Performance and Post-Colonial Thought

As I was reading Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire regarding the effects of colonialism on the colonized identity, I couldn’t help but think of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. Fanon was a Black French-trained psychiatrist from the island of Martinique who focused on Blacks identity formation after colonization. His writing as a post-colonial theorist parallels much of what is written about in Taylor’s work on post-colonial performance of Latin Americans. What I am most interested in is if identity is crucial to performance and politics guide performances of identity, how can someone comfortably or “accurately” perform an identity that was created and controlled by suppressive politics meant to purposefully circumvent the very idea of their being? Or in other words, if you tell me who I am or who I’m supposed to be and that identity is equivalent to nothingness, how can I “be”? Both authors critique how colonization affects the identity performance of the colonized and how the relationship between the subjugated and the subjugator shapes cultural/ethnic identity. The identity of the colonized is ironic in that the colonizer creates within the “being” an identity of, what Fanon calls, “nonbeing” and what Taylor calls “the paradoxical omnipresence of the disappeared". Fanon describes the dichotomy between the two races by establishing Black men as emasculated inhuman beings on a continuous journey to achieve the ideal status of white humanity. It is a social convention not much different that Taylor’s boarding school story where she was being groomed by the “High Anglicanism”. The appropriation of (or attempts to appropriate) white hegemonic standards by brown and black people created, for Taylor, a place where she “wasn’t Canadian, but not longer felt completely Mexican”. For Fanon his race “no longer understands him” or “he no longer understands them”. But what I found so intriguing was the discussion about the gaze…the feeling of looking, being looked at, and looking at someone looking at you. This is a topic that we have discussion before but thinking about what the gaze means in relation to marginalized people’s identity formation was interesting and uncomfortable. Using Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s performance (that portrayed the caged “indigenous” people of the fictitious country Guatinauis underscoring the relationship between colonizer and the colonized), Taylor says, “Avoidance of eye contact and any other gestures of recognition stripped their performance of anything that could be mistaken for a ‘personal’ or individual trait. Colonialism, after all, has attempted to deprive its captives of individuality”. Fanon writes of his experiences as a middle/upper class man (a psychiatrist) in France:
'Look, a Negro!' It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. 'Look, a Negro!' It was true. It amused me.
'Look, a Negro!' The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.
'Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened. Frightened! Frightened!’ Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. My body was given back to me sprawled out. Distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. ‘The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it's cold, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother's arms: Mama, the nigger's going to eat me up.’ Fanon writes that colonized people are forever “sealed in objecthood…abraded into nonbeing”. He asserts that Black men are at a disadvantage when trying to develop a bodily representation conducive to the removal the colonizer-imposed objecthood. Whites’ creation and perpetuation of Blacks’ subjugated status and Blacks’ internalization of this inferiority, has created a compromising position for Blacks as the definer of Blackness without enough agency to disconnect themselves from their empirically derived overdetermined state. Or what Fanon calls “a massive psychoexistential complex”. Taylor seems to concur. Regarding Fusco and Gomez-Pena’s performance, the audience’s dehumanizing interaction with the performers “suggested the impossibility of self-representation by the ‘indigenous’ contained through the tyranny of representation.” It is interesting to see the psychological and cultural effects of colonization in contemporary performance. The Native American (Arawack) left on display in the Spanish court to die, South African (Khoi Khoi) Sarah Baartman paraded for the pleasure of the colonizers, and the Guatinauians who, for one dollar, could be seen in the purest “human” form. Fanon emphasizes that it is only after Black men gain a consciousness of self and assert themselves as complete men will they be on their way to a “new humanism”. If this is true for all colonized people, interestingly for Fanon, the process of going from “objecthood” to consciousness is cyclical with Black men recognizing their fragmented selves through the abrogative eyes of the colonizer and returning to a state of despair.

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postleft

here's a question that might related - political theorists who work on classical liberalism counter-pose two examples:

blacks vs. native americans.

a number blacks have vocally called for rights (inclusion and recognition maybe)

a large number native americans have actively refused assimilation.

are these two examples as oppositional as some theorists say they are? are recognition/inclusion opposed to assimilation? what would a "middle ground" look like, if there is one?

MelissaCrum

First I would say recognition and inclusion are not synonymous. Then, I think inclusion equals assimilation. For example, the Civil Rights movement was a lot about recognition, inclusion and assimilation. With public schools, many Blacks wanted the government to recognize their substandard school materials in comparison to their white counterparts. Many Blacks wanted to desegregate schools so that they would have the opportunity to maintain a better quality of education (or so they thought). In addition, many believed that this would give Blacks the opportunity to disprove their “subhumaness".

“Look we are smart. We aren’t loud, or dirty, or heathens. Look, see, I can be the Negro you want be to be.”

For those who wanted to, desegregated schools provided a venue for Blacks to learn how to adopt to white middle-class standards in order to prove their humanness. This equated not only to an elevated social status (hopefully) but also it was a survival tactic.

“Maybe if they don’t see me as a monkey, an animal, a nigger then maybe… just maybe they would be so quick to kill me.”

So when the Great Migration of Blacks moving from the South to the North occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, Black centers like the urban league run by middle class Blacks, were giving out flyers telling their, umm let’s say what they felt were uncouth, fellow Blacks to not do things like where bandanas or certain clothing in public (white people might see you…then they might see me. And then they might think I’m with you. Or I’m like you. Then they wouldn’t think I’m more like them. Then they are going to remember I’m Black.)

"Excuse him Mr.White man, that country bumpkin Negro just doesn't know any better."

On contrary, the Black Power movement of the late sixties and early seventies was a movement that made America recognize Blacks without desiring inclusion. Blacks wanted their own schools, their businesses, the local government and law enforcement reflect the neighborhood they were patrolling, etc. What real summons it up is the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point program: We want power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities. 1.We want full employment for our people. 2.We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black Community. 3.We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. 4.We want decent education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. 5.We want completely free health care for all black and oppressed people. 6.We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States. 7.We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression. 8.We want freedom for all black and oppressed people now held in U. S. Federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country. 9.We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology.
Seems pretty basic but the first 8 plus years of Civil Rights Black middle-class assimilation standards was not getting the job done. It was a whole lot of white paternalism, not understanding what it meant to be Black in America, what Blacks really wanted and whole lot of re-investing in whiteness. Many laws were passed but rarely enforced so in many ways it didn’t matter. One of the huge accomplishments of the anti-assimilation pro-recognition movement during the BBM was under tenet 5 dealing with education… Black Studies programs in universities. It is the reason why I can attend a predominately white university and major in African American and African studies and not be about how Africa didn’t have a history before Europeans colonized them. Or as Hegel put it, Africa is only a “succession of contingent happenings and surprises” . “The characteristic feature of the Negroes is that their consciousness has not yet reached an awareness of any substantial objectivity”. After Brown vs Board and Black children started to read this in their textbooks many realized assimilation is not the way to go but recognition was necessary and inclusion without assimilation could occur.
So the middle ground… Raymond Winbush would say middle ground are the “gray black people”. “White Black people” are complete, fully assimilated into white middle-class standards that they denounce or ignore all that is Blacks (umm Clarence Thomas comes to mind) then they are “Black Black people” for the most part the flip of the former (some would say very earlier Malcolm X, there is a clear distinction). Then there are “gray black people” who recognized their race and what that means in dominate white society (may or may not be comfortable with that) but is capable of somewhat seamlessly maneuvering through both worlds. The gray area has a huge gradient though. Grayness looks like a Black person feeling comfortable enough in themselves that appropriation of some “white middle-class standards” is entirely bad. If bad at all. But that appropriation should not hinder associations with Others who don’t. I’m going to think some more on gray-middle-groundness…

postleft

wow! you are really good on these points ; )

the gray blackness makes me think of "double consciousness" - it sounds like quite a burden.

in doing our performance studies stuff, especially on the identity/interpellation of Pecheux, there's an interesting question rattling around in my brain: if no one really fits in their identity category (because the ideal types are unattainable and sometimes undesirable), why are those who are most invested in hegemony deal with their alienation in such different ways?

to complicate this a bit more (and to bring it around to something I have a bit more familiarity with): can we claim that whites are still unable to be completely "assimilated" into whitness, they have to constantly compete for being more white? (getting an SUV, buying a nice house in the burbs). and why in the world do they think they are restricted to such grotesque options?

MelissaCrum

I think it all has to do with what Benedict Anderson would call "imagined communities". There is an ideal of what it is to be American (which = male = white = smart = progressive = rich) and the possibily of the American Dream. People float on car doors and risj their lives to get to that dream! But who is the dream reserved for and who can aquire it? Really, only a few people. But those few people of the dominant majority are more likely to aquire (or at least appear to have aquired) the dream. The marginalized communities are told to pull themselves up "by the boot straps" and use "the master's tools" to get where you need to go. That is the American dream right? Aren't I American? "Ain't I a Woman?!" But the American dream, this imagine community in which you are told to reach for inclusion, can't be offered to everyone. A capitalist system can't support it regardless of your race (but so many people are making money off of those trying make their own profit.... credit card companies to name a few). So if Audre Lorde is right and "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house", then the system, the white supremacist power structure, "the house", has to be changed completely. A new mentality has to happen. Then people won't try to "keep up with the Jones" and Jones will stop trying to keep up with a family that doesn't exist.

lang-212

Another group that complicates this issue, at least in terms of discussing assimilation and recognition in my mind would be the GLBT community (not to make that too broad or singular, obviously all of these communities are plural and diverse). I am thinking about the pathologization and medicalization of homosexuality for most of the 20th century, and I guess the continuation of this type of discrimination in the 21st century. Particularly with the issue of gay marriage...this has been a right that has been highly publicized world-wide as an issue for the state, religion, and society in general. However, there are many GLBT organizations and groups who do not identify this as a key concern for the movement(s) as it continues to conform to the heterosexist paradigm, that to fight for marriage is to be invested in hegemony...