997, 313; Kelly 1997b). Rousseau’s Social Contract covers in more detail than available here many additional leadership institutions required to save civic virtue from predicably passionate political executives. Another important implication for contemporary democratic regimes is that well-performing political executives are exceptions to the rule presented long ago by Rousseau, the rule formulated by a champion of republicanism and equality, which holds that extensive public accountability can delay but never destroy the poor performance of self-interested governments. Rousseau’s grim acknowledgment of the passionate self-interest of political executives welcomes the reactive restraints of public accountability, but his deeper devotion to democracy promotes unusual types of public accountability with proactive performativity designed to prevent “usurpations by the government” (Rousseau 1978, 106–7; Rousseau 1985, 10–8). Such usurpations threaten not simply the systems of governance but the very sovereignty of the political order. Hence the distinctive nature of the leadership performance of Rousseau’s nonliberal institutions elaborated in the last of the four books of the Social Contract. The leadership performance of the tribunate, the dictatorship, the censorship, and civil religion complete the Social Contract (Rousseau 1978, 120–32). The Roman originals revered by Rousseau are signals to us to rethink fresh ways that contemporary democratic regimes can reinvest in their sovereignty with proactive as well as reactive forms of executive accountability. The heart of the matter is, as Rousseau (1985, 19–24) advised the Poles, civic education.

Tribunes, Dictators, Censors, Civil Religions A tribunate does not exercise legislative or executive power. Rousseau (1978, 120) suggests that it exercises a kind of judicial power: it “can prevent anything,” even though “it can do nothing.” For a tribunate to be “wisely tempered,” it would need to perform as a “moderator,” avoiding even “a little too much force” when moderating government. Rousseau’s model sounds very similar to versions of judicial review where nonpolitical institutions review the performance of government officials, just as his reservations about excessive “force” sound very similar to contemporary criticisms of excessive judicial activism. The hint is that moderation is encouraged by ensuring that a tribunate has as few members as

432   John Uhr necessary and that it is “suppressed” from time to time—operating only occasionally so as “to prevent usurpations” by the anti-usurping body. The fear is that the desired proactivity would be ruined by immoderate activism when the tribunate would tend to displace or even replace executive or legislative institutions. The paradoxical hope is that proactivity is maximized when the tribunate performs powerfully but rarely—to restrain government from ignoring the spirit of the constitution and to encourage government to again comply with that constitutional spirit. Dictatorships are more challenging to reinvent. Rousseau’s (1978, 121–3) focus is on “public security” when “the safety of the homeland” is at risk of “crisis.” One model is “a supreme leader” (“un chef supreme”) who “suspends sovereign authority.” Note that this emergency leader does not suspend the deeper power of sovereignty; the emergency leader seizes conventional political authority in order to defend sovereignty. Rousseau speaks of the power of Roman “consuls” who could see the importance of regime-saving delegations of authority from conventional government to unconventional leaders. The best safeguard against usurpation by emergency leaders is very short term limits. Yet the potential for proactivity looks weak when we consider the example of Cicero, used by Rousseau to illustrate the power of consuls to let dictatorship slip in to their own hands (122–3). The threats of national security really do require concentrated military power of a type not used or required in conventional government. Rousseau’s suggestion would be that every decent regime needs a safeguard of authorized indecency that can be enacted to perform with whatever force is required to return the regime to security. The proactivity emerges from the defensive quality of this type of leadership, which performs a civil defense function separate and distinct from a militarized international force based on what Rousseau (1997, 308) elsewhere rebukes as “valor in war.” The leadership performance is state security as a means to the greater end of the security of the people as a separate and distinct society: a defense force protecting the sovereign people, untempted by the unrepublican vices of international offense (see also Rousseau 1997, 313–6; Kelly 1997b). Censorship might seem like an invitation to allow leaders to perform too passionately in defending friends and opposing enemies (Kelly 1997a). Liberal intellectuals tend to move away from this sort of government interference with free choice by appealing to the logic of liberalism as a “liberation” from censorship. Liberals know that almost all governments help their friends and harm their enemies; hence liberal intellectuals want to strip governments of censoring powers. However, Rousseau’s foundational concept of the rule of public opinion invites us to see the relationships between the faculty of “public judgment” and a nurturing censoring facility outside the immediate reach of government. Leadership performance in this antiliberal facility is carefully examined by Rousseau (1978, 123–4; cf Rousseau 1960), who fears that this facility is “altogether lost among modern peoples.” The core issue is again public opinion, which is the custodian of the mores of the civic republic, so that whoever “judges mores judges honor” and the acceptable standards of what is honorable for a people. Governments perform self-interestedly in protecting what they see as their own honor, and expert public intellectuals perform poorly when they unwisely stand against censorship when protecting liberal individuality. Although a facility for censorship can protect republican mores, Rousseau warns that a “censorial tribunal” cannot really establish republican mores (Kelly  1997a). Such a tribunal is supplementary rather than foundational. Censors can help prevent the corruption of public opinion, taking corruption here to mean degeneration of the civic mores. The proactivity of Rousseau’s model comes

Political Leadership   433 about when a leadership authority takes public responsibility for the integrity of “public judgment,” performing as a respected mentor of civic opinion, somewhat along the lines of later professional academies or national colleges of higher learning. The last and most complex theme of leadership performance is that of civil religion (Rousseau 1978, 124–32). This type of leadership performance is not necessarily religious: the topic is the civil rather than theological or sacred use of religion. What strikes us here is Rousseau’s open praise of Hobbes’s scheme for “polity unity” through reunification of the two powers of civil and religious power (127). Rousseau’s own scheme of religion appropriate to citizens in a single country: “civil or positive divine right” has its own “dogma, rites, and external cult” as “prescribed by law.” Opposed is the “religion of the priest” promoting an “unsocial right,” denounced by Rousseau as a “worthless” weakening of the primary goal of “social unity.” What modern device can help promote “the social spirit” that even Rousseau fears can suffer when citizens believe that “to serve the State is to serve its tutelary God” (128)? The wrong answer is the belief that there is “no other pontiff than the prince.” Remember that Rousseau’s fascinating examples of leadership performance are protections against limitations of “the prince.” His preferred answer is that a republican citizen must “have a religion that causes him to love his duties,” according to articles of faith determined by the sovereign. These “sentiments of sociability” remain underspecified by Rousseau, although the framework of “public utility” is emphasized. The major implication for contemporary analysis is that the greatest civil sin, or rather vice, is “intolerance”: this function requires an institution capable of helping citizens perform the virtue of “tolerance” (Rousseau 1978, 131). We have returned in effect to the realm of the legislator—the “lawgiver” praised by Rousseau (1997, 310) as one of “the great men” who found nations, who probably alone has the performance potential to establish the scale of public honor. What is very clear from Rousseau’s approach is that Christianity is uncongenial to republican virtue. Not so clear, however, is whether post-Christian doctrines (like, e.g., Unitarianism) can perform a leadership function by helping citizens learn to accept the “sentiments of sociability” without risk to republican sovereignty and its core value of “moral and legitimate equality” (Rousseau 1978, 58).

Conclusion Goffman (1971, 72–3) studied what he termed “disruptions” as the most common challenge to a leader’s performance in impressing an audience. Leaders who engage in “misrepresentation” will face any number of “disruptions” if their audiences begin to suspect the presence of “a discrepant reality” undermining “the fostered reality” intended to impress them. Goffman acknowledges that many social scientists will not care all that much to try to learn “what reality really is,” yet this somewhat cynical carelessness means that students of leadership will not learn “which is the more real” when discrepancies displace carefully fostered impressions. Who can really tell which is “the real thing” when we study public leadership (73n76)? Goffman notes that audiences give performers the opportunity to misrepresent by using deceptive substitutes “because a sign for the presence of a thing, not being that thing, can be employed in the absence of it” (243). Students of leadership performance need to recover some of Goffman’s interest in social morality so that they do not become carriers of

434   John Uhr the many “misrepresentations” he so carefully documented in the early years of performance studies. The clues to that morality occur in those many places where Goffman refers to performers influencing not only audiences but also observers (see, e.g., 63–5). As observers, students of leadership performance can act differently from audiences by using constructive rather than simply compliant criticism, as indeed does Goffman in his own research. We can now understand that the analysis of leadership performance is hard to carry out: “There are no numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitutions” (Bagehot 1963, 244). In Bagehot’s novel political psychology, the “efficient” political leaders of modernizing Britain manage their own political performance by managing the deference of the working classes to the “dignified” leaders from the monarchy and the House of Lords who preside as traditional custodians of British civic culture—dignified here meaning “stately,” to use Bagehot’s imaginative term invoking activities that are “impressive” and “awing” (150). The public performance of one set of traditional leaders disguises the cagey political performance of a set of modernizing leaders. Bagehot identifies Britain as “a disguised republic,” where the public power of the monarchy is “quieted and mitigated,” reflecting the power of constitutional reformers after 1688 to “keep the ancient show” while they “secretly interpolate the new reality” (95, 262, 266). Many citizens “really believe that the Queen governs”; Bagehot reveals that “men, often very undignified, seize the occasion to govern by means of it” (241). Rousseau’s alternative comes at a price. For citizens to be “forced to be free” requires leaders to perform in very unusual ways as servants of their sovereign (Rousseau 1978, 55). Not that these are ordinary leaders: Rousseau’s republicanism breaks away from conventional leadership by asking us to imagine what it would take to have the liberal entity of “the bourgeois” reshaped to perform as “the citizen” of preliberal and potentially postliberal times. It would take very extraordinary leaders performing in the spirit conveyed in the Social Contract as exceptions to liberal leadership. Arguably, Bagehot should have admired such a critique of the liberal, commercial regime he himself did so much to disguise with his own political fiction.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and ‘September 11.’ ” Sociological Theory 22, no. 1 (March): 88–105. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2016. “ ‘Performance and Politics: President Obama’s Dramatic Reelection in 2012.” TDR 60, no. 4 (Winter): 130–42. Alexander, Jeffrey  C. 2017. “Raging against the Enlightenment: The Ideology of Steven Bannon.” ASA Sociology of Culture Newsletter 29, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer): 24–8. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bagehot, Walter. 1915a. “The Age of Discussion.” From Physics and Politics, in The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, vol. 8: Physics and Politics, Currency Monopoly, and Essays, edited by Mrs. Russell Barrington. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bagehot-the-works-and-life-ofwalter-bagehot-vol-8. Bagehot, Walter. 1915b. “Gladstone.” In The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot, vol. 3: Historical and Literary Essays, edited by Mrs. Russell Barrington. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ bagehot-the-works-and-life-of-walter-bagehot-vol-3-historical-literary-essays. Bagehot, Walter. 1963. The English Constitution. London: Collins.

Political Leadership   435 Balme, Christopher B. 2014. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Allan. 1960. Introduction to Politics and the Arts, edited by Allan Bloom, xi–xxxiv. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cameron, David R. 1984. “The Hero in Rousseau’s Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 3: 397–419. Crossman, R. H. S. 1963. Introduction to The English Constitution, 1–57. London: Collins. Euben, Peter, ed. 1986. Greek Tragedy and Political Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Euben, Peter. 1993. “Democracy Ancient and Modern.” PS 26, no. 3 (September): 487–491. Euben, Peter. 2002. “Final Lecture: Political Freedom.” PS 35, no. 4 (December): 709–711. Gildin, Hilail. 1983. Rousseau’s Social Contract: The Design of the Argument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goffman, Erving. 1971. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. Hubner, Zygmunt. 1992. Theater and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kelly, Christopher. 1997a. “Rousseau and the Case for (and against) Censorship.” Journal of Politics 59, no. 4 (November): 1232–51. Kelly, Christopher. 1997b. “Rousseau’s Case for and against Heroes.” Polity 30, no.2 (Winter): 346–66. Masters, Adam, and John Uhr. 2017. Leadership Performance and Rhetoric. London: Palgrave Pivot. Masters, Roger  D. 1968. The Political Philosophy of Rousseau. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Orwin, Clifford. 1998. “Rousseau’s Socratism.” Journal of Politics 60, no. 1 (February): 174–87. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1960. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M D’Alembert on the Theatre. Translated with notes and introduction by Allan Bloom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men.” In The First and Second Discourses, edited by Roger  D.  Masters, translated by Roger D. Masters and Judith Masters, 77–228. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1978. On the Social Contract. Edited by Roger Masters. Translated by Judith Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1985. The Government of Poland. Translated with an introduction by Willmoore Kendall. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. “Discourse on Heroic Virtue.” In The Discourses and Other Early Writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch, 305–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saxonhouse, Arlene. 2019. “J. Peter Euben, 1939–2018.” Political Theory 47, no. 1: 3–5. Schechner, Richard. 1986. “America’s Leading Actor at Work.” TDR 30, no. 4 (Winter): 4–8. Schechner, Richard. 2003. Performance Theory. Revised and expanded edition. London: Routledge. Schechner, Richard. 2006. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Shklar, Judith N. 1964. “Rousseau’s Images of Authority.” American Political Science Review 58, no. 4 (December): 919–32. Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. “Bush’s Happy Performative.” TDR 47, no. 3 (Autumn): 5–8.

436   John Uhr Tulis, Jeffrey K. 1987. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Uhr, John. 2014. “Rhetorical and Performative Analysis.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, edited by R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart, 253–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uhr, John. 2015. Prudential Public Leadership. London: Palgrave. Uhr, John. 2018. Performing Political Theory: Pedagogy in Modern Political Theory. Singapore: Palgrave. Wilson, Woodrow. 1898. “A Wit and a Seer.” Atlantic, October. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1898/10. Wilson, Woodrow. 1965. The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson. Edited by E. David Cronon. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Woodruff, Paul. 2008. The Necessity of Theater. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 27

A da ptation a n d En v ironm en t Landscape, Community, and Politics in Henrik Ibsen’s Rosmersholm by Duncan Macmillan (2019) Vicky Angelaki

I would like to begin this chapter with a reference to the closing statements in my book Theatre & Environment, where I engage with the work of theater scholars who have led some of the most impactful ecocritical enquiries: Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (2012; see also their individual work), Una Chaudhuri (especially 1995; Chaudhuri and Fuchs 2002; Chaudhuri and Enelow 2014), Carl Lavery (2016; Finburgh and Lavery 2015). I specifically take up their call for broader “greening” action and for scholarly activism so as to establish the environment, nature, and the climate crisis, at the heart of our enquiries (Angelaki 2019). By environment I mean landscape, nature, spatial and geographical context. This imperative indicates that these are not only concerns that we ought to examine within the context of plays or of theatrical performances and events, which may have a self-evidently environmental thematic identity. It is also a process of systematically reassessing the entire canon, looking back and rereading; of inscribing the environment, nature, and climate change, then crisis, as primary parameters with which to understand a certain text or work and to uncover the political and social factors at play. An environmentally driven approach, then, serves as a tool for understanding the ideologies embedded in the text, as well as for highlighting the cluster of issues that it serves to draw our attention to. Such a methodological inquiry, though distinct and embedded within ecocriticism, also transcends genres of literary criticism in terms of its social urgency. In that way, it is akin to the imperatives and practices of postcolonial theory: reading back and raising the oppressed, colonized voices to the orthodoxy of imperialist hierarchy. As Sruti Bala (2017) argues, drama, theater and performance studies are fields that would be well served by a wider process of decolonizing. I am particularly drawn to the definition offered in this statement: “Decolonisation here means persistently training ourselves to recognise how such epistemic privileges are ingrained in our disciplinary histories and

438   Vicky Angelaki challenge them on an ongoing basis. At a basic level, it is about learning to imagine the conditions of knowledge formation differently”. Most recently, Helen Gilbert’s (2019) work has served to highlight intersections between postcolonial theory and ecocriticism with specific reference to theater and performance, recognizing both the opportunities and the challenges of such emerging dialogues. And while Bala is of course dealing with race concerns, as well as with a lack of knowledge and understanding that arise from distance and underrepresentation, I am keen to show how such a methodology also speaks to the odd invisibility of landscape that has strangely haunted a lot (though certainly not all) of critical analyses of drama, theater, and performance, as focus has often gravitated on characters, social context, form, or even intentionality driven by authors’ biographies. It is both welcome and fascinating to observe the broader, cross-genre intersections that ecocriticism has also produced, extending well beyond the domain of science to occupy the discourses of popular authors, for example, in the recent work of Naomi Klein (2019), On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, and Jonathan Safran Foer (2019), We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Such is the extent of the crisis, as well as the anxiety that it produces, that what not that long ago might have been considered a scientific, academic issue has now crossed over to a considerably wider readership keen to engage. Such books are different from the work of Stephen Emmott. For example Emmott’s (2013) Ten Billion, which was originally conceived as a theater piece (2012), was subsequently published for a broad audience, but its tone is different; it reads as instructive (by which I am not implying that it not significant) as far as our impact on the world’s resources is concerned. On the other hand, On Fire and We Are the Weather bring a different slant to the task of acknowledging responsibility; their lexica operate at the level of symbiosis as given, moving away from traditional stratifications of cause and effect, and fostering an understanding of the fact that human and environment are always already embedded in one another. My purpose in mentioning these works is to highlight the principle on which the main argument of this chapter is built, and a fact that, however obvious, is too frequently forgotten: that we are our environment; it is not something Other than us, it is of us, and we are of our environment. On theater terms more specifically, then, the fact that environment is always there, in every play and performance we may be examining, and yet it is often not seen but merely relegated to backdrop, rendered secondary, is profoundly problematic. Even in the case of theater that is considered canonical, known, overanalyzed, these discursive absences are loud and visible. To decolonize, I believe, means to actively undermine the dominant perspective of reading, to turn the tables on what our primary angle ought to be, recognizing the shifts and challenges of our present, then writing these into our historical perspectives. It is in that sense that we can work toward greening back, namely, revisiting the theatrical canon to assert that the spaces and conditions in which plays and performances unfold are neither peripheral not secondary; they command a narrative of their own, which ought to be acknowledged not as parenthetical but as equal to, if not dominant over any other part of the plot or activity. We can hardly discuss plot without examining the consequences or triggers for any of the characters’ actions. Nor can we any longer refer to nature, landscape, and weather phenomena as external conditions, when they are, in fact, internal and symbiotic, in the sense that they have been caused by humans, or when they are internalized, in the sense that they have a direct impact on the way people feel, think, and (re)act. The academics I mentioned earlier (Arons, Chaudhuri, Lavery, May) have made a compelling argument for the revisionist greening of the canon, to which I fully subscribe. Arons

Adaptation and Environment   439 and May (2012, 3–4) write, “ecocriticism can be seen to play a role analogous to that of feminist criticism, which similarly seeks to reveal the ways in which literature of the past reinforced culturally constructed ideas of gender and to celebrate the strategies used by feminist writers to rewrite and revise those ideas.” They are careful to place the term “canonical” in scare quotes to recognize the problematics of the term. The question of how we define the canon relates to whether we think of it as literature of the past and established, in the sense of oft-quoted, -taught, and -revisited texts, or whether we can expand our understanding to think of the canon as dynamic and evolving—and of our intervention in its interpretation as a dynamic act. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the canon is not, and cannot be, a universal signifier. Here I am dealing with a play that belongs to what might be described as the European canon of theatrical naturalism. This greening of the plays of the past with a view to understanding both why and how they may continue to occupy our attention in the present and future is neither daunting nor superfluous. It is, on the contrary, essential, part of reversing the hegemonies of the past, set up as Western societies performed their anthropocentric, neoliberalist turns: concerns that focus on the individual and their perception of the world rather than on the symbiotic, dynamic, mutually impactful interaction between natural world and individual. Landscape is no less important than the economy as a conditioning factor. In fact, predating it, if anything, it is, and always has been, more urgent and more significant than individuals and their transient crises. As for the importance of the effort of revisiting the canon with an environmental perspective, Clare Finburgh and Carl Lavery (2015, 6) set up the grounds on which such an intervention is more than merited here: “Whether defined in terms of tragedy, naturalist performance and/or melodrama, there is nothing surprising about the environmental limitations of modern stage. Theatre’s function as a theatron (or site of looking) for the analysis of heightened and destructive human passions and emotions necessarily turns the spectatorial gaze away from the materiality of the external world. For if one wants to examine what is essentially human, as much western theatre purports to do, all that is deemed superfluous to that investigation – here, the environment – needs to be bracketed off.” Finburgh and Lavery’s critique of course pertains to the importance of instating the environment as a crucial focusing factor. Writing about a different period in theatrical representation (the Theater of the Absurd), but with a focus that is very relevant to my inquiry here, Finburgh and Lavery ask, “But what type of green past are we trying to reclaim? And how might we gain access to it?” (16). For the purposes of this chapter, and to answer this question in the context of my remit, I am also interested in the argument put forward by Paul Lindholdt (2015), who writes specifically about Ibsen, albeit regarding another play, one that constitutes, arguably, Ibsen’s most self-evidently environmental paradigm: An Enemy of the People. As Lindholdt observes, it is not only the source text but also the treatment it receives in subsequent productions, and the artists involved in those productions, that serve to reinforce and to shape its agenda. In the context of his case study, Lindholdt refers to the playwright Arthur Miller, whose own socialist imperatives found fertile ground in Ibsen’s play. I am certainly interested in Ibsen’s source text of Rosmersholm, but I am prioritizing a consideration of how it functions environmentally and politically in our time, especially as cast through the lens of another playwright, Duncan Macmillan, in whose work ecological concerns have recurred. Making good, then, on the promise of Theatre & Environment (Angelaki 2019), always on the understanding that conversations on drama, performance, and environment can never

440   Vicky Angelaki be fully conclusive because of the ways in which data evolves but also because of the ways the nature of theater-making itself changes, this chapter expands my range of paradigms by considering a modern classic in a contemporary production that underlines the symbiotic relationship between theatrical text and environmental inquiry, while being open to simultaneous, interrelated lines of investigation—in this case, community and politics. Such a staging approach is responsive to the reality that any crisis forms part of a mutual implication between human and nonhuman agencies. In selecting Rosmersholm, I aim to evidence that concerns of social, political, and environmental justice go hand in hand. I am also reminded of Aron and May’s (2012) definition of ecodramaturgy as “theater and performance making that puts ecological reciprocity and community at the center of its theatrical and thematic intent.” Macmillan’s previous role as dramaturg in Katie Mitchell’s 2071, developed with scientist Chris Rapley (Rapley and Macmillan  2015), evidences his ongoing engagement with narratives of ecology, sustainability, and preservation, as well as a concern with mutual implication. That last issue is a major theme in this production of Rosmersholm; it is conceptualized at the level of human and landscape, inside and outside, democracy and privilege, with a view to demonstrating how these binaries evaporate. The unifying thread that dissolves them is nature, both human and nonhuman.

Rosmersholm: Landscape as Politics In 2019 the Duke of York’s Theatre in London staged “a new adaptation” of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, created by Duncan Macmillan (text) and Ian Rickson (direction). Macmillan is one of the playwrights most attuned to the climate crisis, as work like Lungs (2011) and 2071 (Rapley and Macmillan 2014) also demonstrates. As I discuss in detail elsewhere (Angelaki  2017), in Lungs, Macmillan uses the plot device of a conversation between a young couple to highlight the realities of our impact on the world through everyday choices such as having children, in the context of overpopulation and resource drain. In 2071, Macmillan collaborated with Rapley and director Katie Mitchell to create a performance lecture focusing on the urgent need to manage the planet’s rising temperatures. In Macmillan’s reworking of Rosmersholm, there are two important elements to note. First, the term adaptation rather than version is used, implying a greater degree of creative intervention on the text. Second, that the couple John Rosmer and Rebecca West are the central plot pivot and that politics, local, national, and international, are interwoven with the environment as essential conditioning factors in this staging of Rosmersholm is very fitting when we consider Macmillan’s broader oeuvre. This is a play where the land “is a significant agent recognized as exercising a compelling power in the lives of those who are close to it” (Frenz 1964). This transcends the set of characters inhabiting the estate, extending into the local community. As the ecologies of Ibsen’s microcosm are transferable as political example more broadly, so the allegory in this proto-environmental play is significant. One of the most fascinating elements of Rosmersholm is that we are not dealing with a couple in the traditional sense. That is, Rebecca and Rosmer are not married, or even involved in a romantic relationship (despite the speculation). Theirs has been a meeting of minds, although the text does, eventually, reveal desire on the part of both protagonists for one another. Rebecca and Rosmer are seen throughout as two poles that attract, two

Adaptation and Environment   441 individuals who balance each other, conditioning one another through reciprocal affect, an interpersonal impact that is mental, emotional, and physical at the same time. In this production, Rebecca West is played by Hayley Atwell and John Rosmer is played by Tom Burke. Rosmer is a relatively recent widower; as the play opens, we learn that his wife (here renamed Beth) took her own life one year earlier. As the play unfolds, we will learn about the context of the woman’s suicide, her ailing mental health and the disappointment of being childless, the emotional and physical distance between her and Rosmer, and also her thoughts regarding Rosmer and Rebecca’s relationship. Other important events that mark the plot of the play are Rosmer’s disenfranchisement within the community where his family—whose burden he still carries—has held power for a very long time; a crisis of identity, which leaves him radically uncertain as to his options, or his future; the revelation of his desire to start afresh with Rebecca as his partner; an ethical dilemma that will make it impossible for Rebecca to pursue happiness with Rosmer, as her own past resurfaces. An identity crisis, more broadly conceived, concerns not only the play’s main characters but also those that we (largely, with the exception of the servants) do not see: the broader community. The events of the play unfold as an election is pending, for which Rosmer will be claimed, then rejected, by two ideologically opposed sides. At the time when the play was staged at the West End, Britain was experiencing its own crisis of identity—political and social—regarding its position in Europe, with Brexit looming and a prime minister (Theresa May) stepping down as the country was negotiating its options. The outside, the environment, literally and metaphorically, was key: in Ibsen, this is the landscape and community; in Britain’s case, it was the European Union and collaboration versus insularity. From the first pages of text, Macmillan (2019) communicates that this is a political play with contemporary urgency; he does so by quoting Ibsen, writing one year before Rosmersholm: “There is still much to be done in this country [Norway] before we can be said to have achieved full freedom. But our present democracy scarcely has the power to accomplish that task. An element of nobility [emphasis original] must enter into our political life . . . of character, of mind and will. . . . It will come to us from our women and our working men.” Janet Garton (1994) describes this time in the author’s life: “Ibsen was an eager follower of contemporary debate, and alert to all the burning issues of the day, including this one. He was resident in Munich . . . although he was travelling too, most importantly to Denmark and Norway; and from his vantage point . . . was well placed to follow both European and Scandinavian developments. His plays can be plotted along various axes: politically, as a commentary on the struggles of the growing movement towards parliamentary government and national independence in Norway.” Macmillan frames the stage environment of the play as follows, and I provide a selection from an extensive opening stage direction (as we might expect from a text based on Ibsen): Darkness. The sound of a nearby mill – enormous, powerful, rhythmic. Wind through tall trees. Deep, fast-moving water. [. . .] A door flies open, allowing a thin shard of reflected daylight into the room. Dust particles move in the air. A woman runs barefoot through the darkness . . . as she approaches a tall window and tries to open its shutters. . . . Bright, early afternoon sunlight spills in. [. . .]  (Macmillan 2019)

442   Vicky Angelaki We then learn more about the interior of the house, where, in the impressive drawing room, on this summer’s day in 1886, the decor is of “birch branches and stones” but also “water damage on the walls and floorboards” (). Critics mostly missed what in my view was a deliberate and systematic evocation of the natural element visually and verbally from the beginning through to the finale. Some exceptions: The Stage reviewer writes that, in the play’s denouement, “as the sun starts to set on Rosmer and Rebecca, the whole stage looks as if it is aflame” (Tripney 2019); the reviewer for A Younger Theatre describes the charged inside/outside dynamic on which Rosmersholm is built, commenting on the thoughtfully constructed interplay, for example, observing, “Touches like having an outside breeze move the curtains when the window is open . . . [are moving] on a spiritual level” (Patrick  2019); The Guardian reviewer comments, “Rather than have Rebecca first seen crocheting a shawl . . . [Macmillan] shows her letting light into a room shrouded in gloom. . . . And Rosmer himself, in a bid to escape his inheritance, hurls flowers at the hated portraits [of his ancestors, which dominate the sitting room where most of the action takes place]” (Billington 2019). Still, there is, broadly, an absence of comment on Ibsen’s or this production’s creators’ use of symbolism, at least on any deep level, even though their subtlety of response to Ibsen is such that what have been described as “symbolistic patterns [. . .] drawn very largely from primitive folkloristic sources – sources which spring directly from man's relationship to land and sea and which inevitably assume a dark-toned, fateful view of life” (Gustafson 1955, 10), become tangible. Besides being strongly evocative in terms of social context (in the case of the Ibsen quotation) and of imagery (in the case of the description of the play’s opening setting), Macmillan’s introduction is also strongly politicized from the beginning, as well as infused with inside/outside dynamics, indicating the symbiosis between the house and its natural setting. Chris Megson (2010, vii) remarks on “The Naturalist quest for verisimilitude via the forensic reproduction of the observable world.” Naturalism, that is, is predominantly concerned with human nature and its systematic inspection in the fullest sense: mental, emotional, and physical—but also, certainly, with actual, nonhuman nature, with the environment. Megson observes, “The social critique of the play emerges from the spectator’s recognition of the chains of causality – that is, the material, psychological, even physiological, determinants of the action – which the play makes explicit” (ix). There is a great deal in that early information provided by the text to the reader, and by the stage to the spectator, in terms of how nature is politicized in the sense of heritage and privilege, but also how nature will always reclaim the human and human-made, emerging as a dominant force. This force stands in stark contrast with individuals’ inability to acknowledge their agency and responsibility, to work with the landscape rather than against or in spite of it. Ibsen creates the perfect metaphor for how, if we are unable to face our reality bravely, it will always suppress us—and the force of nature is irreversible. But in these early stages, this is merely hinted at: the outside is alluring; the light is friendly—a certain openness and promise for a novel perspective exists, as Rebecca opens the window. Upon closer inspection, the tense dynamics are already at play; that nature can be both a partner and a risk, an ally or an adversary, is visible in that description of the decor alongside the water damage. The pendulum can shift either way. This is not a binary, Ibsen and Macmillan tell us: both glory and doom are ever present; it is their negotiation that changes us from passive observers to agents, and from agents of destruction to agents of positive change.

Adaptation and Environment   443 What was at stake in Britain in 2019 was the country’s empathy versus insularity, and, more specifically, an insularity that was not only national—in the context of Britain’s relationship to its European neighbors—but that concerned the level of the individual. Insularity, at national, governmental and individual, civic levels, is tied to narratives of the past; it is the very tenet of neoliberalism. Empathy, on the other hand, on a national level presupposes an understanding of allilepidrasis (mutual impact), of appreciating that actions and decisions taken on a local level impact the international, that what happens beyond the notional and physical boundaries of my own property does impact my own life, and indeed the choices that I make as an individual impact a local but also a much more broadly conceived community of others, who may be very different from me. In Rosmersholm, it is, ultimately, this narrative that is at stake: will the estate, with its natural elements of separation (the forceful water mill), be seen as an island of retreat for the ruling, privileged class and of separation from the community, or will it be seen as the ground for positive political reformation and opening up; for an understanding of the fact that all of life and community are contingent, and the labor required for change cannot be undertaken individually, but must be seen as a collective task? In 2019, then, Rosmersholm appeared to appeal to a nation’s psyche: how the country (now not Norway, but Britain) would view its embeddedness in the narratives of others; how it would or would not commit to caring for those more vulnerable; how it would work toward equality, including, of course, gender equality; and, as I also discuss in Theatre & Environment in the context of the referendum vote, how such an important player within the European narrative would handle its responsibility toward the world out there in terms of collaborative policy. For all those dilemmas, however explicitly unnamed in Macmillan’s adaptation, John Rosmer stands as a metaphor. His attempt to better understand the electorate on the eve of a major battle captures the turmoil that every public figure ought to be awake to: how the working class might best be cared for; what happens when the working class feels unseen; how this may lead to the usurping of its best interests by demagogues. Macmillan’s Rosmersholm crafted a suitably multidimensional platform dramaturgically, careful not to sideline any of the concerns for the sake of another. Its dynamic female protagonist reminded us that in systemically enforced, institutionally established patriarchal strategies of holding on to power, women’s private lives can always be weaponized against them so as to first neutralize and then dispose of them as political agents of change. In Rosmersholm, it is the female characters that are primarily attuned to the world out there (including the housekeeper and Rosmer’s dead wife, who was so haunted by the landscape). Rebecca, charged by this world, tirelessly works to represent it in the conversations that happen inside Rosmersholm’s corridors of power: as landscape and as community. That she does this at a time when women are not even allowed a vote is particularly meaningful. As one scholar describes her, Rebecca is “a true daughter of nature,” not least because—a point made more emphatically in Ibsen’s source material—“She comes down to Rosmersholm from the rugged wilderness of Finnmark” (Thune 1968, 316), with “ ‘nordlandsmystikken,’ the mystery of the North . . . a common feature in nineteenth-century Norwegian literature” (Garton 1994, 113). A point made clear in both Ibsen and Macmillan is Rebecca’s “love of air, light, and flowers in contrast to the customary gloom and depression of Rosmersholm” (Thune,  1968, 316). Therefore, it is understandable that the great wide open world is, to Rebecca, a question of access as natural as being able to be part of the open space of the

444   Vicky Angelaki landscape. Indeed, “When she first comes down from Finnmark, she feels . . . that a great new wide world is opening before her, and she yearns to be in the vanguard of the new age where each individual would assume full and complete freedom” (Thune, 1968, 316). Such a reading also helps us better understand Rebecca’s decision at the finale of the play: she has failed to make a difference to public life via her connection to Rosmer, who, unlike her, has social capital defined by class and political agency inscribed by gender; yet he is paralyzed at his range of options. The peace she has found, as she says, has concerned their coexistence within the four walls of the estate, and their intellectual intimacy. But this is not, ultimately, how she imagined her life’s purpose, nor how she would frame her own agency, which was always to be cast on a wider canvas. What is therefore at stake for Rebecca is her political agency more than her personal happiness. For Rosmer, on the contrary, it is the pursuit of individual fulfillment that drives the effort and produces the struggle; his forays into politics have always been awkward and inconclusive. Still, the crisis is equal and real for both of Ibsen’s—and Macmillan’s— protagonists, and it concerns the negotiation of the dilemma between self-centeredness and individual prosperity versus the assumption of responsibility. It is, on contemporary terms, the dilemma between the principles of neoliberalism and those of participation—ideologies directly linked to Britain’s own social crisis in the Brexit years. Rosmersholm thus serves on two levels, literal and metaphorical, as a vehicle for making a case for the significance of ideological awareness and agency and as a way of building a bridge, across history and geography, to other communities, against the insularity proposed by Britain’s dominant political climate at the time, reminding spectators that history is a narrative with space for intervention.

Community Activism: Political, Social, and Environmental Justice When Rosmersholm opens, the determiner for all that will follow has already taken place: a visitor has arrived. His presence will be a trigger for an attempt at opening up Rosmersholm and, in itself, is already a signal of doom. The person in question is Governor Andreas Kroll, Rosmer’s brother-in-law. It has been a year since he last visited and a year since the death of Rosmer’s wife, but we are now on the eve of an election, and Kroll is aware that Rosmer’s support is crucial for a win. Even though Rosmer’s own dining room is to be used as a polling station, the man himself is notably distanced from public life. Kroll has arrived to invite him to become the editor of The Tribune, a newspaper in which Kroll has secured the majority share so that he might use it for his conservative agenda and as a counterforce to The Lighthouse, the left-leaning newspaper that he describes as radical. Kroll aggressively manipulates Rosmer, counting on his aversion to public life (and his withdrawal from his role as pastor), to entice him with a role that effectively requires no public action but merely the lending of his name and long-held family authority as a community leader. The entire play, it soon becomes clear, is a battle for Rosmer’s mind, body, and soul; when his mentor, the society outcast Ulrik Brendel, appears not long after Kroll has made his own entrance, a link to the idealism of the past appears plausible. Brendel, however, will also disappoint; he

Adaptation and Environment   445 has become a caricature (see also Garton, 1994: 113) of his former fiery self and is no longer a force to be reckoned with. And while the ever-weighing Ibsenian past haunts Rosmer, his desire to work toward a fairer society eventually surfaces as Rebecca’s influence becomes manifest in a way that links clearly to the Ibsen epigraph cited earlier: ROSMER. EVERYONE! Nobility. Nobility. Not just for the privileged. Nobility in politics. Nobility in the press. Nobility throughout society. Respect for each other. Patience and compassion for each other’s views and experiences. (Macmillan 2019) However, the course of action through which Rosmer might begin to pursue this imperative is where his awkwardness, weakness, and ultimately his destruction, lie. He is too sincere for any of the clashing political doctrines—or for the men representing them. This becomes clear when Rebecca uses his office—and his name—to write a message to Mortensgaard, The Lighthouse editor, whom Rosmer had once publicly disgraced for having a relationship with a woman abandoned by her husband, and Mortensgaard arrives late at night in Rosmersholm for a discussion. Rosmer, having denounced faith and religion— both of which he feels have abandoned him—offers the support of his name for the political side represented by Mortensgaard’s newspaper. At first Mortensgaard is delighted; such an endorsement ought to win the election. But when it becomes apparent that it is no longer a Christian man who offers this endorsement, but a man bereft of faith, Mortensgaard distances himself from Rosmer, as Kroll also does. It is then that the exploitation of both sides becomes fully exposed: seeking to enhance their doctrine through the support of a man seen as a foundation of the community, they abandon him when he is no longer willing to act as a bearer of his family’s heavy weight. However compromised Rosmer’s position might be in the crossfire of two opposing political sides, both of which will now seek to discredit him in their respective publications, it only becomes hopeless when he realizes the full extent of Rebecca’s influence, and that their relationship may not have been as equal, or noble, as he had believed. Once confronted by Kroll about the nature of her relationship with the man who adopted her as a young adult, likely because, unbeknownst to her, he was her biological father, Rebecca becomes vulnerable to Kroll’s demands. The play’s ending is tragic, though, for some brief moments, it is also hopeful: Rebecca and Rosmer contemplate a possible future together, only to concede that the weight of the past is impossible to shake off; then they take their final steps toward the water mill, exiting to commit suicide in the same manner that Beth had. Still, for a short interlude, and as the sun was setting, life seemed to burn brighter than death as their enthusiasm for a potential life away from the estate made this option almost plausible. Politics and environment in Rosmersholm are entirely symbiotic from the relatively quiet—though rich with foreboding—beginning through to the literally cataclysmic finale. In the Macmillan-Rickson production, the work of Rae Smith (scenographer), Neil Austin (lighting designer), and Gregory Clarke (sound designer) was crucial in establishing the right atmosphere, not in the sense of mere accompaniment for the text but of active agent moving the story forward. The Rosmer estate, as we know, is directly adjacent to a water mill—in itself, a forceful intervention on nature, which serves to further enhance the power

446   Vicky Angelaki of an already potent element. The water mill is the estate’s center of gravity, the intersection of life and death equally, and the ultimate force to be reckoned with. As Garton (1994, 114) notes: Water surrounds this play. It begins with Rosmer attempting, and failing, to cross the path over the mill-stream, and ends with the fall into those same waters, whose pull has been felt behind the whole of the action. Rosmer and Rebecca are both sea-creatures. . . . Many of the most dangerous spirits of Norwegian mythology are connected with the power of river, waterfall and sea; and nowhere in Ibsen’s writings is this power more strongly felt than in his next play [The Lady from the Sea, which clearly demonstrates that nature was fast becoming a factor of augmented significance in Ibsen’s theater].

Early on in the play, upon his return to Rosmersholm after a year’s absence, Kroll “inspects the water damage below the window” in the sitting room and asks, “There was a flood?” (Macmillan 2019). WEST. There’d been a storm and— When the wheel stopped turning, the banks broke open. It happened very fast. KROLL. But—they stopped the mill to retrieve her body. WEST. No. Her— Her body— Stopped the wheel.

As we will later hear, Beth spent most of her time seated in a chair with a direct view of the mill. Life and death, in this case, embodied the repercussions of the false inside/outside binary: the physical and conceptual separation of the person from the outside world and the community to their own detriment. Rosmersholm warns that the environment can become a foe when humans fail to interact with it in a meaningful way, when they live on the illusion of the viability of separation and of the utilitarian exploitation of landscape without a consideration of its own intrinsic needs. Looking through the window at the water mill, which has long since resumed its function after Beth perished, Kroll says: The water mill is the beating heart of Rosmersholm. For it to stop, it felt as if— As if the whole town— As if the entire world had died with her. (Macmillan 2019)

Humans are transient—and yet their impact on the landscape and its ecology lingers. It is the natural element that remains. And, as events will show, how it has been treated by humans directly impacts how that natural element will behave against the human-made: with force or with compassion. Indeed it is the nonhuman that appears to be the living organism that endures, that breathes and vibrates with life and that nurtures or ceases it: the “beating heart.” Rosmersholm clearly shows us the consequences of nature becoming monetized, of the ecologies of a community functioning around capitalism, of a people’s separation from the organic relationship to landscape, which has been displaced by profit. As revealed in Kroll’s statement “This community was built with wood from the water mill”

Adaptation and Environment   447 (Macmillan 2019), the ruling class has exerted its authority and influence on the majority on the basis of exploitation of the natural landscape and subsequently used it to draw a line (both physical and notional) of separation from it between those privileged and those not. At the end of the play, the results of the election, which we will never learn, bring on a new phase for the community, while a flood storms the sitting room, the literal and metaphorical manifestation of a force of change. As the Rosmer line ends, and, with it, Rebecca’s hope for social agency, so nature reclaims, erases, resets; it ushers in a new stage in history. Perhaps it will be built on democracy and participation, as Rosmer and Rebecca had envisaged but as their own ties to their pasts had prevented them from delivering. As Rosmersholm moves into its final moments, Rebecca and Rosmer appear to be reclaimed by the landscape, which has begun to invade the house. While they are contemplating their choices, enchanted by the dream of a future away but acknowledging that no distance will ever be enough between them and their past, Macmillan’s (2019) stage directions read, “The room has continued to darken. Lamps have faded and extinguished. REBECCA and ROSMER are surrounded by darkness, as if the room itself has clarified its focus on their conversation.” Beyond human-made safety and comfort, then, we are predominantly of our environment, and it is that relationship that will be the most definitive one. Rebecca says, “Love is selfish. It makes you a country of two. At war with the rest of the world”. With this definitive pronouncement on the untenability of insularity, a meaningful realization that the world is larger than the individual, Rebecca and Rosmer will exit to meet their deaths, falling in the water, crushed by the mill. They are a form of sacrifice to the elements (see Greenberg 1994), those who had to be lost for the old limitations of class to become obsolete, for access to the earth to be not the trope of privilege but the bond of a community, no longer operating on false dichotomies (see Durbach 1977; Frenz 1964; Thune 1968). As is true for any Ibsen play, Rosmersholm does not operate didactically. Rather, it leaves us with a final impact whose interpretation rests with the individual spectator. In this case, we might deduce that, for all their efforts, Rebecca and Rosmer have not managed to transition to the future they so desired (socially and personally), though they have laid the groundwork for it by their own ideological inquiries and ethical dilemmas. And although it is not purposeful to conclusively argue whether Rebecca’s and Rosmer’s deaths were inevitable or otherwise, precisely because the nuances of interpretation that follow Ibsen—and that are given adequate space in Macmillan’s adaptation—are so profound, it is important to note that these are not deaths that will be devoid of impact. On the contrary, following the crisis, and with the repercussions of seclusion and repression, as well as the confines of class (here, both aristocracy and working class appear equally entrapping) fully evident, we are at least encouraged to think that a moment of social reckoning toward a more progressive future might come. Therefore, following this conclusion of the past, a process of rebirth, environmental and societal, might follow. And even though, as stated earlier, neither Rebecca and Rosmer, nor the audience, will know whether change will come—a feeling that, of course, is more compelling toward social reflection and action than a safe dramatic resolution—the production’s closing allows no doubt that the force enwrapping Rosmersholm, as Kroll arrives, inspecting the empty room and seeking Rosmer urgently, is other than human. The old familiar anthropocentric concerns have been superseded:

448   Vicky Angelaki A gust of wind blows the curtains through the open window. A chill. … A sequence of loud cracks. … A building rush of water. … Water begins to pour into the room. KROLL stands still in horror. The water rapidly covers the floor. (Macmillan 2019) In Rickson’s production, this ending, beyond being visually poetic, was extraordinarily evocative. As the water flooded the floor, the flowers that Rosmer had earlier hurled in the direction of the family portraits—an attempt to humanize, through nature, the authority figures still haunting the present—became driftwood. The forceful element of water captured the force in the energy of the crowd on voting day, and perhaps also their wrath at the establishment. A flood has come; change and even a democratic revolution may be afoot. As Rebecca is lost, so, in a way, the wilderness of landscape that she had always loved avenges her: she becomes the tide.

Conclusion In academic scholarship on Rosmersholm, the finale has been a recurring point of reference, a complex gesture that invites much speculation and explication. There are diverging viewpoints, as can be expected; Rebecca West is, after all, one of Ibsen’s most intricate characters, and her relationship to Rosmer, to Rosmersholm, and to the outside world is too profoundly nuanced and challenging to commit to a single reading. However we may choose to read these final moments—as emancipatory for the self and for others, as defeatist, or as sacrificial— what cannot be overlooked is the strong symbiotic link to nature and environment that is a determiner of action. Macmillan’s adaptation offers a muscular reinforcement of this, as does Ibsen’s source text. Readings of the play in context, considering the work that precedes and follows Rosmersholm (The Wild Duck and The Lady from the Sea, respectively; see also Raphael 1963), emphatically prove that Ibsen was pursuing an engagement with how individual and environment are dynamically interrelated; how one cannot exist, and especially not thrive, without nurturing contact with the other; that when this reciprocal bond is neglected, when we confine ourselves—or attempt to—too restrictively to the routine of the inside, the world suffers, and so do we. Or, similarly, we begin to display symptoms of that separation—an abjection, a discontent—that are manifestations of the need to reconnect to that natural sublime that is bigger than the self. In an interpretative act of “greening back,” such concerns surface robustly, and in substantial adaptations, such as Macmillan’s, the environment comes to reclaim its significance as protagonist rather than be relegated to a convenient backdrop for the psychological composition of any given character. It is not merely of service to the play; it drives the play. Within Ibsen’s oeuvre, it is difficult to find texts where the environment is not primary, and this is precisely why these works land so emphatically into the twenty-first century, as theater-makers are paying more

Adaptation and Environment   449 attention to such concerns in the face of climate crisis. But there is still more work to be done, and adaptation, along with ecodramaturgy, are powerful means of doing so. In that way, a mediation between the emergencies of our present and the innovations of the past can deliver a path toward civic realignment, toward an appreciation of the fact that, however much might separate us politically, as the climate activist Greta Thunberg (2019) has sharply summarized our shared current situation, “our house is on fire.” There is no longer a convenient inside/outside binary to cling to. There can be only collectivity, care, and action.

References Angelaki, Vicky. 2017. Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis. London: Bloomsbury. Angelaki, Vicky. 2019. Theatre and Environment. London: Red Globe Press. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May, eds. 2012. Readings in Performance and Ecology. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bala, Sruti. 2017. “Decolonising Theatre and Performance Studies: Tales from the Classroom.” Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 20, no. 3: 333–45. Billington, Michael. 2019. “Rosmersholm Review: Atwell and Burke Are Breathtaking in Ibsen Masterpiece.” The Guardian, May 3. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/may/03/ rosmersholm-review-haylet-atwell-tom-burke-ibsen. Chaudhuri, Una. 1995. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chaudhuri, Una, and Shonni Enelow. 2014. Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Chaudhuri, Una, and Elinor Fuchs, eds. 2002. Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Durbach, Errol. 1977. “Temptation to Err: The Denouement of ‘Rosmersholm.’ ” Educational Theatre Journal 29, no. 4: 477–85. Emmott, Stephen. 2013. Ten Billion. London: Penguin. Finburgh, Clare, and Carl Lavery, eds. 2015. Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd: Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage. London: Bloomsbury. Frenz, Horst. 1964. “Eugene O’Neil’s ‘Desire Under the Elms’ and Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm.’ ” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 9: 160–5. Garton, Janet. 1994. “The Middle Plays.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, edited by J. McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 106–25. Gilbert, Helen. 2019. “Performing the Anthropocene: Marrugeku’s Cut the Sky.” In Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent, edited by B. Neumeier and H. Tiffin. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 219–233. Greenberg, Yael. 1994. “The Hidden Architecture in Ibsen’s ‘Rosmersholm.’ ” Modern Language Review 89, no. 1: 138–48. Gustafson, Alrik. 1955. “Some Notes on Theme, Character, and Symbol in ‘Rosmersholm.’ ” Carleton Drama Review 1, no. 2: 3–13. Klein, Naomi. 2019. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lavery, Carl, ed. 2016. “Performance and Ecology—What Can Theatre Do?” Special issue, Green Letters 20, no. 3.

450   Vicky Angelaki Lindholdt, Paul. 2015. Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Macmillan, Duncan. 2011. Lungs. London: Oberon Books. Macmillan, Duncan. 2019. Rosmersholm. London: Oberon Books. Digital Edition. Megson, Chris. 2010. The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays. London: Methuen Drama. Patrick, Grace. 2019. “Review: Rosmersholm, Duke of York's Theatre.” A Younger Theatre, May 5. https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-rosmersholm-duke-of-yorks-theatre/. Raphael, R. 1963. “Illusion and the Self in ‘The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm’ and ‘The Lady from the Sea.’ ” Scandinavian Studies 35, no 1: 37–50. Rapley, Chris, and Duncan Macmillan. 2015. 2071: The World We’ll Leave Our Grandchildren. London: Hachette. Safran Foer, Jonathan. 2019. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thunberg, Greta. 2019. “ ‘Our House Is on Fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate.” The Guardian, January 25. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/ jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate. Thune, E. 1968. “Tragedy and Myth in ‘Rosmersholm.’ ” Scandinavian Studies 40, no. 4: 310–8. Tripney, Natasha. 2019. “Rosmersholm Review at Duke of York’s Theatre, London: ‘Hayley Atwell Is Superb.’ ” The Stage, May 2. https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2019/rosmersholmreview-at-duke-of-yorks-theatre-london/.

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BODY, VOIC E , GE ST U R E This section of the Handbook focuses on performing, including voice, technique, gesture, and appearance in a range of contexts. Performance is embodied. The body alerts us to the somatic norms—the corporeal standards—that operate within political institutions (Puwar 2004). As Reinelt (2016) points out, “Because theatre and performance studies work through an epistemology of embodied practices and symbolic codification, it is an exemplary site for commenting on and contributing to public knowledge about [politics].” The semiotics of bodies—encountering and passing each other, sometimes noticed, ignored, or challenged, violated or violating—allow us to read the underlying politics of identity, ideologies, and solidarities that form and are played out within institutional politics. Performing bodies also help us understand the politics of agency—using our bodies, making distinctions between body and mind, body and emotions, working with our bodies, feeling the pain and negotiating this, all allow us to identify spaces of danger, of love and of repair, of politics as we experience it (Munsi 2016). It is in and through bodily performances that key political notions and practices such as dissent, participation, citizenship, and representation are given (shifting and contested) forms and characters. Without noticing this, our understanding of institutional life would be limited (Rai 2014). However, the body on view does not perform in a vacuum; it does so in space, place, and time, which are co-constituted as the performance takes form, while at the same time bringing the stage into being by occupying it, speaking from it, and creating an aesthetic that forms and translates the politics being performed (5). This section attends to forms of theater and wider performances that explore political themes such as participation and representation, for example verbatim theater and participatory theater. At the same time, drawing on Nick Ridout’s (2009, 65) distinction between making political theater and making theater politically, the section attends to the process of

452   BODY, VOICE, GESTURE making performance politically as one of the sites where people make difference and find agency in the face of precarity and predominant ways of thinking that attempt to circumscribe what we know, how we know, and what we can do. Social theorists and theater and performance studies scholars have reacted rapidly and sharply in response to the politics of mass assemblies in Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Zuccotti Park, and Shaheen Bagh that have drawn the world’s attention in recent years. In Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler (2015) asserts the importance of collective acts of assembly such as protest marches. “When bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones),” writes Butler, “they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear” (11). In her chapter Bishnupriya Dutt likewise attends to the corporeal materiality of resistant subjectivity, of the body and of assembled bodies, exploring recent performative manifestations of protest in India. She discusses a religious festival instrumentalized for electoral gain and a civil society protest performance during the Indian parliamentary elections in 2019. While the growing rightwing rhetoric and cultural mobilization in spaces of mass congregations adopt stereotypical gestural rhetoric, Dutt argues, gestures that emerge from protest sites can be read as transgressive and agentic bodily idioms—calling into question the powerful dimensions of reigning notions of the political. While some protest movements recall and reclaim earlier movements for justice and social change—citing, recuperating, and remixing protest tactics, strategies, and memes (Taylor 2019)—others create new gestural languages and strategies of mobilization. Dutt finds affirmative antecedents of the contemporary protest-performance in India in past theatrical practices, particularly those elaborated by Bertolt Brecht. Alan Finlayson also addresses political protests while questioning how the performance of ideology is made routine in and through the practices of political movements—in meetings and marches, for example. Considering the contribution of performance studies to the analysis of political ideologies, he shows how we can better understand ideologies by attending to their manifestations as persuasive rhetoric. Employing examples from the British political scene, Finlayson demonstrates “how political leaders perform fidelity to a political tradition, draw rhetorical authority from it, and promote, perform, and embody a particular sort of ideological ‘ethos.’ ” As Marianne Hirsch (2019, 16) reminds us, to protest is also “to bear witness together, to testify publicly” (as the Latin etymology of the word attests). “Protest requires joint action and, importantly, addressees an audience: those with the authority to satisfy the demand and those to observe the claim” (16). In her chapter Sruti Bala explores undesired audience participation, expressed in rebellious or contentious gestures disrupting a scene. Drawing on a rich body of work on the gestures of participatory art, where she posits that gesture is simultaneously an expression of an inner attitude and a social habitude, she reads the gestural as a way to link discussions on participatory art to broader issues of citizenship and collective action. The chapter by M. I. Franklin on the female punk musicians Viv Albertine, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Brix Smith Start, and Cosey Fanni Tutti also illuminates the productive power of performance to reimagine the world. Reading the published memoirs of these musicians, Franklin argues that they provide rich insights into the complex, underground sexual politics of making it in a male-dominated industry. Her analysis shows how the artists’ narratives challenge androcentric stereotypes in the “story of punk,” thus rescripting “the official record of punk registers of musical and

Body, Voice, Gesture   453 political protest as groundbreaking experimental artists who also excel at playing fast, loudly, and with the libidinous energy usually attributed to ‘masculine’ performance­.” The body is a site of impassioned, fraught, and complex debates across the globe today. Two essays join these debates by addressing the politics of representing disability and the differently abled body in theater (Bree Hadley) and politics and erotica in representations of the abused body (Lisa Fitzpatrick). Hadley considers how the terms by which artists, activists, and scholars define and debate the presence of the disabled body in performance have changed over time, and the role these changes continue to play in efforts to interrogate how we see, speak, and think about the performance of different bodies and bodily differences. Fitzpatrick, on the other hand, examines recent theatrical representations of extreme violence and cruelty, including representations of genocidal violence, in order to consider the pull of the erotic and playwrights’ strategies that resist it. She proceeds by bringing into dialogue Georges Bataille’s reflections on the relationships between violence, eroticism, and the body, and Butler’s work on vulnerability, where she argues for vulnerability as a shared, ontological quality of humanity. Fitzpatrick’s inquiry also resonates deeply with Kelly Oliver’s writings on these themes, especially Oliver’s (2007: 164–5) claim that in the context of witnessing difficult or traumatic histories, ethics requires a vigilant self-interrogation of our own conscious and unconscious aggressive impulses and fascinations with violence and war as well as “owning up to the ways in which we profit both materially and psychologically from the suffering of others.” Oliver’s injunction to learn to see differently—to see the world as fundamentally about connection and dependency and to engage on a continual self-interrogation—is critical, and something that her and Fitzpatrick’s analyses share in common. The final essays in this section offer novel perspectives on how politics is understood, felt, and activated in different performance contexts in the United Kingdom and the United States. Inspired in part by Susan Leigh Foster’s writings on the relationships between choreography, kinaesthesia, and empathy, Stephen Coleman reflects on his collaboration (in 2018) with the renowned choreographer Sharon Watson and dancers from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. The goal was to produce a contemporary dance work reflecting the public mood in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The chapter begins by considering the ways political affect can exceed the capacities of typical scientific representation. It goes on to suggest that by attending to corporeal experience we might find ways of encapsulating prevalent political moods. Coleman’s chapter concludes by offering four arguments for further imaginative collaboration between artists and social scientists, with a view to developing modes of political attention that capture the dynamics of politics as a felt experience. Julia Peetz’s essay addresses issues of embodiment in the performance of politics, focusing in particular on the significance of politicians’ bodies in twenty-first-century US politics. The essay begins with a reflection on the famous 1651 frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, which offers an evocative and indelible image of political embodiment. For Hobbes, argues Peetz, the social contract was principally rooted in the concept of sovereignty: the noncontractual status of a supreme, or sovereign, ruler who would ensure law and order among their people. Like God, this sovereign power was always itself above the law and could take the form of a singular or corporate body. Peetz questions whether the image of literal embodiment exemplified by Leviathan’s frontispiece can actually help explain how populist politics operates through performance.

454   BODY, VOICE, GESTURE Overall, the essays making up the “Body, Voice, Gesture” section of the Handbook engage a range of theatrical and performance modes from across the globe—from protest marches and occupations of public space via community theater and experimental works to traditional plays and performances—using multiple approaches and offering myriad perspectives on these themes.

References Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2019. “Introduction: Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory.” In Women Mobilizing Memory, edited by Banu Karaca, Jean Howard, Marianne Hirsch, María José Contreras, Ayşe Gül Altınay, and Alisa Solomon, 1–23. New York: Columbia University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2007. Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media. New York: Columbia University Press. Rai, Shirin M. 2015. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies, 63, no. 5: 1179–97. Reinelt, Janelle. 2016. “Coerced Performances? Trafficking, Sex Work, and Consent.” Lateral 5, no.2 https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.2.9 Ridout, Nicholas. 2009. Theatre and Ethics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sarkar Munsi, Urmimala. 2016. “Mediations around an Alternative Concept of “Work:” Re-imagining the Bodies of Survivors of Trafficking.” Lateral 5, no. 2 https://doi. org/10.25158/L5.2.11 Taylor, Diana. 2019. “Traumatic Memes.” In Women Mobilizing Memory, edited by Banu Karaca, Jean Howard, Marianne Hirsch, María José Contreras, Ayşe Gül Altınay, and Alisa Solomon, 113–32. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 28

I n ter ru ption a n d I n ter pel l ation Leaving the Theater in Search of the Theater Sruti Bala

Tableau In a well-known essay, Walter Benjamin ([1966] 1973, 4–5) argues that Brechtian epic theater is not so much about mimetically depicting or reproducing situations but rather about revealing the conditions underlying a situation using various means and techniques of interruption, such as stage design, music, heightened punctuation, and the actor’s Gestus. Far from ruining its enjoyment, Benjamin points out, the interruption of a scene counterintuitively brings about a keen awareness of a specific situation, a sense ofrapture in the spectator. Just as the sports enthusiast can remain engrossed in a game and simultaneously be cheering, hooting, and commenting on the players’ moves, or a radio listener can switch on and off, move in and out of the radio show with ease, so Benjamin imagined the audiences of Brecht’s epic theater as participants engrossed in the scene while being simultaneously keenly aware of the circumstances of the scene. They find a “pleasurable recognition” of the conditions of a situation not despite but in the very moments of its interruption and foregrounding of its framing (13). He introduces a curious example to elaborate how such an interruption could bring an ongoing scene to a standstill, enrapture it, and simultaneously dynamize it: This uncovering (making strange, or alienating) of conditions is brought about by processes being interrupted. Take the crudest example: a family row. Suddenly a stranger comes into the room. The wife is just about to pick up a bronze statuette and throw it at the daughter, the father is opening the window to call a policeman. At this moment the stranger appears at the

456   Sruti Bala door. “Tableau,” as they used to say around 1900. That is to say, the stranger is confronted with a certain set of conditions: troubled faces, open window, a devastated interior. There exists another point of view from which the more usual scenes of bourgeois life do not look so very different from this.  (18–19)

The stranger’s unannounced appearance at the scene interrupts a sequence of actions that would presumably have continued in the absence of the stranger. For Benjamin, the interruption is intriguing in the way it leaves not only the stranger but all the figures in the scene wondering what might happen next, what happened earlier, what led to this moment, what is the larger condition it evokes. The stranger is confronted with a scene that apparently grinds to a halt, calling upon everyone concerned to piece together the puzzle of a given moment. The distance to the event makes the details of the event become vividly perceptible. Benjamin’s stranger is left astounded (erstaunt), not knowing how to interpret what is going on and how to respond. Yet so are all the others in the scene, including ourselves as readers and implied spectators. This state of astonishment or enrapture permits a deep recognition of the historicity and larger purport of a scene (Butler 2015). Benjamin’s scene implicates us as theater audiences to the extent that we too might take the place of the strangers who appear as interruptions at the door and seek to make sense of what plays out in front of us. We might, however, feel closer to the position of the daughter, who is about to face an object being hurled at her by her mother. We might step into the shoes of the father, seeking refuge in the law to resolve a domestic crisis. We might participate in the rage of the mother, who, for some unknown reason, throws a bronze statuette at her daughter. We might, besides all this, become alert to the gendered dimensions and connotations of what purports to be a scene of domestic violence and conflict. Yet Benjamin’s interpretation of such participation is bound in a paradox: it is a participation that is possible not through involvement but through marked distance. The distance of the stranger from the scene is not only physical but also marked on the lines of kinship; he or she is not a relative or friend, but someone unfamiliar, a neighbor perhaps. It creates an interruption and simultaneously affords a possibility of witnessing. The moment of interruption generates observations and insights about the event and its larger implications. For the stranger who appears at the door of the family row, Benjamin ([1966] 1973, 5) comments, “the more far-reaching the devastations of our social order (the more these devastations undermine ourselves and our capacity to remain aware of them), the more marked must be the distance between the stranger and the events portrayed.” The scene becomes perceptible to us as a scene of devastation only when we are able to step aside from it, which is of course not the same as turning away from it. The scene, as Benjamin describes it, does not necessarily occur on a theater stage but is an imagined domestic scene, a hypothetical event that serves as metonym for bourgeois society at large in Benjamin’s reading of Brecht, a society wherein familial relations are inseparable from status, wealth, and property. It becomes theatrical because of the appearance of a stranger, who, by virtue of assuming the position of a spectator, makes of the occurrence “a scene” and thus shifts it from the quotidian realm to the register of the theatrical. Yet it is equally the constitution of the family row as a theatrical scene that allows for an examination, an exposure of the bourgeois family as an institution, thus shifting it from the imaginary to the register of the political. The scene of interruption thus reveals some of the co-constitutive entanglements between theater, performance, and politics.

Interruption and Interpellation   457 Benjamin’s curious case of the family row was intended as a scene that crystallized the principles of Brechtian epic theater. It has often been referenced as a reflection on the potential of theater to enable an artful interruption of ordinary time (Kear 2004). However, in this contribution I use it as a point of departure to reflect more generally on the significance of moments of interruption in theater and performance. Under which conditions might they be deemed political? And what precisely accords such interruptive gestures the quality of performance when they occur in the political realm? I begin by outlining forms of interruption that are deemed objectionable, from the more innocuous sounds and movements that disturb the conventions of performance to the uninvited hurling of objects or abuses at the stage. These moments of interruption, sometimes quotidian and well-intended, at other times creating headlines and uproars, compel us to reconsider assumptions about participation as being somehow inherently benign and harmonizing. I then turn to a 2018 lecture-performance by the Belgian scholar-artist Chokri Ben Chikha, in which the gesture of interrupting the protocols of theatrical performance raises questions about what makes performance political. In the course of researching the phenomenon of interruption in performance, I was drawn to the political philosophy of Louis Althusser, whose conception of ideological interpellation ties the discursive and material act of interruption to processes of subject formation. Reading Althusser’s scene of interpellation, in which the interruption of a quotidian situation by an act of hailing heralds the formation of a subject, I suggest that the political in performance is to be found not in the definition of politics but in its staging. Performance and politics are thus related by the ways in which they interrupt and interpellate each other. As a scholar trained in the disciplines of theater and performance studies, I am specifically interested in the visceral, vivid, material details of how interruption happens and what ensues as a result of such interruption. I am wary of romanticizing and elevating the concept, and hope to demonstrate that it is not in itself benign or emancipatory. Its analysis can be meaningfully pursued in terms of its gestures, an approach I have recently developed in a book-length study of participatory art (Bala 2018). The present contribution reads interruption and interpellation in conjuncture with broader political concerns around the intersections of the performative and the political.1

Scenes of Interruption in the Theater Theater stages are accustomed to receiving material and verbal tokens of disapproval from their discontent audiences. In some cultures, these interventions are no cause for alarm, as they form part of accepted conventions, serving as barometers of audience responses. Performers are expected to be prepared to respond to them gracefully and try to do a better job as entertainers and artists. A poor performance may receive vocal expressions of dissatisfaction, such as audiences behaving boisterously or boos and hoots. In some popular performance traditions, it is not uncommon for artists, especially those performing solo numbers, to face audience disapproval in the form of rotten tomatoes, eggs, slippers, paper planes, and other objects or invectives.2 This might be regarded as the negative counterpart to being showered with cash or flowers and generous applause and shouts of praise for a

458   Sruti Bala skilled performance, which are positively connoted and therefore not considered to be interruptive. Where the interruption is unexpected and not an accepted convention, it presents a more complicated situation. The immediate response to the pelting of objects on stage or other unsolicited interventions in a proscenium stage performance is usually a foregrounding of security arguments: unruly audience members are ushered out of the hall, reprimanded or fined for disturbing the show. Reviewers click tongues at those who couldn’t care less for the sacred conventions of the art space. Yet once the wider debates are initiated, once people care to ask what purpose the interruption served and if the protestors’ demands ought to be taken seriously, or whether they pose a threat to artistic freedom, such disruptive gestures, or indeed the artists to whom they are addressed, may even become hallmark moments or figures of theater history. The phenomenon of the interruption of a stage performance can be motivated by a wide range of political or ideological positions. The act of throwing objects on stage as a marker of disapproval seems to cut across traditional political divides. It is to be found on both left and right sides of the spectrum, as it were, and is targeted at both politically so-called progressive as well as conservative theater forms. There are numerous examples of performances by renowned theater-makers subject to attacks by groups who raise objections to the performance’s message, content, or dramaturgical choices on political, religious, or ideological grounds. There are equally numerous instances of activist attacks targeted at the theater as a form of institutional critique and creative, tactical disruption or in order to draw public attention to a specific cause.3 Tomatoes or eggs become the recognizable signs of a disapproval that cannot be expressed without an audience, but as signs they need to be read with attention to the specificity of their contexts. Perhaps it is not that useful to distinguish between or judge these differently motivated interruptions of performance solely according to their political or ideological views. This is not to claim that these distinctions do not matter; in fact quite the contrary. It does obviously matter if the interruption is a form of parrhesia, of speaking truth to power or not, of “punching up” rather than “punching down,” as the conventions around appropriate targets of humor in comedy prescribe. Yet besides the questions of who is being offended or interrupted, and for what reason, and whether or not we feel it is justified, it is relevant to ask what such scenes of interruption might reveal about the porous and co-constitutive relationship of performance and politics.

“Does Anyone Have a Lighter?” At the end of the 2018 performance lecture “The State of the Theatre,” an event that traditionally inaugurates the annual Dutch Theatre Festival, the Belgian scholar-artist Chokri Ben Chikha announced to a full hall in the majestic Municipal Theatre of the City of Amsterdam that he would set himself on fire. His lecture addressed the urgency for theatermakers to stop merely commenting and reflecting on the problems of the world while remaining safely within the bubble of the theater industry, and called upon them to start intervening in the world. When he announced toward the end of his lecture that he would immolate himself as a first possible step in that radical direction, the rumble in the audience was palpable. Ben Chikha then picked up a jerry can, which he had ostentatiously placed

Interruption and Interpellation   459 next to the lectern at the start of the lecture, walked to the front of the stage and doused himself with the liquid. During the seconds while all this was playing out in front of an increasingly disconcerted audience, one spectator, who happened to be a well-known senior theater personality himself, got up from his seat and shouted “Stop!,” then marched up to the podium, exclaiming, “This is not nice, not even as a joke!,” and then physically urged Ben Chikha to leave the stage, which, incidentally, he was doing on his own anyway. Ben Chikha’s last lines as he exited were “Does anyone have a lighter?” The lecture-performance by Ben Chikha, the intervention of the audience member, and all that played out after it ended were the subject of much discussion in the Dutch and Flemish theater circuits for the next weeks. Was it actually petrol that he doused himself with? One online commentator said he was so outraged that if it would really have been petrol, he would file a police report against Ben Chikha for incitement to violence or disturbance of the public peace. Another replied that if it was only water, then it would be an equally cheap prank and Ben Chikha deserved to be reprimanded for raising false alarms and insulting the audience. Why play with the emotions of the audience, so the argument went, in order to merely make a stale point about theater’s (lack of) political impact, a lament as old as theater history itself? Theater ought not to be reduced to a site for political stunts. For some, the interruption of a lecture-performance by a staged or real threat of self-immolation was a frivolous tactic. For others, including myself, it was a gesture of purposeful interruption, a clever use of tactical frivolity to urge us to be both circumspect and hopeful about the political potentials of theater and performance. It was not difficult to recognize the numerous markers of a theatrical frame that were part of Ben Chikha’s lecture-performance. All along, a volunteer was seated in the wings of the stage with a fire extinguisher close at hand, a scenographic conjuring of the imminent possibility of fire but also an instance of law and order, authorized to interrupt the performance at any moment if public health and safety are endangered. Retrospectively, the volunteer’s high-visibility yellow-orange vest could be interpreted as an uncanny foreboding of the gillets jaunes movement in France that emerged two months after the performance, in November 2018. Anyone might have wondered why she needed to be positioned so glaringly visible to all if it was simply about adhering to fire and safety regulations. Before Ben Chikha picked up the jerry can and poured the liquid on himself, he curiously proceeded to take off his white designer shoes, as if at least these precious consumer objects of desire should be spared the sacrifice. As for the jerry can, this shrill yellow plastic object stood out as an odd accessory right from the moment he entered the stage, unbefitting the occasion of such a prestigious and formal event as the annual “State of the Theatre” lecture. Even more obviously staged was his closing line, asking the audience for a lighter, ironically placing the onus on others to start the fire, and thus turning his threat into another’s responsibility. This was no doubt a trigger for the audience member who interrupted the lecture in an undeniably sincere attempt to prevent an act of self-immolation. In the end, instead of setting himself on fire, Ben Chikha had in fact drenched himself with water, without even wetting his shoes. Yet although there were enough signs to recognize that this was “just a performance,” the speech act of declaring that he would set himself on fire, along with the acts that followed, no matter how symbolic and self-referential, had an illocutionary and perlocutionary force that left the audience fairly perplexed. It was not a coincidence that he left the stage and did not return for the usual round of applause, another breach of theatrical convention that further confounded the straightforward

460   Sruti Bala framing of the situation as a performance in a conventional theater space. My own bafflement grew with what happened right after the lecture-performance was over. The moderator of the evening appeared on stage, proclaiming the next item on the program, the announcement of a BNG Bank–sponsored theater award. As if nothing had just happened, as if this was just a change of television channel, as if the radical call underlying the annual “State of the Theatre” lecture was a minor interruption to what was determined to adhere to festival conventions and remain an undisturbed festive opening. Upon hearing the groans of dismay from the audience, the moderator then changed his mind and invited the public to take a few minutes to share with each other their responses to what had just taken place. Meanwhile stage hands mopped and dried the stage in preparation for another performance later that evening. An official from the awards committee awkwardly mumbled into the mic, supposedly as a joke, asking if the wooden floor might be damaged from the liquid that was poured on it. The evening then proceeded as scheduled: the awards were announced; the theater festival was declared open. The absurdity of the situation couldn’t have been more painfully apparent. Ben Chikha’s plea to the theater world to “step out of its cage” was immediately followed by the guardians of the theater sector rushing to make sure the cage was, in fact, intact, without any cosmetic damages. For all his passionate critique of the insensitivity of the art world, what followed his lecture-performance was evidence of the very same business-as-usual approach he was reproaching.

Leaving the Theater in Search of the Theater The reference to theater as a cage was not a passing metaphor in Ben Chikha’s lectureperformance. It formed a recurring theme of the entire lecture, which touched on a wide range of issues, including the phenomenon of fake news and fact-free politics, the Arab revolution, and the history of human exhibition in Europe, a subject he extensively dealt with in his doctoral research (Ben Chikha 2013) and developed artistically in the work by his company, Action Zoo Humain. The cage is a particular kind of stage, a stage of display and control, with its own biopolitics of the spectacularization of difference. If the human zoo was a perverse but commercially successful strategy of using a cage as a means to draw invisible borders between the normal and the abnormal, which resulted in a lasting racialized regime of ordering, stratifying, and differentiating between humans, then the same strategy—Ben Chikha termed this zooism, a neologism derived from the Dutch word zooïsme—can be found in today’s world, whereby entire populations are locked in material or metaphorical cages and dehumanized as objects of spectacle. “The world has silently devoured the theatre and now serves it back to us every day as a human zoo” (Ben Chikha 2018, 4). The lecture broadened the meaning of zooism from the nineteenth-century phenomenon of human exhibits to instances in the contemporary world: deportation and detention policies, the prison-industrial-military complex, the occupation of Palestine, xenophobia in his country of residence, and the growing technologies of securitization and surveillance. These and other instances exemplify how the preservation of the privileges of a few depend

Interruption and Interpellation   461 on the restriction of other sections of the population. In Ben Chikha’s elaboration, the cage metaphor thus shifted terrain: from the critique of the “cage as a stage” to the “world as a cage” and finally to the “stage as a cage.” For if features of the artistic domain such as fiction, affect, distraction, and artifice have become absorbed and appropriated into the cynical business of politics, he argued, does that not make it urgent for artists to revise and reclaim the task of theater and performance, to transgress the limitations and borders of artistic domains and extend the theater podium to sites external to the conventional theater? He called upon his fellow theater-makers: “Reclaim the truth. It’s we who have, after all, got what it takes. We know how to arouse emotions. With our artistic truth we can unmask, bewilder and imagine” (Ben Chikha 2018, 7). The idea of an artistic truth is central to Ben Chikha’s point, a truth that belongs to a different register than juridical or philosophical or empirical truth, which neither mimics nor rejects these orders of truth but rather offers other possibilities to unmask and reconfigure and transform the existing conditions of the world. To pursue this artistic truth, he proceeded, involves discovering and following the example of the role models that theater provides: “troublemakers, provocateurs, truthtellers, fools, oracles: all age-old role models for those concerned with justice” (7). At first glance, Ben Chikha’s notion of artistic truth seemed to be an assertion of an antitheatrical position, a call for a shift from constative to performative acts (Parker and Sedgwick 1995). Following this line of argument, the performance stage as a site of mimetic, secondary representation, “parasitic” in J. L. Austin’s (1962) terms, could be interpreted as a restrictive and limiting space of pursuing artistic truth, a cage, as it were, that needed to be broken out of in order for the fools and truth-tellers and oracles to make performative interventions in the world. Why should the creative interventions of the world be left to amateurs such as Greenpeace and Pussy Riot, he asked sarcastically. Aren’t we, the professionals of the theater and performance sector, far more qualified to be creative and imaginative? (Ben Chikha 2018, 7). Yet while Ben Chikha proclaimed that theater must step out of its limitations of representation, he simultaneously called for theater and performance to take inspiration from historical figures such as Mohamad Bouazizi, the twenty-six-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor whose public self-immolation is regarded as the trigger for the surge of popular uprisings in Tunisia in 2010, or Jan Palach, the Czech dissident whose self-immolation marked a turning point in the Prague Spring in 1968. These figures were inspirational, Ben Chikha (2018, 8) claimed, because they understood that the revolution could be set ablaze only by turning themselves into a site of spectacle, a self-sacrificing human zoo, as it were. Besides being another tongue-in-cheek pointer to the closing act of the lecture-performance, the reference to these two figures as performers raises different questions: In what sense were they performers? How do their “performances” pursue or enunciate an artistic truth? If it seems cruel and disingenuous to render their tragic acts of self-immolation as performance, it seems equally inappropriate to ask artists to mimic them and do as they do in the theater. At the same time, it could be argued, particularly with reference to Mohamad Bouazizi, that his act of self-immolation was not a political act, to the extent that it was a spontaneous act of despair and outrage at the corruption of the government; it was not premeditated or in the service of a political cause. Its status as a deeply political act is derived not from existing repertoires and recognized conventions of political action but from its symbolic power and from its having taken place in full public view in front of the government office, hence from its performative force, as it were (Bargu 2016, 28). The reference to Bouazizi’s death as

462   Sruti Bala a model for theater’s political potential points to its status as a performative moment, in the way it interrupted and brought to crisis the existing order of the political, inviting us, as Banu Bargu suggests, “to question the link between the agency of the individual and the movement of history” (29). The questioning of this link opens out the possibility of extending the realm of the political to theater and performance and its relations between the agency of the individual performer or artist and the collective movement of theater and performance as political, social, cultural, historical institutions, practices, and sites. Ben Chikha’s “artistic truth” thus assumes a paradoxical quality: it is to be found by leaving the theater in search of the theater, as it were.4 The paradox is most palpable in the moment of interruption, when the lecture-performance condenses into a tableau vivant. The performer who has just doused himself with a liquid and declared (threatened, some would say) that he will set himself on fire creates an interruption in the conditions that guarantee the suspension of disbelief, the smooth mechanism of theatrical activity. It is an interruption to the extent that it portends no longer remaining a staged, scripted scene. No wonder, then, that an audience member is compelled to also interrupt the scene and prevent what they fear may turn into an act of self-destruction in the guise of radical performance. Yet as the performer leaves the stage, leaving the audience with the burden of the question “Does anyone have a lighter?,” the conventions of the theater world are laid bare, made visible and observable, as the floor is mopped and the moderator announces the next item on the program. The idea that it may be only a staged and scripted scene after all now becomes equally uncomfortable, all the more so in its juxtaposition to what follows. For even if it is merely water and not petrol, and even if the scene is scripted and Ben Chikha does not actually set himself on fire, the gesture is nonetheless consequential; it bears a performative force derived from its paradoxical closeness to and distance from actual acts of self-immolation. It gives the audience a glimpse, however tentative and stylized, of what it might be like to witness such an act, which, for most, is accessible only through mediatized news reports. And it simultaneously stretches the boundaries of the theater, bringing into relief the frameworks at its edges, the infrastructures that enable its workings and keep its imaginary mechanisms intact. The question “Does anyone have a lighter?” thus becomes a form of interpellation, in the way Althusser (2014) famously formulated it in his mise-en-scène of subjectivation, the exemplary situation wherein a policeman calls out “Hey, you there!,” hailing a certain subject position into being by calling it out in an accusatory mode. Hailing in the mode of hurling, as it were. To respond to Ben Chikha’s call is to bear some form of responsibility, even guilt, which cannot be shed just because the performance has technically come to an end. The audience is thus bound to the scene in a volatile impasse, is made co-responsible for abetting the act of self-immolation, which amounts to harming a person and committing an act of arson, albeit for a supposedly greater cause. Conversely, when the moderator proceeds to move to the next item on the program, the audience is interpellated as being co-responsible for viewing the scene with nonchalance and distance, as if it wouldn’t matter, as if it were insensitive and irresponsive to the turmoil of the world, as if theater were mere entertainment. The impasse is, however, uniquely generative, in that the closing gesture leaves an act unfinished, stalled, placing upon the audience the task of imaginative completion and leaving contingent the possibility of a different ending in the future. The audience, not unlike the stranger in Benjamin’s domestic scene, is thus faced with a situation of both intense identification and simultaneous disidentification. This is precisely

Interruption and Interpellation   463 what the Brechtian Gestus refers to in Benjamin’s interpretation of the domestic scene: not simply the outward expression or bearing of an inner feeling or attitude, as the common English usage of the term gesture suggests, but an interruption of the conflation between inner and outer worlds. In Samuel Weber’s (2008, 98) reading of Benjamin, Gestus is not “the fulfilment or realization of an intention or of an expectation but rather its disruption and suspension. It entails not so much expression as interruption. And it is this that makes it eminently theatrical.” Gestus calls situations into being, brings their smooth movement to a halt, as it were, making a situation perceptible in its details and its contradictions by interrupting any assumed direct link between inner feeling and outer expression. In Brecht’s thinking of epic theater, the generativity of Gestus on stage was an essential means of achieving the Verfremdungseffekt, the effect of disidentification or defamiliarization, which he regarded as necessary for the cultivation of a critical and politicized audience. Gestus is the purposive arresting of movement, and thus the arresting of any possible identification with meanings and associations attached to movement, a technique that seeks to lay bare inconsistencies and make a scene perceptible in its vivid details. In Judith Butler’s (2015, 41) reading of Benjamin’s scene of the family row, with the bronze statuette about to be thrown by a mother at her daughter, the gesture functions “as the partial decomposition of the performative that arrests action before it can prove lethal.” The gesture, as sketched by Benjamin, brings the scene to an indefinite halt, just as Ben Chikha’s gesture of dousing himself with a liquid simultaneously ends and dislocates the scene at a disconcerting moment. In this gestural contingency, the theater is the exemplary or privileged site for an operation of power to become perceptible, but the full manifestation of the operation of power is paradoxically displaced elsewhere, outside the conventional institutions and platforms of the theater, in its backstages and its rehearsal spaces, on the streets, in public squares, in Parliament, in the workplace, in all the sites that form the interface of performance and politics.

Scenes of Interpellation At stake in this contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance is the significance of an interruptive mode of participation both in terms of theater and performance theory as well as in the theorization of politics. Benjamin’s scene of the family row interrupted by the arrival of a stranger serves as a case in point to elicit an anecdotal conception of the gestural in Brecht’s epic theater. Ben Chikha’s lecture-performance presents a scene of interruption on a different register, where the seemingly stable boundary between the theater as institution or site of political practice and the world of political action is destabilized. Both these “scenes” trouble the relation between performance and the political, revealing that these are not watertight compartments, that theater is not merely a metaphor for describing the political, or that the political is not simply a theme that is depicted on stage, but that they are intertwined in their modalities in complex ways. To think through the implications of this co-constitutive entanglement at a broader level, I turn now to a third scene of interruption, namely to Althusser’s famous scene of interpellation, which I referred to in passing earlier. Althusser’s insights on ideology and subject formation and his privileging of the theater as a site for thinking the political are pertinent

464   Sruti Bala to the current discussion in many ways. In recent appraisals of Althusser’s political philosophy, scholars have been attentive to his references to theater in his writings on ideology as well as on the materialism of the encounter.5 This includes his interest in Brecht, in the plays of Carlo Bertolazzi, and in the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, particularly the productions of Giorgio Strehler and Paulo Grassi (Althusser [1962] 2003, 1969). However, the case that best concretizes Althusser’s (2014, 191) use of a “theoretical theatre” is the scene of a policeman’s hailing in his well-known essay on ideology. Here theater serves as an analytical dispositif, as Etienne Balibar (2015, 2) points out; it allows certain philosophical problems to be identified from singular situations and moments and for general principles and observations to be extrapolated, made perceptible. The scene of hailing is, however, not a scene from a conventional theatrical performance but, akin to Benjamin’s family row, a quotidian situation in all its singularity, presented or staged, as it were, in terms of a scenic structure, enabling a distanced observation and recognition of underlying mechanisms at work. It is in some senses a displacement of the theatrical register onto a hypothetical day-to-day situation. The tableau vivant in this scene is the moment of a policeman calling out to someone on the street and the person who responds to this call turning around: Hailing as an everyday practice governed by a precise ritual takes spectacular form in the police practice of hailing: “Hey, you there!” (It functions in very similar forms in interpellating or summoning at school.) Police hailing, however, unlike other kinds of hailing, is repressive: “Your papers!” . . . Identity, concentrated in first and last names, and so on, makes it possible to identify the subject (presumed in police hailing to be more or less suspect; initially presumed, that is, to be a “bad sort”), thus to identify him without confusing him with another subject, and either “let him go” (“It’s all right”) or “take him in” (“Follow me!”) . . . the whole terribly material ritual that ensues when a policeman recognizes a “bad sort [mauvais sujet].”  (Althusser 2014, 190–1n24)

What exactly does “interpellating” mean and imply here? The term as deployed in French is  derived from the Latin interpellāre (to interrupt by speaking) and refers in one of its meanings to a person being intercepted in public by an instance of authority, stopped in their tracks and singled out from a crowd, as it were, and being required to identify themselves. Given that Althusser wrote this around the time of the student revolts of the late 1960s in France, it is not unlikely that the then widespread police practice in public squares of screening individuals deemed suspect in the eyes of the law informed his specific deployment of the term. To be required to identify oneself with papers is not only to declare to the authority who one is and what one’s name or address is but moreover what one was intending to do, where one was heading as the act of interpellation occurred; it is to be intercepted in the act one was engrossed in by way of the police hailing, calling out to one with the words “Hey, you there!”6 To be more precise, interpellation is thus not simply synonymous with hailing; it is the staging of the hailing as an act of interruption by the law (or by other repressive or ideological state apparatuses), accompanied by the turning of the head, an acknowledgment of being the one hailed. Butler (1997, 106–7) formulates the performative aspect of this cogently when she remarks that interpellation is “not an event, but a certain way of staging the call, where the call, as staged, becomes deliteralized in the course of its exposition or Darstellung.” For Althusser, this is a typical scene of subject constitution: when the individual hailed as being a “bad subject” in the eyes of the law (Was it me the policeman was summoning? Did

Interruption and Interpellation   465 I do something wrong?) is subsequently “let go” when the law enforcers are reassured that the individual is not a “bad subject” after all. In this scene of encounter, the individual gives account of themselves to the law, and in doing so recognizes themselves as a subject. Subjection and subjectivation thus condense into one scene, no doubt oversimplified and reductive but nevertheless useful and dynamic in the possibilities of interpretation it offers.7 The scene is conjured by Althusser in order to concretize the functioning of ideology and to demonstrate that the state and its subjects share not only a legal or territorial but also a psychic relationship, marked by ideology. A state “recruits” its subjects not only through law-enforcement institutions and agents like the police and the courts but, equally, and in a far more heterogeneous and decentralized manner, through so-called ideological state apparatuses such as schools, religious bodies, the social institution of the family, and the media, and art institutions such as the theater. These ensure that individuals as subjects are compliant with and subjugate themselves to the terms of the state by willingly believing that their position within the state and its structures is a natural one. Althusser argued that through these ideological state apparatuses, subjects are hailed into being; individuals come to recognize themselves as subjects through being interpellated. Although the scene of interpellation presents a chronological sequence, Althusser’s (2014, 191) significant point is that there is no order of succession or vantage point of being outside of ideology, for, as he points out, “the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” This implies that ideology is not first an idea in abstraction that is subsequently inserted into or translated into certain material practices and actions, but that ideology comes to existence through material practices and not outside of them. Ideology is the unity of idea and action, “at once ideas and actions, ideas in actions,” he argues ([1962] 2003, 146), following from the work of Antonio Gramsci. In fortifying this argument, Althusser (2014, 186) cites Blaise Pascal’s aphorism “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe,” implying that it is not necessarily the belief that comes first, taking on the form of religious rituals and acts, but equally the act of kneeling down in church, moving one’s lips in prayer through which one becomes interpellated as a believer, as a subject of the ideological apparatus of religion. Althusser’s scene of police summoning thus alerts us to what he terms the material—and what theater and performance scholars might term the embodied or performed—manifestation of ideology. In this light, it is not surprising that Althusser was greatly invested in the revolutionary potentials of Brechtian theater. In his essays on amateur theater, Brecht remarks, “Crying is caused by sadness, but sadness is also caused by crying” (cited in Esslin 1986, 30), implying that certain psychological states and forms of self-identification are not independent of the gestures, rituals, or acts in which they are embedded. In Althusser’s ([1962] 2003, 141) opinion, Brecht’s theater, like Marx’s philosophy, developed such a unity of idea and action not merely as technique or formal device but as a political practice that pervaded all aspects of his theater. Although Althusser is careful in not making any general proclamations about theater’s political potential at large, and cautions against the reduction of political theater to the mere imitation of Brechtian techniques, he does indeed maintain that theater as a phenomenon has the capacity to sustain a relation to revolutionary politics and philosophy. “One cannot see the place of politics in the theatre with a naked eye,” he maintains in what seems like a counterintuitive turn of argumentation (142–3). While insisting that ideas and actions are simultaneous in appearance, he nevertheless claims that the unique potential of theater lies in the way this simultaneity is allowed to be

466   Sruti Bala displaced and interrupted. The recognition of the self as subject that is central to the working of ideology thus becomes a highly risky enterprise in the theater. Unlike the subject on the street who (albeit in nine out of ten cases, Althusser notes) immediately turns around when hailed by the police, the theater’s ideological mode of recognizing the self is staged in the risky play of recognition not being immediate or guaranteed. It might happen that audiences leave entertained, disappointed, or reassured by what they have seen. They have then recognized themselves in ideological terms as connoisseurs of the theater, as art lovers, as critical subjects. It might, however, occur that there is a moment of being disconcerted and interrupted in one’s self-image by theater’s interpellation. As an indication of this risk, the last section of Althusser’s ([1962] 2003, 147) unfortunately unfinished text “On Brecht and Marx,” intriguingly titled “Theatre and the Risk of Fire,” hints at this scene of estrangement from cherished ideas of oneself and of the theater: In the theatre the spectators are given the pleasure of seeing fire played with, only to be reassured that there is no fire, or that the fire is not in their house but in somebody else’s house, anyway not in theirs. . . . If we want to know why the theatre entertains, we must take into account this particular type of pleasure—playing with fire without danger—with its double stipulation: 1. It is a fire without danger because it is on the stage, and because the play always extinguishes the fire; and 2. When there is a fire, it is always at a neighbour’s house. . . . The audience is, indeed, composed of neighbours.

I quote this at length, for it affords a serendipitous rejoinder to the lecture-performance by Ben Chikha in drawing this contribution to a conclusion. Ben Chikha’s risky play with (self)-immolation may have ended with a reassurance to the audience that there is, after all, no fire on the stage, and indeed the visible placement of a volunteer with a fire extinguisher offstage literalized this reassurance. Yet it also simultaneously left the audience with an eerie recognition that the neighbor’s house is in fact the place where the audience is, and that perhaps it is not the play that will extinguish that fire after all. In her study on temporality and its relationship to history, Maurya Wickstrom (2018, 9) recognizes how fire in relation to performance is often deployed—usually metaphorically but sometimes also actually—to “signal the interruption of history as processionism,” i.e., as a history of linear progression. Fire, even the signaling of the possibility of fire, allows for an interruption of the experience of time, such that it is not simply a temporality of getting from one moment to another but also about the imminent and mythical possibility of riot, unrest, and uncontrolled outcomes, a weapon of the disenchanted that threatens to raze the ideological apparatus of the theater. The fire in Ben Chikha’s lecture-performance is staged as literal, but it is simultaneously interrupted and thus deliteralized. The threat that the fire represents can obviously be interpreted in many ways: the self-inflicted destabilization and decentering of the theater in terms of its place and relevance in the world, a kind of institutional self-critique; the devastating self-recognition of the audience in being interpellated as critical but nonetheless bourgeois-liberal art enthusiasts and thus as paralyzed political subjects. I have tried to grapple with how and under which circumstances interruption in performance might be a generative form of participation and serve as a case in point for examining the interfaces of politics and performance. I do not claim that interruption is, in itself, radical or counterhegemonic; it very often isn’t. Nor do I advocate a conceptualization of it as a technique that can be implemented as a political tool regardless of context. I argue that in taking interruption seriously and accounting for it politically, specifically in conversation

Interruption and Interpellation   467 with concepts of political theory, it becomes important to pay attention to the material details of a scene of interruption, to scale down the action to gestures, images, tableaux vivants, and scenographic particularities. In the process of examining a number of scenes of interruption, moving in and outside the domain of theatrical performance—imaginary, theatrical, and theoretical—the practices and acts of interruption drew me toward the political concepts of ideology and interpellation. Intriguingly, these concepts are elaborated by political theorists as theatrical scenes. The political dimensions of the scenes are not distinct from but are embedded in their materiality. The political is thus not to be found in the definition of politics but in its staging. This might seem counterintuitive to the project of outlining the political in theater and performance, but only if one imagines the political as an item to be searched, identified, and spotted in the otherwise un/a/nonpolitical realm of performance, or if the political is deemed the realm of ideas and debates and opposed to performance as the realm of action. This chapter, like the rest of the Handbook, suggests that it is time to put aside that tired binary and engage more rigorously with methodologies and approaches in distinct disciplines, such as theater and performance studies and political philosophy, to develop concrete practices and areas of study and research.

Notes 1. The approach I am suggesting resonates with Emily Apter’s (2018) conception of “unexceptional politics,” referring to those “micropolitical phenomena for which classical political theory and political science have no precise names” and elude conceptual grasp along the lines of exceptionalism. It also takes a cue from Rai and Reinelt’s (2014) proposal to work out a grammar of politics and performance. 2. The origins of such customs, especially the throwing of rotten food on stage, is unclear, though often estimated as dating to the Middle Ages. One of the earliest documented uses of rotten tomatoes to signal disapproval and shaming of an actor is a New York Times article from 1883, reporting a trapeze artist, John Ritchie, leaving the stage demoralized upon being pelted with tomatoes by an angry audience (N.N. 1883). In folk entertainment forms in India, it is not uncommon for audiences to occasionally throw footwear as a marker of insult. This practice is also adopted in cinema theaters, where slippers are hurled in disapproval at figures on the screen. 3. A well-known example of this is the series of so-called “Tomato Incidents” in the Netherlands, which began with a group of protestors disrupting a performance in the  Municipal Theatre in Amsterdam by pelting the performers with tomatoes (van Maanen 2009). 4. Baz Kershaw (2006) pursues a similar line of argumentation in his conception of the paradoxology of performance, whereby the analysis of performance is akin to the Buddhist proverb of “riding an ox in search of the ox.” 5. Butler’s (1997) early engagement with Althusser’s theory of subjectivation strongly informs her conception of gender performativity.In more recent writing, such as the essay “Theatrical Machines,” Butler (2015) reads Althusser’s work in connection with notions of disidentification and disobedience, referring to numerous instances from theater and performance. Etienne Balibar’s (2015) essay most prominently engages Althusser’s use of the theater, elaborating on the Althusserian conception of ideology in terms of a dramaturgy, forming a continuum between the politics in theater and the theatrical in politics. The

468   Sruti Bala same journal issue includes relevant responses to Balibar by scholars such as Banu Bargu, Judith Butler, Warren Montag, and Adi Ophir, all of which emphasize the place of theater in Althusser’s conception of ideology and the subject. 6. For an extensive discussion of the genealogy of the concept, see Montag (2013). 7. The critique of Althusser’s scene as reductive is worked out in Butler 1997.

References Althusser, Louis. [1962] 2003. “On Brecht and Marx.” In Louis Althusser, edited by Warren Montag, 136–49. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Althusser, Louis. 1969. “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht.” In For Marx, 129–51. London: Verso. Althusser, Louis. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso. Apter, Emily. 2018. Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. London: Verso. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. William James Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bala, Sruti. 2018. The Gestures of Participatory Art. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Balibar, Etienne. 2015. “Althusser’s Dramaturgy and the Critique of Ideology.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies 26, no. 3: 1–20. Bargu, Banu. 2016. “Why Did Bouazizi Burn Himself? The Politics of Fate and Fatal Politics.” Constellations 23, no. 1: 27–36. Ben Chikha, Chokri. 2013. “What Is the Critical Value of Using Stereotypes as Theatrical Signs? The Human Zoo as (Re)Search Instrument” [Wat Is de Kritische Waarde van Het Gebruik van Stereotypen Als Theatertekens? De Zoo Humain Als (Onder)zoek(s)instrument]. PhD diss., University of Ghent. Ben Chikha, Chokri. 2018. “The State of the Theatre 2018” [Staat van Het Theater 2018]. Opening lecture. Amsterdam: Dutch Theatre Festival. Benjamin, Walter. [1966] 1973. “What Is Epic Theatre?” In Understanding Brecht, edited by Stanley Mitchell and Anna Bostock, 1–13. New York: Verso. Butler, Judith. 1997. “ ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’: Althusser’s Subjection.” In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, 106–31. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. 2015. “Theatrical Machines.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies 26, no. 3: 23–42. Esslin, Martin. 1986. “Brecht and the Scientific Spirit of Playfulness.” In Auctor Ludens: Essays on Play in Literature, edited by Gerald Guinness and Andrew Hurley, 25–36. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kear, Adrian. 2004. “Thinking out of Time.” Performance Research 9, no. 4: 99–110. Kershaw, Baz. 2006. “Performance Studies and Po-Chang’s Ox: Steps to a Paradoxology of Performance.” New Theatre Quarterly 22, no. 1: 30–53. Montag, Warren. 2013. “Althusser and Lacan: Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Interpellation.” In Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War, 118–40. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. N.N. 1883. “An Actor Demoralized by Tomatoes.” New York Times, October 28.

Interruption and Interpellation   469 Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1995. Performativity and Performance. Essays from the English Institute. New York: Routledge. Rai, Shirin  M., and Janelle Reinelt, eds. 2014. The Grammar of Politics and Performance. London: Routledge. van Maanen, Hans. 2009. Het Nederlandse Toneelbestel van 1945 Tot 1995. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Weber, Samuel. 2008. Benjamin’s Abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wickstrom, Maurya. 2018. Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Chapter 29

Per for mi ng Politica l Ideol ogies Alan Finlayson

Introduction Several strands of political theory and analysis converge on concepts and practices of performance. These include anthropological work on the nature and effects of political rituals (e.g., Fortes 1962), which has contributed to our understanding of the embodied and experiential aspects of contemporary politics through analyses of, for example, Parliament (Crewe  2010), party conferences (Faucher-King  2005), and voting (Coleman  2013). Also included here are poststructuralist studies of political language, the “grammars” of politics (Norval 2007), and the interaction between the citational, iterative performance of political identities and their subversive resignification (Butler 1990; Lloyd 2007). There is novel and influential work in political theory on, for example, the performance practices of representation (Saward  2010) and spectatorship (Green  2010), while research into the rituals of parliamentary politics has enriched study of how power is instantiated and reproduced by political institutions (e.g., Rai and Johnson 2014). Notably, Rai’s (2015, 1194) “political performance framework” draws on critical political sociology, directing attention to the interaction of embodiment, staging, language, and labor, enabling critical evaluation of the “authenticity, legitimacy and liminality of both political claim-making and claim-makers.” (2015: 1194) Another subfield that has begun to converge on themes of performance is the study of political ideas. Historians of political thought drawing on J. L. Austin have for some time understood their object of study to be speech acts, the conditions or contexts of their performance, including “vocabulary, rules, preconditions, implications, tone and style” (Pocock 1987, 89 and the emergence of conceptual innovation (Skinner 2002). Political scientists, interested in how and why particular ideas come to prominence in policy formation and decision-making, have drawn on critical theories of discourse, power, and problematization (e.g., Bacchi  2015) and various interpretive methods (see Dowding et al.  2004)

472   Alan Finlayson emphasizing the performative, contingent, and situated aspects of politics and policy. This area is, then, ripe for a fuller “performance turn,” supplementing, in Alexander’s (2004, 530) words, study of the “cultural logic of texts” with analysis of “the practical pragmatics of performance.” The collective representations of a culture are made present through fleshand-blood performances involving not only words and scripts but also physical places and stages and actors behind whose “social and theatrical performance,” writes Alexander (2011, 57), “lies the already established skein of collective representations that compose culture—the universe of basic narratives and codes and the cookbook of rhetorical configurations from which every performance draws.” Such a performance turn in the study of political ideas would particularly enrich research into political ideologies, by which we mean the ever-shifting configurations of concepts, narratives, and arguments that make up the traditions of political thinking we usually encounter as various “isms” (such as socialism, conservatism, and liberalism) and that appear in public life not only as written and spoken texts but also as the embodied and putatively persuasive performances of political leaders, organizations, and movements. There is already intense interest in how ideologies can be understood in relation to rhetorical action—those moments in which people are arranged as performer and audience and engage in a situated, interactive exchange of arguments. It is with such rhetorical analysis of political ideologies that this chapter is primarily concerned. It begins with a longer discussion of theories of political ideology and of the relationship of these to research into political rhetoric, followed by an argument about the fundamental importance to political performances of rhetorical ethos. A discussion of the connections of such performances to ideology in general is followed by a final section which considers the critical analysis and evaluation of the organization and governance of political-rhetorical and ideological performances.

Ideas, Ideologies, and Rhetoric The term ideology often has a pejorative sense, implying excessive attachment to ideas as opposed to practical realties, or referring to thinking propagated by those with power so as to legitimate their rule and to foreclose on criticism by making certain ways of thinking seem or feel untenable. Such critical conceptions of ideology have great value, but here we use ideology in a neutral way, as a name for the historically formed and continuously revised arrangements of political terms and concepts—the traditions—that organize and orient collective political thinking and acting. Political concepts such as equality and liberty are polysemic and intrinsically contestable (Freeden 1998; Gallie 1956). Political ideologies are formed out of the “decontestation” of these kinds of ideas and by the provision of semantic solutions to “the messiness and indeterminacy of perceptions and comprehension of the political world” (Freeden 2013, 118). Stabilizing concepts and their relationships and making things commonly apprehensible, political ideologies enable the coordination of collective political action. Insofar as people have a common understanding of, say, equality and of its relationship to liberty, rights, and the legitimacy of state action, they are able to argue meaningfully with each other about how to adapt or apply their ideology to particular political or policy problems; they can contend with or ally to other ideologies; they can seek to articulate

Performing Political Ideologies   473 their thinking with the language, myths, and narratives of wider culture in the establishment of a hegemonic political formation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Ideologies, then, are an ineliminable aspect of political life. Research into them requires close analysis of the histories of the ideas, words, symbols, and genres on which particular performative speech-actions draw. Such actions become part of history, and so research must also attend to what Freeden (2013) calls the shifting “microstructure” of ideologies, the arrangement of terms and concepts within them. Notably, Freeden suggests that this requires “an eye and an ear for the breadth of existing political discourse in all its forms and varieties, past and present” (118). In other words, scholars of political ideas can’t look only at the great works of political theory and the most refined instances of policy formation. Political theory is also found in the interviews, slogans, chants, demonstrations, pamphlets, and speeches that make up such a lot of political activity. Reading these involves not only identifying their organizing concepts and extracting their core propositions but also exploring their expressive and figurative nature: the use of poetic rhetorical devices such as metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche that are, in Laclau’s (2005, 12) words, “instruments of an expanded social rationality,” the specific argumentative appeals and strategies employed and the ways in which these are manifested in and through the enactment of ritualized political performances on various kinds of political stages. The study of political ideologies must, then, take seriously the acting, speaking, and thinking of politicians of all kinds, making “the performances of politicians” a distinct object of investigation, asking “how they act when they act politically . . . how they take a stand, or justify or explicate a certain standpoint” (Palonen 2005, 8). From the rhetoricians’ point of view, political ideologies are distinguished not only by the meanings they ascribe to concepts, the ways in which these are related to each other, and the propositions to which they give rise, but also by how these are all justified. That is to say, the kinds of arguments used to justify a political claim, and the forms in which these are articulated, are not neutral conveyors of a more important message but part of that message. Part of what a political ideology prescribes (and proscribes) is precisely the kinds of argument to be used in its propagation, the degree to which they must or can be, say, ra­tional, poetic, emotive, and so on. For this reason, the study of political ideologies is a study of rhetoric, and the analysis of political rhetoric is always an investigation of political ideology (Finlayson 2012). Rhetoric, as Aristotle famously said, is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” It is a particular and a practical art, employed when a speaker (or writer) seeks to affect the decisions or actions of a particular audience about a particular matter. Analysis of political rhetoric is thus often concerned with the means of which particular practitioners availed themselves—why they did so, what governed their choice, what happened, and what this might tell us about politics as such (e.g., Atkins et al.  2014; Atkins and Finlayson  2013,  2016; Atkins and Gaffney  2017; Hatzisavvidou  2016; Martin 2016; Turnbull 2013). It is also interested in “rhetorical situations” (Bitzer [1968] 1999), the moments in which rhetoric is demanded of political actors, how orators, arguments, and audiences are brought together, and the means by which rhetoric responds to or creates the situations in and on which it may act. Here rhetorical and ideological action is necessarily “an activity done by an individual group in the presence of or for another individual or group,” a performance (Schechner  2003 22). Often it takes place in specially designated locations—party meeting halls, conference venues, committee rooms, parliamentary

474   Alan Finlayson chambers, platforms in parks, podia in television studios—in a setting and according to rules (both explicit and implicit) that distinguish it from everyday argumentative activity. Rhetorical Political Analysis (Finlayson and Martin  2008) thus sees political speaking, writing, and arguing, as the literary critic Terry Eagleton (2008, 179) puts it, “not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.” One of the things that joins texts with context and with audiences is what Aristotle called the “proofs.” These are the main ways in which rhetorical arguments are demonstrated or justified. In the classical tradition there are three such “appeals”: to logos (reason), to pathos (emotion), and to ethos (character). This simplifying but heuristically productive schema draws to our attention, first, the ways in which, in political disputes, we may try to prove our propositions by reference to key facts and information, integrated into some kind of (quasi-) logical argument (about cause and effect, probabilities, or entailment, for instance); second, to the ways in which stirring the emotions gets audiences to focus on aspects of a case and to see it in a certain light, experiencing it through (and being motivated by) empathy, anger, or injustice (or perhaps demotivated by boredom or indifference); third, to the justification of claims by reference to, or drawing on, something about character—in the first instance that of the person making an argument. Each appeal names a very general kind of justificatory strategy. The art of rhetoric lies in employing these in specific ways adapted to particular audiences, issues, and situations. The appeals must appeal to a particular audience; they must connect to or resonate with “the skein of collective representations” that make up its culture—what its members, for the most part, find reasonable or emotive and how they think of different kinds of character. In the rest of this chapter we will focus on the appeal to ethos and on the ways in which political actors perform characters drawn from collective representations and in so doing make themselves, their body, bearing, and voice, carry the weight of political argument.

Performing Ideological Character Aristotle observed that an orator “must not only try to make the argument of his speech demonstrative and worthy of belief; he must also make his own character look right,” adding that orators “should be thought to entertain the right feelings” toward hearers (Rhetoric, book 2, part 1). This is the appeal to ethos that appears, at first, to concern the character of the speaker, in itself and in its relationship to an audience. Here Aristotle was interested not in what orators brought to a speech from outside of it (their social standing and past achievements, for example) but with how character was manifested as a proof within the speech itself and with its adaptation to the expectations of different audiences that might trust, admire, or respect different kinds of character. In contemporary rhetorical theory this is often understood as the foundation of rhetoric and, following Kenneth Burke (1969), as “identification”: the establishment of an alignment between persons, for instance thorough adaptation to and employment of their styles of speech, gesture, tone, order, image, attitude, and so on.

Performing Political Ideologies   475 The appeal to ethos thus presents, at first, as one that refers to a person’s social role or standing, as when someone says “Trust me, I’m a doctor.” But we quickly see that, especially in the conflicted, uncertain, and fraught contexts of public life, it is often not enough merely to possess certain qualifications, skills, or characteristics; one has convincingly to show them as well as tell people about them and do so in a way that the audience will recognize and in a manner that establishes a positive relationship with them. A doctor who is haughty or rude to patients is less likely to convince patients than one able to show good bedside manner. Ethos is not about having a particular character. It is about playing it. This has very interesting implications for the rhetorical analysis of political ideologies. Conceptions of what something is like—such as a good and trustworthy doctor—exist prior to any particular speech act invoking them. They are part of the collective representations of a culture, the everyday assumptions and expectations of an audience one is hoping to persuade. Consequently, an appeal to ethos is always a kind of doubled argument. That is to say, while at one level ethos is mobilized as support for a particular proposition, at another level an argument is also being made that this particular performance of a character is a good and convincing example of it. A political actor has to make a representation of themselves, adapted to a situation, to extant expectations, and to the political problems or policies at issue. Here ethos might be thought of as the cultivation of a “persona,” where this is “a composite constructed by both the speaker (which might itself be a composite of himor herself and speechwriters and advisers) and the audience (which itself is, by definition, composite, but is also composite in its self-construction)” (Gaffney 2014, 192). At one level this means that rhetorical performers and audiences must subordinate each other to prior expectations of what political leaders can look or sound like and of how an audience should relate to them. This can restrict or hinder the political activity of some kinds of people and some kinds of politics. But in the gap between a general collective representation and its appearance in a particular moment, linked to a particular political proposition, there is room for political creativity and invention. In adapting to audiences and performing an ethos others might recognize, political actors can, over time, alter and supplement the range of recognizable characters. This is an important part of the art of politics. Consider, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s (1976) famous address to her constituency party, made in 1976 shortly after she was christened “the Iron Lady” in a Soviet Union newspaper. She said, “I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown . . . the Iron Lady of the Western World, a cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. . . . Yes, I am an Iron Lady—after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an Iron Duke . . . if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life. . . . They can call me what they like.” This was a clever play with ethos. Assigned a role by others, Thatcher embraced it, created her own rendition of it, and used it to argue not only for herself but also for her politics. At a time when some in her party were worried at having a woman in charge, Thatcher made use of her gender, drawing attention to her costumed appearance while turning a critical label into a positive one, articulating it with a historical memory (of the Duke of Wellington and the Napoleonic Wars) and with an icon of masculine militarized leadership. In so doing she bolstered her authority and enhanced her claim to be a strong and powerful political representative (see also Crines, Dorey, and Heppel 2016, chapter 3). Taking the name “Iron Lady” Thatcher actualized it in an embodied performance of herself that would be developed across her career and culminating

476   Alan Finlayson twelve years later in film of her driving a tank, a Union Jack flying beside her, “her ­bearing suggesting confidence . . . at home with the machinery of war that carried her” (Nunn 2002, 9). Such performances are also arguments about what leadership should be. Leadership is of course a key concept for any political ideology, one that contains many elements and the meaning of which varies depending on how it is related to other concepts. While everyone might agree, at least in principle, that in politics characteristics such as trustworthiness, honesty, sincerity, expertise, and intelligence are important and to be applauded in leaders, the relative weighting we should give to each of these is a more complex question. How these are weighted is one of the things that defines a political ideology. Through their rhetorical performances political actors emphasize a particular conceptualization of leadership, seeking to decontest it. Thatcher sought to articulate herself with Conservative traditions emphasizing resolution, military preparedness, and willingness to fight as key attributes of leadership and in the process changed Conservative ideology. Similarly, the differing ways in which the more moderate Labour leader Tony Blair and the more radical Jeremy Corbyn played themselves were not only different ways of communicating their preferred version of the ideology of the Labour Party but also arguments about it, in the form of demonstrations of what a Labour leader should and could be: Blair came to power in the party playing the part of a modern, responsible, and decisive manager of the state; Corbyn did so playing the part of a moral authority untainted by the compromises of government. Each of these figures (Thatcher, Blair, and Corbyn) came to stand for their politics, making themselves, their rhetorical ethos, a figure, a synecdoche, of their political ideology (which is why, often, critics articulated their rejection of that ideology as a rejection of the person). In any particular political situation (economic crisis, security threat, or political instability) or in relation to a particular issue (economic policy, foreign relations, constitutional reform) there is always an implicit question about what sort of person should take responsibility for sorting things out or implementing policy, and the sorts of skills and experiences most needed. The answer to that question depends on how we understand the situation or issue—and is, then, a key dimension of a political ideology. Performances can again be crucial here. They can reverse this logic so that the presentation of a particular ethos as “the right one for the job,” as the answer to the question of what sort of person should be in charge right now, becomes a way of specifying what the question is and of defining the situation in a particular way. For example, when, speaking of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush took on the cowboy role, promising to “smoke ’em out.” Invoking a mythical character from American history, and taking on that persona, Bush was also performing an argument about how to understand 9/11 and so also beginning to justify a certain sort of response. He was not only utilizing the stage the situation had created for him—he was performatively constituting its mise-en-scène. In her chiffon gown Thatcher, in the context of the Cold War, was not only proving that she could be resolute and defiant but arguing that these were the right characteristics for the moment, appropriate as a policy stance toward the Soviet Union. When a politician has proposed (often indirectly) that a certain sort of character is best suited to a situation, and that they have that character, a further implicit question remains unanswered: How may we identify such characteristics? Honesty might be signaled by evidence of a high level of moral probity, but it might also be shown by plain-speaking

Performing Political Ideologies   477 admission of one’s faults and by the appearance of authenticity; intelligence might be thought of as book-learning demonstrated by quotation and elaborate language, but it might also mean common sense grounded in ordinary life experience as revealed through fluency in the everyday values of a community (see Atkins and Finlayson 2013). Here performances of ethos foreground certain concepts from within a political ideology as part of an argument about the definitions or characteristics of political virtues. Thatcher is again instructive here. She used her gender and her family role (mother, wife, housewife) to forge a symbolic connection between the abstract authority of government and the everyday, private, and domestic spheres, an ethos that “offered forceful authority alongside the promise that she was particularly attuned as a woman to ordinary concerns, fears and desires” (Nunn 2002, 48). The point here is not that her rhetoric is simply carried or amplified by this character but that the character was also a way of foregrounding, combining, and naturalizing much broader claims of Conservative ideology about the right relationship of public to private, about personal responsibility, and about family life and which Thatcher and her advisors sought to exemplify in and through her. It is because of the way she made herself a signifier of Conservatism that Thatcher became a name for one of its variants.

Performing Societal Ideologies Though they are still powerful forces within the formal domains of party and legislative politics, the grip of the traditional “isms” is currently weakened. Electorates are not strongly wedded to party traditions, and national cultures as a whole are increasingly diverse and individualized. Ubiquitous systems of media communication ensure that commercial forms of rhetoric are everywhere demonstrating exemplary parts individuals might pay to play (rather than those we might associate with politics and citizenship). One of the effects all of this has had on politics is that rhetorical performances have become more abstract and general, and rather than exemplifying political ideological positions they refer to and draw on deeper societal cultural-ideological themes. As Alexander (2006, 2010) argues, the public sphere is today a stage for performances of ongoing “social dramas.” Leaders or other key figures in political movements are put in the media spotlight and may become not only performers of specific political arguments but embodied sites of general political and ideological identification. Here ethos formed on particular political ideological stages is stretched (sometimes out of all recognition) as political figures try to connect their particular claims to more general “exemplifications of sacred religious and secular texts” (Alexander 2006, 52). Indeed, the contradictions between the performance required of particular political ideologies and that required of a societal performance space are a constitutive feature of contemporary politics in many democratic states. This disconnection of rhetorical performances from the specifics of ideological traditions, and from the details of policy formation and implementation, means that they are increasingly performances of ideology in the more pejorative sense. That is, they are instantiations and affirmations of mythical archetypes, dehistoricizing naturalizations of contingent contemporary conceptions of types of persons: the rich hardworking businessman; the tough guy; the heroic seeker of truth and justice; the humble and representative everyman-outsider; the ideal man; the right sort of woman. In this context, political leaders

478   Alan Finlayson become like celebrities or film stars, embodiments of such social types (Dyer 1986), expressing, as Corner and Pels (2003, 8) argue, “stylised forms of individuality, which offer a temporary focus for identification and organization by fluid collectives (or ‘audiences’).” This is why it ought not to be surprising that we are seeing more people succeed as political leaders having already become media celebrities and public icons. This is having profound effects on our politics. Burke, as we have seen, thought that all rhetoric has the goal of “consubstantiality,” the creation of identification of people with each other and the establishment of community. But increasingly that identification is achieved through the figure of the political leader who, saturated with signification, becomes an embodied manifestation of claims about overarching principles of social order and part of an ideological attempt to decontest societal difference as such, even as it exaggerates certain kinds of division. This is what is often referred to as populism, a political style that, as Moffit (2016, chapter 4) argues, combines performances of “ordinariness” (indicated by informal styles of speech, over-the-top behaviors, and ostentatious “political incorrectness”), with performances of “extraordinariness,” in which the politician, proposing and demonstrating the existence of some kind of threat or enemy, tries to embody and exemplify “the people” they claim to represent and will defend. In a fascinating discussion of the dramaturgical dark arts of Steve Bannon, advisor to Donald Trump, Alexander (2018, 147) describes him as a mythologist who “scripted and produced” a political movie in which “Donald Trump played the heroic protagonist, and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democrats, and Enlightenment ideas played the dark Beast that the barking, bleached blond populist entered the arena to slay.” Here, then, a performer succeeds not by articulating a political proposal and justifying it by reference to ethos but by adopting positions that help sustain a claim about ethos, making it mythical and inviting people to enjoy the spectacle of him punishing their imagined enemies. Something similar can be seen in the UK where, as Kelsey (2017, 163) shows, news reporting cast the anti-EU Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage in such a mythic heroic narrative: “Seeing the EU as a block of land across the water, controlling our island and suppressing our ‘bulldog breed’ set the scene for a hero to initiate his quest,” which was then portrayed as facing off and overcoming an “establishment” both at home and abroad, to return power to “the people.” In this context there are important analytical and critical questions to ask about the structure of the relationship between performer and audience. A well-wrought performance of ethos is also a demonstration of a kind of exemplary believer of what is proposed. When I argue for something, I am not saying only that I am a person who believes in this. I am also demonstrating, in my being and bearing, what such a person is like: I make of myself an example of an advocate of my politics and its virtues and ask my audience to take up a relationship to that ideal. This is one reason intra-ideological argument has often taken the form of disputing the extent to which this or that political figure is a true embodiment of the ideology, a proper socialist or an authentic conservative. In contemporary political rhetoric, however, appeals to the societal, national cultural imaginary, to our sense of who and what we are or could become, invite audiences to take sides in an epic struggle over who or what most truly embodies “the people.” Critical analysts can ask of such performances: Are audiences being positioned to identify with the virtues a speaker performs and which they might argue we do or should share? Or are they being asked to identify with that speaker—to find themselves empowered by becoming their followers? There is a tremendous

Performing Political Ideologies   479 difference between two ideologies for which, say, equality is a core concept if for one of them it is something to be achieved by the leader, bestowed by them on followers (or attained by them on becoming good followers), and another for which equality is demonstrated in certain ways of behaving toward each other as exemplified or embodied by that leader. The former is an authoritarian political relationship; the latter a potentially democratic one.

Governing and Evaluating Rhetorical Performances Academic discussion of democratic deliberation often takes place as if involving only texts or disembodied beings. A virtue of the rhetorical and performance approaches is that they start from recognition of the fact that politics, in Parkinson’s (2012, 1) words, involves “real people who take up, occupy, share, and contest physical space.” While it is, in some ways, simply interested in documenting and understanding political performances of ethos, the rhetorical and ideological analysis of such cannot ignore the ways they are organized or governed and the effects this has. That raises both critical and normative questions. On the one hand, how a regime stages political speaking and arguing, the places where it is and is not sanctioned, and the forms it is able to take are part of what Jacques Rancière (1999) has conceptualized as a distribution of persons to places, some with and some without speaking parts. It is a way of policing certain kinds of speech and the movements of bodies within and between public spaces, rendering some silent or unintelligible. But on the other hand, as Parkinson (2012, 4) notes, “it can be the case that only certain kinds of spatial arrangements will do, or that certain arrangements amplify or mute particular behaviours that democrats find valuable.” That is to say, we might want some rules and principles to ensure that our political dramatic compositions are congruent with our ethical aspirations. Analysis must, then, attend to the constitutional staging of performances. The power of the US presidency, for example, as was famously noted by Neustadt (1991), consists in no small degree of the “power to persuade.” That is so in part because the Constitution, as Campbell and Jamieson (2017, 644; see also 1990) write, “offers the executive an array of rhetorical opportunities. . . . The president can call Congress into special session, make recommendations that are necessary and expedient, act as commander in chief, veto legislation, and pardon.” In so doing the president must adopt and perform a number of historically evolved and culturally sanctioned roles, such as national priest, “representing the country before God and praying for the nation” or delivering eulogies, “custodian of national values,” “national voice” transcending division, and “commander in chief.” Such “recurrent institutional functions,” Campbell and Jamieson explain, “elicit predictable patterns of rhetorical response” (2017, 637)and expectations on the part of audiences often aware of the historical precedent and who judge accordingly. Speechwriters often directly quote or otherwise allude to past inaugurals, inserting themselves into a generic tradition that is also a national political mythos. Because it is so bound up with such rituals, and with performances that must evoke even as they redefine and add to a national mythology, the

480   Alan Finlayson presidency itself has a mythological aura and political battles become battles over such mythmaking. A question for American politics in particular (but also for other polities) is the extent to which such constitutional design of the stages of politics enables the creative formation and reformation of the national body politic, or disables the more prosaic functions of government (the building of effective coalitions able to take and implement policy decisions). As well as such constitutional rules, historically shaped expectations as to what can happen at rhetorical occasions, the conventions of the genres of performances at them, are key elements of a rhetorical culture. These can make possible certain sorts of democratic political occasion, but they also contain and limit what might happen at them. Where a rhetorical culture reflects assumptions about ethos that are linked to societal ideological expectations about, say, bodies with a certain race or gender, they can be extremely powerful and restrictive (although there may be opportunities for subversive performances). Here, then, we can ask normative questions about who gets to take part and what they have to do in order to be allowed on stage, how audiences are included or not, and what they are allowed to do. We can ask about the sorts of “representative” claims (Saward 2010) that can be made (and to whom) and the extent to which performances involve what Green (2010, 20) calls “candour,” the extent to which spectators are empowered and so situated as to make judgments of leaders performing in events that are “spontaneous in the sense that it cannot be managed or staged or rehearsed from above,” and where “those on stage are not in control of the meaning of the event, how the event will be interpreted is uncertain and thus up to the independent judgment of the spectator.” Analysis and evaluation of the constitutional and cultural governance of rhetorical performance cannot ignore the place of the media. Today politics has become thoroughly mediatized. That is to say, media communication is so extensive and intensive that politics cannot be conceived apart from it and has been remade by it (e.g., Couldry 2013). The typical scene of political performance is not now the live rally. It is most likely to be the televised convention or debate or a recording of such occasions remediated online and consumed by individuals at home, at a time of their choosing. Analysis of the governance of political performance needs, then, to consider how different platforms, technologies, and genres of media organize and host stages for political performances that require them to be adapted to specific codes of audio-visual representation. For a century and more, visual and broadcast media have reconstituted the modes of persuasion characteristic of democratic life (Jamieson 1990) and imposed upon its ideological codes the forms of signification characteristic of, for example, television. They have made the production and reception of rhetorical performances of ethos emphasize the appearance of “intimacy” and “normality,” affecting citizens’ judgments of what is a good politician (Clarke et al. 2018). Now digital, shareable, and participatory means of communication have proliferated the range of public political stages and simplified access to them. This has brought about a proliferation of ideological rhetorical performances governed not by a constitution or a political culture but by the coding of platforms and the commercial demands of the so-called marketplace of ideas. The accessibility of online stages is changing who can be a successful political scriptwriter and who a successful performer while also further fragmenting the public realm. Yet more fundamentally, the participatory and shareable nature of digital media changes the way people experience political performances and the role they play in the unfolding of the drama. In the digital field we are all invited to make a metaphor of ourselves,

Performing Political Ideologies   481 to perform in public ideological characters we imagine to be of our own choosing (Finlayson 2019). This is a vital area for research by scholars of politics, ideology, rhetoric, and performance.

Conclusion The study of political performance brings, as Uhr (2014, 253) puts it, the addition of stagecraft to the study of wordcraft. In so doing it enlarges the object of rhetorical and ideological studies by insisting on the importance of all that is entailed in the public articulation of a text, including constitutional setting, discursive and conceptual history, and all the “means of symbolic production,” including technological innovations. Ideological rhetoric, manifesting as the embodied performance of political speech acts, is just one part of this larger assemblage of stages and technologies—but an important one because it implicates such a range of cultural, ethical, and political themes. The close analysis of such acts can contribute greatly to our theories of what politics is (both in general and in the specific context of the present), to our understanding of the history of political forms and genres, to the evaluation of political institutions, the critique of cultural mythologies, and the assessment of means of communication. All of this is not only a necessary part of thinking about how our politics is working but also a vital prelude to developing, expressing, and embodying arguments about how it might work better.

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Chapter 30

M usic Women Rewriting Punk Performance Politics M. I. Franklin

Introduction Yes, I’m sensitive to sound, I think I have a good ear, and I love the visceral movement and the thrill of being onstage. And even as a visual, conceptual artist, there’s always a performance aspect to whatever I do. —Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir (2015)

Whatever its status as entertainment, music—also one of the performing arts—can become a means for both resistance and oppression; characterized as high or low culture, avant-garde or commercial, decadent or authentic through not only any lyrical content but also the associations that become attached to any sonic repertoire. This malleability of use and multiplicity of meanings arises from the polysemic nature of how any sort of music works, what it is taken to mean, and for whom. Writing (about) and making music thereby occurs within shifting historical and geopolitical debates about the social role or cultural significance of all forms of music-making: as sacred and creative practice, expression of artistic singularity, vector of civilization, signifier of cultural heritage or national identity. There is a long-standing literature in the classical music tradition in which artists— composers, performers, and conductors—consider these complexities through reflections on their work and times (Barenboim and Said 2003; Cage 1973; Adorno 2002). In popular music, such reflections are performed in the so-called rock memoir. In both cases practitioners offer perspectives on a domain in which not only music scholars but also journalists and critics define the terms of reference and hierarchies of value. In recent years women who made their names as proponents of punk music have been publishing their memoirs in quick succession. When considered as contributions to an emerging, multifaceted public archive of women in music, a rich vein of inquiry opens up into the sonic—musical, audiovisual—dimensions of “politics and performance as inter-related discursive and

486   M. I. Franklin embodied practices” (Reinelt and Rai  2014, 4). The memoirs considered here—by Viv Albertine (2014), Carrie Brownstein (2015), Kim Gordon (2015), Chrissie Hynde (2016), Patti Smith (2010, 2015), Brix Smith Start (2016), and Cosey Fanni Tutti (2017)—mount a challenge to dominant narratives of (mainly male) musicians’ engagement with the political and social concerns of their day. As women in punk—a term encompassing a particular constellation of explicitly transgressive music-making and related subcultures, sartorial practices, lifestyles, and gestures of nonconformity—these musicians-turned-memoirists recollect experiences of making music in a period marked by “collective concrete struggles” (Reinelt and Rai 2014, 10); antiwar, civil rights, women’s rights, and antiracism. These firsthand accounts offer alternative perspectives on punk, a musical form and subculture defined by a theatricality of confrontation in the lyrics, production values, and demeanor. They depict respective comings-of-age, creative practices, and political viewpoints in a period spanning the 1960s to the present day. Featuring as walk-on parts in the standard historical narrative of punk as a quintessentially masculinized act of heroic musical transgression (Harris  2010; Morley  2008; Marcus  1989), these women are now also authors in their own right. In this way their memoirs can be considered for their contribution to the trade and scholarly literatures as, by virtue of their publication in rapid succession, they expose the structural gender, class, and race imbalances in (writing about) the performing arts (Reddington 2007; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Saha 2012). Now center-stage and in control of their respective approaches to rescripting the narrative of punk’s sociopolitical significance forty-odd years on, these authors express a range of attitudes to the cultural and sexual politics of their generation, providing a diversity of insights into the visceral masculinities representing punk as music, lifestyle, and performance culture (Gordon 2015, 173, 202–3; Albertine 2014, 79-80, 201; Hynde 2016, 257–8, 278; Tutti 2017, 408–9). This master narrative, as it pertains to punk music since its public entrée in the 1970s, focuses on the onstage shock antics of first-generation punk bands such as the Sex Pistols or Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the larger-than-life personalities of band members from bands such as Joy Division, Toy Love, and Birthday Party, or the high-profile political personae and lyrical content from bands such as the Clash and the Fall. For this reason alone these memoirs constitute a significant revision of received wisdom about the relationship between making music—as art form, entertainment, or political stand—and musicians as agents in how any music emerges as incipient if not explicitly performed politics. The bands that these women cofounded and led straddle this spectrum within the ever-widening category of punk music, effectively rescripting the standard narrative of punk music lived and/as politics through its male protagonists. After an overview of the relevant literature at the intersection of critical schools of music research, sociology, media and cultural studies, and politics and international relations, the rest of this chapter considers the memoirs of these women who made their name in punk scenes as a case in point. The last section analyzes three of the many tracks that feature in these “femoirs” (Fontana 2012: Edgers 2015). Music-making as a collaborative and experimental process, and what to make of the outcomes in retrospect, are central in all these accounts that rescript the historical record, headline acts, and public playlist of how punk—reconstructed here in all its multifariousness—is made manifest as real-life counterculture, politicized pop musicality, and a performance code based on a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos.

Music   487

Mapping the Field Studying how to compose, perform, and analyze music is based on the theoretical canon and concert repertoire of the Western, classical art music tradition (Pasler 2008; Barrett 2016: Franklin  2021). The practices and discourses constituting the standard historical arc of Western music, and predominantly Franco-Austro-German expressions thereof, serve as a mimesis of the history of Western modernity (Attali  1989; Adorno  2002; Berger  2007; McClary 1991, 1992; Regev 2013). Along with its counterpart for non-Western music— ethnomusicology—this literature is considered disciplinarily distinct from popular music theory and research. This more recent domain of inquiry, straddling several disciplines, pivots on the predominantly Anglo-American music industry, with its global market reach and diverse genres (country, pop, folk, jazz, rock, rap, electronic). Studies of the formative influences of music-making from African, African-American, and other, non-Western cultures tend to fall under the rubrics of “world music” or Black culture, and ensuing debates over classification, covered as part of globalization studies (White 2012) or critical literature on the racial dimensions and legacy of slavery and colonialism in the political economy of the popular music market under the aegis of American economic and geopolitical hegemony (Dorsey 2000; Gilroy 1995; Spicer and Covach 2010; White 2010). Concerns about the geopolitical implications of US corporate ownership and control, along with the perceived detrimental sociocultural and depoliticizing effects of the mass consumption of popular— commercial—music and/as (now global) entertainment are of long standing. This literature goes back to the culture industry critique made famous by Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 2002) in the early years of the popular music industry and its concomitant technologies of recording, broadcasting, and distribution. This divide, disciplinary and aesthetic, persists today. It still defines the terms of reference in music scholarship, criticism, and journalism, notable exceptions notwithstanding (Ross 2010, 2011). Nonetheless, like their colleagues in the Western classical music tradition, popular music scholars have also looked to capture the spectrum of (predominantly Anglo-American) popular music as not only entertainment but also a globally significant art form and political platform (Frith  2007; Marcus  1989; Morley  2008; Street  2012; Hesmondhalgh 2013). Frith (2007), for instance, looks to develop a sociological framework for articulating an aesthetics of popular music, while Gracyk (n.d.) considers from a philosophical perspective how ascertaining the “value of popular music” relates to long-standing debates in Western thought about “art and aesthetic value“ (see also Bleiker 2009). These studies have emerged as the bifurcation between “classical” and “popular” music scholarship. Performance cultures have been thoroughly deconstructed from both sides of this disciplinary divide, exposing the ethnocentrism, methodological parochialism, and cultural bias—masquerading as aesthetic judgment—that perpetuate these lines of demarcation, lines that are, in practice, porous, to say the least, for many musicians. Barrett (2016) takes a much more radical perspective by advocating a shift away from the ontological centrality given to sound, the sonic-aural dimension, to any conceptualizations of music as a universally understood domain of inquiry and creative practice. He argues that there needs to be a move to generate “both a new concept and context . . . a

488   M. I. Franklin music beyond the limitation of sound” (7) in order to reengage scholarship with the ways in which music is put to work—by musicians and other artists—as a “critically engaged art form in dialogue with contemporary art, continental philosophy and global politics” (citing Mockus, 167). These reconceptualizations of music as object and domain of analysis have been influenced by the work of Christopher Small (1998, 13), who coined the term musicking in order to reposition the heretofore abstract notion of music as a domain of inquiry based on aesthetics, theories of form, and virtuosic performance cultures. Small inverts these conventions by positing that the artifact cannot be separated from its concomitant communities of practice, networks of supportive relationships, and sociocultural and thereby political contexts of performance and reception (Franklin 2020, 2021). . Splicing through both these debates are those literatures based on feminist politics and accompanying projects of historical recovery, public visibility, personal empowerment, and representative equity. Studies of famous female musicians (e.g., Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Madonna) address these agendas, while considering whether these artists, as women, make music differently from men (Moisala and Diamond 2000; Peraino et al 2013). Others have revisited the classical canon from a feminist analytical perspective (McClary  1991). For instance, Peraino (2001) reconsiders Susan McClary’s (1992) pioneering feminist reading of Bizet’s opera Carmen; Jann Pasler (2008, 213–48) looks at how nationalistic fervor is part of the compositional strategies of the French composer Augusta Holmès; and Mavis Bayton (1998) studies a number of “exceptional” women and their bands across a range of popular music scenes, including those in which the memoirists considered here made their name. The rise of Third Wave studies of gender and sexuality, dissatisfied with the conceptual and political limitations of literature focusing on women musicians as exceptional, iconic artists (Bowers  1989; Koskoff  2000), has looked to deconstruct essentialist, heteronormative frameworks pivoting on studies of how male musicians embody either traditional sexgender stereotypes of cock rock (Frith and McRobbie [1978] 1990) or its androgynous male Other. Peraino (2001, 694) argues that “rock no less, and perhaps more—demarcates a space and time wherein gender and sexuality lose clear definition. . . . [This is] part of music’s appeal and cultural work. The fact that men dominate the world of rock and pop does not mean that music itself uncomplicatedly represents masculinity, as many 1970s feminists held.” Reconsiderations of the audiovisual back catalog and archival and scholarly literature can further such an agenda by highlighting the “gender and sexual [and racial] unruliness” of women as political actors, artists, and performers (Peraino 2001, 694). Taken together these punk-rock memoirs go some way in responding to this Third Wave critique of feminist research agendas for the study of women in music that critics argue have led to a “homogeneous approach in gender studies” that blurs class, race, and ethnicity distinctions (Koskoff 2000, 2–3). Rap and hip-hop are cases in point in that studies of the sex-gender dimensions and feminist politics of classical art and popular music literatures have yet to fully engage with the art and music of not only non-Western musicianship but also African American women, a literature that is nonetheless staking its claims on the musical and scholarly canon (Jones 2015; Magrini 2003; Malott and Peña 2004; Queen Latifah 2000, 2010; Rabaka 2012: Tinsley 2018; Rose 1994; Feldstein 2005).

Music   489

“Punks and Poses” Much of it boiled down to identity, a way of differentiating punk from the rest of the world, making it subversive, confrontational. Whether quiet or loud, fast or slow, pretty or ugly—it was not about a sound or a look—punk was about making choices that didn’t bend to consumptive and consumerist inclinations and ideologies, that didn’t commodify the music or ourselves. —Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015)

Definitional issues notwithstanding, punk has become shorthand for a diverse group of acts, sounds, and musical attributes that rose to prominence in the 1970s as a visceral and audible rebellion against the way the music industry, and global acts of the day, were premised on high thresholds of entry and investment for performing live and in recording studios (Davies 2005; Dunn 2016; Marcus 1989; Malott and Peña 2004; Reddington 2007). Refusing to conform to industry moguls’ punitive contracts, touring and marketing obligations, and production values of the by now lavishly produced pop song and stage act, first-generation punk acts inverted these hierarchies of value and sonic artfulness. Lyrics and interviews covered taboo topics and did not flinch from using expletives or challenging performance mores by insulting audiences and critics in equal measure. Punk songs are known for being very short, fast, loud, and simple to learn, using three-chord guitar progressions. Bands comprised for the large part three to four members on drums, bass, guitar, vocals, and sometimes keyboard. Key to the punk ethos, if not its subsequent branding, has been its DIY approach: the conviction that making music should resist the profit principle, the need for technical virtuosity, high-end production recording techniques, or showing any particular deference to fans, the general public, and arbiters of good taste. As a musical genre and counterculture, punk has undergone numerous permutations and critical reconsiderations around its legacy as the sonic protest of choice for marginalized, disaffected youth and, more recently, high-profile agitprop around the world, from Indonesia to Russia (Davies and Franklin 2015; Dunn  2016). This archetype of punk as a countercultural, anti-aesthetic of music-making and performance is distinct from how punk has been studied as part of the history of youth cultures, fashion lines, and streetwear based on the look that fed media panics at the time. While first-generation bands in the UK (e.g., the Clash in London, Stiff Little Fingers in Northern Ireland) saw their music as integral to their political views—on poverty, racism, police brutality, military occupation, and imperialism—it was not until the US-based and feminist-inspired form of punk-inflected music known as the Riot Grrrls phenomenon in the 1990s brought the gendered power hierarchies of the pop music business center-stage (Marcus 2010; Howe 2009). These bands, like Sleater-Kinney (Brownstein 2015), challenged the sexual stereotype of punk as a music and subculture of rebellion, physicality, and declamatory poses represented as ipso facto a male preserve (Reddington 2007; Malott and Peña 2005). The music press and television lavished attention on the first and second generations of punk musicians who were predominantly Anglo American, white, male, and (nominally) working class. Female punk band members or producers were few, as were

490   M. I. Franklin Black British, African American, Asian American, or British Asian performers (Stratton and Zuberi 2014; Saha 2012). As for prominent female punk artists of color in the UK, the career and legacy of Poly Styrene (1957–2011), lead singer of X-Ray Spex, encapsulates these gaps in the record.

Women Rewriting the Punk Playlist I wanted to play rhythm, not so much because I thought it was easier than lead, but because rhythm turned me on. I’d never once been tempted to play a single note. Chords for me, three; less is more. —Chrissie Hynde, Reckless: My Life as a Pretender (2015)

An autobiography or memoir resides at the interstices of the literary genres and writing conventions that traditionally separate fiction from nonfiction (McKeon 2015; Smith 2010, 3). The use of the first person conveys an intimacy that is both spontaneous and contrived. Experimenting with a range of forms and voice, these accounts are necessarily incomplete, performances unfinished, re-presenting well-known playlists open to further reshuffling. As literary performances, memoirs are also constructed reconstructions, based on selected material from early diaries, family and press photos, and recalled conversations. Approaching these texts as primary material offers an invitation to consider lives and artistic output that, by virtue of being idiosyncratic, challenge stereotypical accounts of (high-profile) women in music (Peraino 2001, 709; Bowers 1989; Simone 2003). While not setting out to do so, memoirs such as these underscore the aforementioned moves to consider more methodically the study of (any) music as socioculturally embedded (Small 1998) and, thereby, less as a reified—and rarefied—object of analysis than as “a process engaging bodies, time, and space” (Barrett 2016, 167). The personal and public political dimensions to these recollections also show women striving, thriving, and holding their own in a domain that remains deeply skewed in favor of male experiences and musical articulations, exemplified by the critical acclaim given to the male memoir (Sheffield 2012). Yet, as Brownstein (2015) notes, drawing on her time with Sleater-Kinney, there is an underlying pressure to make overt, literally political music. This has creative and aesthetic implications for how an artist perceives her work as alternative, a creatively political and politically creative act: “We had spent years attempting to exist free of excess and arbitrary labels that were not descriptions of our music: female, indie, queer, Riot Grrrl, post–Riot Grrrl music. Now here we were with the potentiality of being a ‘political’ band” (185). Brownstein is the most explicit in how she reflects on her life with SleaterKinney and their role as exceptions to the rule: What does it feel like to be a woman in a band? I realized that those questions—that talking about the experience—had become part of the experience itself. . . . There is the music itself, and then there is the ongoing dialogue about how it feels. The two seem to be intertwined and inescapable. . . . I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman in a band—I have nothing else to compare it to. But I will say that I doubt in the history of rock journalism and writing any man has been asked, “Why are you in an all-male band?”  (111)

Music   491 Kim Gordon, Viv Albertine, Patti Smith, Brix Smith Start, and Cosey Fanni Tutti are less forthcoming about their political viewpoints, ambivalent about being branded feminists (Coen 2012). For these are authors who write not only as groundbreaking musicians, once budding and now experienced producers, but also as visual artists, fashion designers, scriptwriters, poets, and television personalities with ongoing careers and creative interests. And to confound another stereotype about women who become public figures, high-profile artists, these authors see their lives as parents, partners, and private citizens as integral to rather than a negation of their lives as public figures, punk rock “icons” (Smith 2015). These books defy another essentializing trope in this respect: that making it as a female musician must entail conforming to the usual sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll clichés of life on the road. Hynde (2016) and Tutti (2017) pull no punches in this regard, albeit in different registers of detail, defiance, humor, and regret. Patti Smith (2010) is discrete and sparing in her references to past lives and to loves such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Gordon (2016) bases the narrative arc of her memoir on the creative impact of her breakup with the cofounder of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore. Brix Smith Start (2016) is generous in her assessment of life and music with her ex-husband and founder of the Fall, Mark  E.  Smith, while Albertine (2014, ix) provides page numbers to passages on sex, drugs, and punk rock “for those in a hurry.” With these caveats in mind, I turn to three examples of music revisited in these memoirs in more detail, as discussed by the authors and based on an adapted musicological analysis, organized in order of their release.

The Slits, “So Tough” (Cut, 1979) We were trying to write great pop songs, but ended up creating something new by accident. —Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2014)

Albertine devotes several chapters to how the Slits’ first album, Cut (1979), was made; groundbreaking musically for their use of reggae and African beats, improvised instrumentation, lead singer Ari Up’s vocals and onstage moves (Inayatullah  2016; Stratton and Zuberi 2014). These rhythms and styles for a “girl band” labeled punk drew on different musical and cultural sensibilities to the loud thrashing, three-chord, very short songs of their contemporaries. This sound was due in no small part to the formative roles that the reggae and dub pioneers Dennis Bovell and Don Letts played in producing the album and the band’s first videos. But it was also the effect of Ari Up’s creative vision—she was only sixteen at the time—and unmitigated confidence about how the album should sound, insisting that session musicians should follow her lead (Albertine 2014, 213–4). “So Tough” is a good example of the Slits’ speaking-singing style, that is comparable to what is called Sprechstimme in modern classical music, based on their stylized screaming-yelling of the words. This track draws on a conversation between Albertine and John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, frontman of the Sex Pistols and Ari Up’s stepfather) about Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols bassist) and his deteriorating well-being. Albertine (2014, 217–8) recalls fondly how

492   M. I. Franklin she was trying to make a guitar riff fit the words until Sid himself suggested repeating “the first part of the riff, do it twice . . . a great idea and I liked that he contributed to the song about himself.” The track opens with voices (Ari Up and Albertine) muttering and then half-humming the refrain to create a sort of buzzing over the drumbeat; “He had fun experience / Nothing he does ever makes sense / He is only curious / Don’t take it serious.” Then the Albertine riff enters (20 seconds into the track). This first of three verses has four lines, interspersed with two backing-vocal phrases: “so tough” (twice) and “so hard” (twice). The second verse has eight lines, more snippets from the Lydon-Albertine conversation, punctuated with “so strong” (twice), “too long” (twice), “too much” (twice), “too fast,” and “slow down,” all spoken-sung in a descending scale—a conversation with a sort of punkish Greek Chorus. The guitar riffs link in to, and build from the chorus “He had fun experience / Nothing he does ever makes sense / He is only curious / Don’t take it serious.” Each of the four repeats differ in their rhythmic and vocal shaping as the last phrase repetitions (“Don’t take it serious”) build up and then release into the next verse. The song draws to a close with a section combining lines from chorus and verses that culminates by repeating “Don’t take it serious”; Albertine’s (on the off beat) reggae-strum builds in intensity until the abrupt ending at the end of the third, loud repetition, “DON’T TAKE IT SER-I-OUS.” The track then fades out with a recapitulation of the muttering voices from the intro. This ode to Sid Vicious, one of Albertine’s favorite tracks, presents the contradictions between his public and private personae (his losing struggle with drug addiction, alleged role in the violent death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and his own death at the age of twenty-one) through the irony of the reference “so tough.”

The Fall: “U.S. 80’s–90’s” (Bend Sinister, 1986) Being a woman and playing bass guitar, or any guitar, seemed about the coolest thing in the world to me. Too bad I couldn’t really play. I didn’t realize that it didn’t matter. Punk had changed all of that. In less than a year I’d be writing my own songs, and playing in my own band. In three years’ time I would be in England recording the first song I’d ever written. —Brix Smith Start, The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise (2016)

This album is one on which Smith Start talks about working with her ex-husband, Mark E. Smith, founder of the Fall (he died in 2018 age sixty-one), particularly on his singular vision and approach to writing—as someone who did not play any of the instruments, and then recording songs as live improvisation. This aspect of the sound and effect of the Fall tracks as conscious “first takes,” the mistakes not edited out of the final mix, is integral to what Smith Start considers the essence of the Fall’s sound. It is also, to her mind, integral to the continuity of Mark E. Smith’s hold on the band despite innumerable changes in lineups: “Leaving in the mistakes, insisting on first takes, simplifying arrangements to the most elemental, tribal cacophony . . . aren’t recipes for brilliance, but herein the magic lies”(Smith Start 2016, 224).

Music   493 She then recalls how the lyrics of “U.S.  80’s–90’s” draw on an experience of being interrogated about prescription pills at US Customs in Boston, generating their “own version of a hip-hop track” in which “Mark proclaims ‘I am the original white (big shot) rapper.” This track is based on a repetitive, “blistering and hypnotic” (Smith Start 2016, 222) combination of rhythms that open with a standard rock-drum intro; two main riffs from both lead and bass guitar back the style that characterizes Mark E. Smith’s vocals as he recounts, metacomments on this episode. He never sings in the conventional sense of the word; he intones, languidly slurs over the music backing in all the Fall’s lineups, ones that include two drummers, bass guitar, keyboards, lead and rhythm guitar, and (Smith Start often singing) backing vocals in various combinations and registers. Smith Start considers her part on this track a heavier example of her riff-writing, based on what she considered would go “really well with what [the Fall] were doing and develop this kind of lead guitar technique—very hooky, simple, powerful, leads” (182). The hook in the song is the title, sung as refrain with a two-tone bass rhythm. The riff that Smith Start speaks of enters at 10 seconds into the track, a rocky, melodic lead-guitar line that provides the hook. Additional sound effects are provided by Mark E. Smith’s “idiotic megaphone” (225), discernible toward the end of the track at 3:33. Four minutes and forty seconds of ironic self-deprecation and geopolitical sardonicism held together by bass-guitar and lead-guitar riffs, said “idiotic” megaphone vocals, and a rock-steady drumbeat.

Sleater-Kinney: “Faraway” (One Beat, 2002) Mostly, I didn’t want to be a girl with a guitar. “Girl” felt like an identifier that viewers, especially male ones, saw as a territory upon which an electric guitar was a tourist, an interloper. I wanted the guitar to be an appendage—an extension even—of a body that was made more powerful by my yielding of it. . . . The archetypes, the stage moves, the representations of rebellion and debauchery were all male. . . . We wrote and played ourselves right into existence. —Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015)

Part 2 in Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl opens with an analysis of how her band Sleater-Kinney, affiliated with the aforementioned Riot Grrrl movement (Marcus 2010; Bayton 1998), worked. A three-piece, drums and two guitars (no bass), neither Brownstein nor Corin Tucker “were interested in playing too many bar or power chords. So my chords were half-formed; I was always trying to leave room for Corin . . . a story that on its own sounds unfinished, a sonic to-be-continued, designed to be completed by someone else” (Brownstein  2015, 87). As with the experimental punk rock pioneered by Kim Gordon’s (2015) band Sonic Youth, their guitar tunings were not standardized but instead tuned to fit Tucker’s vocal range. Brownstein notes how tuning “her guitar . . . [for example] in C-sharp . . . one and a half steps below standard tuning . . . creates a sourness, a darkness that you have to overcome if you’re going to create something at all harmonious and palatable. So, even when we’re getting toward a little bit of catchiness or pop sheen, there’s always

494   M. I. Franklin an underlying bitterness to it. The tuning also forced Corin to sing differently—it pushed her into her higher registers, into a wailing, the outer edges” (Brownstein 2015, 87). With the power of Janet Weiss as drummer, Brownstein (2015, 87) notes, there was no longer a need for a bass player to provide the obligatory “depth and low end.” Brownstein writes eloquently about how Sleater-Kinney refined ways to “sound like a full rock band” (87) despite the lack of a bassist, working to eschew any sense of a “lo-fi trebly noise . . . [learning to become] used to compensating yet unafraid of space or discord” (87). To the listener these subtleties, and the labor involved, may not be apparent given the full-throttle sound that this three-piece achieved through “ways of playing that were very compatible with each other” (87) as interwoven guitar lines playing in unison. Brownstein goes on to recall that another facet to “the uniqueness of our sound is that we rarely land on a basic chord—the music stays somewhere in between, it’s always not quite right, which of course can sound more right than anything, or at least like nothing else” (87). How does this work out for the album One Beat (2002) in the three minutes and fortyfive seconds of “Faraway”? The lyrics here evoke first reactions to hearing about the 9/11 attacks: “Why can’t I get along . . . with you.” The first verse goes like this: “Seven thirty a.m. / Nurse the baby on the couch / Then the phone rings / Turn on the TV / Watch the world explode in flames / And don’t leave the house.” There is no musical intro in this track, as convention could dictate; the first line begins on the fourth beat of the first bar, both guitars in unison with drums in full throttle and Tucker’s “wailing” vocals around two-three notes. The second verse follows the first after a brief link with guitar (1:02), which follows the same intervals of this melodic line. The song takes off in the middle section (1:14), upping the tempo with the two vocal lines separating into lead and backing to come together again on the main refrain: “Why can’t I get along / Why can’t I get along / Why can’t I get along with you?” (sung twice). The last minute, a third of the song, consists of repeated variations of the main riff, to finish off with a return to the second part of the main verses (3:11): “Standing here on a one-way road / And I fall down, and I fall down / No other direction for this to go / And we fall down, and we fall down.” And four bars of guitars in unison to the end. This track exemplifies their punk-based yet original sonic art, their political concerns being both lyrical and instrumental, as antiphonies of drive, build, call and response, and release.

Conclusion Since our music [Sonic Youth] can be weird and dissonant, having me centerstage also makes it that much easier to sell the band. Look, it’s a girl, she’s wearing a dress, and she’s with those guys, so things must be okay. But that’s not how we had ever operated as an indie band, I was always conscious not to be too much out front. —Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015) I wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock ‘n’ roll . . . strong rhythmic chords and electric feedback. —Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)

Music   495 This contribution has considered how these artists’ memoirs inform inquiries into the musical dimensions of the politics-performance nexus in three ways: (1) for their rewriting of the history of punk—music and politics—as a male domain in light of how subsequent generations consider its global significance and cultural legacy as a particular musicality of dissent; (2) as overdue contributions of the experiences and contributions of women (straight, queer, working class, middle class) who co-created punk then and there; (3) as an emerging primary source, archival scripts that can address the restrictive lexicon for considering “female” rock, pop, punk personae and “feminine” modalities of performance (e.g., girl in a band, girl band, woman-with-guitar, backing vocalist, tortured star). Although written for the general public—fans and pundits—rather than an academic readership, these memoirs dovetail feminist and critical music scholarship looking to deconstruct the ethnocentrism and heteronormative and androcentric preoccupations that have characterized mainstream classical art and popular music scholarship and criticism to date. In terms of punk as a performance style and a politics of aesthetics (Bleiker 2009: Regev 2013) based on an antagonistic approach to both the classic pop song and stadium rock, what binds the Slits, Sonic Youth, the Fall, and Sleater-Kinney beyond the presence of these women is their experimental impulse. Not just reducible to respective levels of (lack of) technique or musical training but in terms of their commitment to an avant-garde or punk aesthetic to push the boundaries of the verse-chorus conventions and acoustics of the popular song. Where we can hear the differences from what is now regarded as a classical punk or pop song is in terms of the mix, e.g., inversions of the balance between instruments and vocals, different sorts of guitar tuning, unconventional time-signatures, instrumentation through other sorts of sound effects (e.g., glasses, matches, spoons), rhythmic combinations, and how these elements all came together (or not) in the studio from the point of view of production values. The anecdotes, reflections, and personal recollections contained in these books resonate with critical debates on the sex-gender politics of performing—and writing about— experimental and politically conscious music that consciously defies mainstream conventions. Hadley Freeman (2016) puts her finger on the issue for where they will be allowed to reside in the burgeoning “rock memoir” literature: “How narrow the parameters still are for women in the public eye, who are expected to be exceptional but also an everywoman.” As “truthful” these memoirs may or may not be, for fans or historians, here they are considered a timely contribution to the rescripting of punk’s contribution to the range of musicalities that can be deployed as form of audiovisualized resistance to incumbent forces of social, cultural, and political order. Punk artists (choose) not only (to) die young; they also age, settle down, and move on to other creative pursuits. Differing in the weight they give to these sorts of metalevel analyses, these authors also provide many ways to reconsider underlying essentialisms and determinisms of another sort: those that reduce the political legitimacy of socially engaged art and culture to whether they function for formalized politics, along the lines of scholarly and institutionalized discourses about what counts as politically “sovereign” or “dissident” terms of engagement, affiliation, or historical significance. In considering the musical dimensions of politics and/ as performance, including how states might opt for one sort of musical soundtrack over another to assert and accompany their military or cultural power at home or abroad, transgressive music-making continues to trouble the status quo, in theory and in practice. These authors’ reconstructions of their lives and artistic endeavors on the margins of the musical

496   M. I. Franklin mainstream are, at the very least, testimony to how women have always been present, formative creative—and political—forces, equals to male colleagues who still get star billing.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno. Edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press. Albertine, Viv. 2014. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys: A Memoir. New York: St Martins Press. Attali, Jacques. 1989. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Barenboim, Daniel, and Edward W. Said. 2003. Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. New York: Pantheon Books. Barkin, Elaine, and Lydia Hamessley, eds. 1999. Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music. Zürich, Los Angeles: Carciofoli. Barrett, G. Douglas. 2016. After Sound: Toward a Critical Music. London: Bloomsbury. Bayton, Mavis. 1998. Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. London: Oxford University Press. Berger, Karol. 2007. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bleiker, Roland. 2009. Aesthetics and World Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bowers, Jane  M. 1989. Feminist Scholarship and the Field of Musicology: I College Music Symposium. 29, 81–92 College Music Society. Brown, Courtney. 2008. Politics in Music: Music and Political Transformation from Beethoven to Hip-Hop. Atlanta: Farsight Press. Brownstein, Carrie. 2015. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir. New York: Riverhead Books. Cage, John. 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Coen, Joe. 2012. “Punk Feminism: Up the Pinks!” Huck, August 1. https://www.huckmag.com/ perspectives/reportage-2/punk-feminism/. Davies, Matt. 2005. “Do It Yourself Punk Rock and the Disalienation of International Relations.” In Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture, and Politics, “What does (the Study of) World Politics Sound Like?” co-authored with Matt Davies, in World Politics and Popular Culture: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, edited by Frederica Caso and Caitlin Hamilton, an E-International Relations Edited Collection. April 2015; 978-1-91081402-4 ISSN2053-8626. Dorsey, Brian. 2000. Spirituality, Sensuality, Literality: Blues, Jazz, and Rap as Music and Poetry. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Dunn, Kevin. 2016. Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life. London: Bloomsbury. Edgers, Geoff. 2015. “Rise of the Female Rock Memoir.” Washington Post, September 4. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/rise-of-the-female-rock-memoir/ 2015/09/04/64db029e-5097-11e5-933e-7d06c647a395_story.html?utm_term=.1734af2d4b12. Feldstein, R. (2005), ’I don’t trust you anymore’: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s. Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4 (Mar, 2005): 1349–1379.

Music   497 Fontana, Kaitlin. 2012. “The Rise of the Femoir.” Hazlitt, August 23. https://hazlitt.net/ longreads/rise-femoir. Franklin, M. I. 2005. “Introductory Improvisations on a Theme.” In Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture, and Politics, edited by M. I. Franklin, 1–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Franklin, M. I. 2020, “Music Making Politics – Beyond Lyrics.” In Politik Nummer 1 | Årgang 23 | 2020, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen (2020): 51–69. Franklin, M. I. 2021, Sampling Politics: Music and the Geocultural. New York, and London: Oxford University Press (in press). Freeman, Hadley. 2016. “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer: Review—The Problem with ‘Femoirs.’ ” The Guardian, September 9. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/sep/09/the-girl-with-the-lower-back-tattoo-review-amy-schumer-autobiographymemoir-femoir. Frith, Simon. 2007. Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Frith, Simon, and Angela McRobbie. [1978] 1990. “Rock and Sexuality.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 317–32. London: Routledge. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Boston: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Kim. 2015. Girl in a Band: A Memoir. New York: Dey Street Books. Gracyk, Thomas. N.d. “Aesthetics of Popular Music.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed February 2, 2017. http://www.iep.utm.edu/music-po/. Harris, John. 2010. Hail! Hail! Rock “n” Roll: The Ultimate Guide to the Music, the Myths and the Madness. London: Hachette, Digital/Little, Brown Book Group. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2013. Why Music Matters. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor  W.  Adorno. [1944] 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Howe, Zoe Street. 2009. Typical Girls? The Story of The Slits. London: Omnibus Press. Hynde, Chrissie. 2016. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday. Inayatullah, Naeem. 2016. “Gigging on the World Stage: Bossa Nova and Afrobeat after De-Reification.” Contexto Internacional 38, no. 2 (May–August): 523–43. Jones, Grace. 2015. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. New York: Gallery Books, Simon & Schuster. Koskoff, Ellen. 2000. “Foreword.” In Music and Gender, edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, ix–xiii. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Magrini, Tuilia, ed. 2003. Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malott, Curry, and Milagros Peña. 2004. Punk Rockers’ Revolution: A Pedagogy of Race, Class, and Gender. Oxford: Peter Lang. Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcus, Sara. 2010. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. New York: Harper Perennial. McClary, Susan. 1991. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, Susan. 1992. Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

498   M. I. Franklin McKeon, Belinda. 2015. “Me, Myself and I in an Age of Autobiographical Fiction.” The Guardian, August 20. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/20/me-myself-i-inan-age-of-autobiographical-fiction. Moisala, Pirkko, and Beverley Diamond, eds. 2000. Music and Gender. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Morley, Paul. 2008. Joy Division: Piece by Piece. Writing about Joy Division 1977–2007. London: Plexus. Pasler, Jann. 2008. Writing through Music: Essays on Music, Culture and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peraino, Judith A. 2001. “Review of Madonna: Bawdy and Soul; Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin; Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music; Girls Will Be Boys: Women Report on Rock, by Karlene Faith, Alice Echols, Mavis Bayton, and Liz Evans.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 3: 692–709. Peraino, Judith A., Suzanne  G.  Cusick, Mitchell Morris, Lloyd Whitesell, William Cheng, Maureen Mahon, Sindhumathi Revuluri, Nadine Hubbs, and Stephan Pennington. 2013. “Music and Sexuality.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 3: 825–72. Queen Latifah. 2000. Ladies First: Revelations of a Strong Woman. New York: Quill. Queen Latifah. 2010. Put on Your Crown: Life-Changing Moments on the Path to Queendom. New York: Grand Central. Rabaka, Reiland. 2012. Hip Hop’s Amnesia: From Blues and the Black Women’s Club Movement to Rap and the Hip Hop Movement. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Rai, S. and Reinelt, J. (Eds) (2014). The Grammar of Politics and Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Reddington, Helen. 2007. The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era. London: Routledge. Regev, Motti. 2013. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Polity Press. Reinelt, Janelle and Shirin M. Rai. 2014. “Introduction.” In The Grammar of Politics and Performance, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Janelle Reinelt. London and New York: Routledge. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Ross, Alex. 2010. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Picador. Ross, Alex. 2011. Listen to This. London: Fourth Estate. Saha, Anamik, 2012. “Locating MIA: ‘Race’, commodification and the politics of production”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(6) 736–752. Sheffield, Rob. 2012. “The 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time.” Rolling Stone, March 23. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/books-greatest-rock-memoirs-of-alltime-161198/. Simone, Nina. 2003. I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Patti. 2010. Just Kids. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Patti. 2015. M Train. New York: Knopf. Smith Start, Brix. 2016. The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise. London: Faber & Faber. Spicer, Mark, and John Covach, eds. 2010. Sounding Out Pop: Analytical Essays in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Music   499 Stratton, Jon, and Nabeel Zuberi, eds. 2014. Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945. London: Ashgate, Routledge. Street, John. 2012. Music and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2018. Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tutti, Cosey Fanni. 2017. Art, Sex, Music. London: Faber & Faber. White, Bob W., ed. 2012. Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

chapter 31

Eroticism a n d th e Politics of R epr esen ti ng th e A bused Body Lisa Fitzpatrick

Introduction This chapter explores the potential for representations of sexual violence to be framed as erotic and received as sexually titillating. It focuses mainly on two different examples of representation, both concerning sexual violence in conflict: the photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the representation of the Bosnian War in Colleen Wagner’s (2010) play The Monument.1 This Canadian play premiered in Toronto in 1995, and again in 2018. In the intervening decade it was translated and staged in Germany, Japan, and Rwanda, in each case speaking to local atrocities and wars. These two examples have been chosen to contrast forms of representation as well as the assumed objectives of their creators. The photographs are clearly intended to function as a form of sexual abuse and humiliation and as titillating images for consumption by spectators, including the soldiers. The play, in contrast, removes the violated body from the gaze of the spectator to draw attention instead to the brutality of war and the ubiquity of sexual violence in wartime. In doing so, it seeks to commemorate the female victims of war, while refusing the spectacle of the body on display for an audience. Yet both texts explore the intertwining of sex, violence, and pornography, and the dynamics of this in conflict and postconflict situations. In this analysis, the focus is also on the concept of vulnerability and its shadow, ignorance, in relationship to heteronormative erotica and pornography and the construction of hegemonic heteromasculinity.

502   Lisa Fitzpatrick

The Appeal of Violence Slavoj Žižek’s (2008, 1) taxonomy of violence defines subjective violence as “acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict,” visible actions with identifiable perpetrators. But this is only the most obvious element in a triumvirate that includes two forms of objective violence: systemic and symbolic. These three are not really separable, though systemic and symbolic forms of violence tend to pass largely unnoticed as byproducts of the normal functioning of societies and economies. Žižek refers to the “fascination” of subjective violence, and indeed the appeal of the horrifying spectacle is not in doubt. Aristotle states that “objects, which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies” (Poetics, IV). However, he is speaking of mimesis, a fictional representation of events and characters, not of the actual display of “ignoble animals or dead bodies.” Plato’s parable of Leontion, who cannot resist the desire to gaze upon the bodies of executed men, contradicts Aristotle’s explanation of the spectator’s fascination as rooted in the pleasures of mimesis. For Plato (1980), the struggle is between reason and desire. Leontion’s desire to look overcomes his reasoned revulsion: although disgusted with himself and the spectacle, he continues to stare. Leontion finds his contemporary parallel in the common human desire to look at road traffic accidents, real or fictional televised surgery, and all kinds of events and entertainments that expose death, injury, and the internal mysteries of the human body to the view of the onlooker. This fascination is understandable: we each have a body that we cannot see inside; we are all vulnerable to mishap and injury; and death waits unseen for us all. Leontion’s struggle between his desire to look and his reason reflects the twin poles of fascination and revulsion at this display of the mutilated corpses of the executed men. Death exerts a fascination, but, equally, this knowledge that the human person is reducible to meat and blood is held in abjection. The story of Leontion illustrates a long-standing philosophical question of the appeal of “negative affect,” as Paisley Livingston (2013, 398) terms it in his reflection on Du Bos’s 1719 Réflexions critiques sur la poësie et sur la peinture. Du Bos posits that the emotions of fear or pain or grief aroused by works of art are pleasurable because they are artificial and under the control of the spectator (Livingston  2013, 396). Reviewing the responses of different philosophers, including Hume, to this paradox, he concludes that art offers a complex pleasure, which may include painful emotions that are mitigated and sometimes evoked by the beauty of the artwork. Adapting this argument, then, Picasso’s Guernica is shocking and frightening, but the power of the work is in the eloquence with which it expresses and evokes the devastation and the tragedy of war. Similarly, by framing the suffering body as a synecdoche for timeless ethical and moral questions, art allows the spectator to contemplate horrors and to ponder on the dilemmas that such events raise. It distances the spectator from the issue, allowing for a complex engagement with the work. This arguably allows for a representation of horror that is ultimately ethically justified and aesthetically enriching and that leads to a greater understanding of the value of human life and dignity. But there is also a baser pleasure in viewing another’s pain, which scholars responding to the Abu Ghraib photographs elucidate. Susan Sontag (2004a, 95) states, “Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest.”

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   503

Violence, Vulnerability, and Ignorance Violence in representation, and studies that address it, tend to focus on subjective violence, as Simone Weil (2008) does in her essay on The Iliad. She writes, “Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it” (45); that is, it can turn the living human being into a dead body. In addition to killing outright, it can also impress upon an individual that death is imminent and inevitable; this reduces the individual to the condition of “bare life,” as Agamben (1998) names it. Weil (2008, 47) describes this person-as-thing as one who breathes but is not alive, who no longer has the capacity to feel or act and who is therefore outside of subjectivity: “Though breathing still, he is no more than matter; still thinking, he can think no more.” The person-as-thing is no longer capable of empathetic connection to others and is therefore no longer recognizable to them as a human being. The contemplation of the individual in this state provokes horror and revulsion, as well as fascination. Weil (2008), writing in 1940, foreshadows the concerns of a number of later writers including Georges Bataille (1957, 1961), Judith Butler (2004, 2009, 2016), Elaine Scarry (1985), and Susan Sontag (2003). Each of these returns in his or her scholarship to the figure whose suffering illustrates our human vulnerability and our own potential dehumanization through suffering, as well as the corresponding power (and thence the inclination) to inflict torment on others. Weill (2008, 47) invokes the figure of King Priam, reduced to a suppliant who kneels to kiss Achilles’s hands “terrible, manslaughtering, which had slain so many of his sons,” to illustrate the humiliation of the conquered and the implicit warning to the conquerors. In The Iliad, vanquished people of ancient Troy no longer appear human to the victorious Greeks, but the victors themselves are playthings of the chaotic nature of force and are intoxicated by the illusion of power it gives them. Weil reads in The Iliad a warning that although “all are destined from birth to endure violence, the realm of circumstances closes their minds to this truth. . . . [The strong and the weak] believe they are of different species” (53). The spectacle of the human being reduced in this way to a thing exposes the vulnerability of all human beings to harm at the hands of others, knowledge that is threatening and thus must be held at bay. This perhaps underlies and motivates the savagery that Jean Franco (2013) describes as a kind of “Bacchic frenzy” that is one response to this phenomenon. She describes the sadistic murders of young women in Juárez, Mexico, as offering “an erotic thrill” to the participants and to the “spectators”—which includes herself and her readers (224). She quotes from police reports that specify murder by dislocation of the young women’s necks during rape to enhance the sexual pleasure of the aggressor, because if the neck is broken at a certain point of the vertebrae it “generates a convulsion that certain attackers deliberately seek” (219). Franco’s work identifies the phenomenon of erotic pleasure in violence and in the contemplation of the violated body, and associates it with an extreme machismo that devalues and dehumanizes women. She explores the capacity of people to enact extraordinary violence and cruelty, sometimes in the grip of a “savage hysteria” (55), when the vulnerability of the victims becomes an inciting factor. Vulnerability is normatively associated with women more than men, but Judith Butler’s (2006, 2008, 2010) work since the 9/11 attacks on the United States has increasingly explored its ontological nature as well as refining its definition. Vulnerability is often understood as a

504   Lisa Fitzpatrick negative quality, as susceptibility to harm or violence, sometimes used interchangeably with helplessness. As material beings in a material world, we are all vulnerable to the actions of others, vulnerable to their care and tenderness as well as to harm at their hands. Rather than describing a quality akin to weakness or powerlessness, vulnerability in this framework describes openness to others and to the surrounding environment, a capacity to love and to be affected by others, and a capacity to learn and change. Butler (2008) proposes that, when acts of violence draw attention to the vulnerability of human life, maintaining an awareness of our shared vulnerability might provide the basis for an ethical response to the violence that is not simply retaliation. The illusion that the strong and the weak are fundamentally different is a significant thread in work exploring vulnerability as the basis for ethical interpersonal relationships and studies on ignorance. Erinn Gilson (2011) argues that vulnerability is often understood simplistically as susceptibility to harm, akin to weakness. It is therefore not recognized as a universal human destiny but is instead denied and projected onto others with whom the individual does not identify. Gilson, Kelly Oliver (2007), and Nancy Tuana (2006) describe this denial of vulnerability as ignorance, which is not passive and is far more complex than simply not knowing. Ignorance involves the act of deliberately ignoring knowledge that is disruptive to the individual’s worldview. Tuana’s (2006, 11) taxonomy of ignorance includes willful ignorance described as “not knowing and not wanting to know,” a “systematic process of self-deception . . . that infects those who are in positions of privilege, an active ignoring of the oppression of others and one’s role in that exploitation.” By choosing to ignore their awareness of their own vulnerability, individuals construct an illusion of invulnerability, which has the effect of separating them affectively from those deemed to be vulnerable: typically, women, the poor, people of color, those who are disabled or ill, and of course defeated enemies in wartime. Crucially, this invulnerability is presented as a mark of moral excellence. Conversely, vulnerability—physical, emotional, psychological, or economic—when understood reductively, tends to be constructed as the fault of the vulnerable, for example as evidence of their failure to engage successfully with the neoliberal capitalist economy. The denial of vulnerability and the construction of an illusory invulnerability is a common response, alongside anger and rejection, to victims of violence. This is all the more so when social structures are precarious, as they are in times of conflict. Multiple examples demonstrate the frenzied infliction of violence upon the powerless, from public demonstrations of racial hatred toward immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in wealthy Western countries (such as attacks on refugee housing in Ireland and Germany, and public demonstrations by far-right organizations like Britain First and Alternativ für Deutschland), to the public lynching of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States (Apel 2004; Wood 2009; Young 2005; see also Carr 2016 on lynching in present-day USA, and the artwork of Kara Walker), to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, posed and performed for the camera, discussed later. This violence is often sexually charged: the lynching of African American men to supposedly protect white American women frequently had a sexual element, whereby part of the torture included the castration of the victim (Apel 2004, 90). These public murders also acted to suppress abjected knowledge of white men’s rape of black women. Rage against immigrants is frequently expressed in fears of sexual violence against local women and of miscegenation (as in the “Eurabia” propa-

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   505 ganda imagery employed by Alternativ für Deutschland).2 Similarly, the torture of male and female prisoners at Abu Ghraib uses the victim’s sexual and gender identity to attack and destroy him or her (Apel 2005). The prisoners, already racially and culturally defined as “other,” are further dehumanized in their captive vulnerability. Their otherness and their vulnerability mark them as feminine or feminized, Oriental, vessels or material for sexual violence, which will enable their guards to reiterate and reinscribe patriarchal gender norms, protecting their own invulnerability in the process.

Vulnerability, Sexual Violence, and the Pornographic The instinct to inflict violence on a vulnerable “other,” to preserve the perpetrator’s willful ignorance of his or her own vulnerability, does not explain why this violence is so often sexual in nature. However, vulnerability is associated with women and, often, with versions of femininity seen in heteronormative erotica and pornography. The representation of sexual violence as erotic has a long history, as can be seen in archival theater posters showing disheveled maidens being rescued by muscular heroes from the clutches of villains, and the historical popularity of rape plots in plays of all genres. Carine Mardorossian (2014, 2) radically rethinks the relationships of violence, gender, and eroticism to argue that all violence is inherently sexual. She writes, “Violence itself entails the mobilization of a relational and structural paradigm of masculinity / femininity” (5), building on earlier work by De Lauretis (1989) and reading physical violence as a strategy to occupy a dominant masculine position while enforcing a subordinate and therefore feminine position on the “other.” Sexual violence is deeply embedded in Western art as a dramatic trope that constructs and performs gender stereotypes of feminine modesty and submission and masculine virility and agency, reiterated in children’s stories, romantic novels, popular songs, stage comedies and melodramas, and films from the silent era to present-day Europe, Bollywood, and Hollywood. In fictional form sexual violence is not represented as brutal or painful: it is forceful and passionate, and its object eventually joyfully submits, as Scarlett O’Hara does when Rhett Butler carries her upstairs in the 1940s Hollywood blockbuster Gone With the Wind. In such representations there are no blackened eyes, split lips, broken noses, or torn vaginas. Instead the use of force is naturalized as an erotic pursuit that heightens the eventual pleasure for both, while reinscribing gender stereotypes and power relations. The theater scholars Charlotte Canning (1996) and Lizbeth Goodman (1993) see rape and sexual violence as recurring issues for exploration in women’s writing for performance, and other scholars have noted its thematic emergence in devised group-created processes (Fitzpatrick  2018; Pilkington  1994). Solga (2009) turns to early modern English plays to interrogate staging practices that make sexual violence visible or invisible. These scholars concur that female theater artists find it important to express women’s experiences of sexual violence as embodied, painful, disempowering, and humiliating. Their work challenges assumptions about the erotic potential of physical force, to note the silencing and shaming effect on victims of that cultural trope and its contribution to what Buchwald, Fletcher, and

506   Lisa Fitzpatrick Roth (2005) term “rape culture.” The Monument, for example, is concerned to foreground women’s experiences and vulnerability in wartime and challenges the male character’s ­common narrative of women as the spoils of war. Yet the association of the erotic with force or physical violence is persistent. In his writing on eroticism, Georges Bataille (2012) explores the links between death and the erotic impulse, noting that the awareness of death stimulates sexual desire, as is clearly demonstrated in times of war and emergency. He writes, “In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation” (16). Having established an intrinsic relationship between eroticism and violence, Bataille draws on the writings of de Sade, centering his argument around one key idea: “There is no better way to know death than to link it to some licentious image” (de Sade, quoted in Bataille 2012, 11). By arguing that knowledge of death and mortality is essentially intertwined with the erotic, Bataille (1989) directs his reader to its potential to reveal to us something of the mysteries of death. In doing so, he identifies a link between the infliction of pain and death on another and erotic pleasure; as Franco (2013) points out, some people clearly do experience pleasure in the pain of others. Bataille’s special fascination is with depictions of the moments before death—actual or fictional—when the living individual recognizes the imminent inevitable death of the body. Tears of Eros identifies numerous examples in ancient and modern art, and Bataille turns repeatedly in his writings to the image of Fou-Tchou-Li, who appears to be transported beyond the physical world as he suffers the “death of a thousand cuts.”3 In other writing, Bataille describes and analyzes works of fine art, photography, and film that document or represent in fiction the moments before death when the subject enters into a liminal state that Weil understands as the person-as-thing and Bataille understands as ecstasy: transportation beyond the limitations of the body, a glimpse into eternity. Suffering is an integral aspect of this ecstatic state, because it is physically overwhelming: this is in opposition to Scarry’s (1987) understanding of pain as eliminating everything but the body’s suffering and fastening the individual destructively to the body. Sontag (2004a) associates the fascination with terrible pain on the point of death with our desire for authenticity. Of photographs that capture the moment of death, she writes that one can gaze on the faces of the dying man “for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship” (60). Bataille’s description of the sexual act focuses on the naked body, the (dis)possessed body in the self-obliterating moment of orgasm, or petite mort, using again the imagery of religious ecstasy and sacrifice, with the female as the sacrificial victim. Ecstasy’s connotations of both pleasure and suffering are explored by Sontag (2003, 99), who writes of Bataille that “suffering . . . is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation.” His imagery compares the sexual act with human sacrifice: the man “lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the bloodstained priest his . . . victim.” The woman is “despoiled,” “laid open,” stripped of her “modesty,” and overwhelmed by “the violence of the sexual urges” (Bataille, 2012, 90). Simone de Beauvoir’s (2009) discussion of eroticism uses similar language and draws attention to the violence of terms like deflower and the emphasis on male possession of the female partner. Notably, Bataille’s exploration of eroticism in his fiction and his scholarly writing is strongly influenced by the Christian tradition, specifically Roman Catholicism, with its emphasis on the sinfulness of the flesh and the need to subordinate and discipline the body and its desires. In Tears of Eros (Bataille 1989) he traces the depiction in Christian art of the naked body in Hell, being torn by demons, sawn into pieces, burned and branded

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   507 and brutalized. The result is “a distant, often brutal eroticism . . . the terrible alliance between eroticism and sadism” (83). These frenzied images find a contemporary echo in the tortures described by Apel (2005), Franco (2013), and Sontag (2004a, 2004b). The identification of vulnerability and a kind of passivity or submission to violence as essential to female desirability and sexual pleasure, and thus as erotic, frames the female body in terms of both rape and love and blurs the distinctions between the two. By identifying vulnerability with femininity, masculinity tends to be constructed in oppositional terms as invulnerable, or at least less vulnerable, making vulnerability a quality that must be denied and projected onto a gendered or racialized other (Tuana  2006; Sontag  2004b). Vulnerability may therefore incite tenderness and passion or loathing, rage, and physical aggression. Where erotic performances represent masochistic or sadistic acts or disempower and humiliate one of the protagonists, passions of violence and rage may become confused with eroticism. Studies of pornography, and of extreme violence in fiction film, reveal a history that intertwines violence with sexually explicit material intended to titillate the reader.

The Exposed Body: Abu Ghraib In 2004 a report on the American news magazine program 60 Minutes II on CBS broke the story of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, showing some of the photographs taken by the soldiers as they carried out the abuse and posing with the body of a dead detainee. Shortly afterward the photographs were published in the New Yorker, and then in numerous publications, both print and digital, around the world. Among the scholars reacting to the photographs and the events they document are Susan Sontag (2004b), Wendy Hesford (2006), Kelly Oliver (2007), and Judith Butler (2008). They ask the same question, pondering how it is that the torturers are captured in the pictures, often smiling for the camera: Sontag comments on the rarity of this. It can only mean that the torturers do not think that they are doing wrong and assume that their behavior will meet with widespread approval. They seem unaware of the gravity of their actions, as if they were engaged in pranks or hazing. These images bear a striking resemblance to pornography: a naked man on a leash, naked men piled into a heap, naked men smeared in feces.4 Sontag (2004b) wonders how much of the abuse was inspired by online pornography. Pornography has historically included materials that use depictions of sexual violence in the construction of normative masculinity. William Darby (1987, 162) explores the depiction of “ ‘therapeutic’ rape and overwhelming masculine sexual power” in popular American fiction of the 1950s, and Erin Barry’s (2017, 227) study of “Tijuana Bibles” (pocket-size, sexually explicit comic books popular in the 1930s) finds that they encouraged “the normalization and glorification of sexual violence as a measure of sexual performance and as an accepted part of a sexual encounter.” Her analysis identifies the use of erotica to cement homosocial relationships and promote bonding. While Darby’s and Barry’s focus is on civilian society, the use of violent pornography to facilitate male bonding and the construction of a racial or sexual “other” as a vehicle for the expression of this bond is apparent in gang rape testimonies and mass sexual violence in war against both male and female victims (Sanday  1990; Carlson  2005; Zawati  2007; Franco  2013). The victims in these instances

508   Lisa Fitzpatrick become the sexual focus of the aggressors, their bodies providing the material for shared demonstrations of ethnic loyalty and macho masculinity. Purcell (2012, 14) defines pornography as an industry and as “an imaginary” entangled in “the visible, hidden, and always-mobile connections between misogyny, aggression, sex, and violence” and heterosexism. Like Paasonen (2011) she explores the increasingly common emphasis in heterosexual pornography on the degradation of the female partner and the infliction of pain and discomfort upon her. While she does not suggest that these qualities are essential to pornography, I would argue that pornography’s typical exaggeration of primary and secondary sexual characteristics, and its construction of a sharply drawn sexual binary, tends to emphasize feminine passivity and receptivity and male activity for erotic purposes.5 These analyses, which focus on popular online and video pornography, identify similar images and tropes to contemporary horror cinema. In her seminal 1991 essay, Linda Williams investigates the gendered body in three cinematic genres: horror, pornography, and melodrama. She notes that pornography and horror increasingly depict explicit and extreme acts of sexual violence and cites the director Alfred Hitchcock’s advice “Torture the women!” as “it has long been a dictum of the [horror] genre that women make the best victims” (5). Sontag (2004a, 95) writes, “All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic.” In considering the reception of these genres, Williams (1991) argues that they seek to engage the bodies of the spectators in affective, instinctive responses to the image: fear, lust, disgust, tears, and so on. Her work becomes the basis for Kerner and Knapp’s (2016) examination of the representation of pain in “torture porn”: pornography and extreme horror. Like Williams, they turn their attention to the body of the spectator as well as the mutilated bodies displayed on the screen, to argue that contemporary culture exhibits a nostalgia for bodies and a longing for the “Real” and for a “return to the Real of the body” (Žižek 2002, quoted in Kerner and Knapp 2016, 47) that graphic representations of torture and bodily mutilation seem to offer. The films seek to “elicit a visceral response in the spectator” (Kerner and Knapp 2016, 46) evoked by agonized screams and depiction of blood and wounds. The authors argue that “these bodies in pain are on display in a manner that share affinities with the display of bodies in the throes of pleasure, as found in hardcore pornography,” and that they foreground the “fragility of human flesh” (52). In both horror and pornography there is a longing for a reality that is not mediated, a reality of the body rather than of the virtual. These film studies scholars offer an explanation for the erotic or corporeal fascination of the torture photographs, the desire that they seek to assuage in the perpetrator and in the actual and imagined spectators. This desire is sexual, but not only sexual: it is a desire for the Real of the body and of death and of knowledge of the Real. In this way, as the images of Abu Ghraib demonstrate, this physical violence can become a means of inflicting sexualized humiliation and gaining pleasure from the sight of the violated body. That body is “other” to the soldiers because of its perceived ethnicity, which furthermore acts to feminize it and thus emphasize its abjection (as does smearing it with excrement, posing it like an animal, or playing with suggestions of homosexuality). To deploy the argument set forward by Kerner and Knapp in relation to the American genre of “torture porn,” to which Sontag likens these images, the photographs reflect a “melancholic loss” of a collective American past. The loss is of a past when Americans were connected to their bodies and worked with their bodies—a bucolic existence memorialized in the myth of the Wild West. In contrast, the contemporary American worker is alienated from physicality, has become soft and

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   509 feminized, working with computers and digital technology in air-conditioned spaces. By displaying bodies in pain the spectators—the soldiers, and we too—are recalled to our own bodies, returned to the Real of the body. We experience the “mystery and indecency” of our shared spectatorship; we experience a “prurient interest,” and insofar as these are young and healthy bodies our experience may also be “pornographic” (Sontag 2004a, 95).

The Concealed Body: The Example of The Monument Colleen Wagner’s (2010) The Monument frames the infliction of pain on the body as part of a moral and ethical web that motivates the torturer and shapes his or her relationship to the victim. In contrast to the Real of the body captured in the images of the victims in Abu Ghraib, this play enacts a stylized representation of violence and does so to confront the audience with difficult philosophical questions about power, violence, revenge, and justice. It does not offer an erotic or eroticized spectacle of the abused body and avoids the explicit exposure of the body to the audience. The avoidance of display, of nakedness, and of explicit representations of rape is a recognizable strategy for staging rape while maintaining the spectator’s attention on the experience (pain, trauma, loss of life) of the victim, rather than a spectacular framing that privileges the perspective of the aggressor. The play is a two-hander, for one male and one female actor. Its episodic structure spans an unspecified number of weeks in the life of a nineteen-year-old soldier and war veteran, Stetko, and fifty-year-old Mejra in an unidentified postwar society. The reviews of the premiere, which took place in March 1995 at Canadian Stage in Toronto, a main-stage professional theater space, suggest that it was closely identified with the Bosnian War in this first production. Canada was a site of immigration and refuge for citizens of the former Yugoslavia fleeing the conflict and the breakdown of the society, and this is not the only work staged during the mid-1990s that addressed that theme, though it is perhaps the only one given a full professional performance. The timing of the work, the plotline of mass rapes and genocide, and the names of the characters suggest the former Yugoslavia. However, the fact that the play has been translated and produced in other countries and cultures since then, and another production in Toronto in 2018 uses the play to speak of the disappearance of more than one thousand First Nations women, suggests that the play can in fact speak to other traumas, other genocides. A close reading of the text suggests that this is indeed so: that the play raises important questions about gender, rape, and conflict that transcend narrow national identification. The play opens with Stetko alone on stage strapped into an electric chair, about to be executed for crimes that include the rape and murder of at least twenty-three women. Spotlit, he “appears small in the vast darkness” (Wagner 2010, loc. 133)6 as he speaks to an invisible gallery. He speaks without remorse or reflection upon the humanity of his victims, opening with a description of his “favourite”: a teenage girl, a virgin, “with watery eyes. Like a doe’s” (loc. 133). He compares himself to the others, who rush to orgasm; unlike them he claims that he doesn’t care much for the world and was a mystery to the psychiatrists who assessed him. He also speaks of his induction into this violence by the other soldiers, who

510   Lisa Fitzpatrick stripped him naked, mocked him for refusing to take part, and said “that maybe they should [rape] me.” When he couldn’t orgasm they “rubbed my face in shit and made me do it until I came. So I faked it. . . . After it was over they told me to kill her” (loc. 180). He kills the woman partly out of fear she will tell the others that he didn’t come, and comments that after it was over, and she was buried in the mud, “somebody might have mistaken her for a dead pig” (loc. 180). The image echoes Virginia Woolf ’s famous response to images of the Spanish Civil War: she describes the photograph of a casualty as “a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated it might on the other hand be the body of a pig” (quoted in Sontag 2003, 4). The dehumanization of war is therefore in the eyes not only of the killers but also of the spectator and witness. Stetko continues his testimony, that with the other men he would take part in the selection, rape, and murder of women, taking them from the prison camps into the forest. The forest is the archetypal place of monsters and of danger, the place where the darkest impulses can be enacted and the deepest and most primitive fears can be realized. It is a space of horror. Stetko justifies his actions: they were not personal; he has nothing against “those ‘people’ personally”; he was only a boy, and had to enlist or his family would be in danger. He attributes his actions and his current dilemma to “fate” (loc. 207). The description of mass rape as genocide recurs in literature on the Bosnian War, and subsequently on other conflicts. Nena Moćnik (2016) summarizes the three strands of genocidal strategy: to force people to flee in terror so that the region is ethnically cleansed; to rape women until their wombs are destroyed so that they can no longer carry a pregnancy or give birth; and to impregnate women so that they bear the children of their enemies. The elimination of the enemies’ genetic line by forcing women to bear the children of their enemies as a form of genocide is clearly aligned with the patriarchal construction of family and nation. Systemic rape indicates one of the ways in which war reenacts patriarchal violence on the bodies of women and children.7 Stetko give voice to this strategy, saying, “It’s a very good way to wipe out a race. Take away their women and get them pregnant” (Wagner 2010, loc. 258). Stetko’s words echo a common ethnonationalist framework that diminishes the mother’s genetic contribution to the child and privileges instead a concept of identity that is patrilocal and patriarchal. Spivak (2015, 75) names this “reproductive heteronormativity” and positions it as a key source of nationalist legitimacy (see also Ahmed 2004, 124). Yet in the middle of his self-serving narrative, Stetko summarizes the ethical problems that the play explores. If war is a crime, he asks, why do we keep having them? His behavior and its consequences for him and others are framed by the circumstances of a war that was not of his making but that radically altered his normal moral universe. He challenges Mejra with the logic of war: If I don’t kill you, you will kill me. When she argues that the women he murdered were all someone’s daughters and that he should look at every woman “as if she were your daughter,” he turns the question around, asking, “Why don’t you look at every man as if he were your son?” (Wagner 2010, loc. 1348). The play investigates the question of guilt and culpability and the possibility that it is purely chance that made Stetko a murderer. Indeed the action of the play shows oppressive violence as a dynamic, transferable form of power that seduces first Stetko, and then Mejra. She saves Stetko’s life, but she does so in order to enact a brutal revenge. It is clear to the audience from the opening scenes that Mejra will be revealed as a victim of rape and as the mother of one of the murdered girls: the logic of the play’s structure demands this. She brings Stetko to her home, a comfortless house on a barren farm in the

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   511 “charred ruins of the land” (Wagner 2010, loc. 1995). After he eats and expresses his relief at being “free,” she tells him, “You’re not free” and “with a single smooth motion deliberately slices off his ear” with a small sickle. He falls, and she fastens a collar and chain around his neck and bolts it to the ground. She orders him to stand, then beats him methodically until he falls again, shaking (loc. 351–406). In the stage directions, the beating lasts a long, long time. Its impact for the audience is in its duration: an interminable and exhausting process. The next scene shows more physical and verbal abuse: Mejra calls him Stinko; she shackles him to a wooden plow and forces him to pull it; she orders him to lift a boulder and drop it onto his foot (loc. 482–560). She also tells him that his girlfriend was murdered and gangraped and mutilated, taunting him with the image of his own crimes inflicted on the body of someone he loves (loc. 849). But the plot follows the gradual rehumanization of Stetko as he begins to feel empathy, eventually taking Mejra to the graves of his victims. One of these, inevitably, is Mejra’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Ana. Stetko describes his attempted rape and murder of the girl, whose corporeal vulnerability is expressed in her “watery eyes. Like a doe’s” (Wagner 2010, loc. 1995) and whose spiritual vulnerability is expressed in her care for the dignity of others and her refusal of hatred. Stetko names his victims, one by one, as he lifts them from the mass grave, and he places Ana into her mother’s arms. The uncovering of these destroyed bodies is represented poetically on stage, as red dresses hanging from a forest of knotted ropes, creating the monument of the title. The red dresses are handled as bodies, lifted gently from the ground and finally accorded their due dignity. Through a combination of the dialogue and these staging strategies the violated body is evoked for the spectator. The red dress functions as a symbol of femininity, the color also suggesting spilled blood and violence; the vivid color also creates a spectacular monument that commemorates the innumerable nameless women who have been victims of war, each one some mother’s daughter.

Conclusions The staging of the violated body raises questions about the spectatorial pleasures of violence, the fascination of viewing the body as it is mutilated or as it dies, and the ethical and practical issues of representing the suffering body on stage or in the media. The photographs at Abu Ghraib reveal a web of interrelationships between pornography, violence, sex, and power, while their creation as pornographic objects also speaks of the sexual nature of all subjective violence. In work that seeks to draw attention to the horrors of war, however, the problems of representation include how to avoid a titillating or erotic display of the violated body. The Monument illustrates the attempts to express the violation of rape in wartime without the presence of the suffering bodies of the victims, using objects instead to capture the affect of their vulnerability, reduced by violence from human beings to things. The play also complicates the role of the perpetrator and foregrounds the vulnerability of his human body and his grief at his actions and the death of his own loved one. His body— mutilated and bruised—is presented before the audience as an example of redemptive suffering; his forced admissions of impotence undermine the macho bravado of his early speeches. His journey is from a pretense of invulnerability in the opening scenes to recognition of his shared humanity with his victims in the final moments of the play. Furthermore,

512   Lisa Fitzpatrick by eschewing the violation of the body’s gendered vulnerability and acts of violence that target the individual’s sexuality, the violence enacted on Stetko is not constructed as erotic. The beating, the mutilation, the physical punishment—these target his feet, his ear, and his shoulders, body parts that are shared by both sexes. Crucially, too, Mejra takes limited pleasure in inflicting pain. The violence she performs is intended to avenge her daughter, but it fails to do so. When she beats him, she “fights back tears” (Wagner 2010, loc. 409), and when she thinks she has killed him, she “fights back retching . . . wants to scream but can’t . . . is like a caught animal” (loc. 1309). This contrasts with the images of Abu Ghraib, which do suggest that the soldiers experience pleasure. It seems that by denying Mejra pleasure, the play denies the audience an easy identification that might facilitate scophiliac pleasure in the spectacle. In contrast to the images from Abu Ghraib, The Monument stages an ethical response in which, crucially, acts of sexual violence are never mimetically presented and the depiction of bodily violence is subordinated to the philosophical problem of vengeance and justice explored in the characters’ relationship.

Notes 1. The Bosnian War (1992–95) was an ethnic war in the former Yugoslavian Republic that is now Bosnia and Herzogovina. The mass rape of Bosnian women was afterward prosecuted as a war crime; see Mocnik (2016, 2018). Plays that represent aspects of this history include Prime Cut Belfast’s collaboration with Haris Pašović on an adaptation of Bertrand Russell’s Conquest of Happiness, which toured Derry and Belfast in Northern Ireland, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Mostar in Bosnia; and Matei Vișniec’s The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined addresses the mass rape of women in the Congo, and I Once Knew a Girl explores women’s experiences of the conflict in Northern Ireland, including sexual violence against women and children. All of these examples seek to speak of rape in wartime without explicit staging of rape, focusing instead on the impact on the body and the mind of the victim. See Fitzpatrick (2018, chapter 4). 2. See, for example, Brown (2019). 3. The photographs of Fou-Tchou-Li were reportedly taken in China in 1912 and document a public execution in which the condemned person is slowly dismembered while still living. The aim of the executioners is to prolong the process, and thus the suffering of the individual and the horror of the punishment for the onlookers. Bataille is fascinated with these images, which are also discussed by Sontag (2003) and Taylor (1998). 4. Mainstream (heterosexual) porn, as both Paasonen (2011) and Purcell (2012) discuss, frequently offers images of women naked and restrained, in animalistic poses, spattered with semen, urine, or excrement, or ingesting semen, urine, or excrement. 5. Paasonen (2011) and Purcell (2012) explore the emphasis in contemporary pornography of more and more “extreme” performances of sex, typically divorced from expressions of pleasure; these include multiple simultaneous penetrations, “gang-bangs,” and physically grueling scenes that, Purcell notes, seem devoid of pleasure for performers of both sexes (156). 6. The references are all to the Kindle edition of the play. 7. While my focus here is on heterosexual male-female rape, there is a small but growing body of scholarship on male-male rape in conflict. This violence is also associated with destroying the male victims’ capacity to reproduce through the infliction of injury to the

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   513 genitalia; other kinds of shaming injuries resulting in, for example, incontinence; or through traumatic psychological damage that makes forming sexual relationships more difficult after rape. See, for example, Zawati (2007); Stemple (2008); and the work of the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, www.refugeelawproject.org, which includes rehabilitative work with male survivors of sexual violence.   Although ethnonationalist ideals of ethnic purity are commonly recognized by scholars writing about the mass rape of women in conflict, these assaults on male victims suggest that the aggressors’ concept and strategy of genocidal rape targets both sexes.

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514   Lisa Fitzpatrick Gilson, Erinn. 2011. “Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression.” Hypatia 26, no. 2: 308–32. Gluhovic, Milija. 2013. Performing European Memories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodman, Lizbeth. 1993. Contemporary Feminist Theatres. London & New York: Routledge. Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. 2000. “The Grand-Guignol: Aspects of Theory and Practice.” Theatre Research International 25, no. 3: 266–75. Hesford, Wendy S. 2006. “Staging Terror.” TDR 50, no. 3: 29–41. Hume, David. 1874–75. “Of Tragedy.” In The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. 3, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose. 4 vols. London: Longman, Green. Jeffreys, Sheila. 2007. “Double Jeopardy: Women, the US Military, and the War in Iraq.” Women’s Studies International Forum 30, no. 1: 16–25. Jones, Alysha. 2012. “Intimate Partner Violence in Military Couples: A Review of the Literature.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 17, no. 2: 147–57. Kane, Sarah. 2008. Complete Plays. London: Methuen Drama. Kerner, A. M., and J. Knapp. 2016. “Pain: Exploring Bodies, Technology, and Endurance.” In Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Juers-Munby. London: Routledge. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2016. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre. Translated by Erik Butler. London: Routledge. Livingston, Paisley. 2013. “Du Bos’ Paradox.” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 4: 393–406. Mardorossian, Carine. 2014. Framing the Rape Victim. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Moćnik, Nena. 2018. “(Un)Canning the Victims: Embodied Research Practice and Ethnodrama in Response to War-Rape Legacy in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” In Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 14, No. 3, 23–39. Moćnik, Nena. 2016. “Sexual Abuse of Muslim Women in Balkan Conflict in the 1990s and the Question of the Hidden Genocide.” In Islam in the Balkans: Unexpired Hope, edited by Muhammet Savas Kafkasyali, 398–427. Ankara: TİKA, T. C. Başbakanlık. Oliver, Kelly. 2007. “Innocence, Perversion, and Abu Ghraib.” Philosophy Today 51:3 343–56. Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pilkington, Lionel. 1994. “Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education.” TDR 38:4 17–47. Precup, Mihaela, and Rebecca Scherr. 2017. “Sexual Violence in Comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8, no. 3: 225–6. Purcell, Natalie. 2012. Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary. London: Routledge. Radstone, Susannah. 2002. “The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11.” Signs 28, no. 1: 457–9. Radstone, Susannah. 2008. The Sexual Politics of Time. London: Routledge. Rosen, Leora  N., Robert Kaminski, Angela Moore Parmley, Kathryn Knudson, and Peggy Fancher. 2003. “The Effects of Peer Group Climate on Intimate Partner Violence among Married Male US Army Soldiers.” Violence against Women 9, no. 9: 1045–71. Sanday, Peggy. 1990. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on Campus. New York: New York University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solga, Kim. 2009. Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Eroticism and Representing the Abused Body   515 Sontag, Susan. 2003. “Regarding the Pain of Others.” New York Times March 23. https://www. nytimes.com/2003/03/23/books/chapters/regarding-the-pain-of-others.html. Sontag, Susan. 2004a. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. Sontag, Susan. 2004b. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times, May 23. https:// www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html. Spivak, Gayatri C. 2015. Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books. Stemple, Lara. 2008. “Male Rape and Human Rights.” Hastings Law Journal 60, no. 3: 605–46. Taylor, John. 1998. Body Horror: photojournalism, catastrophe and war. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tuana, Nancy. 2006. “The Speculum of Ignorance.” Hypatia 21, no. 3: 1–19. Wagner, Colleen. 2010. The Monument. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. Kindle edition. Weil, Simone. 2008. The Iliad of the Poem of Force. Translated by James P. Holoka. New York: Peter Lang. Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4: 2–13. Willis, Emma. 2014. Theatricality, Dark Tourism, and Ethical Spectatorship. London: Palgrave. Wood, Amy. 2009. Lynching and Spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Young, Harvey. 2005. “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching.” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4: 639–57. Zawati, Hilmi M. 2007. “Impunity or Immunity: Wartime Male Rape and Sexual Torture as a Crime against Humanity.” Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture 17, no. 1: 27–47. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. London: Profile.

Chapter 32

Per for m i ng Ge st u r e s at Prote sts a n d Other Site s Bishnupriya Dutt

For many politics has become gestural; it is about refusing to engage with power on power’s own term; about action, not ideas about symbolic control of territory to create islands of utopia. —Paul Mason, quoted in Hughes and Parry, “Theatre, Performance and Activism” (2015)

Since 2016 we in India have held onto two significant performance gestures as symbols of democratic expressions against a conservative right-wing regime, gestures symbolizing freedom: fists up in the air amid slogans of Azadi (freedom) and The Walk by the performance artist Maya Rao.1 In February 2016 student leaders from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were arrested on charges of sedition for raising slogans in support of Kashmiri separatists. The videos of students shouting slogans such as “Freedom from poverty,” “Freedom from feudalism,” “Freedom from Manuvad” (the sayings of the sage Manu upheld by the Hindu right wing), and “Freedom from Modi” that were circulated as evidence against the students had been tampered with by the notorious Zee television to condemn the students and the university, which stood for liberal and progressive values. When the student leaders were released, the gestures of fists up in the air and shouts of “Azadi!” welcomed them back onto the campus and duly came to be associated with growing protests across the county. The Walk, on the other hand, originated at another time (2012) and space and recirculated in various versions in the public domain and spaces of protests. However, there was a critical moment in the struggle at JNU when students, demanding the release of their leaders, were joined by Maya Rao. She walked down the stairs in long strides reciting her text, amid the students sitting in protest, holding their hands in solidarity and reassurance.2 In the years since then, the gestures have returned and are prominent in various demonstrations and protest sites as well as in dedicated spaces of performance and theater. Artists and performers are increasingly feeling the need to demonstrate their opposition toward the imposition of right-wing conservatism and an accompanying neoliberal economic policy,

518   Bishnupriya Dutt which intends to withdraw social welfare and subsidies from education and health. The activists and artists cite gestures of the past while creating new gestures of assertion and in the process create a counterrepertoire of gestures to the growing right-wing populism, which also deliberately evokes various gestural idioms for its own agendas. The renewed interest in gestures across the public domain and in performance practices has opened up possibilities in terms of sites of protest and performances and, as an extension, academic scholarship. Popular examples, such as Occupy Wall Street in New York City, Gunduz the dancer-choreographer’s standing posture in Taksim Square in Istanbul, protesters at Tahrir Square in Cairo, the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and student protests all over the world, were replete with gestures that would subsequently be remembered as the mnemonics of protest, to later assume a life of their own and be cited or referred to in other performance practices and scholarship. Both practice and scholarship have therefore identified gestures as an integral performative aspect of political protests and the formation of the political subject. While the gestures of protests continue to be performed and documented through scholarship, other, more sinister, right-wing gestures surfaced in the public domain; their hypervisibility needs to be included in any discussion on gestures. Large crowds echoed Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s call, arms raised in the sky hailing the Mother Nation (Bharat mata) with a jingoistic energy. Support for the regime’s response to the Pulwama incident of February 2019 in relation to conflict with Pakistan3 and abrogation of Article 3704 of the Indian Constitution, which gave Kashmir a special status in the federation, was performed with a number of these gestures in congregated sites. It is therefore difficult to ignore the populist practices that are taking shape in the public domain on an almost daily basis. The chapter, while acknowledging the recent focus on gestures as cultural strategies and a renewed interest in politics and performance, also offers a critique based on the fact that gestures are idioms and forms and do not necessarily generate meanings on their own. This is not only a note of caution in an otherwise celebratory engagement with gestures of protest but important to create methodological approaches, which then allow one to understand what has been seen as the gesture of criticality of the political subject or dissensus (Fischer and Katsouraki 2017) and the congregational sites of populism or consensus. The two parallel sites do not aspire to emulate each other but exist within two different domains which require different methodological approaches and theorization; the chapter aims to do just that by discussing gestures of protest, and gestures of populist power.

Focusing on Gestures of Protest Politics and performance, an area of interest for many scholars, has received a new lease on life by the focused scholarly interest on gestures as performance in sites of protests. Baz Kershaw claims that the study of traditional forms of political theater has as a result shaken “free of the meta-narratives that had given the earlier forms their meaning and utility. The performance of protest then, can be seen to embody new sources of radicalism in the changing cultures of civil society” (Wark 1994, quoted in Kershaw 1999, 122). The mnemonics of

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   519 protests are often expressed in gestures, which offer a means to read them as a performative idiom in a changing political landscape of theatrical forms. According to Kershaw, reading them merely as a disruptive event posited as an occasional “irrepressible blow out of a vast and usually invisible mass of turbulent socio-political material” is undermining the role performed by citizens engaged in protest with various gestural vocabulary in civil society as an integral aspect of democratic practices (120). In protest sites new performative gestures therefore express new forms of dissidence. Lara Shalson, in the context of the wave of protests which swept the world since 2011, highlights “the conspicous use (and reuse) of the theatrical gesture both to convey protest messages and to spread those messages across bodies” (Shalson, 2017, 74). The zombie walks of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where the protesters bloodied themselves, munched on monopoly money, and marched on Wall Street (Schneider 2012); Occupy London and the dancers performing steps from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in Guy Fawkes masks in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral (Nyong’o 2012); the Greek protests against austerity at the Syntagma Square with a coffin, while the artist rises from the coffin to stand with mask and Maalox on his face (Chatziprokopiou 2015); and the most recent, the hands-up gesture in Black Lives Matter protests in the USA (Diamond 2018 Schneider 2018)—all these allow us to understand politics through performance and assertions in light of gestures. The focus on gestures has prompted many scholars to take into consideration theoretical references to embodied performance and bodily transgressions and agency involved in creating gestures at sites of protests (Hughes and Parry 2015). Carrie Noland (2009, 206), for example, reads gestures as “kinetic organized energy,” connecting the embodiment philosophy to the gestures of protests. Noland explains that gestures are segments sliced from a kinetic continuum which can be identified as significant units inscribed with cultural meanings, but also by gesturing this inscribed meaning achieves embodiment and inflection. Noland’s emphasis on agency is what is critical in this context, which is the transgression of the socially conditioned bodily practice to disturb the habitus, to surpass its communicative or instrumental purpose and therefore afford the opportunity for interoceptive of “kinesthetic awareness, the intensity of which may cause subjects to alter the ways they move” (2). Political gestures are performed directly at the sites of politics and performance and include taking up remarkable postures and use of legs or arms in ways that break traditional meanings, respond to the sites of protests and power, and can inspire a collective response. Although their very power amid the chaos of the protest sites draws attention to them, to examine gestures with the lens of embodiment it is important to ask the question in terms of authorship, as Lara Shalson does: who can stand in for whom, and how do different bodies signify differently?” (75). The gestures and the embodied presence of the protesting subject or performer and her emergence as a political subject through the assertion of the gesture in civil society is useful since it allows one to think of the gesture as the form rooted in the materiality of the bodily performance, creating far deeper impact than the ephemerality of the protests. It allows one to cross over from self-representation to a presence and connect the gesturing bodies to resistance. For Hughes and Parry (2015) the transgressive gesture, producing dissonances and “dehiscence,” is the key entry point, but only to read it as a loose stimulus in the protest sites (ingenuous objects, costume or the accompanying slogans could be as effective). As per Josette Feral’s theorization of theatricality, they argue that since the gesture cannot pass unnoticed and is actually determinant on “seizing control of the quotidian a ‘cleft in the

520   Bishnupriya Dutt quotidian . . . becomes the space of the other, the space in which the other has a place’ ” (quoted in Hughes and Parry 2015, 302). It is imperative, then, to locate the gesture in the site, amid a public to register as a gesture of protest and resistance. The gesture therefore assumes a critical meaning which visualizes the transition from a body traumatized or vulnerable to one of assertion and dissent, which, as Sruti Bala (2018, 15) argues, is what allows one to frame the gesture without looking for aesthetics or efficacy. While gestures have been regarded as tools of analysis they are have increasingly been seen at the center of the discussion, perceived as a major tool of analysis as well as framing. Shannon Jackson (2012) reads the embodied performance as immaterial labor and the domain of performance as an important body site. Jackson argues that the gestures which have managed to hold the attention of scholars were often the creative expressions of performers, artists, and even athletes whose bodies are conditioned and trained for going beyond the accepted norms of social conditioning to perform the gestures which draw attention to sensory excesses (18–20). These creative expressions emerge in the protest sites and assume new meanings and circulate in a wide circle of reception and efficacy that art activism or performance art, as Jackson refers to it, cannot aspire to. Both Jackson (2012) and Shalson (2018) equate gestures of dissent with Performance Art practices, particularly due to its focus on durationality, endurance and labor. This is an apt entry point to look at the protest-performance sites in terms of transgression and agency, and indeed a number of the gestures that have circulated appeared at the intersection of the sites of protest-performances. Performers like Maya Rao and other dance-performance artists who are developing a new agitprop-style gestural vocabulary often work in these interstices, with the gesture taking on a new life in performance sites, which then consecrates the performative gestures.5 Gestures in protest sites, juxtaposing performance and politics, in turn were bound to influence and radicalize art activism itself and inspire performers in the field to understand the need for innovative transgressive gestures. It is also important in this context that the gesture originates with an individual, who is often a performer or actor or a known public figure, often initiating a gesture which then translates into collective subjectivity, As Nyong’o (2012, 139) emphasizes, these protest sites and innovative gestures help to subjectify the people from the de-subjectification of late capitalism and neoliberalism. Bala (2018) focuses on a range of participatory art practices, particularly those which may be regarded as extensions of activism into “civic and public life” and are impacted by radical impulses. The gestures she mentions are often those which resonate from the radical sites of protest-performances into the areas she identifies as applied and community theater, performance art, and participatory visual arts and immersive performances. Gestures are what allow her to look at the divergent multiple practices as “a constant shuttling between art’s aesthetic and sociopolitical dimension, and the intersections between individual and collective forms of embodiment” (17). Bala’s (2018) reference to gestures is not restricted to physical transgressive embodied communication. For her, gesture is what is “situated between image, speech and action, no longer image, speech and action, no longer image but not yet act, not strictly within the coordinates of languages but not wholly external to it” (15). Therein lies the debate between theorists of embodiment (Noland and Ness 2008, Noland, 2009) and gesture emerging out of the linguistic discourse, which, according to Noland, merely becomes an illustration of language and reduced to an abstract sign rather than a creative-embodied transgressive

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   521 bodily impulse which creates the unique gesture, whose power of communication is what makes it so effective and agentive. Bala’s examples range from various transgressive gestures to the more conventional ways of using the term gesture as an indication, which is being gestured at by the performances. Unlike Noland’s argument, these may be merely a performative strategy, rehearsed and perfected, and not the unique moment of bodily transgressions. What is being argued, then, is that the gesture can be a transgressive, physical idiom or form, which can stand on its own to create its own radical meaning. In that sense the ability to fix, read, or gather from a gesture its meanings are inbuilt characteristics of the gestures themselves evolved from its location at the vibrant site of protest in the public domain. At the same time the body in gesture has to find its expression in either the posture or bodily movement and can work only within its own specific limits. In this context one could ask: Do gestures refer to their own historical and genealogical citations, readable in their own histories and memories? In a recent article titled “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up,” Rebecca Schneider (2018) aims to connect gestures from the past to the present and offers an important methodological framework to historicize gestures in contemporary protest politics and performances. According to her, historicization does not imply fixing meanings, as she believes that performances invariably escape such attempts; rather she notes that where the “so-called past and the so-called future meet and greet at the site of reiteration . . . open[s] the possibility of future alterations” (286). Some of the key points she reiterates are significant given her example of Black Lives Matter and its the long history of the civil rights movement in the USA. She uses such terms as “response-ability” and action extended across temporalities with possibilities of future alterations, past gestures finding a new future and, as her essay suggests, the potential of carrying history in another direction. Citations in reference to histories of gestures are what therefore layer a merely bodily idiom with its political and cultural significance. The varied scholarship in the field, particularly on protest and performances, is substantial, and along with creating a new turn in the discipline of theater and performance studies it also helps to document gestures, which, like all performance and its forms, are fleeting and ephemeral unless recorded or taken up and performed again and again. Once the protests diminish we see how their liberatory potentials were marginalized, but the innovative, creative, and powerful body idioms with their own cultural currency remained either in other performance sites inciting memories of a historical-political moment or through the large range of scholarship.

Gestural Sites of Communalism and Hypernationalism If the gestural repertoire of protest sites is well established due to its citations, references, documentation and theorization, the populist sites of mass propaganda cannot be ignored, if a counter gestural vocabulary has to be created. If Kershaw has asked us to read political subjectivities in the participation and gesturing as an integral part of democratic practice, how do we read the public domain replete with gestural idioms of the xenophobic and

522   Bishnupriya Dutt racial kind, which we want to reject? The recent right wing resurgence in India, for example, uses sites of cultural congregations to invent symbolic gestures to provoke divisive communalism. Read through the lens of gestural politics, the victory of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) and the National Democratic Alliance in 2019, is an example of public demonstration of a gestural repertoire effectively translated into actual vote shares, parliamentary majority and state power. Socio-cultural discourses, particularly those codified as representing one particular identity—the Hindu religious identity as Indian identity—produces its own cultural markers and gestural manifestations. Further, state power is used to showcase these religio-cultural manifestations in the public domain. Below I evoke some examples in pre-election moments of 2019 and one held on 5 August 2020. The BJP is known for its public mobilization strategies based on spectacles, merriment and entertainment; it inaugurated its 2019 election campaign by mobilizing the Hindu cultural event of kumbh-mela6 to its own political advantage. Though we have seen a growing state patronage of such religious festivals emphasizing Hindu identity, the Kumbh in 2019 was particularly staged as an unprecedented spectacular extravaganza, in contrast to its earlier versions7. The Kumbh held at intervals of five years was instrumentalized and scaled up to unprecedented heights to become the backdrop for the performance of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. The festival environment set the tone of the gestures by the political players. The Prime Minister performed at the inaugural and closing ceremony, with the predictable gesture of folded hands or hands raised over his head. His overwhelming presence was ensured throughout the Kumbh fair , through life sized hoardings at the site and for those who did not visit the festival by the extensive media coverage. Kershaw (1999) warns us of the sites of carnivals, which have often been associated with subversion and compared to protest sites; he argues that these sites can also show strong elements of “ritual purgation” and “elements of catharsis” which are totalizing and hence problematic. Carnivals, notes Kershaw, can restrict and simplify dramaturgies between the symbolic and the real, unlike the protest sites, which have shown innovation particularly in their invention of gestures, and their configurations between the symbolic and the real (107). The gesture of hands folded and palms together in the form of a “namaskar” or “Namaste” is played out in various forms in these sites by leaders of BJP, particularly the Prime Minister. A common mode of greeting each other in India, it is also a sign to offer prayer or show devotion to divine entities. Modi adopts the gesture primarily to convey its devotional meaning and often raises his folded hands over his head to raise slogans of Jai Ram or Jai Bharatmata. In a recent such event on 5 August 2020, to lay the foundation stone of the controversial temple at Ayodhya, Modi held his hands in the same devotional style, from the time he stepped out of his plane, to greet the local dignitaries, to entering the temple site, in front of the various idols on display, to the ritual site where a sapling was planted, till he came out to address the public. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic only a few selected people were allowed into the actual site but the event was streamed on giant screens outside and all over the country, where large groups of people also raised their folded palms up in the sky evoking Ram and Sita. The dominance of the audio-visual medium now highlights such gestures more than ever and circulates them in the public domain as one associated with Hindu –God worship8. The namaskar as a Hindu identity marker is often accompanied by speeches, where the body language becomes more aggressive and the same gestures, to show subservience to Gods, are now transformed into gestures of assertive jingoism. The election trail of 2019 and

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   523 its backdrop changed drastically in the middle of the month long ardh-Kumbh, with the Pulwama incident. The Prime Minister, wearing a saffron turban screamed out such rhetoric as, “Blood for Blood” “Will take fight against terror into its home. . . I will settle all scores” (Indian Express 2019). Senior journalist Barkha Dutt (2019) wrote about how the Prime Minister delivered a speech with the poster of the Pulwama martyrs forming the backdrop of his electoral address. Posters saying “Mark your forehead with blood; offer prayer using bullets,” were used by party supporters to greet Modi at public rallies. Hands raised, and the Namaste on top of his head, are modified to reflect the chauvinism. I particularly describe these gestures as they are extremely limited in their scope but add to Narendra Modi’s image of the patriarch exhibiting a Hindu identity, who requires a larger than life presence at mass congregations and in the media coverage. Jan-Werner Müller (2019) regards such strategies of right wing forces as a global phenomenon with the rise of Orban, Erdogan, Kaczynski, Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and perhaps Netanyahu, and despite different national trajectories he says they share a common cultural strategy, of an “authoritarian populist art of governance” (1). The dramaturgy of the populist art propaganda is based on nationalism, with racist and in case of India communal overtones and as he emphasizes in the context, “a combination of cultural war, patronage and mass clientism” (1). According to Müller “Populists talk incessantly about unifying the people, but their political strategy involves dividing societies and waging cultural wars; whoever doesn’t want to be unified on their own terms is cast out” (3). Pankaj Mishra (2019) writing in New York Times on Modi’s election victory sees these also as seductive cultural strategies, similar to the many far right demagogues, who titillate a fearful and angry population with the scapegoating of minorities, refugees, leftists, liberals and others. Gestures performed at congregational spaces are cultural strategies, which help one to show allegiance or a rebelliousness inviting state censorship or harsher retribution. In Müller’s (2019) analysis the opposition from civil society and what we refer to as the innovative gestures, are symbolic oppositions which circulate in the public domain and challenge the state’s claims to be the sole representative of the people. Müller however points out that often populists relish protests; it puts fuel on the “fire of cultural wars they thrive on” and allows enemies to be excluded, persecuted and also publicly denounced. He warns that the “lesson here is not of course, that citizens shouldn’t take to streets to protest, only that they ought to be aware of how swift and sophisticated populists can be in turning dissent to their own advantage, to justify what always end up as a form of exclusionary politics” (3). In Modi’s India, we often saw civil society protests identified and proclaimed publicly as the enemies and as anti-national. India Today published an index recently to show how activists were being increasingly branded as criminals with various categories of draconian laws being evoked to denounce, arrest and incarcerate them (India Today 2019c).9

Contesting Gestures Gestures as a performative strategy are being constantly played out in the public realm as two distinct modes, one demanding allegiance or consensus, the other expressing dissent. If the transgressive gesture and the ones which are evoked, along with partisan and hate speech, are merely performative forms or body idioms, how does one gain vis-a-viz the other,

524   Bishnupriya Dutt meaning and contextualization through mediation and performance? Or, once created, do they take on a life or their own and create citations or reassertions or a historiography or, as Schneider (2018) would say, meanings accumulated in the intervals between historical locations? Brechtian gestures, set against the experience of National Socialism’s use of overt gestures and hyperperformitivity, deliberately focused on countering the dangerous consequences of being drawn into a vortex of totalitarian mimetic frenzy and was the principal means for Brecht’s actors to suspend acting altogether and break from mimesis into deliberation and interpellation. Brecht (2015, 185) allows the useful notion of a critical intervention in terms of gestures, as “in every sentence and every gesture there is [a] decision to be signified,” which allows one to focus on the gaps between mimetic and gestural expressions. This gap is a quotation, and “in order to reach a characterization of the meaning of a gesture in itself, one must consider that the action is intended to achieve a purpose in the world that the gesture, the agent of action—must use as a means to achieve that purpose” (23). Puchner (2002, 153) writes in terms of Brecht’s gestures, “The intelligibility of the gestus is assured not only by selection but by a particular mode of theatrical presentation, a mode through which the theatre’s mimesis is brought under the control of meaning.” He points to the difference between gesticulation and gestus “by way of deixis, the gesture of gesture” (15). The contemporary rediscovery of Brecht is what Tony Fischer, quoting Jackson, calls “the agonic nature of the political,” which is “capable of uncovering more complex social antagonisms that exist within the theatrical aesthetics” (Fischer and Katsouraki 2017, 16). In the next section I map the contrast between the spaces of mass mobilization and smaller but interventionist spaces to examine different modes of engagement and attention when democracy is at risk and choices and preferences of cultural activism are being narrowed.

Identifying Sites of Critical Gestures in the Public Realm As we have seen, recent works in the discipline of performance studies allow us to understand choices in cultural activism and how critical gestures of democratic articulations are significant in civil society, often attain a life of their own, and are cited and shaped to become signifiers and what I have called the mnemonics of protests. The critical gesture, according to Fischer and Katsouraki (2017), is a gesture of dissensus, associated with democratic assertions and distinguished from the gesture of consensus. They argue that while the gesture of consensus is reductive and a mere form which is repeated to generate stereotypical meanings, the dissensual gesture extends from being a mere abstract idiom to create a dram­a­tur­gi­cal intervention and an embodied transgressive moment, shaped by current crisis, and draws links with its own histories. The dissensual gesture is one that generates “antagonism” not at a simple empirical level but at the “symbolic level where social reality is seen to be discursively constructed and where the social imaginary is constituted” (Fischer and Katsouraki, 2017, 6). The reference to social reality in the Indian context understands the enormous significance of religion and religious practices, which are still prevalent, and the positive aspects of social imaginary. What is desirable would be to acknowledge the

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   525 plurality of socio-religious identities which exist within the country. Conversely the objective to evoke religion for politics particularly in terms of the majoritarian religion results in a homogeneity which is unnatural, and any consensus aimed at this direction is one predominantly of exclusion. Democratic articulations and critical gestures are the ones who refuse co-optation and split open these spaces of consensus where the dominant religious identities are exhibited as empty gestures and expose the threat of exclusion. In the process, it is important as they claim that the signifier which is the gesture does not allow a closure but instigates questions and challenges to reveal the cunning appropriation of religion to exhibit a performative expression of the nation as one religious entity. The question, however, remains: How does such understanding in terms of gestures relate to the study of politics, where performance is secondary? I cite two important references from political studies which resonate with similar concerns. Recent studies in the Indian context, particularly in the area of citizenship manifestations, read a tectonic shift from civic nationalism to an ethnic nationalism in the reformulation of the conception of political community and its terms of membership (Jayal 2019; Roy 2016). Religious identity, inherent in the ethnonationalism being evoked at the sites of mass mobilization, according to Jayal has historical precedence in the nation’s inception and framing of the Constitution. For the right-wing BJP, she writes, “the communitarian ideology of Hindutva yielded a perverse and exclusionary universalism” determined by the criteria of religion (Jayal 2013, 226). Since 2014 it is this exclusionary politics which is being culturally mobilized and is assuming violent overtones. Jayal writes in reference to the tendencies of inclusion and exclusion, “The structural inequalities of Indian society are reflected in the fragility of the constitutional settlement as well as in the official strategies adopted to address the exclusions of both a material and symbolic nature” (17). The consensus of prioritizing a religio-ethnic notion of belonging conflated with pa­tri­ot­ ism is anomalous and contradictory and is led by fears of threats to internal or external security, or, as Anupama Roy (2016, 173) calls it, a “protection bargain” and a compulsion toward subordinate citizenship. It is the “insurgent citizen,” a term she borrows from Holston, who “emerge[s] from a world beyond the struggles around constitutional text and its meaning in a domain permeated by performative acts of the power of the state and people’s resistance to the exercise of such power” (179). The act of dissensual gesture, according to Roy, is located in the rational spaces of representation where critical politics surface and symbolic signifiers are displaced and disrupted and refuse closure. Many such insurgent gestures may be cited in recent times; they do not exclusively originate in the creative agency of the artist or an individual but are a general impulse which circulates in the public domain and the collective imagination, where they forge a network by which political communities come together. Here the “marginality of the idiom [read: gesture] does not correspond with the power of the idiom, and the modern elements of citizenship practices it carries with it—the power of peaceful dissent, of public spiritedness and civic conscience, and the desire for institutional integrity and trust” (Roy 2016, 187). I refer to one such gesture. On March 2 and 3, 2019, a program of performances under the banner “Artistes United against Hate” was organized as an alternative site to the unprecedented jingoism which erupted all over the country after the air strikes on Balakot (see note 3). This was held at the historical site of the Red Fort, where on August 15, 1947, the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, in a poetic enunciation eulogizing democracy, declared in­de­pend­ence.

526   Bishnupriya Dutt The artists comprised a large range of singers, performance artists, and musicians, many performing for the first time in such a site of protest. They were hoping to seize the pre-election moment, but instead helplessly watched the sudden political turn in the aftermath of the Pulwama incident. Such sites of live protest-performances seemed irrelevant when war cries dominated the public domain, interspersed with communal hatred and expulsion of the Kashmiri population and students in the capital (Economic Times 2019; India Today 2019b). The performers stoically continued, hoping still to bring back calm and a space to expose the shrewd mechanisms of a polarizing government. This was for many of us a breathing space to move out of what seemed the space of consensus of hyperperformativity of a nation losing all self-critical gestures of rationality. At 8.30 p.m, amid rainfall and dropping temperatures, Maya Rao appeared on the stage named “Ekta-manch” (Unity Stage). She entered with the swift gestures of a dancer. Trained in the traditional dance form Kathakali, Rao deliberately performed gestures of the codified form, particularly hand gestures, and what is called the mudra repertoire. Except for the physical gestures, she made no other concessions to the traditional dance form, in either her costume or makeup. Dancing Indian classical dances in front of such historical monuments has long been a part of heritage projects,10 but in one sweep Rao broke the temporal linear connection. She gestured toward the site where she stood, picked up some soil strewn on the floor, held it up, and slowly let it trickle down from her hands in a gestural pose, countering Prime Minister Modi’s speeches, still fresh, on driving terrorists from the soil of Kashmir and India. Her reference to the site and the soil was meant to recount an alternative history of India, that of the nation being born and the transition from being colonial subjects to citizens of an independent nation, where democracy was laid as the foundation stone. It is that historical site, she recalled and reminded her audience, where Nehru raised the flag, where the soldiers of the Indian National Army were tried and executed by the British in 1946,11 where the battle for the first war of independence was fought in 1857 to oust the British and reinstate the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, on the throne. Her feet wide apart in the Kathakali style, particularly designated for male dancers, she held her posture. Then she suddenly abandoned the classical pose and squatted on the floor, as the working class in India does, and in a very direct address innocently asked, “How long? Five years, five years we saw and endured.” And again later in the performance, she came back to the squat position and said, “I want food in my mouth,” and made a very poignant appeal: “No more—not one more five years.”12 Playing on displaced syntactical signs of the classical form, using and departing from the codes of the classical body constantly, the squat is the biggest postural-gestural disturbance and highlights the economic hardship large numbers of the population are facing.13 The play of the codified body signifies a cultural conditioning of the classical bodies which is visualized and upheld as the ideal, and Rao evoked these as symbolic signifiers to constantly perform them as contradictions. Her body was also in contrast to the voice and the monologue which narrates the histories while pointing out the anomalies of the hegemonic dominant discourse circulating so widely in the public sphere. She evoked an entire range of gestures and visibly deconstructed the signs. In an inclusive moment with other activist artists and the audience, she called it the artistic fauj (contingent), an artist army, that fights to expose and reveal the false construction of the dominant cultural narrative as ahistorical. She pointed to what is at stake and that the artists are in actual danger of losing out on the power to make the gestures so integral to the democratic articulations which had

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   527 provided these sites of self-expression. This space of coming together as a congregation of artists is one where each pursues his or her own dissensual gesture and has the power to perform dissent.

Conclusion The research and various drafts of this essay were stretched over time, from a charged pre-election scenario, where anything was possible, to the resounding electoral victory of the BJP and the year which has elapsed since then. The essay, conceived at the moment when the future was in a state of suspension, at the end had to acknowledge the paradox of the cultural war unleashed by the right wing in electoral politics and how the increasing and innovatively performative gestures of the protest sites were systematically marginalized and made redundant in electoral politics. Yet the growing protests and politicization of the protest-performance sites has kept the gestures visible and reappearing and emphasizing why it should not be read merely as gestures emerging out of embodied performances without a historical consciousness and a selfcritical rationalization of what scholars like to call a post-Brechtian use of the gesture14. This requires the performance manifestation of a self-reflexive criticality which is historically part of a democratic articulation. The dialectical tension between hegemonic Indian cultural histories and radical interventions has always provided a strong critique of any attempt to homogenize the nation and risk democratic spaces. Religion was probably the most powerful but narrowest of these criteria for homogenization and, because of its inherent contradictions, also possible to disrupt and challenge. To intervene in the totalizing discourses of the state of course needs an alternative political discourse aligning with the artist-activists in reclaiming democracy, not out of narrow self-interest but for larger questions of social justice and inclusion. The celebratory performance of gestures now associated with communal-religious belongings requires, as I have argued, exclusion, violence, and alienation of many. Democratic practice does the opposite: it promotes inclusion in diversity. And as Maya Rao screams out in rage and despair, “The second war of independence is about to come, seventy-two years since we attained independence. And it is time to fight the battle as anti-nationals and not fear as they are bound to brand our democratic performative gestures as seditious.”15 As the right-wing government and party depoliticize the spaces of mass congregations, with the current elections consecrating their power for the next five years, they also politicize the spaces of protest by such binaries as national-antinationals. We seek to be recognized as the antinationals looking forward to reclaiming democratic spaces with radical gestures.

Notes 1. Maya Rao’s walk was first performed amid protests against the rape of Nirbhaya (Jyoti Singh) organized by JNU on December 31, 2012, in Delhi (Dutt 2015, 2017). 2. The JNU performance was on February 15, 2019, a few days after the arrests (Parmeswaran, 2016).

528   Bishnupriya Dutt 3. On February 14, 2019, forty Indian security personnel were killed by a suicide bomber at Pulwama (Kashmir), leading to tension between India and Pakistan and to Indian air strikes on Balakot, bringing the countries to the verge of war. 4. On August 5, 2019 Article 370, which gave special status and a degree of autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, was revoked by a presidential order and resolution in Parliament. Jammu and Kashmir were to be divided into two union territories. Kashmir has been a subject of dispute between India and Pakistan since 1947, and the move was seen as thwarting Pakistani interest in Kashmir. 5. Gestures traveling between public sites and the theater are upheld in theater research. Nesreen Hussein (2015), for example, describes how the independent theater in Egypt adopted the gestures from protest sites to stage their performance of No Time for Art. 6. BJP spokesman N.  S.  Shaina announced it as the grand start to their campaign in an NDTV program anchored by Vikram Chandra on January 20, 2019. 7. A budget of 420 million GBP was spent on the festival to provide infrastructure and according to the official website 120 million Hindu devotees attended the fair this year. The previous highest attendance was in the Kumbh in 2013 of 30 million. 8. The site where the temple dedicated to Rama is to be built and the Prime Minister participated in laying the foundation was where the Babri Masjid stood and was demolished in 1992. After decades of legal warfare, mob violence and state-sponsored religious pageantry the staged event on 5 August 2020 is being seen as the final death knell to India as a secular republic. 9. The most notorious such incident is the Bhima Koregaon event in 2018, when Mahars (Dalit-untouchable community) celebrating the bicentenary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon were pelted with stones, leading to the death of one person. In the aftermath there were widescale protests and strikes across Maharashtra. Subsequently the state evoked the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and arrested five civil rights activists from all over the country, claiming that they had Maoist links. 10. India celebrated twenty-five years of independence and many other such commemorative events, classical dances, and music were performed at this historic site. 11. The Indian National Army (INA), also known as the Azad Hind Fauj (Army of Free India), was organized under Subash Chandra Bose to liberate India with help from the Japanese Imperial Army. Between 1945 and 1946 ten court-martials were held in public at the Red Fort by the British government. Indian people perceive those punished as patriots rather than enemy collaborators. 12. Since 2015 there has been an enormous economic crisis in India, with unemployment and inflation reaching an all-time high. Demonitization in November 2016 caused untold misery to the common people (Azad et al. 2019). 13. The irony of the issue is that the BJP does not have an economic program and does not deal with any issues of development in their election manual, but only violence and religious identities. See India Today 2019a. 14. Civil society activism has increased since December 2019, particularly after the Citizenship Amendment Act passed in December 2019. The protests at Shaheenbagh and other such sites led by women have also been significant in terms of performance activism. A number of the gestures were part of its protest strategies. 15. The BJP government launched their attack on JNU in 2016 with very similar binaries of nationals and antinationals, evoking a colonial law on sedition, and in recent times took it to its larger campaign strategies with its war propaganda.

Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites   529

References Azad, Rohit, Shouvik Chakraborty, Srinivasan Ramani, and Dipa Sinha. 2019. A Quantum Leap in the Wrong Direction? Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Bala, Sruti. 2018. The Gesture of Participatory Art. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 2015. Brecht on Theatre. Edited by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn. London: Bloomsbury. Chatzipropokopiou. Marios. 2015.” What does this Country Kill in You?”. Contemporary Theatre Review, 25, no3 (August): 426–428. Dutt, Barkha. 2019. “Keep Soldiers out of Poll Battles.” The Week, March 17. Dutt, Bishnupriya. 2015. “Performing Resistance with Maya Rao: Trauma and Protest in India.” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3: 371–85. Dutt, Bishnupriya. 2017. “Protesting Violence: Feminist Performance Activism in Contemporary India.” In Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times, edited by Candice Amich, Elin Diamond, and Denise Varnay. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Economic Times. 2019. “Kashmiri Students Attacked in Maharashtra.” February 22. https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/kashmiri-students-attackedin-maharashtra/articleshow/68106084.cms. Fischer, Tony, and Eve Katsouraki, eds. 2017. Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hughes, Jenny, and Simon Parry, eds. 2015. “Theatre, Performance and Activism: Gestures towards an Equitable World.” Contemporary Theatre Review 25, no. 3 (August). Hussein, Nasreen. 2015. “Gestures of Resistance between the Street and the Theatre Documentary Theatre in Egypt and Laila Soliman’s No Time for Art”. Contemporary Theatre Review, 25, no3 (August): 357–370. India Today. 2019a. “BJP Manifesto 2019: Top 10 Promises for Next 5 Years.” April 8. https:// www.indiatoday.in/elections/lok-sabha-2019/story/bjp-top-promises-1496617-2019-04-08. India Today. 2019b. “Pulwama Attack: Kashmiri Students from Various Parts of India Allege Harassment, CRPF Launches Helpline.” February 16. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/ story/pulwama-terror-attack-kashmiri-students-allege-harassment-crpf-helpline1457910-2019-02-16. India Today. 2019c. “Activists or Criminals?” March 18, 20. Indian Express. “Will take fight against terror into its home . . . I will settle all scores” 2019. March 5. 1. Jackson, Shannon. 2012. “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity.” Drama Review 56, no. 4: 10–31. Jayal, Niraja G. 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Delhi: Permanent Black. Jayal, Niraja G. 2019. “TIF—Faith Based Citizenship.” India Forum. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/faith-criterion-citizenship. Kershaw, Baz. 1999. The Radical in Performance, between Brecht and Baudrillard. London: Routledge. Mishra, Pankaj. 2019. “How Narendra Modi Seduced India with Envy and Hate.” New York Times, May 23. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/modi-india-election.html. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2019. “Populism and the People.” London Review of Books 41, nos. 10–23: 35–7.

530   Bishnupriya Dutt NDTV. 2019. “Kumbh ‘Showcased Best of Our Culture, Spirituality,’ Says PM Modi.” March 6. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/kumbh-mela-2019-in-prayagraj-uttar-pradesh-pmnarendra-modi-kumbh-mela-showcased-best-of-culture-2003719. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noland, Carrie, and Sally Ann Ness, eds. 2008. Migrations of Gestures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nyong’o, Tavia. 2012. “The Scene of Occupation.” Drama Review 56 (Winter): P136–49. Parameswaran, Ameet. 2016. “Performance, Protest, and the Intimate Public.” Drama Review 60, no. 2: 2–3. Puchner, Martin. 2002. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roy, Anupama, 2016. Citizenship in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2012. “It Seems As If I Am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labor.” Drama Review 56 (Winter): 150–62. Schneider, Rebecca. 2018. “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gestures in the Times of Hands Up.” Theatre Journal 70, no. 3 (September): 287–306. Shalson, Lara. 2017. Theatre and Protest.London: Palgrave. Shalson, Lara. 2018. Performing Endurance: Art and Politics since 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wark, McKenzie. 1994. Virtual Geography. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso.

chapter 33

W h at’s i n a Na m e? The Politics of Labeling in Disability Performance Bree Hadley

The terms we use to describe the disabled performer, and the presence of the disabled body in performance, are both distinct, and distinctly political. In this chapter, I want to consider the labels we attach to disability, disability performance, and the work of disabled performers. More specifically, I want to consider the way these labels have begun to change in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This change, I want to argue, can be interpreted as a performative political gesture in its own right, a form of political activism in its own right, above and in addition to the activism occurring in the performance itself. For disabled performers and their supporters, advocates, and allies, critiquing old labels and coining new ones has been an important part of their efforts to make performance political and make political performance (Ridout 2009). Changing the way theater about, with, and by disabled people is labeled—together, of course, with changing the content, story, and style of specific theater works—has contributed to efforts to deconstruct problematic images of disability on stage and/or share positive experiences of disability identity, community, and culture on stage. In the past three decades, disabled performers in the US, UK, Europe, Australasia, and elsewhere have worked hard to move past (1) traditional theatrical terminology that casts disabled characters as monstrous, terrifying, or tragic and (2) traditional therapeutic, recreational, and amateur theater terminology that casts disabled participants as outsiders, involved in the practice for personal rather than professional reasons, incapable of virtuosity, and, indeed, interesting largely because of their unique incapability (Hadley  2014). This shift in terminology has started to change attitudes toward disabled performers among mainstream theater companies and among audiences. This said, new terms have also created new uncertainties, co-optations, and contestations that have yet to be unpacked in the literature examining this fast-evolving field of political performance practice. In this chapter, I place analysis of the performative political gesture of labeling in disability performance in dialogue with learnings about the pros and cons of new forms of labeling—or, indeed, nonlabeling—in disability social and educational services. In doing so, I highlight problems associated with any approach to labeling any political performance

532   Bree Hadley work in any context. I conclude, therefore, by advocating for an approach that acknowledges that labeling and/or relabeling is a political tool, useful less for its ability to capture the full nuance of a political performance, activism, or advocacy movement and more for its ability to achieve a desired change in the public sphere at a specific moment in time. Accepting that old and new labels alike cannot be “right forever” but only “right for now,” as determined by their capacity to create certain outcomes may be the only way to work through radical, irresolvable challenges that arise with almost any approach to speaking about work about, with, by, or for disabled people, or any other marginalized group.

Labels, Labeling, the Development of Disability Identity The part labeling plays in the construction of disability identity has been the subject of intense scrutiny across sociology, disability studies, and related fields of scholarship for more than fifty years. Since Erving Goffman’s early studies of self-presentation (1956) and stigmatized identity (1963), scholars have understood how labeling can impact sense of self and how much backstage and frontstage effort is needed to manage a stigmatized identity status. “The label might, from the perspective of the labeller, be seen as a neutral, descriptive or scientific diagnosis,” as Mårten Söder (1989,119) says, “but in fact it is something much more. It puts the person in a category that is loaded with meanings and preconceptions.” The act of labeling a disabled person a monster, cripple, stoic overcomer, or inspiration—in words or in the way we interact with people marked by those words—defines both the person and the broader social perception of people like them (Hadley 2014). In disability studies in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars and activists alike called for a paradigm shift from a medical model that labeled and thus constructed disability as an individual physical problem that needed to be cured, controlled, or otherwise overcome, to a social model that saw disability as constructed by social, institutional, and architectural systems that prevented people with corporeal or cognitive differences from participating in society (Abberley 1987). In the 2000s critique of the social model of disability acknowledged that pain, paralysis, amputation, and sensory differences are real phenomena, with real physical effects on a person and their relationship to the environments that exclude them (Shakespeare and Watson 2001, 2010; Barnes 2012). Helen Meekosha and Russell Shuttleworth (2009), Margrit Shildrick (2012), Dan Goodley (2013), and others conceptualized a critical model of disability studies, which engaged with the complex web of material, social, cultural, gender, racial, national, and political entanglements that determine how we perceive, perform, and produce prevailing understandings of disability. This series of paradigm shifts drew attention to the way labels, together with other factors in the social field, impact disabled people’s lives. Together they provided activists, advocates, and policymakers involved in the disability rights movement with the tools they needed to argue that it was society that needed to be fixed—in word, in action, and in architecture—not the disabled individual, to ensure greater inclusion of people experiencing disability in everyday life. From the 1980s forward, theater scholars, artists, and activists used this theory to understand the part stage performance plays in defining disability. Early studies examined the way disability has functioned as a symbol of deficit, deviance, trauma, tragedy, overcoming,

What’s in a Name?   533 or inspiration in dramatic performance (Garland-Thomson  1997; Mitchell and Mitchell 2000; Siebers  2010). The majority of published studies to date have focused on the way Western drama depicts disabled people as monsters, villains, or victims (Kuppers 2003, 2014, 2017; Johnston  2016; Hadley  2014). There have, however, also been studies from Asian scholars arguing that in the East too, performance has been a vehicle for defining disability identity in terms of deficit and deviance (Vimal 2019). After critiquing these traditional representations of disability and the discourses attached to them, scholars turned their attention to contemporary practice. Scholars immediately noted a major mutually co-constitutive relationship between the disability rights movement in the US, UK, Europe, and Australasia in the past thirty years and the disability arts movement—and, more specifically, the disability performing arts movement—in the same regions in the same period (Johnson 2012, 6, 9–10). For disabled performers, the stages that once perpetuated problematic stereotypes became important platforms to speak back to these stereotypes as part of their overall activist practice.

Disability Arts, Disability Performance, and Politics Disability arts—and, more specifically, disability performance—is a highly politicized practice. It is led by artists who identify as disabled and use their artwork to speak back to prejudice and/or to express pride in being part of disability culture, as one part of their overall disability activist work (Solvang 2012, 179). Accordingly, disability arts overall, and disability performance in particular, typically positions itself in direct discursive counterpoint to what its proponents perceive as problematic predecessor practices. On the one hand, disability arts positions itself in counterpoint to mainstream theatrical representations of disability as monstrous, deviant, or tragic. On the other hand, however, disability arts also often positions itself in counterpoint to what on the surface are seemingly more aligned practices, such as outsider arts or therapeutic, recreational, or amateur arts, in which nondisabled people facilitate arts-based activities designed to improve disabled people’s communication skills, social skills, or confidence. As Per Koren Solvang puts it, politically driven disabled artists “distance themselves from art therapy and outsider art” (180). These therapeutic and outsider art paradigms focus on the individual and the psychological health of the individual and expressing feelings about the lived experience of oppression. This means these programs are often still aligned with a medical model, where disability is seen as a personal rather than a political problem. As a result, while many stakeholders— politicians, policymakers, producers, teachers, funders, media, and the public at large—do still see art therapy as a positive practice worthy of support (Lee et al. 2019), artists affiliated with disability arts tend to reject its values. Though disability arts encompasses all artforms—performing arts, visual arts, film, television, and new media—the performing arts has been a particularly prominent site for activist work (Hadley 2014). It has, as a result, been particularly quick to move into this political disability arts paradigm. Certainly there are still therapeutically oriented performing arts programs for disabled participants in operation across the US, UK, Europe, Australasia, and elsewhere, but the majority have at least begun to shift their language—if not their

534   Bree Hadley practice—from “celebrating” the “inspirational” example of the people who are “stars” simply for “taking part” to more meaningful aesthetic aspirations for their participants. By contrast, many visual arts programs remain within personal and therapeutic models. The quicker transition to a more politicized mode in the performing arts is partly due to the liveness of the form and the inherently political act of bringing spectators and society at large face-to-face with a disabled performer speaking with agency, authority, and power they would not normally have in day-to-day life at the core of theatrical forms. It is also partly due to the fact that theatrical tools and techniques are readily co-opted across from activist protest forms into performance and/or from performance across into activism, blurring the boundaries between the two. In the 2000s early disability performance emphasized labeling and the way labels— whether the labels traditionally available to disabled people in day-to-day life or the labels traditionally available to disabled people in dramatic performance—limit the horizons of possibility for disabled people. It drew spectators’ attention to the lived experience of disability and the way labels imposed by society become more disabling than any specific physical impairment for many disabled people. The artists creating this work “tend[ed] to avoid natural, autobiographical narratives about diagnosis, crisis, overcoming, and cure” (Hadley 2014, 9), for fear these would be too readily read as tragic individual stories. Instead these artists tended to use live art, performance art, installation, comedy, and choreography to draw spectators’ attention to the problems ableist ideologies, systems, and architectures present for disabled people when they enter the public sphere. The remobilization of freak show imagery by artists like Mat Fraser, the stand-up comedy of artists like Liz Carr, the provocative public space interventions of artists like Bill Shannon, and the inclusive dance of companies like Axis Dance Company, all provide examples of the power of this type of work (Hadley 2014; Kuppers 2003, 2014). More recent disability performance practice moves beyond direct identity politics— speaking back to labels, stereotypes, and the limits they impose directly—and instead engages spectators in a visual, visceral, or sensory experience of the positive aspects of living as a disabled person. New practices with new aesthetics and new politics stress pride and possibility (Solvang 2012, 179). The work remains provocative. Many artists proactively claim labels like “cripple” and concepts like “crip” time, space, culture, and aesthetics to change the meanings attached to the disabled body and the way it thinks, speaks, and moves through spaces, and afford this way of being power and potentiality (Sandahl 2003). The aim is to engage spectators in examining new ways of being in oneself, in relation to others, and in relation to the world, on stage, with a view to later extending this out into the social world. Companies like Sins Invalid, for example, provoke spectators with work that expresses diverse sexual preferences and practices of disabled and/or queer people— presenting images of new possibilities for relating to each other on stage and thus ultimately in our social world. Activist disabled artists have pointed to the power of this contemporary work to argue for their place on mainstream stages and argue against the continued practice of “crip drag” or “cripping up,” whereby nondisabled actors use prosthetics to play disabled parts—perpetuating a problematic legacy of visibility-without-agency for disabled people on theater stages (Komparály  2005). The cutting edge of debate in the field currently focuses on the way ­disability disrupts conventional aesthetic models—the power of these disruptions to produce interesting new aesthetic forms—and the problems that arise when mainstream theater-makers co-opt the distinctive aesthetics of disabled people for their own purposes.

What’s in a Name?   535 The best known example of this tension in recent years is perhaps the French director Jérôme Bel’s Disabled Theater, a work produced with learning-disabled performers from the Swiss company Theatre Hora, which some felt use the disabled actors’ bodies simply as symbols in the service of a nondisabled director’s vision (Umathum and Wihstutz 2015). The increased interest in disability performance, according to Solvang (2012), has produced tensions between the early politically driven work, with its emphasis on fighting for inclusion, and more recent work, which is increasingly institutionalized through disability performance programs, events, and festivals, and, now, co-optations by mainstream theater-makers interested in the aesthetics—but not necessarily the activist agenda—of a now fashionable and fundable form of practice. The landscape of disability performance is now very well-researched, with dozens of books examining the way performances work to achieve specific personal, social, aesthetic, or political effects (Hadley and McDonald 2019; Hargrave 2015; Kuppers 2003, 2011; HickeyMoody 2009; Henderson and Ostrander 2010; Sandahl and Auslander 2005), company histories (Grehan and Eckersall  2013), country histories (Johnston  2012), and spectatorial responses (Hadley 2014). These shed light on a range of new terminology that has started to emerge to describe disability performance, but they say less about the political work this terminology is doing.

The Politics of Labeling in Disability Performance From the outset, the language used to describe art forms and artists has been central to the disability arts movement’s—and thus the disability performance movement’s—politics. The development of new labels, as I said at the outset, has been a performative political gesture in its own right, designed to enact and guide the enactment of a disability rights agenda, not just onstage but beyond the stage, in the industry. Part of this relabeling has related to the aesthetic of the work, with performers reclaiming concepts of crip bodies, time, culture, and aesthetics, endowing them with power and potential. This component of recent relabeling initiatives has been written about at some length (cf. Kuppers 2014). However, part of this relabeling has also related to the industry, and the power relationships in play in the industry, around the production of theatrical work. Here new terms are designed to describe different combinations of artists, art forms, content, aesthetics, politics, agency, and authority in the production process—and, most critically, describe who has leadership during the production process. This new terminology has been noted and defined in industry reports (Austin et. al. 2015) and in academic literature (Hadley and McDonald 2019) but has yet to be subject to critique that considers the tension it is creating in some quarters of the industry. The first and clearest set of language shifts introduced by the disability arts movement is that designed to differentiate between non-disability-led practice and disability-led practice. Though both get used as broad umbrella terms, technically arts and disability practice is the correct term for therapeutic, recreational, or amateur programs led by nondisabled artists, and disability arts is reserved for programs of a more professional or political nature led by disabled artists themselves (Hadley and McDonald 2019). The point of this labeling, of course, is to flag the different level of agency disabled artists are afforded in the different

536   Bree Hadley types of practice—mainstage practice, where they still typically need to pass as nondisabled to be included in the production in the first place, versus therapeutic, recreational, or amateur arts and disability practice, where they can participate but typically do not lead the process, versus professional or political disability arts practice, where they drive decision-making. As commentators have noted, the different level of agency disabled artists are afforded often translates into a different aesthetic style in the work produced. The next language shift introduced by the disability arts movement—drawn directly from a parallel shift in the disability social services sector—is a shift to person-centered language, a shift, in other words, from the term disabled artist to the term artist with disability. This shift is intended to be respectful, placing the person before the description. It is part of a movement toward integration or mainstreaming in which artists with disability will eventually be present not just in disability art programs and/or arts and disability programs but in mainstream arts programs that present work that has no reference to disability in its content, story, or style at all—as themselves, whether they pass for nondisabled or not. However, the political agenda of disabled artists has not allowed them to adopt this shift as universally as in the service industries. For politicized artists who promote the idea that disability is an identity lived by a person within a community with a clear shared culture, the same as gender, sexuality, or race, the term artist with disability can be problematic. Labeling oneself as an artist with disability can feel as odd as speaking of oneself as an artist with deafness, with womanness, with blackness, or with queerness. As a result, both terms—artists with disability and disabled artist—have come into common usage to describe artists with physical, sensory, and/or intellectual disabilities, the former in therapeutic, recreational, or amateur “arts and disability” contexts, in policy, or in program delivery, and the latter in political “disability arts” contexts. The only area in which identity labels are clearly defined, then, is in description of deaf or Deaf artists. Activists cast Deafness as the identity, language, and culture of a community of people, which may include the hearing parents, partners, and children of deaf or Deaf people. While deafness describes a physical condition, Deafness describes the identity, sign language, and culture of people who may or may not be deaf. In this paradigm, Deafness is a language difference, not a disability, and Deaf artists are neither disabled artists nor artists with disability. For this reason, many companies, programs, events, and festivals use the term disability and deaf or Deaf arts rather than just disability arts to flag inclusion of both types of artists in their programs. These slight tensions over the use of person-centered language are minimal compared to tension around “lived experience of disability” and “leadership by people with lived experience of disability” within the disability arts movement. These labels are important, because placing decision-making in the hands of disabled people is considered most ethical and because doing so determines eligibility funding in many countries. In practice, however, there are many companies across the US, UK, Europe, and Australasia which are led by nondisabled people but use terms like disability-led to market or secure funding for work. Some argue that being the parent, partner, or child of a disabled person has allowed them to see the impact of inaccessible systems, institutions, and architecture throughout their life, so they do have lived experience of that problem and thus the right to use of the terminology. Others argue that having lived experience of a similarly stigmatizing identity—a mental health issue or an intersex identity, for example—gives them lived experience of otherness and thus the right to use of the terminology. Others still argue that engaging a disabled person as a performer, co-devisor, member of an advisory committee, or consultant constitutes leadership and thus the right to use of the terminology. Some, of course, cast these as

What’s in a Name?   537 experiences of disability-adjacent identity or allyship or collaboration and query the level of agency afforded disabled participants, or at least the clarity of the description thereof for marketing, funding, or political advocacy purposes. The landscape of industry practice is further complicated by the emergence of a number of additional less clearly defined terms to describe relationships between disabled artists, nondisabled allies, and other stakeholders, and nationally specific terms (Hadley and McDonald 2019). Terms like inclusive company or production often—but not always—refer to work produced by mixed groups of disabled people. Terms like integrated- or mixed-abilities companies and productions often—but not always—refer to work produced by disabled and nondisabled in partnership. Though these new labels, languages, and meanings are in use across the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australasia at least, there are national differences even among these largely Westernized nations. In the UK, for example, practitioners speak of learning-disabled artists and would find the term intellectually disabled artists still in use in the US and Australasia offensive. In Australia the term learning disability is in use but describes a completely different type of disability, and so conveys a meaning different from that operative in the UK context. These terms, and the work they are designed to do, are complex. They highlight a desire to emphasize professional, political, and community culture-building performance practices, which work in a social or postsocial model of disability, more than therapy, outreach, or diversion practices. They place artistry, rather than disability, at the forefront of the practice. For advocates, applying labels that draw attention to identity rather than artistry, or draw attention to the personal, social, and instrumental impact of artistry rather than the aesthetic and political power of artistry, is problematic. It reduces responses to the practice to the congratulatory celebrations of the charitable spectator rather than considered aesthetic critique. It thus reduces the aesthetic and political impact of the work in the public sphere. Though designed to emphasize artistry, however, these terms still maintain a strong emphasis on disabled identity. This is necessary to ensure disabled people are afforded agency, including the right to lead the work and the right to funding that society may provide to support the work. As a result, these terms both emphasize and de-emphasize disability. They embody paradoxes, emphasizing artistry but maintaining the concept of the disabled artist. They embody slippages, emphasizing lived experience of disability but expanding the concept to include parents, partners, children, and others with disabilityadjacent identities and experiences. They embody inconsistencies, emphasizing leadership but allowing it to take the form of consultative rather than core creative roles. These paradoxes, slippages, and inconsistencies demonstrate just how complex and challenging the deployment of new labels—as a performative political gesture to try to create new attitudes to disability, disabled performers, and their work—can be.

The Pros, Cons, and Tensions of Labeling Practices The work the disability arts movement has done to develop new labels, terms, and language to describe disabled artists and their work over the past thirty years parallels—and, in part, draws on—shifts in labeling practices in the disability social and educational services sector

538   Bree Hadley in the same period. Where disability arts differs from these sectors is in the degree of metalevel debate about the pros and cons of new labeling practices undertaken within the discipline to date. Placing the two disciplines in dialogue thus has the potential to offer useful insight into the tensions that the performative political gesture of relabeling disabled performers, and the work of disabled performers, is creating in the field of disability arts. In the 1990s and 2000s social services and education scholars discussed the question of labeling at length. Following Goffman (1956, 1963) they came to understand labeling as the process by which society creates identity categories—usually deficient identity categories. More critically, they came to understand how disabled people internalize these identities (Söder 1989,119). The problem, they argued, was that these labels construct disabled people as deficient, incompetent, and dependent on others, creating a reality that disabled people are forced to perform (120). This constructs disability as an identity category, segregates disabled people, and drives service provision for this segregated group. In response to “sharp criticism of services based on labelling theory” (120), new terms, and new meanings for old terms, were introduced to address this issue in policy and service provision. The social and educational service sectors used this “sharp critique of labelling” as a starting point for arguing the case for new recognition, rights, and protections for people with disabilities (Ho 2004, 86). For scholars and practitioners working in these sectors, as for those working in disability studies and in disability arts, this began with a move from medical to social and postsocial models of disability. For the service sector, of course, some medical diagnosis is still required; it cannot operate solely on self-identification, the way disability arts tends to. This shift did, though, help the services sector understand people with disabilities as individuals, with complex intersectional identities, in need of personalized as much as systemic accommodations (86). This new recognition of individuality, rights, and choice was flagged by a shift to person-centered language—people with disabilities rather than disabled people (Söder 1989,120). In the early stages, the disability social and educational service sectors adopted an approach that aimed to improve inclusivity by maintaining rather than withdrawing the concept or label of disability. The services sector did not revalorize disability as a positive identity around which people could build pride, community, and culture the way the arts did. They did, however, place emphasis on the ability within disability. In both cases, this became a foundation for support, advocacy, and access to opportunity—including more mainstream social, educational, or artistic opportunity. In both cases, this eventually led to calls for inclusive, integrated approaches, in which disabled and nondisabled people might participate in mainstream opportunities together on more equal terms, as a hoped-for future. However, disability and social services scholars soon identified challenges with their new approaches to labeling and with the transition from stigmatizing labels to more positive language, to nonlabeling within an integrated environment, at least three of which map directly onto the tensions starting to emerge around labeling in the disability arts sector. The first area in which social and educational services scholars identified problems with their new approaches to labeling was with the nonlabeling approach to labeling. Early on, these sectors trialed initiatives that introduced disabled children into mainstream schools without attaching any labels to them, in much the same way many disabled and deaf and Deaf actors aspire to one day simply be part of mainstream theater productions without being labeled disabled in funding, casting, or marketing material at all. What social and

What’s in a Name?   539 educational services scholars learned, however, is that a nonlabeling approach does not in itself lead to improved attitudes to disability for the person, their peers, or the public at large (Söder  1989, 122–3). Indeed their research highlighted “paradoxical” (123) consequences. Nonlabeling can change perceptions and interpretations of disability. But it can also create a perception that disability shouldn’t have any impact—and, as a result, require an accommodation—in an integrated environment (123). Translated to an arts context, their research on nonlabeling and integrated environments in which disabled and nondisabled actors perform together could simply affirm the perception that passing, overcoming problems, and attempting to perform characters, stories, and performance styles the same way as nondisabled artists is the measure of success for disabled artists wanting to enter the arts industry. Such perceptions could adversely impact disabled artists if they lead to a belief that special accommodations to support their participation are no longer required in a now more integrated arts industry, where we do see disabled artists in mainstream companies and venues much more often than we used to. The second area in which social and educational services scholars identified problems with their new approaches was with strategic approaches to newly available accommodations and funding. Reflecting on early rollout of funding for individual student support or integrated learning environments, scholars became concerned that some stakeholders had “ulterior motives in diagnosing students as learning disabled, given the funding situation in the various educational systems” (Ho 2004, 88). Though it is a delicate issue about which many artists, allies, and other stakeholders are reluctant to speak too publicly in the arts industry, it is clear that new approaches to labeling in disability arts are liable to the same forms of strategic co-optation that social and educational service scholars started to identify in their sectors. The expansive meanings attached to terms like disability, lived experience of disability, and disability-led practice have already begun to lead to mixed interpretations, misinterpretations, and even misleading categorization to access funds (Hadley 2017a), creating tension as politically motivated relabeling of practice by some parties collides with more practically and financially motivated relabeling of practice by other parties. The third area in which social and educational services scholars identified problems with their new approaches was specificity of support services for disabled people. In schools and other social services contexts, the shift from stigmatizing difference to individually accommodating difference and then to ultimately trying to include all differences within one integrated environment accommodating many different differences did ultimately create problems (Ho 2004, 90). This included a change in attitude and ability among the service workforce supporting disabled people (Söder 1989, 123–4). Nonspecialist support workers, taught to work with everyone and to see the person, not the disability, failed to recognize the distinct requirements of disabled people and the distinct requirements arising as a result of the intersection of disability with other gender, sexual, and racial identities. Paradoxically, then, disabled people sometimes felt less visible and less well served in integrated models. Translating this to the arts context, this is the risk that could arise if disability becomes just one of many diversity categories—together with mental health diversity, gender, sexual, and racial diversity, and cultural diversity—within the overall arts and diversity agenda. Separating disability from the other identity categories with which it intersects can be problematic. However, suggesting disability is simply one difference among many can be equally

540   Bree Hadley problematic if it leads to lack of attention to specific issues—if it leads, for instance, to lack of attention to the fact that disabled artists need to expend time, effort, and energy to negotiate for support workers, resources, and equipment to undertake practice, something other diverse artists simply do not have to do. As in social and educational service sectors, if new approaches to labeling see lived experience of disability blurred with a range of different differences as part of a broader arts and diversity agenda, they could leave disabled artists feeling paradoxically less rather than more visible as a result of the performative political gesture of relabeling many have devoted themselves to in recent years. This problem could, unfortunately, impact not just today’s artists but tomorrow’s artists, scholars, and students, if slippage in labeling practices today leads to slippage in the archives of tomorrow. A search of national archives already tends to produce slim results with regard to the production, dissemination, and consumption of performing, visual, and creative arts by disabled people over time (Delin 2003). Lack of work about, with, and by disabled people in a performing arts archive may be because work does not exist or because work has not been curated into the collection, which claims to provide a neutral history but in fact offers a sexist, racist, ableist reading of the historical record (Hadley 2017b). But the absence of reliable records over the past thirty years is in fact often due to changing, uncertain, and contested approaches to labeling work. As long as the labels used to describe disabled performers and their work remain subject to slippage, then constructing a reliable, comprehensive, and readily searchable archival record of the work remains a nearly impossible task. Archivists may mislabel arts and disability practice as disability arts practice and/or find it difficult to describe what a specific company meant by disability-led practice, inclusive practice, integrated practice, or mixed-abilities practice. Archivists may not feel comfortable labeling new material at all because the artist chose not to define themselves as disabled in their promotional materials. Archivists may redact words like cripple that are now considered offensive. Artists, activists, scholars, and archivists all need to be able to understand labels, and the way they change over time, within their political context. Without the ability to do this, future scholars and practitioners may reinvent wheels, mistakenly believing they are the first to try particular approaches to addressing prejudice, stereotyping, and exclusion, because slippage in labeling makes past political maneuvering invisible to future practitioners. In the disability social and educational services literature, scholars like Ho (2004) have started the process of reflecting on the performative political gesture of labeling and how it has impacted practice in schools, rehabilitation centers, hospitals, and other contexts. In disability arts this process of reflecting on the pros, cons, and tensions produced by the performative political gesture of labeling, relabeling, and relabeling again has yet to begin. What is evident even from this preliminary account, however, is that the benefits of new labels—in terms of increased confidence among artists, increased profile, and increased opportunity—are accompanied by drawbacks of increased integration of disabled artists into a larger access and diversity agenda, increased perception that the access argument may have already been won, and potentially increased co-optation of disabled identities for financial or strategic gain. What placing the disability social and educational services literature on labeling in dialogue with a preliminary analysis of the performative political gesture of labeling within disability performance does show is that reflecting on the ways politics operates at this level—at the level of labels attached to performance practices—is an essential corollary to reflecting on the way politics operates in the performances themselves.

What’s in a Name?   541

Present and Future Priorities Changing the labels attached to the disabled body has long been a critical part of the disability rights agenda, including the agenda that underpins disability performance. In this chapter I have traced some key shifts in the language used to describe disabled performers and their work in the past thirty years, particularly in the US, UK, Europe, and Australasia. In doing so, I have identified both benefits and uncertainties, contestations, and paradoxes coming out of this relabeling process. Though I have focused on how disabled artists, particularly disabled artists working in Western or Western-colonized contexts, are making use of the performative power of labeling, the insights are potentially relevant to other artists with political agendas working in other contexts, including women, people of color, and LGBTIQ people. The pressing question this discussion raises is how to identify work, navigate the distinct, distinctly political, and sometimes contested labels practitioners use to identify work, and acknowledge change over time without rendering legacies of practice invisible and/or so individually nuanced as to be impossible to group together into a political movement. The response to this question may demand acknowledgment that labeling is a political act, used to negotiate positions, perspectives, and attitudes to practice that necessarily changes over time. Looking for the right or most respectful language to describe disability arts and disabled artists may require recognition that terms can only ever be “right for now,” not “right forever.” In the past, changes to language—for instance, the shift from invalids and handicapped to disabled people and ultimately persons with disability in a disability social services context—have been positioned as new and permanent improvements that people have become attached to. This new-now-and-forever notion that comes with each change may help increase inclusion in the short term. However, it may also make language, labels, and meanings static, sedimented, stagnant, and no longer the subject of reflection as part of the political agenda in the long term. Taking an approach that accepts all changes in labels as temporary may allow artists, activists, and scholars to make room for change as part of an ever-evolving political agenda rather than positioning the current moment as the teleological end point or the most evolved possibility in terms of our practice. It may allow disabled artists, activists, and their allies to maintain self-reflexivity and make audiences at large aware of why we need to maintain self-reflexivity as part of the ongoing negotiation of access, agency, authority, and rights over time. It may create opportunities to conceptualize collaborative, creative new approaches to speaking about the work which highlight rather than hide the difficulty that naming work about, with, by, and for disabled people presents. Approaches that are future-focused and multifaceted to meet the needs of different stakeholders with different desired outcomes. Approaches that emphasize labels’ usefulness as tools to effect change instead of getting stuck in anxiety about the labeling process in itself. Adopting a more useful-for-now attitude to language, labels, and their meanings at any given moment in time may allow for a more nuanced approach. Whether such an approach to the language, labels, and meanings used to describe disability on stage or in the industry would address all the issues—particularly issues with strategic co-optation of labels to access funds and status—remains an open question. But a useful-for-now approach might allow the industry more broadly to acknowledge that both labeling and nonlabeling approaches always present complex, challenging, and paradoxical problems. Accordingly, it might allow the industry more broadly to acknowledge that new approaches can never

542   Bree Hadley resolve the problem of labeling once and for all. They can only be specific tools for use in achieving specific desired advances in the specific disability politics agenda that prevails at specific moments in time. Old and new approaches to labeling are necessarily reductive, so their usefulness lies less in their ability to capture, categorize, and convey the nuance of lived experience than in their capacity to achieve certain effects.

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What’s in a Name?   543 Johnston, Kirsty. 2016. Recasting Modernism: Disability Theatre and Modern Drama. London: Bloomsbury. Komparály, Jozefina. 2005. “Cripping Up Is the Twenty-First Century’s Answer to Blacking Up: Conversation with Kaite O’Reilly on Theatre, Feminism, and Disability.” Gender Forum: Illuminating Gender, June 6, accessed September 25, 2015. http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln. de/illuminating/interview_oreilly.html. Kuppers, Petra. 2003. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York: Routledge. Kuppers, Petra. 2011. Disability Culture and Community Performance. Find a Strange and Twisted Shape. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuppers, Petra. 2014. Studying Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuppers, Petra. 2017. Theatre and Disability. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, Justin, Shawn Goh, Sarah Meisch Lionetto, Joanne Tay, and Alice Fox. 2019. “Moving beyond the Art-as-Service Paradigm: The Evolution of Arts and Disability in Singapore.” In The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media, edited by Bree Hadley and Donna McDonald, 100–13. London: Routledge. Meekosha, Helen, and Russell Shuttleworth. 2009. “What’s So ‘Critical’ about Critical Disability Studies?” Australian Journal of Human Rights 15, no. 1: 47–76. Mitchell, David  T., and Sharon  L.  Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ridout, Nicholas. 2009. Theatre and Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandahl, Carrie. 2003. “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, nos. 1–2: 25–56. Sandahl, Carrie, and Philip Auslander. 2005. Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. 2001. “The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?” Research in Social Science and Disability 2: 9–28. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. 2010. “Beyond Models: Understanding the Complexity of Disabled People’s Lives.” In New Directions in the Sociology of Chronic and Disabling Conditions: Assaults on the Lifeworld, edited by Graham Scambler, 57–76. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Siebers, Tobin. 2010. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2012. “Critical Disability Studies: Rethinking the Conventions for the Age of Postmodernity. In The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Nicholas Watson, Alan Roulstone, and Carol Thomas, 452–62. London: Routledge. Söder, Mårten. 1989. “Disability as a Social Construct: The Labelling Approach Revisited.” European Journal of Special Needs Education 4, no. 2: 117–29. Solvang, Per Koren. 2012. “From Identity Politics to Dismodernism? Changes in the Social Meaning of Disability.” ALTER—European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche sur le Handicap 6, no. 3: 178–87. Umathum, Sandra, and Benjamin Wihstutz. 2015. Disabled Theater. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vimal, Akhila. 2019. “Performing Disability: Representation and Power in ‘Classical’ Indian Dance.” In The Routledge Handbook of Disability Art, Culture, and Media, edited by Bree Hadley and Donna McDonald, 336–46. London: Routledge.

chapter 34

Ta k i ng a Position Contemporary Dance and the Communication of Deep Political Feeling Stephen Coleman

What happens when an expert in political communication collaborates with a contemporary choreographer to produce a dance work reflecting the public mood in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum? What can each of these disciplines bring to an understanding of political moods as “enigmatic states where the subject is not in control of what seems most intensely subjective about a situation” (Altieri 2003, 58)? How might the conventionally macho language of politics (“boys” talking about sovereignty, strategy, and power) engage creatively with putatively feminized practices of bodies in expressive motion with a view to understanding how the political is performed? What light might such collaboration cast upon routine misperceptions between political effects and affects? What follows is stimulated by my collaboration in 2018 with the renowned choreographer Sharon Watson and dancers from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance to produce a contemporary dance work exploring the feelings of people I interviewed who had voted for and against Brexit in the UK referendum of 2016. Living in the aftermath of this vote, communities had to interpret what it had said about them, and then adjust themselves to the tonal ambiguity of a divisive present. This chapter reflects upon that collaborative process with a view to engaging Susan Leigh Foster’s (2010, 14) important questions about the relationships between choreography, kinaesthesia, and empathy: “Are there ways in which a shared physical semiosis might enable bodies, in all their historical and cultural specificity, to commune with one another? Are there techniques of knowledge production that invite us to imagine the other without presuming knowledge of the other?” The chapter begins by considering the ways in which political affect can exceed the capacities of typical scientific representation and suggesting that through attention to corporeal experience we might find ways of encapsulating prevalent political moods. I argue that dance has the potential to provide ways of attending to deep, prereflective, affective moods underlying and surrounding political situations. I focus on what it means to take a position. How far is positioning a function of agency? I then reflect upon the work of translation through which a choreographic devising process was informed by qualitative data. I address the opaque notion of political mood and the methodological challenges of

546   Stephen Coleman responding to such a preconceptual feeling. The idea of affective framing is outlined as a new way of thinking about such translatory work. The chapter concludes by offering four arguments for further imaginative collaboration between artists and social scientists with a view to developing modes of political attention that capture the dynamics of politics as a felt experience.

Brexit Means . . . um, er . . . [Nervous Cough] People took positions. There were movements for and against free movement. Leavers bestirred themselves to take back control. Remainers huddled protectively, insisting that we are better together. These metaphors of tension and release pointed to deep and pervasive feelings, many of which lay beyond the reach of an exhausted political lexicon. Locked into a restricted code that appeared to be insensible to the embodied pulsations, frustrations, and projections that permeated and shaped the public mood around Brexit, political insiders declared themselves bemused and unnerved. In the absence of shared meaning, opacity ruled. Both the campaign leading up to the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and its torturously contested aftermath can be read as a carnival of euphemisms, the unsaid and the unsayable vying with one another for affective force. Each side in the argument sought to convince the other that they were not what they might seem to be. Repetition of the banal mantra “Brexit means Brexit” served to obscure a more profound uncertainty not only about what Brexit signified but whether its meaning was indeed semantically salvageable. Many politicians, pundits, and pollsters regarded the Brexit decision as a victory of mood over thought, the revenge of pathos over a public sphere upon which logos had lost its cold grip. As one scholar put it, “The referendum was not fought on logical, sober, rational arguments. It was fought on raw emotion” (Foster  2016, 2). For the political commentator Matthew D’Ancona (2017) Brexit “enshrines visceral allegiance—the currency of populism.” The term visceral is telling in its reference to gut reaction: a response one feels typically within the abdominal area that seems to emanate from a source deep within the body. Such language evokes the old dualism between mind and body in which the former generates the calculative certitude of rational choice and strategic action, while from the latter exudes a surplus, affective energy that needs to be tamed and contained. Political affect is too frequently reduced to a source code for manipulation, the body and its deep feelings easily dismissed as toxic accomplices of vulgar populism. But as John O’Neill (2004, 22) has rightly argued, “It is a conceit of ours that if society rules us at all it does so in our minds rather than in our bodies.” Embodied interaction with the affective environment is at the core of the phenomenon that we call politics. The thoughts and feelings that emerge from such interaction are often barely registered, opaquely articulated, and far removed from the encrusted convictions of ideology, but they compose a powerful store of sensory experience that give shape and meaning to political subjectivity. To speak of Brexit as an affective phenomenon is not to suggest that it entailed a flight from reasoned cognition but to recognize that intangible political moods often possess an energetic dimension. When we feel moved to act or retreat or explode or tense up, this is not merely “a lower form of speech” (Ahmed 2004, 194) but a particular form of consciousness by which the body senses what it feels to be right or wrong, what constitutes a threat or an

Taking a Position   547 opportunity, what inspires and what disappoints, how to take a position when faced with a broad menu of potential postures, contractions, and thrusts. As Raymond Williams (1977, 134, 128) reminded us, political feelings are often experienced “at the very edge of semantic availability,” comprising more or less than words can say. Teresa Brennan (2004, 140) speaks of “the intelligence of the flesh” and argues, “The difficulties in understanding that the senses and the flesh embody a logic that moves far faster than thought are tied to Western schemas that degrade the body and bodily intelligence. This is because the schemas invariably rank the soul in terms of intellect first, followed by the capacity to sense, followed by the fleshly passions. . . . The fleshly category is assumed to be the least intelligent and to have the maximum disorder.” It is not my purpose here to reverse these schemas by devalorizing the significance of conscious thought. Rather, it is to acknowledge a marked discrepancy between the depths of our insights into verbalized, intellectualized, ideologically categorized manifestations of political thinking and the virtual absence of a language for describing, explaining, or engaging with the profoundly consequential dynamics of affective political motivation and evaluation. To speak of the latter is to strive for a vocabulary capable of translating what might at first seem to be inchoate, subconscious, and prelinguistic states of sensibility into epistemically accessible forms of political meaning. I suggest that dance is one such translatory instrument, offering a unique way of thinking about and observing the ways in which people are moved, take positions, and go with or against the flow. I use these corporeal metaphors intentionally, for they refer to aspects of intersubjective political behavior that are too often overlooked by individualistic, hyperrationalized accounts of political agency. Scholars working in political science—and its subfield, political communication—have become overattached to the image of the cognitively and affectively self-contained subject. To be sure, humans inhabit individual bodies, adopt first-person perspectives on reality, and experience intimate emotions. But corporeal experience is immersed in social environments, and “our nervous systems are constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their own skin, as well as from within our own” (Stern 2004, 76). To neglect the myriad ways in which political subjects are caught up in proprioceptive relations with one another risks producing an objectified, disembodied conception of democratic citizenship, one that celebrates the Western-romantic notion of individual autonomy but has little to say about the emergence of intersubjectivity. The latter depends upon attunement to a conflux of affective influences that often lead people to feel their way into judgments in advance of intellectual reflection. Diana Coole (2007, 416), one of the few political theorists to take the body seriously, refers to “a corporeal way of knowing, whereby bodies emit and decipher signs that do not necessarily pass by way of consciousness.” How might we come to acknowledge these signs, thereby refining our understanding of political ways of knowing?

Dancers: Making Their Appearance Explicitly According to Hannah Arendt (1998, 198), the polis should not be thought of as a bounded physical or constitutional space. The “true space” of politics, she argues, “is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word . . . where I appear to others as others appear to

548   Stephen Coleman me.” It is a space in which people “make their appearance explicitly.” Political presence entails a complex choreography of appearing: “The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised. For though the common world is the common meeting ground for all, those who are present have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects. Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.” But what exactly does it mean to be differently positioned? How do positions come to be adopted? Are they literal positions in which muscled bodies hold themselves or are held, or merely symbolic positions, rather like nodes in a sociogram? If we are convinced by Arendt when she states that political copresence within a “common meeting ground” entails acknowledgment of “the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position,” by what method might we come to understand and represent this complex arrangement of positional deployments, tensions, and confluences? We can think about social positioning in a number of quite different ways, ranging from the abstract and disembodied to the fleshy and incarnate. When political scientists speak about people taking a position, they are usually referring to identification with a bundle of interests, preferences, and values. While such positioning comprises intellectual and moral commitments, it is also often determined by primary feelings about who one thinks one is and what one is prepared to stand for, as well as who one could never imagine oneself being and what sort of positions one would never want to be seen to take. According to Charles Taylor (1989, 23), “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” Knowing where one stands is only one aspect of social consciousness. The other is to know how one is positioned in relation to others and how it might feel to be subjectively positioned in their place. Referring to this as “training one’s imagination to go visiting,” Arendt (1998, 323) argues that it is only by attending closely to the plurality of surrounding experiences and perspectives that it becomes possible to “take our bearings in the world.” For Arendt, the body politic is indeed a space of disparately positioned bodies, appearing to one another, seeking and giving attention, and capable of realizing intersubjective communication only by reaching out. This political ethos of stretching toward the other contrasts with a conception of politics in which taking and sustaining a position entails unyielding resistance to all other counterpositions. It entails a commitment to engage with the world as a constellation of materially embodied relations that can flourish only through mutually generous attention. Intersubjective communication depends upon developing nonsolipsistic modes of attention. Given that subjects are enmeshed in a semiotically crowded world in which the meanings, values, and concerns of others are never simply obvious, it is important to attend to the implicit, latent, subtle, and nonverbal indicators of positioned subjectivity. Jonathan Crary (2001, 17) has discussed at length the new way in which people began to think about

Taking a Position   549 subjective attention in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Prior to then a camera obscura theory of perception had prevailed, assuming a mimetic link between human vision and its objects. Rejecting the notion that objective reality could be captured by automatic use of the senses, psychologists began to think of subjects as fully embodied observers who could make sense of the world only through selective sensory attention. Working within an ever-contracting field of perceptive selection, whereby attention to one thing is always at the price of the exclusion of another, attention came to be understood as a product of framing. To frame is to sort the broad data of experience, consciously or unconsciously, into a salient order. Such framing works at the cognitive level, but often it also includes a prereflective, affective dimension comprising ambient collective moods simmering below the radar of articulable consciousness that frame political situations without ever defining them. Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries there emerged several new ways of thinking about the relationship between what we observe, what we feel, and what we know. Crary (2001, 42) points out, “As part of the larger physiological reconfiguration of subjectivity that occurred during the nineteenth century, attention, in almost all of the various ways it was theorized, was inescapable from physical effort, movement, or action . . . [and] was generally synonymous with an observer who was fully embodied or for whom perception coincided with physiological and/or motor activity.” Thinkers working in a range of disparate disciplines attempted to get to grips with the implications of this modernization of subjectivity. Phenomenological philosophers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty became fascinated by the body’s innate reversibility, its simultaneous vulnerability to its environment and capacity to act upon it. Sociologists such as Mauss and Bourdieu explored the micro-traces of distinctive trajectories of socialization upon the ways that people stood, walked, sat, ate, laughed, and breathed. Modernist dramatists such as Stanislavski and Copeau began to focus on the manifestation of social positioning through the habitus of the body and urged actors to “inhabit” their characters’ pre-expressive bodies, transcending the gap between inner impulse and outer reaction. The thread running through all of these approaches to selective attention was a sensibility to the ways subjects are expressively and repressively positioned. The embodied subject was no longer regarded as simply a structurally placed agent; it was a sentient, vulnerable, socially oriented being, attention to whom called for a degree of emotional discernment uncharacteristic of positivist social science. All of this prompted a search for new methods of attending to and speaking about embodied subjects and their affective environments and orientations. Freudians interrogating the volatile energies of the political unconscious, cultural sociologists unveiling the anchoring scripts through which power is performed, and artists of various kinds attempting to destabilize the self-naturalizing pretensions of conventional representations have all contributed to this project. My aim here is to suggest that contemporary dancers and choreographers are especially well placed to develop refined modes of attentiveness to the affective dynamics of embodied intersubjectivity. Thinking of dance as “the expression and transference through the medium of bodily movement of mental and emotional experiences that the individual cannot express by rational or intellectual means” (Martin, quoted in Copeland and Cohen 1983, 3), I want to suggest that it can contribute in valuable intermodal ways to a heightened perception of political mood. At around the same time as thinkers were turning to the body as a site of social action and reaction, important questions were being raised about the relationship between thought

550   Stephen Coleman and movement. In the 1880s the neurophysiologist Henry Charlton Bastian identified what he referred to as a kinaesthetic system of movement. Beginning with an account of the relationship between muscle receptors and the cerebral cortex and culminating in a sophisticated theory of sensual integration, kinaesthetic theory opened up an approach to thinking about the literal connections between the social and corporeal dimensions of lived subjectivity. Spurred by kinaesthetic insights, contemporary dancers began to move (literally) beyond the rigid technicalities of classical dance and develop fresh ways of signifying meaning through the body that could not be contained by words. As the pioneering choreographer of contemporary dance Martha Graham put it, “Dance has nothing to do with what you can tell in words. It has to do with actions, coloured by deep inarticulate feelings that can only be expressed in movement” (quoted in Horosko 2002, 48). This is not to suggest that purposefully, artistically moving bodies possess a metaphysical capacity to express prediscursive truth, but that, at their best, they offer a different modality and texture of synchronesthetic truth-telling than is available to propositional, logocentric codes of articulation. Thinking kinaesthetically raises questions about the fragile boundaries between the reflexive (knowing) body and shared (empathetic) bodily experience, the ways in which affect seems to circulate within and across bodies, generating “associational connotations” (Martin 1936, 117) that frame political action. Several choreographers and dance theorists, rightly resisting hyperrationalist dismissals of the body as a site of feminine chaos and dance as a practice in which aesthetics and politics are irretrievably disjoined, have reflected upon the potential of contemporary dance as a mode of political expression. Andre Lepecki (2013, 13–15) draws on Arendt’s observation that “we do not know—at least not yet—how to move politically” and points to the intimate relationship between “moving freely and . . . imagining and enacting a politics of movement as a choreopolitics of freedom.” Mark Franko (2006, 4) argues that dance is political “in circumstances . . . where forms of movement and socio-political life take shape simultaneously if apparently independently.” He states, “If ideology is a persuasive and therefore fundamentally rhetorical appeal to the mind and the senses, choreography is a potent means of its caption. But choreography can also effectively undo or counter such rhetorics” (6). J.  Lowell Lewis’s (1992) study of Brazilian capoeira suggests that this dance constitutes a “physical dialogue” about power conducted through bodily action rather than speech. Deirdre Sklar (1994, 12) urges an approach “that takes seriously the ontological status of immediate bodily experience in the production of knowledge and epistemologies.” Andrew Hewitt (2005, 11) argues that “choreography has provided a discursive realm for articulating the shifting, moving relation of aesthetics to politics and for thinking about questions of semiotic ‘motivation’ in systems of representation.” All of these dance scholars point to the potential value of a series of opaque relationships: between nonverbal expression and political rhetoric; between ways in which bodies move and power circulates; between sensual modalities capable of becoming attuned to one another; and between positivist and tacit ways of knowing. With very few exceptions (Coole 2005, 2007; Mills 2017) the intellectual traffic has been one-way: dance specialists have reflected upon the political ramifications of their practices, but political theorists and scholars of political communication have failed to devote serious attention to the ways bodies constitute “our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions” (Merleau-Ponty  1964, 5). A recent turn to the study of embodied affect has begun to create space for accounts of the performative nature of political agency (Thrift 2008;

Taking a Position   551 Bennett 2009; Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds 2010; Hurley and Warner 2012; Coleman 2013, 2015; Highmore 2017), but such work has tended to be conducted within disciplinary silos in which sensitivity to the precognitive, somatic dimensions of political performance are easily sidelined. Beyond methodological gestures toward interdisciplinarity in which dancers and other sensory artists are recruited to represent political findings in novel forms, there is a strong case for a more ontologically inspired collaboration between the disciplines with a view to exploring how politics comes to be experienced as a vital, sensate quality and political agency as a field of potential actions that are always mediated through the feeling body. Perhaps the most promising contribution of contemporary dance to political understanding is as an affective framing device, inviting its audiences to think about disagreement and contestation less in terms of asserted propositions than experiential Gestalt (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 76). Using techniques such as bodily tension and release, representations of nervous states, and visually performed metaphors, contemporary dancers not only remind people of what a situation feels like but open up such feelings to forms of embodied knowing that exceed verbal representation. One way this happens is through conceptual integration or blending, a process in which diverse mental spaces are brought together through enacted metaphors (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). For example, whereas in descriptive or propositional terms feelings such as jittery resolution or disgruntled indifference might seem to be abstruse, elusive, or simply contradictory references to the postBrexit mood, when choreographed through expressive bodies they might constitute an affective frame capable of evoking a complex social ambience in which neither “leavers” nor “remainers” were able to feel settled. Such affective framing is not an alternative to reflective analysis but a reflection of (and on) the reality that what we know cannot always be reduced to what we can say in words, that certain conditions of emotional tension, intensity, and incongruity are best accessed and explained through modes of embodied cognition. Affective framing entails resisting the estranging effects of abstract thought and encountering lived reality at the apperceptive level of raw animation. For example, notions such as economy, country, control, and sovereignty often serve as rather lazy proxies for complex notions that are shrouded by creating a euphemistic distance between sign and experience. Derek McCormack (2013, 165–6) rightly suggests that “abstraction is often framed as an epistemological process through which the rational mind, facilitated by the terms of the Cartesian mind-body split, withdraws itself from the lively, chaotic and unpredictable energies of the sensate world in order to better understand this world from a distance.” A phenomenological impulse to understand the world head on and close up, by attending to its experiential texture, makes it necessary to move beyond the lens of abstraction and grasp the adaptive, improvisational, and ambiguous ways in which material reality occupies bodies.

Capturing the Political Mood Moods are felt: we are in them, and they constitute an affective lens through which the vitality of experience is perceived. They inflect political agency in countless ways, unleashing, disturbing, blocking, overcasting, distracting, and paralyzing affective energy. Caught

552   Stephen Coleman up in something “ambient, vague, diffuse, hazy, and intangible” (Felski and Fraiman 2012) that discloses the world to them in nonpropositional terms, people find themselves riding “the wave of collectively recycled affective knowledge” (Berlant 2010, 8). This can be profoundly disorientating, for in moods people form intense attachments to sensations that feel as if they reside at the core of their subjectivity but in fact emerge from beyond them. The aim of my collaboration with Sharon Watson and the dancers from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance was to capture the edgy, jumpy political mood that became apparent in the long aftermath of the UK’s Brexit referendum. Rather than seeking to recuperate a definitive meaning through aesthetic representation or to suggest that public feelings were merely a preparatory stage for rational action, the aim of this short dance piece was to point to the ambiguity of the political moment, to apprehend the affective strain between decision and discord that followed what appeared to be a plebiscitary settlement but turned out to be a historical impasse. The aesthetic ambition was not to disambiguate this tension but to prompt what Gadamer (1991, 33) refers to as an “indeterminate anticipation of sense,” the evocation of a shared emotional (dis)orientation that, in being made present, might then be addressed. In the introduction to her book Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart (2007, 4) states that she is attempting “to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us. My effort is not to finally ‘know’ them . . . but to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form.” It was the sense in which Brexit hit or exerted a pull on people as a form of feeling that we wanted to explore in this collaboration. Trying to represent such feelings ran the serious risk of flattening them, making them too neat, nameable, and propositionally appraisable. We were in danger of ending up with a prosaic inventory of bland affects. Avoiding this entailed focusing upon spaces of interaction between embodied feelings and their sensory environment, without becoming fixated on either of them separately. In seeking to generate “a tactile engagement with a situation that is really going to change everybody’s lives in some shape or form” (interview with Sharon Watson), our collaboration focused on the consequences of the Arendtian sense in which “everybody sees and hears from a different position.” Rather than interrogating the ideological nature of those positions (which is, of course, the crucial task of critique), we wanted to capture the relational dynamics of political mood as incipiently agentic feeling. I began by conducting a series of interviews with people who had voted for and against Brexit. The purpose of these was to explore the sensations of being tied into a political position. What does such commitment feel like? How does it feel to encounter others who are strongly committed to radically different positions; who caricature or disparage one’s own position; or who, in taking their position, seem somehow to be denying one’s right to take any position at all? What happens when political disagreements turn personal, or when personal animosities and misrecognitions are vented as spurious political discord? How do people read into others’ positions submerged or unacknowledged feelings that are strategically concealed from public discourse? And what happens when one discovers in one’s own position affective motives that one is afraid to own up to or articulate? In short, these interviews invited people to move beyond what they thought (or thought they thought) about Brexit and focus on what they felt about this irresistible national event in which taking a position amounted to a performance of moral exposure.

Taking a Position   553 The interviews were recorded and transcribed, and my first analysis of them involved a search for conceptual themes, semantic patterns, moments of hiatus or silence, and parallels and incongruities between verbal and corporeal expression. My aim was to produce a mood map, which unlike conventional cartography was preoccupied with ways of getting lost, losing the plot, experiencing disorientation and making faltering tracks across fragile terrain. I wanted to trace the contours of a political mood that, while occasionally triumphant and joyous or abject and forlorn, was overwhelmingly perplexed and perturbed. The following extracts are typical of the mood of somewhat apprehensive, somewhat weary irritation that ran conspicuously throughout my interviews: At the moment, it’s very unclear, because it seems like everything that’s coming out of the news is, “Yeah, we’ll be out, but it’ll be another seven-year agreement on this and a five-year agreement on that.” And I think it’s quite clouded. . . . I think people feel as though a lot of compromises are going on and it’s a lot of watering down. It’s led to family divides as well. It’s younger generations against older generations. I’ve got a very close friend, fifty-five years old, and her daughter, who is twenty-eight, they had a big falling out over it. Very close, mother and daughter. Mother voted out, daughter voted in. The daughter couldn’t believe. . . . “Mum, why have you voted out?” The mum’s response was, “Well, I just want [our neighborhood] to be like it was thirty years ago.” And the daughter said, “That’s why you voted out, Mum? Because you want [the neighborhood] to be like it was thirty years ago?” . . . The daughter didn’t talk to her mum for a month. I was just shocked for quite a while, and in my head I was like, “Wow, will we actually really leave? Like, will the government actually act upon it?”

I was struck by the ways talk of Brexit was often overshadowed by a sense of emotional deadlock, as if, having voted as democratic agents, people found themselves ensnared by circumstances beyond their control. For many people, regardless of how they voted in the referendum, politics appeared to be a scene of repetitive rupture and inexorable disappointment. I wanted the dance piece to capture this feeling of impasse as “a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety” (Berlant 2011, 199). As an affective mood, anxiety entails a projective pessimism: a feeling of unease toward an unspecified object, such as an evanescent situation or direction. When the political mood is anxious, people do not simply argue but argue about what it is they are arguing about: “My Brexit doesn’t mean what you think it does.” But when we entered the studio anxiety took a different form. The dancers began to worry about what it would mean to apply their own bodies to a problem that seemed to belong so fixedly to an alien epistemic domain. How is one expected to feel and move in response to a trading bloc or a constitutional treaty? The choreographer insisted that this was not about representing opinions but about the experience of finding oneself in a shared, rather awkward social space—the political community as a diffuse field of affective relations that frame and constrain kinetic possibilities: It’s universal at the moment . . . we’re all in the same space. Not necessarily with the same vision and expectation of outcomes. . . . So, I think that was the common denominator, we’ve all experienced it from the external perspective and have a personal experience of it. I didn’t ask the question, which way they would have voted. I deliberately avoided that. But I think what was real for [the dancers] was knowing that it has got a surrounding affect, whether that

554   Stephen Coleman was through the atmosphere that they experienced; whether that was through an absolute personal connection to anyone that did put a mark on a ballot paper.  (Watson interview)

In response to this focus on the relational dynamics of tacit discord, the dancers began to experiment with movement that embodied nervous spaces between bodies. The methodological process of devising the dance relied more on improvisation than attested technique. Often this entailed taking a brief, suggestive anecdote and exploring its somatic implications (figure 34.1). One story of post-Brexit anxiety from my interviews reminded me of Donnel Stern’s (2010, 10) astute observation that, “in any particular moment, with any particular person, some of what one ‘is’ with the other is unformulated, while other parts of our being with the other are available to us as perceptions.” The interviewee was a “remain” voter of AfroCaribbean descent who told me about the strange way a number of people she ran into in the days after the majority vote for Brexit chose to address her: “Well, what was interesting was that when I spoke to my friends in the weeks or so after the referendum . . . so, say like I bumped into them accidentally, they were bent over apologetic, and I just felt that they were apologetic for what had just happened. . . . In some way they were saying ‘I’m fine with you.’ . . . That’s what I felt like—people were saying ‘Sorry’ but in a different way.” This is a complex observation, provoking interesting thoughts about the way impersonal racism can sit alongside interpersonal congeniality, the irrepressibility of unstated discourses, and the often overlooked consequences of political shame and embarrassment. The interviewee tried to imagine what her friends were saying to her verbally, but it was only from their nonverbal stances that she felt able to interpret their real position. The choreographer encouraged the dancers to explore the micro-gestures through which bodies can enfold and repulse one another at the same time. Recalling one of the most poignant sections of the dance piece, in which two dancers embrace one another in restive contest between solidarity and hostility, Watson observed that she sought to “build a sense of nervousness,

figure 34.1.  Rehearsal for ‘Taking a Position’. Source: Northern School of Contemporary Dance.

Taking a Position   555 a sense of energy, wanting a body to communicate to another body.” If politics is conventionally described in terms of subjective motivation and agency, it materialized here in the intersubjective spaces between and around individual bodies. Politics in this sense is not what we do, but what we are in. Although what emerged from the devising process was to some extent a narrative dance piece, the story told was defined by its elusive indeterminacy: an account of what happens when people lose the plot and are left with only a residue of affective form. “The narrative in this story is inconclusive. . . . For me, the narrative actually begins from the day that the Brexit decision was made and ended at the moment where we were collectively in the studio deciding the moments we wanted to reference. . . . It’s not like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where we know that there’s a conclusive end. . . . Then it is very clear that there is a definite ending. This has no definitive ending” (Watson interview). Brexit has come to stand as a metonym for a state of permanent cultural ambivalence. The process of adjustment grinds on as an interminable narrative that is in permanent retreat from effectual resolution. Insofar as Taking a Position succeeded or failed as a dance piece, a political performance, an act of interdisciplinary translation, or an experiment in mood capture (and it might have succeeded in one but not others of these respects), it did so as an attempt to illuminate the nervous ethereality of political form, that dimension of politics in which “the factor of significance is not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function” (Langer  1953, 32). As a creative exercise in affective framing, the piece said, This is how the situation feels to us. Before we even take positions in response to the situation, this is the affective terrain we’re in, these are the affective resources that seem to be available to us.

Working with Embodied Political Feelings This chapter has focused on a single collaboration in which, to paraphrase Arendt, researchers from different disciplines trained their data to go visiting. The choreographer and dancers stretched as far as they could in the direction of my interview data to render it somatically articulate. I attempted to search beyond the manifest testimony of my interviewees, identifying their leakages of feeling that were often at odds with the propositional claims they made. In this I was guided by Peggy Phelan’s (1996, 97) astute observation: “The uneven join between the body and consciousness is packed with the expansive ooze of the unconscious.” The main significance of this kind of collaboration lies in its implications for future research. Can this kind of stretching and sharing of energies contribute to a richer understanding of how everyday politics is performed? I want to conclude by briefly setting out four reasons for believing that it can. The first relates to our understanding of what the performance of politics entails. Conventional political studies tend to focus on politics as an outcome of the intentional action of calculative agents. The assumption is that political performers set out to make certain things happen: voters to adopt certain preferences; audiences to be persuaded by messages; communities to be made more cohesive. The kind of research considered here

556   Stephen Coleman focuses on the nonintentionality of much that is political. It draws attention to the kind of political scene in which people perform in ways that they cannot fully understand, in which neither rational motives nor coherent beliefs explain how and why people seem to be swept along by feelings that are not (yet) clear to them. Williams (1981, 168) observed that political experience is often “not fully articulated” but is sensed as “disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble.” Abstract, unnamed, and hard to reference, such feelings precede beliefs and conscious motives, setting out an affective pathway for them to be formed through expressive gestures. People are often unaware that they have such strong feelings—that things matter to them so much—and it is only through expression that such psychological states come to be recognized. The philosopher Sue Campbell (1997, 52) offers an astute warning against assuming “that the expression of a psychological state is an instance of revealing or disclosing that state and is in no way formative of it.” To the contrary, she argues, it is through the activity of expression that feelings come to be formed and identified. A similar point is made from a phenomenological perspective by Farnell and Varela (2008, 227): To describe a sensory experience as meaningful is not to say that the physical sensory response is accompanied by an inner mental event or external signified that is its significance, it is to describe the kind of sensory experience it is. Active engagement in sensory experience is meaningful. The signifying here is not some semantico-referential meaning outside of the sensory act, it is meaningful because it is understood at some level, and therefore a semiosis—a meaning-making process—is at work. Sensory acts make sense without necessarily being thought about—i.e., engaging in reflective, abstract, critical, propositional, or theoretical thought.

So the kind of political analysis that dancers and political communication scholars can fruitfully explore lies at the fuzzy boundary between inchoate apprehension and expressive gesture. The latter might be verbal, but there are many other ways in which people make expressive moves. Interdisciplinary collaboration and translation might entail looking and listening for the expressive gestures that surround words or attending to the corporeal signals through which unconscious unease is presented as somatic performance. To dismiss such investigation on the grounds that it is too far removed from the intentional drives of “real” politics would be to confine the performance of the political to the relatively narrow domain of worked-out motives and articulable beliefs. We need to think carefully about the kind of questions that such an epistemic stance would leave us unable to analyze or tempted to dismiss as prerational detritus. Second, the kind of research collaboration that I am proposing enables us to focus upon the nuanced tonality of situations, the political shades of gray that cannot be captured with blunt positivist technologies such as opinion polls. Political feelings frequently comprise quite rich conceptual blends, best expressed in metaphors that bring together a range of ideational, psychic, and performative strands that stand in mutual tension and complementarity (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). Notions like proud vulnerability and engaged inattention are difficult to untangle as propositional perspectives but reflect the kind of affective confusions, inner conflicts, and nervous exhaustion that can overcome a population. Thinking about the rather caricatured images of “angry, white, working-class” Trump voters or “left-behind” Brexiteers, there is a danger of reducing such groups to one-dimensional stereotypes, locked into the arid clichés of semantic limitation. It is in situations of complex

Taking a Position   557 affective performance that metaphors are most helpful—and it is the embodied metaphors that dancers make visible that remind us most poignantly that there is an analytical aspect of political performance that is best understood by showing rather than describing. Such showing need not be mimetic. Indeed, often the most potent feature of performance is its capacity to problematize representativeness, to induce a degree of intellectual humility through which we feel free to feel bewildered. I have described this approach to identifying and representing political situations as affective framing: a form of proprioceptive sensibility that draws upon what Thomas Csordas (1993) refers to as “somatic modes of attention.” Such framing serves as a political orienting device. Its purpose is not analytical in the sense of organizing empirical detail or theorizing an evaluative perspective but aims to access the historical feeling of a situation. In doing so it points to the intricacy and entanglement of affects within both communities and individuals. It is a step in the direction of liberating political actors from facile one-dimensionality. Third, this kind of research collaboration allows us to thicken our conception of intersubjectivity. In addition to offering brilliant theoretical insight into the ways politics depends upon the meeting of subjects who are strangers and can never expect to know or understand one another fully, Arendt (2006, 51) offers her readers an evocative aesthetic image of political community as a space in which acknowledging common ground is frustrated by the “infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond the most diverse points of view.” For Arendt, politics takes place amid a “sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments,” and the requirement “to look upon the same world from one another’s standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects” is its most pressing ethical challenge. The work of arriving at intersubjective perspectives is arduous (Coleman 2018), and it is not always clear to people that the simple act of adopting a political position can have consequences that constrain or injure others. How, then, can bodies move in ways that assert the performative confidence of taking a position while showing respectful sensitivity to bodies that have chosen or been forced into quite different positions? What is needed is a terminology that is sensitive to the micro-communications that compose the everyday practices of the political. Terms like bump, push, slip, explode, browbeat, meld, shrivel, and clutch are rarely used by political scientists seeking to describe the dynamics of intersubjective intercourse, but contemporary dance at its most perceptive illuminates the precariousness of civic interaction using precisely such representations of social motility. Finally, there are methodological dividends to be accrued in the process of working on political performance as both theory and practice. An overly theoretical approach to performance risks neglecting or devalorizing the felt sense that is so crucial to understanding the physical enactment of the social. An overly practical approach might fail to problematize the structural and cultural pressures that constrain or stimulate bodily action. At stake here are traditional macro-micro tensions, compounded by the presence of real, live, pulsating bodies.

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558   Stephen Coleman Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between Past and Future. London: Penguin. Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2010. “Thinking about Feeling Historical.” In Political Emotions, edited by Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds, 243–59. New York: Routledge. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Campbell, Sue. 1997. Interpreting the Personal: Expression and the Formation of Feelings. Cornell University Press. Clore, Gerald L., and W. Gerrod Parrott. 1994. “Cognitive Feelings and Metacognitive Judgments.” European Journal of Social Psychology 24, no. 1: 101–15. Coleman, Stephen. 2013. How Voters Feel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, Stephen. 2015. “Beyond the Po-Faced Public Sphere.” In Can the Media Serve Democracy?, edited by Stephen Coleman, Giles Moss, and Katy Parry, 184–93. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Coleman, Stephen. 2018. “The Elusiveness of Political Truth: From the Conceit of Objectivity to Intersubjective Judgement.” European Journal of Communication 33, no. 2: 157–71. Coole, Diana. 2005. “Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities.” Political Studies 53, no. 1: 124–42. Coole, Diana. 2007. “Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 3: 413–33. Copeland, Roger, and Marshall  Cohen, eds. 1983. What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crary, Jonathan. 2001. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Csordas, Thomas. 1993. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8, no. 2: 135–56. Diener, Ed. 2000. “Subjective Well-being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index.” American Psychologist 55, no. 1: 34. Enns, Peter, and Julianna  Koch. 2015. “State Policy Mood: The Importance of Over-time Dynamics.” State Politics & Policy Quarterly 15, no. 4: 436–46. Farnell, Brenda and Charles Varela. 2008. “The Second Somatic Revolution.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 38, no. 3, 215–240. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark  Turner. 1998. “Conceptual Integration Networks.” Cognitive Science 22, no. 2: 133–87. Felski, Rita, and Susan Fraiman. 2012. “In the Mood.” New Literary History, 43. Forgas, Joseph  P. 2017. “Negative Affect and the Good Life: On the Cognitive, Motivational,  and Interpersonal Benefits of Negative Mood.” Sydney: University of New South Wales. Foster, R. G. 2016. “ ‘I Want My Country Back’: The Resurgence of English Nationalism.” LSE Brexit. Foster, Susan L. 2010. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge. Franko, Mark. 2006. “Dance and the Political: States of Exception.” Dance Research Journal 38, nos. 1–2: 3–18. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1991. Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations relating to the Philebus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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560   Stephen Coleman Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. von Scheve, Christian, and Mikko Salmella, eds. 2014. Collective Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Williams, Raymond. 1981. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso. Zimbra, David, Ahmed Abbasi, Daniel Zeng, and Hsinchun Chen. 2018. “The State-of-the-Art in Twitter Sentiment Analysis: A Review and Benchmark Evaluation.” ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems 9, no. 2: 5.

chapter 35

The Body Politic a n d J FK’s Ba d Back Questions of Embodiment in the Performance of Politics Julia Peetz

The famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan ([1651]  1985) offers an indelible image of political embodiment. Hobbes’s human-shaped leviathan towers, scepter and sword in hand, over a horizon of rolling hills abutting, toward the middle of the page, a walled city. Strikingly, under the crowned head with its bearded, though not particularly malevolent, face and eyes that do not quite seem to point in the same direction, the leviathan’s torso and arms are a mosaic made up of the bodies of his subjects. The subjects’ faces are turned away from the landscape and toward their ruler, heads tilted upward, as if, even as they literally form part of his body, the people still felt compelled to gaze upon him. It’s the kind of image that, like a Chuck Close portrait, from a distance looks like a solid figure—a large man wearing a patterned garment, perhaps. But this solidity dissolves into a multitude of smaller, more abstracted shapes—in this case, roughly sketched human shapes—when viewed up close. Hobbes’s contractual theory of sovereignty provides a complex linchpin between premodern and modern conceptions of representation insofar as it moves politics away from divine right and toward the human-made creation of the leviathan. Within this, the depiction of the sovereign as a gigantic human man made up of many smaller people is just one of several images used to describe the sovereign, but it is this visual image that is most easily identified with the actual person of the king in monarchic absolutism, the historical context that Hobbes’s theory serves (Neocleous 2003, 20–1). The most eloquent study of the monarchic vision of the people’s embodiment in their leader is Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) The King’s Two Bodies, which traces to the Middle Ages the strange separation between the king’s body natural and his body politic, the latter of which never dies and whose members are, in an organismic vision of the absolutist state, the king’s subjects. The King’s Two Bodies continues to offer inspiration to scholars of embodiment and performance, particularly those working at the intersection of politics and performance studies and whose work is,

562   Julia Peetz like this chapter, embedded in a context of Western history and literature. In the past few years, for instance, political theorists focusing on performances of contemporary populism have drawn on both Hobbes and Kantorowicz to characterize the relationship between “the people” and populist leaders. In this recent work, embodiment is thought of as an intensified version of political representation. It is argued that, “in populism, the leader does not simply represent ‘the people’ but is actually seen as embodying ‘the people’ ” (Moffitt  2016, 64, emphasis in original). Within the specific context of US presidential politics, which is the focus of this chapter, a populist like Donald Trump would thus be posited to connect with his base of supporters in a fundamentally different mode of performance from more conventional politicians: the connection between the populist and his supporters is characterized as an at least partial throwback to a literal vision of political embodiment exemplified by Leviathan’s frontispiece and the idea of the king’s two bodies. However, this chapter argues that the idea that contemporary populists literally embody their followers ought to give us pause. A key aim of my analysis is to explore the significance of politicians’ bodies in contemporary politics, how that form of embodiment complicates representation, and whether the image of literal embodiment exemplified by Leviathan’s frontispiece can actually help us to explain how populist politics operates through performance. While the concept of the king’s two bodies offers a tantalizingly concrete image of the people’s embodiment in the leader, I intend to show that there is a clear, though infrequently appreciated distinction between premodern, literal concepts of embodiment and modern, much more abstracted ideas of representation, even when representation involves descriptive elements that hinge on the physical resemblance between representatives and represented (Pitkin 1967). It is productive to engage in the interdisciplinary study of embodied performance and politics precisely because literal embodiment was superseded by a more abstract idea of representation that foregrounds the viewpoint of the political audience and presupposes the people’s sovereignty. In US politics as well as in contemporary Western democracies more broadly, political representation works through performance in ways that cannot be captured by the literal thinking of the king’s two bodies. Thinking through the significance of embodiment in contemporary US politics using both ideas developed in populism scholarship and the theoretical tools of theater and performance studies can be a highly illuminating approach to the study of politics. However, this sort of interdisciplinary engagement is thus far limited in research that attempts to understand how contemporary populism, in particular, works through performance. My larger objective here is to show that an exploration of the significance of embodiment in contemporary politics also clarifies why populist politics and performance should be seen to work through a common “grammar” (Rai and Reinelt  2015), in ways the reliance on Hobbes and Kantorowicz in the current scholarship obscures rather than illuminates. The second half of this chapter therefore engages with a range of embodied performances of the US presidency by George Washington, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Donald Trump to explore the salience of embodiment in US presidential politics. I posit that some of the insights of theater and performance studies should be applied to think through historical continuities in the performance of political power. Focusing on continuity in embodied performance offers a more productive means of critique than does the postulation of a radical break between mainstream politics and the mode of representation that is enacted by contemporary populism.

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   563

Embodiment vs. Representation When it comes to the political relevance of the bodies of politicians and political representatives, embodiment is frequently defined as a perceived connection between a leader’s body and the nation or constituency as a whole; the thriving or declining health of the leader, for instance, becomes an indicator of the health of the nation (e.g., Gökarıksel and Smith 2016; Lowndes 2013; Moffitt 2016). This approach promises to explain something about why politicians’ bodies are scrutinized, commented on, and imbued with significance; it appears to provide a means of accounting for the fact that bodies never “enter the political arena . . . simply as biological organs” (Coole 2007, 413). The idea of the king’s two bodies as a vision of absolutist power is a frequent reference point in this scholarship. The idea’s premodern status, moreover, enables scholars to sound alarm bells when politics is diagnosed as having taken a turn toward the authoritarian: its ostensive applicability makes it appear that politics is, literally, moving backward to a moment that privileged the perspective of those in power and excluded the majority of people from it. In the history of Western political thought, literal ideas of the body politic or of a leader as the incarnation of power are seen to have lost their place when the advent of democracy shifted focus away from concrete embodiment toward the abstraction entailed in political audiences’ reception of power’s performances. In contrast to this, fascism has been diagnosed as a literal step backward insofar as scholars have, albeit controversially, argued that it entails a return to premodern corporeal tropes of the body politic (cf. Critchley 1993; Lefort 1986; Neocleous 2003, 21–3). Current scholarship of populism and performance revives arguments about the renewed relevance of the corporeal, literal body politic. Scholars claim, for instance, that while “talk of the body has largely disappeared from our political vocabulary following the rise of liberal democratic politics,” populism (not unlike fascism) “can be read as an attempt to re-embody the body politic,” so that “in populism, the leader does not simply represent ‘the people,’ but is actually seen as embodying ‘the people’ ” (Moffitt  2016, 64). This sort of embodiment is proposed to be qualitatively different from representation, and it is explicitly linked to Kantorowicz’s theory of the king’s two bodies and/or to Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is posited, for instance, that “the contemporary populist leader’s body is stuck with a modern, secularised version of Kantorowicz’s (1957) characterisation of the king’s two bodies” (Moffitt  2016, 68) and that the connection between people and the leader in populism entails “the re-entry of a Hobbesian authorization of sorts into politics” (Arditi 2007, 66). The latter point of view is based on the presupposition that populists pursue a kind of antirepresentative strategy owing to their strong distaste for representation, which is seen to eclipse even Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s objections to representation as a political principle (see Barish 1981, 256–94). In other words, because (especially right-wing) populists are seen as suspicious both of representation (preferring to see themselves as “placeholders” for the people) and of citizen empowerment (opposing autonomous initiatives that allow people to act by themselves; Arditi 2007, 65), scholarship returns to Hobbesian theory to describe the connections they forge with constituents. In light of the showmanship of current populists—from Beppe Grillo and Geert Wilders to Nigel Farage and Donald Trump—the proposition that contemporary populism should be studied in terms of its performances is as unsurprising as it is apposite. However, the

564   Julia Peetz tendency to argue for what sets performances of populism apart from performances in representative politics more broadly conceived obscures the continuity between performances by populists and those by other political representatives because it claims that populism employs a different and much older grammar, in the sense of a wholly different way of enacting the representative relationship between politicians and constituents, from “regular” representative politics. For some time, political representation has been understood to work both performatively (in terms of constituting the representative relationship between politicians and constituents) and through performance (i.e., it is enacted through the public performances of representative claim-makers and their reception by political audiences; Saward 2006, 2010). As an example, we might think here of Bill Clinton’s performances emphasizing his muchvaunted ability to empathize with people by “feeling their pain” during the 1992 presidential campaign (Herbert 2016). In the model of performative representation, Clinton’s performances would be assumed to have resonated with his audiences, more so because Clinton followed three Republican presidential terms and presented a corrective to the more pragmatic style of George H. W. Bush (Lakin 2018). One might posit, for instance, that a large proportion of the electorate felt unsupported by Bush’s WASPish reticence and that Clinton’s empathetic style therefore resonated more strongly. His election victory is then indicative both of the effectiveness of his performance and of the successful performative evocation of a representative relationship between him and a clear majority of the US electorate. Populists1 like Trump, however, buck the system, since they denounce the institutional apparatus to which they seek election and give bad-mannered performances that depart from the norm. Because populists appear to defy the rules that politicians’ performances usually follow,2 scholars of populism and performance postulate that the representative relationship established between populists and their constituents departs from the model of performative representation. To understand why that argument is problematic, it is necessary to briefly recall what is entailed in Hobbesian authorization and the idea of the king’s two bodies. Hobbes’s sovereign can be said to directly embody the people, as in the frontispiece of Leviathan, because there is no sense that his actions are somehow in the spirit of the people’s will. Instead “the literal truth is that the individual subjects are the authors of what the sovereign does, and they own those actions” (Martinich 2016, 333, my emphasis). In Leviathan, “to get themselves out from the miserable condition of Warre” which is the state of nature, wherein life is famously conceived of as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” the people are theorized as having given up to the sovereign their right to govern themselves (Hobbes [1651] 1985, 168, 223, 227). They thereby authorize his absolute power over them. A consequence of this authorization is that the people are in no position to criticize the sovereign: the sovereign’s actions are their own. This means that, “if they don’t like the behavior of the sovereign, they should criticize themselves,” since “in the political case of Leviathan, the words and actions of the sovereign get attributed to his subjects” (Martinich 2016, 318, 328). The idea of the king’s two bodies similarly relies on a literal conception of embodiment: the sovereign king figures as the head directing his subjects, who are the members of the holistically conceived state-organism. Kantorowicz (1957, 194–8, 210) traces the concept to the Catholic Church, which over the course of the twelfth century started to refer to the corporate body of the church as the corpus mysticum (as opposed to the corpus verum, the Eucharist); the king’s two bodies thus introduces “a whiff of incense from another world”

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   565 into the political sphere, ensuring legitimacy and succession through an idea of miraculous perpetuity. This quasi-magical and profoundly literal thinking behind the mystical body of the state/king made royal processions in prerevolutionary France, for instance, “full-blown spectacle[s] of political incarnation” that could claim to re-present, or embody, the entire state-organism (Friedland 2002, 38). Performance studies has traditionally proposed thinking of social performances in terms of distinctions between (effective) ritual and (comparatively ineffective) theater or entertainment or between the liminal and the liminoid, although these distinctions are far from clear-cut (cf. Schechner [1994] 2002; 2020, 148; Turner 1974). However, distinctions between the obligatoriness of the liminal and the voluntary character of the liminoid, or between the efficacy of ritual and the inefficacy of theater or entertainment, do not clarify the crucial difference between premodern and modern performances of power. The question here is how these performances speak to different perspectives, and whose perspectives a theory encompasses and foregrounds. What is distinctive about the premodern configuration of political embodiment is its disregard for political audiences and its exclusion of the people from power. The sovereign holds and exercises power, and the people, having (in a purely theoretical prior event) authorized him to do so, are assumed to consent to this exercise. Their potentially evolving views and perspectives are not relevant to the theory. If they form a part of the body politic, this is a subsumed part, either (as for Hobbes) in the name of ensuring their own security or as mere members of a body politic that is directed by its head, the king. In line with this focus on the sovereign’s exercise of power, the historian Paul Friedland (2002, 41) argues that premodern performances like royal processions were distinctly inward-focused, “not primarily intended to manufacture symbols for the benefit of others; these spectacles were first and foremost about the metamorphosis of political actors.” These performances were not directed at external audiences in the way modern political performances are. Of course, the focus on the people’s authorization of their sovereign in Leviathan, as well as quotations drawn on by Kantorowicz (1957, 224) that imply “the people’s” agency, might seem to contradict the inward focus I have just described. With respect to this apparent consideration of “the people,” it is important to stress, however, that Hobbes’s focus remains inward. The sovereign’s power is meant to protect the people from the violence of the state of nature, which is seen to be as much of a threat to individuals as it is to the king. But this apparent focus on the people primarily serves to legitimate the monarch’s power over them by positing a theoretical authorization event that incorporates them, as subjects, into the body politic. As the political philosopher Al Martinich (2016, 318) puts it, “Authorization is supposed to immunize the sovereign from criticism.” One of the most significant differences between premodern political embodiment and modern political representation is that, in the former, “the people” serve as a theoretical construct to consolidate and legitimate the king’s power. In the latter, “the people” actually, and at historically specific moments of voting, polling, or public protest, exert agency over politicians’ ability to represent them. In this sense, Leviathan’s frontispiece is misleading: although the people are depicted as gazing upon their leader, the Hobbesian perspective does not cast them in the role of a political audience. But how “the people” perceive the legitimacy of politicians and political institutions today matters, as does the erosion of trust in the same. With the advent of liberal democracy in the West, sovereignty passed from the king to the people rather than to any individual

566   Julia Peetz political leader. In the process, the image of the body politic also moved from focusing on an individual head or king to a collective idea of the sovereign people. In this modern configuration, even if leaders still occasionally gesture toward figurative analogies between their own bodies and the nation, the more persistent image becomes that of the social body of the people (Neocleous  2003, 21–8). That the sovereign people are still imagined as a “body” is apparent in tropes that posit the need to protect the nation’s “orifices” (borders) from outsiders and caution against “infection” of the nation by those deemed undesirable (Jewish people under Nazism; undocumented immigrants described as an “infestation” by Trump; etc.; Neocleous 2003, 29–30, 35; Simon 2018). Along with the passing of sovereignty from the individual body politic of the king to that of the people, there was a shift from concrete embodiment (which privileges the perspective of those in power) to abstract representation (which shifts the focus to the political audience’s reception of power’s performances). This emergent outward focus on the people’s perspective depended upon a parallel and simultaneous shift in ideas about acting and performance (Friedland 2002). Evolving away from the literal-minded notion that actors metamorphosed into their characters, theorists instead began to stress that acting was about rendering outwardly, and for the benefit of an external audience, the features of a character without undergoing a fundamental inner transformation. Denis Diderot’s (1883) Paradox of Acting most famously propounded this stance, while in the prerevolutionary United States an audience-focused ideal of rhetorical persuasion became increasingly influential (Fliegelman 1993). With the new, outward focus of performance, it became important whether a political actor’s performance was bought into and trusted by the audience. In other words, rather than literally embodying, or metamorphosing into, a holistic state-as-living-organism, political performances of would-be representatives were now subjected to the judgments of audiences. While premodern political embodiment was literal, holistic, organic, and focused on those in power, modern political representation emerged as fundamentally audience-focused and concerned with forging an abstract connection, through a perceived affinity of their views and aspirations, between constituents and performing politicians. To illustrate this point further, consider that much of the significance of the premodern split between the body natural and the body politic as Kantorowicz explores it lies in the depersonalization of the kingship. Roach (1996, 36–8) teases this out in a discussion of the difference between the king’s wooden effigy and the king’s actual corpse in the royal funeral, explicating that it was the king’s effigy, rather than the deceased body itself, that symbolized the immutability of the social order. Unavoidably, the bodies natural of kings and queens died and were replaced by successors. These successors derived their legitimacy, at least partly, through the concept of the immortal body politic. The split between the king’s bodies natural and politic thus served to assuage anxieties over the continuation of the royal line in a system where political renewal was brought about through the necessity of the sovereign’s death rather than the choice offered by elections to the sovereign people’s social body. The people’s collective and depersonalized body itself remains (relatively) unchanged and thus inherits the continual and perpetual character of the premodern body politic (Neocleous 2003, 17). Contemporary politicians are faced with a fundamentally different succession problem than kings precisely because the body politic is no longer seen to be literally embodied in the leader and regarded as transferable to a rightful successor. In the new, abstract configuration, political leaders’ bodies no longer occupy a hallowed category of their own; instead political representatives emerge out of while also remaining part of the people they

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   567 represent. Such representatives have to rely on their connection to political audiences—a connection forged very much in terms of the theory of performative representation, i.e., through the politician’s performance and the audience’s reception thereof and suspension of disbelief therein. If we allow that populist politicians’ effectiveness is often facilitated by their charisma (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2014), and that this mysterious quality encompasses such difficult-to-define properties as “public intimacy (the illusion of availability), synthetic experience (vicariousness), and the It-Effect (personality-driven mass attraction)” (Roach 2007, 3), then the problem of succession comes into focus. To pass the torch successfully, a populist leader would need a potential successor to be counted on not merely to pursue a specific party platform but to somehow replicate his predecessor’s personal connection with the audience. We should, in short, be careful not to refigure premodern political embodiment as a more intense version of twenty-first-century political representation. This is also why it is unhelpful to suggest that social performances in modern societies might be able to “engage in a project of [societal] re-fusion,” as a result of which they would effectively cease to be “performances in the pejorative sense” and return to an essentially premodern and more effective status of ritual (Alexander  2011, 27, emphasis in original). Ultimately it is important for performance and politics scholarship to appreciate that contemporary politics operates through performance as it does precisely because an intensely literal and quasi-magical idea of political embodiment has been replaced by an abstract concept of representation that necessitates that performances are geared toward, and produced for, political audiences.

Bodies in Performances of Contemporary Politics If populist politicians do not literally embody the body politic in the premodern sense, then what role remains for embodiment in contemporary politics? In other words, how can we grasp the significance of politicians’ bodies in their public performances, given that twenty-first-century “audience democracy”3 frequently puts an increased personalized focus on politicians and their physical bodies? Moffitt’s (2016, 65) observation that many populists “draw attention to their bodies to prove or demonstrate potency and strength” is astute in this regard, especially concerning right-wing populists. Recall, for instance, Trump during the 2016 US presidential election campaign producing a physician’s note that did not merely attest to his good health but went so far as to boast, “If elected, Mr Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” (Bornstein 2015). Certainly the hyperbolic tone of this note is exemplary of the “bad manners” style in which, “through crude banter, politically incorrect statements or boasts,” populist politicians seek to perform their strength (Moffitt 2016, 65). But, pace Moffitt’s step from attention being drawn to populists’ bodies to positing that populist leaders therefore “re-embody” the body politic in a throwback to a quasi-premodern configuration wherein the “ ‘the people’ [are] present in the leader’s physical body” (64), thinking through the importance of embodiment in contemporary politics and performance does not require us to posit a throwback to premodern magical thinking. Indeed, assuming that such an atavistic throwback would be

568   Julia Peetz possible risks blinding us to the importance of embodiment as one of the repertoires of affective, metalingual engagement through which performances in contemporary politics act upon political audiences and in which social relations are “embedded” (Rai 2015, 1183). Questions about embodiment in politicians’ public performances directed at audiences are about harnessing the perception of legitimacy by mobilizing cultural associations of certain bodies with concepts of power, authority, and representative capacity. This is necessary because, in democracies, alternative candidates are presented for public scrutiny to the sovereign people. If there is now a heightened focus on politicians’ bodies, including those of populists, this is an aspect of the personalized attention paid to individual politicians in twenty-first-century politics. Since audience democracy diverts attention from the substance of policy and toward politicians’ performances in the public sphere, questions about the body that might be posed in other performance settings become relevant. Theater and performance scholarship recognizes that the bodies of performers can be distractions, drawing audiences’ attention away from more abstract content a performance might be attempting to convey. In the theater, bodies distract because the physical presence of the actors, especially well-known ones, can become such an “overwhelming reality” for spectators that it jeopardizes their investment in the fictional world portrayed on stage (Conroy 2010, 37–8). Whether on stage or screen, an actor’s body, acting as a vehicle for the audience’s memory of their past roles, can come to “dominate the reception process,” taking attention away from the content of a performance and casting its reception in light of previous roles the actor’s body has inhabited (Carlson 2003, 8). Analogously, in audience democracy politics is personalized, conveyed through public performances, and transmitted by media technologies. These enable vast audiences not merely to know politicians’ words but to see their performances, potentially, as in the case of big speeches like the US president’s State of the Union address, even in live broadcast. Under such conditions, the focus on politicians’ bodies is inevitable. The remainder of this section discusses the significance of embodiment to the particular case of the US presidency as a political role that is performed, focusing on how performances of this singularly visible role both harness and sustain specific ideals of embodiment. Embodied performances of the US presidency follow cultural norms that are retained in the collective memory of their audiences. The quasi-perpetual nature of the people’s social body points to why questions about embodiment in contemporary politics concern historical continuity rather than historical breaks or throwbacks. We might productively understand performances of the US presidency to be “ghosted,” in the sense Marvin Carlson (2003) proposes, by the memory of previous presidents. “Ghosting” consists of presenting to the audience “the identical things they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context”: the present experience of a play or character in the theater is “always ghosted by previous experiences” of the same play, the same actor, the same character, etc. (4, 2). A paradigmatic case is the title role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Carlson describes as ghosted “by the memories of famous Hamlets of the past” in such a way that a new actor attempting the role needs to have “already developed a strong individual style and achieved a sufficient level of success and reputation to test himself against the role generally regarded as the hallmark of the art” (79). For an iconic role such as Hamlet, audience expectations and judgments are shaped by the memory of previous performers. In its appeal to collective memory, ghosting resembles “surrogation,” as Roach (1996, 2–4) describes it. But presidential elections fill a vacancy in the social fabric not (usually) created by death but

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   569 designed to occur at regular intervals and for which an exact replacement would be decidedly unsatisfactory: as noted earlier, Bill Clinton’s empathetic style, for instance, was in some ways perceived as a corrective to George H. W. Bush’s aloofness. Performances of the US presidency are better thus described as ghosted in the public perception by the collective memory of previous presidents: each president needs to harness cultural associations with what is presidential, a number of which relate to his physical body, but is also haunted by the immediate predecessor’s perceived shortcomings, to which a compelling contrast needs to be presented. George Washington, known to have been a military leader, an accomplished athlete, and a farmer who stood six feet two inches tall, set a precedent of able-bodied male virility for the US presidency. Washington (1798) noted in a letter requesting a horse that he wanted one whose “Size & strength must be equal to my weight,” thus setting a nearly comically formidable example of presidential physicality, one that both inaugurates a presidential tradition of the association of power with able-bodied masculinity and conforms to broader cultural norms in doing so. Theodore Roosevelt is another prominent exponent of presidential manliness (Testi 1995). During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump mobilized the presidential tradition of embodying power, authority, and the capacity to represent the nation through the healthy male body against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In the first presidential debate, in response to a question about why Trump had previously asserted Clinton did not have a “presidential look,” Trump insisted, “She doesn't have the look. She doesn't have the stamina. I said she doesn't have the stamina, and I don't believe she does have the stamina. To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina” (Politico Staff 2016). This argument was effective because Clinton was the first female presidential candidate of a major party and thus could not fit into the physical mold presented by forty-four male past presidents. It was also forceful because Clinton had two weeks previously been reported to have nearly collapsed on the campaign trail owing to pneumonia (Martin and Chozick 2016). Of course, Trump’s claims were much more crudely explicit than most other politicians would have been in asserting his own physical strength and his opponent’s supposed weakness. Yet this performance relied on an underlying set of conventions that regulate and constrain the public performances of all US presidents. While opposition against the idea of a female US president has been falling (Burden, Ono, and Yamada 2017) and discussions of women’s roles in politics are now widespread, residues of a general tendency in Western culture to normatively ascribe power and strength to healthy, able-bodied masculinity persist. According to this way of thinking “masculinity is defined as able-bodied and active”; therefore “traditional notions of woman and disability converge, reflected in the ascription of characteristics such as innocence, vulnerability, sexual passivity or asexuality, dependency, and objectification [to women]” (Manderson and Peake 2005, 233–4). The classicist Mary Beard (2017, 79) has recently popularized a similar reading of the cultural association of male physicality with power and authority, noting that “the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded” in Western tradition going back to antiquity. Given the uniqueness of the presidential office and its prodigious representative task, the succession of forty-four male presidents that preceded the 2016 election, and ideals of self-sufficiency derived from the American founding myth of settling in the wilderness of an “empty” continent (Jaffe 1997, 64–70), audiences are more likely to perceive presidential candidates as competent and credible representatives of the nation if they meet norms of

570   Julia Peetz perceived masculinity and attendant standards of physical strength and virility. This is a process of “the acquisition of being through the citing of power” (Butler [1993] 2011, xxiii), in that bodies need to conform to, or “cite,” a standard of perceived physical strength that is associated with power in order to become legible as potentially powerful. If, in modern societies, “the body comes to be seen as an arrangement of meanings that is produced by social knowledges, by a system that aligns bodies and meanings in a grid of ‘biopower’ ” (Kuppers 2003, 5), then, despite recent inroads made, the representational power of the US presidency remains aligned with the strength and virility associated with healthy, able-bodied masculinity. Although a record number of women were elected to Congress in the 2018 midterm elections and a woman, Kamala Harris, was ultimately chosen as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020, the question of whether a woman can win the presidency became a major topic of discussion during the 2020 Democratic primary: according to a much-publicized poll, a clear majority of Democratic and independent voters (74 percent) say they would be comfortable with a female president, but only 33  percent of these voters believed their neighbors would also be comfortable with this (Ipsos 2019). Bias against women in US presidential politics and awareness of such bias persist. In this context, the public performances of a populist like Trump reaffirm and weaponize ingrained cultural meanings embodied by masculine performers rather than attempting to reduce their influence. It may be objected here that, empirically, although all past presidents have been male, not all were able-bodied or healthy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for instance, is now well known to have contracted poliomyelitis in 1921 and to have been unable to walk without assistance for the rest of his life. John F. Kennedy suffered from disabling back pain for most of his presidency. However, the ways in which both Roosevelt and Kennedy downplayed physical limitations in public serve to further illustrate how closely presidential power is associated with able-bodied masculinity. FDR, and the national press with him, sought to give the impression that he had overcome his illness and remained “an uncommonly strong, vigorous man” (Pressman 2013, 333). While there was some disparaging reporting on Roosevelt’s disability, for the most part the press helped him to “realize his political ambitions” by aiding him in “casting himself as the conqueror of illness” (356; Lowndes 2013, 482–3). Roosevelt’s narrative of “overcoming” disability and reasserting “normality” is a common one, for “while femininity and disability reinforce each other, disabled masculinity rests on the notion of contradiction” (Manderson and Peake 2005, 234), spurring narratives of the masculine conquering of disability as a way to resolve the contradiction. As president, Roosevelt was the most frequently photographed person in the United States, but photographs of him in a wheelchair were suppressed by Secret Service camera seizures during his time in office: they are extremely uncommon and were not published during his lifetime, a fact that further contributes to the downplaying of his disability in the American collective imagination (Pressman 2013, 337, 339). Roosevelt’s public performances instead emphasized his physical strength through the choice to conduct a “vigorous, peripatetic campaign” as well as his “athlete’s upper body” and his “commanding, mellifluous voice” (330). Kennedy has similarly been described as a publicly “dynamic man full of vigor and youthful energy,” but one whose “aura of vitality belied the fact that he was patently unhealthy from an early age” (Pait and Dowdy 2017, 247). Kennedy’s long history of back pain, due to which he occasionally walked with crutches and for which he wore a back brace

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   571 and was treated with injections, remained hidden from the public during his lifetime. Instead Kennedy gave public performances that foregrounded the physical strength that was thought to befit his status as the youngest man ever elected to the presidency. A recent medical study of the history of Kennedy’s spinal conditions concludes, “Unbeknownst to the general public, Kennedy faced these external challenges [of civil unrest and the possibility of nuclear war] while also battling the internal challenge of back pain that was all too often debilitating, and he relied on a near-daily therapy regimen, at times using various combinations of exercise, massage, procaine injections, support orthotics, crutches, narcotics, and illicit intravenous injections of methamphetamines in an attempt to manage this pain” (253). Medical doctors have speculated whether Kennedy’s back brace might even have contributed to his death, postulating that the brace could have “played a role in setting up Oswald’s final shot” by presenting the shooter with a clear target since it prevented Kennedy from collapsing forward. Nevertheless so little of Kennedy’s medical condition was known during his presidency that his enduring public image is of a young, virile president. FDR, Kennedy, and their semi-secret medical conditions speak to the extent to which the US presidency as a political role is ghosted by performers who sought to conform to stringent norms of masculinity and able-bodiedness associated with the power and authority necessary to represent the nation to itself. The persistence of these norms is apparent in controversies around the inclusion in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC of a statue depicting Roosevelt in a wheelchair around the turn of the millennium; the statue in question was not added until 2001, four years after President Clinton had dedicated the original memorial (Olin 2012). And the focus on presidents’ bodies has, if anything, intensified as media technology has facilitated greater access to the images—moving and otherwise—of US presidents. In recent decades there have been no more cases in which presidents required assistance with walking or standing, but there has long been speculation that Ronald Reagan might have suffered from Alzheimer’s disease during his second term (Berisha et al. 2015). Despite this, in Reagan’s case too the impression that persists is of a strong, tall, perennially dark-haired man. Reagan’s embodied performance—and the physicality demanded of US presidents more generally—is perhaps best summarized in Tony Kushner’s (2007, 192) play Angels in America, where the character of Roy Cohn contrasts his own declining health with Reagan’s enduring physical prowess: “Look at Reagan: He’s so healthy, he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm.” During the 2008 presidential campaign the necessity for presidential bodies to embody health, vigor, and masculinity became further apparent when John McCain’s advanced age of seventy-two and history of melanoma became major topics of discussion. The anxiety about the possibility of McCain not surviving his potential presidency was particularly acute because his prospective vice president, Sarah Palin, had been poorly vetted and was widely judged as too inexperienced to replace him (Heilemann and Halperin  2010, 282, 396–416). Additionally, Palin was a woman faced with the possibility of being cast in a role that had only ever been filled by men and that has always demanded performances of specifically male virility. This masculine coding of the US presidency conforms to a broader pattern that reinforces male agency and female passivity: nations are only abstractly emblematized as female (as “justice” or “liberty,” for instance), whereas “associations of nations with male figures often incorporate real male rulers” (Nield 2000, 103).

572   Julia Peetz By asserting that Hillary Clinton had neither the “look” nor the “stamina” for the presidency, Trump weaponized the extent to which “presidentiality” is associated with ideals of embodied masculinity, physical health, and virility. But populist performances like Trump’s differ in tone and inflection more than in the quality of the representative relationship they aim to forge. Crucially, this becomes apparent only if we focus on how these performances attempt to conform to specific norms and ideals of embodiment rather than positing that certain performances might recoup mystical or quasi-magical ideas about the authorization of absolutist rulers. Theater and performances studies provides theoretical tools and resources for such analyses of contemporary politics, for, as Elin Diamond (1996, 5) observes, “as soon as performativity comes to rest on a performance, questions of embodiment . . . become discussable.” Building on Judith Butler’s ([1993] 2011, xii) argument that performativity is “not . . . the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather . . . that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains,” Diamond (1996, 5) calls for performance analysis to investigate the norms and conventions that each performance reiterates: “When performativity materializes as performance in that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing (a reiteration of norms) and a thing done (discursive conventions that frame our interpretations), between someone’s body and the conventions of embodiment, we have access to cultural meanings and critique.” Thus, if we accept that the representative relationship between politicians and constituents is performatively constituted, then questions of embodiment should be put to the individual performances that constitute this relationship. The question we should put to performances of populism is not How do populists break away from representation altogether? but What sorts of ideas about power and representative capacity are weaponized in populists’ embodied performances in the public sphere? The significance of embodiment in contemporary politics lies in the creation of expectations of what credible political leaders look, sound, and move like rather than any direct link between the strength of a leader’s body and the body politic as a miraculously formed organism. Trump’s performance in the 2016 campaign, in other words, relied on an underlying set of conventions that, through its perpetuation in the collective memory of the national social body, still regulates and constrains the public performances of US presidents. The presidency remains unique as a political role in that it is the only position in US politics tasked with representing the entirety of the nation. The tremendous antipathy toward Hillary Clinton in 2016 that was further fanned by the Trump campaign, the existence of a number of election-deciding Obama-Trump swing voters (Meko, Lu, and Gamio 2017), and the large preponderance of misogynistic images of Clinton during the campaign all point to the persistent cultural coding of female power as illegitimate, even monstrous—despite Clinton’s success in the popular vote.4 In line with the “bad manners” style of populist politics, Trump’s performance drew attention to this cultural coding explicitly, disparaging his opponent during the presidential debates in terms many would consider below the belt, like the comments about Clinton’s stamina or the description of her bathroom break during a Democratic primary debate in 2015 as “disgusting” (White  2015). Embodied performance may also be a particular focus for populist politicians more broadly, as populists tend to position themselves as unique, charismatic, anti-establishmentarian figures who are more difficult to replace than party functionaries precisely because they present themselves as singular outside infiltrators. The embodied performances of politicians draw audiences’ focus away from party platforms toward individual politicians and

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   573 their bodies; populists weaponize this tendency and exploit it as they draw a pointedly personalized focus to themselves. Nevertheless the case of the US presidency illustrates that past presidents, in the attempt to get audiences to accept them as credible representatives, have striven to reiterate conventions of embodiment that emphasize virile, able-bodied masculinity in their public performances. This targeting of audiences and the citing of culturally embedded markers of power through the physical body mean that studies of embodied performance in contemporary politics must concern themselves with the tension between a performance and its reception. That is where the power of discourse to restrict and control perceptions of legitimacy is put in tension with the individual agency of political actors and their audiences, opening up the possibility of reinforcing historical orthodoxy or demanding change.

Notes 1. For present purposes, populism is defined as a political style that is performed and is characterized by the evocation of a binary split between “the people” and “the establishment,” the performance of a sense of crisis, and media-savvy, “bad-mannered” performances that break with established rules of political discourse (see Moffitt 2016, 41–69). 2. On the sharp limits traditionally imposed on the complexity of mainstream political speech in the United States, see Lehrman (2010). 3. Audience democracy is primarily defined by increasingly personalized and image-based election campaigns and by “reactive” voting behavior, meaning voters respond to the terms of electoral choice as defined by candidates rather than expressing their identities through the act of voting (Manin 1997, 218–34). 4. Beard (2017, 76, 79) notes that the depiction of Clinton as a “classical” severed Medusa head and Trump as Perseus, her heroic slayer, was “very much part of the everyday, domestic American decorative world” during the 2016 election campaign, pointing to a larger tendency of women’s exclusion from legitimate leadership.

References Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. Performance and Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Arditi, Benjamin. 2007. Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barish, Jonas. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beard, Mary. 2017. Women and Power. London: Profile Books. Berisha, Visar, Shuai Wang, Amy LaCross, and Julie Liss. 2015. “Tracking Discourse Complexity Preceding Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis: A Case Study Comparing the Press Conferences of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.” Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 45, no. 3: 959–63. Bornstein, Harold N. 2015. “Letter ‘To Whom My Concern [sic].” December 4. https://web. archive.org/web/20160209001903/https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/ Health_Record.pdf Burden, Barry C., Yoshikuni Ono, and Masahiro Yamada. 2017. “Reassessing Public Support for a Female President.” Journal of Politics 79, no. 3: 1073–8.

574   Julia Peetz Butler, Judith. [1993] 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin. 2003. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Conroy, Colette. 2010. Theatre and the Body. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Coole, Diana. 2007. “Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 3: 413–33. Critchley, Simon. 1993. “Re-tracing the Political.” In The Political Subject of Violence, edited by David Campbell and Michael Dillon, 73–93. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Diamond, Elin. 1996. Introduction to Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond, 1–12. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Diderot, Denis. 1883. The Paradox of Acting. Translated by Walter Herries Pollock. London: Chatto & Windus. Fliegelman, Jay. 1993. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language and the Culture of Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Friedland, Paul Andrew. 2002. Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gökarıksel, Banu, and Sara Smith. 2016. “ ‘Making America Great Again’? The Fascist Body Politics of Donald Trump.” Political Geography 54: 79–81. Heilemann, John, and Mark Halperin. 2010. Race of a Lifetime. London: Penguin. Herbert, Jon. 2016. “The Oratory of Bill Clinton.” In Democratic Orators from JFK to Barack Obama, edited by Andrew  S.  Crines, David  S.  Moon, and Robert Lehrman, 117–47. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hobbes, Thomas. [1651] 1985. Leviathan. Edited by C.  B.  Macpherson. London: Penguin Classics. Ipsos. 2019. “Nominating Woman or Minority Come Second to Nominating Candidate Who Can Beat Trump.” Press release. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/ documents/2019-06/daily-beast-gender-topline-2019-06-17-v2.pdf Jaffe, Erwin A. 1997. “Our Own Invisible Hand: Antipolitics as an American Given.” In The End of Politics? Explorations into Modern Antipolitics, edited by Andreas Schedler, 57–90. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuppers, Petra. 2003. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge. New York: Routledge. Kushner, Tony. 2007. Angels in America: Parts One and Two. London: Nick Hern Books. Lakin, Matthew. 2018. “The Oratory of George  H.  W.  Bush.” In Republican Orators from Eisenhower to Trump, edited by Andrew  S.  Crines and Sophia Hatzisavvidou, 129–50. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lehrman, Robert. 2010. The Political Speechwriter’s Companion: A Guide for Speakers and Writers. Washington, DC: QC Press. Lowndes, Joseph. 2013. “Barack Obama’s Body: The Presidency, the Body Politic, and the Contest over American National Identity.” Polity 45, no. 4: 496–8.

The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back   575 Manderson, Lenore, and Susan Peake. 2005. “Men in Motion: Disability and the Performance of Masculinity.” In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, edited by Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, 230–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Jonathan, and Amy Chozick. 2016. “Hillary Clinton’s Doctor Says Pneumonia Led to Abrupt Exit from 9/11 Event.” New York Times, September 11. https://www.nytimes. com/2016/09/12/us/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign-pneumonia.html. Martinich, Al  P. 2016. “Authorization and Representation in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” In The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, edited by Al P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra, 315–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meko, Tim, Denise Lu, and Lazaro Gamio. 2017. “How Trump Won the Presidency with Razor-Thin Margins in Swing States.” Washington Post, November 11. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. 2014. “Populism and Political Leadership.” In Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership, edited by R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart, 376–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neocleous, Mark. 2003. Imagining the State. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Nield, Sophie. 2000. “National Identity and the Female Body.” In Feminisms on Edge: Politics, Discourses and National Identities, edited by Karen  Atkinson and Sarah  Oerton, 101–10. Cardiff: Cardiff Academic Press. Olin, Laurie. 2012. “The FDR Memorial Wheelchair Controversy and a ‘Taking Part’ Workshop Experience.” Landscape Journal 31, nos. 1–2: 183–97. Pait, T.  Glenn, and Justin  T.  Dowdy. 2017. “John  F.  Kennedy’s Back: Chronic Pain, Failed Surgeries, and the Story of Its Effects on His Life and Death.” Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine 27, no. 3: 247–55. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Politico Staff. 2016. “Full Transcript: First 2016 Presidential Debate.” Politico, September 27. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/full-transcript-first-2016-presidential-debate228761. Pressman, Matthew. 2013. “Ambivalent Accomplices: How the Press Handled FDR’s Disability and How FDR Handled the Press.” Journal of the Historical Society 13, no. 3: 325–59. Rai, Shirin M. 2015. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies 63: 1179–97. Reinelt, Janelle and Rai, Shirin  M.. 2015. Introduction to The Grammar of Politics and Performance, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Janelle Reinelt, 1–18. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Saward, Michael. 2006. “The Representative Claim.” Contemporary Political Theory 5: 297–318. Saward, Michael. 2010. The Representative Claim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schechner, Richard. [1994] 2002. “Ritual and Performance.” In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Tim Ingold, 613–47. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

576   Julia Peetz Schechner, Richard. 2020. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 4th edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Simon, Abigail. 2018. “People Are Angry President Trump Used This Word to Describe Undocumented Immigrants.” Time, June 19. https://time.com/5316087/donald-trumpimmigration-infest/. Testi, Arnaldo. 1995. “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity.” Journal of American History 81, no. 4: 509–33. Turner, Victor. 1974. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice University Studies 60, no. 3: 53–92. Washington, George. 1798. “Letter from George Washington to William Fitzhugh.” August 5. Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/06-02-02-0392. White, Daniel. 2015. “Donald Trump Calls Clinton’s Bathroom Break ‘Disgusting.’ ” Time, December 22. https://time.com/4158303/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-disgusting-schlonged/.

pa rt v i

AFFECT This section engages with the relationship between politics, performance, and affect. This relationship is evident in many different areas of inquiry: cultural memory and public cultures that emerge in response to histories of trauma (Soh 2008), the production of compassion and sympathy in human rights discourses (Fassin and Rechtman 2009), new forms of historical inquiry that emphasize the affective relations between past and present, and the affective foundations of social coexistence and the cultural politics of everyday life (Clough and Halley 2007; Staiger, Cvetkovich, and Reynolds 2010). Affect frames performances and helps to illuminate its various aspects and hide others; atmospheres of performance also help us read the underlying tensions or solidarities and liminality, what Victor Turner described as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” that generates a promise, threat or possibility of change (quoted in Alexander 2006,13). The authors in this section not only point to different ways of conceiving bodies and subjects of politics but also generate rich and fruitful debates about how affect might be mobilized for theoretical, political, and social transformation. Overall this section highlights a variety of themes and interdisciplinary dialogues that the study of the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political has either inaugurated or revitalized. Empathy, as a critical concept and affect, features centrally in Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison’s chapter. Exploring the nexus of performance, emotions, and politics, the authors address the role of empathy in processes of reconciliation after conflict and trauma. Over two decades ago, Kaja Silverman (1996) theorized two main forms of empathetic identification, idiopathic and heteropathic, derived from the German philosopher Max Scheler. Idiopathic identification assimilates or appropriates the experience of the other, which is to say, the distinctiveness of the other’s experience is only interpreted with reference to one’s own experience. Heteropathic identification, on the other hand, is a movement out from the self to identify with the other’s position that preserves a perception of the other as a separate subject; it is an ethical, nonappropriative, and not self-serving relation that recognizes

578   Affect the other as a separate, individual, and equal subject. It is the latter form of empathy that is at the center of Bleiker and Hutchison’s essay. Drawing on their work in postconflict Sri Lanka, they demonstrate how theater facilitation, which encompasses a range of emotions—from fear, anger, and resentment to compassion and empathy—may facilitate forms of social healing and reconciliation, forge ethical communities, and lead to far-reaching social transformation. The chapter by Jordana Blejmar shows how the inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic historical experiences brings to the fore a related yet distinct set of issues— especially for the children of survivors and those of their generation born in the aftermath of violence such as war, slavery, and expulsion, who connect so deeply to the past they have not directly experienced that they insist on the term memory to describe that ­connection. The US-based literary critic Marianne Hirsch (1999, 8) has named this ­phenomenon “postmemory”: “identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by an admission of an unbridgeable distance separating the participant from the one born after.” Postmemory entails reaching across lines of difference to the experience of others to whom one is not related by blood, a kind of connective memory work that could engender “transnational interconnections and intersections in a global space of remembrance” (Hirsch 2012, 247). In her recent work, Blejmar has discussed the theatricalization of this memory discourse by addressing the links between memory, politics, and performance in the works of by postdictatorship writers and artists in Argentina, many of them children of disappeared or persecuted parents. Hirsch (2012, 6) has expanded her discussion of postmemory to include “affiliative” rather than “familial” postmemory, suggesting that postmemory is not “limited to the intimate embodied space of the family” and may “extend to more distant, adoptive witnesses or affiliative contemporaries.” Similarly, Blejmar shows how the exponents of this kind of theater practice in Latin America demonstrate that (post) memory is not merely a “familial” and private issue but a collective effort, a political intervention in the present, indispensable for reconstructing the fibers of political and social life in Latin America. While Bleiker and Hutchison and Blejmar address the significance of affect to the ways we remember, commemorate, or disavow things from our recent or not so recent past, as well as the psychic complexities of the work of reparation in relation to performance, Narelle Warren shows that “small acts of repair” (Hirsch and Spitzer 2017) also emerge “in the spaces between people, simultaneously embedded within relationships between people and expressed through everyday decisions, actions, and performances.” Warren observes that most research on care has focused on policy-derived and biomedical perceptions of the work of carers, where care is constructed—and performed—in terms of the doing of care rather than its normative affects. Drawing on her ethnographic work in Australia, Warren elucidates the moral experiences embedded within and expressed through acts of care, arguing that “caring is often much more complex than it is understood in the popular imaginary, which is largely focused on burden.” Exemplary of the latest interdisciplinary dialogue between performance, different care professions, and the practice of care (Fisher and Thompson 2020), Warren’s essay articulates new ways of looking at how care is performed in everyday encounters, interrogating the politics and ethics of care and the boundaries between care practice and performance.

Affect   579 Warren’s critical intervention also resonates with Nobuko Anan’s reflections on love—a form of affect too intimately bound up with institutions and discourses of the “normal” and too deeply embedded in conventional social structures such as marriage and the nuclear family to be available for queering. As David Halperin (2019, 396) writes, following Michel Foucault, “[p]recisely because love has so often served to consecrate the kinds of social relations that are already approved and admired, it has posed a persistent problem for queers.” Love has not been accessible to queers either as a representation or as a form of life. Anan’s chapter examines mother-child love linked to love for the nation in two Japanese plays that put the dualities and contradictions of love at center stage. Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2013) addresses a homosexual transvestite’s relationship with his mother in postwar Japan, while in Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell (1984) a pre–World War II silk factory represents the Japanese Empire, where a mother and her daughter are manipulated by the nation. While demonstrating how these plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation through reconfiguring their love for their mother, Anan offers new perspectives on the conditions and characteristics of nonoppressive, mutually enhancing ways of loving. Issues of social and political equality also features in Illan rua Wall’s chapter, which takes its cue from the uprisings on the global political scene since the end of 2010, including the massive encampment in Tahrir Square, Cairo, the anti-austerity protests in Syntagma Square in Athens, and Occupy Wall Street in New York. While the aspirations, practices, and historical specificities of these political mobilizations have been highly diverse, they share a number of features: the transformation of urban public spaces into encampments, the refusal of representation, and the articulation of forms of radical democracy. However, as Wall contends, beyond the representative or symbolic dynamics involved, this “politics out of doors” is also notable for its affective and atmospheric potential. Hence he argues for the need to understand protest moods and atmospheres as historical and social phenomena. Drawing on his ethnographic work on Hong Kong’s Occupy movements in late 2014, Wall develops a “nestled” theory of atmospheres, claiming that an atmospheric account is essential to grasp the affective potential of protests. Likewise drawing on collaborative ethnography and multidisciplinary theorizing, Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra examine the performances, identities, and emotions underlying the work of elected politicians and their effects on people’s imagination and feeling of national belonging. Developing a relational approach to the study of constituency work, and drawing on a mix of political anthropology, pragmatic philosophy, and emotion theory, these authors ultimately argue that “politicians who ignore the sacred—the ritual, symbolism, and drama of politics—and merely try to impress voters with their ideological standpoints, will find it harder to secure support.” James Brassett’s chapter engages the outpouring of Brexit comedy as an important case study of the politics of humor. Attuned to the fact that affect often denotes an excess to that which is felt in the human body or indexed through cultural grids of meaning, Brassett argues that we should reframe “Brexit comedy” or “the comedy of Brexit” as a socially consequential practice that teases at the (changing) social and political consensus in ways that defy expectations, conventions, and representations. Goran Petrović Lotina’s essay on the connections between performance and populist politics is certainly timely, not least because cultural performances are regularly utilized by populist movements, both progressive and authoritarian, to gain support. Taking a cue from Angela Marino’s (2018) argument in

580   Affect Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela that “populism is a performed act” (166), defining populism as “a unifying strategy of collective identification carried out through the everyday and the spectacular embodied act” (10), Petrović Lotina reveals how theatrical performances such as Rimin Protokoll’s 100% City can create and sustain alternative networks of agency and new forms of collectivity. Chapters in this section of the Handbook guide readers to the diversity of scholarly topics, themes, and interdisciplinary dialogues that thinking about affect in relation to politics and performance opens up or enables.

References Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fisher, Amanda Stuart, and James Thompson, eds. 2020. Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Halperin, David M. 2019. “Queer Love.” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 2: 396–419. Hirsch, Marianne. 1999. “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by M. Bal, J. Crew, and L. Spitzer. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. 2017. “Small Acts of Repair: The Unclaimed Legacy of the Romanian Holocaust.” In Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, edited by L. Bond, S. Craps, and P. Vermeulen, 83–109. New York: Berghahn Books. Marino, Angela. 2018. Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Silverman, Kaja. 1996. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York; London: Routledge. Soh, Chunghee Sarah. 2008. The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Staiger, Janet, A.  Cvetkovich, and A.  Reynolds, eds. 2010. Political Emotions. Milton Park, Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

chapter 36

Postm emory Politics and Performance in Latin America Jordana Blejmar

This chapter addresses the links between memory, politics, and performance in the works of the so-called postmemory generations in Latin America, composed of those who were born or grew up during the dictatorships and internal conflicts that shattered the region during the second half of the twentieth century.1 It specifically discuss two plays: Villa+Discurso (Villa+Speech, 2011), written and directed by the Chilean dramaturge Guillermo Calderón, and Cuarto intermedio: Guía práctica para juicios de lesa humanidad (Recess: A practical guide for trials of crimes against humanity, 2018), directed by the Argentine filmmaker Juan Schnitman and performed by the writer Félix Bruzzone, a son of disappeared parents, and Mónica Zwaig, a French lawyer and actress. In Villa a committee responsible for the management of Villa Grimaldi, the most emblematic torture and detention center of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–90), now converted into a site of memory, summons three young women, all called Alejandra, to help them decide what to do with the remains of that site of horror: whether to convert it into a museum, to rebuild it exactly as it was during the dictatorship, or to leave its ruins untouched. In Discurso, the second part of the performance, the three actresses take turns performing the role of a former Chilean president and survivor of the dictatorship, Michelle Bachelet, who delivers an imaginary farewell speech to the audience before stepping down from her presidency. In Cuarto intermedio, Bruzzone and Zwaig examine some of the most delirious aspects of the trials of the perpetrators of the 1976–83 dictatorship in Argentina, which were reopened in 2003. They discuss the performative nature of the trials, their elements of dark comedy, and the lack of interest among those who are not directly affected by the crimes. Aided by a screen on stage and addressing the public directly, Bruzzone and Zwaig act as “memory recruiters,” guides, and translators between different worlds—the judicial, the derechohumanístico, the world of theater—and between past, present, and future. Both Villa+Discurso and Cuarto intermedio touch upon Latin America’s bleakest crimes with commitment but without solemnity, featuring what I have called somewhere else a “playful memory” (Blejmar 2016) of their respective national traumas. Moreover, though these plays address past traumas, they are also very much about the present of memory

582   Jordana Blejmar politics in the region. Calderón’s play was released a year after the end of Bachelet’s first administration (she was reelected in 2014). Discurso is a response to the misogynist attacks that she was subject to during her presidency, and Villa echoes the ongoing debates about what to do with the material traces of the horror in the region. Moreover, Villa+Discurso intervenes directly in the Chilean political arena because it was conceived as a site-specific performance to be staged in former clandestine centers of detention and torture around the world, including Villa Grimaldi and Londres 38. It proposes an understanding of these sites as spaces for deliberation and not as places that demand silence and passive contemplation. Cuarto intermedio also intervenes in the (Argentine) public sphere by addressing the disengagement of civil society during the trials and by presenting itself as a sort of intermediary between the judicial audiences and the Argentine people. These plays, I argue, represent a major contribution to the interdisciplinary and global field of (post)memory studies. They raise uncomfortable questions associated with the intergenerational transmission of memories, including who has the right to speak about the painful past, and what is our responsibility, our implication (Rothberg 2019), toward shared national traumas. Both plays claim that (post)memory is not merely a familial and private issue but is also a collective effort, and that more expansive communities of what Marianne Hirsch (2011) has called an “affiliative postmemory” are necessary to reconstruct the fibers of political and social life in Latin America. Moreover, postmemory is conceived here not so much as a representation or a reenactment of the past but as a political intervention in the present. Thus the focus in this chapter is not only on the content of these plays (how postmemory is represented) but, more importantly on the effects, and affects, that they produce on and beyond the stage. Elsewhere (Blejmar 2016) and also briefly later in this chapter, I discuss some of the reservations that I have about using the framework of postmemory to analyse the cultural memories of the children of the disappeared, and of other members of the same generation, in Latin America. Here, however, I focus my attention on a specific aspect of postmemory that I believe is pertinent for the Latin American context, namely Hirsch’s call to understand the transmission of memories that occurs beyond the family frame. Echoing recent efforts in the field of affect theory to challenge the victim/agent dichotomy as well as oppositions such as private/public, passion/reason, and actor/spectator, both plays present children of victims (and victims themselves) who are also “memory agents” precisely to question the opposition between victimhood and agency. These productions aim to transform their audience—spectators of past dramas—into actors of present struggles. Thus Villa+Discurso and Cuarto intermedio oppose themselves to the idea of theater as a space of illusion, spectacle, and seduction, and encourage instead what Jacques Rancière (2009, 3) has called a “theatre without spectator[s]: not a theatre played out in front of empty seats, but a theatre where the passive optical relationship implied by the term” is replaced by another word, “drama,” in the sense of “action.” What is required, Rancière continues, is a theater “where those in attendance learn from as opposed to being seduced by images; where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs” (4). In this conception of theater, one that we find in the plays addressed here, the solitary experience of the spectator is replaced by the communal feeling of the audience, for “theatre remains the only place where the audience confronts itself as a collective” (5) and, in the examples addressed here, as a living and affective community of both mourners and memory activists.

Postmemory   583

New Documentary Theater in Latin America The new millennium witnessed several Latin American countries electing neopopulist governments that brought about new cultures of remembrance that contrasted with previous official efforts to achieve reconciliation and to forget the past.2 Since the first half of the 1980s, the governments of the so-called democratic transitions aimed to remember the victims of the dictatorships, and sometimes also legally prosecute the perpetrators of human rights violations. At the same time, they often obliterated the political subjectivity of the desaparecidos to emphasize their status as “pure victims,” as well as ignoring the fact that children of militants and persecuted parents were firsthand victims themselves. In the mid1990s new voices—notably those of the children of the disappeared in the newly formed organization HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio; Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) and those of former left-wing militants—diversified the cultures of memory, bringing to light new experiences and new memories of the traumatic past. These narratives were key to counteract the discourses of forgiving and forgetting that dominated the neoliberal discourses of that period. At the same time, however, they tended to offer epic accounts of militancy, transforming victims into heroes. The 2000s opened the door for more complex readings of the 1970s and 1980s. Former militants published books in which they triggered public debates about, for example, the revolutionary trials executed by some armed organizations or about the role of children during armed struggles. A small but representative group of sons and daughters of disappeared parents, and other members of that generation, published influential books, acted in plays, directed films, and exhibited photographic essays in which they reflected on underexamined aspects of the period, such as what it was like growing up in the shadows of a phantom parent or as a child of a perpetrator, or what it means to inherit a political exile. It is within this cultural and sociopolitical context that a group of offspring of the adult protagonists of the 1960s and 1970s directed and performed in plays that reenacted their childhood memories of terror and disappearance (for an overview of some contemporary Latin American plays see Proaño Gómez and Verzero 2017). Emblematic plays of this trend include Mi vida después (My life after; Lola Arias, Argentina, 2008) and its Chilean version, El año en que nací (The year I was born, 2012), in which a group of actors reconstruct their parents’ youth through pictures, toys, letters, records, old clothes, and blurred memories. In the play El rumor del incendio (Rumor of fire, 2016, part of a larger multimedia project) by the Mexican theater group Lagartijas tiradas al Sol, Luisa Pardo reenacts the life of her mother, Margarita Urias Hermosillo, an ex-guerrillera during the so-called dirty war, connecting national memories of the period with her personal observations and emotions. Similarly, in the Uruguayan play Pogled by Santiago Sanguinetti and Iván Solarich (2011), Solarich re-creates different episodes of his life and his relationship with his Serbian Croatian parents, who emigrated to Uruguay and became communist militants persecuted by the dictatorship. It is also worth mentioning Límites (Borders, 2015) by the Chilean collective La Laura Palmer, in which three Argentine performers and three Chilean performers playfully tell the audience the history of the 1978 Beagle conflict, which almost

584   Jordana Blejmar resulted in Chile and Argentina going to war, intertwining important historical events with their biographies. The play’s emphasis on the idea of the border as a convention is useful for thinking about national battles, but also for reflecting on other supposedly fixed divisions challenged by all these plays, such as the private versus the public and actors versus spectators. Borders are understood here not only as imaginary separation lines but also as zones of contact, commonality, and hybridity. Like the rest of the postmemory performances, Límites also plays with the borders between disciplines, as it is a multimedia and transmedia production, simultaneously staging live music, photography, and a large screen on stage. The blending of fact and fiction in these plays has led scholars to refer to them as “new documentary theatre” (Bravo Rozas 2016), ethnodramas, or “biodramas,” a term originally coined by the Argentine dramaturge Vivi Tellas in 1998 to refer to plays that use the biographies of their performers as material for constructing the dramaturgy. The Chilean actor and director Italo Gallardo (2015 n.d.) has also called this type of theater “a performed conversation” with the public due to the rupture of the imaginary “fourth wall” with the audience. The main idea of these plays is to explore history through a personal lens and to introduce to the public a particular aspect of the performers’ lives in an (auto)fictional framework. While they are performed and directed by members of the “second generations” of the postdictatorship or postconflict era, these plays are not mere examples of what Hirsch (1992-93, 1997) has called postmemory, a term that describes the mediated and fragmented nature of the memories of children of victims of traumatic events, which are linked to the past not so much through recollection as through the imagination. Instead these plays expand and complicate the notion of postmemory. They do not conceive the experiences and memories of the children as adoptive or secondhand memories but focus instead on firsthand recollections of those years. In other words, all these plays look at the past from the perspective of what Hirsch calls the “generation after” (1997, 5), but they also show that in many of these cases the memories of the performers are not “memories of memories” and do not come after those that belonged to the members of previous generations; they instead coexist—or even conflict—with them. One key aspect of these plays is that they highlight the heterogeneous experiences (and heterogeneous memories) of the members of the same generation, since the experience of someone who was born during the events and who has therefore a vicarious memory of those years is very different from, for example, that of an older boy or girl who grew up during dictatorial regimes half-understanding what was going on around them. The way in which each of these children revisit that past in adulthood in films, plays, or literature also varies from case to case. In this vein, the Uruguayan sociologist Gabriel Gatti (2014), also the son of a disappeared father, has suggested (without explicitly citing Hirsch) that there is not one postmemory associated with the dictatorships but rather postmemories, in the plural. While some members of HIJOS, for example, attempt to recover the meaning of words (politics, identity, family) that changed forever after the coup, other filmmakers, artists and writers who are also children of disappeared parents, speak from the void or absence and produce what he calls “narratives of the absence of meaning.” These narratives point to the ruins of both modern identities and traditional ways of representation at the same time as they recognize new social spaces and affective communities born from that exhaustion. From a more radical view, the Argentine cultural theorist Beatriz Sarlo (2005, 136) dismisses the notion of postmemory altogether for considering that, in a culture characterized by the hegemony

Postmemory   585 of the mass media and where “everything is fragmentary in the twentieth century,” there is nothing ontologically different between the memories of the survivors and those of their heirs. All these memories, she argues, are mediated, fragmentary, and vicarious. There are, however, certain attributes that distinguish the cultural memories of those who grew up during the dictatorship from those of the adult survivors, not least the public and political role that emotions and feelings play in their approach to the past. Far from being conceptualized as internal and subjective experiences and obstacles that affect good judgment, emotions and feelings are treated by the directors and performers of these plays in line with Sara Ahmed’s (2004) definition of cultural emotions as the “glue” that gathers people together and the condition of possibility for a new understanding of politics and agency. This is clear, for example, in the transnational communities created by La Palmer or by Lola Arias, not only in Mi vida después but also in plays such as Campo minado (2016), where the subjective and emotional experiences of the former enemies of the Malvinas/ Falkland War (1982) allow them to create new alliances despite their different backgrounds and disagreements. The Argentine scholars Cecilia Macón and Mariela Solana (2015, 18) have highlighted the performative aspect of affects that are, according to them, “capable of altering, with their irruption, the public sphere.” They vindicate specific affects such as shame, hate, rage, and disgust and the role of the so-called negative affects in politics, a sphere more frequently associated with affects that are considered to be more positive, such as pride and joy. As argued by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010), among others, affects act and play a key role in assessing the political agency of subjects often seen as passive victims of past traumas. These plays do not put emotions on stage as a way of trying to get the audience to identify with the performers; the stage is not a space for catharsis for the victims (emotions in these plays are often visibly fake or staged). Rather they allow the performers to speak up and take center stage as vulnerable but also political subjects. That aim is in line with the notion of vulnerability theorized by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetty, and Leticia Sbasay (2016), that is, as a potential tool for resistance and activism. As we will see in the following sections, affects and emotions in Latin American postmemory plays also invite us to discuss the blind spots of historical chronicles and legal testimonies. These plays offer a subjective view of history, but at the same time a reading of the private/public dichotomy as a political tension.

Memory as a Collective Effort Villa+Discurso and Cuarto intermedio propose a slightly different relationship between politics, postmemory, and performance to that set out by the plays referred to in the previous section. Like those productions, these plays also put postmemory subjects on stage. Here, however, the performers do not reconstruct a past that they did not live or that they lived when very young but rather discuss a series of politics of memory of the present and the role of performance (and art more generally) in those politics. Both plays also put on stage less traditional postmemory subjects. The daughters in Villa are also biological descendants of perpetrators, thus complicating the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, and in

586   Jordana Blejmar Cuarto intermedio, Zwaig, the French daughter of exiled Argentine parents, introduces questions associated with the underexplored issue of intergenerational transmission of memory in the diaspora. Thus in these plays the children-performers do not act as Hamlet-like figures, interrogating their parents’ specters; instead they act as guides, translators, and intermediators between human rights activists and professionals (the committee responsible for a memory site in one case, those in charge of putting perpetrators on trial in the other) and the audience. They are, in that sense, examples of a recent trend in Latin America that examines ways in which the heirs of the traumatic past relate to collective and personal traumas beyond family narratives and the first-person. In Villa the main actresses play the role of daughters of female victims of the Chilean dictatorship, a piece of information revealed only at the end of the play; in Cuarto intermedio, one of the two performers is a son of disappeared parents. Neither of these plays, however, are so much about the personal struggles of these former children of the dictatorships; instead they address how we are all directly or indirectly implicated in that violent past. In this vein, these plays also exemplify recent efforts in memory studies to expand the universe of postmemory and the different ways we are connected to past crimes. By displacing the role of the heirs of the dictatorship, both Villa and Cuarto intermedio exercise what Hirsch (2011) describes as an “affiliative postmemory,” a structure of transmission that refers to the circulations of memories beyond the family frame. Hirsch proposes this term as a way of acknowledging “the difference between an intergenerational vertical identification of child and parent occurring within the family and the intra-generational horizontal identification that makes that child’s position more broadly available to other contemporaries” (115). The idea of affiliative postmemory is linked to what Michael Rothberg (2019) has called the “implicated subject,” a category that breaks the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, one that often fails to provide an adequate explanation for how violence works. It refers to people who are not directly part of the scene but who are still implicated in histories of violence via indirect participation. Rothberg distinguishes diachronic from synchronic implication; the former refers to our participation in past histories (for example, being a third-generation descendant of a Nazi). Here the implicated subject bears some sort of responsibility as part of someone who lives in a place where a crime has been perpetrated to which he or she belongs. “Synchronic implication” refers to our participation in events of the past that are still unfolding (for example, in a globalized world our implication in the death of the thousands of children in developing countries dying in clandestine workshops where the clothes we wear are made). For Rothberg, implication is a form of complicity but lacks the legal or moral connotations traditionally associated with complicity. It is an ethical and sometimes political term and has to do with direct and indirect consent. He argues that the implicated subject is not an identity but rather a subject position that we sometimes occupy and sometimes do not. At the heart of both Hirsch’s and Rothberg’s reflections are key questions about transmission that also animate the plays studied here: What does it mean to inherit history, and what is our responsibility toward a shared traumatic past?

Postmemory   587

Villa+Speech In a text written for the debate about what to do with the ESMA Memory Site in Buenos Aires, the survivor Lila Pastoriza (2005 n.d.) poses the following questions: “How do we make ‘multiple approaches’ coexist and listen to each other, producing the consensus that allows us to move forward? What do we want to represent [in those sites]? With what objective? In what way?” Villa explores similar questions about the future of memory in terms of production and reception, highlighting the conflicts of interests that always animate these debates. Calderón was born two years before Pinochet’s coup and is one of the most celebrated contemporary directors in Latin America. Born in 1971, his first play was Neva (2006), a one-word title that set the trend for his following productions: Diciembre, Clase, Villa, Mateluna, and so on. For Calderón theater is a space to debate issues of human rights, memory, and impunity. His plays are thus “text-driven; the focus is not the stage, props or even actors’ movements, but rather language and what the words can mean in and out of the theatrical context” (Hernández 2013, 64). His trademark is a combination of empty stage, simple lighting, and actors with wireless microphones, which transforms the theater into a quasi-private space, one that establishes an intimate relationship between actors and audience. These minimalist creations, dispossessed of external resources or props and not at all spectacular (Piña 2015, 170), focus primarily on the performers, their dialogue and expressions. Calderón wrote Villa to provide a historical contextual framework for his play Discurso. Villa and Discurso are often performed together, but they were conceived separately. (Here I focus only on Villa; see Hernández [2013] for an analysis of Discurso.) Both plays are examples of his understanding of theater as both a future-orientated field and one that intervenes directly into the political memory debates of the present. In this play the three Alejandras gather around a wooden table that holds a model of Villa Grimaldi. The miniature model suggests, as an imaginative exercise, that the same performance takes place inside it, thus producing an effect of mise-en-abyme. When Villa is performed in the real Villa Grimaldi, there is the same multiplying effect of a mirror reflecting another mirror. The play extends beyond space and time to reach the borders of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park. There is thus an indissoluble relationship between the site and its representation and performance, between history (the physical location of Villa) and memory (the different narratives attached to it), and between theater and life. Villa Grimaldi, which included the Cuartel Terranova, the center of operations of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional active between 1974 and 1978, was destroyed to erase any trace of the crimes committed there. The women are thus given the task of deciding what to do with the ruins. They discuss three options. The first is to rebuild the Villa as it was during the dictatorship, to demonstrate, especially to foreigners who visit the country, that there was no “perfect crime” and that the house is material proof of those felonies. But what seems like a legitimate argument soon becomes something more sinister: “I would rebuild everything,” says Carla Romero, one of the actresses, “the silence, the terrible smell, the motors of the night, the artistic ambience, and I would buy the paraphernalia, the bed . . . the smell of shit. . . . I would create a kind of Disneyland, of realistic reality so that people could feel what the victims felt. And I would make the public feel like prisoners. I would make

588   Jordana Blejmar them wait, I would separate men from women, in short I would make them suffer and I would get some survivors from the original Villa to act as guides.” Confronted by this disturbing scenario, another Alejandra (played by Isabel Ruiz) proposes building a museum of contemporary art instead, a white house containing nice things. This proposal also quickly becomes more terrifying than it first appears. This Alejandra imagines visitors using Mac computers that contain photographs and information about those who betrayed their fellow comrades and software that would allow visitors to imagine “the path not taken” by the victims. But the most controversial proposal of all is to incorporate an artistic intervention with a German shepherd in a corral to remind visitors that the prisoners in that place were raped with dogs. This disturbing scene is also provocatively and darkly humorous: “Alejandra suggests that in order for the installation to be successful the museum should acquire different dogs so that they can take turns performing, since after all, they also have rights and they should be able to take breaks to comply with the law” (Hernández 2013, 75). Finally, the third Alejandra (Macarena Zamudio) discusses another option for the site: to leave the Villa as it is because somehow the site speaks for itself: “Collage, pastiche, without plan. And one day there was a park and one day this park was of peace, that is, it is a beginning, a monument to the collective, to popular organization.” As Lila Pastoriza (2005, 85) points out, “It is usually said that these sites ‘speak for themselves’ and in some sense there is no doubt that this is the case. When seeing them, touching them, crossing them, being where the events occurred, the visitor feels the concrete presence of the past.” But the three women are not so sure about this option either, because “basically it is a shy idea,” more like not proposing anything at all. A fourth option—“to rebuild the place as it was before and create the illusion that nothing happened here . . . a happy house”—is only briefly mentioned before being quickly dismissed. To answer the question of what to do with the place, Villa seems to suggest, there are other questions that should be answered first: What to remember, what for, and for whom? Memory is not an abstract construction. It must speak to someone, and it must speak to future generations. This issue is directly addressed toward the end of the play, when by chance the three Alejandras reveal that they are all daughters of women who were raped in Villa Grimaldi. (One, the blonde Alejandra, is the daughter of a Mapuche mother raped by a torturer of German origin.) The late revelation of the direct connection between the female characters and the site in this play suspends the survivor’s “privilege” to speak, even if momentarily, and allows for a more inclusive community of memory based on common interests and political ideas rather than on biological ties and what Cecilia Sosa (2014) has called in her attempts to queer and expand memory, the “wounded families” of the dictatorships. Behind the women, on the wall, is a sign with a timeline that includes key events and photos of the history of Chile and a phrase—“What happened in this house, also happened outside it. State terrorism operated on the whole country”—that reminds the (Chilean) audience that what happened in Chile is not a family, private, or domestic issue concerning only those directly affected by terror but one that affects everyone. And as such, memory, and the decisions about what to do with traces of the past, is also a collective effort. Asked about which of the three options he preferred, Calderón, who wrote the scripts for the audio-guides of the Peace Park at Villa Grimaldi, said that he believed the relatives of the victims should decide what to do with the place. But the production offers a more

Postmemory   589 complex answer because the women are not any children but children of both victims and perpetrators. They are all called Alejandra in reference to “la Flaca Alejandra,” a Grimaldi survivor and member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), who ended up collaborating with the military, had a relationship with one of them, and whom many consider a traitor. “I wanted for them to be the trauma themselves, and the Alejandras in the play are the impossible conundrum of being the daughters of the victims and of the perpetrators and they are not using their real names, they use noms de guerre,” says Calderón (Interview with Jean Graham-Jones 2017, n.d.). Paola Hernández (2013, 69) suggests that they could be the same person divided into three characters. This divided identity—part daughter of victim, part daughter of perpetrator—complicates the notion of postmemory, the intergenerational transmission of trauma to which these characters are exposed, and the perpetrator/victim dichotomy that often dominates both memory studies and the performances of postdictatorship generations in the region. Moreover, the fictional presence of Bachelet in Discurso, both a survivor and Chile’s former president, evokes the blurry distinction between private and public dramas (she did not address her abduction publicly until a television interview in 2014) and between the different positions of implication that the same subject may have in relation to the dictatorial past.

Recess: A Practical Guide for Trials of Crimes against Humanity Cuarto intermedio: Guía práctica para juicios de lesa humanidad is a multimedia lectureperformance first performed in 2018 at one of the former houses of the writer Victoria Ocampo, now converted into an art space in Buenos Aires. It formed part of a literature series organized by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes known as Literatura Expandida (Expanded Literature), a project that sought to blur disciplinary borders and explore the connections between different artistic fields. In the play a human rights lawyer (Zwaig) and a son of disappeared parents (Bruzzone) share with the audience their knowledge of the trials of crimes against humanity. Bruzzone and Zwaig talk about how to get to the trials (which bus to take and what is the best shortcut to get there), what people can do in the trials, and the bloopers and errors that occurred there. They offer advice about what to bring to hearings and where to buy the best coffee in the courts. They also imagine a future for those trials, what will happen with everything that has been said and recorded there. Questions about the future of memory and the intergenerational transmission of memories are thus also at the heart of this performance. Like Villa+Discurso, Cuarto intermedio aims to generate awareness of human rights issues, but it goes one step further by directly interpellating the audience and encouraging them to participate actively at the hearings. If people will not go to the trials being held in Comodoro Py, then Bruzzone and Zwaig will take the trials to the people. The play thus echoes similar initiatives by the postmemory generations—notably HIJOS campaigns such as “Yo me pongo la camiseta por el Juicio y Castigo a los genocidas” (I wear the T-shirt of Trial and Punishment for Genocides) or “Dibujar (en) los juicios” (Drawing [in] the trials)—that also aim to get people involved in these human rights struggles.

590   Jordana Blejmar Performance is a logical tool for this task as theater and trials share common ground. Trials are always mise-en-scènes and involve re-presentations of a drama. In Argentina some trials against the perpetrators of the dictatorship even took place in theaters, as was the case with the trial related to the detention and torture center known as La Cacha: the audience was located in the stalls and the trial took place on stage. There was even a theatrical dynamic, with attendees leaving their coats at the Ticket Office and being given a number to pick them up afterward (Alfón 2014). Cuarto intermedio presents the trials as a real drama, but also as a black comedy or, more specifically, a comedy of errors. At one point, for example, Bruzzone tells the audience that one of the Infojus news correspondents spent a considerable amount of time listening to a different hearing than the one originally assigned to him because he got lost in the building. Cuarto intermedio also incorporates something of an atypical romantic comedy. “I have an affair with the B side of the trials,” says Zwaig, known in Comodoro Py as “the joy of the trials,” “an affair with those anecdotes of the everyday, of the theatrical that is present in any judicial hearing.” Bruzzone—whom the writer Tamara Kamenszain (2016, 105) calls a “lover instead of hater”—then confesses, “I started to be a little fan [of the trials] too.” The trials also have elements of action films; Bruzzone and Zwaig compare the three stages of the mega ESMA case with the Star Wars trilogy. Like any good thriller, the trials have villains, superheroes, “devil’s advocates” (the title of a chronicle that Bruzzone and Zwaig [n.d.] wrote for the magazine Anfibia about the defenders of the perpetrators), drama, crying, and performers. Despite all this apparent “entertainment,” however, the hearings can also be extremely boring. Bruzzone talks about three fears he had when Infojus asked him to cover a trial hearing: the fear of not knowing what was going to happen, the fear of not understanding what was happening, and the fear of getting bored. It is not only journalists and chroniclers covering the trials who have to fight against boredom. Trials can also be boring for the accused, even as their fate is being decided. Alfón (2014) relates the case of a repressor who used to fight boredom during the hearings with crossword puzzles. “Cuarto intermedio,” the judicial term that refers to an official pause in a trial during which nothing happens, is thus an apt title for the play. Beyond the courtroom the trials seem to cause not so much boredom as indifference. Bruzzone and Zwaig interview people away from Comodoro Py and ask them if they know about the trials, where they are taking place, and if they would like to go. The interviews are shown to the audience on a large screen located on one side of the stage. Most people respond that, yes, they would go to the trials, but they have not gone yet. There is also a moment when the performers invite spectators to participate in the (fictional) trials reenacted on stage. Spectators are converted into actors. They are given a booklet, and each is assigned a role, as judge, complainant, witness, or defense attorney. Bruzzone and Zwaig act here as “memory recruiters” or “memory headhunters” both inside and outside the theater, encouraging empathy between the wider society and those directly affected by the crimes. Cuarto intermedio shows in this way that the transmission of the past is not a natural or involuntary process, nor one that takes place in the private sphere, but is rather a collective effort involving political will and civil engagement. The performers are heirs of that past but also guides and translators, challenging once again the apparent opposition between actor and spectator, victim and memory agent.

Postmemory   591 Toward the end of the performance the issue of translation (and transmission) is directly addressed. Bruzzone wonders if there is a dictionary that contains all the explanations for terms related to crimes against humanity. Zwaig says that she has a dictionary that she brought from France precisely for that purpose. While she reads, in French, the literal definitions of terms such as forced disappearance, torture, and humanity, Bruzzone reads in Spanish similar entries that they wrote for their own “Larousse Ilustrado de Lesa Humanidad” (Illustrated Larousse of crimes against humanity). But the entries in Spanish are not literal translations of the entries in French, and the definitions of those entries are loose interpretations (including metaphors, images, allegories) of the words in question. There is no closure of meaning here but semantic proliferation, borrowings of languages, blurry frontiers between the fictional and the documentary, the factual and the imaginary. The performers, for example, replace the expression “forced disappearance,” which they find in the French dictionary, with the word “fan” (ventilador). In their dictionary, the definition of that word is a fragment of the testimony of a woman whose sister was disappeared: “Mom dressed the fan with clothes of the negrita. And she said that at night the negrita used to come and talk to her. She had hope in her heart that my sister would come back and talk to her. She dressed the fan with my sister’s clothes.” For the entry “Literature” in the French dictionary, Bruzzone and Zwaig choose “Literature and cinema” for their own dictionary: “The thing that gets mentioned the most in the trials of crimes against humanity are films,” says Bruzzone. The entry includes the anecdote of a survivor who, during a hearing and while being interrogated about the looks of a repressor who tortured her, mistakenly described Al Pacino instead of her torturer, because he was nicknamed after a character played by the US actor. This confusion between fiction and reality is also present in the entry “documentary film,” which includes an anecdote about how, in one of the trials, a policeman in charge of the transmission recorded an episode of The Simpsons instead of the hearing. The common denominator for these entries is the difficulty of transmitting (and translating) trauma and the “catastrophe of meaning” (Gatti 2014, 15) introduced by the coup. More than literal representations and definitions, this history demands nonrepresentational affective encounters with images that provoke what Massumi has called “a shock to thought”: “a jolt that does not so much reveal truth as thrust involuntarily into a mode of critical inquiry” (quoted in Benett  2005, 11). The performers’ dictionary of rhizomatic echoes is indeed the product of a reorganization of the ways we lived and communicated in the world before the coup. Disappearance—the absence of a body to mourn, the negation of death—is such an extreme experience that we can name it, we can approach it only with a combination of registers and languages, with disciplinary hybridity, ambiguity, and intermediality, all elements that in this play respond to both an aesthetic and a political decision. Cuarto intermedio is thus about boredom, indifference, and confusion, all negative affects, but also about empathy, joyful encounters, and hope. At the end of the play the performers imagine a future invaded by apes (the idea evokes the humorous apocalyptic futures imagined by the performers in Mi vida después). “This dictionary is for them,” they say, because when they arrive “they are going to enter Comodoro Py, they will find the videos and the files of crimes against humanity and they will not understand a thing.” There are hundreds of hours of footage, hundreds of files (“the weight of justice in this story”), and thousands of testimonies, all of which will never be able to transmit the real meaning of

592   Jordana Blejmar what happened. Here Bruzzone and Zwaig propose a notion of the archive that incorporates the personal and the subjective. The performance itself is part of that affective, ever-changing archive of both memory and history.

Conclusion Villa+Discurso and Cuarto intermedio are part of a new type of political and postmemorial theater in Latin America. The 1990s witnessed the “second generations”, particularly those who formed part of HIJOS, in the streets, the avant-garde of that innovative combination of performance and politics that were the escraches, public denunciations outside the homes of perpetrators accompanied by live music, sketches using giant puppets, and a lot of noise. In the 2000s those who grew up during dictatorships returned to the enclosed space of the theater, but one that has a dynamic relationship with the outside, one that is not so much text-based as a “performative conversation” with the public. And those on stage are no longer only children of the victims but young men and women who have diverse experiences of living and growing up under terror. They form a new and expanded community of affiliative postmemory, gathered together by their efforts to remember the past but, perhaps more important, by the desire to imagine new, promising futures. By putting on stage diverse types of postmemorial subjects, with different grades of implication toward a shared past, these plays invite us to revisit history beyond the victim/perpetrator dichotomy and encourage us to build, collectively and collaboratively, a “theatre without spectators.”

Notes 1. Argentina (1976–83), Chile (1973–90), Uruguay (1973–85), Brazil (1964–85), and Paraguay (1954–89) were all ruled by military dictatorships during this period. Other Latin American countries were also marked by civil wars and violence. In the 1960s, for example, Mexico suffered a so-called dirty war, an internal conflict between the PRI government (backed by the US) and left-wing student and guerrilla groups. The conflict between Colombian government forces, paramilitary groups, crime syndicates, and left-wing guerrillas such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) has dominated the country’s politics for over half a century and has produced a vast number of dead and displaced persons. In 1980 in Peru the Maoist organization Shining Path started an insurrectional war after a decade of military rule (1968–80). The internal armed conflict lasted until the mid-1990s and produced thousands of victims. 2. In Argentina, Néstor Kirchner was elected president in 2003 (he died in 2010). He was succeeded by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, his wife, for terms in 2007–11 and 2011–5. Hugo Chávez was president of Venezuela from 1990 to 2013. In Bolivia Evo Morales was elected president three times: 2006–9, 2009–14, and 2014–present. In Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was president in 2003–11, followed by Dilma Rousseff, a former victim of the dictatorship, before she was impeached and removed from office in 2016. In Chile Michelle Bachelet led two administrations: 2006–10 and 2014–8. José “Pepe” Mujica served as president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. In Mexico, Vicente Fox (president in 2000–6) created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Social and Political Movements of the Past, for judicial

Postmemory   593 investigations into state crimes against political movements. In Peru, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was published in 2003.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alfón, Fernando. 2014. “Juicios x escritores: ‘La divina comedia y las formas jurídicas.’ ” Infojus, March 17. http://infojusnoticias.gov.ar/especiales/juicios-x-escritores-la-divina-comedia-ylas-formas-juridicas-55.html. Bennett, Jill. 2005. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. California: Stanford University Press. Blejmar, Jordana. 2016. Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bravo Rozas, Cristina. 2016. “El nuevo teatro documento en Argentina, Uruguay y Chile: La reapropiación de la memoria.” Acotaciones, July–December: 117–42. http://www.resad.es/ Acotaciones/index.php/ACT/article/view/121. Bruzzone, Félix, and Mónica Zwaig. N.d. “Los abogados del diablo.” Revista Anfibia. http:// www.revistaanfibia.com/cronica/los-abogados-del-diablo/. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, eds. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Calderón, Guillermo. 2014. Interview with Jean Graham-Jones, PEN World Voices 14, 28 April. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5C9MO0uCVE. Gallardo, Ítalo. 2015. Interview with Radio Universidad de Chile, 24 June. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiUltoHjCdM. Gatti, Gabriel. 2014. Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay: Identity and Meaning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory  J.  Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham & London, Duke University Press. Hernández, Paola. 2013. “Remapping Memory Discourses: Villa+Discourse by Guillermo Calderón.” South Central Review 30, no. 5: 61–82. Hirsch, Marianne. 1992–93 “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse 15, no 2: 3–29. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photograph, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2011. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. Kamenzsain, Tamara. 2016. Una intimidad inofensiva: Los que escribe con lo que hay. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia. Macón, Cecilia, and Mariela Solana. 2015. Pretérito indefinido: Afectos y emociones en las aproximaciones al pasado. Buenos Aires: Título. Pastoriza, Lila. 2005. “La memoria como política pública: Los ejes de la discusión.” In Memoria en construcción: El debate sobre la ESMA, edited by Marcelo Brodsky, 85–94. Buenos Aires: La marca editora. Piña, Juan Andrés. 2015. “Verbalidad, política y poesía en el teatro de Guillermo Calderón.” Estudios politicos 137: 165–82. Proaño Gómez, Lola, and Lorena Verzero, eds. 2017. Perspectivas políticas de la escena latinoamericana: Diálogos en tiempos presente. Buenos Aires: Argus-a.

594   Jordana Blejmar Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso. Rothberg, Michael. 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sarlo, Beatriz. 2005. Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Sosa, Cecilia. 2014. Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship. London: Tamesis.

chapter 37

Per for mi ng Politica l Empath y Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison

Introduction Politics can be intensely emotional. Few would contest this observation. Emotions are highly political as well, both in terms of how they function in everyday life and through their inherently social nature. Indeed in this sense the relationship between emotions and politics can be conceived of as co-constitutive. Political forces shape and constrain how we feel, but emotions can also generate political transformation. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the role of performance in this relationship between emotions and politics. We do so by examining the role that empathy plays in cultivating cultures of reconciliation after conflict and trauma. The political and performative roles of emotions are particularly visible in the wake of conflict. This is why we focus on the links between emotions in postconflict, conciliatory politics. Traumatic events, such as wars or terrorist attacks, disrupt continuity and generate powerful emotions, most notably fear, anger, and resentment. In many instances, political actors deal with the legacy of trauma by reimposing the order that has been violated (Edkins 2003). Emotions can in this way be directed by elites who are concerned with reinstating political stability and social control. Healing often becomes more about retribution and revenge than an active attempt to move toward understandings that may beget peace, collaboration, and emotional catharsis. This is a familiar pattern in conflict zones, from the Middle East to Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka to Somalia, from Iraq to East Timor, and from Rwanda to Kashmir. Years, decades, and in some cases even centuries of conflict and the historical legacies of conflict have left many societies deeply divided and traumatized. In these contexts, new forms of violence often reemerge, generating yet more resentment (see Kaplan 2001, 2005; Volkan 1997).

596   roland bleiker and emma hutchison The key argument we advance is that a performative approach illuminates not only how emotions can perpetuate conflict but also how they can help divided societies adopt reflective cultures of reconciliation. The performative dimensions of emotions are particularly crucial because they are the place where emotions are presented in the social realm and can thus be seen to link individual, embodied emotions and collective ones. Consider, for instance, how televised representations of a terrorist attack can communicate individual experiences to a much larger, often global public. Such representations can occur in images and narratives, by word of mouth, via old and new media sources, in the countless stories that societies tell about themselves and others. These representations are important and are moreover performative insofar as they allow communities to collectively experience the respective events and in turn enact particular emotional and political responses. To be clear at the outset, we define performance as processes that seek “to communicate to an audience meaning-making related to state institutions, policies and discourses” (Rai 2014, 1–2). Performances can take place in multiple ways, such as in speeches, television broadcasts, protests, and social media representations. But key to all forms of “performative politics” is what Judith Butler (2010, 147) calls “acts of self-constitution”: ways that both foreclose and enable political possibilities, conditions, and realities. We illustrate our argument about the importance of performance—and the links between performativity and emotions—by focusing on the political role of empathy. Empathy is commonly defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Oxford English Dictionary). Promoting empathy in postconflict societies can enable understandings of how and why various parties to a conflict—both victims and perpetrators—feel the things they do. This is precisely where an understanding of the performativity of emotions comes in. By focusing on how individuals and communities collectively enact particular kinds of emotions after conflict, a performative approach to emotions emphasizes the need to acknowledge all types of traumatic emotions and helps to devise active mechanisms through which societies can move on. This is not to say that empathy is always a positive force. For instance, imagining the mind of a perpetrator of violence can both be terrifying and entrench societal divisions. But at the same time, successful reconciliation requires opening up political spaces where feelings of injustice can be recognized, accepted, and, if possible, worked through collaboratively (see Mihai 2016; Yoder 2006). Key here is a social environment wherein fear and anger can be acknowledged in a way that allows divided societies to overcome ideas about justice that center around retribution or revenge. But an additional and active engagement with empathy and compassion is essential if societies are to succeed in working through trauma in transformative rather than merely restorative ways (see Schaap 2005). Instead of inscribing dichotomous or even righteous forms of defining identity, this alternative would seek to open a space where more accepting and empathetic configurations of community can be generated. Key to peaceful postconflict possibilities is an approach that not only conceives of emotions and political agency as inherently linked but also suggests communities need to consciously draw and reflect upon these links in order to move forward in ways that free societies from past pain and division. We begin the chapter by briefly overviewing and situating our inquiry within the broader literature on emotions and conflict. We then survey prevailing approaches to emotions and

performing political empathy   597 conflict, showing how they focus primarily on managing fear and anger. Equipped with this background, we focus more explicitly on the key purpose of this chapter: advancing an appreciation of the performative dimensions of emotional politics. Using this framework, we illustrate how actively drawing on empathy and compassion can promote alternative ways of dealing with conflict that are more conducive to promoting a politics of reconciliation. We do this by examining one specific case study that outlines the roles that art, and in particular theater, plays in peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. When developing these positions and the illustration, we draw on and expand some of our previous work on this topic, most notably Bleiker (2012), Bleiker and Hutchison (2008), Hutchison (2014, 2016, forthcoming), Hutchison and Bleiker (2008, 2013, 2014).

Conceptualizing Emotions and Conflict Few realms are more emotional than politics. Politicians intuitively know how to tap into the emotions of their electorates. Fear drives and surrounds war, terrorism, and the construction of strategy and security. Diplomatic negotiations could not be pursued without a basic level of trust. Empathy is central to successful peacebuilding processes. The list of examples is endless. And although present in many theories, from realism to liberalism, emotions have largely been only implied and, as a result, overlooked as an explicit element that is central to political life. They have been seen as phenomena that rational policymakers deal with or react against. Over the past decade or two numerous scholars have started to address head-on the role of emotions in politics and international relations. The need to rethink the dichotomy of emotion and rationality is now widely recognized. The politics of emotions has thus become a burgeoning area of research. The respective debates stretch across areas that include security and strategy, foreign policy analysis, statecraft and diplomacy, international political economy, international aid and humanitarianism, and development. Take just one example: the emotional predispositions and bonds that develop between political leaders. Studies in political psychology and foreign policy were among the first international relations approaches to take emotions seriously. Emerging in the 1970s, contributions explored the relationship between emotion and reason in the process of decision-making. They opposed the assumption that decisions are taken on the basis of “classical rationality,” stressing instead that leaders often have no choice but to draw upon ideas and insights that may involve “the emotional rather than the calculating part of the brain” (Hill 2003, 116). More recent work draws on neuroscience and other literatures to explore how emotions shape face-to-face diplomacy (e.g., Holmes 2013). Add to this that historians have long examined how heads of state and other decision-makers are influenced by the emotional context in which they grew up, think, and operate (see Costigliola 2012). Emotions are usually defined as conscious manifestations of bodily feelings, but, from a political perspective, it is important to stress that emotions have social dimensions too. When exploring this point some scholars draw a distinction between emotions and affect. While emotions, such as fear and anger, can be identified and analyzed, affect is, by contrast, presented as broader and subconscious bodily sensations, such as atmosphere, mood, intuition, temperament, attachment, disposition, and even memory (see Ross 2006, 199;

598   roland bleiker and emma hutchison Holmes 2015). We use the terms emotions and affect somewhat interchangeably because for us the distinction between them is not as clear-cut and as mutually exclusive as some scholars maintain. Affective states are subconscious factors that still nonetheless frame and influence our more conscious emotional evaluations of the social world. We cannot offer a comprehensive overview of the literature on emotions and politics here. Instead we illustrate the issues by engaging and briefly reviewing the literature with regard to one particular realm: the links between emotions and conflict.

Prevailing Approaches to Conflict: Managing Communities of Fear and Anger Emotions become particularly visible, acute, and politically relevant in situations of conflict. Traumatic events challenge and fracture not only an individual’s feeling of self but also a society’s sense of unity and community. Trauma can generate powerful emotions, such as fear, anger, mistrust, and betrayal, which can in turn bind societies and communities together by generating a culture of resentment and anxiety. The disruptive, chaotic, and emotional situation that follows traumatic political events constitutes a unique political opportunity to construct new forms of identity and community—forms that are less likely to lead to violence and new conflict. In reality, though, such opportunities are far too often lost. In most cases, the social dislocation wrought by traumatic events is countered immediately with political projects that seek to mobilize the unleashed emotional energy in ways that restore a sense of community, security, and order (see, e.g., Edkins 2003, 9–16, 215–33). Efforts to control panic and injury are made, but as Andrew Schaap (2005, 13–5) argues, in so doing the very exclusions and prejudices that initiate conflict are often unknowingly reconstituted. Certain emotions—hatred, fear, and anger—become central tools for political appropriation, while others, such as empathy, compassion, and wonder, become marginalized. The consequences are often fatal, leading to new sources of hate and thus to new forms of conflict. Of central importance here are manipulations of the politics of fear (see Ahmed 2004, 62–81; Brown 1995, 68–73; Butler 2004, 19–49; Holmes 2004, 130–1). Postconflict societies are not simply divided by the pain of past or continuing injustices, but also by the feelings that accompany traumatic histories and memories. Significantly, these emotions often extend to broader social relations. This is not simply the case for those who have survived or witnessed trauma firsthand; it is also true of society more generally. Fear and anger can be passed down generations, transcending the structures and boundaries within the wider social or communal sphere, and can influence perceptions of the world and of others. Phenomena that are feared also engender anxiety and hostility toward outsiders, because they threaten (see Ahmed 2004, 78–9; Furedi 2004; 2005, 122–5). We do not deny that fear and anger have no place in processes of political reconciliation. Such emotions should, indeed, be of central concern (Muldoon 2008; Govier 2002). Recognizing fear and anger brings them into the public sphere, and in so doing incorporates them into processes that aim to placate feelings of revenge and create a culture of healing and collaboration. But when fear and anger remain unacknowledged and unaddressed, they can easily

performing political empathy   599 re-create a culture of anxiety and resentment. They then risk becoming objects of short-term political manipulation. The political response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, illustrates how politicians frequently appropriate the feelings of fear and anger that are associated with trauma. Consider how Washington’s foreign policy became immediately centered around this major event. Couched in a rhetoric of “good” versus “evil,” the US reaction to 9/11 reestablished the sense of order and certitude that had existed during the Cold War: an inside/outside world in which, according to the American president at the time, George W. Bush, “you are either with us or against us” (quoted on CNN, November 6, 2001). The long-term consequences of such antagonistic political manipulations are far-reaching. A political community that is constituted by feelings of anger and fear of the outside will inevitably be dragged into new forms of conflict. In the wake of 9/11 political elites have constituted a world where to be secure means to be cordoning off a safe inside—a sovereign state protected by military means—from a threatening outside. But almost two decades after 9/11 the specter of terrorism remains as threatening and potent as ever. The wars of response in Afghanistan and Iraq have not brought peace but, instead, generated new forms of hatred and political violence that go far beyond the immediate causes and consequences of the original terrorist attack. One could suggest that given the ensuing escalations in conflict, including the years fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it is difficult to hold in sight a genuine end to the cycle of violence. Fault lines of conflict and trauma have instead been set for decades.

Appreciating the Performative Dimensions of Emotional Politics How, then, is one to understand this distinctive and seemingly intractable cycle of emotions and conflict? And how is it possible—conceptually and politically—to find a way to more peaceful, stable, and potentially forward- and indeed outward-looking political relations? The key argument we advance in this chapter is that a performative approach—or, more specifically, an understanding of the politics and potentials of performativity—can not only shed light on the links between emotions and conflict but can also help to identify ways out of the ensuing cycles of violence. Our approach to performance and performativity builds on the work of a range of postpositivist and feminist scholars, such as Jeffrey Alexander (2004), Judith Butler (1990; 1997; 2010; 2011), Shirin Rai (2014), and Cynthia Weber (1998). Foremost here, and as Rai (2014, 1–2) highlights, is that performances are politically imperative because they establish social and political links between the private and the public realms. This is also precisely why they are crucial to understanding the relationship between emotions, conflict, and reconciliation. Performances are, at their most basic level, what individuals and collectives do and through which they find and make meaning. They are crucial because they are the everyday practices through which individual emotions both acquire and reflect wider collective, political dimensions (Labanyi  2010, 223–4). Put differently, it is through the everyday and seemingly mundane and often unconscious performing—that is, the doing— of emotions that individuals formulate and embody their social relationships and sense of

600   roland bleiker and emma hutchison personal meaning and identity. A performative approach to emotions thus emphasizes that emotions have “both a social and a psychic dimension” and that these are simultaneously constituting through the act of “doing things” (Braunmühl 2012, 224; Labanyi 2010). Performances can therefore be seen to work in collaboration with forms of representation. Indeed this is crucial to appreciating how emotions attain often pivotal political significance, such as during and after times of conflict. At a first instance, emotions are personal and inherently private phenomena: they have to do with how we feel as individuals in our own bodies. But emotions, as embodied as they are, become collective through practices of representation. We can really know the emotions of others only through representations— through the gestures that communicate the things we feel (Fierke  2002, 95–99; Ross 2006). It is through these representations—through ways of seeing, sensing, perceiving, and interpreting—that individuals “act out” and in essence thus “perform” their place in society (Braunmühl 2012, 233). Performing emotions, then, provides a pathway for individuals and communities to simultaneously experience and enact politics. The issue of conflict and trauma is illustrative here. Although distant witnesses can never truly understand the emotions of somebody affected by a tragedy, the process of communication establishes a public context where the private nature of grief can be ascribed wider social meaning and significance. Luc Boltanski (1999, 152) speaks of “an unstable position between real emotion and fictional emotion.” There will always be voices that seek to tell stories about emotions, weaving their accounts— incomplete as they may well be—into the fabric of both individual and collective conceptions of being and knowing (Ahmed 2004, 20–39, 92–100). These voices, and the manner in which they are performed publicly, generate a public discourse in which audiences make sense of conflict and suffering. There are, of course, numerous ways in which emotions are performed and communicated, from political speeches and constitutional declarations to protest marches and televised depictions of famine, terrorism, or any other major political events. Take the example of democratic politics. Rai (2014, 1180) stresses how performances allow publics to judge the “authenticity, legitimacy and liminality” of the various claims that are made and the actors that advance them. Stephen Coleman (2015), in a similar way, identifies at least three performative sites in democracies: the politicians who stage their campaigns, the media that edits and diffuses these performances, and the voters who cast their verdict. The relationship between these three sites of performance is in constant flux and inevitably linked to changing power relationships. New forms of power may emerge once an audience is aware of the theatrical politics that surrounds the struggle over governance. Expressed in different words: being aware of the performative aspects involved in elections allows citizens to move from passive consumers to active agents (Rai 2010, see also Rai 2014). Consider a few examples of how performances forge links between individual and collective emotions. Televised depictions of a terrorist attack set in place socially embedded emotional processes that shape not only direct survivors but also a much larger community of people. Representations can occur through images and narratives, by word of mouth, via old and new media sources, through the countless stories that societies tell about themselves and others. Ross (2014) writes of the “circulation of affect,” of how emotions are consciously and unconsciously diffused in numerous ways, including through their public display. Ross suggests we can conceive of group-level emotions only through the types of meaning that are manifested in the expression of emotions. This is why he urges scholars

performing political empathy   601 to investigate how identities are being constituted through narratives, images, and other representations (Ross 2006, 201). These are the processes through which emotions become manifest and defined. They shape identities, attachments, attitudes, behaviors, and communities and, in doing so, establish the emotional fabric that binds people together (see AbuLughod and Lutz 1990, 13–6; Lutz 1988). There are already several studies that explicitly or implicitly turn to representational-based research to explore the consequences of how collective emotions are evoked (Fattah and Fierke  2009; Fierke  2012; Löwenheim and Heimann 2008; Ross 2006; Saurette 2006; Solomon 2012). The influence that performative representations of emotion exert on political dynamics is particularly evident in the realm of visual culture. A growing body of literature examines how in the age of globalization various senses interact with the visual and how the visual has come to be seen as a particularly “reliable,” even “authentic” way of knowing the world (Mitchell 1994, 2005; Bleiker 2018). Some go as far as stressing that the real political battles today are being fought precisely within these visual and seemingly imaginary fields of media representations, where “affectively charged images” shape our understanding of political phenomena more so than the actual phenomena themselves (Bronfen 2005). “Performance makes visible,” Janelle Reinelt and Shirin Rai (2015, 14) stress, pointing out that performances are forms of power in the sense that they have to do with how multiple actors and positions struggle to engage the public stage in an attempt to contest political issues and gain legitimacy. Images are central to shaping and reshaping how audiences respond to conflict and to political phenomena in general.

Alternative Approaches to Conflict: Toward a Performative Politics of Empathy If the performative dimension of emotions does indeed play a significant role in shaping identity and conflict patterns, then it also has the potential to rethink ways through and out of cycles of violence. If scholars and politicians had a better understanding of the role that emotions play in these processes, they would also be able to more carefully consider the roles of emotions in conflict, as well as—crucially—reflect on, reclaim, reorient emotions in ways that promote societal healing and reconciliation. In the remaining part of this chapter we seek to explore how emotions—and an appreciation of emotions as performative individual, social forces—can be seen and appreciated as forces of change and strategies of conflict transformation and reconciliation. Before such strategies can be implemented in an institutionalized setting one must face difficult questions concerning how individuals and groups divided by conflict can initially be brought together, and thus how personal and collective feelings of fear and outrage can be transformed into emotions that may help to confront and ameliorate conflict: optimism and hope. We do not imply here that victims can completely forget and let go of their pain. Nor do we suggest that anger and frustration will necessarily fade away. What we do stress, though, is that some form of emotional turning point in conflict must be reached before

602   roland bleiker and emma hutchison divided societies can successfully cultivate new ways of thinking about trauma and envisage the possibility of establishing a harmonious or at least nonviolent order (see GobodoMadikizela 2002, 15; Schaap 2006, 7, 87, 90–4). We concentrate on one particular but important aspect in the relationship between trauma, emotions, and reconciliation: how an alternative, less divisive sense of identity and community can be cultivated following experiences of trauma. Establishing such a conception of community is admittedly a challenge. It would involve an understanding of trauma’s impact—at both a personal and a social level—and an attempt to put into practice strategies that promote empathetic and humanizing ways of reconciling past grievances. Doing so acknowledges that the prevailing institutionalized models of reconciliation and healing are not enough. If divided societies are to come together and start a process of healing, then there need to be strategies in place that allow individuals and groups to negotiate past grievances and to unpack how their memories and emotions force the past into the politics of the present. We thus focus on the links between empathy and performativity in political efforts to overcome cycles of violence and promote reconciliation. Empathy generally involves the ability to identify with (to at least some degree) the experiences and situation of another. This is why scholarly writings often suggest that empathy is key to reconstructing social relationships and communal bonds after mass violence and trauma (Crawford  2014; Gobodo-Madikizela  2002; Halpern and Weinstein  2004; Schaap 2006, 3–4). The respective reasoning behind this is that individuals and groups divided by conflict must be able to see the situation from the complex perspective of another, one who has been traditionally considered an adversary. In so doing the suffering and trauma of others may “resonate emotionally,” thereby providing an understanding of how another feels and why they may feel the things they do (Halpern and Weinstein 2004, 579–82). Victims and perpetrators may, as Gobodo-Madikizela (2002, 23) contends, be able to see each other as above all “human.” This recognition may then lead to processes of rehumanization—of both victim and perpetrator—and in turn inspire the agency needed to successfully embrace reconciliation. Of course, implicit within this approach is that a form of empathetic identification—with the suffering other—can help to break down the antagonisms that caused the initial conflict. Feelings of empathy—and perhaps similarly, sympathy and compassion (see Whitebrook  2002)—may therefore prompt the shared understanding that is needed to take responsibility of and, in turn, resolve the conflict for the betterment of all.

Illustrative Case on Art, Empathy, and Peacebuilding We illustrate the links between performance, emotions, and politics by briefly engaging a concrete example: the role of the arts in peacebuilding processes. We highlight how artistic performances have the potential to address and transform the crucial but often neglected emotional legacies of war. This is the case because art can increase empathetic understanding by bringing perspectives and voices that otherwise might not be heard in prevailing approaches to peacebuilding.

performing political empathy   603 Consider the case of this multiethnic, bilingual mobile theater group from Sri Lanka. Called Jana Karaliya in Sinahala, Makkal Kalari in Tamil, and The Theatre of the People in English, this group has for years been one of the few peacebuilding organizations that can attract involvement from and support by both conflict parties in Sri Lanka. It is a mobile, multiethnic, and multireligious theater group. Established in 2004, Jana Karaliya has been touring the island with the objective of promoting mutual understanding, tolerance, and trust within and among divided communities on the island. When highlighting this case we draw on collaborative research we have conducted with Nilanjana Premaratna (see Premaratna and Bleiker 2010, 2016; Premaratna 2018; Bleiker 2009). The objective of Jana Karaliya/Makkal Kalari theater is to advance peacebuilding by bringing together parties and narratives in conflict. Doing so is far from easy in a highly volatile and fragile environment. The group does not preach “peace” to the community. Instead, by creating a multiethnic, bilingual group it shows that coexistence among the parties in conflict is possible. It leads by example by incorporating members from all different ethnic fractions of the conflict. The theater performances that Jana Karaliya stages reenact situations of everyday interethnic coexistence and collaboration. The group travels to remote areas where audiences might never have personally met a member of the vilified opposing ethnicity. Being not only multiethnic but also bilingual enables the group to perform anywhere in the country. The group also draws from and merges the different drama traditions of the Sinhalese and Tamils, triggering new societal narratives. There is no way a short mention like this can provide an even remotely accurate assessment of the work done by Jana Karaliya and other artistic engagement with conflict and its aftermath. Nor can Jana Karaliya solve the conflict in Sri Lanka, which is complex and characterized by countless setbacks. Breaking down stereotypes and deep-seated antagonism is a long and arduous task and inevitably littered with setbacks and frustration. But the case of Jana Karaliya—a theater group performing in a country devastated by ethnic conflict—can highlight how the arts can open up spaces for empathetic understanding in conflict situations. Art is uniquely suited to express multiple voices. It is more ambivalent than other forms of communication. Visual art, for instance, always has multiple interpretations. Other art forms, such as theater, are based precisely on the idea of bringing out multiple and at times even contradictory voices. Mark Chou (2012, 52) speaks of a form of multivocality that contains deep democratic potential in its “ability to publicise multiple realities, actors and actions” in such a way to challenge the existing political order. Bringing into dialogue silenced voices and narratives, art can potentially create space for new and more inclusive community narratives. Jana Karaliya illustrates several ways in which this takes place. The realm of art is a relatively safe place for expression of what might be censored or too risky to be voiced elsewhere. This is particularly the case in intensive conflict situations, where political speech is often censored and art tends to be one of the few less regulated or even unregulated realms. Take theater: it is a public forum that re-creates reality through imagination. As such, it is not bound by the constraints of the conflict context or the social conventions. Thus what may seem impossible in a real-life encounter becomes possible within the imagined space of the theater. It becomes possible to incorporate silenced voices and perspectives to engage the audience in new ways. The performative dimensions of the arts have the potential to influence narratives and identities at a community and a personal level; they can express and perhaps even transform

604   roland bleiker and emma hutchison some of the emotional legacies of conflict. Take again the example of theater, which Cohen, Varea, and Walker (2011, 42) perceive as “one of the most powerful mediums for creating live contact between individuals from opposing sides of a conflict.” It encourages gathering, working, and acting together. Theater provides an opportunity to recast prevailing understandings of the conflict so as to present a reconciliatory and cohesive vision. Artistic expressions, in this sense, open up spaces where emotional pain can be witnessed and communicated. The conflict is then brought down to a level where personal trauma can be narrated and perhaps even transformed.

Conclusion In our brief illustrative case study on performance, emotions, and conflict we suggested that theater can make a modest but symbolically important contribution to peacebuilding in two ways: (1) by providing a forum in which individuals can come to terms with their personal experiences of conflict and become more attuned to understanding and appreciating the former enemies; (2) by facilitating ways in which individuals and groups can come to terms with the deep emotional wounds inflicted by conflict. To highlight the crucial role of empathy in reconciliation is not to suggest that empathy automatically leads to peace and healing. Consider a victim of violent conflict trying to put herself into the mind of the perpetrators of violence: this can be a frightening thought that re-creates the trauma and perhaps even entrenches the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, self and other. This is why Naomi Head critiques the manner in which empathy is often unproblematically embraced as benign and automatically beneficial for reconciliation. She shows that empathy is always embedded in complex sociopolitical contexts and in the values that the respective social relations embody (Head 2016b). Empathy, then, does not automatically involve compassionate or altruistic behavior (Head 2012, 39). For instance, empathy with a member of one’s own community might in fact limit one’s capacity to empathize with those of other communities (Head 2016a, 181). Or consider how empathy can be used strategically in military campaigns in order to better anticipate and preempt the actions of enemies (Head 2019). This is also why Rose McDermott (2014) criticizes how distinct emotions, such as empathy, fear, and anger, are too often lumped together in broad categories that wrongly assign either positive or negative value to emotional experiences. Emotions are always complex and intertwined with sociopolitical relations. Equipped with a more nuanced and political understanding of empathy, one would need to cultivate an approach to reconciliation that explores how the wounds of trauma can be healed in ways that placate antagonistic relations rather than perpetuate them. This crucial issue—how to nullify cycles of violence and create prosperous and respectful engagements between adversaries—has, of course, been of central concern to scholars and practitioners who deal with conflict at the domestic and international level (see Schaap 2006). Performativity is crucial in promoting empathy as a practice of reconciliation. A more empathetic and peaceful political order can emerge only when the mindsets and values that underpin reconciliation spread through society and become accepted and embraced by a majority of people. But achieving such inclusive values in the wake of violence is far from easy. Indeed the approach to empathy we discuss here—a turn to performing empathy—is

performing political empathy   605 as much a process of reconciliation itself rather than an endpoint. Seeking to cultivate empathy—that is, an understanding of how conflict looks from different perspectives—can itself be seen as part of a performance through which divided societies reconstitute forms of subjectivity. This is to say, it is in the doing of empathy that new forms of identity and meaning after conflict may be formed. This is why it is important to understand the performative dimensions of a politics of empathy. Practices of representing conflict and its emotions, whether fear and anger or guilt and remorse, inevitably become sources of identity. They often define communities in a divisive way, creating a sense of safety and unity in juxtaposition to a hostile and threatening outside. Countering such tendencies, a process of reconciliation that sees emotions as part of the social fabric and as forms of knowledge and judgment would attempt to unpack the feelings and perceptions that accompany destructive social relations. It would articulate identity and notions of community in less disparaging ways. A political process of healing would attempt to place fear and anger in context, thus drawing more actively upon feelings of compassion and empathy in order to articulate and realize a more respectful relationship between identity and difference. Processes of healing in the wake of trauma take time. Entrenched identities cannot be uprooted overnight, nor can the antagonistic political sensibilities and practices that are intertwined with these identities. Reconciliation is a long-term project. But traumatic events, precisely because they disrupt existing patterns of identity and community, offer unique opportunities to initiate such a long-term process of healing.

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chapter 38

Ca r e Narelle Warren

Care is a conceptual chameleon, shifting in meaning depending on how and where the term is used (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015; Mol 2008). Contexts and actors thus shape how care is understood, in terms of who provides care, who receives it, and what that care comprises. Individuals, collectivities, institutions, and states all provide care, yet how they do this varies considerably. This chapter considers the different ways that care is conceptualized before considering how the increasingly popular notions of performance and performativity can extend and add nuance to understandings of care.

Care and Affect As a word, care has it etymological roots in the Latin cura, which has two related meanings (Reich 1995): first, it refers to worries, troubles, or anxieties (which are embedded within the term concern as defined by Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). This may go some way to explain the modern association of care as “burden,” which is reflected in policy documents and in health and social interventions, an association that is increasingly contested (Maguire, Hanly, and Maguire 2019; Warren and Sakellariou 2019). This root definition of cura resonates with the sense of “caring about,” attending to the emotional well-being of another person, described by Manderson and Warren (2013). Related to this, cura was also used to describe how a person provided for another’s welfare (Reich 1995), which reflects the more instrumental caring for (Manderson and Warren 2013) or the material doings of care (Puig de la Bellacasa  2011). Contemporary conceptualizations of care simultaneously draw on both of these meanings and originate in an ethos of care—a moral, political, and ethical orientation—that gives priority to considerations of another (Puig de la Bellacasa  2011). That is, the obligation people have for one another is also part of care. Care is thus intersubjective (Mol 2008; Warren and Sakellariou 2019)—it is produced between people in interactions with one another—and essentially social.

610   narelle warren The multiple components of care—caring for, caring about, and the ethos of care—are deeply intertwined, persistent, and inseparable. Yet, depending on political, social, cultural, and temporal contexts, what this looks like in practice varies widely. The concept of affect offers a productive way of examining how such contexts shape care and how it is understood, practiced or delivered, realized or lived. Rather than being rooted in the feelings and emotions of care, affect precedes the lived realities of care. It is sub- or preconscious, largely inexpressible through language, and shapes the priming or openness that individual parties bring to interactions (Shouse 2005). Rather than being a sense that is expressed, affect is an unconscious force that “makes feelings feel” (Shouse  2005). When applied in relation to care, affect shapes the embodied interactions that can become practices of care: the caring about and caring for described earlier. As Thomson (2015) illustrates, affective atmospheres of care are evidenced through feelings, sensory (including touch) interactions, and bodily expressions. Attending to notions of performance and performativity allows the articulation of such affective dimensions. In contemporary literature, the relationship between care as an emotional disposition and care as responsibility toward another is highlighted, often simultaneously. Central to the conceptualizations discussed here is a recognition that care is not a static construct but rather is defined by its provision and practice (Mol 2008): in its performance, care is (re)defined and made salient for that local setting. Repeated performances of care, illustrated by brief case studies, serve to reinforce care as an intersubjective and relational practice (Warren and Sakellariou 2019; Thomson 2015). The resultant aesthetics of care draws upon ideas of mutuality, reciprocity, respect, and interdependence, which are realized through affective connection between people and bodies (Thomson 2015).

Considering Care: Defining the Concept While these definitions privilege forms of care delivered between individuals or groups of individuals, care exists beyond the interpersonal. Claims are made regarding the delivery of care at all levels of the social structure, including, for example, by nation-states, whose policies and governance structures ostensibly provide care for citizens (and sometimes noncitizens). For example, governments around the world have policies on immigration and border security that exist ostensibly to ensure the safety of their citizenry (Fjäder 2014), thus providing care, but which also simultaneously demarcate who is to be cared for and who is excluded from the range of care. Similarly, state-based welfare policies explicitly provide care for citizens in need. Institutions make claims to care, and many have at their core a language of care, as with healthcare or child care. Professionals, collectives, and individuals all engage in care in various ways. The conceptualization of care used at these macrostructural levels evokes some elements of directly interpersonal care. Such broad usage of the term care, evidenced in its application across sectors, for different purposes, and to describe a wide range of acts, attributes, and feelings, highlights its increasing ubiquity. Everyday life is saturated with imageries of care: as Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) illustrates, care is evoked for a wide range of purposes, from selling products (for example, in Unilever’s advertising products as “beauty that cares”) to capturing the essential

care   611 elements of people’s relationships. Care and its imagery act as the hallmarks of a close positive relationship, thus highlighting both a particular affective disposition and emotional orientation from one to another. Yet these imageries of care also reinforce social inequalities, especially in terms of gendered inequalities (Rai, Hoskyn, and Thomas 2014). Recent focus on care as an analytic in social theory highlights its production through assemblages or as enabled by the affordances of context (Farrugia et al. 2019). This theoretical attention has brought increasingly sophisticated lenses for the conceptualization of care across diverse fields, from dramaturgical performance (Thomson 2015) to social reproduction (Rai, Hoskyn, and Thomas 2014; Elias and Rai 2019), and from an interrogation of the relationship between cure and care (Giordano 2018; Stegenga 2018) to the potentiality of noncare (Stevenson 2014). For Stevenson, the flipside of care is not its absence but rather what occurs when care produces harm: noncare is an artifact of different understandings of what care is and what it means. Such theoretical work of care necessitates an interrogation of the structural and systematic factors that may produce uneven outcomes.

Performing Care: Care as Resource Care reflects and is reflected in the relations between people (Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015; Warren and Sakellariou  2019) yet also stands outside of these affective experiences as a resource that can be variously deployed, withheld, or examined. As a resource, care is valued in contradictory ways: on one hand, it is perceived as having low value, as reflected in the wages of care workers and in the limited access to social power of those who perform the unpaid duties of care; notably, these are often women whose work is both devalued and marginalized (Thomson 2015). Indeed, Rai, Hoskyn, and Thomas (2014, 87) argue that care itself has traditionally reflected uneven access to power by those involved in its production and provision: typically delivered by women, care is a “gendered social relation” constituted by the state in ways that reinforce an unequal gendered order. However, these trends stand in juxtaposition with the economic realities of informal care, characterized low or no incomes and limited access to social welfare buffers, thus underscoring the contradiction that the gendered devaluation of care generates. Care broadly offers much value to societies and nation-states, both in terms of reported budgets allocated to formal services as well as in the replacement value (the cost if those hours were delivered by formal services) of informal care services. This can be starkly demonstrated when looking at care related to health alone: in the UK the replacement value of the care provided by informal carers is approximately the same as the entire health budget (£132 billion annually; Buckner and Yeandle 2011).1 Important within this notion of care as a resource is the role of the state as supporting formal and informal care—for the latter, through the provision of carer-related welfare and respite services—but also in simultaneously constituting who and what is (or can be) a carer, furnishing and withholding resources or social standing in relation to this definition. In his analysis of dementia care, Balfour (2019), for example, highlights the persistence of unjust material conditions that permeate formal and semiformal aged care environments; informal care is an adjunct to the underfunded and underresourced formal care provided

612   narelle warren in such settings. Such analyses underscore the relationship between public or social justice and care; attending to performativity offers one way to examine this.

Formal Care Settings Care is articulated in formal care settings, where care providers (for example, people employed in health, disability, or aged care sectors) engage in practices and perform acts that reflect contextually specific understandings of care (Mol 2008). What I mean by this is that, within formalized settings, care-as-resource operates in particular ways specific to that setting. Care here is inseparable from work: it involves work undertaken by professionals (and nonprofessionals in these settings).2 Medical and nursing practitioners, for example, may monitor blood pressure (or other biomarkers) of their patients as part of their provision of care; this distinct form of healthcare does not—or may not be—what constitutes care in another setting. While care provided in early childhood settings may involve health-related concerns (and thus have a minor resemblance to healthcare), child care in such settings is inseparable from the education provided by the workers. Reading, writing, singing, playing games or sports, doing crafts, feeding, toileting, or documenting progress (and other activities that take place in child care environments) all constitute practices of care, even if that is not their primary stated purpose (i.e., to educate). For Hochschild (2012), jobs that require emotional labor evoke care: flight attendants in her study worked to manage their passengers’ feelings, putting aside their own emotions, and in so doing engaged in practices of care. In each of these examples, care-as-resource is difficult to extricate from notions of concern, obligation, and responsibility for the well-being of another or others. Care-as-resource is finite, sometimes characterized by scarcity (and indeed this is a central concern in dialogues of a future aged care crisis), not least because it involves significant resource demands, which cannot be ignored (Buch 2015). The financial resource aspect of care is explicit in settings where informal care takes over where state responsibilities stop or fall short (Warren and Sakellariou 2019); where funding is not available for particular forms of care, informal carers are often required to step in. Balfour (2019) outlines a performing arts initiative established to provide affective support for people living with dementia in institutional settings; relational clowning was used to reinforce the identity and personhood of participants—a task that would otherwise be the responsibility of friends or family members. Indeed, as Buch (2015, 277) argues, care draws upon “social, labor and material resources,” suggesting that the provision of care—even in formal settings—is more than instrumental. Embedded within formal relations of care too are concepts of duty: each of the domains described earlier (healthcare, child care, care-full work) involves a prescribed and monitored duty of care. This duty ensures that care is not merely evident in actions and practices—in the work of care—but reflects a responsibility toward another. It is therefore a disposition or an orientation. For Buch (2015) and others, effecting duty of care involves the deployment of affective resources to, for, and with another. That is, in providing the work of care, people emotionally and socially engage with others (albeit to varying levels) within that same care network or relation. These forms of care—those that emerge from and

care   613 through affective contexts—offer insights relevant to myriad examples of care provision and receipt beyond spousal care.

Conceptualizing a Politics of Care: Examining Performativity Science and technology studies (STS) have contributed significant advances in the theorization of care, highlighting the ontological politics (Farrugia et al. 2019) that re/produce and re/constitute care. Care is ontological insofar as it is made and remade through attempts to know—and to subsequently theorize—care itself; each new rendering acts to shape how it is defined and realized. At the same time, these ontologies of care reflect social and political interests, and thus reflect the power structures that give rise to them (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011; Martin, Myers, and Viseu 2015; Farrugia et al. 2019). Rai, Hoskyn, and Thomas (2014) make this explicit when they consider the depleting effects of social reproduction: approaches and systems of care serve to reinforce the production of inequalities both within the home and in society. Central to an STS approach to care is the concept of performativity: care does not exist a priori but is “made or articulated in and through those practices [traditionally thought to discover it] . . . in and through specific relations” (Farrugia et al. 2019, 7). Both the practices and the relational contexts of care are therefore important. Just as care does not (often) exist in a vacuum—it is relational, constituted through its mutuality, as I will elucidate, even if that relationship is with the self (as in self-care)—the identity of “carer” is largely understood in the performance of that role (also discussed by Black 2018; Buch 2015). That is, it is only by performing practices of care that a person evokes their identity as a carer, if even then (as I will demonstrate). Yet such performances are prescribed, produced, and constrained by the state and by broader notions of social reproduction (Rai, Hoskyn, and Thomas 2014); who can and who will provide care is constituted by normative expectations about gender and work, as well as the boundaries between public and private life (Thomson 2015). Boundaries are important too in determining who is formally recognized (i.e., by the state) as an informal carer, and who is marginalized or excluded from this role. Informal care largely takes place in private spaces, away from the public domain. Household domestic—private—space is ideologically gendered in ways that render women having less economic and political power (Elias and Rai 2019). Such ideologies position men as being in charge of the household, with an economic status that reflects that social and political power; in contrast, as Elias and Rai argue, state and local ideologies promote women as homemakers and nurturers, with limited agency (209). The artifact of this is that women undertake the less-valued work of the household, that of care, a stance that is reinforced by government policies. My own work on care focuses on that provided in practices that are commonly considered informal care, that is, those practices of care outside of social institutions and structures. Yet even within this, the performance and performativity of care are reinforced. Care is not outside of the state; instead informal care often stands in for the state (Warren and

614   narelle warren Sakellariou 2019), particularly in providing replacement labor. But at the same time, who is considered an informal carer is determined by eligibility criteria for carer welfare: just under half (43 percent) of all informal carers in Australia receive some welfare assistance from the state (Australian Bureau of Statistics  2019). However, to receive such payments—i.e., to be formally recognized as an informal carer—only those who provide ongoing and constant care to people with significant care needs, and who previously received a relatively low income,3 can receive a carer allowance. Such policies serve to reinforce the notion of care as underpaid and undervalued, while simultaneously ensuring that those who provide care are removed from any economic power (by limiting their possible income) and located within the domestic sphere (through the requirement for constant care provision). I turn now to a series of brief case studies4 with people who provide and receive— often simultaneously—care around Parkinson’s disease.5 Particular attention is given to how notions of caring are (re)constituted and (re)configured in response to a profoundly impactful, and ever progressing, health condition.

Case Studies of Care The marginalization and exclusions of informal care (which align with Elias and Rai’s 2019 work) call for a greater engagement with a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan 1982), which attends to the lived experiences of care and highlights the mutuality and respect that characterizes care relations (see Thomson 2015). This was emphasized by the people with whom I worked, particularly participants’ ideas of connection and responsiveness to another. While they talked about the work of care, they not only discussed the challenges of care but also spoke to the generative aspects of care. Discussions of informal care are of ongoing relevance because disabling and chronic conditions prompt transformations within individuals so diagnosed and in terms of their affective relations with others (Warren and Sakellariou  2019). Care is a central part of this experience in and through the formal and informal care encounters that occur in a range of contexts to ensure that people’s needs are met and their health is managed. These range from patient-provider interactions, where care is institutionalized and delivered as healthcare, to the forms of care purposively produced between people who negotiate, adjust, and tinker with their everyday practices (Mol 2008; Warren and Sakellariou 2019; Sakellariou and Warren  2018). In so doing, relational and affective practices of care move beyond a unidirectional process where one person (the carer) provides to or for another, which is how nation-state policies, healthcare systems, and providers often imagine care. More often, people collaborate to produce forms of care simultaneously grounded in the present (i.e., concerned with the here and now) and future-oriented. These ideas of care are performative, shaped by doing and knowing, and people’s practices and acts of care shape what is understood as care—and thus who is a carer. At the same time, gendered ideologies around household spaces and domestic tasks—factors that Elias and Rai (2019) highlight as essential components of social reproduction—are emphasized. Evident too in the case studies is Pols’s (2005) contention that carers coproduce the subjectivity for the person for whom they care and their own subjectivity is co-constituted by the person for whom they care. Black

care   615 (2018, 80) puts it this way: “Social activities of care both constitute and are constituted by morally/ethically framed relations with others and oneself.” In so doing, these case studies speak to care as a layered set of interpersonal, moral, and politico-ethical obligations (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011).

Chronicities of Care Viewing care through the lens of performativity, this chapter continues a critical redirection of contemporary theorizing on care beyond state and biomedical ideologies of carers that emphasize carer burden or care-as-burden (Warren and Sakellariou  2019). It highlights Thomson’s (2015, 457) aesthetics of care, the “set of values realised in a relational process that emphasises engagements between individuals and groups.” A relational and affective approach to care does not deny that work is not an integral part; these include bodily management activities, such as showering and toileting, assisting with medication or medical appointments, mobility within the home and around the community, in feeding, and maybe undertaken by informal carers alone or with the support of a paid carer. Indeed care may be challenging, gut-wrenchingly difficult, tedious, and burdensome. While these are all features of care, other aspects of care are also present and similarly demand recognition. The social experiences of care, in which the more instrumental activities of caring for another are entwined with the affective caring about that same person (Manderson and Warren 2013), can be understood only within the context of the relationships that give rise to this care (Sakellariou 2015; Sakellariou and Warren 2018; Black 2018).

Case Study 1: Carer or Spouse? Gail and Stan had been married for over fifty years when Stan experienced a complication due to his Parkinson’s which affected his speech and social engagement (for more detail on their story, see Sakellariou and Warren 2018). While Gail described her engagement in care practices, she didn’t explicitly refer to herself as a “carer”; this was reinforced by her ineligibility to receive a carer’s allowance (thus, to her mind, excluding her from formally using the role descriptor). Rather, she located her caring as a natural extension of their spousal relationship. Gender was emphasized in Gail’s accounts: she gradually gave up her previous pursuits (valued leisure activities) to take care of Stan as his condition progressed. This reinforced her position as being located within the domestic sphere, while also relegating her own work as worth less than the care activities. In this way, care reinforced gendered ideologies of roles within the family: a form of performativity. But caring was performative for Gail in another way: as she learned to care for Stan, she engaged in new activities and gained increasing expertise as a carer. Each of these new skills moved her closer to seeing herself as a carer: “I just expected that I would be [a carer]. Nobody else was going to care for him and that was going to be my [job].” For Gail, the point at which spouse and carer could be separated was not so much unclear as it was completely integrated; the carer role was not distinct but rather was increasingly absorbed into her identity as Stan’s wife.

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Beyond Work: The Mutualities of Care Labeling care as distinct from other elements of a relationship had a performative effect itself. Participants found it difficult to articulate their care-related role, and very few identified themselves as a carer; instead they were concerned with what Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) calls “matters of care.” They were preoccupied with concern for their spouse and had made a moral and ethical commitment to do their best to create the conditions for the achievement of a good life. For example, when asked about her carer (Don, her husband, age eighty-six), Beryl (age eighty-one) was confused. She explained that, while she cared for him and he cared for her, this is just what they did for each other as spouses; there was nothing exceptional that either did which might warrant any special label. Their mutual care provision involved slight tweaks (Mol’s 2008 tinkering) on what they had always done: reminding each other about medication, accompanying each other to gentle exercise classes that were recommended to all elderly people in their community, and preparing meals that met their dietary requirements. Beryl’s confusion captures the give-and-take reciprocity of everyday relationships that some participants understood as distinct from the carer role— largely because of the private location of care within the household and their exclusion from formal carer policies.

Paid Care While care can—and often does—reflect the kinship ties that bind people together, the affective component of paid care further complicated people’s understandings of the carer role. Emotions are engaged and relationships develop even where one cares as part of one’s employment (Hochschild  2012), and it was only when they observed this—when they needed additional support to care—that participants started to position themselves (more) as carers. Thus care became performative in the way that Butler (1990) has theorised—i.e., it was constitutive of identity—only when it extended outside of the household and the spousal relationship to include external social and paid instrumental support. This highlights the political and structural contributions to the performativity of care: while participants were considered carers by the healthcare system at the point of diagnosis (often well before they actually provided hands-on care), they themselves didn’t use the label until much later, as Maureen’s case study illustrates.

Case Study 2: Maureen Maureen (pseudonym) had cared for her late husband (John) for over a decade following his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, but it was only in the last twelve months of his life that she considered herself a carer. Prior to this, she had simply viewed herself as his wife. In contrast, the healthcare system designated her “John’s carer” immediately after his diagnosis. Although Maureen engaged in acts of care for John, she did not conflate her actions with her identity until the care activities reached a certain intensity. The gradual degeneration of John’s health state (itself a feature of Parkinson’s disease) meant that, although Maureen

care   617 initially undertook small supportive tasks when he found them increasingly difficult, the extent to which she would help him increased over time. This started with relatively minor tasks but soon progressed to more “scaffolding”-type tasks (as described by Hyden 2014), where she provided the resources and support for John to achieve the things he wanted. By the final year of his life, Maureen was no longer able to care for him alone. It was only when the intensity of caring required input outside of Maureen’s individual capacity that she sought additional support and, in doing so, recognized that her acts of care extended beyond what she understood as “normal” spousal care. This example demonstrates an important aspect of the performativity of the carer identity: at the point of diagnosis, and despite the assignment by healthcare providers, participants positioned their identity only in terms of spouse. However, over time, with repeated and increasingly intensified caring, the identity of carer was made increasingly salient, first being adopted, then consolidated through activities, and reinforced through external involvement in acts of care. Engagement with external supports, such as peer support organizations, were also performative. At around the time that the intensity of caring increased, Maureen formally joined a peer-support association. She found this group helpful as it facilitated informal information sharing: “We learned a lot . . . made a lot of friends, and yes, we got a lot of help.” While this formal support helped participants and their family members to learn to live with Parkinson’s, it also reinforced the gendered carer identity. Most carers in the group were women, who would bring food to share or would prepare food for the other group members; generally they would stay in the kitchen, talking, while the men socialized. This setting further underscored the performativity of care and reinforced the gendered roles of care: in these peer-support group encounters, women literally were the nurturers, preparing, cooking, and delivering food to the table; in some instances, carers also fed their spouse. While gender shaped ideas of care, care practices reinforced ideas of gender. Cultural assumptions around the role of women and expectations of filial piety further contribute to how care is constructed, lived, and regarded. Gender—and the power relations embedded within gender relations—are especially important; Broom and Lenagh-Maguire (2010) highlight how, regardless of whether or not they are the ill person, women take on the self-management of chronicity as it occurs in their household. Yet care is performative outside of these individual relationships: it necessitates engagement with political structures, which gives rise to moral and practical tensions in the enactment of care. Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011, 90) conceptualizes care as having three constitutive elements: affective commitment, material doing, and ethico-political obligation, and I posit that the externalization of care plays a significant performative role. This was evidenced in Maureen’s recognition of her own limitations in providing care for John and in calling upon others for support. Enacting ethico-political obligations of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) in very specific ways, participants purposefully engaged externally, implicitly acknowledging their own incapacities—or the limits of their own capacities—for care, precisely because they took seriously their responsibility for their spouse’s well-being. This stepping outside of the self and the relationship to prioritize the other prompted recognition of themselves as carers beyond that embedded within the spousal relationship. Attending to performativity allows a consideration of how such competing priorities were negotiated in everyday encounters of care.

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Politics and Performativity of Care The different understandings—and manifestations—of care presented in this chapter are subtle but are important and necessitate interrogation. States, institutions, and collectivities all have influence on the performativity of care: policymakers and healthcare providers regularly assume that the affective and relational components of care mean that people will unproblematically accept and give instrumental care. At the same time, formal structures clearly delineate who can and who cannot evoke the label of carer. Governments regularly provide very limited (if any) effective support for carers, and what they do profoundly shapes the gendering of care and domestic spaces more broadly. This chapter draws upon brief case studies of care in the context of a chronic neurological condition—Parkinson’s disease—and the associated progressive disability, as experienced in Australia. Australia has well-developed universal healthcare coverage delivered by the healthcare system yet relies upon key assumptions about the role of the state and social institutions, including the family, in providing care. As Frank (1991) explains, chronic illness allows people so affected to reframe and revalue relationships. Not only does illness and any ensuing disability change things within and for the person directly (bodily) affected, but it gives rise to the considerations of care and carers I have discussed. Insofar as people in care relationships perform and are situated in cultural, affective, political, and economic contexts, this reconfiguration process needs to be understood in terms of the multiple ways they attempt to negotiate and coproduce a good life despite, and perhaps because of, emotional and material costs. The argument presented in this chapter advances the position that care is performative because of the implicit engagement of political structures in including and excluding particular people, roles, and spaces. The subtle boundaries have real resonance for people’s lives and thus require attention. I argue that caring can be understood fully only in the context of the relationship itself: people with chronicity and disability—in other words, those in need of care—also make choices about their life to enhance the well-being and life of another. For carers too, the importance of the relationship—and the positive things they get from the relationship—is central to their experience of caring. Yet these relationships occur in a context where the very act of care is shaped by a series of inequalities and injustices that require greater attention (Thomson 2015). Importantly, it is only by attending to the inequalities of care—and actively considering the gendered ideologies that underlie care practices— that we can start to achieve a good life for both carers and those for whom they care. A lens on performativity creates a space to extend conversations about care relationships beyond a simple focus on the challenges of care that lie ahead, to focus on more moral and just experiences embedded within and expressed through acts of care.

Notes 1. While this reference is somewhat dated, it is the most recent I could locate; trends from 1995–2010 indicated that the replacement value of informal care had tripled over that period (Office for National Statistics 2013), and it is likely that this trend has continued.

care   619 2. It should be noted that paid care work takes place even in informal settings and may include duties such as showering, toileting, cleaning, and feeding. Similarly, informal and relational care is delivered in formal settings, such as family members who help feed their aged relative in elder care institutions (as just one example). 3. As of August 2019, the maximum income allowed for a person to remain eligible for a carer’s allowance is equivalent to 57 percent of the average Australian full-time income (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019). 4. The research discussed here was undertaken from 2012 to 2015 and explored the lived experiences of Parkinson’s disease in Victoria, Australia. Participants were fifty-five people with Parkinson’s and thirty-four informal carers. They were mostly older, of low to middle socioeconomic status, and living in regional and rural areas. While I had hoped to recruit a culturally diverse sample, this did not eventuate, as there are barriers in recruiting participants from some Australian cultural communities due to stigma associated with neurological conditions for older people (see Sathianathan and Kantipudi 2018). This meant that the experiences of people of Anglo- and European-Australian cultural backgrounds are overrepresented in this chapter, while other experiences are not. This fact itself contributes to the, or one particular, political constitution of care presented here. 5. Globally Parkinson’s is the second-most common neurodegenerative condition and typically affects people in later life (Tanner, Brandabur, and Dorsey 2008). It presents across a large spectrum, and although it has four hallmark signs—bradykinesia (difficulty executing or maintaining movement), tremor, rigidity, and postural instability—these are not all experienced by all people so diagnosed (Poewe 2006). Each of these signs is idiopathic, and thus the condition presents across a broad spectrum (for a more detailed discussion of these varying presentations and their implications, see Warren and Manderson 2015), which creates challenges for people diagnosed and their carers.

References Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2019. “Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia.” Canberra, Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/0/C258C88A7 AA5A87ECA2568A9001393E8?Opendocument. Balfour, Michael 2019. “The Politics of Care Play, Stillness and Social Presence.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by P. Eckersall and H. Grehan, 93–97. London: Routledge. Black, Steven P. 2018. “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Care.” Annual Review of Anthropology 47: 79–95. Broom, Dorothy  H., and Aodhamair  Lenagh-Maguire. 2010. “Gendered Configurations of Diabetes: From Rules to Exceptions.” Journal of Gender Studies 19, no. 2: 195–209. doi:10.1080/09589231003695997. Buch, Elana D. 2015. “Anthropology of Aging and Care.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 277–93. Buckner, Lisa, and Sue Yeandle. 2011. Valuing Carers 2011. London: Carers UK. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Elias, Juanita & Shirin M. Rai. 2019. “Feminist Everyday Political Economy: Space, Time and Violence.” Review of International Studies 45, no. 2: 201–20. Farrugia, Adrian, S. Fraser, R. Dwyer, R. Fomiatti, J. Neale, P. Dietz, and J. Strang. 2019. “TakeHome Naloxone and the Politics of Care.” Sociology of Health and Illness 41, no. 2: 427–43.

620   narelle warren Fjäder, Christian. 2014. “The Nation-State, National Security and Resilience in an Age of Globalisation.” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 2, no. 2: 114–29. Frank, Arthur. 1991. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giordano, Cristiana. 2018. “Political Therapeutics: Dialogues and Frictions around Care and Cure.” Medical Anthropology 37, no. 1: 32–44. doi:10.1080/01459740.2017.1358715. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. 3rd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hyden, Lars-Christer 2014. “Cutting Brussels Sprouts: Collaboration Involving People with Dementia.” Journal of Aging Studies 29: 115–23. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2014.02.004. Maguire, Rebecca, Paul Hanly, and Phil Maguire. 2019. “Beyond Care Burden: Associations between Positive Psychological Appraisals and Well-Being among Informal Caregivers in Europe.” Quality of Life Research. epub.doi:10.1007/s11136-019-02122-y. Manderson, Lenore, and Narelle Warren. 2013. “ ‘Caring for’ and ‘Caring about’: Embedded Interdependence and Quality of Life.” In Reframing Quality of Life and Physical Disability: Global Perspectives, edited by N.  Warren and L.  Manderson, 179–94. Social Indicators Research 54. Dordrecht: Springer. Martin, Aryn, Natasha Myers, and Ana Viseu. 2015. “The Politics of Care in Technoscience.” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5: 625–41. doi:10.1177/0306312715602073. Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London: Routledge. Office for National Statistics. 2013. Household Satellite Accounts – Valuing Informal Adult Care in the UK. Newport, UK: United Kingdom Office for National Statistics. Poewe, Werener H. 2006. “The Natural History of Parkinson’s Disease.” Journal of Neurology 253, Suppl 7: VII2–6. doi:10.1007/s00415-006-7002-7. Pols, Jeannette. 2005. “Enacting Appreciations: Beyond the Patient Perspective. Health Care Analysis 13, no. 3: 203–21. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2011. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 1: 85–106. doi:10.1177/0306312710380301. Rai, Shirin M., Catherine Hoskyn, and Dania Thomas. 2014. “Depletion: The Cost of Social Reproduction.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 1: 86–105. Reich, Warren T. 1995. “History of the Notion of Care.” In Encyclopedia of Bioethics, edited by W. T. Reich, 319–31. Revised edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan. http://care. georgetown.edu/Classic%20Article.html. Sakellariou, Dikaios. 2015. “Home Modifications and Ways of Living Well.” Medical Anthropology 34, no. 5: 456–469. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2015.1012614 Sakellariou, Dikaios, and Narelle Warren. 2018. “Caring with Others: Constructing a Good Life with Incurable Illness.” In Ethnographies and Health: Reflections on Empirical and Methodological Engagements, edited by E.  Garnett, J.  Reynolds, and S.  Milton, 159–76. London: Palgrave. Sathianathan, Ramanathan, and Suvarna Jyothi Kantipudi. 2018. “The Dementia Epidemic: Impact, Prevention and Challenges for India.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 60, no. 2: 165–7. Shouse, Eric. 2005. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8, no. 6. http://journal.media-culture. org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Stegenga, Jacob. 2018. Medical Nihilism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

care   621 Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tanner, C. M., M. Brandabur, and E. R. Dorsey. 2008. “Parkinson’s Disease: A Global View.” Parkinson Report, Spring: 9–11. Thomson, James. 2015. “Towards an Aesthetics of Care.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 4: 430–41. doi:10.1080/13569783.2015.1068109. Warren, Narelle, and Lenore Manderson. 2015. “Credibility and the Inexplicable: Parkinson’s Disease and Assumed Diagnosis in Contemporary Australia.” In Diagnostic Controversy: Cultural Perspectives on Competing Knowledge in Healthcare, edited by C. Smith-Morris, 127–146. New York: Routledge. Warren, Narelle., and Dikaios Sakellariou. 2019. “Neurodegeneration and the Intersubjectivities of Care. Medical Anthropology. epub. doi:10.1080/01459740.2019.1570189.

chapter 39

The Nation as Fa mily Motherhood and Love in Japan Nobuko Anan

Introduction After the end of World War II, Japan transformed from a nation ruled by an emperor to a democracy during the Occupation by the United States. The postwar Constitution enacted in 1947 removed the emperor’s status as a living god and designated him as the “symbol of the state and the unity of the people” without political power. However, this did not fundamentally change Japan’s polity. Historically Japan was ruled by the most powerful family of each time. In theory it was ruled by the imperial family from time immemorial, but the emperor was often pushed into the background and actual rule was by military clans based on the samurai families. With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the emperor’s political authority was restored; this established Japan as a modern family-state, where Japanese citizens symbolically became the emperor’s children. In this context, his “new” status as the symbol of the state and the unity of the people after the war merely maintained the one that had been present throughout Japanese history. This notion of the Japanese polity as a family is explored in this chapter, with the focus on the mother’s role within it. As Japan saw itself as a family-state in its nation-building process, women took on an expanded role within the national discourse. In this discourse, each household was expected to function as a miniature nation-state, where a woman, as a “good wife and wise mother,” served to sustain the familial and hence national lineage by reproducing and educating future Japanese citizens. In the premodern period, women’s role was also to maintain the family lineage within the aristocracy and samurai class, but this ideal was now promoted nationwide. Women also contributed to industrialization. Although Japan was a late starter in the global competition, a silkworm plague in Western countries increased the demand for Japanese silk, resulting in the early development of the silk and textile industry (MorrisSuzuki  1992, 101). The employees of this industry were primarily women as cheap labor.

624   nobuko anan Given that Japan was resource poor, securing extensive resources for industrialization eventually led the government to invade and colonize neighboring countries and join the war. As Japan’s war efforts intensified, the slogan “Give Birth and Multiply” was launched in tandem with “Rich Nation, Strong Army.” Women were expected to give birth to as many (male) children as possible who would fight as “the emperor’s children” to enlarge the territory ruled by “the Japanese family.” As women were relegated to second-class citizens with neither conscription duty nor suffrage, being the mother of soldiers was their only way to be recognized, and many women were proud to be part of the nationalist agenda. Thus, during the modernization and industrialization process, women and mothers played an increasingly important role, tied to the national family.1 Contemporary Japan has continued to highlight the roles of family and mother. Although Japan is nominally a democracy, the same political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP (conservative despite its name), has been in power for most of the postwar years, as if it were an extension of the samurai clans that governed the country previously. However, Japan as a family-state is facing challenges with its high proportion of elderly and a low fertility rate. To address this issue the government has increased the number of immigrants as labor in the past few decades,2 but this is in conflict with the nation’s self-image as an ethnically “pure” family. In effect, immigrants are excluded from various communities and often deprived of their health benefits, pension, and other welfare services (Mochizuki 2019, 32–3). Another approach has been to liberalize the labor laws to provide more opportunities for women in the market (Macnaughtan 2015), but this has further reduced the birth rate. To counter this, the government has tried to increase day care services for children, but these changes have not been sufficient to balance the workforce. Moreover, the low birth rate coincides with the shift in power dynamics across East Asia due to the increasing military presence of China. In this climate, maintaining the population is a critical issue for the government, and high-profile politicians continue to encourage women’s “contribution to the nation by increasing the birth rate,”3 reducing them to “child-bearing machines.”4 Thus politics in Japan is tightly focused on family, and motherhood is an existential concern. Japanese theater and performances are not always explicitly political, but family and mother are common themes that are inherently political. For example, Shūji Terayama (1935–1983), an important avant-garde playwright and director in the angura (underground) theater movement in the 1960s and 1970s, frequently depicted overbearing mothers in a rural landscape, where protagonists attempted to escape the status quo.5 The experimental performance company Yubiwa Hotel (1990–) has portrayed groups of girls resisting motherhood in a way that suggests a revolt against society.6 In this chapter I focus on two plays that make the link between mothers and the nation explicit. The first comes from Rio Kishida (1946–2003), a mentee and collaborator of Terayama, who problematized mother-daughter relations within the Japanese Empire in many of her plays.7 I will discuss her Thread Hell (Ito jigoku, 1984), in which conflict and love between a mother and her daughter are unfolded in a prewar silk-reeling factory as a symbol of the Japanese Empire. Kishida belonged to the generation of female theater artists in the late 1970s and early 1980s who ran their own companies in the hitherto male-dominated theater scene. The second work is Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2015), first produced in 2013, which is inspired by the life of a male-to-female transvestite singer, Akihiro Miwa. His8 biggest hit, released in 1964, idealizes the bond between a son and his self-sacrificing mother as part of Japan’s recovery after World War II. However, the play depicts a troubled mother-son relationship, in which she denies

the nation as family   625 him a place in a family because of his homosexuality. The play is considered in relation to the current political context, wherein Japan has been weakened by various disasters. Noda (1955–) has been a leading playwright and director since the late 1970s. His works are political comedies on issues such as the emperor system and postcolonialism. These two plays explore how mother-child love may be possible outside of the conventional national, gender, and sexual framework. Nationalized mother-child love is a performative, which, as an authoritative force, creates subjects by binding them to cite and repeat certain practices as natural (Butler 1993, 226–7); one can come into this world only by performing this version of mother-child love. These plays undo, or at least attempt to undo, such performance. The chapter is informed by psychoanalysis, which provides a rich resource for understanding love emerging in the identification process where the Self becomes distinct from the Other. The identification process in mother-child love can yield insights into how people negotiate the relationship between the Self and the nation.

Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell In Thread Hell, Kishida unties the knot connecting mother, family, and nation in her typical style, using poetic language and traditional Japanese images tinged with an avant-garde edge. The play is set in the Kameido Silk Mill, modeled on the mill of an actual company, Tōyō Muslim (Kishida 2001, 175). The time is 1939, an war has broken out. In the play, the mill, called the Thread-and-Yarn Store, turns into a brothel at night where female workers, called “SilkReeling Women,” serve as prostitutes under the supervision of the male owner and recruiters. As mentioned, the spinning industry was one of the main sources of foreign capital, and the government played an important role in the recruitment of female factory workers for this national goal (Narayan 2016). In reality, recruiters of factories often sold women into the sex business (Hosoi 2005, 68). While the idealized, desexualized womanhood of “good wife and wise mother” was promoted nationwide, working-class women in particular were sexually exploited. The Thread-and-Yarn Store thus symbolizes the Japanese nation-state. The protagonist, Mayu, arrives at the Thread-and-Yarn Store in search of her mother, Ame, now working as one of the Silk-Reeling Women. Mayu is imbued with the national gender ideal, and her purpose is to avenge Ame’s “unmotherly” behavior by killing her. Ame was not a “good wife and wise mother”; she left her family, and moreover, she killed Mayu’s lover. However, in her confrontation with Ame, Mayu learns that the reason for her deeds was to liberate Mayu from the family system. Ame murdered Mayu’s lover so that she would not be used to prolong his family lineage. Ame brought with her the book of their family tree when she left, in order “to be the last person to keep that worthless family tree alive,” and in this way her daughter can be “a cipher,” “just a zero” (Kishida 1984, 214). This book is a reference to the Japanese family register, which since the Meiji Restoration is a national record of one’s place within a family. Since the family register links people to their parents and ancestors, it creates a family tree for the Japanese nation. Although Ame wants to escape the family system by taking her book, ironically she is trapped in the Thread-and-Yarn Store, which represents the Japanese family-state. In the play, thread metaphorizes the relationship between the masculinist, national gender ideal and the women manipulated within it. The men at the Thread-and-Yard

626   nobuko anan Store, whose names are reminiscent of thread, such as Nawa (rope), Himo (string), and Tegusu (gut), control the Silk-Reeling Women, sometimes literally using strings attached to the women to move them around the stage like puppets. This is most vividly demonstrated when Mayu kills Ame. At the end of their confrontation, Nawa, the owner of the Store, appears on stage and encourages Mayu to kill Ame. The scene is enacted by the men of the Store controlling Mayu with threads, showing that Mayu’s desire to kill her “unmotherly” mother actually comes from the nation. Thus Ame’s wish to save her daughter from the national family has failed. Kazuko Takemura, a leading feminist literature and film scholar in Japan, discusses mother’s sorrow in her psychoanalytic approach to mother-daughter relations. As is true for many other feminist researchers, she is both inspired by and critical of Julia Kristeva, who connected psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism in her exploration of motherhood (Takemura 2002, 156). Takemura first challenges gender essentialism in Kristeva’s proposal of the Imaginary Father, loving and not judging, one that functions as a link between the semiotic (the affective, “maternal” realm with tones and rhythms of speech, irreducible to grammatic language structures)9 and the symbolic (the linguistic, “paternal” realm with the system of syntax). Takemura maintains that this role is not played by the father but by the mother, because she is the one who experiences both collusion with the child during pregnancy (or the state of the chora, when no distinction between Self and Other exists) and separation after delivery (which is the first step in the formation of ego) (158–62). Takemura further disagrees with Kristeva’s argument that love is impossible between mother and daughter. Love, in other words, missing, requires distance or separation from the object, but Kristeva does not acknowledge this distance between mother and daughter; in her view, they are homogeneous as they share the same gender and sex. On the contrary, Takemura maintains that they do get separated during delivery, and therefore love can emerge between them. She points out, however, that this love relation must end when the daughter completes the ego-formation process and enters the symbolic, where, as a “mature” person, she is required to identify herself as “mother,” that is, a “supplement” of men—in this realm, there is no other way for her to exist. Therefore “maturity of the daughter is, for the mother, to give up the daughter’s subjectivity” (163–7).10 As the mother sees her daughter entering the symbolic, writes Takemura, she cries out, “Never become the father’s daughter!” (167). The same cry is heard in Ame’s lines. However, when it is about to reach her daughter, the father figure intervenes. As her father’s daughter, Mayu removes her “unmotherly” mother from the symbolic. Moreover, in this sphere, as if to replace Ame, Mayu “naturally” turns into mother, as Ame’s last words to her indicate: “You’re already with child” (Kishida 1984, 216). Nonetheless the shock of the matricide Mayu committed under the men’s control soon brings her to the realization that what she has considered her subjectivity was gained through her subjection to the national gender ideology. Now she sees that behind the family lineage of Japan is the lineage of women’s misery. She stands up to Nawa and says, “On a straight, sun-baked road, there’s a line of women. I am there, and my mother. Behind Mother is Mother’s mother, and further behind her is Mother’s mother’s mother . . . mothers followed by more mothers, interminably. The mothers’ bodies are all tied in a row, linked by a single thread. The mothers tell me to cut the thread . . . [t]o blind the . . . one [father figure] who is right behind me manipulating the string” (Kishida 1984, 217–8). Feeling generations of mothers beside her, the daughter fights to free herself and them from enslavement. This

the nation as family   627 resignifies the relation between mother and daughter, previously mediated by the father and nation. Importantly, after her death Ame stays with Mayu as a “lingering smell,” and therefore Mayu’s challenge to the father figure is also Ame’s. Indeed Ame and Mayu have been connected by smell throughout the play. In her search for Ame, what directed Mayu to the Thread-and-Yarn Store was Ame’s smell. Ame asks Mayu if she has identified her mother by overhearing her “life story” (which the Silk-Reeling Women tell their clients to entertain them), and Mayu replies, “Words don’t remind me of anything”; it is “by smell” that she has found Ame (Kishida 1984, 214). This is evocative of mother-daughter relations during the process where the mother functions as linkage between the semiotic and the symbolic. Love exists between them in this realm, and smell may be its equivalent. Love becomes possible when one is separated from the chaotic condition where Self and Other are not distinguished, but it also presupposes proximity as mother and daughter still stay close to each other until the latter enters the symbolic. Similarly, smell requires distance and proximity; it is difficult to smell oneself, but one can smell someone who is close to one. What stays with Mayu in her fight against the “father of women” (218) is therefore love between mother and daughter. It is also important that this smell-love belongs to the senses grounded in the body. As Takemura maintains, love between mother and daughter is plural and all-encompassing, and therefore it is not just naturalized, spiritual love. It also includes sensual love. Takemura (2002, 171) writes, “If the Self is formed through the separation from chaos and love supplements the separation, identification means to acquire the ability to love and to be urged by the necessity of loving. Therefore, love includes the affect of missing at every level, and it should be the force which goes far beyond the dichotomy of materiality and spirituality, contact and distance, homogeneity and heterogeneity.” However, mother-daughter sensual love is fundamentally unthinkable within the symbolic. When the daughter enters the symbolic as a “mature woman,” she must forget the love for her mother in all gradations— except for the spiritual one. Therefore, states Takemura, a mature woman is melancholic (176–7). As Freud (1915, 153) observes in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” melancholics cannot identify what they have lost, as the loss is too painful for them to face. However, in Thread Hell, love at all levels resists being erased. Even when Mayu exhibits a melancholic symptom at the beginning of the play (that is, her inability to recall who she is looking for), she is still guided by her mother’s smell. Mayu’s melancholy reaches its deepest level when she kills her mother to gain a place in the symbolic, but soon after this, as she realizes the extent of her deed, she recalls her love for her mother and laments, “Without knowing darkness, without knowing grief, I’ve cut the bonds of love” (Kishida 1984, 219). She now acknowledges the mother-daughter love in all gradations, and it is this love that overthrows the nationalist masculinism at the Thread-and-Yarn Store. In the last scene of the play, the audience find Mayu spinning thread as one of the SilkReeling Women in the Thread-and-Yarn Store, but it is not what it used to be. Also, although she was said to be with child in the earlier scene, she does not seem to be so now. The women repeat the beginning of the play, but with a difference. It began with Mayu appearing on stage, when the Silk-Reeling Women expected her arrival at the Store through their sixth sense. At the end of the play, a woman appears on stage, and the Silk-Reeling Women, including Mayu, joyously expect her arrival. She says to them, “Now that each of us is our own master, let’s not leave her out in the cold” (Kishida 1984, 220). This new woman is

628   nobuko anan performed by the same actor who played the role of Ame. Mother and daughter are reunited, and as Mayu’s name (“cocoon”) suggests, they will spin a thread of love, the thread that will not be tangled up in love for the nation.

Hideki Noda’s MIWA Matricide also takes place in Hideki Noda’s MIWA, which traces the life of Akihiro Miwa, a male-to-female transvestite singer (1935–), with fictional episodes woven into the story. He was open about his homosexuality in mainstream show business as early as the late 1950s. As a non-Christian country, Japan has a long history of open homosexuality. In the premodern period it was common for Buddhist monks and samurai to have sexual relationships with their apprentices.11 Even to this day, homosexuality is not hidden in some media; for example, a genre of novel and manga (graphic novel) called Boys’ Love depicts male homosexual romances and is sold openly in almost all bookstores. There have also been all-female musical and revue companies12 since the early twentieth century; the performers specialize in either male or female roles and therefore appear as butch-femme couples even though the companies stage heterosexual romances. However, at the same time, since the late nineteenth century, homosexuality and other queer orientations have been abnormalized in various facets of society. Unlike in some other countries, LGBTQ movements, where sexual orientation is made part of one’s public identity as a citizen, are not strong in Japan. As such, same-sex marriage is not legal, meaning that homosexual couples cannot legally form a “family” even though some local governments have issued partnership certificates since 2015, which provide various civil rights (housing, insurance, mortgage, and hospital visitation; STOCK LGBTQ+ 2019). This mixed history helps to explain why homosexual and transvestite comedians are quite popular on television, while homosexuality is often hidden in real life. Miwa holds a unique position among Japanese homosexual media personalities as he is seen as a cultural figure for his artistic talent and insightful understanding of social problems, including critical stances on the government’s desire for remilitarization in the current power dynamics within East Asia from his perspective as a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. In the play MIWA, Noda delves into a contradiction within Akihiro Miwa. Although he is critical of heteronormativity, chauvinism, and masculinist aggression, he has achieved stardom largely with a song that celebrates the bond between mother and son as good members of the national family, which is inherently heteronormative. In the play, Noda has Miwa’s alter ego kill his mother as a revolt against such a conceptualization of family and nationhood. The play also relates idealized motherhood to the memories of nuclear destruction during World War II, which is often compared to the aftermath of the triple disaster in northern Japan in 2011. By doing so, it demonstrates how such motherhood has survived the national crises and even been reinvigorated by them. The play MIWA largely consists of episodes of Akihiro Miwa’s homosexuality, wartime experiences, and artistic career from his autobiography. Noda’s critical examination of motherhood runs through these episodes, and it needs to be considered in relation to Miwa’s most popular hit, “Song of the Yoitomake” (Yoitomake no uta), written and composed by him and released in 1964. Yoitomake refers to construction workers who engage in

the nation as family   629 solidification of the ground by pounding it with a weight. In the song, a son wishes his dead mother could see his success as an engineer during the economic development after the war—the success he has made, encouraged by the image of his yoitomake mother soaked in sweat and dirt. Miwa was inspired by his friend’s mother in the characterization of the mother in the song, but the conception of the song emerged when he toured rural areas where the audiences were mostly poor day laborers. Although he is a chanson singer, he felt that the experiences of these people left behind by the Westernization of urban areas could not be expressed through chanson. “Song of the Yoitomake” was motivated by his desire to create “Japanese songs about Japanese lives and affects sung in Japanese” (Miwa 1992, 400). Thus Miwa’s reputation comes from a song in which the hard work of yoitomake mothers solidified the base for Japan’s economic development in the postwar period. The link that he makes between mother and Japan is close to a typical nationalist trope. To understand the mother-child love and matricide in the play MIWA, it is necessary to understand how love is depicted in Akihiro Miwa’s repertoire. One of the songs that he is known for is a cover version of Édith Piaf ’s “Hymne à l’amour” (included in his 1968 album Maruyama Akihiro Deluxe), which celebrates excessive love. The protagonist proudly declares that she will do anything, including discarding her country, to remain loved. Not only the lyrics but also Miwa’s performance is excessive. He wears his trademark gaudy dress and heavy makeup, and although he is beautiful, it is not “truly feminine” beauty. In this appearance, he sings extremely passionately, with strong vibrato. It is moving but also close to being kitsch. Lauren Berlant, in her psychoanalytic exploration of affect in relation to belonging, argues that love relations stabilize and secure individuals’ sociability in forms such as the heterosexual couple, family, or nation. In other words, love functions as a “placeholder” (Berlant 2012, 95) within a “normal” society. Thus the narrative of love is sanitized; aggression, fear, and ambivalence, that is, excess generated in the sites of desiring (which is primarily an infant’s relation with the mother), are disavowed to maintain the fantasy of normalcy (19–68). What we see in Miwa’s “Hymne à l’amour” is a move against this. While the protagonist clings to her lover, this tenacious attachment does not lead to sociability. Moreover, as sung by the transvestite homosexual Miwa, she is not a conventional she. I would argue that what draws people into his performance is this excess. For a moment, it allows them to bask in what they were required to disavow in exchange for normalcy. Nonetheless, as if Miwa himself polices the excess, he also leads his audience to a “healthy” form of love with “Song of the Yoitomake.” In contrast with his normally lemon-colored long hair and dresses, for this song he wears a simple dark shirt, a pair of trousers, and a black wig, identifying himself with the son in the song. This coherent gender alignment is accompanied by the fantasy of the coherence of familial love, whereby the son receives the baton from his mother as a good, productive Japanese citizen. The song celebrates Japan’s recovery from the aftermath of World War II, and its message of familial and national love appeals to many, especially in the years after the triple disaster at Fukushima in northern Japan, where on March 11, 2011, an earthquake of 9.0 magnitude was followed by a tsunami 40.5 meters high (Naikaku-fu  2011) that caused the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. These events killed 15,898 people, injured 6,157, and left 2,531 missing (Keisatsu-chō 2019). The sheer enormity of the disaster devastated the northern regions and scarred the entire nation in a way that was similar to the aftermath of World War II. The Japanese pride in advanced technology was crushed, and there was fear of radioactivity residue (Gebhardt 2014, 11–13; Iwata-Weickgenannt and Geilhorn 2017, 2–3). It is in this context that Miwa’s “Song of

630   nobuko anan the Yoitomake” became popular again after he sang it on TV at NHK Red and White Song Battle (NHK kōhaku utagassen) in 2012. In this annual event the national broadcasting company Nippon Hoso Kyokai invites singers whose songs represent the national zeitgeist. “Song of the Yoitomake” was possibly selected as what Lisette Gebhardt (2014, 22) calls a “national therapy” that gently soothes the national wounds and affirms its future recovery, like the one that Japan achieved after the war. As Yoshikuni Igarashi (2000, 165) maintains with regard to Japan’s memory of World War II, by the late 1960s “[t]he hardship . . . suffered by Japanese people during and immediately after the war became an integral part of the narrative that everyone knew had a happy ending.” “Song of the Yoitomake,” released in 1964, exactly offers this narrative. With the vulnerability of the national mood, calls for solidarity often slip into calls for national unity, glorifying the supposedly shared quality of the Japanese, such as their ability to work selflessly for the common goal of restoring the nation (Gebhardt  2014, 23). The mother and her son in “Song of the Yoitomake” could get invested with the desire for this type of unity and even seem to acquire the status of a symbol of the unending lineage of the national family. For example, in the 2012 kōhaku, the MC introduced the song as a celebration of the mother-child bond that survived difficult years surrounding the war. Another symbolic example is the massive statue Mother and Children in the Tempest in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. Completed in 1960, it depicts a mother protecting her children from the atomic blast. Lisa Yoneyama (1999, 195), in her research on the memory surrounding nuclear disasters in Hiroshima, points out a widely shared understanding of the statue’s symbolism: the mother-child tie is too strong to be destroyed by the atomic bomb. As if not to succumb to the idealization of such mother-child love, Noda stages matricide in MIWA. Nonetheless, while Noda is critical of nationalized motherhood, he is also keenly aware of the difficulty in resisting it, as it is deeply ingrained in the Japanese psyche. His approach is therefore nuanced. He invented a character named Androgyne residing within MIWA, who represents the real-life Miwa. They are performed by different actors, but in the story, only MIWA can see and hear Androgyne. Adoration of motherhood is expressed by MIWA; he admires almost all the maternal figures, including his birth mother, stepmother, and the Virgin Mary (whose statue is in the church near his childhood home in Nagasaki). On the other hand, Androgyne attacks motherhood and eventually succeeds in matricide without MIWA’s knowledge. The conflict between MIWA and Androgyne becomes complex toward the end of the play, when the reason for Androgyne’s matricide is revealed. It is because, despite his love for his mother, she blamed him for his homosexuality. In Japan a mother’s success is typically gauged by her son’s in the symbolic, to which she has no access (Allison 2000, 126). Androgyne, an “abnormal” son, fails her, and therefore maternal and familial love is not granted to him. His matricide is against such “institutions and ideologies of . . . familial love” (Berlant 2012, 88). However, this matricide does not bring about catharsis. Rather, it even appears powerless in the face of idealized motherhood. In the play, its persistence is alluded to by the context where the matricide takes place. Androgyne killed his mother around the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, as if to terminate his mother together with the Japanese family-state. However, in reality, this was not realized. As mentioned, the Japanese polity as a family-state has remained the same even after the war, and nationalized motherhood has survived. “Song of the Yoitomake,” released after the war, does testify to this. Strikingly, in the play it is Androgyne who suggests that MIWA sing about the mother,

the nation as family   631 as if he missed his mother after the matricide and wished to console himself by bathing in the “normal” image of mother-son love. Love as a means for normalcy might indeed be addictive. One knows that it could hurt but cannot help desiring it. In contrast to Androgyne, MIWA eventually turns away from his adoration of mothers and considers them as “worthless” (Noda 2015, 292). One important incident that has influenced him is his homosexual colleague’s suicide due to his mother’s rejection, reminiscent of Androgyne’s case. MIWA has now concluded that “unconditional maternal love is a lie” and that “[i]t’s children who love their mothers unconditionally” (292). In the last scene of the play, Androgyne disappears into MIWA, suggesting that they become one to reconfigure love for mother together. In the scene, MIWA recalls the hellish scene of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped, evoking the time when Androgyne committed matricide. In the nationalist discourse, the end of the war is the start of Japan’s “miraculous” development, in which mothers played an important role. However, Noda sees this moment differently; nationalized motherhood survived this crucial moment, so this is the “ground zero” that needs to be revisited to explore other ways of loving the mother. The final scene takes place at MIWA’s concert. There is a chair beside him backstage on which he does not allow anyone to sit. This is because, according to him, “that person is always sitting on that chair and watching me” (Noda 2015, 304). Asked by another character who “that person” is, MIWA responds in poetic lines: I’ve forgotten . . . who was sitting there. But it was “that person.” In a very quiet evening. Peacefully. Smiling. I was curling, embraced by “that person.” I was squeezed, but I could expand myself. In the green breeze in the spring. In the blue starry night in the summer. In the red forests in the autumn. I loved “that person.” In the white, white light in the winter. I loved “that person” very much. “That person.” But I don’t remember who that was. Time does not erase love. But time erases memory. Time mercilessly erases the memory that I loved. And only the chair remains on which someone was sitting. Only the absent chair remains there. I’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten . . . I’ve forgotten.  (304)

“That person” is of course his mother, as is suggested by the image of himself curled up and embraced like a fetus in the womb. As he recalled the site of the atomic destruction as the “ground zero,” here he seems to be reminiscing about the time he was in his mother’s womb as the starting point for a new relationship to his mother. Noda may have MIWA forget that “that person” is his mother in order to dissociate love from the politically charged term mother. In MIWA’s lines, mother is not a placeholder for familial or social belonging, as Androgyne had believed. Neither is she worthless, as MIWA claimed earlier. Here love just appears unconditional. Nonetheless this utopic space does not remain unsettled, because MIWA’s inability to name “that person” as his mother does seem melancholic. Melancholics fail to identify the loss of their loved ones, and this is their unconscious way to deny the loss. MIWA’s oblivion of the identity of “that person” may be caused by Androgyne’s refusal to let go of the deep-rooted desire for belonging to the family and nation. Throughout the play Noda seems to ask, How can we love mother outside of the nationalist paradigm? How can mother love us outside of it? While the play provides a glimpse of what such love might be, ambivalence remains. However, Noda ends the play with MIWA singing “Hymne à l’amour,” not “Song of the Yoitomake.” He sings about excess of love, not the sanitized love for and of nationalized motherhood.

632   nobuko anan

Conclusion Motherhood within the Japanese family-state has been discussed since the late nineteenth century not only by male nationalists but also by female activists and artists in various fields, including literature, visual arts, and theater and performance. The issue is pressing for these women, as it is their own material bodies that would become the site where the abstract ideologies are embodied. While there are those who are willing to perform nationalized motherhood to gain recognition within the nation-state, others resist it. These are the resistant daughters who struggle not to repeat their mothers’ performance. In other words, these daughters struggle against a performative of national ideologies, which haunt them via their mothers. In the past ten years, mother-daughter relations started to attract wider attention. The number of books, targeting nonacademic readers, on the daughter’s troubled relations with her mother is increasing.13 Tamaki Saitō (2014), one of the authors and a psychoanalyst, writes that the long silence on this matter within the general public may testify to the difficulty in critiquing motherhood, but now it is as though the daughters’ urge to discuss it overflowed their bodies. Although first produced three decades ago, Kishida’s Thread Hell may offer some insights into an alternative mother-daughter bond outside of the family-state. Heteronormativity in the typical conceptualization of motherhood and nationhood comes to the fore in Noda’s MIWA. While Thread Hell presents a mother and her daughter who resist being incorporated into the national family, MIWA portrays a male homosexual who is precluded from it. Indeed as recently as 2018, a huge controversy took place when an LDP politician, Mio Sugita, claimed that the current public spending on LGBT support was too generous,14 considering that LGBT people were “unproductive” (Ikeda 2019). This statement implies that these people do not deserve citizenship, and this national context is reflected in the mother’s heterosexism in MIWA. As a matter of fact, Akihiro Miwa lost popularity after he came out in the mass media (Satō 2017, 83), and one important factor that brought him back to national attention was “Song of the Yoitomake” (214). While there is strong resistance to the idea of LGBTQ as public political identities, male homosexuals are given a place within the entertainment media as long as they appear nonthreatening to the Japanese family system. Matricide is conducted in both these plays. Although its purpose and outcome differ in each, the depiction of this extreme form of violence in these leading playwrights’ works, produced thirty years apart, demonstrates the intensity of motherhood as a performative force within the Japanese nation. These plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation by reconfiguring their love for their mothers.

Notes 1. There are rich resources on the women’s status in prewar and wartime Japan from feminist perspectives, such as Mackie (2003) and Ueno (2004). For non-Western contexts in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in general, Jayawardena (1986) is classic. 2. The number of immigrants has tripled in the past three decades; as of 2018, it is about 2.6 million, which is 2 percent of the population in Japan (Mochizuki 2019, 4, 16).

the nation as family   633 3. This was uttered in 2015 by Yoshihide Suga, the current chief cabinet secretary minister (Hoshino  2015). Similarly, Tarō Asō, a former prime minister and the current deputy prime minister and minister of finance, said in 2014 and 2019 that women unwilling to give birth are “problematic” (Asahi Shimbun Digital 2014, 2019). 4. This was uttered in 2007 by Hakuo Yanagisawa, who held various ministry posts (Mainichi Shimbun 2019). 5. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (2005) has written extensively on Terayama’s work. 6. See my monograph, Anan 2016. 7. Yasuko Ikeuchi (2008) examines motherhood in both Terayama’s and Kishida’s works. 8. I use the masculine third-person pronoun to refer to Akihiro Miwa, as his first name is a male name. 9. This is different from semiotics, the study of language. What Kristeva means by semiotic is affective practices that are not signified in the symbolic. 10. Takemura is inspired by Judith Butler’s work, in particular, her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). However, while Butler considers that a daughter incorporates the category of “woman” into herself in her “maturation” process, Takemura highlights that it is instead the category of “mother.” 11. However, there is almost no record on female homosexuality in the premodern period. For English readers, a good resource on sexual minorities in Japan is McLelland, Suganuma, and Welker (2007). 12. They include the Takarazuka Revue and the OSK Revue. For the former, see Anan 2016. 13. The trend started in 2008, when Tamaki Saitō’s Haha wa musume no jinsei o shihai suru and Sayoko Nobuta’s Haha ga omokute tamaranai were published. 14. Sugita is highly ignorant in this matter. Currently the main public support for LGBTQ people is the issuance of partnership certificates, which cost almost nothing (Ikeda 2019).

References Allison, Anne. 2000. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Anan, Nobuko. 2016. Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Asahi Shimbun Digital. 2014. “Asō zaimushō ‘ko o umanai hō ga mondaida’ shakai hoshōhi meguri.” December 8, accessed December 20, 2018. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ ASGD77WNXGD7UTFK018.html. Asahi Shimbun Digital. 2019. “Asō-shi ‘kodomo o umanakatta hō ga mondai’ hatsugen o tekkai.” February 4, accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ ASM243SY1M24UTFK00R.html. Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1915. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In Collected Papers 4, translated by Joan Riviere, 152–70. London: Hogarth Press. Gebhardt, Lisette. 2014. “Post-3/11 Literature: The Location of Pain—Internal Negotiations and Global Consciousness.” In Literature and Arts after “Fukushima”: Four Approaches, edited by Lisette Gebhardt and Masami Yuki, 11–35. Berlin: EB-Verlag.

634   nobuko anan Hoshino, Norihisa. 2015. “Suga kanbō-chōkan ‘kodomo unde kōken o’ Fukuyama san no kekkon uke.” Asahi Shimbun Digital, September 29, accessed September 10, 2019. https://www.asahi. com/articles/ASH9Y621MH9YUTFK00R.html. Hosoi, Wakizō. 2005. Jokō aishi. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Igarashi, Yoshikuni. 2000. Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ikeda, Sachiko. 2019. “Sugita Mio mondai no sonogo.” Gendai no riron. Accessed September 16, 2019. http://gendainoriron.jp/vol.18/rostrum/ro04.php. Ikeuchi, Yasuko. 2008. Joyū no tanjō to shūen: Pafōmansu to jendā. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Iwata-Weickgenannt, Kristina, and Barbara Geilhorn. 2017. “Negotiating Nuclear Disaster: An Introduction.” In Fukushima and the Arts: Negotiating Nuclear Disaster, edited by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Barbara Geilhorn, 1–20. London: Routledge. Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London: Zed Books. Keisatsu-chō kinkyū saigai keibi honbu. 2019. 2011 nen Tōhoku chihō Taiheiyō-oki jishin no keisatsu sochi to higai jōkyō’ Keisatsu-chō kinkyū saigai keibi honbu. Accessed September 15, 2019. https://www.npa.go.jp/news/other/earthquake2011/pdf/higaijokyo.pdf. Kishida, Rio. 2001. Thread Hell. In Half a Century of Japanese Theater 2, translated by Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei and Naomi Tonooka, edited by Japan Playwrights Association, 160–221. Tokyo: Kinokuniya. Mackie, Vera. 2003. Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macnaughtan, Helen. 2015. “Womenomics for Japan: Is the Abe Policy for Gendered Employment Viable in an Era of Precarity?” Asia-Pacific Journal/Japan Focus 13: 1–19. Mainichi Shimbun. 2019. “Seijika no shitsugen mondai hatsugen o furikaeru.” April 11, accessed August 15, 2020. https://mainichi.jp/graphs/20190411/hpj/00m/010/002000g/17. McLelland, Mark, Katsuhiko Sunagawa, and James Welker, eds. 2007. Queer Voices from Japan: First Person Narratives from Japan’s Sexual Minorities. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Miwa, Akihiro. 1992. Murasaki no rirekisho. Tokyo: Mizu shobō. Mochizuki, Hiroki. 2019. Futatsu no nihon: “Imin-kokka” no tatemae to genjitsu. Tokyo: Kodansha. Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. 1992. “Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization.” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1: 101–21. Naikaku-fu. 2011. Tokushū Higashi-Nihon daishinsai. Accessed September 15, 2019. http:// www.bousai.go.jp/kohou/kouhoubousai/h23/63/special_01.html. Narayan, Saarang. 2016. “Women in Meiji Japan: Exploring the Underclass of Japanese Industrialization.” Inquiries Journal 8, no. 2. Nobuta, Sayoko. 2008. Haha ga omokute tamaranai: Hakamori musume no nageki. Tokyo: Shunjūsha. Noda, Hideki. 2015. Eggu/MIWA: Nijūisseiki kara nijusseiki o nozoku gikyokushū. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Saitō, Tamaki. 2008. Haha wa musume no jinsei o shihai suru: Naze “hahagoroshi” wa muzukashī noka. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan. Saitō, Tamaki. 2014. “Jo: ‘haha no musume’ kara no shuttatsu ni mukete.” In Haha to musume wa naze kojirerunoka, edited by Tamaki Saitō et al. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan. e-book. Satō, Gō. 2017. Miwa Akihiro to Yoitomake no uta: Tensai tachi wa ikanishite deatta no ka. Tokyo: Bungei shunjū. Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. 2005. Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

the nation as family   635 STOCK LGBTQ+. 2019. 2019 nen saishin! Pātonāshippu seido o dōnyū shiteiru jichitai matome. Accessed September 10, 2019. https://3xina.com/rainbow/post-805/. Takemura, Kazuko. 2002. Ai ni tsuite: Aidentiti to yokubō no seijigaku. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Ueno, Chizuko. 2004. Nationalism and Gender. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

chapter 40

Constitu ency Per for m a nces The Heart of Democratic Politics Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra

Introduction: A Relational Approach At the core of any democracy is the relationship between elected representatives and those they represent.1 This relationship between representative and represented is often analyzed as one of MPs’ functional roles. Searing (1985) classifies UK MPs’ work as “welfare officers” or “local promoters,”, while Norton’s (1994) taxomony offers seven types: safety value, information provider, local dignity, advocate benefactor, powerful friend, and promoter of constituency interests. But conceiving this work in terms of roles glosses over critical ingredients: identities, relationships, power, and emotions. As Goffman (1959) pointed out in his study of how individuals present themselves in social encounters, the idea of roles can miss the point that people are responding to different audiences through performance and power struggles. The “claim” to represent tens of thousands of diverse constituents, as Saward (2007) puts it, creates endlessly different expectations and meanings in the relationships between parliaments, parliamentarians, and groups within any democratic society. Saward’s approach challenges assumptions about how representation can be reduced to outcomes— such as satisfying interests or winning elections—and opens up possibilities for taking seriously rhetoric and performance as important parts of political work. When you consider their encounters in everyday politics, you can’t avoid questions about how MPs deal with conflicting demands of diverse constituents, or even the contradictions and conflicts created by the ambivalent and changing views in individuals and groups. What accounts for the variation in the way they respond? What do the endless demands do to MPs’ well-being or sense of self? To address these questions, we have developed a relational approach to the study of constituency work, dwelling on the themes of performance, identity, and emotions, leaning

638   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra most heavily on a mix of political anthropology, pragmatic philosophy, and emotion theory. We rely not on the mathematical modeling, taxonomies, and formal frameworks of some political science, which tend to strip the everyday drama out of politics, but point to common and varying patterns and processes. We argue that affect is never absent from human interaction and constitutes an essential and ever-present quality in political life, where it becomes recognizable as emotion. Emotion in this sense is an embodied response to the world, as opposed to a private intrapersonal experience. Our empirical material is drawn in part from Crewe’s (2015) ethnography of UK MPs2 and also a piece of in-depth collaborative participant-observation that the two authors undertook in October 2018. This involved fieldwork in the constituency of Dundee West, Scotland, where we participated in as many events, conversations, and functions as we could over two days with the MP and his staff.3 In the typically participatory and immersive way that anthropologists do research, we refined precisely what we should study in depth with the people we encountered during research. The themes of performance, identity, and emotions emerged out of our own backgrounds but also the interests of the MP and his staff. This collaborative ethnographic approach developed as an multidisciplinary method involving ongoing explorations and sense-making between the researchers as to how they were constructing meaning with informants.

A Political Anthropology of Constituency Work It is in the field of anthropology that the relationships between MPs and their constituents have been framed as both performative and symbolic. Anthropology has been described as “philosophy with the people still in,” a discipline that focuses on how individuals and groups relate to each other and create meaning for themselves (Ingold  2018, 4). Relationships between politicians and citizens were a focus for the work of the first anthropologist to study a European Parliament, Marc Abélès. French politicians stress their local roots; a politician is above all the representative of a territory with all its traditions, even a living symbol of a locality (Abélès 1991, 268, 174). In the UK too, our relationship with our MP is not so much about the representation of our views as the shared belonging to a locality and their championing of our area (Crewe 2014). MPs are not just women or men of actions, ideas, and policies; they are symbols with the power to evoke. This power of evocation is essentially the capacity to evoke an emotional response and, in particular, a response that affirms a mutual or collective identity. These identificatory processes are experienced as “feelings” of belonging and “we-ness.” To identify with an MP’s gestures is to affirm their authority to represent. Being seen as “local” is the most important identity marker when people elect their MP in the UK (the evidence is summarized by Judge and Partos [2018, 207]). All MPs symbolize the link between local and national government, and even political locality and nation, as succinctly illustrated when one MP presided over the celebrations for the Queen’s birthday in England in 2012 (Crewe 2015, 104–5; figure 40.1). This event involved residents in a constituency assembled to watch a parade by cadets (the military), vicars speaking about the importance of community (the church), and the MP (Parliament) concluding the speeches

Constituency Performances   639

figure 40.1.  Sir George Young (MP) in his North West Hampshire constituency. Photo by Emma Crewe

by encouraging us to drink a toast to the Monarch. The MP symbolized the embodied link between community, Parliament, and the Monarch reigning over the nation,4 an example of how identities are constructed through performance and ritual at a local level. MPs tend to be loathed as a collective in most countries, but in their constituencies they are still VIPs, sometimes even loved. UK MP Paul Flynn’s constituents knew everything about him, he told us, and they think “He is a mad bastard, but he is our mad bastard.”5 He described the relationship between MP and constituent as “that of a priest and parishioners, solicitor and clients, shepherd and flock, shop steward and workers and friend of many friends. The MP should be the living embodiment of the constituency, tirelessly promoting and defending the territory with the ferocity of a mother protecting her offspring” (Flynn  2012, 138). MPs extol the virtues of their constituency—its beauty, variety, or warmth—and develop an affinity with the place they represent. MPs can champion their locality, at least in general terms, without incurring anyone’s displeasure, so this process has a performative quality achieved through their interactions with their constituents. This fosters the sense of an expanded “we” identity of which they are the embodied representative. The anthropologist Zahir Ahmed (2019) has complexified representation by arguing that Bangladeshi MPs are involved in endless shape-shifting and gift-giving to build up their reputation and win support from different groups of people. Corbett (2015, 74–5) found that the expectation of largesse from MPs in the Pacific Islands is ubiquitous. There is also a rich seam of ethnographic work on constituencies in Uganda (Tamale 2000) and India (Ruud

640   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra 2001; Michelutti 2008), all demonstrating that to understand politics you have to appreciate specific cultural practices in their historical context. Comparison across Global South and North constitutes a serious gap in the literature. Corbett (2015, 72–3) writes about women’s experience of representation in a way that echoes across contexts; politicians in the Pacific Islands reflect that once elected, your constituents own you, and for women it is a form of dual ownership. They represent their constituents but also all women because their total number in Parliament is so low. Some politics scholars have recently adopted an ethnographic approach. Shirin Rai’s work on ritual and performance is an especially innovative body of (often ethnographic) work on parliamentarians, including her latest book with Carole Spary on Indian women MPs performing representation (Rai and Spary  2018). However, this approach is far from accepted by all political scientists across the world. For example, Martin, Saalfeld, and Strøm (2014, 9–11) critique such “micro-political” or in-depth studies of parliaments for their lack of potential for generalizing and making causal links and claim that it is US political science that offers the most useful research innovations, despite the many questions— including about performance and emotions—their methods struggle to address. They misunderstand the contrasting ways that positivist science and ethnographic approaches establish rigor. As Geertz (1973, 5) explains, the rigor of thick ethnographic descriptions of culture is based on interpretation, “the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.” Anthropologists don’t so much study people as learn from and with them; Ingold (2018, 11) explains, “We observe not by objectifying others but by paying attention to them, watching what they do and listening to what they say. We study with people, rather than making studies of them.” Given that to survey MPs in one political system is hard enough, but to do so comprehensively across cultural contexts would be impossible, we will consider MP-constituent relationships thematically, as (1) political performance and (2) emotional responses, with a particular emphasis on UK constituencies.

Political Performance in Constituencies Political work is about far more than being constrained by rules, norms, or roles. It involves people struggling for power, making meaning, and (re)forming alliances and divisions. In these struggles, the performance of politics involves putting on a show (Goffman 1959), both as individuals and in groups, because getting things done in democratic politics means endlessly winning support and outsmarting your opponents. The “putting on of a show” is also a “show” of affect or a performance of emotion. Paradoxically, the “show” has to be perceived as authentic, i.e., as nonperformative, in order to appear plausible, but this authenticity is also performative. The inevitable competition and enmity involved in democratic politics creates a magnification of normal human experience, making it a rich and complex domain for the study of power, identity, and emotions. In the past few decades this has intensified, with politicians being even more exposed by the twenty-four-hour digital revolution, transforming the way that politics is performed, observed, and participated in. The political performance of representation by MPs takes place in many sites: Parliament’s debating chambers, committee rooms or meeting rooms, television studios, Twitter, local

Constituency Performances   641 party offices, and offices, streets, and meeting venues within constituencies. UK MPs are well-known for name-dropping their constituencies in Westminster (Crewe  2015, 84–6). Eric Pickles MP mimicked other MPs by saying that Stockport was close to his heart, a gem and a magnificent town, Formby a wonderful place to invest, and Rochdale was the apple of his eye, all within the space of an hour.6 Even the lesser-known parliamentary rituals provide opportunities for constituency name-dropping; “points of order,” when an MP can ask the Speaker to take action regarding rules being broken, can be harnessed to the constituency cause. As Speaker John Bercow pointed out, they can even act like a press release: “It is part of the choreography of Parliament that this is tolerated to some extent.”7 MPs try to represent constituency interests during the various processes entailed in making law. For example, Stephen Lloyd MP explains why he voted against his own party’s introduction of tuition fees: “For me, the promises I made to my constituents will always come first.”8 Interwoven with the representation of their constituents, the MP is in the business of self-presentation to constituents and others. These days no MP ignores their image or appearance. Photos and reports on how MPs have raised constituency issues bloom all over MPs’ websites, their campaign literature, in the local press, and on Twitter. As soon as MPs ask a question in Parliament, they rush back to their office and instruct their staff to put out a press release or call the local paper. Paul Flynn (2012, 142) advises other MPs, “Be ubiquitous and ever present in the constituency. The drip feed of blog, tweets, early morning radio interviews that are repeated throughout the day, widely advertised surgeries (meetings with constituents), and attendance in the Chamber in a camera-exposed position, all propagate the message ‘Busy MP.’ ” If you follow MPs around to meetings in public places—churches, community centers, a university, a business park, a housing association—they take photographs and email them to their staff or put them on Twitter themselves. The increasing importance of face-to-face contact is found elsewhere as well (figure 40.2). The US political scientist Richard Fenno (1978, 56) writes of US representatives that trust is the magic ingredient. “If people like you and trust you as an individual, they will vote for you,” members told him. So conversations between politicians and their constituents are not so much about policy or political ideology as about whether the member can be trusted. It takes time to win the moral approval contained within trust, and it means getting close to people or giving the illusion of closeness. One US representative told Fenno that no one will vote against you if you are on a first-name basis, and if you chew their tobacco, then they will even fight for you. Another representative put it this way: “The best way to win a vote is to shake hands with someone. You don’t win votes by the thousands with a speech. Very rarely will anyone ask you about how you stand on anything” (64, 85). Communication involves a subtler process whereby US politicians spend time in their districts to measure and enhance their voting leeway. Representatives know that they will be required sometimes to vote against the wishes of their constituents. To do this without losing too many votes they have to be trusted; the more a politician is trusted, therefore, the more leeway they have (Fenno 1978, 140–51). Again, this quality of trust is not abstract but an embodied experience of emotion requiring mutual affirmations of identity. It is not policy agreement that voters demand; according to US members of Congress, it is a feeling of belonging to one another. Members continually talk about the shared streets, the characters, and the churches, stressing their commonality, understanding, and affectual resonance. They vary their presentation to different groups within the constituency. When voters do see the member as the same as them, perhaps if their identity overlaps, then the member

642   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra

figure 40.2.  Caroline Lucas in her Brighton Pavilion constituency becomes a symbolic representative (figure 40.3). For example, one member said, “Almost anything I do makes them feel proud. They know I’m a black man standing up for the black man” (120). While in a few countries constituents rarely see their elected representatives (e.g., Ethiopia; Ayenew  2019), in most parts of the world, including the UK, MPs’ interaction within their constituencies has intensified hugely with rising expectations and cuts to the welfare state. Constituency work doubled between the 1970s and the end of the 1990s, and over half of MPs claimed that they spent more than 40 percent of their time in their constituency by 2012 (Judge and Partos 2018, 268). Crewe (2015, 92) observed surgery meetings in six constituencies and found almost half were considered “urgent.” MPs and their staff develop an in-depth knowledge of the characters, rules, resources, and latest changes, a sociopolitical, institutional, and economic ethnography of the local welfare state. MPs and staff aim to treat all constituents, irrespective of whether they are supporters or even voters,

Constituency Performances   643

figure 40.3.  SNP politicians in Dundee. Photo by: Emma Crewe as equally deserving of attention and take care to avoid assessing the merits of the case explicitly in their conversation with the constituent. Refusing to take any action is extremely rare. But when experienced MPs write on behalf of a constituent, they hint at the severity of the case: “We ask that this be looked at in a timely manner” all the way to “This is extremely urgent,” as appropriate. They would destroy the goodwill of government and voluntary agency contacts if they give the impression that fast and time-consuming responses had to be made in all cases. This mediation by MPs between constituents and the state inevitably privileges some above others—and there is no avoiding this—so representation is uneven however much politicians strive to act otherwise. Unevenness and inequality are found between constituencies too. More established MPs have a huge bible of useful services, contacts, and resources, while newer MPs may not. The political position of the MP will make a difference. An MP whose party is in government can’t blame government for their problems, and if their party controls the council then they have to defend their record. On the other hand, if their party governs either locally or nationally, they have the advantage of better access to decision-makers who can make something happen. MPs’ own identities influence whom they listen to most closely but also how people react to them. British women MPs seem more comfortable than their male counterparts with “glorified social work,” as some observers call the process of listening to constituents relate tales of suffering in surgery meetings (Crewe 2015). In a familiar gendered pattern of women’s work receiving less public recognition than men’s, this invisible political work counts for nothing when trying to get promotion to the frontbench. One

644   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra British Asian MP was particularly articulate about how his identity affected his work: although some Asians trust him, others disapprove of him because he speaks out against caste and domestic violence, infuriating traditionalists who think he has been too influenced by Western thinking. The former MP Dame Anne Begg, who uses a wheelchair, did not want to be pigeonholed as a disability activist, so rather than working on disability as a separate issue isolated from context, she considered the interests of disabled people in the course of all her work as an MP, e.g., as chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee, seeing how disability is related to pay, pensions, benefits, or whatever comes up.9 So demands for proportional representation of different groups in society are complicated by the multiple identities of MPs. The question of whether or not people are best represented by those with a shared identity becomes problematic when you consider that there can only be overlapping identities, rarely identical ones. Identity is always provisional. While a parliamentary chamber should be representative of the wider population because they are then more likely to consider a range of interests and the electorate will have more faith in them, an overlapping identity between specific MPs and constituents is no guarantee of truer representation.

The Performance of Emotions in Politics Identity is also performative. We continually gesture to both ourselves and others about who we are, where our allegiances lie, and to which groups we feel affiliated. These gestures are complex in that they may belie multiple and possibly conflictual or concealed senses of who one is behind a cohesive presentation that may shift according to whom one is with. For this reason to explain how emotion enters into political work, we will reflect on specific interaction rather than think abstractly, as if divorced from everyday experience, drawing in particular on a visit we made to a specific constituency in Scotland. Over a two-day period of collaborative ethnography we engaged with the Scottish National Party (SNP) MP Chris Law and his four constituency staff—Hannah, Jerry, Mike, and Lesley—shadowing, observing, interviewing, and participating in their activities. Mike and Lesley are caseworkers, while Hannah is normally Law’s researcher in Westminster, and Jerry is the media officer. The physical constituency office in Dundee West is highly visible, positioned at a key intersection in the heart of the constituency. The glass-fronted presentation communicates a transparency and an accessibility which felt exposing to the workers within at certain times, symbolic of the visceral and totemic contact between the world outside and one of its political representatives, mediated by the MP’s staff. One can look in at the bodies inside, and they in turn can act as an audience to events outside (figure 40.4). The overriding impression was that the work of the constituency office is always suffused with affect and emotion. By affect we mean the totality of feeling states experienced by participants, and by emotion we mean affect that has come to make sense to the participants and that can potentially be communicated as sense (Wetherell  2012). However, affect, if conceived of as physiological resonance between interdependent bodies, also patterns human relationships. The meanings we ascribe to these patterns of physiological resonances are communicated through the vehicle of emotion. Thus conscious experience is patterned

Constituency Performances   645

figure 40.4.  Nick Sarra outside Chris Law’s constituency office, West Dundee. Photo by: Emma Crewe unconsciously through emotionally saturated themes, in this case of constituency work and how identities are constructed, and it is these we briefly explore. The question of identity is central here because so much political life is constructed around issues of belonging. Constituents present their cases with the hope that the staff responding to them will understand, i.e., identify with their concerns and difficulties. The MP and his staff in this particular office work hard to convey this understanding and identification. To identify with is to feel a sense of alliance with and to find one’s own experience in the experience of another. It is the sense of I am like you and you are like me. The implicit contract involves the mutual protection of self-interests for the public good. If you vote for me, then your interests will be recognized and taken care of. However, what stands for the public good is highly contestable and a matter for ongoing negotiation. Issues of identity reveal the dynamic of control involved in the formation of selves. An adequate sense of control is necessary for a feeling of security and safety. Identities are often fought over when issues of security and safety, and thus control, are at stake (Marris 1969). These ongoing processes of identification appeared psychologically demanding on constituency staff, required as they are to engage with disturbances and challenges in the community, which may also come to represent a failure of the state. For example, we heard that 50 percent of presentations to the constituency offices were mental health–related. When we visited, the caseworkers reported that they were dealing with 125 live constituency cases. In effect this means that wider individual, family, and sociological disturbances, embodied

646   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra in the constituents and their individual histories and concerns, express themselves through the conduit of the constituency offices. As mentioned previously, issues of control link with issues of identity. To belong securely is to feel potentially safer and in possession of a greater degree of control over the vicissitudes of life. Turning to the MP and his staff during a time of crisis is an attempt to negotiate a further degree of control and thus safety. This expression of sociological disturbance is experienced through the feeling states of the office staff. Consider the emotional work involved in the following three cases. A man pointedly stands just outside the constituency office looking up at a neighboring tower block through binoculars. This man is suicidal and communicating his disturbance in a directly emotional way to the constituency staff within. From behind the window the staff find themselves interpreting the meaning of this spectacle as a communication of suicidal intent. There is a strong invitation here for the watching staff to resonate with the performed anxiety and emotional complexes (Burkitt 1999). These might involve emotions such as guilt and anger since these are often dominant themes in situations involving suicide, both completed and threatened. The staff here are being “invited” by the man with the binoculars to feel disturbed as an attempt to force action or recognition. Here we see the politics of emotion at its most raw and played out as a complex power relation with the constituency office. The performance of his distress before the audience behind the office window evokes an emotional response and potential political leverage (figure 40.5). An elderly constituent frequently wanders into the office to complain of seemingly minor issues, such as displaced paving slabs. He takes time and attention, but the staff find a way of coming alongside him and see him as lonely—more emotional work that requires tactful handling. Wider social difficulties around bereavement, loneliness, and alienation are played out in the office, not necessarily as open communications but in indirect and complex ways that require understanding and sense-making. The paving slab issue here is a symbolic communication of lack of control and insecurity that masks loneliness and alienation. The paving slab, a piece of broken community artifact, acts as a means of forming a

figure 40.5.  Photo by: Nicholas Sarra

Constituency Performances   647 relationship with the MP’s office. Similarly, a constituent with a psychosis presenting with a case that revolves around accusatory and bizarre delusional beliefs requires seventy emails involving twelve different organizations. The presenting problem again masks underlying needs to belong and to be held in mind. These three narratives indicate again the function of the office as a conduit for the disturbances of the wider community. These disturbances are processed emotionally by the office staff, who are continually affected and having to make sense of the presenting situations. The volume of cases necessitates triaging, and it seems that the construction of urgency in this situation is formed in relation to the quality of anxiety presented. Emotionally challenging situations in which constituents present their concerns aggressively or disturbingly need much time to process. There is more work involved in maintaining an identification with the concerns of a hostile or disturbed constituent. Attitudes toward a case can shift remarkably as cases develop unforeseen nuances, and these attitudes are communicated with emotional meaning. This work is not just about dealing with the turbulence of others but also about navigating the emotions summoned up for the staff. So the mood in the office corresponds with the mood presented. Cases presented come charged with affect, and this affect communicates directly to the bodies of the MP and staff through processes of physiological resonance, identification, and arousal. Since they work to form a collective identity, the mood of the office arises through affectual resonance. The making of practical judgments is necessarily imbued with emotion. The office can feel sad, angry, anxious, grateful, happy, or disturbed according to who walks through the door or what comes through the screen or phone. Emotion is at work here and has to be made sense of in order for the MP to represent the constituents. The constituents’ cases arrive with an affectual tone that is translated into emotion as the process becomes imbued with meaning. Political representation is thus a politics of affect (Sarra 2019; Massumi 2015). The making of practical judgments and the taking of positions is necessarily imbued with emotion. Emotion here is essentially relational and political in that the feeling states of the staff and their MP emerge through their interaction with themselves and the world around them (Burkitt 1999). These feeling states are richly communicative and form a key quality in how decisions and attitudes are taken.

The Politics of Affect Like Sara Ahmed ([2004] 2014, 10), we view emotions as relational, neither just individually felt nor just socially and politically constructed: “So emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” This is clearly expressed in the relationships between an MP and their staff. Any correspondence sent out by these staff goes in the name of the MP. The staff of MP Law explained that they all act and perform as Law but in slightly different ways. Their backgrounds—whether as civil servants, in business, or as political party members— gave them each a unique way of communicating. In a complex twist of modern politics in the UK, MPs’ staff represent MPs representing their constituents. All staff working in this

648   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra constituency office of Dundee West recognized the construction of a collective MP through their own collaboration in representing him. Thus the voluminous email traffic needs responding to as if it were the MP himself responding. MPs will come to represent a social object (Mead 1934) in the sense that they come to stand in the public’s eye for something larger than their own individuality (e.g., representation), although that individuality may well express both party and personal political ideology and its branding. An ongoing process of imaginary anticipations and identifications takes place and is embodied affectually in which the constituency staff are able to form a collective in which “we” and “I” become fused both through the persona of the MP and the personae of the staff. The MP evokes the social object of representation, and by extension the staff do the same by their active work in performing the collective “we.” Representation is therefore linked with identification, which is an essentially emotional process involving an acute sensitivity to issues of belonging or the processes of inclusion and exclusion that concern constituents. The more the MP can extend this sense of “we” identification, the more successful they will be. The work of forming a “we” collective through the vehicle of the MP’s and party’s identity may exert pressures on the sense of self. Not everything is possible to say, and so private concerns may build without expression. The collective identity has to be maintained and fosters cohesiveness, but this cohesiveness may conceal the MP’s ongoing work of negotiating different perspectives, which can lead to feeling overwhelmed and the need for a confidante. Loneliness in this type of work may arise when the capacity to lead a private life is difficult, as implied by Snyder (2017, 86): “The choice to be in public, depends on the ability to retain a private sphere of life. We are free only when it is we ourselves who draw the line between when we are seen and when we are not seen.” The anger toward the MP expressed when they fail to transform constituents’ lives is felt by the staff as well. So gratitude from those who have been helped takes on significance for staff. The emotional tenor of the office is further understood by the appearance of the front window, where a range of colorful and positive thank-you cards form a partial screen for those within. Being thanked is an important experience for the constituency office and again an indication of the continual emotional work staff are obliged to perform through their contact with the powerless, despairing, and challenging among their constituents. The thank-you process also supports the process of representation through identification. Thankyous foster the alliances necessary for mutual identification and collectivity, remarked upon in the first section. The thank-you affirms the mutual recognition and support required for the electability of the MP. It is a vote of confidence in the MP, and emotion is the vehicle of this gesture. The message is I am grateful for what you have done for me and, when received, has the sense of an invitation to mutual identification and alliance building with the sense of You’re one of us. It is essential that MPs and their staff are able to identify with their constituents in order to understand them. This identificatory process is not a passive process but has to be performed as emotional communication. The MP and staff have to work at the performance of mutual understanding and identification by pressing the flesh and chewing the proverbial tobacco. As if to provide a counterpoint, the washroom provides an image of evacuation and detoxification with a formidable array of air fresheners, insecticide, antibacterial agents, and a fly swatter. It is as if the disturbing emotion that reaches the office from the wider community might unconsciously seek to be expurgated if not adequately assimilated

Constituency Performances   649 through the thank-you processes. We are not suggesting this observation as a generalizable truth for all MPs’ offices but rather as a way of drawing attention to the possibility that intense affect may seek release or expression through displacement or catharsis. As the feeling tone becomes recognizable as emotion, humor comes to serve as a mitigation of everyday anxieties and concerns. Humor is a condensed style of communication. It speaks of the taboo and of underlying power-related themes that may betray themselves beyond the speaker’s conscious intention. Thus, on a visit to attend that opening of a leisure facility, a rival politician (over a foot shorter than his rival) made two jokes in relation to his “standing,” an ostensible reference to the difference in height. This is accompanied by ducking under the ceremonial opening ribbon. The joke here communicates a political rivalry within the constraints of a specific public space where allegiances may be divided and sought after. The humor acts as a catharsis for the affectual political tension but is double-edged and ambiguous. A repeated theme was “speaking from the heart.” This suggested an apolitical position (in the sense of individualized without interdependency), which was nonetheless intensely politicized. The use of the heart organ has come to be understood as a form of self-evident authenticity. It speaks of a correspondence between values and action but may be unconscious of any social formation. The claim in speaking from the heart is for an authenticity that can be communicated emotionally. The effective performance of emotional authenticity is a compelling tool in political life and a direct invitation to identify with that which is being expressed through an emotional resonance with the speaker, as in the following comment made about a fellow MP: “I didn’t know what he was talking about but he sounded brilliant.” This remark from an MP suggests that performance of emotion counts for much. In this sense emotion is seen as potentially political, for the heart is seen as an authentic position. This sense of emotion is therefore indivisible from that of felt values. If felt values are expressed through the vehicle of emotion, then an idea of authenticity arises. This authenticity, however, masks the attitudinal dispositions and interdependencies formed through social identifications and power relations (Taylor 1991).

Multidisciplinary Conclusions We began with the premise that democracy takes shape in different ways according to its historical and sociocultural setting. Even within one country you can find contrasting views on politicians: in West Bengal, India, they are seen as dirty, unprincipled, and corrupt (Ruud 2001, 117), but Michelutti (2008, 178–83) found in North India that Yadav leaders are a martial race, with a historical link to Krishna fighting for social justice. That doesn’t mean that generalizations are rendered impossible by local specificity. What can we conclude about the performance of MPs representing their constituencies across the world? It is clear that much more is going on than the common reductionist explanations of MPs as respresentatives merely furthering their electoral interest or fulfilling a role. Of course MPs try to win elections in their constituency, so everything they do must be contributing to that, but since they spend huge amounts of time on a small number of constituents with chronic problems, and even on nonvoters (children, asylum seekers), there must be more

650   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra to constituency work than narrow political self-interest. Political representatives are themselves symbols; they are a substitute for voters, part of the symbolic construction of politics without which we could have no conception of political reality. They connect localities with the nation, which partly explains why MPs having a “local” identity has become so important. In this view representation is about organizing the world rather than just reflecting it, and “the politician must possess the essentially aesthetic talent of being able to represent political reality in new and original ways” (Street 2004, 444–5). What they are expected to do in their constituency depends on context. In Bangladesh they give gifts; in Ethiopia they give speeches; but in the UK they give social and emotional labor. The UK has experienced a long period of austerity, leaving all but those in affluent households feeling neglected, and the failures of the state show up in the constituency office, where MPs’ caseworkers act as the collective representative and attempt to heal or reverse these failures. However, the social and emotional labor apparent in the work of UK MPs may be generalizable cross-culturally, although expressed and performed idiosyncratically in different contexts. In other words, emotion may be seen as a relational feature of all constituency work. Emotion communicates the qualities inherent in the processes of identity formation ubiquitous in political work. The question of emotion has often been neglected or overlooked in political science literature on politicians. Perhaps this is because it is often essentialized and seen as a quality of individual behavior as opposed to performative, communicative, and arising through the relational. A fuller understanding of the work of representation can be developed if a multidisciplinary approach is taken—and here we have tried to interweave the perspectives of political anthropology, pragmatic philosophy, and group analytic theory. Our view is that emotion and its performance are fundamental to political life and that we miss something important if we fail to recognize this and the connection with how identities are constructed through political processes. The presence of emotion is not only discernible in exceptional circumstances or when feelings run high but is an omnipresent quality in all human relating and thus in all political work. Therefore we argue that it is erroneous to separate rational from emotional process and more helpful and pragmatic to view them as mutually constitutive and arising at the same time in political life.

Notes 1. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Global Challenges Research Fund AH/R005435/1. 2. For an explanation about ethnographic methods, see Crewe 2017. 3. The MP and his staff read an earlier draft, made corrections, and consented to the use of their names. We would like to convey our gratitude and appreciation to them, as well as others we interacted with, for their warm welcome, patience, and fascinating insights during our visit. 4. Interview by Emma Crewe, June 2012. 5. Interview by Emma Crewe, November 2013. 6. Eric Pickles MP, HC Debates, March 12, 2013, col. 12, 15, 20. 7. Interview by Emma Crewe, January 2012. 8. Stephen Lloyd MP website, accessed June 28, 2013, Crewe 2015, 86. 9. Interview by Emma Crewe, May 2012.

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References Abélès, Marc. 1991. Quiet Days in Burgundy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahmed, Sara. [2004] 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Zahir. 2019. “From Shape-Shifting to Collusion in Violence: An Ethnography of Information Relationships between Bangladeshi Members of Parliament and Their Constituents.” Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology 42, no.1: 5–20. Ayenew, Meheret. 2019. Parliaments, Public Engagement and Poverty Reduction in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa: Forum for Social Studies. Burkitt, Ian. 1999. Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage. Corbett, Jack. 2015. Being Political: Leadership and Democracy in the Pacific Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Crewe, Emma. 2014. “The Westminster Parliament: Performing Politics.” In Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliaments, edited by Shirin Rai and Rachel Johnson, 40–59. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Crewe, Emma. 2015. The House of Commons: An Anthropology of MPs at Work. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Crewe, Emma. 2017. “Ethnography of Parliament: Finding Culture and Politics Entangled in the Commons and the Lords.” Parliamentary Affairs 70, no. 1: 155–172. Fenno, Richard. 1978. Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. New York: Harper Collins. Flynn, Paul. 2012. How to Be an MP. London: Biteback. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. Honneth, Axel. [1992] 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Judge, David, and Rebecca Partos. 2018. “MPs and Their Constituencies.” In Exploring Parliament, edited by Cristina Leston-Bandeira and Louise Thompson, 264–273. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marris, Peter. 1969. The Politics of Uncertainty: Attachment in Public and Private Life. London: Routledge. Martin, Shane, Thomas Saalfeld, and Kaare Strøm. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Legislative Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Mead, George Herbert. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Michelutti, Lucia. 2008. The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India. New Delhi: Routledge. Norton, Philip. 1994. “The Growth of the Constituency Role of the MP.” Parliamentary Affairs 47, no. 4: 705–720. Rai, Shirin, and Carol Spary. 2018. Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ruud, Arild Engelsen. 2001. “Talking Dirty about Politics: A View from a Bengali Village.” In The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, edited by C. J. Fuller and V. Benei, 115–38. London: Hurst. Sarra, Nicholas. 2019. “Attachment and Trauma in Groups and Organisations.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 35, no. 2: 263–272. Saward, Michael. 2006. “The Representative Claim.” Contemporary Political Theory 5: 297–318.

652   Emma Crewe and Nicholas Sarra Searing, Donald. 1985. “The Role of the Good Constituency Member and the Practice of Representation in Great Britain.” Journal of Politics 47, no. 2: 348–381. Snyder, Timothy. 2017. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin Random House. Street, John. 2004. “Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Representation.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6: 435–452. Tamale, Sylvia. 2000. When Hens Begin to Crow. Gender and Parliamentary Politics in Uganda. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage.

chapter 41

Com edy a n d th e Per for m ati v e Politics of Br ex it James Brassett

Introduction: The Failure of Post-Brexit Comedy The critical literature on comedy and (global) politics has commonly identified a resistant, transgressive, and subversive set of potentials in humor and joke telling (Amoore and Hall 2013; Odysseous 2001; Rossdale 2019). A range of authors from different perspectives have pointed to the capacity of jokes and laughter to form an everyday and popular language for the expression of dissent (Kìshtainy 2009; Rodrigues and Collinson 1995; Tang and Battacharya 2011; Yang and Jiang 2015). Ridicule of public political figures is often figured as an easily wielded “weapon of the weak” (Scott 1987), with authors noting how the vulgarity of humor is fundamental to its political power (Orwell [1945] 1968). The rude and offensive nature of jokes and the bodily effects of laughter combine to produce a vision of comedy as a form of solidarity, whereby “the people” are reminded of the pretensions and formality of public order (Bakhtin 1984; see also Critchley 2002). In common parlance, comedy and satire are often understood as excellent strategic vehicles for “punching up” against the powerful. Understood in these terms, the experience of comedy after Brexit might be figured as a case study of failure. Despite an overwhelming comic turn against Brexit, and at the risk of stating the obvious, the plethora of anti-Brexit jokes has thus far not managed to overturn the decision of the referendum. In more nuanced sociological terms, the routine practice of joking about the folly of Brexit, the stupidity of its leaders, as well as the commonly referenced ignorance and racism of the “Leave voter” has rather had the effect of entrenching division. Should we therefore temper the optimistic vision of comedy as an instrument of resistance?

654   James Brassett An altogether more skeptical position in the literature on humor and joking instead highlights the complicity between humor and power; indeed, a range of scholars have pointed to the sociological effects of ridicule in modern society (Billig 2005; see also Bergson 1911). Here the focus is on the “butt of the joke,” a subject who is subjected to a socially accepted form of humiliation, thereby redescribing comedy and laughter as a disciplinary practice in modern society (Lockyer and Pickering 2008). Think of—inter alia—jokes about race, gender, physical attributes, sexual orientation, etc. While sympathetic to both the resistant and disciplinary diagnoses of the role of comedy in global politics, this chapter seeks to develop a more performative set of insights. Simplifying matters somewhat, comedy, humor, laughing, and joking can be understood to do different things at different times. A particular joke may well inspire or galvanize a form of resistance, critical or subversive reflection. But the same joke may also perform a con­ serv­a­tive function; indeed the very nature of the comic form often plays upon exaggerated or stereotypical character traits. Rendered thus, I argue that it is better to think of comedy as a site of politics per se. Especially in a British context, comedy and comedians have a special place in the production of cultural meaning; they work within a tradition, rework and reperform jokes in new contexts. As such the vernacular form of comic resistance might be better viewed as an ongoing conversation rather than an instrumental vehicle that does or does not “impact upon” some predefined vision of (state-centric) politics (Brassett and Sutton 2017). The role of comedy in the performative politics of Brexit can afford a number of interesting insights on the reactions, oppositions, and identities that have been constructed in public discourse. This chapter will identify three specific discourses on the relationship between comedy and Brexit that speak to the performative politics of British identity through a period of (ontological) crisis (Browning 2018). The aim is to rephrase “Brexit comedy” or “the comedy of Brexit” as a socially consequential practice that teases at the (changing) social and political consensus. Against those who might discern in Brexit a thoroughly divisive failure, I want to suggest that comedy can be an adaptive language that is capable of reflecting (on) its own positionality, while allowing for fundamental conflicts and disagreements to be played out. Comedy as politics. The first section looks at the discourse of comedy politicians. Initial reactions to the Brexit vote identified a special new form of “joker politician” in the guise of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, who had “hoodwinked” the population with their “oafish wit” and “irreverent barbs.” This attempt to stabilize the discursive separation between comedy and politics speaks to a larger performative politics of Brexit that portrays (this) crisis in terms of irrationality, madness, etc. and seeks to foster a renewed belief in the progressive potential of politics. The second section addresses the discourse of the comedy establishment and the idea that the preponderance of anti-Brexit satire was a sign of the comfortable position that many comedians hold within the EU liberal market consensus. While a focal point for proLeave arguments about a wider “cultural conspiracy” to Remain, the debate nevertheless provoked an interesting set of questions about the political role and positionality of the professional comedian. The final section questions whether the consensus over the relationship between comedy and politics is beginning to move on from the divisive politics of Brexit to embrace a more plural tone. Here the polyphonic nature of (some) comedy suggests a move to focus on the elites who supported Brexit (rather than the people who voted for it), as well as the way pro-Brexit comedians like Geoff Norcott have been able to find a

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit   655 place in mainstream comedy. Quintessentially, this discourse of moving on is performatively embodied and subverted in the recent work of Stewart Lee, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of a letter he wrote to fans about where his comedy can credibly go after Brexit. By no means an exhaustive survey of post-Brexit comedy, this chapter is an attempt to go beyond the idea that comedy is a simple case of “joking for our side.” Of course, such comedy exists after Brexit, as per descriptions of Farage as a “frog-faced arse wipe” on The Last Leg, or the hilarity that ensued when Danny Dyer repeatedly called David Cameron a “twat” on Good Morning Britain. But the intensity of post-Brexit politics has also fomented opportunities for professional comedians to innovate. On one level, it is simply quite hard to tour an anti-Brexit show when audiences might be Remain, Leave, or both. Indeed Marcus Brigstocke famously recounted how Brexit forced him to rethink his comedy in light of audience walk-outs (Silito 2017). On another level, while the easy association of comedy with the left has always been problematic, the preponderance of Remain-supporting comedians has brought this idea into sharp relief, questioning how joking in favor of the Single European Market can be understood as particularly resistant.

Comedy Politicians When you look at the EU now, it reminds me, it makes me think of . . . walking round this wonderful underwear factory, it makes me think of some badly designed undergarment that has now become too tight in some places, far too tight, far too constrictive, and dangerously loose in other places. —Boris Johnson, Leave Campaign Speech, quoted in The Guardian (2016)

A prominent early discourse on comedy and Brexit was that one of the reasons Leave had won was that the campaign was fronted by politicians who had a special facility for humor. While this discourse was ostensibly orchestrated around the body of the politician, it also contemplated a wider set of issues about the (proper) role of comedy and satire in politics. This discourse is important, therefore, because it establishes a framework for regulating comedy and comedians as separate from politics, a separation that I will argue is both unstable and prone to fall apart. In this way, I draw on Judith Butler’s (1993, 2) understanding of performativity as the “reiterative power” of a discourse “to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” The politics of this “reiterative power” lies in the ontopolitical insight that any attempted closure entailed in a given performative is always already contingent; as Butler argues, such closures depend on audience reception, uptake, phrasing, and—under certain circumstances—the potential for subversive readings. Thus, drawing on Butler’s famous example, gender may well be performed in heteronormative terms— with a set of oppositions (e.g., to homosexuality and transgender identities) and regulatory hierarchies (e.g., within and between sexes), but the very fact that it depends upon such exclusions means that the performative is inherently unstable (and therefore political). As she argued recently, “Breakdown is constitutive of performativity (performativity never fully achieves its effect, and so in this sense ‘fails’ all the time; its failure is what necessitates its reiterative temporality, and we cannot think iterability without failure). Its moments of

656   James Brassett breakdown are also important for another version of ‘critique’ (Butler 2010, 153). On this view, the discursive attempt to separate comedy and politics in order to stabilize the meaning of each is likely to fail. This might be because comedy is inherently political, or that politics—especially Brexit politics—is inherently ironic (Weaver 2019). But it is also because the meaning of each is always already evolving; the relationship between comedy and politics is contingently emergent through discursive performances, receptions, and subversions. The discourse of the comedy politician centered on two overlapping arguments that circulated in the wake of the Brexit vote. The first was that politicians like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were either buffoons or had cynically used their “clown like” personas to disguise the “reality” of their politics. The second argument extrapolated out to the wider— often negative—ramifications of this mixing between comedy and politics. The overriding tone of this discourse was a lament for a time when “proper comedy” was handled by skilled professional satirists who sought to hold politicians to account. Politicians, on the other hand, had a seriousness of purpose and a facility for fair judgment. Instead, what many critics now saw was an unedifying mix of politics and “entertainment” that risked credulity and justified, for many, the “national humiliation” of Brexit as a host of international publications invoked various Monty Python sketches to represent the “self-harm” that the UK was inflicting on itself.1 In visual terms, the discourse of comedy politicians was easily performed via images of Boris stuck on a zip wire, waving union jack flags, or Boris wiping out a Chinese school child in a rugby match. Several such images came together to present the idea of clownish politicians who were an embarrassment to themselves and the nation. While Farage does not play on precisely the same “oafish charm” as Boris, there was nevertheless scope to work with his “frog-like” face and “unflinching” confidence. Appearing on Question Time, Russell Brand questioned the amiable and humorous way in which the media image of Farage is relayed: “As much as any of us I enjoy seeing Nigel Farage in a boozer with a pint and a fag laughing off his latest scandals about breastfeeding or whatever, I enjoy it. . . . But this man is not a cartoon character. He ain’t Del Boy. He ain’t Arthur Daley. He is a pound shop Enoch Powell, and we've got to watch him” (On Demand News 2014). But there was greater depth and nuance to the discourse of the comedy politician than a simple sneer at the ridiculous buffoons who had caused Brexit. After all, if they were really so silly, how could they possibly have “caused” Brexit? An important line in the argument was developed in a previously published article by Jonathan Coe that the London Review of Books began circulating on the day of the Brexit vote. In the article “Sinking Giggling into the Sea,” Coe (2013) used his review of a book, The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, to develop a critique of the role of satire in politics. Taking a lead from the satire boom of the 1960s, Coe argues that the spirit of satire is “anti-establishment,” the themes that concerned Beyond the Fringe were the church, the judiciary, the government. However, as the popularity of satire grew, its facility for producing laughter must be questioned, first gently, because the main exponents emerge from the androcentric, upper class, Oxbridge-educated circles that make up the establishment, and then performatively, because the “arched eyebrow business” turns into a commodity. In this way, Coe positions the career of Johnson in terms of his appearances on Have I Got News for You and the way he was able to play the role of the “nasty Tory” politician for laughs because “he understands that the laughter it generates, correctly harnessed, can be very useful to a politician who knows what to do with it”. On this view, not only has the edge of satire been

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit   657 blunted, but the clown politician has entered into a symbiotic relationship with humor: “In an age when politicians are judged first of all on personality, when the public assumes all of them to be deceitful, and when it’s easier and much more pleasurable to laugh about a political issue than to think about it, Johnson’s apparent self-deprecating honesty and lack of concern for his own dignity were bound to make him a hit”. This view of Johnson proved very popular in the period after the Brexit vote. It provided a critical heuristic for thinking through how the Leave campaign had disguised their message. As Coe argued, “If we are chuckling at him, we are not likely to be thinking too hard about his doggedly neoliberal and pro-City agenda, let alone doing anything to counter it”. Just so, if he was eating a pastie in Cornwall, or joking about undergarments in an underwear factory (e.g., “Knickers to the pessimists!”), then, it was supposed, people were unlikely to be thinking too hard about the “real politics” of Leave. Similar points were echoed by Will Davies (2016), who suggested that far from contesting politics, satire had now become a servant of Leave politicians: “The willingness of Nigel Farage to weather the scornful laughter of metropolitan liberals (for instance through his periodic appearances on Have I Got News For You) could equally have made him look brave in the eyes of many potential Leave voters. I can’t help feeling that every smug, liberal, snobbish barb that Ian Hislop threw his way on that increasingly hateful programme was ensuring that revenge would be all the greater, once it arrived. The giggling, from which Boris Johnson also benefited handsomely, needs to stop.” Again for Farage, his crafted “man on the street” persona is a neat trick for someone who went to public school and worked in finance. Yet Farage has managed to conjure a kind of irreverence toward the EU (and the Tory party) that arguably plays on older tropes of comedy as “vulgar” and “cheeky.” In one of his final speeches to the EU Parliament he mused over how the EU used to laugh at him when he first arrived, concluding triumphantly, “Well you’re not laughing now!” Two weeks after this address, a short video began to circulate on social media. Farage spoke in front of an MP who seemed to gesture—in universal fashion—that Farage was a “wanker.” The video circulated with gleeful retweets and replies that someone was finally being honest about Farage. It was suggested that the video crystallized the mood of a nation, with many commentators expressing dismay that Farage portrayed himself as the voice of the UK in Europe, when he couldn’t even get elected back home. However, what looked set to become a viral sensation was quickly questioned in the comments section. The apparent hero with the hand gesture turned out to be Ray Finch, a fellow member of the UK Independence Party, and a counterview began to circulate that the true subject of the accusation was in fact Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission. Suddenly the mood in the comments sections turned to scorn as people began to comment that this was precisely the kind of abusive and childish politics that had brought such shame on our nation.

The Comedy Establishment The discourse of the comedy politician attempts to separate comedy and politics in order to stabilize the latter. A host of academic articles point to the way politicians have always used humor as a form of statecraft (Wood, Corbett, and Flinders 2016); indeed, when many in the public sphere support the use of satirical memes by—inter alia—Corbyn’s Labour,

658   James Brassett Donald Tusk, and Emanuel Macron—there has been a significant repudiation of the use of humor by right-wing and Leave politicians. In line with cultural discourses of crisis as moral panic, where the crisis event is portrayed as a moment of delusion, normally gendered as hysterical, the discourse of the comedy politician performs the Brexit vote as a piece of trickery. This is therefore an argument that overlaps with wider ideas about the importance of reason, facts, experts, etc. The use of comedy by Johnson and Farage implies bad faith and that they cannot be trusted. Typically for a divisive subject like Brexit, the second discourse on comedy and politics came from the right, and Leave supporters, who felt a dissonance between their apparent victory and the performance of their own cultural position as “idiots” and “racists.” If the discourse of the comedy politician had noted the links between comedians and the upper echelons of British society as a qualification on the resistant potential of satire, then the discourse of the comedy establishment weaponized this idea. Far from a simple correction or qualification, “liberal comedy” would now be implicated in the hegemonic common sense of an EU capitalist hierarchy that was in the midst of a fundamental social “revolt.” The discourse of the comedy establishment emerged from two overlapping arguments that both had a reactionary quality, pushing back against the apparent mood of negativity that seemed to engulf the UK after the Brexit vote. If Leave had won, surely this would be a time for celebration, they wondered? But it was not. First, the idea of a “cultural conspiracy” to subvert the Leave vote began to identify the role of media and metropolitan elites in refusing to accept the result of the referendum. A critical extension of this view suggested that professional comedians held an all too comfortable position in the EU liberal market consensus, that “liberal comedy” had become hegemonic, and jokes now had to be judged in terms of whether or not they portrayed the “right kind of political opinion” (read: cosmopolitan, pro-European, and diversity-promoting). Second, a critical variant of the “political correctness gone mad” agenda sought to develop a critique of the liberal values of the comedy establishment as a new form of fascism. Simply put, was anti-Brexit comedy actually guilty of the very problems of racism, misogyny, and—most fundamentally—hatred of the working classes that it claimed to question? In material terms the discourse of the comedy establishment was easily represented in terms of wealth, mainstream media presence (especially BBC), and the palpable fact that the vast majority of comedians were pro-Remain. Especially in the UK, where comedy is taken very seriously as part of the national culture, this linking of satire to elitism was a powerful discourse, not least because of the apparent connections between British comedy and left-wing resistance. If comedy really was such an open and pluralist discourse, why was their only one openly Tory, pro-Brexit comedian at the 2016 Edinburgh Festival? Brendan O’Neill (2017) summarized the position in a typically provocative piece for The Spectator: “Britain’s comics are almost universally anti-Brexit. The conformism is staggering. . . . That a hulking swathe of the populace rejects the EU, but hardly a single comic does, shows how utterly disconnected the comic class really is. It confirms the colonisation of British comedy by a breathtakingly narrow strata of society.” By using references to a “comic class” and ideas about the “colonisation” of comedy, the discourse suggests that conformity of opinion emerges from a hegemonic position within—and for—power. The comedy establishment emerges as a critical discourse that portrays Brexit as a rebellion by the “lower orders.” Instead the “comic class” is “being overrun by well-fed toffs or well-connected middle

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit   659 classes who tend to share the same world view. Hence the cultural elite now thinks one thing and ordinary people think another.” While it might be argued that not all comedians are rich and successful, or that not all comedians are blind to the range of different reasons people voted to leave, there is no doubt that the idea of the comedy establishment impacted comedy. At one level, a number of comedians reflected on the difficulty of doing anti-Brexit comedy. In particular, Marcus Brigstocke went public with his concerns—indeed his doubt and uncertainty—about how to deal with such a divisive topic as Brexit (Silito 2017). While comfortably anti-Brexit in his comedy, he reflected upon how uncomfortable he felt about repeated audience walk-outs during his live shows: “People have been angry; people have walked out of shows and people have booed. A lot of the people that I think of as my audience will not be back—they won’t come again—they’re that angry.” At another level, comedians and comedy writers began to question the nature of anti-Brexit comedy. Was it really that funny? Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, argued that Brexit comedy was “exclusively negative. . . . Many jokes essentially paraphrase as shooting ourselves in the foot, and the rest rely on lazily branding 52 percent of the voters as racist” (quoted in Sabur 2017). On this view, Brown introduced the idea of a dynamic interaction between comedians and their audiences: One would have hoped comedians would be able to find comic mileage in their evident disengagement from half of the public, but there instead seems to be little to no such acceptance and analysis of the referendum result, instead merely anger and lashing out at stupid people making the wrong decision, as they see it. As far as audience reaction goes, it tends to be fairly warm with television studio audiences at most such recordings take place in the resolutely pro-remain London, but in the rest of the country—England and Wales, at very least—one can only begin to imagine how alienated and offended some audiences must feel.

Against the bad faith image of comedy and Brexit, then, the discourse of the comedy establishment invites a different, albeit potentially totalizing vision, that ‘liberal comedians’ are part of the ideological superstructure of EU capitalism. When faced with a challenge to the(ir) hegemony, the comic class has actually turned against the working classes they apparently sympathize with. As the pro-Brexit comedian Geoff Norcott (2018b) put it, “Normally in political satire, it’s a case of attacking the ideas, or the Party, you play the ball not the man, but this was the other way round, one of the first satirical responses to Brexit was to call everyone stupid and racist, so there was that sort of ‘peephole moment,’ where you go ‘oh right, it’s like that is it?’ And particularly when a lot of the people who voted Leave were working class people. It came from the left, who often prize the idea of ‘punching up,’ but now they were ‘punching down.’ ” More critically, in one of his stand-up shows, Norcott (2018a) openly questioned the balance of racist attitudes on the Remain side: Brexit. Telling me I’m a fucking racist cos I voted Leave, right. . . . Working class people are on the fucking frontline of racial integration. Do you know what I mean? We’ve actually got friends in those communities! Our kids might even be in classes with those people, they might come over for tea, our kids might date people from that community. Don’t fucking tell me about racism when all it comes down is artisan bread, fuck you! [Posh accent] “Well I mean you know, who’s gonna come and pick the strawberries or work at Pret?” Wow I didn’t know that was what the EU was there for, just to provide you with economic oompa loompas, eh? Maybe you’ll actually have to pay the going rate for childcare?

660   James Brassett On this view, the class, racial, and gender politics of Remain voters is foregrounded in a way that might reflect a more sophisticated take on the politics of Brexit than “cosmopolitan Remainers” vs. “racist Leavers.” Possibly, or possibly not, given the move to stereotype Remainers. Far more likely, I would suggest, is the continuation of an impasse over the very terms of (comic) debate.

Moving On? Despite the divisive politics of Brexit comedy, this chapter has argued that humor is a more diverse and ambiguous social practice than simply joking for our side. Comedy can do different things in different circumstances. It can be inclusive and empancipatory, yet it can also wound and exclude, through stereotype, humiliation, or simply affirming the values of a particular group. What is sometimes lost in the politics of comedy is how each joke, or comedy act, is not a “once and for all” moment of politics. Rather, comedy, as a profession and as a social practice, is adaptive over time, an everyday language of political engagement (Brassett 2016). Attempts to discipline the language, to say that one or other version is correct, or to critique it for its close association with, say, a politician or the establishment, are simply extensions of politics (which exploit the resonance of comedy with a wider public). In this final section, therefore, I move beyond the either-or mode of reasoning to explore a more reflexive capacity in humor, to question positionality and to reflect (upon) political contingency. As Laurent Berlant and Sainne Ngai (2017, 234–5) argue, this can be an uncomfortable process, which is precisely why it is political: “Comedy’s propensity to get in trouble—sometimes greater even than genres like horror or porn— gets thrown into sharper relief when we think of it as a vernacular form. What we find comedic (or just funny) is sensitive to changing contexts. It is sensitive because the funny is always tripping over the not funny, sometimes appearing identical to it. . . . Comedy helps us test or figure out what it means to say ‘us.’ Always crossing lines, it helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear.” Instead of seeking to police comedy and politics, or contest the starting points of “legitimate” dialogue, we might embrace the rough edges of post-Brexit humor as part of a changing consensus on politics. Accepting that “this is a very difficult time in history to do stand-up,” Stewart Lee (2018) has developed a routine that reflects deeply on hisand our own position within the performative politics of Brexit, questioning the role of the comedian in finding a way through this “dissensus.” I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, because I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for 18 months and as I didn’t know how Brexit would pan out I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done. I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit because I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification. [Crowd laughter and applause] THAT’S RIGHT! Clap the things you agree with! Clap, clap, clap! Agree, agree, agree. “Did you see Stewart Lee in Southend?” “Yeh.” “Was it funny?” “No, but I agreed the fuck out of it. It’s almost as if it were targeted at my exact social demographic in a cynical attempt to maintain a future proof audience for long term mortgage repayment purposes.”

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit   661 By placing his own position as a market subject within the political economy of (anti-) Brexit comedy, Lee takes ownership of the contingency of humor, questioning its reception in a largely supportive audience (for money). The admission is an important one for his ability to then proceed to what he (or the character of Stewart Lee) “really thinks.” He moves through some old-fashioned Tory bashing, that Brexit was the result of the ongoing rivalries of “a small group of competitive posh men.” So, “as student David Cameron put his penis into a dead pig’s face” and then to outdo him “David Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist.” At this point, Lee is arguably tripping over the not funny by focusing on the gendered and bestial othering of public figures, a fact illustrated by his mock-childish “Euuuurgggh!” But he qualifies; “caustic wit there like Toby Young, do you like it?” Not only has Lee acknowledged the contingency of his position, but he has exaggerated the vulgarity of the normal anti-Tory shtick to satirize its affinities with the right. The movement allows him to get to the point where he can openly discuss how comedy about Brexit must take place in a fundamentally conflicted context, where he plays to both Remain and Leave audiences: And the Remain voting cities now, they loom out of the map, don’t they, like fantasy citadels, in a Tolkein-esque landscape, wonderous walled cities full of wizards and poets, and people who can understand data. In the middle of a vast swampy fen, with “here there be trolls” written over it. [Mixed laughter] Yeh down here, laughter, up there, people going hang on, “Trolls Stew, that’s not a very fair way, you know we are in Leave voting Southend-on-Sea, trolls, that’s not a very fair way to describe the English and Welsh majority that exercised their democratic right to vote to leave the EU,” and it isn’t, to be fair. . . . Look we are gonna leave the EU, that is happening and I think people have gotta put their differences behind them, and try and make it work. And I don’t know if you can make massive generalisations about people who voted to leave Europe . . . because people voted to leave Europe for all sorts of different reasons, and it wasn’t just racists who voted to leave Europe. . . . Cunts did as well . . . stupid fucking cunts. Racists and cunts.

It is both an exaggeration of his previous vulgarity and a setup for a dialectic with a new (pedantic) voice, with nasal emphasis: “and people with legitimate anxieties about ever closer ties to Europe.” Lee contemplates how members of his audience might write in to express these “legitimate” concerns, and he compares them to other types of voter, who may have simply wanted “bendy bananas,” and not this “chaotic inferno of hate.” The character of Stewart Lee clearly has disdain for Brexit voters, but the comedy sketch has also permitted different voices into the discussion. This culminates in a typically guttural sketch about an article he wrote in Observer: I wrote, “Voting to leave Europe as a protest vote is a bit like shitting your hotel bed as a protest against bad service and then realising you now have to sleep in a shitted bed.” And my friend Ian, my best friend, Leave voter, he said to me, “your metaphor doesn’t make sense Stew,” he said, “by your own admission, the EU is institutionally flawed, and freedom of movement can lead to exploitation of the labour market. So in a way,” he said, “there’s already some shit in the bed.” And I said, “Yes Ian, but if there’s already some shit in the bed, you don’t fix that by doing even more shit, into the already shatted bed.” And my friend Ian said, “No you would move into a different bed,” and I said, “Yes Ian, but what if that different bed, instead of some shit, has got Boris Johnson in it?” And my friend Ian reluctantly conceded that he would remain in the original shatted bed.

662   James Brassett

Conclusion Comedy yields an interesting perspective on the performative politics of Brexit. Discourses of the comedy politician and the comedy establishment have emerged from and partly entrenched the divisive nature of public discussion. Ideas about “proper” “rational” politics have overlain stereotypes of stupid racist Leave voters, while quasi-critical discourses on the comedy class have fostered a conspiratorial view of the liberal establishment. However, beyond a vision of comedy as joking for our side, I have also sought to argue that there is within comedy a capacity for reflexivity and adaptation, that the language of politics provided by comedy can live with the dangers of stereotype, the close proximity between the funny and unfunny. In certain circumstances, this reflexive potential can allow for an alternative discourse that reflects our own positionality within a changing context. This might be read into the qualified dialogue envisaged in Lee’s routine, where different arguments for Leave are situated, engaged, in terms of political consequences as well as ad hominin stereotypes. Norcott (2018b) has spoken of an altogether more ambitious vision of dissensus: “This is one of the great things about Brexit, it’s a re-set, it’s a year zero moment for politics and a reminder that democracy means everybody’s got skin in the game.” For example, one of the great comedy successes of the post-Brexit period has been the rise of The Mash Report, a satirical news show fronted by Nish Kumar that has done much to reflect the gendered and racialized experiences of Brexit, while retaining a polyphonic editorial line that includes pro-Brexit comedians like Norcott. Thus a radical view of the changing context might be that it is potentially far more inclusive because of, not despite, the divisive nature of discourse. However, I conclude this chapter by pointing to the letter that Lee wrote to his fans as a sign of the everyday global politics at stake in comedy: “I am not doing a new stand-up show until the Autumn of 2019, which will then tour, far less than usual, until Spring 2020 and then it’s done. . . . I  do not intend to ever do the numbers I did for the Content Provider tour again. . . . I need to do a year or so of dad stuff at home, see some music and comedy and films and hills and rivers. & get fit. & thwart intestinal fate. & I need to have a think about where to go with stand-up with me in my 50s as the ’70s/’80s cultural consensus that shaped me dissolves and the darkness rises.” One of the points that the discourse of the comedy establishment got right is that humor performs within a context, and the divisive nature of Brexit is a sign that the context is changing. While some argue that liberal comedians are irrevocably tied to an establishment discourse, this chapter has argued that this ignores both the importance of doing difficult comedy and the capacity of (some) comedians to reflect on their own positionality within the changing consensus.

Note 1. Quintessentially, the New Yorker ran a cover page of some men from the Ministry of Silly Walks stepping over a cliff edge. This line has been repeated regularly in critical discourses on Brexit, increasingly by EU politicians who commonly reference the “Black Knight” scene, where a knight doesn’t know when to stop fighting.

Comedy and the Performative Politics of Brexit   663

References Amoore, Louise, and Alex Hall. 2013. “The Clown at the Gates of the Camp: Sovereignty, Resistance and the Figure of the Fool.” Security Dialogue 44: 93–110. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1911. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Copenhagen: Green Integer. Berlant, Lauren., and Sianne. Ngai. 2017. “Comedy Has Issues.” Critical Inquiry 43: 233–49. Billig, Michael. 2005. Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour. London: Sage. Brassett, James. 2016. “British Comedy, Global Resistance: Russell Brand, Charlie Brooker, and Stewart Lee.” European Journal of International Relations 22, no. 1: 168–91. Brassett, James., and Alex Sutton. 2017. “British Satire, Everyday Politics: Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, and Charlie Brooker.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, no. 2: 245–62. Browning, Chris. 2018. “Brexit, Existential Anxiety, and Ontological (In)Security.” European Security 27, no. 3: 336–55. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of “Sex.” London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2010. “Performative Agency.” Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 2: 147–61. Coe, Jonathan. 2013. “Sinking Giggling into the Sea.” London Review of Books 35, no. 14: 30–1. Critchley, Simon. 2002. On Humour. London: Routledge. Davies, Will. 2016. “Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit.” Goldsmiths, Political Economy Research Centre. http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/thoughts-on-the-sociology-ofbrexit/. The Guardian. 2016. “Boris Johnson Compares EU to Badly Fitting Underwear.” May 16, accessed July 27, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-5YcGT2iV8. Kìshtainy, Khalid. 2009. “Humor and Resistance in the Arab World and Greater Middle East.” In  Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East, edited by M. Stephan, 53–63. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, Stewart. 2018. “Content Provider.” Recorded live at the Palace Theatre, Southend on Sea, April. Released on BBC i-Player and YouTube. Lockyer, Sharon., and Michael. Pickering. 2008. “You Must Be Joking: The Sociological Critique of Humour and Comic Media.” Sociology Compass 2, no. 3: 808–20. Norcott, Geoff. 2018a. “Brexit Voter Stereotypes.” Comedy Unleashed, June 21, accessed October 11, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imCGfN-GZHg. Norcott, Geoff. 2018b. “Interview with Christopher Hope: Audiences Are bored of Brexit Themed Comedy.” Chopper’s Brexit Podcast, July 27. Odysseous, Louiza. 2001. “Laughing Matters: Peace, Democracy and the Challenge of the Comic Narrative.” Millennium 30, no. 3: 709–32. On Demand News. 2014. “Russell Brand and Nigel Farage Clash over Immigration.” December 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7idh5BmsWk. O’Neill, Bredon. 2017. “Britain’s Comics Can’t Stand Brexit—but the Joke Is on Them.” The Spectator, April 6, accessed August 11, 2019. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/04/britainscomics-cant-stand-brexit-joke/. Orwell, George. [1945] 1968. “Funny, but Not Vulgar.” In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 781. London: Penguin.

664   James Brassett Rodrigues, Suzanna., and David. Collinson. 1995. “ ‘Having Fun’? Humour as Resistance in Brazil.” Organization Studies 16,, no. 5: 739–68. Rossdale, Chris. 2019. Resisting Miltarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sabur, Rozina. 2017. “Comedians Claim Anti-Brexit Jokes Are Damaging Their Careers as Audiences outside London Walk Out in Offence.” The Telegraph, April 4, accessed October 11, 2019. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/04/comedians-tell-anti-brexit-jokesdamaging-careersas-audiences/. Scott, James. C. 1987. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silito, David. 2017. “How Many Pro-Brexit Comedians Are There?” BBC, April 5, accessed October 11, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39507659. Tang, Lijun., and Syamantak. Bhattacharya. 2011. “Power and Resistance: A Case Study of Satire on the Internet.” Sociological Research Online 16, no. 2. Weaver, Simon. 2019. “Brexit Irony on The Last Leg and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Critiquing Neoliberalism through Caricature.” In The Joke Is on Us: Political Comedy in (Late) Neoliberal Times, edited by J. Webber. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Wood, Matthew, Jack Corbett, and Matthew Flinders. 2016. “Just Like Us: Everyday Celebrity Politicians and the Pursuit of Popularity in an Age of Anti-Politics.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, online. Yang, Guobin., and Min. Jiang. 2015. “The Networked Practice of Online Political Satire in China: Between Ritual and Resistance.” International Communication Gazette 77, no. 3: 215–31.

chapter 42

Atmospher es of Protest Illan rua Wall

The gilet jaunes protest of December 8, 2018, was billed as a major confrontation.1 News channels circulated the message that over eighty thousand police officers would be tasked with public order duty around France. The police announced that they would bring their armored cars to the capital, emphasizing their functionality: their mobility, the power to break through barricades, and water cannon to clear crowds. The previous weekend’s protests had seen extensive unrest, with police losing control of the area around the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Elysees. This unrest had been building since the first gilet jaunes protests, and even with major concessions from President Emmanuel Macron, they did not seem to be abating. All of this is to set the scene, to insist upon the affective intensity of the environment in which the protest took place. Protests, particularly big protests involving large numbers of people, do not happen in an affective vacuum. There are nervous energies circulating: foreboding, excitement, anxiety, hope. As Bataille (1985, 162) remarked in the context of the united front against fascism in 1936, “What drives the crowds into the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being.” On December 7, 2018, such a storm was building in Paris. This chapter engages with the question of protest atmosphere to argue that affective atmospheric conditions of protest are important for understanding their social, political, and legal potential. This is not to exclude the great wealth of research on causes or conditions of protest, much of which is evidenced in this collection, but to add another dimension. As such, it is an important addition to theories of performance and politics. It supplements the attention that speech and significance receive, with an understanding of a material communication of bodies (Brennan 2004). Atmosphere is understood as the affective tone of space. It is produced by those gathered in that space, by the spatial dynamics and the affective social conditions. But it also affects those present, changing their capacity to act. Thinking about atmospheres thus supplements the framework of political performance (Rai 2014), complementing its careful focus on specific events and scenes, while sensitizing the analyst to affective circulation.

666   Illan rua Wall The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I describe two extant engagements with protest atmospheres: the social movement studies analyses of protest atmospheres and police tactics as atmospheric interventions. In the second part, I begin to build an alternative account of protest atmospheres. Drawing initially from affect studies, I produce an analysis of “nestled” atmospheres, where different affective bubbles sit within one another, refracting events through their affective tones.

Social Movements and Protest Given the extensive subfield of research on the work of emotion and bodies in protest (Jasper 2011, 285), there is surprisingly little research on the affective atmospheres of protest. One exception is Della Porta and Giugni’s (2013) development of an atmospheric indicator. Situations are distinguished as “relaxed,” “tense,” or “mixed,” which is related to the “group emotional culture” and the “situational emotional culture.” They point out that particular groups have specific rituals and patterns of meeting that are built up over time. Both the affective patterns and specific situational emotional dynamics affect the way that “discussions in meetings (and controversies) unfold and end” (128). There are, however, fairly significant shortcomings that augur against the simple adoption of this approach for our purposes. First, it is almost entirely dependent upon the demeanor of the people involved. Thus we could question how far beyond a narrow mimetic paradigm Della Porta and Giugni can move us. There is little reflection on the sociopolitical setting or the spaces inhabited. Second, while the orientation of the atmosphere (as tense or relaxed) is useful, in the article its significance is not developed beyond the space of meeting rooms. A tense atmosphere may turn a discussion to acrimony and aggression more quickly, whereas differences of opinion in a relaxed meeting might be more tolerated. But this distinction is very much aimed at explaining how a discussion unfolds. Once we move this measure out of the meeting room and onto the streets in crowded protest, the distinction between tense and relaxed is less useful. Third, Della Porta and Giugni seem to reduce atmospheres to a spectrum with tense and relaxed at its poles. But as we will see, atmospheres shape crowd behaviors. Thus, by reducing the types of atmosphere to a tense-relaxed polarity, they have precluded other atmospheres that generate other types of behavior. Van Leeuwen, Klandermans, and Van Stekelenburg (2015) provide a more complex metric, although it suffers from precisely the same shortcomings as Della Porta and Giugni’s. They gathered a large data set of atmospheric perceptions: “A cluster analysis of . . . perceptions among participants of seventy-five contemporary European street demonstrations revealed that demonstrators perceive four different atmospheres: harmonious, volatile, tense, and chaotic” (Van Leeuwen, Klandermans, and Van Stekelenburg 2015, 94). Thus the 2009 National Climate March in London had a “harmonious atmosphere”; the second UK student fees protest in 2010 was “volatile”; the 2010 May 15 Real Democracy NOW! protest in Madrid was tense; and the 2012 Pink Saturday Parade in Haarlem (Netherlands) was chaotic. The cluster analysis reduces multiple different accounts of atmospheres to a narrow metric. It is then possible to correlate the perceived atmosphere to particular activities. The primary factor they identify is the relation between the protestors and the police: police repression led protestors to perceive the atmosphere as volatile or tense, whereas “if police

Atmospheres of Protest   667 either facilitated an event or did not intervene, demonstrators generally perceived a ­harmonious or chaotic atmosphere” (93). While this study is at least drawn from a wide variety of different street protests, it advances our understanding of atmospheres beyond Della Porta and Giugni’s only insofar as it helps us escape a polar analysis. Instead each term represents clusters of associated feelings and experiences. The argument against such a move is that a reductive response is unable to cope with the nuanced, situational analysis that is necessary to understand atmospheres. Indeed this shortcoming is acknowledged by Van Leeuwen, Klandermans, and Van Stekelenburg, who encourage more qualitative investigation. Atmospheres are nebulous; they shift and change depending on behavior, space, light, sound, and myriad other elements. This rapidly shifting nature is important because atmospheres help shape crowd behavior. We could take just two different scenes during the December 8 gilet jaunes protests in Paris to demonstrate this problem. In both, La Fanfare Invisibile (The Invisible Marching Band) moved with the crowds. La Fanfare Invisible (see also Honk! 2016) is an open group of musicians who share a repertoire through their website and welcome participants to join their “joyful resistance, capable of strengthening the social fabric. During a state of alarm we citizens as followers of non-violent strategy, produce musical bombing, treble clef terrorism, acoustic crime, and we put ourselves at the direction of the social movements and organizations in struggle.” La Fanfare Invisible are an interesting atmospheric node. During the gilet jaunes protests on December 8, they played with the protestors through the streets of Paris. Around the group people sang and danced. They moved through streets and squares. At times they filled the entire space of a street or intersection with their music, and at times they were drowned out by chanting or noise. We might imagine a bubble of music around La Fanfare Invisible. The greater the intensity, the greater the affective forces it exercises on those within the bubble. The affects that circulate around the band are different from those for whom it is part of the background din or just out of earshot. But this observation underlines the problem with both of the studies discussed earlier. Because large crowds are made of constellations of different affective intensities these atmospheres articulate with one another, so a surge of joy or panic in one space might ripple through a square. At the same time we must see that atmospheres are uneven, inconstant, and shifting. Thus to say that the atmosphere of a protest is “tense” or “chaotic” is not really to explore the actual circulation of affect. We can see this more clearly if we examine two scenes more closely. In the first, La Fanfare Invisible play in front of a line of heavily armed Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité at the intersection of Rue Saint-Antoine and Rue du Turenne, in the vicinity of Place de la Bastille (Là-bas si j’y suis 2018). The camera circles around, moving from the dancers, the crowds who mill about, the band who sway rhythmically, to the police in heavy riot gear, long shields proffered, blocking streets. At one stage the camera lingers on an officer who aims a rubber bullet launcher through the riot shields. He gestures to the camera to turn away, but despite everything he is not aggressive. Another officer gives the peace sign. This looks “mixed,” in Della Porta and Giungi’s (2013) scheme, with elements of tension and relaxed atmospheres. In a second video, La Fanfare Invisible plays the same tune on the Avenue de l’Opera. The crowd is packed densely around them, and there is a greater intensity to the scene. Even on the poor-quality video, a different energy is apparent. The crowd jump up and down, dancing together in the tightly packed space (Producer Unknown 2020). The camera is held high above the crowd and pans around again. But as the chorus begins, large numbers of people simultaneously duck. The camera is turned to face the ground, the

668   Illan rua Wall music suddenly fades away, and people try to escape. The camera holder moves through plumes of tear gas, and the clip ends. We could put this second scene too on Della Porta and Giugni’s scale, but it is not clear that the question of tension really adds anything explanatory. Or does it help us understand the changes of atmosphere to say that it was chaotic and volatile if the first scene was harmonious? We will return to these videos later, but for now my point is simple. If an atmospheric investigation is primarily concerned with the characterization of a protest (as a whole), then it will lose most of its explanatory power. You cannot simply characterize the scenes as one thing or another. They are tense and relaxed and chaotic. But they are also perhaps celebratory, swelling, angry, slow, dangerous, invocatory, comical, challenging, terrifying, rapid, pulsing, painful, individuating, festive, and panicky. It is impossible to detail the atmospheres of these gilet jaunes protests from these rough video clips with any certainty. We cannot utilize the “feel” of the video because we are not simply talking about a visual economy. As we will see, atmospheres are material. But if the atmospheres could be described by someone there, carefully “sensing” the shifting dynamics (Wall 2019), the result could not be mapped against one or two axes.

Policing Atmosphere Police manuals provide an interesting counterpoint to social movement analysis. As I have developed elsewhere, public order manuals provide a shifting archive of tactical analysis of crowd atmospheres (Wall 2019). There is huge variety and nuance in different countries’ manuals, but I will focus on the UK because the archive of manuals is generally available. Through each different iteration, we find a gradually shifting understanding of the types of atmospheres that the police want to create. Instead of Van Leeuwen, Klandermans, and Van Stekelenburg’s emphasis on the perceptions of the protestors, the police manuals emphasize the tactical interventions that can be used to change crowd dynamics. In the first iteration of the UK manual (ACPO 1983), the police generally sought to generate atmospheres that would frighten crowds. In 1983 there was a wholesale adoption of the tactics that the Royal Hong Kong Police Force had collected from the embers of the British colonial experience (Wall, forthcoming). The former Hong Kong police commissioner explained that the aim of deployment in this model was “the projection of police units in an efficient, effective and formidable manner which creates an atmosphere in the riotous mobs of apprehension and awe which could be close to fear.” If successful, “the crowd will scatter: ‘They run like the dickens!’ ” (quoted in Northam 1988, 136). By breaking up crowds the intensity of at­mos­ pheres could be dissipated. The 1983 manual suggests a two-stage approach: the police should begin with a “show of force” and progress to the “use of force” if the crowds do not dissipate. The tactics deployed as part of a “show of force” sought to manipulate atmospheric conditions. They included a focus on how the police arrive on a scene in large numbers to rapidly shift the atmosphere; the use of a full line of officers rushing forward as one in a baton charge; dog-handling in ways that evince fear and worry. There were also a number of tactics that were entirely atmospheric. Section 17 describes a tactic wherein police beat their shields with truncheons: “Despite training, confidence and levels of suitable equipment, police officers deployed against hostile crowds during public disorder are likely to experience emotions ranging from anxiety and fear to outright anger. The use of chanting, shouting or the rhythmic

Atmospheres of Protest   669 beating on protective shields can act as a morale booster prior to deployment and also serve to release stress in police officers” (Northam 1988, 89). This is to facilitate the loss of “police . . . anxieties about impending deployment . . . in the sense of group confidence engendered” (89). The police seek to underline their strength in numbers, giving rise to fear and trepidation. After the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999 (Smith 2014), police forces internationally began to develop new tactics to deal with the antiglobalization movement. The new model of “strategic incapacitation” (Gillham, Edwards, and Noakes 2013) included the arrest of key organizers (decapitation) and the zonal management of protests, where for instance police confine protestors to “free speech” zones, at some distance from the events being protested (Passavant 2009). Police forces experimented with “kettling” or “containment.” Kettling is the process of holding protestors in a confined place for a period of time. The UK Keeping the Peace manual (Association of Chief Police Officers 2010, 110) explained that “containment” was a “contingency tactic to be used when alternative tactics to prevent serious disorder, serious injury or loss of life have failed or are expected to fail.” However, this narrow construction of the tactic belies a complex atmospheric intervention. Police decide to kettle protestors for two reasons. The first is that the kettle is an apparatus of differentiation. It is an attempt to divide the violent elements from the peaceful (College of Policing 2018; OSCE and ODIHR 2016). Chemistry provides the metaphor: the kettle is a tool for purifying mixtures. The police kettle ramps up the pressure by forcing the crowd to remain static. “Containment of the public can generate great anxiety and frustration,” as the review of public order tactics by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary remarked in 2009 (52). But this is not an accidental side effect. As Anand (2010) explains, containment “is not a strategy that prevents disorder, contrary to the police claims, for it encourages more anger, fear and exasperation amongst those ‘contained.’ During the [UK student] protests [of 2011], it was clear that peaceful resistance became less so only after police started kettling.” The kettle gets the crowd to their boiling point. This intensity of atmosphere pushes some to express that anger at the police lines. In this way the crowd can be refined. People infuriated in the kettle are taken to have always been “violent elements,” even if it is the kettle that has driven them to confrontation. The second atmospheric dynamic is that the crowd is released only when it is exhausted. In other words, the kettle must always hold the participants just too long. The containment operates then to “allow” the crowd to take place. But it intensifies energies, meaning that the crowd soon burns itself out. The police release the participants in slow, orderly streams. The aim here is to ensure that the crowded subjectivities do not re-form. The police fear that the release of the kettled crowd will lead to sparks of anger drifting around the tinderbox of the city, fanning flames at multiple sites. In this sense, exhaustion is essential. Both the intensification of crowd dynamics and their exhaustion are crucial to the at­mos­ pheric dynamics of the kettle and are implicit in police manuals and guidance. While the police manuals and social movement research provide interesting hints at atmospheric analyses and tactics, they do not progress the analysis of protest atmospheres sufficiently. Thus I will begin from a different framework, developing some of the insights of affect theory. In particular I will suggest two different approaches to thinking about protest at­mos­ pheres. In the first, I use a disagreement about the ontology of affect to think about how atmosphere sensitizes us to the body in a different way. In the second part, I use the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong to think about nestled atmospheres and shifting intensities.

670   Illan rua Wall

Affective Atmosphere Affect studies is an increasingly fragmented field of research. This section is not a summary of that field but a way of framing one disagreement about affect that might help us think through an atmospheric account of protest. We could begin by noting that, for many, at­mos­ pheres seem so obvious in everyday lived experience: the electrifying gig, the tension-filled room, the winter’s evening in the pub before the crackling fire, the stadium during a local game. When they are at their most intense, atmospheres are palpable. But once we place them into our traditional epistemologies, they seem to evaporate. This uncertainty can be understood as an extension of what Brian Massumi (2002) calls the “autonomy of affect.” He argues for a strong separation of an affective realm from discursive and psychological fields. Affects are a direct material comingling of bodies without any need for language, history, or any other mediation. Emotions are social, but affect is prepersonal. Ruth Leys (2011, 437) summarizes: “Affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs—because they are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. For . . . [affect] theorists . . . affects are ‘inhuman,’ ‘pre-subjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these.” Massumi (2002) suggests that affect circulates between bodies without the need for perception or signification. Cognition always comes late. It arrives microseconds after the moment, and then “makes sense” of what has occurred, as though it was always the driving force. Language captures the vibrancy of affect, it “re-register[s] an already felt state (for the skin is faster than the word)” (25). But affect remains independent of signification. In “making sense” of affect the emotional response captures and closes the affect, reducing its potentiality. Affect has already escaped this capture, and Massumi writes that this escape is experienced as the punctual shock or a continuous sense of vitality or aliveness. “One’s ‘sense of aliveness’ is a continuous, nonconscious self-perception” (36). Affect is not mediated by thought, language, emotion of ideology; instead it is im-mediate. So the epistemological uncertainty about how to treat atmospheres is another way of describing the autonomy of affect, its immediacy, its “prior” materiality. Although she does not share the Deleuzean inspiration, it is useful to parallel Massumi’s with Teresa Brennan’s work. Imagine yourself, for a moment, in a forest or a refuse dump: the smells of timber, damp, and vegetation or the sour tang of human detritus. These smells come from objects decaying. As they rot, objects release molecules into the air. We smell these when they reach a certain level and we are sufficiently attuned to them. But irrespective of whether we consciously perceive them, these molecules are there in the air. They touch our skin; we inhale them. People are no different; human bodies are in a state of decay. They release sweat, breath, dead cells, and other detritus. Brennan (2004, 192) insists that we can understand atmospheres as a certain type of communication of bodily matter, that they are “the other’s affects.” One body reacting to a fear stimulus releases a particular set of molecules. Another body, passing through that same space moments later, absorbs these molecules and changes accordingly. Senses heighten; they become more alert. Brennan insists that this is a nonlinguistic communication of one body to the next, a material sharing

Atmospheres of Protest   671 of affects: “The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects . . . come via interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact. By the transmission of affect I mean simply that the emotions and affects of one person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (3). Crucially, these physiological effects persist even when the bodily change never reaches the level of consciousness. Brennan specifically engages with crowds, where bodies press together with density. They are a site for particularly intense sharing of affects. The emanation of one body in joy, calm, or aggression is shared on a material level. This material communication changes the bodies in the crowd, but it comes from the crowd. Thus models of contagion become an important node for thinking about how crowds work. We can contrast Massumi and Brennan’s ideas with William Mazzarella’s (2017) analyses in The Mana of Mass Society. He is suspicious of the pure materiality described in Massumi. Instead of taking inspiration from Gabriel Tarde, Mazzarella turns to Durkheim’s 1912 analysis of “mana.” This was the energy that vitalized ritual assemblies of specific Polynesian, Aboriginal, and First Nations communities: “In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces” (Durkheim quoted in Borch 2012, 71). Durkheim wrote, “When they are once come together, a sort of electricity is formed by their collecting which quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation. Every sentiment expressed finds a place without resistance in all the minds, which are very open to outside impressions; each echoes the others, and is re-echoed by the others” (in Borch 2012, 72). Crucially, mana was not a psychological or interpsychological relation, as in Tarde. Instead it was a social fact that itself had an effect on those present. In this way, Durkheim at once borrows heavily from the tradition of crowd theory while also recasting its insights. Mazzarella argues that a constructive reading of Durkheim’s idea of mana allows us to approach the insights of recent affect theory in a different way. In Mazzarella’s hands, this vital energy becomes a social form. Donald Trump, for instance, surged forth on a “mana wave”; he “made energy.” Trump and his team were mana-workers, actively seeking out waves of resonance with the populace. This draws our attention not simply to “the meanings to which we find ourselves attached but also their rhythms” (Mazzarella 2017, 3). But it rejects the absolute division between affect and discursive circulation. Trump’s power was not (or at least not simply) in his overt messages; it was in the sly gestures with which he undercut “what he was supposed to say”—in his rhythms, habit, demeanor, gestures, confidence. The attempt by the Clinton campaign to fact-check his statements could never touch the core affective resonance—as Durkheim put it, the “phenomenal oversupply of forces that spill over” (quoted in Mazzarella 2017, 56). Resonance is “constitutive” of the subject, but because mana passes through the subject that resonates it also breaks it apart. As such there is a “shared field of emergence in which no such boundaries [of subject and object] can be taken for granted” (Mazzarella 2017, 5). In this way, Mazzarella maintains the rejection of the subject (that lies at the heart of much of affect theory) while rejecting the exclusion of discursive coproduction. Given that this is not a chapter about ontologies of atmosphere, I do not propose to insist upon one over the other account. Instead I would like to borrow from Ngai and Anderson: “Rather than an analytic distinction . . . [I suggest] we employ a ‘pragmatic-contextual’ distinction that is designed to attend to the different types of experience gathered together in a unitary category such as ‘affect.’ This is to make terms such as feeling, mood, atmosphere,

672   Illan rua Wall and so on, into sensitizing devices designed to attend to and reveal specific types of relational configurations, rather than unproblematic claims about what affect really is ‘out there’ in the world” (Anderson 2014, 12). For this chapter, what atmosphere actually is (whether entirely autonomous affective materiality or a social fact) matters less than what the question does. As Anderson writes, “The question of ‘what affect is,’ gets replaced by questions of what the terms allow us to do: What do they attune us to? What do they show up? What do they sensitise thought and research to?” (12). I want to suggest that the question of atmosphere in crowded protest sensitizes us first to the question of being-gathered. Being-gathered here means being collected by a mana wave, or entraining with the affective dynamics of the situation. Being-gathered identifies the manner in which the atmosphere attracts, pulls in, and whips up bodies. When bodies are out of sync with the atmosphere, the atmosphere appears to stand out with an intense vibrance. But bodies become attuned to the situation and, with this, the atmosphere fades into the background. The body is gathered by the atmosphere, and it shapes the body’s behavior. To think about this we could return to the second video of the gilet jaunes discussed at the outset. In it the crowd jumping up and down around the band is a result of the music, but it is also contagious. People lose themselves in the moment. They dance because others are dancing, because the excitement and enjoyment of the shared music demand it, and because the dance adds to the growing atmospheric intensity. They are being-gathered by the movement, the rhythm, the noise, by the atmosphere. These layer on top of all the other factors that lead up to protest, such as their common cause, the opportunity, and the means to express their dissent. The music itself has complex histories that are also expressed and shared in some senses in the dancing. Then the gas is released in the space and the shared feeling in the moment is shattered. Tear gas is actually a misnomer; it is a fine powder that is dispersed in clouds. As one, rather dry medical analysis puts it, “Acute CS [a common tear gas compound] exposure . . . results in instantaneous irritation to the eyes, nose, mouth, skin, and respiratory tract. Dermal effects include itching, stinging, and redness, with potential blistering and allergic contact dermatitis. Ocular exposure can result in lacrimation [crying], blepharospasm [involuntarily closing the eyelids], itching, and burning sensation. When inhaled, CS often leads to coughing, choking, salivation, and chest tightness” (Rothenberg et al. 2016, 98). CS gas forces one to immediately retreat from the environment. The gassed subject’s breathing, touch, smell, and vision become excruciating. They become painfully aware of their body’s basic functioning, to the exclusion of everything around them. As Jolie Lee (2014) comments for USA Today, “Many people feel tear-gas can be suffocating. . . . It produces a drowning feeling that your airways are filled up with liquid.” Where the music draws people out of themselves, coperforming the shared atmosphere, the tear gas forces bodies to turn in on themselves. But I suggest that an atmospheric analysis would insist that this is also a form of gathering. Both the music and the gas gather bodies into particular formations, at­mos­ pheres that are conducive to different types of behavior, that change the body’s capacity to act. In one there is extension, shared rhythmic movement; in the other there is panic, fear, and isolation. But this is a shared isolation. Tear gas is an atmospheric manipulation. It gathers bodies in panic. In short, atmospheres focus us on the circulation and sharing of others’ affects, whether that is through prediscursive materiality or through a medium of resonance.

Atmospheres of Protest   673

The Tone of Space Atmospheres first sensitize us to bodily resonance and contagion. But they also encourage us to think about the spatial dynamics. For example, a cathedral captures height; the emptiness of the space above is encapsulated in a way that is designed to bear down upon those within. A stadium (particularly when circular or oval) reflects the crowd, posing one crowd against another with the sport in the middle; by reflecting a crowd against another on the other side of the stadium’s bowl, the space generates cycles of intensification as one fires the other up. However, when we shift our focus away from spaces that have been specifically designed for particular atmospheres, it becomes a little more difficult. To understand how these atmospheres might work, it is useful to examine one moment of crowded protest and the spatial dynamics involved. In late 2014 more than 200,000 teenagers and young adults were involved in an occupation of a number of key sites around Hong Kong. The north side of Hong Kong island is built around car-laden roads, high-rise tower blocks, and elevated passageways. The occupation began as a protest on Tim Mei Avenue, which borders the east side of the Hong Kong Legislative Council complex, but Tamar Park and Connaught Road were the ultimate epicenters. Tamar Park sits sandwiched between the two key sites of political power in Hong Kong—between the Legislative Council and the Office of the Chief Executive. To the south of this complex is the polluted, noisy, and congested dual carriageway of Connaught Road. The occupation began on Sunday, September 28, 2014. That afternoon the crowds gathered first in Tim Mei Avenue, and then began to wrap around the Legislative Council into Tamar Park as numbers grew. The police were out in force, readied for action after two previous nights of protest. They faced off against tens of thousands of secondary school and university undergraduate students. As dark began to fall, the crowds were beginning to spill over from Tim Mei Avenue and Tamar Park. Professor Petula Ho described the essential moment when the crowds began first to move from Tim Mei Avenue, the walkways and footpaths, onto the arterial dual-carriageway of the Connaught Road: “The cars were driving slowly [along the Connaught Road]. . . . At some point we . . . just called [to those on the other side] to just [gesturing] “Come, come on, come, join us.” And then suddenly, the street, the traffic slowed, and actually it was quite empty. . . . So we decided to just go across it. The cars were stopping. I think the Occupy idea was already there. And then somebody said we should just sit down. And we did. We could see the whole road was full. . . . Suddenly there were people everywhere. . . . It was really, really a very strange moment” (interview with author). For Ho, the space felt “freed,” with people walking across the road that had just been full of cars whizzing past. “It was just so sudden. So glamorous,” she said. Glamor is a really interesting way of characterizing this moment. Etymologically glamor connotes magic or enchantment, and in current usage it is a quality that causes excitement and attraction. It is a quality or aura that elevates a body, drawing them out of the ordinary (Roach 2007). After the first people moved across the street and the traffic was diverted, the crowd fanned out and the occupation began. Over the course of the next several days, the occupation of the Connaught Road would expand. Within a week tents would emerge, and within two weeks the occupation would stabilize as barricaded zones of occupation were established. As the occupation grew, people established what they called their “villages.” These were understood through a nostalgic frame: “Umbrellaville harkened back to the old Hong Kong

674   Illan rua Wall we loved and missed. All along Harcourt Road, micro-communities emerged where people smiled, the streets were inviting, and the nights—the nights were just beautiful” (Ng 2016, 168). These villages consisted of five to ten tents. New intimacies emerged as boundaries between “neighbors” broke down. One student occupier contrasted these village spaces to the normal relations within the city’s residential districts. She explained to me that if you knew more than two or three neighbors in your apartment complex you would be considered nosy. But in the occupation, the private spaces had a radically different atmosphere. “When night fell, we saw strangers sitting in circles and chatting on the street. We couldn’t remember the last time we saw strangers sitting in circles and chatting on the street. These simple activities may be commonplace anywhere else in the world, but they have all but gone extinct in emotionally unavailable and socially awkward Hong Kong” (Ng, 2016, 168). The South China Morning Post picked up on these emergent villages: “The protesters had demonstrated that they treasured the community they had developed. . . . ‘People actually want to stay as long as possible to ensure the sense of community and livelihood.’ . . .  ‘Hongkongers used to be quite cool to each other, never saying hello to our neighbours and not even knowing their surnames after 20 years,’ Chan [another occupier] . . . said. ‘Perhaps this movement could make a change in everyone’ ” (Szeto  2014). There were intimate atmospheres in the villages. Crucially, however, these minor spaces of intimacy and nostalgia were nestled in a broader performative public space where different types of affects circulated. The occupation happened around the site of government in Hong Kong. The Legislative Council building itself is comparatively low, perhaps ten stories. It is an elongated rectangle with large a curved glass wall on its north end, forming the exterior wall of the room that houses the legislative assembly. Emerging from the south end of the Legislative Council building is a twenty-six-story tower. Slightly askew, atop this tower is a four-story roof and bridge across to the central government tower. The building corresponds roughly to the Cantonese and Mandarin symbol for a gate. It signifies transparency and openness (Legislative Council n.d.). Tamar Park is sandwiched beneath these two towers of the executive and legislative branches. Instead of the building dwarfing small groups of people in the park, as imagined in the architectural images (Hok n.d.), masses of people flooded the space, changing its affective dynamics. Judith Butler (2015) underlines the performativity of moments of assembly like that around the Legislative Council building. She explains that there is more to occupation than simply “bodies that come together to make a claim in public space” (70). To understand them in these terms is to “fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed . . . when these crowds gather” (71). The crowds performatively enact a new “space of appearance” that is qualitatively different from the conventional public sphere. When the students and activists occupy Admiralty, Mong Kok, and other sites, they remake the public space. It no longer bears the atmosphere that the architects sought to design into the space. Instead it becomes a new space of appearance for these bodies. By acting as if they were the political assembly, they enact a new space of political assembly. This space “cannot be separated from the plural action that brings it about; it is not there outside of the action that invokes and constitutes it” (77). If the occupation as a collection of villages was marked by new intimacies of friendship, the occupation as public space tended to different atmospheres. Jason Ng’s (2016, 33) account of the first night of the occupation is a useful window onto the atmospherics of the crowd’s

Atmospheres of Protest   675 “space of appearance”: “As night fell, the tension rose. Harcourt Road—an eight-lane thoroughfare that connects to Connaught Road—was strewn with broken umbrellas, water bottles and lone shoes, left behind by fleeing protestors. Mobile phones were rendered useless. . . . We moved to a footbridge outside the Police Headquarters on the ominously-named Arsenal Street. There, high above the ground, we saw a formation of riot police wearing army helmets and gas masks advancing steadily from Wanchai toward Admiralty. . . . [Lit] only by the streetlight’s amber glow, the scene was eerily reminiscent of the streets of Beijing on that fateful June night in 1989.” Ng contrasts the denuded space of Harcourt Road, littered with detritus of popular disorder, with the police formation on Arsenal Street as it advances on the occupation. He describes the tempo changing as he traveled to the site of intensity in Admiralty and its “growing euphoria . . . suffused with tension and trepidation” at the protest (30). Tension is key, but not in Della Porta and Giugni’s sense. This is tension between different spaces, between different atmospheres. There is foreboding, fear, a sense of imminence and immediacy. We can contrast the two logics of space: the occupied zones as a political space of appearance represent a general scale where political claims can be made, addressed to the Legislative Council itself and the Office of the Chief Executive; and the villages as a site of common life, the everyday trivial dynamics of private space, now shared with “neighbors” and fellow villagers. The two logics of space tend to generate different atmospherics, but they are not separate: as the atmospheres of the political space of appearance intensify, the village spaces fade in intensity, but equally, as the confrontations fade and the occupiers return to their public intimacy of the villages. There is an ebb and flow of these sites of intensity. An  overlap and a separateness. There is a danger that we understand the at­mos­pheric dimensions of occupation through the spectacular moments when the political space of appearance is staged in confrontation or demonstration. But the point here is also to see the sort of “public intimacy” of the villages as equally important to the atmospheric constellation of the zones.

Conclusion Atmosphere provides in important field of investigation for protest, and for political thinking more generally. In the context of protest it is the presence of crowds that renders at­mos­ phere a particularly acute dynamic. It does not replace more conventional accounts of social movements (their historicity, symbolic economies, and representational claims) but supplements this analysis with a focus on the unfolding of protest situations and their affective and atmospheric valence. The chapter cautions against reductive accounts of atmosphere, where the fluidity of a scene is reduced to a single term, which can never capture the plurality and dynamism. Just as a theater critic would be very slow to claim that all plays could be reduced to two or four moods, theorists of protest and performative politics should be equally discerning. Atmospheric analysis requires careful attention to the affective flux of particular scenes. We must pay attention to the rhythms and flows of bodies, to the spatial dynamics, and to those terms that disclose the affective auras at play, because it is essential to begin to understand atmospheres as they shape bodies’ capacity to act.

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Note 1. I would like to thank Swastee Ranjan and Stephen Legg, who read this piece in advance, and the editors of this volume, who offered invaluable comments.

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Atmospheres of Protest   677 Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3: 434–72. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzarella, William. 2017. The Mana of Mass Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ng, Jason. 2016. Umbrellas in Bloom. Hong Kong: Blacksmiths Books. Northam, Gerry. 1988. Shooting in the Dark. London: Faber & Faber. OSCE and ODIHR. 2016. Human Rights Handbook on Policing Assemblies. Accessed June 5, 2018. https://www.osce.org/odihr/226981?download=true. Passavant, Paul. 2009. ‘Policing Protest in the Post-Fordist City’ Amsterdam Law Forum vol. 1 no. 1. 93–116. Producer Unknown. 2020. “Gilet Jaunes – Tear Gas - 2018” Accessed August 19, 2020. https:// youtu.be/B_utnaO1whQ Rai, Shirin. 2014. “Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics.” Political Studies, 63, no. 5. 1179–1197. Roach, Joseph. 2007. IT. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rothenberg, C., S. Achanta, E. R. Svendsen, and S.-E. Jordt. 2016. “Tear-Gas: An Epidemiological and Mechanistic Reassessment.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1378, no. 1 (August): 96–107. Smith, Noah. 2014. “The Dark Side of Globalisation: Why Seattle’s 1999 Protesters Were Right.” Atlantic, January 6. Szeto, Mirana May. 2014. “Protestors Build Makeshift Communities at Occupy Sites.” South China Morning Post, November 3, accessed November 12, 2018. https://www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/article/1630823/protesters-build-makeshift-communities-occupy-sites. Van Leeuwen, Anouk, Bert Klandermans, and Jacquelien Van Stekelenburg. 2015. “A Study of Perceived Protest Atmosphere: How Demonstrators Evaluate Police-Demonstration Interactions and Why.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 20, no. 1: 81–100. Wall, Illan rua. 2019. “Policing Atmospheres.” Theory, Culture Society 36, no, 4: 143–162. Wall, Illan rua. Forthcoming. Law and Disorder. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

chapter 43

Per for m a nce a n d Popu lism Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity Goran Petrović Lotina

Until recently it was suggested that First World capitalist societies lived in a postdemocratic time. Following philosopher Jacques Rancière (1995), who proposed this term in 1995, and sociologist and political scientist Colin Crouch (2000), who has popularised it since 2000, neoliberalism has created the conditions for postdemocracy. This socioeconomic model of politics was developed after the Second World War and implemented in Western European countries throughout the 1980s. By foreclosing the idea of a political alternative, neoliberalism suppressed the conflictual nature of the left-right political spectrum and urged political parties to position at the center. By establishing “a consensus at the centre” neoliberalism intended to create a harmonious society inhabited by free individuals.1 To achieve this goal, neoliberalism paved the way for a politics in which the interests of the people became regulated and controlled by financial capital, stripping state institutions of their democratic role of governance and enabling the banking and business elites to take power over them. This is how the hegemony of transnational and global flow of funds was established, restricting the role of state institutions to setting laws ensuring the smooth flow of capital and reducing the possibility of the people to exercise their democratic right to free elections that in reality offered no concrete choice. By establishing “consensus at the centre,” neoliberalism shifted democratic elements of popular sovereignty from the realm of politics and created what we call a postdemocratic age. The challenge to postdemocracy arrived with the crisis of neoliberalism that was accelerated with the collapse of the global financial system. Following the international downturn of financial institutions which began with the crash of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008 and subsequently influenced the debt crisis in several eurozone member states (Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), governments across the EU implemented huge bank bailouts. To sustain the banks, they introduced austerity measures and budget cuts across various sectors. One consequence was a decrease in the economic power of citizens and an increase in unemployment rates across the EU, particularly in the

680   Goran Petrović Lotina southern countries with already lower living standards. A sudden drop in living standards in this region caused dissatisfaction with current politics and gave rise to numerous unrests. In 2011 in Greece and Spain people took to the streets to protest these austerity measures. United around the Greek Aganaktismenoi (2011) and the Spanish Indignados or Movimiento 15-M (2011), they stood against the neoliberal model of financial resolution and the elite class of wealthy bankers and businessmen. The elite was accused of being more or less directly responsible for the crisis that affected their living standards. The protesters claimed a greater power of the people and the transformation of the political system and institutions that privilege one social class. Factions of these movements gave rise to left-wing populist parties: in Spain, Podemos (2014) under Pablo Iglesias Turrión, and in Greece, Syriza (2015), headed by Aléxis Tsípras. These populist parties set as a goal to transform institutions of parliamentary democracy at the national and the EU level and defend the demands of the people.2 Nevertheless the challenge to the hegemony of the neoliberal postdemocratic politics of consensus did not arrive only from the left-leaning civil movements and populist political parties. The unprecedented influx of people across the Mediterranean from economically vulnerable areas and conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East into the EU, particularly in 2015 and 2016,3 has been instrumentalized by right-wing political parties for criticizing the EU debt crisis.4 They are the Freedom Party of Austria; the French National Rally, formerly known as the National Front; the Italian Northern League; Alternative for Germany; the Netherlands Freedom Party; the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia; the UK Independence Party; Poland’s Congress of the New Right; and the Danish People’s Party. In the course of austerity measures and with unemployment rates increasing across the EU, leaders of these parties gained support by designating immigrant workers and asylum seekers a threat to the economic and cultural stability of the nation-state, national identity, and national security.5 They accused the current political elites of implementing immigration and integration policies that ruined the welfare state.6 Promising to restore the economic power of the workers and the middle class at the national level, right-wing narratives resorted to racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other forms of intolerance. Besides criticizing current immigration laws on national and EU levels, they began to mobilize Eurosceptic, ethnic, and authoritarian discourses. In a nutshell, the dissatisfaction with the hegemony of “consensus at the centre” opened up a possibility for a new politics aimed at restoring elements of popular sovereignty. Populist movements and parties designate politicians who put business interests above the interests of the people as the elite, dividing the social realm into two camps: the people and the elite. Nevertheless, whereas populist movements on the left are calling upon a recovery of democratic elements of equality and popular sovereignty by advocating much more progressive and inclusive forms of subjectivity that would embrace various cultural differences, populist movements on the right are mobilizing regressive forms of subjectivity based on nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance, at once relativizing past and current responsibilities of “advanced” societies and neoliberal politics for wars, conflicts, and environmental crises that force people to emigrate. To suggest, however, that the left-wing populist parties are seeking a solution in transforming the EU institutions while putting emphasis on economic problems, and that the right-wing populist parties are resorting to Euroscepticism while emphasizing cultural differences, would oversimplify the complexity of populism. For example, new forms of

Performance and Populism   681 nationalism can be registered on the left. Political scientist Julian Göpffarth (2019) observes that left-wing movements with populist elements, such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise in France, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Aufstehen in Germany, call for restricted immigration in order to reestablish the welfare state. At the same time, a nationalistic imperative on the right began to show new tendencies too. In April 2019, ahead of the EU elections that took place between May 23 and 26, the then Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the right-wing populist party the League, Matteo Salvini, invited Eurosceptic parties to unite in a pan-European block (Giuffrida 2019). Thus, in both cases, new forms of popular identities are being created. One conclusion can be drawn from such a conjuncture. Postdemocracy is the consequence of instituting “a consensus at the centre.” In neoliberalism, the politics of consensus are identified with individual liberty and the rule of law regulated by financial capital. This type of identification imposes the same solutions for both the political left and the political right, doing away with any possibility of popular struggle. For consensual politics, all forms of contest, conflict, a(nta)gonism, and social mobilization are considered to be exceptions. The view on society as a harmonious unity of various individuals has been suppressing elements of collectivity, equality, popular sovereignty, and the possibility of confronting the governing. This is why the rise of populist movements may be seen only as the return of popular sovereignty into institutions. However, the end of postdemocracy, at least from the left-wing perspective, should not be seen as a way of establishing “a populist regime.” Rather, it should be seen as an expression of endeavor for the transformation of existing institutions and the construction of progressive politics. In what follows I consider the return of democracy to the realm of politics and popular sovereignty into institutions as a performative practice of constructing the people, that is, innovative forms of subjectivity, community, or collectivity. Providing insights into the politico-philosophical models of democracy that emanate from the differential civil movements—absolute democracy informed by the horizontal choreography of leaderless civil movements and agonistic democracy informed by the vertical choreography of civil movements that have leaders—I envisage the performative practice of constructing the people in terms of choreography of articulation that enables the moment of sublimation of horizontality into verticality, embodying the multitude of democratic identities in a popular form of collectivity. The choreography of articulation suggests a view beyond the dualism of position on the political left and a possible way of empowering the left to contest a dominant politics and a growing institutionalization of the right-wing populism and to embody alternative forms of living together. The performance 100% City by the Berlin-based art collective Rimini Protokoll offers a view on articulation as a choreographing practice of enacting imagined forms of collectivity.

Constructing the People Many political philosophers have discussed populism, offering different perspectives on it. Some recent and most influential contributors are Chantal Mouffe, Cas Mudde and Christobal Rovira Kaltawasser, Benjamin Moffitt, Jacques Rancière, Kirk Hawkins, Ernesto Laclau, and Kurt Weyland. In their book Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Mudde and

682   Goran Petrović Lotina Kaltawasser (2017, 6) define populism as ideology, “a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” On the other hand, Moffitt (2016, 3) in The Global Rise of Populism describes populism as style, “a political style that is performed, embodied and enacted across a variety of political and cultural contexts.” In his essay “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found,” Rancière (2016, 102) envisages populism as a term that “serves simply to draw the image of a certain people.”7 Because people as such do not exist, Rancière explains, there are only diverse and antagonistic images or figures that condense in themselves sequences of discourses that reject either governmental elites, practices, and ideologies or foreigners, differences, and otherness. In Is Chávez Populist? Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective, Hawkins (2009, 1049) lays out a discursive definition of populism; analyzing the speeches of some populist leaders—actual words, tone, and style of the language—he defines populism “as a Manichaean discourse that identifies Good with a unified will of the people and Evil with a conspiring elite.” For his part, Laclau (2005, 74) in On Populist Reason envisages populism as a political logic that manifests through a discursive articulation of plurality of dissimilar and unsatisfied demands in an equivalential chain of popular demands. In other words, the political logic implies a symbolic unity of the people, or “the underdog,” against “an institutionalised other.” Kurt Weyland’s (2001) essay “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics” brings one more perspective on populism. He writes that populism is “a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalised support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers” (14, cited Moffitt 2016, 20). Drawing upon Laclau’s view on populism and findings from their joint volume Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985), Mouffe (2018, 11) in For a Left Populism stresses that populism is “a way of doing politics that can take various ideological forms according to both time and space, and is compatible with a variety of institutional frameworks.” Whether conceived as ideology, style, figure, discourse, political logic, or strategy, populism in all these views implies a moment of division between the people on the one side and the elite on the other. What follows from this observation is that the debate about populism is a political debate about constructing the people, that is, new forms of subjectivity and community. The performance scholar Janelle Reinelt (2014, 37) writes that “the absence of ‘people’ or the inability to imagine one holds back the development of effective political strategies.” This important topic, evolving around the notion of “the common,” has been at the core of many political theories from the left. To envisage “the common,” political philosophers such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Roberto Esposito, Maurizio Lazzarato, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy find inspiration in the horizontal, leaderless social movements, such as Indignados, and the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza’s concept of the multitude, which allowed them to envisage community in terms of absolute or direct democracy. In Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza ([1670] 2018) conceived of the multitude as a plurality of singularities that exist in the common public sphere, while rejecting any form of authority of the state. Drawing upon Spinoza’s view, Virno (2004) suggests that the multitude survived the creation of the state through the distinction between the private

Performance and Populism   683 and the collective. According to him, the multitude inhabits the middle region between the private and collective domains that he calls the “common place.” The common place consists of shared linguistic and logical forms dubbed the “public intellect.” Virno writes, “The movement to the front of the part of the intellect as such, the fact that the most general and abstract linguistic structures are becoming instruments for orienting one’s own conduct, this situation, in my opinion, is one of the conditions which define the contemporary multitude” (15). When the public intellect is situated in the common space, outside special places, community, or the state, the multitude is a plurality that manifests in a collective action of the many without converging into one, into a volonté générale. It stands for new forms of subjectivity and community that emanate from the common space, the harmonious and smooth space without a constitutive division. Such a community, enabled by the principle of withdrawal from state institutions and the logic of representation that they imply, is an expression of direct rule of the multitude, of the horizontal politics of absolute democracy. On the other hand, to envisage alternative subjectivities and forms of community some other left-wing political philosophers, such as Laclau and Mouffe, found inspiration in the vertical social movements with leadership, such as Podemos, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s notion of the people.8 In De Cive, Hobbes ([1642] 1983) explains that the multitude, which consists of a plurality of individual wills with no rights and laws and which is as such threatened by violence of the other, at a certain moment has to transform by means of social contract into the people that has one will and to whom one action may be attributed. In Hobbes, the concept of people is correlated to the state and the existence of rules and laws, which can guarantee peace and security to all citizens. In modern democratic societies, the rule of the people is secured through elections. It is through the plurality of voices that elected leaders may represent and defend the demands of the citizens and protect their rights. Accordingly, the elected representative does not have one will but represents various democratic wills within the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Mouffe stresses the importance of institutions for establishing a concrete social order and constructing the people.9 She writes that antagonism, a form of relationship in which opposite sides are seen as enemies, is inherent in societies and that the role of democratic institutions is to transform or articulate potential antagonism into agonism, a form of relationship in which opposite sides are seen as adversaries (Mouffe 2013). This view suggests that the role of institutions is to construct the people as agonistics.10 Agonistics stands for a plurality of democratic identities that inhabit a striated space, such as women, workers, LGBTQIA, people of color, immigrants, and environmentalists. These democratic identities are constructed through the principle of identification with the set of ethico-political values that are shared among the members of one or more associations. They symbolize various democratic struggles, such as feminist, labor, or antiracist struggles, against a hegemonic politics that regulate their identities through the existing institutions. And it is only through engagement with institutions that dominate them that various democratic identities may contest a hegemonic politics, defend their demands, and invigorate democracy. Accordingly, populism can be seen as a reaction to the failure of a hegemonic politics to represent and defend a multiplicity of democratic demands within institutions. It entails

684   Goran Petrović Lotina mobilization of various unsatisfied democratic associations of people in a social movement, calling for the return of popular sovereignty to the realm of politics. This populist tendency requires the articulation of the initial horizontality of the multitude democratic identities into a vertical structure of a popular identity represented by a charismatic leader. This, for example, was the case with the horizontal movement Indignados (2011), which articulated in the vertical political structure with the leadership of Podemos (2014). The role of the leader is to incorporate, defend, and represent the unity of different democratic entities that share similar ethico-political values. Such a moment of representation implies a choreography that inscribes the people within a particular symbolic order and embodies a collective will. Accordingly, populism is a performative practice of constructing the people on the symbolic level. It articulates a particular set of relations between the differential democratic entities into a form of popular (comm)unity that is symbolically united and represented. When community is envisaged in such a way, it becomes what Gramsci ([1935] 2007, 186) calls “ ‘concordia discors’ that does not have unity for its point of departure but contains in itself the reason for a possible unity.” When the reason for unity lies in the shared quest for freedom and equality, that is, in shared ethico-political values, the common cause of struggle for left-wing populism must be envisaged as a critical engagement with institutions dominated by the elite and threatened by the right-wing populist parties. It is through strategic engagement with the existing institutions, symbolic orders, and representational norms that innovative forms of community may be embodied.

The Choreography of Articulation Various ways of constructing the people that emanate from civil movements inspired some performance scholars to examine how artistic performances embody democratic forms of community. There are performance scholars who find inspiration in the horizontal politics of absolute democracy, in the rule of the self-organizing multitude. For example, in Artist at Work, the philosopher and performance scholar Bojana Kunst (2015) writes that the production of subjectivity and community is at the center of the capitalist processes of production. Drawing upon Virno (2004), she stresses that the shift from the industrial phase of capitalism, or fordism, to the postindustrial phase, or postfordism, is a consequence of changing the process of production and the role of work. With such a change, not only has the focus of production moved from the synchronization of the body with the machine to the exploitation of constant movement, creative potentials, and linguistic-cognitive competencies of individuals to produce capital; more important, the line between work time and leisure time disappeared, and everything became work, including social relationships. Kunst suggests that by means of exploitation of human potentials to think, imagine, communicate, and collaborate through movement, artistic performances have also been put at the service of the production of capital, adding economic value to the physical and linguisticcognitive abilities of humans and hence to the homogenization of society. Bodily movement in dance and performance, collaborative relations between the performers and the audience, as well as the visibility of art and artists, are also exploited to produce capital. By subordinating every aspect of human life to the demand of capital for the acceleration of consumption,

Performance and Populism   685 postfordism succeeded in accelerating even time, adding economic value to temporality. The consequence is a creation of a community embodied in workers’ identity. To replace the postfordist condition, Kunst introduced a postrepresentational and temporal dimension of duration. According to Kunst, manifestations of duration, such as slow movement, sleep, laziness, and inactivity, reveal that our perception of time is constructed and economically conditioned. Hence it is a temporal dimension of duration that provides the people and the workers with the potential to subvert the capitalist process of production. She locates the subversive potential of duration in the strategies of avoiding the movement accelerated by capital. What Kunst (2015) calls “a durational search for new political embodiments” through strategic avoidance shows in both civil movements and artistic performances. For instance, she writes that the international, horizontal civil movement Occupy (2011–2) consists of “localised but connected forms of temporal persistence and endurance in certain places” (117). She traces temporal persistence and endurance too in Igor Štromajer’s and Brane Zorman’s performance Statika (2007), broadcast from the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong onto a big screen installed in the Hellerau Festival House in Dresden. During this performance, which lasts over thirty-five minutes, the audience observes a static robot in front of the flickering city lights. The audience’s waiting for something to happen, their persistence and endurance, becomes a durational pleasure that can create a radical political and antagonistic disruption and discloses the plurality of ways of living together. Accordingly, duration as an alternative view on temporality fosters an understanding of the common as a “merely the ordinary state of being together, deprived of all historical tasks” (Kunst 2015, 92). When the common is understood in ahistorical terms, community enables a constant dispossession of collaboration. In such a community there is no exchange, no identity, no representation, no economy, no universality, no otherness or anything else to be shared; in fact, in such a community, Kunst writes, “there is no common being” (96). There is only “I,” or as Nancy (1991, xxxix) who inspired Kunst suggests, a “strange beingthe-one-with-the-other to which we are exposed.” The community that is thus called into existence consists of the parallelism of positions of embodied “I.” The theory behind such a view suggests that a popular form of community is not united by any representation but by the temporal dimension of what Kunst calls meeting, which stands for a durational procedure capable of addressing a specific relationship with movement. However, despite an attempt to avoid any representation of identity by means of duration and enable the embodiment of the self-organized multitude, Kunst’s view on community remains trapped in the very problematic that she aims to challenge. By ascribing political value to duration, Kunst preestablishes identity at the level of a temporal dimension manifested by less work, inactivity, and waiting rather than by acceleration, flexibility, and efficacy. The consequence of this tactic, which opposes the workers’ identity associated with acceleration with the one associated with duration, is the creation of an essentialist identity. It reconfirms the workers’ identity that, in reversal, works less, slowly, and lazily. As a result, a unity of people becomes designated by class identity incapable of avoiding, that is, withdrawing from the postfordist techniques of production and returning to “common use” social, affective, cognitive, and other life forms, as Kunst would like it to be. Within this view, community becomes simply a class-differentiated model of democracy.

686   Goran Petrović Lotina To envisage community beyond reductionism to class identity, we must acknowledge that the capitalist forces cannot be perceived only in terms of postfordist techniques of production. They also manifest in postfordist techniques of domination that aim at putting under control forces embodied through various social practices by means of which different human associations are able to resurrect ethico-political values supressed by economic interests and to contest the capitalist forces that dominate them. Techniques of domination are set in motion by various systems of control, such as law, bureaucracy, obligations, mass media, surveillance, and knowledge production. They rely on discourses that govern affects toward the construction of a community united around symbols that foster the reproduction of capital and sustain a hegemonic politics in power. When capitalist forces are understood to hegemonize social forces through both the techniques of production and the techniques of domination, community must be envisaged beyond reductionism to any preestablished identity that has an ultimate ontological foundation, such as workers’ identity, women’s identity, immigrants’ identity, or any other essentialist construction of identity. In fact, such a community must be capable of welding various democratic demands guided by disparate ethico-political values that are being suppressed by global capitalist forces, such as those of women, immigrants, refugees, people of color, environmentalists, the poor, LGBTQIA, and antinuclear weapons activists, including demands that vary between the workers in the same or different company, country, or ­continent.11 Accordingly, a community that embodies various democratic identities can be seen only as the result of collective identifications around a set of shared ethico-political values. Radical relationalism that stems from the process of identification transforms the multitude of democratic demands, or democratic wills, in Gramsci’s ([1935]  2007, 164) “collective” or “popular will.” This view implies that community, or rather collectivity, is historically constructed in the encounter between different human associations that anticipate “I” in terms of “we” and “they,” or of “the people” and “the elite.” Consequently, to embody a popular form of collectivity that upholds suppressed ethico-political values, the people must unite and engage in a struggle against a common cause of subordination: against the hegemonic forces that dominate, possess, and exploit them at every level of their lives. If the hegemonic politics rely on discourses that govern affects toward the construction of a popular identity united around symbols that foster the reproduction of capital, then the strategy of engagement with institutionalized politics requires a moment of countersymbolization. Such a countertactic points out that every social unity is a potential hegemonic unity constructed at the symbolic level and conditioned by that which it excludes. It is then by articulating a (counter)hegemony that a popular collectivity mobilizes affects toward the construction of democratic forms of living together allegiant to shared ethico-political values.12 The choreography of articulation of the multitude into the people, of an immediate horizontality into a mediated verticality, enables the return of democratic social forces in the realm of politics and popular sovereignty in the institutions. It calls for the sublimation of the initial temporal dimension of duration that avoids and resists a hegemonic politics into a proactive engagement with and struggle against the institutionalized forces that dominate various aspect of people’s lives. To establish a popular collectivity, then, through the strategic engagement with the politics, discourses, and symbolic representations that have power over institutions, the temporal dimension must articulate at a particular moment in the spatial dimension. As Laclau (1990, 40–3) writes, time always becomes spatially represented

Performance and Populism   687 through a cyclic succession of dislocations. What is called space is a sequence in which relations between the different subject positions allegiant to shared ethico-political values are partially structured, embodied, and represented on the symbolic level within a particular institutional context and at a particular moment. This approach suggests that the power of people does not reside in use-value, in moving fast or moving slow, but rather in collective identification around shared ethico-political values advocated through various social practices, including the performing arts.

Imagining a Popular Form of Collectivity in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City In Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, the performance scholar Angela Marino (2018) suggests that left-wing populism is a performance of re-creating the state. She stresses that popular performance is constructed by complex cultural and political arrangements that move through a charismatic leader to re-create the state. She dubbed these arrangements or various embodied acts of performance “such as fiesta dance, theatre, music, and everyday performed behaviours that transmit unifying strategies of collective identification” “populist repertoires” (3). We can retain Marino’s view that (left-wing) populism is constructed by various embodied acts of performance. However, we must recognize that various performance practices not only transmit unifying strategies of collective identification; they also enact them, helping citizens to envisage, experience, and, eventually, generate alternative forms of collectivity. The topic of constructing alternative subjectivities and imaginary forms of collectivity has been of concern for many performance artists. For example, a Berlin-based team of author-directors, Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel, who have worked together since 2000 under—as they prefer—the label Rimini Protokoll, has been interested in this topic. First thing to mention is that Rimini Protokoll does not work with professional actors but with “ordinary people.” The performance critic Eva Behrendt (2003) refers to the presence of ordinary people in performance as “experts of everyday-life.” Writing on Rimini Protokoll’s play about death in Deadline, Behrendt lists experts of everyday life (or, in this case, experts of everyday death!) as the owner of a crematorium, a tombstone sculptor, a funeral violinist, and a student of medicine. The performance critics Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford (2016, 5) described ordinary people in performance as “real people,” that is, “contemporary people who have a verifiable physical existence, and who usually have not received institutional theatre training and have little or no prior stage experience.” They write, “These real people literally appear on stage or are represented—through techniques such as verbatim text, film, pre-recorded or live-feed video—and figure as consensual ­protagonists in specific theatre forms and genres” (5). Real, ordinary people, members of local communities, are the main protagonists of Rimini Protokoll’s performance 100% City (2008). Working with one hundred residents of a particular city, i.e. Athens (2010), London (2012), Krakow (2013), Philadelphia (2014), Yogyakarta (2015), São Paulo (2017), and elsewhere, they wanted to envisage the city as a collectivity consisting of various democratic associations of people. I attended 100% City in

688   Goran Petrović Lotina 2014 in Brussels, during Kunstenfestival des Arts, a few weeks before the federal elections that took place on May 25. The casting of one hundred Brusselaars was done in accordance with the five criteria maintained by the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis (BISA): age, sex, nationality, place of residence, and family composition. To make the population of Brussels even more representative, the data proceeding from the sociological surveys, such as language, employment, nationality at birth, religion, and sexual orientation, were also taken into account.13 In addition to these one hundred persons, five undocumented individuals—an immigrant, an asylum seeker, a diplomat, an expat, and a foreign student— were also invited to take part. Each participant was asked to select another, respecting the demographic criteria. As it turned out, the complexity of Brussels’ demographics, as well as the fixed dates of the run, September 2013 to May 2014, required some casting adaptations. Brigitte Neervoort, a Brussels-based representative of Rimini Protokoll responsible for coordination and casting of 100% Brussels, employed a cluster principle that sometimes engaged her and her six-member team to find people who would fit the statistics.14 Afterward each participant was photographed and interviewed on the basis of the following questionnaire: “I am unique because——. At home I speak——. On stage you can recognise me by——. I would join a demonstration for or against——. The slogan would be——. I have this tic or idiosyncrasy——. I belong to the following groups——.” The questionnaire served as a basis for the performance narrative, while the answers accompanied the participants’ portraits in the book, which also contained the statistical data, the description of the casting process, and a text by the sociologist Eric Corijn, who described the city of Brussels in all its diversity. 100% Brussels began like this: a person steps into the spotlight and starts speaking in the microphone in French and, for a moment, in Dutch. For instance, in French he says, “Je m’appelle Benoit Laine” (My name is Benoit Laine); then he continues in Dutch: “Ik werk voor BISA, Staatsinstelling voor het Brusselse Gewest” (I work for BISA, the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis). After giving some autobiographical information and showing the book that contains statistics on Brussels inhabitants divided into categories, such as sex, age, community, civil status, and nationality, as well as the list of citizens taking part in the performance, Laine—responsible for the Methods and Statistics unit at BISA— explains the process of casting. This is what he says in French: “Afterwards, we had to find 100 persons that would represent the city following a [statistically based] sampling plan. I live in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, just like 8% of the inhabitants of Brussels. I should still find 7 [persons from Molenbeek]. Yet, I had to find 14 persons between 0 and 9 years old [from Brussels]. Therefore, I have started a chain reaction, and as number 2 I chose my daughter Marion who is 7 years old.”15 Just like Marion, Laine’s daughter, who appears on stage wearing the swimming goggles that identify her, every other person steps into the spotlight with an object of identification that extends their autobiographical narrative. One hundred inhabitants of Brussels proceed to the microphone, one at a time, and introduce themselves. They are families with children, singles, or couples. We are introduced to people of different origins, from different countries, speaking different languages. Some are scientists, teachers, social workers, or volunteers; some are retired, unemployed, students, or pupils. Among them are people with disabilities, undocumented persons, people of color, a member of the LGBTQIA community. Slowly, people of different origins, language groups, colors, genders, sexes, ages, weights, and heights fill the stage. An elderly woman, Christian Gabriels, who introduces herself at the beginning as a retired person now

Performance and Populism   689 dedicated to voluntary work, steps out of the crowd to explain that the 100 persons on stage represent 1,154,635 inhabitants of Brussels, and that each one of them is a representative of approximately 11,546 inhabitants of Brussels. Another person, Max Nisol, announces that 49% of Brussels inhabitants are men and 51% women, and that the transgender community, to whom this person belongs, is not officially represented in BISA statistics. At that moment, the other 99 persons split into groups of men and women. One hundred persons on stage split into different groups in order to simulate different associations based on age difference, nationality, or neighborhood; when one person declares she lives in Belgium due to the political and economic crisis in her own country, another person joins the same side of the stage. Participants express different opinions on topics, such as “I think there should be one common language within the European Union,” or “I think the EU should grow.” The demands of women to wear a veil, the unemployed to work, the gay to adopt children, and many other local actualities always split the citizens according to their opinion in different associations, left and right from the line that divides the stage. The same happens with questions about capitalism, belonging to political parties, and so on. And when those who decided not to vote at the forthcoming federal elections in Belgium are asked to leave the stage, they can only observe how the rest of the inhabitants of Brussels make decisions about issues that might concern them too, such as the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership; financing Congo’s government, that is, keeping Congo in debt; tax paying; and reducing the number of cars in the city. 100% City demonstrates that inhabitants of a city may share some values and disagree about others. It also shows that each citizen may belong to different human associations constructed around mutually disparate and conflicting ethico-political values. This suggests that the city is an expression of an eternal tension between the multitude of human associations. It is not a smooth space but rather a striated space of constitutive division.16 Accordingly, the articulation of various social movements, democratic identities, and different demands in a popular collectivity can only be seen as the result of collective identification with shared ethico-political values. This is clearly demonstrated at the end of the performance, when “all” inhabitants of Brussels began to dance, enacting an imagined (comm)unity. In the context of the Belgian federal elections that were to be held just a few weeks after the performance, the practice of dance consisting of discordant movements became a symbolic unity of different social practices, democratic identities, and public spaces in struggle for freedom and equality, providing “us” with agency. In 100% Brussels a call for unity does not propose a temporal fusion that avoids a strategic engagement of the people with the existing institutions. It suggests a unity through voter turnout, so far the most democratic way to engage with existing institutions, contest a hegemonic politics, and gain power over the right-wing political parties. All this can only mean that a popular form of collectivity does not manifest in the temporal dimension of duration nor the dimension of acceleration. In fact, it does not depend on the qualitative properties of humans to move, be it fast or slow. Neither does it manifest in a form of unity that inhabits the smooth space without a constitutive division. In other words, it is not a matter of unity in an essentialist identity, whether workers’, women’s, or immigrants’. Rather, a popular form of collectivity is a consequence of identification between the multiplicity of democratic identities that inhabit a space striated by many lines of separation yet allegiant to shared ethico-political values. As such, it presupposes a unity in struggle against a common cause of subordination, against the capitalist forces that

690   Goran Petrović Lotina dominate, exploit, or discriminate both separately and collectively. Accordingly, populism is not an ideology, a set of normative ideas, political beliefs and attitudes, as Mudde and Kaltawasser advocate. Nor is it a coherent political style as proposed by Moffitt, a discourse reduced to semiotics and phonology as in Hawkins, or a strategy depending exclusively on the capacities of individuals as in Weyland. Rather, populism is a choreographing practice of constructing or articulating the people, or popular forms of collectivity, that can take many forms. It is a fusion of social forces in a struggle against the elite. Only when populist movements from the left-wing political spectrum engage with the existing institutions, representations, and discourse, dominated by the elites, are they capable of contesting and transforming them and returning popular sovereignty to the realm of politics. In this sense, populism (on the political left) can be seen as a counterhegemonic, choreopolitical practice capable of dislocating the existing and articulating an alternative order of politics, symbolic representations, and discourses, evolving around the shared ethico-political values of freedom and equality.

Notes 1. On “a consensus at the centre” and its consequences for the growing popularity of the right-wing political parties in the 1990s, see Mouffe (2005). 2. This chapter puts the focus on populism in Western Europe. Populism in Eastern Europe, just like in the other regions of the world, has different manifestations and requires a separate study that would provide insights into the local historical, geopolitical, cultural, and economic constellations. 3. Immigrations to Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century differ from immigrations to Europe seen previously, by an unprecedented number of asylum seekers and sharply divergent routes of arrival. See Collett and Le Coz (2018). 4. Anti-immigration has been playing a key role in the growing popularity of the right-wing populist parties across Europe since the mid 1980s. See Ivarsflaten (2007); Mouffe (2002). 5. Mudde and Kaltawasser (2017) write that the right-wing populist parties see immigrants as a threat to national security. 6. Akkerman (2012) writes about the significance of immigration and integration policies for the radical right parties. 7. “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found” was first published in French in 2013. 8. On Laclau and Mouffe’s critical approach to Hobbes’s theory, see Laclau and Mouffe (1985); Mouffe (2013, 24–41). 9. Rancière’s model of communal anarchism is also inspired by the notion of the people. However, unlike Mouffe, he dismisses institutions and representations as foundations of domination and hierarchy. On the difference between Mouffe and Rancière, see Petrović Lotina (2018). 10. Mouffe’s view on society in conflictual terms has been influenced by Carl Schmitt. See Mouffe (2005, 36–69). 11. When subjectivities are approached in collective, relational, and ethico-political terms, identities such as women and workers do not disappear; they stand for the feminist and labor struggles on every level that these identities are subordinated to the capitalist forces of domination.

Performance and Populism   691 12. Taking a lead from the theory of hegemony, I have been developing the idea of articulation as a choreographic practice (Petrović Lotina 2017). 13. BISA gathers information about population based on age, sex, nationality, place of residence, and family composition. All other data are provided by universities, NGOs, or institutes. 14. I am drawing here on the phone interview that I conducted with Brigitte Neervoort, a Brussels-based Rimini Protokoll delegate responsible for coordination and casting of 100% Brussels on October 9, 2017. 15. Video link to the performance: https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/proj­ect/100brussels. 16. The performance scholar Christopher Balme (2014) suggests that the “theatrical public sphere” too consists of a multiplicity of spaces.

References Akkerman, Tjitske. 2012. “Comparing Radical Right Parties in Government: Immigration and Integration Policies in Nine Countries (1996–2010).” West European Politics 35, no. 3: 511–29. Balme, Christopher. 2014. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behrendt, Eva. 2003. “The Experts of Everyday-Life.” Rimini Protokoll, September 1. http:// www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/text/the-experts-of-everyday-life. Collett, Elizabeth, and Camille Le Coz. 2018. After the Storm: Learning from the EU Response to the Migration Crisis. Brussels: Migration Policy Institute Europe. Crouch, Colin. 2000. Coping with Post-Democracy. London: Fabian Society. Garde, Ulrike, and Meg Mumford. 2016. Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond. New York: Bloomsbury. Giuffrida, Angela. 2019. “Europe’s Far-Right Leaders Unite with a Vow to ‘Change History.’ ” The Guardian, May 18. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/18/europe-farright-leaders-unite-milan-vow-to-change-history. Göpffarth, Julian. 2019. “Can Left Nationalism Stop the Rise of the Far-Right in Germany?” Open Democracy, January 24. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/ can-left-nationalism-stop-rise-of-far-right-in-germany/. Gramsci, Antonio. [1935] 2007. Prison Notebooks. Vol. 3. Edited and translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Hawkins, Kirk A. 2009. “Is Chávez Populist? Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 8: 1040–67. Hobbes, Thomas. 1983. The Works of Thomas Hobbes: De Cive [1642]. Edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth. 2007. “What Unites Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe? Re-Examining Grievance Mobilization Models in Seven Successful Cases.” Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 1: 3–23. Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflection on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.

692   Goran Petrović Lotina Marino, Angela. 2018. Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2002. “Democracy in Europe: The Challenge of Right-wing Populism.” Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/mouffe.pdf. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Mouffe, Chantal. 2009. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics. London: Verso. Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. London: Verso. Mudde, Cas, and Christobal Rovira Kaltawasser. 2017. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. “Inoperative Community.” In Theory and History of Literature, edited by Peter Connor, translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Somona Sawhney, 76:1–42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Petrović Lotina, Goran. 2017. “The Political Dimension of Dance: Mouffe’s Theory of Agonism and Choreography.” In Performing Antagonism, edited by Tony Fisher and Eva Katsouraki, 251–72. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Petrović Lotina, Goran. 2018. “Reconstructing the Bodies: Between the Politics of Order and the Politics of Disorder.” In Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, edited by Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić, 143–63. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rancière, Jacques. 2016. “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found.” In What Is a People, edited by Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Hubermn, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière, translated by Jody Gladding, 101–5. New York: Columbia University Press. Rancière, Jacques. [1995] 1999. Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Reinelt, Janelle. 2014. “Performance at the Crossroads of Citizenship.” In The Grammar of Politics and Performance, edited by Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt, 34–50. London: Routledge. Spinoza, Benedict de. [1670] 2018. A Theological-Political Treatise. London: Global Grey ebooks. https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/theologico-political-treatise-ebook.html. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e). Weyland, Kurt. 2001. “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics.” Comparative Politics 34, no. 1: 1–22.

Index

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t” and “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbott, Tony  160–1, 221 Abe, Shinzo  162–3 Abélès, Marc  638 Abouzeid, Rania  238 Abrahams, Yvette  352 Abse, Leo  269–70 absence 24–5 of defendants  74 politics of  83–4 Abu Ghraib  501–2, 504–5, 507–9, 511–12 abuse 453 acting, neoliberal  394–5 acting style  50 Action Zoo Humain  460 activism by civil society  528n.14 community 444–8 participatory art practices and  520 performance studies as  12 by trade union movements  93 activists, theater attacked by  458 acts, gender  256–7 acts of knowing  391–2 Ada (Milles and Forsberg)  368–70 Adams, Michael  356 Addison, Joseph  29 addressable you  202 Adorno, Theodor  57–8 adversarial method of evidence testing  73, 77 The Aeneid (Kemeid)  202 Aeschylus 13–14 aesthetic experience  366–7 Aesthetics of Appearing (Seel)  366 affect  163, 577. See also emotions

care and  609–10 circulation of  600–1 constituency work and  644–5 political 546 politics of  647–9 affective atmosphere  670–5 affective framing  551 affective labor  257–8 affect theory  582 affiliation 131 affiliative postmemory  582, 586 African bodies, photographing  349–52 African nativism  352–6 Afzali, Aneelah  240–2 Agamben, Giorgio  218–19, 382, 395 Aganaktismenoi 679–80 agency. See also market agency moral 271 performance and  326 performative 10–11 violence and civilian  348 agitprop 489 agonistics 683 Ahmed, Sara  585, 647–8 Ahmed, Zahir  639–40 AI Business School  313 AI for Good Global Summit (AIfG)  307, 310, 313, 319–20 Ainslie, Andrew  347–8 Aitken, Robbie  30–1 Akram Khan (Mitra)  203 Akwa, Dika  30–1, 37, 37n.1 Akwa, Mpundu  30–7, 37n.1 Albertine, Viv  452–3, 485–6, 491–2

694   index Alexander, Jeffrey  102, 425, 471–2, 478, 599–600 alienation  374. See also Verfremdung Alison, A.  92 allegiances 131 Allievi, Stefano  244 All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham 158–9 alternative media  243–5 Alternativ fur Deutschland  504–5 Althusser, Louis  457, 462–7 Amalgamated Society of Engineers  93 American Muslim Empowerment Network  240, 240f American Muslims, bias and  237 American Muslim women  235–6, 241 group identification of  243 mass media and  238–9 “America’s Leading Actor at Work” (Schechner) 423–4 AMLO. See López Obrador, Andrés Manuel Anan, Nobuko  579 anchoring scripts  549 Anderson, Benedict  175 Andersson, Ruben  58–9 Angelaki, Vicky  344–5 Angels in America (Kushner)  571 anger, conflict and  598–9 Anglo, Sydney  121 anthropology 405 political, of constituency work  638–40 anti-austerity protests  213 anticolonial resistance  332 anti-conquest strategies  29–30 antiglobalization movement  669 anti-identitarianism 180 anti-imperialism, national identity and  180 antitheatrical impulse  52 anxiety 395 social 401 appeals 474 appearance  366–7, 451 appearance management  98 appearing 366–7 Arab American women  235–6 Arab Spring  238 Arad, Michael  285–7 Aravindan, G.  51

archives, disability and  540 Arendt, Hannah  547–8, 550, 555, 557 Arias, Lola  585 El-Ariss, Tarek  241–2 Aristotle  11–12, 423–4, 473–4, 502 Arons, Wendy  437–9 art multiple voices through  603 risk through  603 Article 6 of European Convention of Human Rights  75, 80 Article 370 (Indian Constitution)  518 articulation, choreography of  684–7 Artist at Work (Kunst)  684–5 “Artistes United Against Hate” program  525–6 artistic truth  461–2 artist with disability  536 arts and disability practice  540 Art Util (Bruguera)  13–14 ascendency, symbolic logics of  120 Ashton, T. S.  91 assemblies 175–6 Aston, Elaine  14 asylum seeking  200 Australia and  219–21 atmosphere affective 670–5 policing 668–70 of protest  665 space and  665 tone of space  673–5 attention, somatic modes of  557 Atwell, Hayley  440–1 audience artistic level experience  365 decoding by  103 as emancipated spectators  207 experience of performers  365 involvement and immersion  370–1 for memorials  280, 286–9 performer relationship to  478–9 power and awareness of theatrics by  600 reactions by  457–8 script and  408t sensory level experience  365 space between performers and  5–6 symbolic level experience  365–6 audience democracy  567–8, 573n.3

index   695 audience responses  155 Aufstehen 680–1 Auslander, Philip  74–8, 83, 238 austerity 679–80 Austin, J. L.  8–9, 423, 461, 471–2 Austin, Neil  445–6 Australia 578. See also Manus Regional Processing Centre asylum seekers and  219–21 extraterritorial sovereignty  229 refugee-related events  220–1 Australian Federal Police  223–4 authenticating conventions  7 authenticity 24 Barca Nostra (Büchel) and  60–1 contestation of  158–60 culturally determined  58 “The Horrors of the Sea” (Medina) and 59–60 of merchants  268 nearness and  124 presence and  75–6 theatricality and  57–8 authoritarian populism  523 authority legislative 430 scripts and  416 women in spaces of  252 authorization 565 autobiographies 490 autonomous migration  205–6 avant-garde experimental theater  178 Axis Dance Company  534 al-Azar, Mamoud  337f Baartman, Saartjie  65–7, 350–2 Babbage, Charles  368 baby-friendly legislatures  162–3 Bacalar Lagoon  108 Bachalet, Michelle  592n.1 backstage 282 economic recovery and  283–6 Bagehot, Walter  378–9, 421–2, 425, 434 leadership framework of  426–8 liberal theory of  425–6 Bailey, Brett  24, 66–70 Bakunin, Mikhail  380 Bala, Sruti  437–8, 452–3, 520–1

Balakot air strikes  525–6 Balakrishnan, P. K.  44–5, 49–54 Balandier, Georges  120–1 Balfour, Michael  203 Balibar, Etienne  327–8, 463–4 Ballard, J. G.  146 Balme, Christopher  2–3, 24, 29–30, 58–9, 424 Bandt, Adam  228–9 Bannon, Steve  478 Barati, Reza  223–4 Barca Nostra (Büchel)  60–1 Barrow, Charles  93 Barry, Erin  507–8 Barthes, Roland  6 Bastian, Henry Charlton  549–50 Bataille, Georges  503, 506–7, 665 Battle in Seattle protests  669 Baudrillard, Jean  238–9 Bayton, Mavis  488 BBC News Magazine 59 b-boys 140–2 Beagle conflict  583–4 Beard, Mary  569 Beats & Elements  137 Beauvoir, Simone de  506–7 Bedi, Tarini  160 Begg, Anne  643–4 being-gathered 672 Bel, Jérôme  534–5 belief elite rituals and  121 live presence and  83 Bell, Catherine  308 Ben Chika, Chokri  457–63, 466 Bender, Henry  34–5 Benjamin, Walter  294–5, 455–7, 462–4 Butler, J., on  463 Benn, Tony  161 Bercow, John  1–2, 640–1 Berlant, Lauren  629, 660 Bertolazzi, Carlo  463–4 Bescansa, Carolina  162 Beswick, Katie  132 Bevan, Richard  298 Bhabha, Homi  32, 35, 254 Bhambra, Gurminder  344–5 Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)  521–2, 525 Bhasa  45–7, 50–1

696   index Bhima Koreagaon event  528n.9 bias American Muslims and  237 against women in politics  569–70 Biden, Joe  569–70 Billig, Michael  170–1, 378–9 biodramas 584 biopower 569–70 BJP. See Bhartiya Janta Party Black, Mhairi  161 black blocks  110 black bodies hypersexualization of  352 photographing 349–52 blackface  34–5, 356–7 BlackGirlsCode 313 blackleg workers  92, 94–5 Black Lives Matter  241, 281, 518–19, 521 blackness 64–5 performing 357 black resistance  243–4 Black Rod  1–2, 377–8 black women  24 Blair, Tony  476 Bleiker, Roland  577–8 Blejmar, Jordana  578 Blind Spot (Rubin)  238 blockchain 310 Blumenberg, Hans  60–1 Boal, Augusto  207, 214, 296 body misperforming 395–7 performance and  76 in performances of contemporary politics 567–73 political science and  547 semiotics of  451 body politic masculinity and  253–4 morphological dimensions of  252–3 racial exclusions in  254 Bollywood dances  190–2 Boltanski, Luc  600 Boochani, Behrouz  214, 217–30 collaborations by  227–8 border politics  58–9 borders  214, 217

arts and humanities perspectives on  218 Chauka and  224–7 Bosnian War  501, 509–10, 512n.1 Bouazizi, Mohamad  461–2 Bourdieu, Pierre  77, 239, 262 Boureau, Alain  121 Bovell, Dennis  491 Brand, Russell  656 Brassett, James  579 Bratton, William  140–1 Brazil, right to city in  301 breakdancing  136, 141–2 Brecht, Bertold  5–6, 202, 373–4, 452, 462–3, 524 Benjamin and  455–6 Brechtian distancing  201 Brechtian epic theater  455, 463 Brechtian gestures  524 Breivik, Anders Behring  289–90, 290f Brennan, Teresa  546–7, 670–1 Brexit  478, 545 campaign and referendum  546–7 comedy and  579, 653–5, 657–60, 662 comedy politicians and  655–7 interviews with voters after  552–4 mood after  551–5 Brigstocke, Marcus  659 Britain First  504–5 Brit Awards of 2018  145–6 British Standards Institute  313 Brodsky, Joseph  199 Brown, Aaron  659 Brown, Michael  518 Brown, Wendy  344 Brownstein, Carrie  452–3, 485–6, 489–90, 493–4 Bruguera, Tanya  13–14 Bruzzone, Félix  581, 589–92 Büchel, Christoph  60 burden of doubt  259–60 burden of representation  260–2 bureaucratic speech act  201 burial markers  289 burial rites  289 Burke, Kenneth  474, 478 Burke, Tom  440–1 Burns, Elizabeth  27–9, 58

index   697 Bush, George H. W.  564, 568–9 Bush, George W.  423, 476, 599 “Bush’s Happy Performative” (Taylor, D.)  423 Butler, Dawn  1–2, 256 Butler, Judith  8, 28–9, 35–6, 132, 152, 202–3, 213, 236–7, 256–8, 384, 452, 503, 572, 585, 599–600 on Abu Ghraib  507 on Benjamin  463 on excessive representation  208 on interpellation  464 on performative politics  596 on performativity and economic roles  266–7 on performativity and power  655–6 on performativity of assembly  674 post-9/11 fork  503–4 Butler, Mary  268 La Cacha  590 Cadena-Roa, Jorge  24 Calais Jungle refugee camp  204–9 Calakmul Biosphere Reserve  108 Calderon, Felipe  106, 109 Calderón, Guillermo  581–2, 587–9 Callon, Michel  266–7 Calvin, Jean  382 Cameron, David  655 Cameroon 35–6 Campbell, Sue  555–6 Campo minado 585 Canning, Charlotte  505–6 Cantat, Céline  220–1 Cap-a-pie  295–6, 298 capitalism cities structured by  139 feminism and  132 hip-hop and  141 magic and  312–14 Caravan for Democracy  106 care  578, 609 affect and  609–10 case studies of  614–18 chronicities of  615 components of  610 defining 610–11 duty and  612–13 external supports and  617

formal 612–13 informal  611, 614 mutualities of  616 paid 616–18 performativity of  618 performing 611–13 politics of  613–14, 618 power and  611 as resources  611–13 carer burden  615 carer-related welfare  611–14 Carlson, Marvin  568–9 Carr, Liz  534 cars, as second offices  126–7 cartels, employer  91–2 Carter, Mick  98 Carthy, Scott  142 Cassey, Brian  228 Catholic Church  564–5 censors 431–3 Central European University  391–4 Central Park  138 ceremony aspects of  383–5 coronation 381 etymology and political theology  379–82 histories of  382–3 life events and  377 political institutions and  379 political systems and  377–8 structure of  343 temporality of  384–5 Chakraborty, Mimi  159 chakyar 48–50 Chambers, Richard  329 Change and Reform party (OPTs)  328–30 character, political leadership and  476–7 Charges (The Supplicants) (Jelinek)  202 Charles I (King)  382 Charrett, Catharine Chiniara  214 Chartism 93 Chaudhuri, Una  213–14, 437 Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (film)  219–20, 227–8 as evidentiary document  223–4 Manus Prison and  222–3 time, space, borders and  224–7

698   index chauka cell  225–6 Chávez, Hugo  592n.1 Chiapas 105 child care  162–3 child-friendly workplaces  162 Children Overboard Affair  220–1 Chile 592n.1 China  343, 407 national rejuvenation in  409 political performance and  407 scripts and  408, 411, 416 victim discourse in  409 China Dream  408–14 China Global Television Network  412–13 Chinese Communist Party  408–14 victim discourse and  409 choreography 545 of articulation  684–7 performance effectiveness and  103–4 political presence and  547–8 rhetoric and  550 Chou, Mark  603 Christmas Island  219, 226–7 chronicities of care  615 Churchill, Winston  255 Cicero 9 ciphers 144–5 circulation of affect  600–1 cities aesthetic research on  294–6 Brazil and right to  301 capitalism structuring  139 global 297 hip-hop and  140–6 international and  295–6 method and  294–6 mobility and  295 performance and  293 plurality of  294–5 street performance and structures of 139–40 citizenship acts of  227–8 countercultural 190–2 cultural 183–4 manifestations 525 performance and  183, 193 resistance and acts of  220

resistance as performances of  187–90 vernacular 186 Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (India)  151, 528n.14 citizenship gap  183–4 performativity and  186 resistance to  185 City of Refuge  206 city space  137–40 City Statute (Brazil)  301 civic equality  424 civic identity, national theater and  176–7 civic nationalism  525 Civilizing Subjects (Hall)  31 civil religions  431–3 civil service, UK  153 civil society  111, 523 activism by  528n.14 clandestine migration  59–60 “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics” (Wayland) 682 Clarke, Gregory  445–6 class 262 city and  137–40 community and  686 as cultural performance  32 race and  138–9, 188 racism compounding injustices of  138–9 Clinton, Bill  564, 568–9, 571 Clinton, Hillary  160–1, 478, 569, 572–3 clothing, signaling through  158–9 co-constitution 15–18 Coe, Jonathan  656–7 Coffey, Tamati  162 cognitive immersion  370 Cohen, Abner  120–1 Cold War  475–6 Coleman, Stephen  453, 600 collaboration, transnationalism and  227–8 collective identity  648 collective punishment  333–4 collectivity 686–90 of migration  208 relationality of  207 Collini, Stephan  137 Collins, Patricia Hill  153–4 Colombia 592n.1

index   699 colonialism 179 culture and  32 ethnic divisions and  347 exhibitionary complex of  69 naming and  348 photography and  350 refugee cultural production and  220 resisting 45–6 settler  214, 328–9 theatricality and  58–9 colonial mimicry  32 colonial subjects, legal status of  31, 38n.3 colonial theatricality  29–30, 37 colonies, German  31 The Colonising Camera (Hartmann, Silvester, and Hayes)  350 Colonizing Egypt (Mitchell, T.)  29–30 Combination Act of 1824 (UK)  92 Combination Act of 1825 (UK)  92 Combination Acts, repeal of  94 Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 (UK)  91 comedy Brexit and  657–60, 662 establishment 657–60 performative politics and  654 post-Brexit  653–5, 660 comedy politicians  655–7 comic resistance  654 The Coming Community (Agamben)  395 commercial media industries  236 commercial orders  310 communalism, gestural sites of  521–3 communication. See also gesture circular concepts of  364–6 linear concepts of  363–4 rhetoric and establishment of  478 community class identity and  686 imagined  175, 236 managing, of fear and anger  598–9 social imaginations of  393 community activism  444–8 Comodoro Py  589–92 Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité  667–8 competence 124–5 Complete English Tradesman (Defoe, D.)  267–70, 274 condition for humanization  202–3

“The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh” (Brodsky)  199 conflict alternative approaches to  601–2 conceptualizing 597–8 national identity and  178–81 prevailing approaches to  598–9 confrontation 73–4 right of  75, 80 Confrontation Clause  75 Congreso Nacional Indígena  108 Conquergood, Dwight  12 consent, manufacturing  236 Conservative Party (UK)  126, 258, 476 “Considerations on the Government of Poland” (Rousseau)  172–3 conspicuous modesty  126 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 (UK)  94, 96 constituencies MPs’ relationships to  638 political performance in  640–4 representation and  122 unevenness and inequality between  643–4 constituency work  579 context and  650 performance of emotion in politics and 644–7 political anthropology of  638–40 politics of affect and  647–9 relational approach to  637–8 constructing the people  681–4 constructivism  171, 174–5, 178 constructivist turn  122 consubstantiality 478 contesting gestures  523–4 Contesting Nativism in Race, Culture and Sexualities (Ngwena)  348 continuous visibility  261 contracts 269 sovereignty and  561–2 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees 200 Coole, Diana  547 Corbyn, Jeremy  476, 657–8, 680–1 Corijn, Eric  687–8 Corneille, Pierre  383 coronation ceremonies  381

700   index Coronation Order of Richard II  381–2 Corriente Democrática  106 Cottu, Charles  77 council housing  145 countercultural citizenship  190–2 counterculture, punk and  489 counterpublics, Roma  192–3 countersymbolization 686 court life  120 Courtois, Jean-Philippe  313 Cover, Robert  76 Covid-19 pandemic  254, 522 Cowie, Paul  298 Cox, Emma  203, 214 craft guilds  91 Crary, Jonathan  548–9 creativity, neoliberalism and  310 Cresswell, Tim  136, 139–40 Crewe, Emma  579 Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 (UK)  80 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 (UK) 81 Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871 (UK) 94 repeal of  94 Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 2013 (India) 156 criminal proceedings  73 performance theory and  75 politics of presence and  74 video-link remand proceedings  78–80 crip drag  534–5 critical gestures  524–7 critical learning  399 critical performance practices  180 Critical Stages (journal)  204 Croatia 2 Croation New Left  2–3 Crompton, Henry  94–5 Crossman, R. H. S.  426–7 Crouch, Colin  97, 679 Csordas, Thomas  557 Cuartel Terranova  587–8 Cuarto intermedio (film)  581–2, 585–6, 589–92 cults of eliteness  120 cultural appropriation  13 cultural capital  262

cultural citizenship  183 Roma and  184 cultural domination  13 cultural fictions  256–7 cultural frontiers, imperial formation reproduction and  334–6 cultural identity  171 cultural movements  146 cultural nationalism, national theater and 176–7 cultural performance, class as  32 cultural politics, hip-hop as  141 cultural production  236–7 transnational 406–7 culture collective representations of  475 colonialism and  32 Cut (The Slits)  491 cyberspace, racial identity and  237 cyber-typing 237 Daivattar (Panikkar)  49–50 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond  172–3 Dalits 157–8 Daloz, Jean-Pascal  24–5 dance 45. See also litefeet dance countercultural citizenship through  190–2 social positioning and  547–51 as translatory instrument  546–7 D’Ancona, Matthew  546 Darby, William  507–8 Darfur 204–5 Davies, Matt  214 Davies, Will  656–7 Davis, Steve  287 Davis, Tracy C.  28–30 da’wa 242 Death of a Salesman (Miller)  202 debating 258–9 education through  427 Debord, Guy  238–9 deception, leadership performance and  423 De Cive (Hobbes)  683 decolonization, environment and  438 deconolonization defining 437–8 of universities  344–5 decorum  125, 257–8

index   701 Dedić, Arsen  2–3 defamiliarization 462–3 defendants 73 absence of  74 body of  75–7 disappearing 77–83 politics of presence and  75–7 in trials in absentia  81–3 video-link remand proceedings and  78–80 Defoe, Daniel  267–71, 273–5 Defoe, James  269–70 dehumanization 28–9 video links and  79 Della Ratta, Donatella  319 demeanor assessment  73 democracy 637 audience  567–8, 573n.3 democratic deliberation  479–80 democratic elitism  427 democratic participation  425–6 democratic transitions  583 Dening, Greg  29–30 depersonalization 566 Derrida, Jacques  76–8, 83, 206, 380 detention immigration and  220–1 off-shore 220 of refugees and migrants  218–19 de Vaan, Michiel  379–80 dhwani 47–8 Diamond, Elin  57–8, 572 dictators 431–3 Diderot, Denis  566 DigiGirlz 313 digital passages  218 Digital World War (Ullah)  241–2 directive norms  256–7 dirty war  583–4 disability 531–2 definition differences in  537, 539 lived experience of  536–7, 539–40 present and future priorities in  541–2 social services and  541 theater and  453 disability arts  533–6, 540 disability identity as category  538 development of  532–3

disability-led practice  539–40 disability performance  531–5 politics of labeling in  535–7 disability studies  532 disabled artists  535–6 disabled people, depictions of  532–3 disabled performers  531–2 Disabled Theater (Bel)  534–5 Discipline and Punish (Foucault)  76 discourse analysis  155 discursive performativity  405 disguises 109–11 disidentification 462–3 disorientation 255–6 disruptions 433–4 dissensual gestures  524–7 distanciation 47–8 division, in political performance  415–17 dock 76–7 documentary theater, in Latin America  583–5 Domestic Violence Bill (India)  156, 161 Doss, Erika  281 drama, trials and  590 The Drama Review (journal)  425 dress codes  158–9 Duala, Cameroon  30–1, 36, 38n.2, 38n.4 Duara, Prasenjit  174 Du Bois, W. E. B.  70 due process, of politics  427–8 Duffield, Rosie  161 Durkheim, Émile  378–9, 384, 671 Dutt, Barkha  522–3 Dutt, Bishnupriya  452 duty, care and  612–13 dwellings 217 Dyer, Danny  655 dynastic symbols  121 Earth’s Color March  105 ecocriticism  344–5, 437–9 economic recovery  283–6 economic refugees  37 economic transactions  271 Edkins, Jenny  279 education House of Commons role in  427 rehumanizing politics and  399 education through debating  427

702   index Eggers, Maureen Maisha  32–3 Ekenberg, Love  371 Elden, Stuart  343 elites rituals of  121 sacred quality of status of  120 elitism, democratic  427 Elizabeth (Queen)  383, 385 The Emancipated Spectator (Rancière)  293 emancipation  293, 398 embodied epistemology  193 embodied performance, of United States presidency  568–9, 571 embodied performativity  8 embodied political feelings  555–7 embodiment 257–8 in contemporary politics  567–73 defining 563 populism and  561–3 representation and  561–7 sovereignty and  565–6 eminence  24–5, 117, 123–7, 125t Emmott, Stephen  438 emotional labor  268 emotional politics, performative dimensions of 599–601 emotions conceptualizing 597–8 nationalism and  170 performance of, in politics  644–7 performative dimensions of  596 performative strategies and  103 performativity of  596 performing 600 political appropriation with  598–9 of political leaders  597 politics and  595, 597 protests and  666 social 670 social dimensions in  597–8 emotion work  271 empathetic identification  577–8 empathy  443, 545, 597 defining 596 performative politics of  601–2 performativity and  604–5 strategic use of  604

empire frontiers of  327 performativity of  329–31 politics of  328–9 resistance against  327 space and  214 Empire State Development Corporation (ESD) 283–4 Employer and Workmen Act (UK)  94 employer cartels  91–2 Emsley, Clive  97 An Enemy of the People (Ibsen)  439 enframement 28–9 England court reform in  80 dock in trials in  76–7 trials in absentia in  81 video-link proceedings in  78 English Civil War  2, 7, 377–8 English Constitution  378–9 The English Constitution (Bagehot)  421–2, 425–6 Enlightenment  29, 173–4, 254 environment 437 decolonization and  438 environmental justice  444–8 epidermalization 64–5 epistemic violence  63–6 equality 472–3 as premise  297 eroticism 506 ESD. See Empire State Development Corporation ESMA case  590 ESMA Memory Site  587 “The Eternal Immigrant and Aesthetics of Solidarity” (Jestrovic)  203 ethnic groups in Mexico  107 national identity and  169 ethnic nationalism  525 ethnocultural identity  183–4 ethnodramas 584 ethnographic photos  358 ethnonationalism 34 ethos 475–9 EU. See European Union

index   703 Euben, J. Peter  422 EU Elections Monitoring Mission for the West Bank and Gaza  329 Europe, performative creation of  351 European Convention of Human Rights, Article 6  75, 80 European Council  329 European Courts of Human Rights  245 European hegemony  29–30 European Parliament  329, 638, 657 European refugee crisis  218–19 European Union (EU)  478 expansion of  184–5 Hamas and  328–31, 333 Palestine elections and  329 Palestinian relations with  328–9 Roma and  184 Euroskepticism 680–1 Eurovision  14, 409–10 eurozone debt crisis  679–80 evidence testing  73 Evreinov, Nikolai  6 Exhibit B (Bailey)  66–70, 67f, 68f exhibitionary complex  69 exile 199–200 gaze and  199 existentialism 57–8 Exodus for Democracy  106 expansionism 29 external cues  235–6 external supports  617 Extinction Rebellion  13–14 Facebook  143, 145–6 “Faces and Phases” (Muholi)  353, 356, 358 face-to-face contact  641 facial features  355 FACTOM 310 fake news  460 The Fall  492–3, 495 familial love  629–30 La Fanfare Invisible  667–8 Fanon, Frantz  64–5, 180, 262, 327 Farage, Nigel  478, 563–4, 654–7 “Faraway” (Sleater-Kinney)  493–4 Farinati, Lucia  400 far-right organizations  504–5

Fatah party (OPTs)  329–30, 333 Fatsis, Lambros  144 favelas 300–1 fear 597 conflict and  598–9 feminism capitalism and  132 governance 132 Fenno, Richard  641 Féral, Josette  7, 28, 43, 58 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina  592n.1 fetishization  57–8, 65 Fiebach, Joachim  27–8, 37n.1 Finburgh, Clare  439 Finch, Ray  657 Finlayson, Alan  452 fire 466 Firth, Claudia  400 Fischer, Tony  524 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  11–12, 57–8, 175–6, 181 Fitzpatrick, Lisa  453 flaneurs 294–5 flâneuse 294–5 Flynn, Paul  639, 641 Foer, Jonathan Safran  438 For a Left Populism (Laclau and Mouffe) 682 forced disappearance  591 forced trafficking  58–9 Foreigners Out (Schlingensief)  13–14 formal care  612–13 Forman, Murray  140–1 Forsberg, Rebecca  367 Foster, Susan Leigh  453, 545 Foucault, Michel  5, 76, 122, 187, 213–14, 383, 579 Fox, Vicente  106, 592n.1 frames of social justice  35–6 Frames of War (Butler, J.)  28–9 framing affective 551 defining 103 gender 152–6 of grievances  103 mobilization and  103 performance 152–6 politics 152–6

704   index framing (Continued) social movements and  103 space as device for  251 theatricality and  28–9 Franco, Jean  503, 506 Franklin, M. I.  452–3 Franko, Mark  550 Fraser, Mat  534 Fraser, Nancy  24, 28–9 Freeman, Hadley  495 free speech zones  669 Freire, Paulo  296, 335–6, 399 French Revolution  11, 93 Friedland, Paul  565 Friedrich II (Emperor)  381–2 Friendly Societies  91 Frljić, Oliver  2–3, 5–6 frontiers 325 of empire  327 as identity borders  327 instability of  328–9 Palestine as  327–8 performances on  325–6 sites 327–9 terrorist bodies as, of imperial formations 331–4 violence use at  329–31 Fukushima disaster  629–30 Fusco, Coco  180 Gabriels, Christian  688–9 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  366 Galbraith, Janet  225–6 Gallardo, Italo  584 Gambetty, Zeynep  585 Gandhi, Priyanka  158–9 Garde, Ulrike  687 Garton, Janet  441 gas strikes of 1890  95 Gatens, Moira  253–4, 259 Gatti, Gabriel  584–5 Gaza Strip  214, 328–33, 337 gaze, exile and  199 Gebhardt, Lisette  629–30 Geertz, Clifford  120–1, 222–3 Gellner, Ernst  174 gender burden of doubt and  259–60

dress codes and  158–9 framing 152–6 global and local circulations of political representation and  160–3 labor history and  99n.1 parliaments sensitivity to  162–3 performance of political representation and 155 performativity of  152 scholarship 10 sex distinction from  152 site and  214–15 space and  613–15 state legislatures and performance of 256–7 gender acts  256–7 gendered aggressions  241 gendered power relations  10 General Strike of 1926  97 Générik Vapeur  298 Genet, Jean  14, 180 genocide  348, 510 gentrification 300–1 gentry masculinity  253–4 geopathology 213–14 George III (King)  383 Germany 35–7 Akwa, M., and  30–5 blackface in  34–5 colonies of  31 social transformations in  34 gestural sites, of communalism and hypernationalism 521–3 gestures  451, 462–3 Brechtian 524 contesting 523–4 dissensual 524–7 innovative 523 performative 519 as performative strategies  523–4 of protest  518–21 Gewerbefreiheit (law for the freedom of trade)  38n.9 Gezi Park  452 ghosting 568–9 Gilbert, Helen  203, 437–8 gilet jaunes movement  459, 665, 667–8, 672 Gill, Rosalind  395

index   705 Gillan, Audrey  98 Gillard, Julia  160–1 Gilman, Sander  350–1 Gilroy, Paul  63–4 Gilson, Erinn  504 Girls Night Out (Aston and Harris, G.)  14 Gladstone, William  427–8 global cities  297 global citizenship  171–2 globalization  294, 351 early 34 global migration  207 global mobility  199–200 global modernity, identity construction and 178 The Global Rise of Populism (Moffitt)  682 Goffman, Erving  3, 282, 422–3, 433–4, 532, 538 Goldberg, Ann  35–6 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo  180 Goodley, Dan  532 Goodman, Lizbeth  505–6 Göpffarth, Julian  680–1 Gordon, Kim  452–3, 485–6, 491, 493–4 governance feminism  132 Graham, Martha  549–50 Grammar of Politics and Performance (Rai and Reinelt)  3–4 Grammy Awards  309–10 Grant, Bernie  255–6 Grassi, Paulo  463–4 Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Euben) 422 Greenpeace 461 Gregg, Melissa  585 Grenfell Tower  145–7 grievances, framing of  103 Grillo, Beppe  563–4 grime music  136–7, 140–1, 144–6 as spatial practice  145 Groarke, Andy  288 Grosz, Elizabeth  252–3, 255–6 Grunwick dispute  97 Guantanamo detention camp  2 Guernica (Picasso)  502 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  367, 370 Gunawardana, A. J.  45–6 Gunduz 518 Guomindang 410–11

Guteland, Jytte  162 Gutiérrez, Natividad  171–2 Gypsy soaps  192–3 habitus  239, 262 Hadi, Khawla  240 Hadley, Bree  453 Hafez, Sherine  242 Hahn, Otto  367–8 Haj Ahmad, Ammar  207 Hajjar, Lisa  330–1 Hall, Catherine  31 Hall, Stuart  64–6, 188 Halley, Janet  132 Halperin, David  579 Hamas  214, 336, 337f legitimacy and  333 OPT elections and  325, 327–32, 337 views on  332 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  568–9 Hancox, Dan  144–5 Haniyeh, Ismail  330 happenings 118 Harman, Harriet  163 Harris, Geraldine  14 Harris, Kamala  569–70 Harris, Rolf  78–9 Harrison, Robert Pogue  289 Hartmann, Wolfram  350 Harvey, David  139 hate 598–9 hate speech  8 Haug, Helgard Kim  687 Hawkesworth, Mary  151–5 Hawkins, Kirk  682 al-Haya, Khalil  332–3 Haydar, Mona  235, 243–4 Hayes, Patricia  350–1 Head, Naomi  604 headdresses 359–60 Heathcote-Amory, David  256 Heath-Kelly, Charlotte  215 hegemonic masculinity  257 hegemonic monuments  282 hegemony national theater and  176 populism as response to  683 violence and  326–7

706   index Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 682 Hehir, Katy Vanden  295 Henry IV (King)  382–3 Henry V (King)  382–3 Herder, Johann Gottfried  173–4 hermeneutics 364–6 Hernández, Paola  588–9 Hesford, Wendy  507 heteropathic identification  577–8 heterotopia 213 Hewitt, Andrew  550 higher education market model of  395 service provider model in  394 High Rise (Ballard)  146 High Rise eState of Mind (performance)  146 “Hijabi” (Haydar)  243–4 Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS; Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence)  583–5, 589 Hindu religious identity  521–2 Hindutva 525 hip-hop. See also grime music capitalism and  141 city and  140–6 political movements and  144–5 positioning 141 Hirsch, Marianne  452–3, 578, 582, 584, 586 Hislop, Ian  656–7 historical performance, national identity construction and  172–6 history, performing  2 Hitachi  310, 311f Hitchcock, Alfred  508 Ho, Petula  673 Hobbes, Thomas  453, 561–5, 683 Hobsbawm, Eric  95, 173 Hochschild, Arlie Russell  271 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  366 Holmès, Augusta  488 Holocaust museum  282 Homo Sacer series (Agamben)  382 homosexuality  628, 632 Hong Kong  579, 668–9, 673–5 Honneth, Axel  132 hooks, bell  139, 396–7

“The Horrors of the Sea” (Medina)  59 Hottentot Venus  66–7, 350–1. See also Baartman, Saartjie “the Hottentot Venus,”  24 House of Commons  1–4, 162, 377–8 Bagehon on  427 Black speech in  161 clubbiness of  258 debates in  258–9 education role of  427 elite disguising power in  425–6 women in  163, 255 House of Lords  1–2, 425–6 Bagehot on  427 Howitt, Richard  330–1 Hroch, Miroslav  174 humanitarian arrival, deferment of  222 humanization 28–9 condition for  202–3 humor 649 Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Brownstein) 493–4 Hutchison, Emma  577–8 Hutu-Tsutsi violence  348 Huyssen, Andreas  281 “Hymne à l’amour” (Piaf)  629 Hynde, Chrissie  452–3, 485–6, 490–1 hypersexualization 352 #Iam132  104, 107, 111 Ibsen, Henrik  344–5, 439, 441–2, 448–9 ideas 472–4 identification  462–3, 474 empathetic 577–8 heteropathic 577–8 idiopathic 577–8 representation and  647–8 rhetoric and creation of  478 identity  131, 169 alternative media and  243 artistic practices shaping  174–5 civic 176–7 collective 648 cultural 171 defining 131–2 disability 532–3 ethnocultural 183–4 frontiers as borders of  327

index   707 global modernity and constructing  178 in India  521–2 justice and  132 national  131–2, 169 nearness and  124 as performance  131–2 photography and  349 politics  171, 645 religious 525 stigmatized 532 identity politics  132, 171 ideological character, performing  474–7 ideology  465, 472 defining 472–4 gendering of space by  613–15 microstructure of  473 nationalism and  170 societal 477–9 idiopathic identification  577–8 ignorance 503–5 The Iliad 503 illegal noncitizens  220–1 imagined community  175, 236, 281 immersion  363, 366–7 cognitive 370 from involvement to  370–1 producing 371–3 reflective 371 sensory 370 Verfremdung and 373–5 immigration  58–9, 220–1. See also migration imperial, cultural frontiers and reproduction of formations of  334–6 imperial discourses  325 Imperial Eyes (Pratt)  29–30 imperial formations  326–7 imperial imposterism  30–5 imperialism 325 international system relations and  326 terrorist bodies as frontiers of formations of 331–4 violence and  326–7 implicated subject  586 implicit bias  241, 241t imposterism 33–5 impression management  423 improvisation 119 in political performance  415–17

Inayatullah, Naeem  392, 396 inclusive practice  540 Incoming (video installation)  227 indeterminacy, ordering  309–12 India  24, 132, 151, 517–18 gender and political performance in politics of  156–60 greetings in  522 identity in  521–2 minority women in politics of  151–2, 155 Roma and  191 theatricality and  44 Indian Constitution, Article 370 of  518 Indian Parliament  152–3, 155 Kumar, M., as speaker in  157–8 representative claim-making opportunities in 156–7 women in  156 indigenous claim  107–8 Indignados  679–80, 683 individual autonomy  547 industrialization, labor and  95 inegalitarian instability  319–20 infantilization 256–9 informal care  611 marginalization and exclusions of  614 informal street performance  136 city structures and  139–40 injustice class and race interacting in  138–9 space, politics, and  137–40 Inner-City Pressure (film)  144–5 innovative gestures  523 Insoumise 680–1 Instagram 143 institutionalized liminality  215 institutionalizing liminality, politics of  316–19 institutions 683 marked bodies and  153 political 153 race-gendered 153–4 insularity 443 intellectually disabled artists  537 interculturalism 45–7 intermediality 364–6 internal codes  235–6 internalization 64–5 international, cities and  295–6

708   index International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families  200 international migrants  199–200 international system, imperialism and relations of  326 International Women’s Day  156–7 internet political communication and  113 social movements and  113 interpellation  457, 462–7 interruption as participation  466–7 politics and  458 scenes and  455–8 intersectionality 252 intersubjective communication  548–9 intersubjectivity  547–8, 557 invasion complex  205 invisible theater  214 involvement 370–1 invulnerability, illusory  504–5 Iraq War of 2003  423 irony 49–50 irregular migration  59 Is Chávez Populist? (Hawkins)  682 Isin, Engin  186 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria  599 ITU 319–20 AIfG and  307–8 Jackson, Michael  519 Jackson, Shannon  12, 520, 524 Jacotot, Joseph  397–8 Jahan, Nusrat  159–60 Jana Karaliya/Makkal Kalari  603 Japan 623 family and mother roles in  623–4 gender issues in politics of  162–3 homosexuality in  628 motherhood in  632 theater and performances in  624–5 women in  623–4 Jarideh (El Khoury)  334–5 Jeffers, Alison  203 Jelinek, Elfriede  202 jeremiad 415–17 Jestrovic, Silvija  203

jet setters  199–200 Al-Jiliya, Maryam  368–9 Johnson, Boris  1, 254, 343, 415–16, 654–7 Johnson, Corey  218 Jones, Reece  218 Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 204 journeymen 91 July 2005 London bombings (7/7)  288 Juncker, Jean-Claude  657 The Jungle (Murphy and Robertson)  204–9 justice, identity and  132 Justices of the Peace, wages fixed by  91 Kaegi, Stefan  687 kalaripayattu  45, 47–8 Kalidasa festival  45 Kaltawasser, Christobal Rovira  682, 689–90 Kamal, Ghada  239 Kamenszain, Tamara  590 Kanchana Sita (Sreekanthan Nair)  51–3 Kantorowicz, Ernst  381–2, 561–6 Kashmir  518, 525–6 Kaspin, Deborah  350 kathakali 45 Kathakali dance  526 Kear, Adrian  24 Kemeid, Olivier  202 Kennedy, John F.  562, 570–1 Kepe, Thembela  347–8 Kerala, India  24, 44–5 Kershaw, Baz  518–19, 521–2 kettling 669 Khademi, Kubra  13–14 Khan, Salman  191 El Khoury, Tania  214, 327–8, 334–6 Kid Break  142 kinaeshtesia 545 The Kingdom and the Glory (Agamben)  382 King Henry V (Shakespeare)  379 King Richard II (Shakespeare)  381, 383 king’s two bodies  564–5 The King’s Two Bodies (Kantorowicz)  381–2, 561–2 Kirchner, Néstor  592n.1 Kishida, Rio  579, 624–8, 632 Kitwana, Bakari  146 Klein, Naomi  438

index   709 Klich, Rosemary  367 Klivas, Edgaras  23–4 knowing subjects  391–2 knowledge classroom interactions and  398 hierarchy of production of  331–2 racialized 64–5 social imaginations of  393 symbolic reception and  122 Korean War  409 Kotsko, Adam  380–1 Krakowska, Joanna  177 Kristeva, Julia  626 Kruger, Loren  175–6 Kumar, Meira  157–8 Kumar, Nish  662 Kumbh 522 Kunst, Bojana  684–5 Kushner, Tony  571 kutiyattam  45, 47–8, 50 kyriarchal system  228–30 labeling 532–3 of care  616 disability performance and  534 politics of, in disability performance  535–7 pros, cons, and tensions of  537–41 labels 532–3 change and  541 disability performance and  534 labor affective 257–8 gender and history of  99n.1 industrialization and  95 precarity of  395 skilled and unskilled  91 social reproductive  162–3 labor union movements  90 Labour Party (UK)  1–2, 126, 657–8 Laclau, Ernesto  682, 686–7 Lady Astor  255 Laine, Benoit  688 Lampedusa island  226–7 Lampedusa shipwreck  59–60 Landau, Paul  350 Landes, Joan  257–8 language, performativity and  8 Lanka Lakshmi (Sreekanthan Nair)  51–4

La Palmer, Laura  583–5 “Larouse Ilustrado de Lesa Humanidad” (Illustrated Larousse of crimes against humanity) 591 Latin America, documentary theater in  583–5 Laudes Regiae (Kantorowicz)  381–2 Lavery, Carl  437, 439 Law, Chris  644, 645f LDP. See Liberal Democratic Party Leader, Kate  24–5 leadership political 421 political ideology and  476 public 343–4 leadership performance  421 deception and  423 difficulty of  434 frameworks and  422–6 morality of  421–2 Rousseau on  428–31 the League  680–1 Leander, Anna  215 learning critical 399 about learning  392–3 nothing 401–3 unlearning how to  397–8 learning disabilities  537 learning-disabled artists  537 lecture-performances  458–60, 462 Lee, Stewart  654–5, 660, 662 Lefebvre, Henri  137–9, 213–14, 255–6, 294, 297–8 legal discourse, as social capital  77 legal proceedings adversarial 77 video-link remand proceedings  78–80 legal subjectivity  31 legislative authority  430 legislative theatre  296 legislators, Rousseau on  429–30 legitimacy 124–5 Hamas and  333 political performances and  407 scripts and  416 as social category  254 Lehman Brothers  679–80 Lehrstücke (Brecht)  202, 373

710   index Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten (newspaper)  33 Leontion (parable)  502 Lepecki, Andre  550 Lettre d’Alembert (Rousseau)  9 Letts, Don  491 Levi, Moses  32–3 Leviathan (Hobbes)  453, 561–5 Levin, Laura  349–50 Lewis, Clive  1–2 Lewis, Desiree  344 Lewis, J. Lowell  550 Leys, Ruth  670 liberal democracy  425–6 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) (Japan)  624, 632 liberalism  424–6, 429 Rousseau critique of  428 liberty 472–3 Libeskind, Danield  283 Lieberman, Avigdor  331 Liersemann, Heinrich  33, 35–6 liminality 215 trade fairs and institutionalizing  316–19 liminal politics, commercial forms of  318–19 liminal space  5–6 trade fairs and  316–19 Límites (La Palmer)  583–4 Lincoln, Abraham  430 Lindholdt, Paul  439 Lise & Otto (Milles and Forsberg)  367–71 listening  393, 400–1 Litefeet (film)  142 litefeet dance  136–7, 139–44 literacy training  296 lived experience of disability  536–7, 539–40 Liveness (Auslander)  76 live presence  75–6, 84 belief and  83 Liverpool Steam Ship Owner’s Association 96 Livingston, Paisley  502 Lloyd, Stephen  640–1 Lo, Jacqueline  203 The Location of Culture (Bhabha)  32 Locke, John  425 Lok Sabha  156–8 Long March of 2018  332 Lönnerfelt, Linda  367

López Obrador, Andrés Manuel (AMLO)  104, 106, 112 indigenous claims and  108 on social networks  112 Zócalo and  109 Lorde, Audre  153–4 Lotman, Yuri  7 Louis XIV (King)  120 love 579 familial 629–30 mother-child 626 nationalized mother-child  624–5 Lovelace, Ada  368 Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation 283–5 loyalty, nearness and  124 Lucas, Caroline  642f Lukes, Stephen  9–10 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio  592n.1 Lungs (Macmillan)  440 Lydon, John  491–2 lynching 504–5 MacKenzie, Donald  266–7 Macmillan, Duncan  344–5, 440–3, 445–6, 448–9 Macón, Cecilia  585 Macron, Emmanuel  657–8, 665 Madhyama Vyayoga (Bhasa)  45, 50–1 Madison, D. Soyini  12 magic, capitalism and  312–14 Mahagonny (Brecht)  373 Mahars 528n.9 Maids (Genet)  14 Makkal Kalari. See Jana Karaliya/Makkal Kalari Malayalam language  44–5 Malcolm X  244 Mallard, Trevor  162 Malvinas/Falklands War  585 Mamdani, Mahmoud  347–8, 351, 356 Mamma Mia (musical)  14 The Mana of Mass Society (Mazzarella)  671 mana waves  671–2 Manchester bombing of 1996  283 Manow, Philip  383–4 Mansoubi, Moones  227–8 manufacturing consent  236

index   711 Manus (Sahamizadeh)  227–8 Manus Regional Processing Centre (Manus Prison)  217–19, 222–3, 228–30 constructing 222–3 incidents at  223–4 isolation cells in  225–6 Mao Zedong  409 Mapplethorpe, Robert  491 Marcos (Subcommander)  105, 110 Mardorossian, Carine  505 marginality city and  137–40 pessimism and  139 marginalization 235–6 of congresswomen of color  153–4 marginalized zones  300 marginal spaces  139 Marichuy 108 Marino, Angela  344, 687 market agency performance of  267–74 self-interest and  272 market-based exchange, performance in  275 market-based transactions  271 market-making  268, 272–4 markets abstract and everyday  265–6 political uses of term  265 role in society of  272 trade fairs and  309 Martinich, Al  565 Marulićevi Dani festival  2 Marx, Peter W.  34 Marxist tradition, politics conceptions in  5 Maryam (Milles and Forsberg)  368–9 masculinity body politic and  253–4 gentry 253–4 hegemonic 257 power and  255 punk and  486 United States presidency and  568–9, 571 masks 109–11 Mason, Paul  517 Massey, Doreen  252 mass media American Muslim women and  238–9 microaggressions performed by  237–8

protest coverage by  235–6 social interests and  236 mass rape  510, 512n.1 Massumi, Brian  670–1 Master and Servant Acts (UK)  90, 92 repeal of  94 master symbols  120 matricide  628–9, 631–2 May, Theresa J.  437–9 Maya Train  108 Maybe If You Choreograph Me You Will Feel Better (El Khoury)  334–6 Mazzarella, William  671 Mazzini, Giuseppe  380 McCain, John  571 McClary, Susan  488 McClintock, Anne  351–2 McCormick, Brad  295 McDermott, Rose  604 McIvor, Charlotte  203 McKay, Carolyn  79 McKenzie, Jon  13 McKenzie, Lisa  136–7, 139–40, 143 meaning music and  485 transmission of  122 media attention, protests and  102 media communication  480–1 media microaggressions  237 media sites, as political performances  236–7 mediating agents  6 Medina, Juan  59–60 Mee, Erin B.  47–51 Meekosha, Helen  532 Meerzon, Yana  132 Megson, Chris  442 Meiji Restoration  623 Meitner, Lise  367–8 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc  680–1 memoirs  490, 495 as collective effort  585–7 memorial mania  281 memorials audience for  280, 286–9 backstage areas of  282 as political statements  279 as staged hypersignified objects  280–1 time and  279–80

712   index memory  578, 581 memory agents  582 Memory Foundations (Libeskind)  283 Menon, Dilip  46 merchants 268–70 Smith, Adam, on  272 metaphysics political theology and  380 of presence  76–8 metatheatre 43–4 methods cities and  294–6 as devices  296–7 Metropol Theater  34–5 Mexico 24 Chiapas 105 civil society in  111 earthquakes in  109–12 ethnic groups in  107 Indian communities in  105 indigenous claims in  107–8 masks and disguises in  109–11 new narratives in social movements in 111–12 performative strategies in  107–13 protests in  101, 104 revolutionary nationalism in  107, 111 social networks in  112–13 trends in protests in  105–7 Twitter and  112 WUNC and protests in  104 Zócalo 108–9 microaggressions  240–1, 244 gendered 241 mass media performance of  237–8 social 244–7 micro-political studies  640 Microsoft 313 Mignolo, Walter  344–5 migrants 200 artists 202 as hyper-historians  202 international 199–200 state-mandated detention of  218–19 migration 58–9 autonomous 205–6 clandestine 59–60

collectivity of  208 crisis of  218–19 global 207 irregular 59 laws on  214 political theater and  201–4 telling stories about  201 Migration and Performance in Contemporary Ireland (McIvor)  203 military dictatorships  592n.1 Miller, Arthur  202, 439 Milles, Lovisa  367 Mills, Charles  254 mimesis  43–4, 502 mimicry 32–3 miners’ strike of 1984–5  98 minorities, racialized  153, 186 minstrelsy 35 MIR. See Revolutionary Left Movement (Mis)Performing World Politics  391–4, 397–401 mise-en-scène 462 Barca Nostra and  61 Mishra, Pankaj  523 mismanagement power and  423 social leaders and  423 misperformance  391–4, 401 body and  395–7 misrepresentation 433–4 Mitchell, Timothy  29–30 Mitchell, W. J. T.  70 Mitra, Royona  203 Mitterand, Danielle  105 Mi vida después 585 MIWA (Noda)  579, 624–5, 628–32 Miwa, Akihiro  624–5, 628–9, 632 mixed-abilities practice  540 mixophobia 201 mobility cities and  295 uneven 228–30 mobilization framing and  103 nationalist rhetoric and  170 performative strategies and  103 Močnik, Nena  510

index   713 modernism 52 modernization 34 Modi, Narendra  518, 522–3, 526 Moffitt, Benjamin  567–8, 682, 689–90 mohiniyattam 45 Molestation of Workmen Act of 1859  93 Momentum 680–1 monoethnic nationalism  185–7 monoethnic performativity  185–6 Monsiváis, Carlos  108 The Monument (Wagner)  501, 505–6, 509–12 monuments, hegemonic  282 mood after Brexit  551–5 political agency and  551–2 Moore, Sally  308–9 Moore, Thurston  491 moral agency  271 Morales, Evo  592n.1 morality, of leadership performance  421–2 moral learning  272–3 MORENA. See Movement National Regeneration Morris, Margaret  97 Mosse, Richard  227 mother-child love  626 nationalized 624–5 Mother Courage (Brecht)  374 motherhood in Japan  632 nationalized 630 Mouffe, Chantal  682–3 Movement National Regeneration (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional; MORENA)  104, 106–7, 112 Movimiento 15-M  679–80 MPs. See also constituency work political performance by  640–4 public’s views of  639 self-presentation by  641 al-Mtowaq, Marwa  240 Mudde, Cas  682, 689–90 Mudimbe, V. Y.  351 mudra repertoire  526 Muholi, Zanele  344, 349, 352–61 Mujica, José, “Pepe”  592n.1 Müller, Jan-Werner  523

multiculturalism, in Romania  185 Multimedia Performance (Klich and Scheer) 367 multiscalar approach to sites  327 multitude 682–3 Mumford, Meg  687 Muni, Bharata  11–12 Munk, Erica  344–5 Murphy, Joe  204–5 music See also grime music; hip-hop genres 487 mapping field of  487–9 meaning and  485 sociological study of aesthetics of  487 women in  485–6, 488 Muslim women  159 Mussolini, Benito  381–2 mutualities of care  616 Myerhoffs, Barbara  308–9 “My Hijab, My Choice” (Haydar)  244 NAFTA See North American Free Trade Agreement Nakamura, Lisa  237 namaskar 522–3 Namaste 522 natakeeyam 54n.1 National Climate March  666–7 national culture modernist experimentalism and  178 Romania and  184 National Democratic Alliance  521–2 national identity  131–2, 169 artistic practices shaping  174–5 conflict, resistance, and postcolonialism and 178–81 development of  174 ethnic groups and  169 historical performance in construction of 172–6 liberation and  179 nationalism and  169–70 power and  178–9 nationalism 2–3 civic 525 cultural 176–7 emotions and  170

714   index nationalism (Continued) ethnic 525 identity and  169–70 ideology and  170 monoethnic 185–7 primordialism and constructivism views of  171 staged 179 nationalist identitarianism  180 nationalist rhetoric, mobilization and  170 nationalized mother-child love  624–5 nationalized motherhood  630 National Party Congress (China)  412–13 National September 11 Memorial and Museum  279–82, 285–7 National Socialism  524 national sovereignty  169–70 national theater civic identity and  176–7 hegemony and  176 in Poland  177 national theaters  174, 176–8 constructivism and  174–5 primordialism and  174–5 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)  98 nations as association  175 as imagined community  281 Nations and Nationalism (Gellner)  174 nativism  344, 348, 351 African 352–6 performing, in photographic portraits 356–60 photography and  349 as political identity  348 naturalism 442 theatrical 438–9 naturalization 32–3 natyadharmi 48–9 Natyasastra 44 Natya Shastra (Muni)  11–12 natydharami 47 Nauru 219 Nazi Party  380 Nazi propaganda  8 nearness  24–5, 117 ambiguities of references to  124t authenticity and  124

identity and  124 meanings of  124 representation as  123–7 Neervoort, Brigitte  687–8 Nehru, Jawaharlal  525–6 neocolonialism 179 neo-Durkheimian scholarship  9–10 neoliberal acting  394–5 neoliberalism  112, 344, 679 creativity and  310 performances and  406–7 trade fairs as ordering rituals of  308–12 networks, women MPs and  262 Neva (Calderón, G.)  587 New Delhi  151 new documentary theater  583–5 New Model Unions  93 New York City hip-hop development in  140–1 poverty in  138 reconstruction after 9/11  283 subways of  135 New York Declaration on Refugees and Migrants 200 Ng, Jason  674–5 Ngai, Sainne  660 Ngwena, Charles  347–8, 351, 356 Nield, Sophie  132, 226–7 Nigeria 126 Nnaemeka, Obioma  29–30 Noda, Hideki  579, 624–5, 628–32 No Friend but the Mountains (Boochani)  219–20, 227–9 Noland, Carrie  519–21 nonlabeling 538–9 Nora, Pierre  281 Norcott, Geoff  654–5, 659, 662 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 105 Northern School of Contemporary Dance  545, 552 Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Butler, J.)  452 Novalis 366 NUM See National Union of Mineworkers Oak Bank Factory  92 Obama, Barack  254, 478

index   715 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria  161 occult economies  312–13 Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs)  328, 337f elections in  329–31 Occupy London  519 Occupy Wall Street  213, 518–19, 579 off-shore detention  220 Ogata, Yuka  162–3 Oliver, Kelly  453, 504, 507 Olympics  14, 295, 300–2 Omar, Ilhan  235, 245 One Beat (Sleater-Kinney)  494 100% Brussels (Rimini Protokoll)  687–8 100% City (Rimini Protokoll)  344, 681, 687–90 O’Neill, Brendan  658–9 O’Neill, Deirdre  138–9 O’Neill, John  546 On Fire (Klein)  438 online courts  73, 80–1 On Populist Reason (Laclau)  682 On the Social Contract (Rousseau)  421, 429, 431 opening speeches  313 Operation Sovereign Borders  221 OPTs. See Occupied Palestinian Territories ordering indeterminacy  309–12 Ordinary Affects (Stewart, K.)  552 Orgreave coking plant  90 Orientalism 45–6 Orientalism (Said)  29–30, 58–9 Oslo Accords  329–30 The Other City (play)  298–302 Ottayan (Panikkar)  48–51 Our Violence, Your Violence (Frljić)  2, 7 overrepresentation 208 Pacific Performances (Balme)  29–30 paid care  616–18 paintings, theatricality and  62 pakarnnattam 47–8 Palach, Jan  461 Palestine elections in  329–31 EU relations with  328–9 as frontier  327–8 Occupation of  328 Palestinian Authority  330, 333

Palestinian legislative elections of 2006  325 Palestinians anticolonial resistance by  332 collective punishment of  333–4 Palin, Sarah  571 PAN. See Partido Acción Nacional panhandling 140–1 Paniker, Ayyappa  49–50 Panikkar, K. N.  24, 44–7, 49 interculturalism and  47 naturalist and realist critiques  47 transformation in aesthetics of  47–8 Papua New Guinea (PNG) Christianity in  225–6 history of  222 Manus Island detention camp in  217–19, 222–3 Paradox of Acting (Diderot)  566 Paraguay 592n.1 Parameswaran, Ameet  24 Pardo, Luisa  583–4 Paris Opera  13–14 Parkinson, John R.  479 Parkinson’s disease  615–18 participation 48 distance from scene and  456 interruption as  466–7 presence and  369–70 participatory art practices  520 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN)  106 Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) 106 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) 105–6 Pascal, Blaise  465 Paseo de la Reforma blockade  106 Pasler, Jann  488 Pastoriza, Lila  587–8 Pateman, Carole  252–3, 255 patriotism 525 Patten, Christopher  330 Pavis, Patrice  6 Pearson, Mike  214, 296–7 pedagogical relationships  394 peer support organizations  617 Peetz, Julia  11, 453 Peña Nieto, Enrique  105, 111–12 People’s Republic of China  407–11

716   index perception immersion and  373 racist modes of  69–70 performance agency and  326 analyzing 8–9 artificiality and  9 body and  76 cities and  293 of citizenship, resistance as  187–90 citizenship and  183, 193 defining  5–6, 596 disability 531–2 effects of  23 framing 152–6 of gender, in state legislatures  256–7 of history  2 of identity  131–2 of ideological character  474–7 in Japan  624–5 of market agency  267–74 in market-based exchange  275 merchants and  269–70 messages coded through  103 neoliberalism and  406–7 photography and  349–50 political representation and  564 politics and  9–15, 155, 405–6 presence and  76 protests and  104–5 race and  32–3 reiterative process in  3 of representation  154–5, 600 of self-interest  275 social 565 transactional character of  6 Performance, Exile, and “America” (Meerzon and Jestrovic)  203 Performance, Space, Utopia. Cities of War, Cities of Exile (Jestrovic)  203 performance analysis  364–6 Performance and Cosmopolitics (Gilbert and Lo)  203 performance-as-method research  297 performance effectiveness, choreography and 103–4 performance frameworks  422–4 performance methods, using  239–43

performance pressure  401 performances, on frontiers  325–6 performance studies  11–12, 14 as activism  12 focus of  12 political scholarship through  16–17 positioning 12 performance theory criminal proceedings and  75 legal proceedings and  75 performative agency  10–11 performative creation of sociopolitical realities 120 performative gestures  519 performative politics  596 comedy and  654 of empathy  601–2 performative production, representation and 122 performatives, happy and unhappy  423 performative strategies  107–13 emotions and  103 gestures as  523–4 mobilization and  103 performativity  23–5, 43–4, 117 as analysis lens  28 analyzing 8–9 of care  618 citizenship gap and  186 defining 6–8 discursive 405 economics and  266 embodied 8 of emotional politics  599–601 of emotions  596 empathy and  604–5 of empire  329–31 of gender  152 language and  8 monoethnic 185–6 movement from streets to power  106 Muholi and  353 politics of care and  613–14 power and  655–6 protests and  102 representation and  119–23 performers audience experience of  365

index   717 audience relationship to  478–9 disabled 531–2 in The Other City 299 space between audience and  5–6 performing analyzing 8–9 care 611–13 defining 6 emotions 600 social microaggressions  245–7 societal ideologies  477–9 performing blackness  357 Performing Exile (Rudakoff)  203 Performing Exile–Performing Self (Meerzon) 203 Performing Statelessness in Europe (Wilmer)  201–2, 204 peripheral geographies  222 The Persians (Aeschylus)  13–14 pessimism, marginality and  139 Peterson, Erik  380 Peterson, Grant Tyler  137 Petrović Lotina, Goran  344 Phänomenologie des Theaters (Roselt)  367 Phelan, Peggy  74–6, 83–4, 555 phenomenology 364–6 photography 349 affective dimensions of  360–1 of African bodies  349–52 colonialism and  350 ethnographic 358 performance and  349–50 performing nativism in  356–60 Piaf, Édith  629 Picasso 502 picketing 95 labor and trade union movements and  90 legalization of  92 legal restrictions on  93 managing activities within  96 strikes supported by  95 terminology origins  91 in UK  90 picket lines  89 appearance management and  98 matrix of relations in  98–9 police presence and  95, 97–8 refusal to cross  98

spatial context and  92 theatricality of  89–90 Pickles, Eric  640–1 Pink Saturday Parade  666–7 Pinochet, Augusto  581, 587 Piscator, Erwin  13–14 Pitkin, Hannah  155 The Pixelated Prisoner (McKay)  79 place-making 289 Plaid Cymru  1–2 Plato  9, 502 playhouses 118–19 pledge of allegiance  378 Poetics (Aristotle)  11–12 Pogled (Sanguinetti and Solarich)  583–4 policing atmosphere  668–70 Polish National Theater  177 political actors  11 political affect  546 political agency, mood and  551–2 political anthropology, of constituency work 638–40 political appropriation  598–9 political communication  547 internet and  113 political debate  257–8 political feelings, embodied  555–7 political ideas  471–2 political ideologies distinguishing between  473 formation of  472–3 political ideology, leadership and  476 political institutions  153 ceremony and  379 somatic norms in  451 political justice  444–8 political leaders emotions of  597 sovereignty of  431 political leadership  421 character and  476–7 deception and  423 political movements, hip-hop and  144–5 political performance  10–11, 406 in constituencies  640–4 by MPs  640–4 of representation  640–1 script sources for  406–7

718   index political performance (Continued) trust and  641 in UK  415–17 in United States  415–17 political performances legitimacy and  407 media sites as  236–7 political philosophy  405 political presence  547–8 political protest  23–4 political representation  123 gender and performance of  155 global and local circulations of gender and 160–3 performance and  564 populism and  564 theatricality and  117–19 political representatives nearness and eminence and  126 women 132 political science, body and  547 political scripts  343 political sociology  9–10 political space  251 political statements, memorials as  279 political subjectivation  60–1 political subjectivity  301 political systems, ceremonial aspects of 377–8 political theater  13–14 artistic forms in  201 migration and  201–4 women in  258 political theology  379–82 Political Theology (Schmitt)  380 political unconscious  549 politicians, comedy  655–7 politics of affect  647–9 bodies in performances of  567–73 of care  613–14, 618 commercial forms of liminal  318–19 cultural 141 defining 4–5 disability arts and performance and  533–5 due process of  427–8 emotions and  595, 597

framing 152–6 identity  132, 171, 645 of institutionalizing liminality  316–19 interruption and  458 intersubjectivity and  557 of labeling, in disability performance  535–7 performance and  9–15, 155, 405 performance of emotions in  644–7 performative 596 rehumanizing through education  399 space and  137–40 symbolic 10–11 theatricality of  117 women in  569–70 politics of absence  83–4 politics of presence  74–7, 83, 85n.2 politics of representation  122 polytopic representational space  213 Poniatowski, Stanisław August  177 Poovey, Mary  270 populism  344, 680–4 authoritarian 523 Brexit and  546 contemporary 563–4 defining  561–2, 573n.1 embodiment and  561–3 political representation and  564 representation and  566–7 Populism (Mudde and Kaltawasser)  682 Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela (Marino)  344, 687 “The Populism That Is Not to be Found” (Rancière) 682 pornography  505–8, 511–12 positioned subjectivity  548–9 possessive individualism  424 post-Brexit comedy  660 comedy establishment and  657–60 failure of  653–5 moving on  660–2 politicians and  655–7 post-Brexit mood  551–5 postcolonialism 178–81 postcolonial resistance  24, 44 limits of  45–9 postconflict societies  598–9

index   719 postdemocracy 679–81 Postigo, Hector  143 postmemory 578 affiliative  582, 586 new documentary theater and  584 plurality of  584–5 postmemory generations  581 postnational citizenship  180 poststructural critique  28 post-terrorist memorialization  280–2 audiences and  286–9 stylized performance at  289–90 poverty in New York City  138 racialization of  188–9 power audience awareness of theatrics and  600 care and  611 masculinity and  255 mass media and  236 mismanagement and  423 national identity and  178–9 performativity and  655–6 reiterative 655–6 reproduction by  236–7 social imaginations of  393 space and  137, 213 symbolics of  120–1 power relations, gendered  10 practiced space  215 Prague Spring  461 Praljak, Slobodan  84 Prasad, Narendra  49–50 Pratt, Mary Louise  29–30 PRD See Partido de la Revolución Democrática precarious being  202–3 presence 24–5 metaphysics of  76–8 participation and  369–70 performance and  76 politics of  74, 83 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman) 422–3 presidential physicality  569 PRI. See Partido Revolucionario Institucional Price, Richard  94

primacy 122 primitivism  350–1, 358–9 primordialism  171, 174–5 Production of Presence (Gumbrecht)  367 Professing Performance (Jackson, S.)  12 proofs 474 proscenium stage  27–8, 37n.1, 118–19 protestors, reasons for claims  101 protest-performance 452 protest-performance sites  520 protests  452–3, 579 atmosphere of  665 black blocks in  110 elements of  101 emotion and  666 gestures of  518–21 mass media coverage of  235–6 media attention and  102 message encoded in  104 Mexico and  101, 104 performance and  104–5 performativity and  102 repertoires and  101–2 social movements and  666–70 theater studies and  102 trends in Mexico in  105–7 WUNC and  102 psychoanalysis 364–6 public identification  236–7 public leadership  343–4 public mobilization  522 public recognition  10 public rituals  175–6 public sphere critical gesture sites in  524–7 as social drama stage  477 public theater  176–8 Puchner, Martin  52 Puga, Cristina  24 Pugliese, Joseph  226–7 Puig de la Bellacasa, M.  610–11, 617 Pulwama incident  522–3, 525–6 punk  452–3, 489–90, 495 counterculture and  489 masculinity and  486 sociopolitical significance of  486 women in  485–6, 490–1

720   index Pussy Riot  461 Puwar, Nirmal  151–5, 161–2, 214–15 Qiushi (journal)  411 al-Qunun, Rahaf  220 race city and  137–40 class and  138–9, 188 performance and  32–3 seeing through  70–1 theatrical display and  65 race-gendered institutions  153–4 racial identity, cyberspace and  237 racialization of poverty  188–9 of Roma  188–9 racialized bodies  238 racialized knowledge  64–5 racialized minorities  153, 186 racialized Other  24, 33 racialized regime of representation  69 racialized theatrical gaze  66 racialized way of seeing  58–9, 64–5, 69 racial masquerade  33–5 Racine, Jean  383 racism, class injustices compounded by  138–9 racist gaze  63 racist modes of perception  69–70 radio drama  370 Răducanu, George  189 Rai, Shirin  3–4, 151–2, 155, 256–7, 281, 351–2, 405–6, 599–601 ethnographic approaches used by  640 Raindogs (Pearson)  296–7 Rajaram, Prem Kumar  220–1 Ramayana (Valmiki)  46–7, 52–3 Ramayana plays (Sreekanthan Nair)  44–5, 51–3 Rancière, Jacques  186, 207, 293–4, 297, 393, 397–8, 479, 582, 679, 682 Ranjan, Ranjeet  158–9 Rao, Maya  13–14, 517, 520, 526–7 rape culture  505–6 Rapley, Chris  439–40 rasa 47–8 Rasmussen, Mads  245–6 Rats Teater  367, 370–1, 374

Raynor, Ruth  296–7 Reagan, Ronald  423–4, 571 Real Democracy NOW! protest  666–7 realism 356–7 reality television programs  143 Red Fort  525–6 Rees-Mogg, Jacob  145–6, 162 Reeves, Audrey  282 Reflecting Absence (Arad)  285–7 reflective immersion  371 “Reframing Justice in a Globalized World” (Fraser, N.)  28–9 refugee camps  204–9 Refugee Performance (Balfour)  203 refugees  200, 204–9, 220 borders and  217–18 cultural production and  220 economic 37 state-mandated detention of  218–19 Refugees, Theatre and Crisis (Jeffers)  203 Reinelt, Janelle  3–4, 43–4, 177, 451, 601, 682–3 reiterative power  655–6 relabeling 535 relational sociality  208–9 religion 43–4 religious identity  525 remand proceedings, video-link  78–80 “Reminiscences and Perhaps a Small Contribution to the Cultural History of the Fin de Siécle” (Levi)  32 Renzi, Matteo  60 repertoires 119 message encoded in  104 protests and  101–2 representation  24–5, 117 burden of  260–2 constitutive dimensions of  122 constraints on  123 of culture  475 embodiment and  561–7 embodying 158–60 as eminence  123–7 excessive 208 identification and  647–8 as nearness  123–7 performance of  154–5, 600 performative production and  122

index   721 performativity and  119–23 perspectives in  125–6 political  123, 564 political performance of  640–1 politics of  122 populism and  566–7 racialized regime of  69 Rousseau and  563 secondary 461 of space  213–14 symbolic reception and  122 symbolic relationships in  125 theatrical display and  65 violence in  503 representational space  213–15 polytopic 213 representative claim-making  155 institutional opportunities for  156–7 representative claims  154–5, 480 republicanism 424–5 research methods, cities and  294–6 resilient recovery  279–80 resistance acts of citizenship and  220 black 243–4 to citizenship gap  185 comic 654 against empire  327 national identity and  178–81 performances of citizenship and  187–90 urban spaces and  294 resource mobilization theory  103 resources, care as  611–13 “Rethinking Ethnography” (Conquergood)  12 revival 239–45 polymorphic forms of  243 revival rap videos  243 Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) 588–9 revolutionary nationalism  111 in Mexico  107 rhetoric 472–4 choreography and  550 community and  478 identification creation as goal of  478 Rhetoric (Aristotle)  423–4, 474 rhetorical grammar  7

rhetorical performances  477–8 governing and evaluating  479–81 rhetorical sites  215 Richard II (King)  382–3 Coronation Order of  381–2 Richardson, Chris  141 Richetti, John  270 Rickson, Ian  344–5, 440, 445–6 Ridout, Nick  451–2 right to difference  171–2 right to place  84 The Right to the City (Lefebvre)  139 right-wing groups  2–3 right-wing political parties  680–1 Rimini Protokoll  344, 681, 687–90 Rio de Janeiro favelas 300 Olympic Games in  214, 295, 300–2 The Other City and  298–300 World Cup and  302 Riot Grrrls  489–90, 493–4 rites senses beyond language and  314–16 speeches as  313 of trade fairs  313 rites of passage  308–9 ritual ordering  308–9 rituals  43–4, 215 of elites  121 elitist 120–1 neo-Durhkeimian scholarship of  9–10 of parliament and state  10–11 public 175–6 Robertson, Joe  204–5 Robinson, Kevin  98 “The Role of National Theatres in an Age of Globalization” (Reinelt)  177 Roma  132, 183 appropriation and erasure of culture  184–5 countercultural citizenship and  190–2 counterpublics 192–3 education system discrimination against 185–8 exoticization of  184–5 Gypsy soaps and  192–3 India and  191 proliferation of music and dance  184–5

722   index Roma (Continued) racialization of  188–9 recognition as ethnic minority  184 resistance acts as performances of citizenship and  187–90 visibility of  185 Roma Caravan (television program)  189 Romania 184 multiculturalism in  185 national culture and  184 romanticism 366 Roma Party for Europe  189 Romero, Carla  587–8 Roms, Heike  13 Ronzulli, Licia  162 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano  562, 570–1 Roosevelt, Theodore  569 Rosa, Harmut  310 Roselt, Jens  367, 370 Rosmersholm (Ibsen)  344–5, 439–49 Rothberg, Michael  586 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  9, 172–3, 175–6, 421–2, 424–5 on censorship  432 on civil religion  433 on dictatorships  432 on leadership performance  428–31 on legislators  429–30 liberalism critique by  428 representation and  563 republican theory of  425 on tribunates  431–2 Rousseff, Dilma  592n.1 routinised emergency  218–20 Roy, Anupama  525 Royal Commission on Trade Unions  93–4 The Royal Remains (Santner)  383–4 Rubin, Michael  238 Rudakoff, Judith  203 Rudd, Kevin  219, 221 Ruskin, John  63–4 Russell-Moyle, Lloyd  1–2 R v. Jones 81 Rwanda 348 Sahamizadeh, Nazanin  227–8 sahrdayan 47–8

Said, Edward  29–30, 58–9, 179, 326, 330, 351 on exile  199 Saito, Tamaki  632 Saketam (Sreekanthan Nair)  51–3 Salinas, Carlos  105 Salley, Rael Jero  353 Salvini, Matteo  680–1 Sanger, Nadia  352 Sanguinetti, Santiago  583–4 Santner, Eric  383–4 Saramago, José  105 Sarlo, Beatriz  584–5 Sarra, Nicholas  579, 645f Sarvestani, Arash Kamali  219, 223, 227 Saunders, Andrew, “Goofy,”  142 Sauter, Willmar  344 Saward, Michael  102, 151–2, 154–5, 186 Saxonhouse, Arlene  422 Sabsay, Leticia  585 scab workers  92, 98 Scarry, Elaine  503, 506 scenes distance from  456 of interpellation  463–7 interruption and  455–8 scenography 364 Schaap, Andrew  598 Schechner, Richard  5, 11–13, 15, 422–4 Scheer, Edward  367, 370 Scheler, Max  577–8 Schlegel, Friedrich  366 Schlingensief, Christoph  13–14 Schmitt, Carl  380 Schneider, Rebecca  521 Schnitman, Juan  581 science and technology studies (STS)  613 Scott, Edward Macmillan  329 Scottish National Party (SNP)  1–2, 161, 644 The Screens (Genet)  180 scripts 408t anchoring 549 authority and  416 China and  408, 411, 416 defining 406 legitimacy and  416 political 343 political performances and  406

index   723 socialization and  406–7 UK and  416 United States and  416 SCTX See Security and Counter Terror Expo Seale, Bobby  84 al-Sebah, Atallah Abu  331–2 secondary representation  461 Second Discourse (Rousseau)  428 securitizing projects  290 Security and Counter Terror Expo (SCTX) 310–12 security paradigm, generalization of  218–19 Seel, Martin  366–7 Segall, Kimberly Wedeven  214–15 Seigworth, Gregory  585 Select Committee on Combinations of 1838 92 self-command 273 selfhood, social imaginations of  393 self-identification 169 self-immolation 461–2 self-interest 271–2 performance of  275 self-portraits 356–8 self-presentation 532 by MPs  641 self-realization 268 self-sufficiency 569–70 semiotics  364–6, 405 of bodies  451 sensory experience  556, 627 sensory immersion  370 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks  245–6, 279–80, 476, 503–4, 599 audience for memorials  286–9 economic recovery after  283–6 settler colonialism  214 politics of  328–9 The Seven Basic Plots 407 7/7. See July 2005 London bombings sex, gender distinction from  152 Sex Pistols  491–2 sexual violence  505–8 in conflict  501 Shaheen Bagh  151, 452 Shakespeare  379, 381–3, 568–9 Shalson, Lara  519

Shannon, Bill  534 Shannon, Claude  363–4 Shapiro, Michael  295 sharing-circles 144–5 Shatti refugee camp  330 Sheffield Outrages  93–4 Sherman, Sandra  270 Shildrick, Margrit  532 Shipwreck with Spectator (Blumenberg)  60–1 Shiv Sena, women and  160 Shuttleworth, Russel  532 Siddique, Tulip  163 SIEV X boat tragedy  220–1 sign systems  57–8 Silverman, Kaja  577–8 Silverstein, Larry  283 Silvester, Jeremy  350 Le simple corps du roi (Boureau)  121 Singleton, Brian  45–7 “Sinking Giggling into the Sea” (Coe)  656–7 Sins Invalid  534 sites 217 frontier 327–9 gender and  214–15 multiscalar 327 protest-performance 520 rhetorical 215 sites of memory  281 Sixth Amendment  75 skilled labor  91 skin color  356–7 Sklar, Deirdre  550 Skott-Myhre, Hans  141 Skwirblies, Lisa  24 Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On (The Slave Ship) (Turner, J. M. W.)  61–2, 62f Sleater-Kinney  489–90, 493–5 The Slits  491–2, 495 slow scholarship  393 Small, Christopher  487–8 Smith, Adam  267, 269, 271–5 Smith, Anthony D.  173, 175 Smith, Mark E.  491–3 Smith, Patti  452–3, 485–6, 491, 494 Smith, Rae  445–6 Smith Start, Brix  452–3, 485–6, 491–3

724   index Snapchat 143 SNP. See Scottish National Party social acceleration  310 social action, theater and  27–8 social anxiety  401 social capital, legal discourse as  77 social change, structural models and  103 social construction processes  103 The Social Contract (Rousseau)  9 social drama  477 social environments  547, 596 social gender norms  152 social housing  138, 145 social imaginations  393 sociality, relational  208–9 socialization 549 attraction of  325–6 scripts and  406–7 social justice  424, 444–8, 649–50 frames of  35–6 social leaders, mismanagement and  423 social media grime and  145–6 litefeet and  143 protest messages and  104 social microaggressions  244 performing 245–7 social movements framing and  103 indigenous claims and  107–8 internet and  113 new narratives in  111–12 police manuals on  668–70 protests and  666–70 structural models and  103 social networks, in Mexico  112–13 social performances  565 social positioning, dance and  547–51 social relationality  207 social reproduction  298 social reproductive labor  162–3 social school  34 social services, disability and  541 social space  137–8 societal ideologies, performing  477–9 socio-cultural discourses  521–2 sociology 405 music aesthetics and  487

sociopolitical realities elite status and  120 performative creation of  120 Söder, Mårten  532 Soja, Edward  213–14 Solana, Mariela  585 Solarich, Iván  583–4 Solga, Kim  137, 505–6 solidarity  241–2, 244–5 Soliman, Angelo  67 Solvang, Per Koren  533 somatic modes of attention  557 somatic norms  451 Sommi, Leone de  364–5 “Song of the Yoitomake” (Miwa)  628–30 sonic theatricality  51–4 Sonic Youth  491, 493–5 Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence. See Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia, contra el Olvido y el Silencio Sontag, Susan  208, 502–3, 506–8 sopanam 45–6 Sorensen, Martin  245 Sosa, Cecilia  588 “So Tough” (The Slits)  491–2 South Africa  357–9 sovereign king  564–6 sovereignty  51–4, 169–70 contractual theory of  561–2 embodiment and  565–6 passing of, to people  565–6 of political leaders  431 Soviet Union, national identity in  179 space atmosphere and  665 of authority, women in  252 Chauka and  224–7 city 137–40 empire and  214 as framing device  251 grime and  145 ideological gendering of  613–15 marginal 139 political 251 politics and  137–40 polytopic representational  213 power and  137, 213

index   725 practiced 215 production of  294, 297–8 representational 213–15 representation of  213–14 social 137–8 tone of  673–5 urban 294 spaces of appearance  213 Spanish Civil War  509–10 Spary, Carole  132, 256–7, 640 spatial context, picket lines and  92 spatial geography  215 spatial practice  213–14 Speaker of the House (UK)  1–2 Specia, Megan  245 “The Spectacle of the ‘Other’ ” (Hall) 64–6 restaging 66–70 Spectator (newspaper)  29 spectator-actors 296 spectatorial gaze  24 spectatorship  48, 62–3 theatricality and  69 Spinoza, Benedict de  380, 682–3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty  180–1 Split, Croatia  2–3 Sprechstimme 491–2 “Sreekanthan Nair and Ramayana Plays” (Balakrishnan) 51 Srikanthan Nair, C. N.  44–5, 49, 51–4 Sri Lanka  577–8, 603 stage 118–19 memorials and  279–80 political performances and  406 public sphere as  477 secondary representation on  461 staged nationalism  179 Stage Fright (Puchner)  52 stage-public gap  174 state-building 172–3 State of Exception (Agamben)  218–19 “State of the Theatre” lecture  458–60 State of the Union Address  378, 568 state-organism 564–5 state violence  326–7 Statika (Štromajer and Zorman)  685 status interactions  122 Statute of Artificers of 1563  91

Stern, Donna  554 Stewart, Kathleen  552 Stewart, Susan  65 stigmatized identity  532 Stolberg, Sheryl  235, 245 Stone, Oliver  105 Stormzy 145–7 Strange, Susan  312–13 strategic dramaturgy  103–4 masks and  109–10 strategic incapacitation  669 Strauss, Julia  343–4 Strausz, Erzsébet  344 street performance  136 city structures and  139–40 Strehler, Giorgio  463–4 Streicher, Julius  8 strikes  91, 98 damages from  96 pickets supporting  95 Štromajer, Igor  685 STS. See science and technology studies student satisfaction  394 Sturken, Maria  287 Der Sturmer (newspaper)  8 style 257–8 stylization 49–51 subjectification 57–8 subjectivation  462, 467n.5 subjective violence  502 subjectivity Defoe, D., and  268 modernization of  549 positioned 548–9 subjects 31 SubStance (Féral)  28 subversive body acts  8 subversive intellectuals  395–6 subways 135–6 litefeet and  142 panhandling and  140–1 Sugita, Mio  632 Sun Yat-Sen  410–11 Superbarrio 109–10 super-surveillance  153, 161–2, 260–2 surrogation 568–9 Swaraj, Sushma  156 swing voters  572–3

726   index Swinson, Jo  163 symbolic action  103–4 symbolic acts  3 symbolic logics of ascendency  120 symbolic politics  10–11 symbolic positions  548 symbolic reception  122 symbolics dynastic 121 of power  120–1 synchronic implication  586 synecdoche 102 Syntagma Square  579 Syriza 679–80 Szabad Egyetem  392 Szeman, Ioana  132 tableau 455–7 tactical frivolity  459 Tahrir Square  213, 452, 518, 579 Takemura, Kazuko  626–7 Taksim Square  518 Tampa scandal  220–1 tanatunatakavedi  49, 51 Tanenbaum, Susie  135 Taylor, Charles  132, 548 Taylor, Diana  423 teachers formation as  392 unlearning and  397 visibility of  394 teaching plays  204–5 tear gas  672 Tears of Eros (Bataille)  506–7 teatrum mundi metaphor  34–5 technique 451 Tellas, Vivi  584 “Telling Our Stories” workshop  240 Ten Billion (Emmott)  438 Terayama, Shūji  624–5 terrorism 326–7 text messaging  369 Teyyam 45–6 Teyyateyyam (Panikkar)  45–7 Thatcher, Margaret  260–1, 475–6 “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future” (Schneider) 521

theater activist attacks on  458 books about  364 as cage  459–60 disability and  453 diversity of models for  118 extreme experiences in  363 invisible 214 in Japan  624–5 leaving, in search of  460–3 as moral institution  34, 173–4 new documentary  583–5 social action and  27–8 Western conceptions of  27–8, 37n.1 theater historiography  44 theater studies political scholarship through  16 protests and  102 Theatre and Migration (Cox)  203 “Theatre and the Risk of Fire” (Althusser) 465–6 Theatre Hora  534–5 Theatre of the Oppressed  296 Theatre of the People (Jana Karliya)  603 theatrical display race and  65 representation and  65 theatrical events  363 theatrical gaze, racialized  66 theatricality  23–5, 52, 54n.1 analyzing 8–9 artificiality and  9 authenticity and  57–8 Barca Nostra (Büchel) and  60–1 colonial 29–30 colonial discourse and  27 colonialism and  58–9 defining  6–7, 27–30, 43–4, 58 framing and  28–9 “The Horrors of the Sea” (Medina) and 59–60 ideological construction of  57–8 India and  44 Mee on  48 as mode of perception  58 paintings and  62 of picket lines  89–90

index   727 political representation and  117–19 of politics  117 positioning 27–8 postcolonial resistance limits and  45–9 sonic 51–4 spectatorship and  69 uses of term  27 as way of seeing  31, 58 as Western style of thought  58–9 Theatricality (Burns)  27–8 theatrical nationhood  175–6 theatrical naturalism  438–9 theatrical politics, spatial context and  92 theatrical representations, of violence  453 theatrical transformation  50 theatrocracy 120 theatrum mundi 43–4 Theological-Political Treatise (Spinoza)  682–3 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, Adam) 271–5 Thingspiel movement  175–6 ThirdSpace 213–15 Thread Hell (Kishida)  579, 624–8, 632 Three Gorges Dam  413–14 The Three Penny Opera (Brecht)  373 “Thriller” (Jackson, M.)  519 Thucydides 422 Ţigani 185 “Tijuana Bibles,”  507–8 Tilly, Charles  91 repertoires and  101–2 WUNC and  102 time Chauka and  224–7 choreography of articulation and  685 interpellation and  465 memorials and  279–80 Tofighian, Omid  223, 227–8 Together (dance group)  190–2 Tolpuddle Martyrs  93 Tompkins, Joanne  213 tone, of space  673–5 Torside gate dispute  98 torture  507–9, 591 “Towards a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre” (Auslander)  77–8 The Town Meeting (play)  298

Tractatus Theologicao-Politicus (Spinoza)  380 trade associations  91 Trade Disputes Act of 1906 (UK)  96 trade fairs  215 AIfG and  307–8 inegalitarian instability and  319–20 institutionalizing liminality and  316–19 liminal politics and  318–19 as neoliberal ordering rituals  308–12 opening speeches  313 sacred and affective rites of  312–16 sense beyond language and  314–16 Trade Union Act of 1871 (UK)  94 trade union movements  90 activism by  93 General Strike of 1926 and  97 Grunwick dispute and  97 legal restrictions on  93–4 trade unions  92 strike damages and  96 traditional dress  359–60 trafficked persons  200 trafficking, forced  58–9 tragic ethos  207 Trajan’s Column  121–2 transformation, in Panikkar aesthetics  47–8 transgressive acts  136 transnational cultural production  406–7 transnationalism 227–8 trauma 598 difficulty of transmitting and translating  591 legacy of  595 trials 73 defendant’s ability to give account of  77 dock in  76–7 drama and  590 live presence and  76 trials in absentia  73, 81–3 tribunes 431–3 Trump, Donald  138, 160–1, 254, 343, 415–16, 478, 561–4, 567–9, 572–3, 671 Trump Tower  138 trust 597 political performance and  641 truth, artistic  461–2 Truth and Method (Gadamer)  366 Tsípras, Aléxis  679–80

728   index Tuana, Nancy  504 Tucker, Corin  493–4 Turkle, Sherry  237 Turner, J. M. W.  61–2 Turner, Victor  11–12, 120, 215, 317–19 Turrión, Pablo Iglesias  679–80 Tusk, Donald  657–8 Tutti, Cosey Fanni  452–3, 485–6, 491 Twitter  106, 143, 145–6, 156 Mexico and  112 MPs use of  641 2071 (Rapley and Macmillan)  440 Tyler, Imogen  137–8, 200 Uhr, John  343–4 UK. See United Kingdom UK Independence Party  657 Ullah, Haroon  241–2 Umbrella movement  669 UN Climate Change Conferences  319–20 Und der Teufel lacht dazu (And the devil laughs with you) (revue)  34–5 under-employment 95 Underground Harmonies (Tanenbaum)  135 Undoing the Demos 344 uneven mobilities  228–30 Union Square Station  135–6 United Kingdom (UK)  343 civil service  153 court reform in  80 dock in trials in  76–7 performance contexts in  453 picketing in  90 political institutions of  153 political performance in  415–17 scripts and  416 trials in absentia in  81 United Kingdom Parliament  5–6, 153 performances in  1–2 proroguing of  7 United Nations, human rights authorities  223–4 United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime  200 United States  343 Dreamers in  409–10 embodied performance of presidency  568–9, 571

foreign policy after 9/11  599 Japan occupation by  623 migrant children detention by  218–19 performance contexts in  453 political ceremony in  378 political leadership in  426 political performance in  415–17 power of presidency in  479–80 presidential physicality in  569 scripts and  416 self-sufficiency ideals in  569–70 State of the Union Address  378, 568 women in politics of  569–70 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  200 universal hospitality  206 Universidad Iberoamericana  105 universities deconolonization of  344–5 market model of  395 as service providers  394 Unlawful Oaths Act of 1797 (UK)  93 Unmarked (Phelan)  75–6 unskilled labor  91, 95 Up, Ari  491 uprisings 579 urbanization  294, 300–1 urban spaces, plurality of  294 Urias Hermosillo, Margarita  583–4 Urubhangam (Bhasa)  46–8 Uruguay 592n.1 “U.S. 80’s-90’s” (The Fall)  492–3 US Congress as double political stage  117–18 women of color in  153–4 US Constitution  75 US Supreme Court, on confrontation rights 75 Vajpeyi, Ashok  50–1 Vallance, Edward  91–2 Valmiki 52–3 Van Reekum, Rogior  218–19 Vasile, Daniel  189 veiling 243–5 Venda 350 Verfremdung, immersion and  373–5 Verfremdungseffekt 462–3 Verificado 113

index   729 vernacular citizenship  186 Versailles  120–2, 126–7 Vicious, Sid  491–2 victim/agent dichotomy  582 victim discourse  409 Victoria (Queen)  427–8 video-link remand proceedings  78–80 Villa+Discurso (Calderón, G.)  581–2, 585–9, 592 Villa Grimaldi  581–2, 587–9 violence  76, 511–12 appeal of  502–3 civilian agency and  348 frontier use of  329–31 hegemonic rule and  326–7 in representation  503 state 326–7 subjective 502 theatrical representations of  453 vulnerability and  503–5 “Violence and the Word” (Cover)  76 Virno, Paolo  682–5 virtual infrastructures  218 virtual sit-ins  113 voice 451 von Puttkamer, Jesco  31, 35–6 vulnerability sexual violence and  505–7 violence and ignorance and  503–5 WAFFLE crew  136–7, 140–3 Wagenknecht, Sahra  680–1 wages, setting of  91 Wagner, Colleen  501, 509–11 Wales court reform in  80 dock in trials in  76–7 trials in absentia in  81 video-link proceedings in 78 Walk (Rao)  13–14, 517 Walker, Kara  504–5 Walker, Peter  287 Walkley Magazine 228 Wall, Illan rua  579 Warner, Michael  186–7 War on Terror  215, 279–81, 290 Warren, Narelle  578–9

Warwick Politics and Performance Network 3–4 Washington, George  562, 569 Waters, Larissa  162 Watson, Matthew  215 Watson, Sharon  453, 545, 552 way of seeing racialized  58–9, 64–5, 69 theatricality as  31, 58 The Wealth of Nations (Smith, Adam)  269, 271 We Are the Weather (Foer)  438 Weaver, Warren  363–4 Webb, Beatrice  93–4 Webb, Sidney  93–4 Weber, Cynthia  599–600 Wee, C. J. Wan-Ling  13 Weigel, Helene  374 Weil, Simone  503 Weiss, Janet  494 welfare 610 carer-related 611–14 West Bank  329 Westminster Parliament  153, 251 changes in composition of  254 women in  252–3 Wetzel, Daniel  687 Weyland, Kurt  682, 689–90 WhatsApp 219 Whitlock, Gillian  223–4 Wickstrom, Maurya  466 Wilders, Geert  563–4 Wiley (grime artist)  144–5 Williams, Linda  508 Williams, Raymond  546–7 Wilmer, S. E.  201–2, 204 Wilson, Woodrow  426 Wilson Security  227 Wipplinger, Jonathan  35 The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson 656–7 witnessing 62–3 women American Muslim  235–6, 241 Arab American  235–6 becoming insiders  262 continuous visibility of  261 in House of Commons  163, 255 in Indian Parliament  156 in Indian politics  151–2, 155

730   index women (Continued) in Japan  623–4 in music  485–6, 488 Muslim 159 parliaments’ gender sensitivity and  162–3 political representatives  132 in political theater  258 in politics  569–70 in punk  485–6, 490–1 Shiv Sena and  160 as “space invaders,”  252 in spaces of authority  252 in Westminster Parliament  252–3 Women in Science (Milles and Forsberg)  367–71 womenomics 162–3 Women’s March  160–1 Women’s Reservation Bill (India)  156–7 Woolf, Virginia  509–10 workplaces, centralization of  90 World Anti-Slavery Convention  61–2 World Cup  302 World Trade Center  283 World War II  623 worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC)  102, 106 Mexico protests and  104 wrestling 109–10

WUNC. See worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment Wynne-Jones, Ros  98 xenophobia 460–1 Xhosa 350 Xi Jinping  343, 407, 409–16 XPrize 307–8 Yad Vashem museum  282 #YoSoy132 106 YouthSpark 313 YouTube  143, 412–13 Yubiwa Hotel  624–5 Yugoslavia (former)  2–3 Zable, Arnold  227 Zafar, Bahadur Shah  526 Zapatista movement  105, 107–8, 113 masks used by  110 Žižek, Slavoj  502 Zócalo 108–9 zooism 460 Zorman, Brane  685 Zuccotti Park  452 Zulu  347–8, 350–2 Zuma, Jacob  347–8, 348f, 351 Zwaig, Mónica  581, 585–6, 589–92