Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture

Yana Meerzon, David Dean, Daniel McNeil, Yana Meerzon, David Dean, Daniel McNeil

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030399153
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that delves beneath the media headlines about the "migration crisis", Brexit, Trump and similar events and spectacles that have been linked to the intensification and proliferation of stereotypes about migrants since 2015. Topics include the representations of migration and stereotypes in citizenship ceremonies and culinary traditions, law and literature, and public history and performance. Bringing together academics in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as artists and theatre practitioners, the collection equips readers with new methodologies, keywords and collaborative research tools to support critical inquiry and public-facing research in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Cultural and Migration Studies, and Applied Theatre and History.

Part IThe Lives of Others: Precarious Bodies and Self-Fashioning

© The Author(s) 2020

Y. Meerzon et al. (eds.)Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and CultureContemporary Performance InterActionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39915-3_2

Begin Abstract

Precarious Bodies in Performance Activism and Theatres of Migration

Yana Meerzon¹

(1)

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada

Yana Meerzon

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Performance ActivismPrecarious BodiesRefugeesPerformance EthicsStereotypes

End Abstract

In their article, “Mare Nostrum, or On Water Matters,” Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia (2016, 141) note that as global migration is a new norm, we—artists, scholars, ordinary citizens—find ourselves “grappling with a distinct awareness of the limits of performance in the face of this most immediate and urgent of realities.” This awareness emerges “alongside our understanding that forced migration is already caught within the domain of representation […]: we classify migration, we legislate migration, we prevent or enable migration, we produce narratives and images about migration, we devise military strategies that criminalize migration” (141). At the same time, the body of a migrant remains evasive and difficult to represent without falling into blatant stereotyping, objectification, or even the further victimization of an already vulnerable subject. This difficulty with representation compels us to question the political, social, or philosophical impacts of performance activism and to consider the futility, lost opportunities, and disappointments frequently associated with them. Happenings, protests, manifestations, and organized processions present what Guy Debord (2002, 1) calls “an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” While watching political performances, therefore, we often ask: “What was it, exactly, that we were looking for a performance to do, ethically, aesthetically and politically? What did we expect?” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 141).

A participatory art form, performance activism often exploits the affectual power of excitement; it relies on “symbolic elements and uses of the body to communicate claims across borders and languages. […] More and more we witness and participate in local and global acts of protest and solidarity that entail visual, aural, and behavioral figurations evaluated by demonstrators as effective ways of making claims, reclaiming spaces, and denouncing abusive conditions” (Fuentes 2015). Performance activism is also emancipatory, in Jacques Rancière’s (2009) sense of the term. It desires to “dismantle the Cartesian theatrical dichotomy of actor and spectator,” turning spectators into politically engaged subjects, actively performing the acts of citizenship (Lewicki 2017, 276). By aspiring to “facilitate emotional access” to social and economic indecencies (286), performance activism energizes and mobilizes crowds. In this, although somewhat paradoxically, performance activism approximates the bread and circus tradition, a popular past-time of the Roman Empire that involved “chariot races and gladiatorial games that filled the belly and distracted the mind, allowing emperors to rule as they saw fit” (Astore 2013).

Of course, I do not want to suggest a direct link between performance activism and bread and circus past-times, but they are associated: there is danger in the use of political performance as an act of misrepresentation to deliberately excite an audience. This danger is specific to performance activism aiming at representation of the migration crisis. To remind their audiences of our transience and to focus our attention on the precariousness of life, this work stages migration as bodily overflow. It also creates circumstances of voyeurism that can edge on political pornography: “all images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic,” Sontag (2003, 6) writes. “But images of the repulsive can also allure.” Although performance activism often succeeds in mobilizing people, it also appeals to our desire for spectacle. Likewise, it begs the question of what could possibly be an adequate response to a humanitarian catastrophe, be it a war, a genocide, or a migration crisis.

This question has been raised before: from Theodor Adorno to Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas to Judith Butler, many political philosophers have challenged the aesthetics of the representation of a mutilated, raped, abused, or dead body. In theatre, there is a long tradition of fascination with staging violence. Projects that aim to raise awareness about legal, political, and social controversies surrounding migration and asylum seeking repeatedly emphasize the material experiences of migration and the body of a migrant—a site of physical suffering, an object of unwanted gaze, and, by extension, the subject of an artistic experiment. Such bodies often turn into stereotypical representations of stranger-danger and stranger-fetishism (Ahmed 2000).

For Levinas (1998), the concept of face stands as a metonym for both a divine entity and a human being; it acts as a “condition for humanization” (Butler 2004, 141), a reminder of our ethical responsibility towards others. Through representation, we attribute a human quality to any type of Other. At the same time, representation risks producing a personification that may “evacuate the face” as well as perform “its own dehumanization” (Butler 2004, 141). By questioning the results produced by the process of personification—a stereotype —Butler (2004) interrogates the concept of good intention, which often initiates problematic representational tactics, especially if its subject matter is the victimized or the suffering. The excessiveness of representation, Butler argues, can impede the acknowledgement of life’s precariousness, and lead to numbness in our reception, which can undermine the face: our humanity. The excessiveness of representation can also mobilize the onlooker’s empathy—the emotion prone to manipulation—rather than their critical thinking. Butler ’s emphasis on the ethics of representation: one’s need to recognize the ambiguity of a good intention and the tension between giving the Other a voice and the potential for his/her (de)humanization through representation, forms the theoretical focus point of this chapter. In my conclusions, I return to the discussion of responsibility for oneself and for other as an act of recognizing a face, an abstract category of humanity and a synecdoche of a human body, the body of a migrant. I demonstrate that to remind spectators of our transience and to focus our attention on the precariousness of life, many productions of performance activism create the circumstances of an artistic encounter, estrangement, and voyeurism.

Theoretical Premise and Hypothesis

Explaining why Levinas ’ ethical philosophy is relevant in today’s critical discourse about war, oppression, and migration, Butler (2004, 141) states: “when we consider the ordinary ways that we think about humanization and dehumanization, we find the assumption that those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized; and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed not regarded at all.” To Butler, such assumptions can be erroneous. The excessiveness of representation does not rely on the strategies of recognition; it often capitalizes on the workings of a gaze: “we see the migrant as a victim; we sympathize, we empathize” (Cox and Zaroulia 2016, 148). Moreover, we realize that such gaze can turn a migrant’s body into an object of fetishism. Sontag (2003, 6) identified this process with a form of pornography, one seeking pleasure in identifying with the victim. Cox and Zaroulia (2016, 148) argue similarly that, “Confronted with such imagery, we don’t understand what we see,” elaborating that, “We misinterpret it. We see the image of the boy¹ and remember the image of another child playing, perhaps ourselves. The present image picks and haunts our past.”

At the same time, as Sontag (2003, 97) writes, when staging the dead body, it is the photographer and the spectator’s vulnerability that the image addresses. It points at our profound ignorance of what another’s pain means or entails, and what unimaginable mark it leaves on the body and soul of its victim. Looking at the photographs of dead soldiers or any victims of an act of violence, we must realize: “These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us” and “we truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes” (Sontag 2003, 97–98). This argument echoes Adorno’s dictum about the impossibility of writing poetry after the Holocaust (2003). Any representation of such atrocity, Richardson argues (2005, 1) would fall into “the tension between ethics and aesthetics inherent in an act of artistic production that reproduces the cultural values of the society that generated the Holocaust.” At the centre of this issue are questions about the unspeakable, the silence, and the truth of the past and its remembrance, about fact and fiction, and the problematic aesthetics of representation-as—a subjective picture of the past as experienced, remembered, and interpreted by a survivor, or as a fictionalized account (Lang 2000). These areas of concern are echoed in today’s political performances, specifically when the body of a migrant emerges as a guarantee of theatrical truth and of the authenticity of suffering. Mythologizing migration this way, the figure of a migrant risks to become “defaced,” the consequence of representation itself (Butler 2004, 143). My example of this tendency is the 2015 intervention The Dead are Coming —a weeklong series of political actions or “operations” produced by the Berlin-based performance group Zentrum für Politische Schönheit/The Center for Political Beauty (CPB) .

Staging The Dead are Coming , CPB aimed at “transform[ing] piles of corpses into individuals who lost their lives,” turning “refugees into people” (Musyal 2015). The project

began with the transport of the bodies of Syrian refugees who had died in the Mediterranean and were brought by the [CPB] from Italy to Berlin to be given a proper funeral ceremony. The initiative inspired individuals around Germany and Austria to erect makeshift graves, which began to pop up on roadsides and green spaces, imitating in style those burial grounds assembled in front of the Parliament. Their unknown makers thereby took part in the [CPB’s] ethico-political mobilization to mourn the deaths of nameless refugees and to problematize the very absence of a public sphere where such expressions of grief could take place. (von Bieberstein and Evren 2016, 454–555)

The Dead are Coming, 2015: A Brief Example

According to its website, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit/The Center for Political Beauty (CPB), established in 2010 by political theorist Philipp Ruch , is “an assault team that establishes moral beauty, political poetry and human g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part I. The Lives of Others: Precarious Bodies and Self-Fashioning
• Part II. Multiculturalism, Citizenship, and Belonging: Deep Equality and Diasporic Cultures
• Part III. Dreams, Memories, and Storytelling: Applied Theatre and Communities of Praxis
• Back Matter