Abstract
In the summer of 2004, I traveled to the town of Gulu in northern Uganda, proudly bearing an invitation to facilitate theatre workshops at a rehabilitation center for former child soldiers. These children had been kidnapped by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army, which terrorized the region in the longest civil war in the history of subSaharan Africa. In the heart of this warzone, I met another U.S. theatre artist, as eager as I was to contribute her skills. She had arranged for private workshops at another rehabilitation center in Gulu, which she invited me to observe. She led a group of fifteen teenage girls in a series of theatre exercises, working with them to use their body as a tool of expression. She was wearing a loose, flowing skirt, and, as she demonstrated the movements, all of us caught glimpses of her underwear. As members of a culture in which modest dress is a social norm, the girls giggled and whispered among themselves. These outbursts continued despite the obvious annoyance of the facilitator, who repeatedly requested their undivided attention. Although I’m fairly certain that the residents of Gulu did not see my underwear, the image of white woman as ludicrous spectacle haunted my own attempts to practice activist theatre.
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Notes
Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 96, 100–103.
Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 27.
See Christopher Innes, Avant-Garde Theatre, 1892–1992 (London: Routledge, 1993), 6–18, for an overview of what he calls the “cult of the primitive” (9) in avant-garde theatre.
See also James Harding, “From Cutting Edge to Rough Edges: On the Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance,” in Not the Other Avant-Garde: Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance, ed. James Harding and John Rouse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 18–40.
Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 44.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 9.
James Thompson and Richard Schechner, “Why ‘Social Theatre’?” TDR 48.3 (Fall 2004): 13.
See also Julie Salverson, “Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and the Lie of the Literal,” Theatre Topics 6.2 (1996): 181–191
Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR 46.3 (2002): 39.
See also Rustom Bharucha, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
See Seyla Benhabib et al., Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations, ed. Robert Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), for a discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative as it intersects with human rights.
Erik Ehn, “A Space for Truth: Meditations on Theatre – and the Rwandan Genocide,” American Theatre 24.3 (March 2007): 36.
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998)
Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper, 2003).
The phrase “radical passivity” does not come directly from Levinas’s works; he uses terms and phrases such as “passivity … more passive than every passivity” (“Four Talmudic Readings,” 49), “an extreme passivity” (109), a “deathlike passivity” (124), a “hyperbolic passivity” (49). My use of the phrase is influenced by Thomas Wall’s Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
Peter Benson and Kevin Lewis O’Neill. “Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics,” Anthropology of Consciousness 18.2 (2007), 33–34.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981), 127.
Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Žižek et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 139.
Theatre of the Opppressed can be loosely defined as a highly participatory methodology of theatre practice that aims to liberate marginalized and oppressed people through a series of embodied, interactive exercises that seek to analyze and deconstruct structures of power. See Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), for an introduction to the field.
See Chantal Kalisa, “Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide,” Peace Review 18.4 (2006): 515–521, for a discussion of how Koulsy Lamko from Chad introduced TO techniques to the university’s Center of the Arts (517–518).
Immanuel Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003).
Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality: Ann Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 49.
Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 51.
Simon Critchley alludes to the masochistic potential of Levinas’s demand. See Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007), 11.
I borrow this phrase from Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 121ff.
Ehn, Maria Kizito, in The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia, ed. Robert Skloot (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007).
See Nigel Eltringham’s Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 69–79, for the controversy surrounding the terms “Hutu moderates” and “the Tutsi genocide.”
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have published several reports in recent years that document repressive tendencies of Kagame’s government. For a summary, see the report on Rwanda in Amnesty International Report 2008: The State of the World’s Human Rights, available online at http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/regions/africa/rwanda (accessed Sept. 10, 2008). See also Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda, Ten Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship,” African Affairs 103 (2004): 177–210;
Helen Hintjens, “Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda,” Ethnicities 8.5 (2008): 5–41.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 13.
See Helen Hintjens, “Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda,” Ethnicities 8.1 (March 2008): 5–41.
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© 2011 Laura Edmondson
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Edmondson, L. (2011). Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist: Intercultural Encounters in Uganda and Rwanda. In: Sell, M. (eds) Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange. Performance Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230298941_4
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