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 spac