Performance in a Militarized Culture 2016050302, 9781138690189, 9781315229027, 9781138740808

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PERFORMANCE IN A MILITARIZED CULTURE

The long cultural moment that arose in the wake of 9/11 and the conflict in the Middle East has fostered a global wave of surveillance and counterinsurgency. Performance in a Militarized Culture explores the ways in which we experience this new status quo. Addressing the most commonplace of everyday interactions, from mobile phone calls to traffic cameras, this edited collection considers: • • • • •

How militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques How performing arts practices can confront militarization The long and complex history of militarization How the war on terror has transformed into a values system that prioritizes the military The ways in which performance can be used to secure and maintain power across social strata

Performance in a Militarized Culture draws on performances from North, Central, and South America; Europe; the Middle East; and Asia to chronicle a range of experience: from those who live under a daily threat of terrorism, to others who live with a distant, imagined fear of such danger. Sara Brady is Associate Professor at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Lindsey Mantoan is Assistant Professor at Linfield College.

PERFORMANCE IN A MILITARIZED CULTURE

Edited by Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brady, Sara editor. | Mantoan, Lindsey editor. Title: Performance in a militarized culture / [edited by] Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies Identifiers: LCCN 2016050302 | ISBN 9781138690189 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315229027 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Performing arts—Social aspects. | Militarization. Classification: LCC PN1590.S6 P47 2017 | DDC 306.4/84—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016050302 ISBN: 978-1-138-69018-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-74080-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-22902-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures List of contributors Preface: Performance in the Age of Intelligent Warfare Sarah Bay-Cheng Introduction: In the Absence of the Gun: Performing Militarization Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan

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PART I

Sites of Conflict

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1 Mises-en-scène of Militarization: Decommissioning US Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone Katherine Zien

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2 Military Aid: The Spatial Performances and Performativity of Contemporary Refugee Camps Alexis Bushnell and Justine Nakase

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3 Sacred Children, Accursed Mothers: Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey Eylül Fidan Akıncı

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4 The Freedom Theatre and Cultural Resistance in Jenin, Palestine Elin Nicholson

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5 Tactical Performance Across a Revolutionary Timeline Bart Pitchford

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PART II

Militarized History and Memory 6 How to Do Things with Music Criticism: Performances of Victory in German Wagner Reception, 1918–1933 Áine Sheil

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7 “Stop the War in Chicago Please”: Performative Protest and the Limits of Dissensus Susanne Shawyer

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8 Choreographies of Militarized Space: US Military Bases, Everyday Life, and Performance in Okinawa, Japan Jessica Nakamura

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9 Reviving the Tradition of the Battle Painting: The Militarization of Danish Culture Solveig Gade

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PART III

Performing the Soldier

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10 Soldier Street Theater tyler boudreau

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11 No Easy Mission: Zero Dark Thirty and Gendered Heroism in the Post-Heroic Age Lindsey Mantoan

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12 Going Outside the Wire: Service Members as Documentary Subjects in Black Watch and ReEntry Sarah Beck

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13 Challenging the Characterizations of Military Service: A Critical Comparison of British and American Counter-Recruitment Efforts Cami Rowe

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14 Strategic Simulation and the American Military Imaginary Michael St. Clair

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15 Performing Flight: Test Pilots, Commercial Airlines, and the Cold War Scott Magelssen

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PART IV

The Militarization of the Everyday

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16 Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement Lindsay Adamson Livingston

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17 Failure to Adapt: Affect, Apathy, and Doomed Reenactments in American Theatre’s Militarized Dystopias Emily Klein

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18 Weaponized Bureaucracy: Kill-Chains, Drones, and Tethers Asher Warren

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19 Re-staging Surveillance Tragedy as Critical Resistance Jacqueline Viskup

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20 The Time to Break (Silence): Disavowing the Affects of Militarization and Death through the Performance of Black Existence Kashif Jerome Powell Afterword: Constitutive Performances: Human Rights in a Militarized Culture Wendy S. Hesford Index

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FIGURES

1.1 City of Knowledge, Panama, in August 2010. Photo by Katherine Zien. 1.2 Map showing historical bases in the former Canal Zone. Panama Canal Museum Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 1.3 Screenshot from Familia (Family, 2007), listing Enrique Castro Ríos and family members as former US Department of Defense employees. Courtesy of Enrique Castro Ríos. 1.4 Image from Melía Corporation Website showing Sol Melía Panamá (formerly Fort Gulick). Courtesy of Melía Hotels International. 1.5 Dalida María Benfield. Still from La Zona del Canal (Canal Zone). Single channel video (30 mins) and three-screen video installation with still image projections, dimensions variable. 1994–1997. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1.6 Dalida María Benfield. Still from Hotel/Panamá. Single channel video (20 mins) and multiscreen video installation (2–24 channels), dimensions variable. 2010–2014. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 2.1 Barbed wire and tower within the perimeter of Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell. 2.2 Pigeons kept as pets within a family’s living space in Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell. 2.3 World Food Programme Board inside Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell. 3.1 Anti-government protesters run as police fire tear gas to push back thousands of demonstrators close to central Taksim square in Istanbul, 12 March 2014. REUTERS/Murad Sezer.

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Figures

3.2 Turkish police fires water cannons to push back thousands of demonstrators close to central Taksim square in Istanbul 12 March 2014. REUTERS/ Murad Sezer. 3.3 Thousands of people attend the funeral of Berkin Elvan. Photo: MIRA/AFP/Getty Images. 3.4 A banner unfurled on the building of Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos, which reads “The child and the bread are sacred. We won’t forget you Berkin.” 4.1 and 4.2 Playback Theatre performance by The Freedom Theatre actors in Jenin refugee camp, 2011. Photo courtesy of The Freedom Theatre, Jenin. 8.1 Marine Air Corps Station Futenma. Photo by Jessica Nakamura. 8.2 Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman, 2008). Copyright © Chikako Yamashiro, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. Photo by Chikako Yamashiro. 8.3 Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman, 2009). Copyright © Chikako Yamashiro, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. Photo by Chikako Yamashiro. 8.4 Fleeting Visions—The Fence, Grids, Fertility and Sanctions, 2016. Photo by Ikuko Hanashiro. 9.1 Detail from Simone Aaberg Kærn’s Skirmish—The Danish Participation in the Libyan War (Sketch 2), 2012. Mixed Media on Paper. Courtesy of the artist/Peter Lassen. Photo: Anders Madsen. 9.2 Simone Aaberg Kærn, Skirmish—The Danish Participation in the Libyan War (Sketches 1 & 2), 2012. Mixed Media on Paper. Courtesy of the artist/Peter Lassen. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. 12.1 ReEntry at Baltimore’s Center Stage, 2010. Left to right: Bobby Moreno, Joseph Harrell, and P.J. Sosko. Written by Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez; directed by K.J. Sanchez; scene and costume design by Marion Williamson; lighting design by Russell Champa. Photo by Richard Anderson; courtesy K.J. Sanchez. 16.1 Armed members of the Black Panther Party stand in the California State Capitol on 2 May 1967. They were protesting a bill that would restrict their rights to carry arms in public. AP Photo/Walt Zeboski. 17.1 Bjorn Ahlstedt and Tami Dixon in Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, closing scene. Courtesy of Bricolage Production Company and jasoncohn.com. 17.2 Now Jane and Then Jane in The Oregon Trail. Courtesy of Impact Theatre. 17.3 Lysistrata Jones. Courtesy of Joan Marcus. 17.4 Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, Act 1. Courtesy of Kevin Berne and American Conservatory Theatre. 17.5 Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, pre-production. Courtesy of Kevin Berne and American Conservatory Theatre. 18.1 The makeshift drone “control room.” Aerial ReCreation, part of the Altertruism series by Golden Solution. Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2014. Photo by Jesse Hunniford; courtesy Next Wave Festival. 18.2 One of the tethered drones. Aerial ReCreation, part of the Altertruism series by Golden Solution. Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2014. Photo by Jesse Hunniford; courtesy Next Wave Festival.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eylül Fidan Akıncı is a doctoral student in the Theatre Program at the Graduate Center of

the City University of New York. She completed her MA in Critical and Cultural Studies at Boğaziçi University in 2013. Her research interests include dramaturgy, contemporary dance, object performance, and new materialism. Sarah Bay-Cheng is Professor and Chair of Theater and Dance at Bowdoin College, where she teaches modern drama and digital media performance, and researches the intersections among technology, literature, theatre, and history. Her most recent book is the co-authored Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (2015). Sarah Beck is a playwright and PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College studying the dramaturgy of war in verbatim practice. Beck co-wrote This Much is True, a verbatim play about the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes (Theatre 503), and has contributed to Performing Ethos and the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen. tyler boudreau served 12 years in the Marine Corps, was an infantry captain, and deployed to Iraq in 2004. He is the author of Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine (2008) and other publications. boudreau received a PhD in Communication from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with a concentration in Performance Studies. Sara Brady is Associate Professor at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York and Managing Editor of TDR. Her monograph Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: “Whatever It Takes” was published by Palgrave in 2012. She is co-editor with Fintan Walsh of Crossroads: Performance Studies and Irish Culture (Palgrave 2009) and co-editor with Henry Bial of the Performance Studies Reader, 3rd ed. (Routledge 2015). Her writing has also appeared in New Hibernia Review, American Theatre Magazine, and Behemoth. Alexis Bushnell has a PhD in International Human Rights Law. She has worked as a consultant

to the United Nations in Somalia and teaches courses on human rights law, civil and political

Contributors xi

rights, and refugees. She is a Research Associate and Managing Editor for the Centre on Religion and Global Affairs. Solveig Gade is a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Copenhagen. Publications include her book, Intervention & Kunst (Intervention & Art 2010), and essays on social and political engagement in contemporary theatre and performance in journals, including TDR, The Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Diffractions. From 2008 to 2014 she worked as a dramaturge at The Danish Royal Theatre. Wendy S. Hesford is Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of

Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (U Minnesota 1999), and Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, and Feminisms (Duke UP 2011). She is presently Visiting Professor/Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and working on her next monograph, Exceptional Rhetorics: Regulating Childhood and Children’s Rights. Emily Klein is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is the

author of Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in Performance 1930–2012 (Routledge 2014) and co-editor of Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual, and Images of Home (forthcoming from University of Iowa Press). Lindsay Adamson Livingston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Media

Arts at Brigham Young University. Her work focuses on performance and material culture at the intersections of race, space, and memory. She is completing a book project on the gun as a performing object. Scott Magelssen is Associate Professor at the University of Washington and is the author of Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (2014) and Living History Museums (2007). He is co-editor of Enacting History (2011) and Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions (2010). He is also editor of Southern Illinois University Press’s Theater in the Americas book series and hosts the website theater-historiography.org with Henry Bial. Lindsey Mantoan is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Linfield College. She is the author of War

as Performance: Conflict in Iraq and Political Theatricality (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan). Jessica Nakamura is Assistant Professor of Theatre at University of Nevada, Reno. Her current research project explores performances of World War II memories in contemporary Japan. Justine Nakase is a PhD candidate at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is an Irish Research Council Funded Scholar. Her work looks at race, identity, and interculturalism in contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Elin Nicholson is currently a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow (2015–18) at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Elin completed her doctoral dissertation on contemporary Palestinian theatre as cultural resistance against both the Israeli military occupation and the more conservative elements of Palestinian society in 2014.

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Contributors

Bart Pitchford is a PhD candidate in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin. His dissertation examines the intersection of performance and citizenship amongst displaced Syrians living in Jordan. Bart received his MA in Theatrical Sound Design from Louisiana Tech University. He also spent six years as an active duty Psychological Operations soldier. Kashif Jerome Powell is a Los Angeles-based actor, visual artist, and scholar. He received his

PhD in Performance Studies and Critical Race Theory from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He and his partner, a doctor of naturopathic medicine, have recently launched a blog, Phoenix Black, which promotes the liberation of the Black community by exposing the connections between health, education, politics, and art. Cami Rowe is Lecturer in Performance Theory at Goldsmiths College, where she convenes

modules on creative protest and radical performance. An interdisciplinary scholar and activist, she holds a PhD in Politics and an MPhil in Drama. She has produced numerous publications on the topic of political resistance by war veterans. Susanne Shawyer is dramaturg and Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Elon University,

where she also serves as coordinator of the Drama and Theatre Studies program. Her published work explores the dramaturgy of protest, intersections of modern theatre theory and political performance, and the history of applied theatre. Áine Sheil is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of York, UK. She has published

articles and chapters on contemporary opera practice, opera-related arts policy, and the production and reception history of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Michael St. Clair received his PhD from Stanford University in Theater and Performance Studies. His artistic practice and scholarship focus on the intersections among play, games, and performance. He also works as a theatrical designer and creative consultant. Jacqueline Viskup holds a PhD in Theater Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara, with a doctoral emphasis in Feminist Studies. Her research interests include women, war, and the US military in performance, feminist performance theory, and US Latina Theater. She teaches, directs, and freelances in arts fundraising and development. Asher Warren is completing a PhD on intermedial participatory performance at the University of Melbourne. He convenes Performance Studies Melbourne, is a member of the IFTR Intermediality Working group, and graduate student member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures (RUPC). He has published in Performance Research and Australasian Drama Review. Katherine Zien is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at McGill University. She

researches theatre and performance in the Americas. Her monograph, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone, investigates performances and legal constructions of imperialism, race, and sovereignty in the Panama Canal Zone in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

PREFACE Performance in the Age of Intelligent Warfare Sarah Bay-Cheng

In his 1991 book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, philosopher Manuel De Landa observed the ways in which military systems have changed in response to the refinement of digital technologies since World War II. “Today’s computerized networks,” he wrote, “are imposing on the military the need to decentralize control schemes, just as the conidial bullet forced it in the nineteenth century to decentralize its tactical schemes” (45). As I read Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan’s anthology manuscript in the summer of 2016, it occurs to me that part of this decentralization repeats in the conscription of digitally engaged citizens throughout the world within a new kind of decentralized and technological military network. After all, many of the devices and machines that we now readily take for granted—wristwatches, microwave ovens, personal computers, mobile phones, USB file drives, digital printing, GPS, the internet, and so on—began as military projects. Further, as the revelations of Edward Snowden made clear in 2013, even the most seemingly innocuous use of social media could be coopted by international governments as part of widespread digital surveillance. In the United States, more research funding is directed to military purposes than any other, including public health and other scientific research. According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science report on research funding for fiscal year 2013, the money spent on research for the Department of Defense (typically through DARPA, or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) exceeded all other agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health, NASA, etc.) combined (AAAS). Such realities are hardly a surprise any more, but events in the summer of 2016 have made their repercussions all the more evident. In mid-July 2016, the Dallas police responded to a sniper who was targeting officers assigned to a Black Lives Matter protest. Under the orders of the Chief of Police, David Brown, the police sent a robot equipped with explosives to the location of the shooter, killing him when the bomb detonated and likely preventing further deaths. As many news outlets remarked, it was a tactic “unprecedented,” but unlikely to remain unique; Chief Brown defended his choice to the media, arguing that “This wasn’t an ethical dilemma, for me. I’d do it again to save our officers” (Sidner and Simon 2016). Whatever the ethical implications, the event was a thoroughly militarized exercise. The protest was organized in response to the recent police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The Dallas sniper,

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Micah Xavier Johnson, was a former member of the US Army Reserves who had served a nine-month tour in Afghanistan. In the July 7 shooting, elements brewing throughout the summer of 2016 converged: the rise of Black Lives Matter protests in response to police assaults on Black men and women in America; the increased militarization of the US police force as recipients of surplus military technology (Apuzzo 2014); the ongoing debate regarding second-amendment access to firearms; and the return of former military personnel from ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other military actions targeting Daesh, or the Islamic State. What does it mean to consider performance in such a context? In his 2001 Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie detailed connections among technological performance, military operations, and performance studies, noting the “applicability of cultural performance models in understanding the decision-making processes guiding the design, construction, and evaluation of technological performances that range from consumer products to public infrastructure systems” (130). Performance in a Militarized Culture continues that process, using modes of performance analysis to not only understand but also confront and perhaps resist the effects of militarization in contemporary culture. The chapters demonstrate how instrumental performance and theatricality have been to militarized cultures, both contemporary and historical. As Brady and Mantoan argue in their introduction, “performance is and has to be understood as key” to the militarization of culture we experience every day. Their collective implication may be even darker, as they highlight the transformation of citizens into surveillance subjects and the weapons that haunt our social interactions like Hamlet’s ghost, spurring us to aggression. In 1991 De Landa suggested that computer technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), shift cognitive processes from humans to machines and thereby alter the logic and processes of warfare. For the past decade (longer?), researchers developing AI increasingly have relied on crowdsourcing to improve its functioning. Their methods often draw on integrations of social media and consumer shopping, as for example, Amazon’s Alexa, which combines the AI personal assistant with the website’s vast array of products (Simonite 2012). (This was, at least in part, the dystopian future depicted in Alex Gardner’s 2014 film Ex Machina.) If De Landa and Snowden are correct, then one has to conclude that widespread global participation in otherwise banal online activities fuels and enhances digital, militarized culture as collective thinking shifts from individual processing to algorithms and digital predictors. In other words, we may be friending and shopping our way to the next generation of thinking military machines, even as we outsource much of our individual decision-making. Recalling recent events during the extraordinarily hot summer of 2016, I am reminded of Nietzsche’s warning that, “when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you” ([1886] 2002:69). In such a context, what is our relation to the thinking, warring machines around us, and how much of their intelligence have we absorbed? Mantoan and Brady’s valuable anthology may not provide easy answers or reassurances, but they draw our attention back to performance as a mode for thinking and performing through our militarized, contemporary culture.

References American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 2013. “AAAS Report XXXVII: Research and Development FY 2013.” Accessed 22 August 2016. https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/ migrate/uploads/tbli013.pdf. Apuzzo, Matt. 2014. “War Gear Flows to Police Departments.” The New York Times, 8 June. Accessed 22 August 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-police-departments. html.

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De Landa, Manuel. 1991. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. New York: Zone Books. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London; New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. [1886] 2002. “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” Eds Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman; trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidner, Sara, and Mallory Simon. 2016. “How Robot, Explosives Took out Dallas Sniper.” CNN, 12 July. Accessed 22 August. http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/12/us/dallas-police-robot-c4-explosives/. Simonite, Tom. 2012. “Artificial Intelligence, Powered by Many Humans,” MIT Technology Review, 10 September. Accessed 24 August 2016. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/429118/artificialintelligence-powered-by-many-humans/.

INTRODUCTION: IN THE ABSENCE OF THE GUN Performing Militarization Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan

The Weapons Effect In 1967, researchers at the University of Wisconsin tested the idea that the mere presence of a weapon—a gun—“can elicit aggressive responses from people ready to act aggressively” (Berkowitz and LePage 1967:202). After receiving an electric shock by a “peer,” 100 male college students “were then given an opportunity to shock this person.” One of the variables involved was what else was in the room. “In some cases a rifle and revolver were on the table near the shock key. These weapons were said to belong, or not to belong, to the available target person. In other instances there was nothing on the table near the shock key, while for a control group 2 badminton racquets were on the table near the key.” The experiment, which has been studied, independently tested, criticized, affirmed, debunked, and reaffirmed, found that “[t]he greatest number of shocks was given by the strongly aroused [subjects] when they were in the presence of the weapons. The guns had evidently elicited strong aggressive responses from the aroused men” (202). Conducted during a time of war and social unrest—a time in the US marked by the relative (if racist) support for gun control—Berkowitz and LePage’s study engaged how a select group of men performed, with props, on demand and under duress. Now known as the “weapons effect,” the concept that the mere presence of a gun or other weapon increases aggression and violence continues to haunt our understanding of the contemporary world—from the gun sale spikes that occur after a mass shooting to the comparatively fewer incidents of civilian deaths at the hands of police who don’t carry guns (see Rojanasakul and Migliozzi 2016; Noack 2015). Regardless of one’s “belief ” in the weapons effect, the example offers a way of looking at culture. Used as a lens, the weapons effect illuminates in particular the militarized cultures that communities across the globe live within. We wonder: What would happen if there was a fourth group in the experiment—a group for which the guns at first were present, and then removed. Would this group display the same levels of aggression as those who never saw a gun on the table? Would their aggression match those subjects who were always in the presence of a gun?

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In many ways, Performance in a Militarized Culture considers the consequences of weapons in society—both present and absent. Do weapons, once removed, continue to haunt the space? Influence behavior and policy? Reproduce trauma? We posit that total militarization takes place in conditions where the gun need no longer be present for hearts and minds to live in a constant state of military preparedness as well as a more invisible and insidious surrender to the military machine. Yet the process of militarization need not be total to have profound effects on individual psyches and cultural production.

Performance in a Militarized Culture As the long cultural moment that was the immediate aftermath of 9/11 draws to a close, the war on terror has given rise to global militarized cultures. The insidious nature of the war on terror hasn’t disappeared; it has transformed itself into a values system that prioritizes the military. The genealogy of this modern militarization extends through the 20th century, from the shock of the World Wars through the Cold War. This anthology examines militarization as a vital concern for 20th and 21st century performance. Militarized cultures encompass both occupied territories and those subsisting there, and societies not currently under threat of war but that nevertheless put the concerns of civil society in the service of an increasingly powerful military culture. Performance in a Militarized Culture claims that performance is and has to be understood as key to this militarization. The scholars and artists included in this anthology shed light on the militarization of the everyday, from life under occupation to the arming of local police forces with decommissioned military-grade weapons. The discourse of performance illuminates the particular nature of this geopolitical moment: We are subsumed in both obvious and invisible ways into a worldview that privileges military culture on local, national, and global levels. This militarization relies on and performs dehumanization through military mechanisms such as basic training, deployment, and remote warfare; but civilian life, we argue, is equally dehumanized—equally militarized. Drones are military objects, but they not only require less-than-military-grade training to operate; they also fly everywhere—not just over government land and conflict zones but through the “everyday” sky. Civilians now live under the drone. Around the world, militarized cultures leave some struggling to live everyday life amid the justifiable fear of terrorism, while those more privileged enjoy a distant, imagined fear of such danger. The global everyday is not only controlled through militarization but is also experienced in vastly different ways depending on factors ranging from location to socioeconomic class to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religious beliefs. Faced with a status quo that continues to militarize the most practical operations of everyday life, from traffic light cameras to cellphone metadata collection, civilians are increasingly less recognizable as “private citizens” than as subjects of surveillance and counterinsurgency culture. Creating scripts for people to believe and believe in, performance is used to secure and maintain power, even while the performative force of militarization subdues civilian cultures. The discourse of performance illuminates the particular nature of this geopolitical moment: We are not just post-9/11, post-Cold War, post-Arab Spring. We are subsumed in both obvious and invisible ways into a worldview that privileges military culture on local, national, and global levels. Performance in a Militarized Culture has two primary goals: (1) to investigate how militarization appropriates and deploys performance techniques; and (2) to analyze the ways in which performing arts practices confront militarization and are themselves militarized.

Introduction

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Militarism and Militarization In order to construct useful points of contact between performance and militarization, it is first necessary to define both “militarism” and “militarization” with attention to how one is distinguished from the other. Historians and social scientists have generally prioritized “militarism” as the “older concept, usually defined as either the dominance of the military over civilian authority, or, more generally, as the prevalence of warlike values in a society” (Gillis 1989:1 citing Berghan 1984). Oxford Dictionaries refer to “militarism” as “chiefly derogatory” and define the word as “the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests.” Militarism is more often associated with the modern world through the mid-20th century. In contrast, the more active verb “militarize” begins to indicate a process more than simply an ideology or status quo. Use of “militarize” varies from the adjective characterizing a noun—e.g., a “militarized police force”—to indications of a stronger action, such as to “equip or supply (a place) with soldiers and other military resources: a militarized security zone” (Oxford Online Dictionary). Scholars have similarly worked to distinguish “militarism” from “militarization.” Michael Geyer defines militarization as “the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” (Geyer 1989:79). Incorporating Geyer’s definition, John Gillis writes: Militarization is less a thing than a process, one that does not depend on precise definitions of warlike values or even on distinctions like civilian/military, which developed in the classical era of constitution-making during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but which have less and less saliency in the contemporary world. (1989:2) Militarization, therefore, relies not only on history, but the belief in particular historical narratives, as well as culture and a belief in “progress.” And importantly for 21st-century global relations, militarization need not be linked to nations and their governments. Gillis foregrounds the ongoing interaction between society and organization of armed forces: “it is precisely because militarization is a historical process, an ever-changing set of relationships between military and society, that it cannot be pinned down for precise definition or projected onto the ‘other,’ as if it did not apply to us. [. . .] militarization […] is not necessarily leading us in any predetermined direction” (3). Militarization is then inherently linked to performance. It is an iterative process; we are not born militarized, but through performances we repeat daily, we become militarized through a slow process that “may take generations to occur, or […] may happen suddenly as the response to a particular trauma” (Enloe 2007:18). Militarization is not synonymous with a country’s military, but it is also not-not that military. In other words, as the behavior of civilians linking everyday concerns with those of a military force, the line separating civilian and military fades. For Cynthia Enloe, militarization is: a transforming process that happens over time sometimes rapidly, though often at a slow, hard-to-spot creep. And like the process of globalization, militarizing trends can simultaneously change the influence one person has on another, can alter how stories are

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interpreted, can turn meanings upside down. To become militarized is to adopt militaristic values (e.g., a belief in hierarchy, obedience, and the use of force) and priorities as one’s own, to see military solutions as particularly effective, to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes. (2007:3–4) Militarization therefore has no beginning and no end. It’s as old as the human species and as new as the drone. It’s as separate from everyday life as body armor, and yet as intertwined with the very ordinary human behaviors of watching commercials for “military grade” Ford trucks, or wearing Under Armour. It’s the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on cancer, the war on Christmas.

Space, Memory, Soldiers, and the Everyday In an effort to embrace the many permutations of militarization, this anthology is divided into four sections: Sites of Conflict, Militarized History and Memory, Performing the Soldier, and the Militarization of the Everyday. Sites of Conflict investigates the ways in which land, space, and architecture carry memories of past militarized events, even while nations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) attempt to repurpose them for more peaceful or commercial ends. This section also celebrates performances of survival in refugee and occupied spaces, and challenges spectacular performances of violence enacted by governments to control and oppress populations. Chapters by Katherine Zien and Alexis Bushnell and Justine Nakase establish the inescapability of a “militarized genealogy” (30) of spaces and structures formerly used for military means, even while those sites are being deployed for non-military uses. Zien’s chapter, “Mises-en-scène of Militarization: Decommissioning US Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone,” offers a history of sites in Panama formerly designated as US military bases which currently host universities and NGOs. Zien demonstrates the difficulty of rehabilitating militarized spaces. Bushnell and Nakase’s chapter, “Military Aid: The Spatial Performances and Performativity of Contemporary Refugee Camps” examines the organization of sites functioning as refugee camps, which are often modeled on—and sometimes literally located on—concentration camps and other sites designed to control and contain occupants. The architectural genealogy of camps militarizes sites intended to offer refuge, instead placing displaced persons under a panopticon and restricting or dictating their movement through the camp. The role of performance in struggles for power and survival in refugee camps is explored further in chapters by Elin Nicholson and Bart Pitchford. In “The Freedom Theatre and Cultural Resistance in Jenin, Palestine,” Nicholson analyzes testimonies and statements by the artistic staff of the Freedom Theatre (TFT) in the Jenin Refugee Camp and the ways in which TFT performs opposition to the military occupation of Jenin and the West Bank by Israel. “Tactical Performance Across a Revolutionary Timeline” shares Pitchford’s first-hand experience in Amman, Jordan, where he studied Nawar Bulbul’s theatrical responses to the 2011 Syrian Revolution. By comparing Bulbul’s pre-revolutionary tactics to the ones he deploys in Amman while the revolution continues in Syria, Pitchford demonstrates dissident artists’ tactical adaptability. Sites of militarization include refugee camps as well as nations governed by authoritarians who deploy the police or military to control those under their rule. Examining Turkey’s

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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his production and regulation of death, Eylül Akıncı considers Turkey a state of the dead, or necropolis. Her chapter, “Sacred Children, Accursed Mothers: Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey,” argues that government uses of brutal police tactics, rhetoric that labels victims of that violence as terrorists, and regulations of burials, deny full life to its citizens. Part Two, Militarized History and Memory, studies the ways in which memory and behavior can be militarized, and demonstrates the lasting effects on culture of previous iterations of militarization. Áine Sheil articulates how public discourse around Wagner’s Die Meistersinger in the interwar period enabled subversion of the demilitarization provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the performance of a more positive result of tension between nations. In “‘Stop the War in Chicago Please’: Performative Protest and the Limits of Dissensus,” Susanne Shawyer examines the public response to the violent confrontations between anti-war demonstrators and the National Guard at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The televised brutality outraged the public, many of whom implored President Johnson to use his authority as Commander-in-Chief to intervene in the increasingly militarized conflict. The existence of military bases in a community has profound effects on cultural memory. Jessica Nakamura argues in “Choreographies of Militarized Space: US Military Bases, Everyday Life, and Performance in Okinawa, Japan” that the continued US military presence in Okinawa creates conflict on political and personal levels. Drawing from on-site research, Nakamura demonstrates how interventionist performance disrupts the effects produced by the US military presence. Solveig Gade traces the revival of a militarized culture in Denmark that began in the 1990s and continued in the aftermath of 9/11. This military posture has enjoyed broad support and is reflected in the reemergence of the battle-painting genre. In “Reviving the Tradition of the Battle Painting: The Militarization of Danish Culture,” Gade presents the historical evolution of the battle-painting in Denmark and investigates the ways in which some contemporary artists are using the genre to challenge this new militarization. Part Three, Performing the Soldier, examines three types of performance: service people performing their roles as warriors, artists representing military personnel, and civilians taking up aspects of military life in everyday performances. “Soldier Street Theatre” details author tyler boudreau’s experience serving in Iraq in 2004 as part of the “Hearts and Minds” campaign. Counterinsurgency, according to boudreau, requires an impossible script, demanding that soldiers be both friendly and ready to fire their weapons at all times. This contradiction requires a complex improvisation which theatre and performance studies offer a framework to understand. Both Lindsey Mantoan and Sarah Beck evaluate representations of military engagements based on first-hand accounts. Mantoan’s chapter, “No Easy Mission: Zero Dark Thirty and Gendered Heroism in the Post-Heroic Age,” argues that the US raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden offered a performance of masculine heroism in an age where drones and other technologies have diminished the need for valor in warfare. In “Going Outside the Wire: Service Members as Documentary Subjects in Black Watch and ReEntry,” Beck analyzes the methodological questions practitioners of documentary theatre must face when using veterans as subjects. While scholars have given significant attention to the ways in which video gaming positions and trains the gamer as a soldier, academia has largely overlooked the performative methodologies of strategic gaming used to envision and plan future conflicts. Michael St. Clair’s

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chapter, “Strategic Simulation and the American Military Imaginary,” argues that strategic simulation is both playful and a performance that offers healing from trauma and bureaucratic decision-making processes. While the first four chapters in this section address what it means to perform as military personnel, the final two chapters understand the concept of performing the soldier differently. In “Challenging the Characterizations of Military Service: A Critical Comparison of British and American Counter-Recruitment Efforts,” Cami Rowe analyzes counter-recruitment performances by civilians and veterans. These protest performances offer competing visions of soldiers that recruitment efforts mask. Scott Magelssen takes the performance of the soldier into the everyday, charting the lineage of the commercial airplane pilot’s voice back to fighter pilots’ voices from World War II and the Cold War. Using field research and interviews, Magelssen argues in “Performing Flight: Test Pilots, Commercial Airlines, and the Cold War” that the pilot’s voice and its studied folksiness serves as an instrument of control for passengers. The Militarization of the Everyday, Part Four, tackles the insidious and invisible nature of militarization, from the ways in which pervasive gun culture reflects military history and readiness to the militarization of the police. Lindsay Adamson Livingston’s “Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement” investigates the complex interplay between militarization, race relations, gun rights, and attitudes toward violence. Asher Warren’s “Weaponized Bureaucracy: Kill-Chains, Drones, and Tethers” studies the way military and arts organizations have produced similar risk-management cultures. He draws attention to the commonalities between the invisible management of risk—efforts to control the uncontrollable—concerning drones in both artistic performances and military use. Emily Klein and Jacqueline Viskup investigate the ways in which militarization affects our present and our future. In “Failure, Future Tense: Adaptation, Affect, and Apathy in American Theatre’s Militarized Dystopias,” Klein examines four theatrical performances of future dystopias. She argues that anti-heroes in theatrical performances traffic in apathy and failure in order to find space to resist militarization. In “Re-staging Surveillance Tragedy as Critical Resistance,” Viskup incorporates theory on the social function of tragedy to legal scholar Lawrence S. Zacharias’s concept of “surveillance tragedy,” which finds that subjects of surveillance will behave erratically to elude those watching. Analyzing the audience responses to Adriano Shaplin’s Pugilist Specialist and George Brant’s Grounded, Viskup contends that these plays give audiences with tools to resist a culture of militarized surveillance. In “The Time to Break (Silence): Disavowing the Affects of Militarization and Death through the Performance of Black Existence,” Kashif Powell offers first-person narrative of his interactions with his mother in the wake of the San Bernadino terrorist attack. Powell’s emotional response to that event was immediately overwhelmed by yet another shooting of a black man by police. Powell’s chapter argues that the culture of militarization in the US has flooded American political and social consciousness and dehumanizes Black and Brown lives in order to justify acts of state violence. The range of topics covered by this volume includes the entrenchment of military awareness and an expectation of surrendering autonomy to the machinery of the state, as well as theatrical and spectacular performances in occupied territories that reaffirm humanity and what Judith Butler would call our shared precariousness. In her afterword, “Constitutive Performances: Human Rights in a Militarized Culture,” Wendy S. Hesford considers the ways human rights activists use virtual technologies to draw attention to the often invisible appendages of state power. We contend in this volume that military culture is inextricably linked to

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all culture—that it is invisible and omnipresent—and we ask what rights and options for resistance we might still have. We also interrogate the facile assumption that militarization is always something to be resisted, even while we seek out paths toward non-violence and autonomy.

References Berghan, Volker. 1984. Militarism: The History of an International Debate, 1861–1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berkowitz, Leonard, and Anthony LePage. 1967. “Weapons as Aggression-Eliciting Stimuli.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 7, 2:202–07. #BlackLivesMatter (BLM). 2016. “Guiding Principles” Black Lives Matter website. Accessed 18 August. http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/. Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: the international politics of militarizing women’s lives. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 2007. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Geyer, Michael. 1989. “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945.” In The Militarization of the Western World edited by John R. Gillis, 65–102. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gillis, John. 1989. “Introduction.” In The Militarization of the Western World edited by John R. Gillis, 1–10. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Noack, Rick. 2015. “5 countries where police officers do not carry firearms, and it works well.” Chicago Tribune, 20 February. Accessed 18 August 2016. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ chi-countries-where-police-officers-do-not-carry-guns-20150219-story.html. Rojanasakul, Mira, and Blacki Migliozzi. 2016. “After Orlando, Gun Sales Surged.” Bloomberg.com 7 July. Accessed 18 August. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-gun-sales/.

PART I

Sites of Conflict

1 MISES-EN-SCÈNE OF MILITARIZATION Decommissioning US Military Infrastructure in the Panama Canal Zone Katherine Zien

“Panama will always be surrounded by the ghosts of military bases.” Sociologist Raúl Leis (in Lindsay-Poland 2003–205)

FIGURE 1.1

City of Knowledge, Panama, in August 2010. Photo by Katherine Zien.

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Introduction “Only a few minutes away from Panama City, and strategically located alongside the Canal!” intones the narrator of a video advertisement for the City of Knowledge (la Ciudad del Saber), a 300-acre campus hosting universities and NGOs (Ciudad del Saber 2014). As the camera pans over the grounds, the narrator describes the conversion of this former US military base, Fort Clayton, into “a thriving international community where academic, scientific, humanistic, and corporate institutions collaborate to further human and sustainable development based on knowledge.” Clayton’s “old barracks and […] military facilities have been transformed into modern offices, laboratories, and classrooms […] to create a favorable environment for research, learning, innovation, creativity, and interaction” (ibid). For those who knew the area before its transformation, the City of Knowledge departs little from Clayton’s layout: imposing terracotta and stucco structures built between the 1930s and 1950s, with sloping pagoda-like roofs that create a not-unintentional orientalizing effect, seem to float atop pristine, palm-lined grounds. The video juxtaposes sepia-toned vintage photographs of Clayton with colorful presentday images of the red and cream buildings, where multicultural groups gather for conferences and gaze out at the dawning of a proverbial bright new day. Clayton is one of many former US military installations repurposed by the Republic of Panama. Ratification of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties (1977–1978) set in motion the Panama Canal handover, a process whereby the US government returned the Canal and its surrounding Canal Zone—a 553-square-mile territory occupied by the United States since 1904—to Panama. The Panamanian government made plans for the reuse of the Canal Zone’s terrain and infrastructure, transferred between 1979 and 1999 (Figure 1.2 shows a map of US military installations in Panama). One of Panama’s primary goals was to make all former US military sites civilian. The Pentagon had sought to retain some bases after 1999, but this effort was quashed in part by a Panamanian civil society outraged after decades of foreign military occupation (Lindsay-Poland 2003:188). As Clayton and other bases were converted to civilian uses, the Panama Canal’s handover was hailed as both decolonization and demilitarization. The former bases have met multifarious ends since their reversion. Near the City of Knowledge is the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, formerly a US Air Force installation. A luxury resort hotel owned by the Melía Corporation occupies the grounds and buildings of the former United States Army School of the Americas (USARSA, or SOA) (1949–1984), where US officers trained many of Latin America’s military and paramilitary forces in counterinsurgency tactics including torture, terror, espionage, and the use of USmanufactured weapons (Gill 2004). Apart from the bases that were rehabilitated and given new contexts (Clayton and Gulick), other sites were razed (Amador) or left to squatters and rot (Coco Solo). There is no overarching narrative in which to situate these sites’ transitions; the sole link is their demilitarization. It is understandable that Panama’s government has little incentive or desire to preserve these sites’ military pasts. Because US occupation of the Canal Zone went hand-in-glove with militarization, Panamanian leaders feel that the bases’ histories are not part of Panama’s national narrative—a trajectory marked by independence from Colombia in 1903, and sovereignty over the Canal in 1999. In repurposing these sites, the Panamanian government has framed their conversion as a sharp break with the past—and with militarism. While retaining the bases’ physical structures, the Panamanian government seeks to intervene in and alter the embodied

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FIGURE 1.2 Map showing historical bases in the former Canal Zone. Panama Canal Museum Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

ways that people interact(ed) with the sites. The areas, formerly off-limits to many Panamanians, are now declared peaceful and accessible (at least to those who can afford to lease or buy property there)—a process felt to be crucial to the recuperation of Panama’s post-colonial sovereignty. The conversion of that which I am calling the “former military Zone,” while highly laudable, tends to omit the intimate histories of relationships between base personnel and Panamanians, although these histories cannot be preserved or commemorated easily. The former military Zone was, in fact, host to daily micro-interactions of thousands of workers, soldiers, and dependents. Many people in Panama and the United States remember this military Zone

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positively. Indeed, the bases were, by and large, not spaces of violence: rather, they hosted exchanges, pedagogy, training, and transfers of military technique—crucially, through modes of performance, in combat simulations—that were intended for use in “other” sites. With notable exceptions in 1964 and 1989, the Panamanian isthmus did not see direct combat. Rather, the former military Zone functioned as a series of “staging areas”—sites of simulation, representation, and deferral (Donoghue 2014:177). Even if Panama or the United States wanted to preserve their history, what might it mean to commemorate a “staging area,” or represent scenography? The bases’ peaceful conversion also reinforces a military-civilian divide. After the 1989 US invasion, Panama moved to officially eliminate its standing army. The gap between the isthmus’s military past and civilian present echoes mainstream attitudes in the contemporary United States, whose “civilian population,” broadly writ, experiences a sense of estrangement from military affairs, even as the US military “has been engaged in the longest period of sustained conflict in the nation’s history” (Pew 2011). A Pew Research Center report notes that “just one-half of one percent of American adults has served on active duty at any given time,” and enlistment numbers are at their lowest ebb since the interwar period (ibid). Several scholars and journalists examine the widening gap between civilian and military realms, which has become apparent in varying styles of US media coverage and political discourse over the past decades (see Lutz 2009; Gill 2004; Lindsay-Poland 2003:204; Cloud and Zucchino 2015). The Panama Canal Zone’s military infrastructure has, in fact, played a crucial role in constructing and elaborating military-civilian divides on the isthmus and in the United States. As I discuss below, military “staging areas”—located in a Canal Zone framed as both part of and separate from the domestic United States—have allowed US civilians to see the theatre of combat as simultaneously near and distant, violent and peaceful. An analysis of the former military Zone proves the impossibility of divorcing civilian from military strands, however. Praised for its demilitarization, the Zone hosted many civilian functions, conditions, and relationships of domesticity, humanitarianism, leisure, sport, and entertainment alongside its pedagogies of torture, espionage, US-supported proxy wars, chemical weapons testing, military-industrial alliances, and drug trafficking. Panama was strongly connected as a service center with ideological ramifications: as sites of transnational anti-Communist collaboration, the bases employed thousands of Panamanians. Even at their ebb in 1999, they brought in $249 million US dollars to Panama’s national income (Lindsay-Poland 2003:178). One of the artists whose work I address below, Enrique Castro Ríos, prominently displays this intimate military-civilian braid in his film Familia (Family, 2007), which includes vignettes of Castro Ríos and family members formerly employed by the military Zone (see Figure 1.3). Despite the semblance of a break between (foreign military) past and (civilian nationalized) present, the bases’ afterlives continue to “ghost” their contemporary moment. Temporal lags emerge in Panamanians’ naming practices for the ex-bases. While foreign visitors might find the City of Knowledge beautiful, many locals have difficulty envisioning it as anything other than a US military base, off-limits to them for roughly 50 years. Many Panamanians still refer to these areas by their US military names: “City of Knowledge” is still frequently called “Clayton”; a Panamanian friend observed that the US Army was replaced by a “UN Army” of bureaucrats. The late Panamanian sociologist Raúl Leis noted that Panamanians often felt a sense of disorientation and anxiety on entering the Zone, before and after its handover; he called this phenomenon “venganza inconsciente” (unconscious revenge) (Leis 2010).

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Screenshot from Familia (Family, 2007), listing Enrique Castro Ríos and family members as former US Department of Defense employees. Courtesy of Enrique Castro Ríos.

FIGURE 1.3

Even as the former bases have been converted to diverse ends, their pasts persist in haunting mises-en-scène, environmental pollutants, and memories—fond and troubling—that reside in the bodies and affects of people who lived and worked in and around them. Rather than constituting a deficiency, these uneven adjustments to the break are crucial rem(a)inders of the difficulty or impossibility of excising militarized components from spaces concertedly being reframed in the public imaginary as civilian and peaceful. Embodied pasts cling: the sites are sticky with meanings continuously (re)activated by those who remember and retell their histories of connection. Embedded in Panama’s temporal and political discourse of regained sovereignty are other disavowed, continuous histories of the former military Zone. These histories reveal the workings of coloniality—structures of racial and social inequality, modernity’s “dark side,” that do not end with decolonization (on coloniality, see: Mignolo 2011; Moraña, Dussel and Jáuregui 2008). Much like performance scholar Joseph Roach’s concept of “surrogation,” coloniality persists through distinct performers inhabiting comparatively stable roles (Roach 1996:2–3).

Militarization in/as Performance An analysis grounded in performance, then, can bring to the fore the embodied interchanges through which the former military Zone fostered a multitude of lives on the isthmus and in the United States. By reintroducing histories of bodily and affective contact

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that structured life on the bases, a performance-linked (re)definition of militarization can help to dissolve the constructed binary segregating civilian and military spheres. Citing performance theorist Rebecca Schneider, I note the former military Zone’s “inter(in)animation” of “body-to-body transmissions” of affect, gesture, and relation—normative rituals and everyday performativity—with the material structures that contained and shaped these myriad encounters (Schneider 2011:7, 104). The bases’ architecture and infrastructure conditioned in their users what Schneider calls performances of “modes of access,” or “experiential relations to knowledge” (104–05). Expanding upon Schneider’s work, I note that the bases’ architecture operates scenographically, encompassing both movement and materiality, aesthetics and sociality, to script behaviors and interactions past and present. Embodied and physical components alike contribute to shaping the bases’ “architecture of social memory” (Schneider 2011:99–100). Redefining militarization in light of performance also allows us to avoid fetishizing militarism’s violence (on distinctions between militarism and militarization, see Lutz 2002:725). Militarization is a process predicated upon the interpenetration of military and civilian behaviors, styles, and realms. Such processual interpenetration inheres in the OED’s definition of militarization as “the action of making military in character or style; […] transformation to military methods or status” (emphasis added). Military historians and performance scholars including Catherine Lutz, Cynthia Enloe, and Tracy C. Davis define militarization as a permanent state of readiness for war, even of rehearsing security and defense (see Enloe 2000; McEnaney 2000; Lutz 2001 and 2009; Davis 2007; Dudziak 2012; MacLeish 2013). Enloe characterizes militarization as a process that can transform nearly anything, even the most civilian-seeming objects and subjects. In particular, she explores the influences of militarization on women’s lives on the “home front,” often (and inaccurately) construed as war’s opposite. Historian Michael Geyer calls militarization the “social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” (in Gillis 1989:79). These accounts, focusing on possible futures of attack, reveal performance’s subjunctivity—“as if ”—to be a central component of militarization’s spatial and temporal imaginaries. If militarization embeds performance and functions scenographically, then we must reassess the former military Zone in light of the embodied interactions that it has hosted. This angle of approach reveals the Zone’s performance of transnational histories of military-civilian exchange, destabilizing national categorizations and neat narratives of (military) past and (civilian) present. The bases’ scenographic architecture and infrastructure are rem(a)inders of the challenges that attend a post-colonial move to reclaim—and condemn—former US military sites while disavowing their embeddedness in a Panamanian past (and present). The artists whose work I approach in the essay’s latter section—Enrique Castro Ríos and Dalida María Benfield—explore Panama’s histories of US military occupation through techniques of embodiment, site-specificity, and performance, to foreground the sites’ intertwinement of military and civilian, US and Latin American histories, and to reveal structures of coloniality occluded by discourses of demilitarization. Illuminating embodied histories of relation, as Castro Ríos and Benfield do, can bring war close and ground it in the everyday, opening distinct paths and “modes of access” to the former military Zone, to “resituate the site of any knowing of history as body-to-body transmission” (Schneider 2011:104). Perhaps performance offers a way to subvert or undo a story of the former bases that hinges upon decolonization and national independence, with the implicit temporalizing refrain: “Once theirs, now ours; once war, now peace.”

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Panama’s “Guns of Peace”: Building a Military-Civilian Divide The performance of a military-civilian divide has been central to Western hemispheric militarization, and the US government’s construction, and occupation of the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1999 played a significant role in this history. The US government’s occupation of the Panama Canal Zone by treaty, beginning in 1904, enabled the Zone’s transformation into a peaceful arena for the practice of post-war inter-Americanisms. Before US occupation of the Canal Zone, the US Navy was sent to the isthmus at least 12 times—twice at the Colombian government’s request—to protect “free passage” on the Panama Railroad (Lindsay-Poland 2003:16–24). After 1904, with the US Marines’ founding of Camp Elliott, US military contact with Panama made landfall. Canal construction was accompanied by debates over the reach of US military power, pitting pro-military enthusiasts like Alfred T. Mahan and US President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) against anti-imperialists and members of US Congress and the public who did not want another violent intervention like the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) on US hands (Mahan 1911; Bryan 1899; Love 2004; Maurer and Yu 2011:93). TR, executor of Panama’s independence from Colombia in 1903, framed the Panama Canal as politically neutral, devoted to the peaceful stimulation of world trade. Panama would, TR assured critics, contribute to a more open world for commerce and communication, benefiting the United States and its hemispheric and global partners. The Canal’s slogan, “The land divided, the world united,” presaged a “global village” view of transnational capital mobility, disavowing bellicose aims. Meanwhile, the US military footprint in Panama grew: in 1911 US Congress appropriated $2 million for fortification of the Canal, constructing Forts De Lesseps, Randolph, Sherman, Amador, and Grant, and the US Army’s 10th Infantry garrison at Camp Otis (Enscore 2000:1–5; USARSO 2011). World War I induced further fortification (Johnson 1994:27–29). When the “Panama Canal Guard” was renamed as US troops after 1915, US military presence on the isthmus, allegedly for Canal defense, became entrenched (Enscore 2000:1–6, 1–8). Canal administrators continued to emphasize the civilian nature of their enterprise. Canal construction (1904–1914) was funded and administrated separately from US military installations. Canal employees were kept physically apart from US soldiers in the Canal Zone, although interactions (and altercations) occurred (Donoghue 2014:30). The Canal’s civilian premise, however, belied its location within the US Department of War and the civilian Zone’s chain of command, comprising high-ranking military officers (Johnson 1994:12–15). The Canal’s paradox—a US Army project called “civilian”—permeated its terrain with valences of militarization transposed to the realms of industrial labor, medicine, and social control. TR contributed to this military-civilian imbrication by calling Canal workers “an army of laborers” and the dynamite blasts that carved the Canal “guns of peace” (Inglis 1906). But TR’s military rhetoric nonetheless sought to portray Canal builders as at war with ungainly nature, not people. Despite its burgeoning military installations, the Panama Canal came to be considered an axis of Pan-Americanism (1890–1930), “Good Neighbor” politics (1933–1945), and larger discourses of amicable exchange. In 1960—four years before Panama-US relations hit their nadir in the violent Canal Zone flag protests—the US government continued to stress these ideas, promoting a campaign called “Operation Friendship” to strengthen ties between Panama and the Zone, as a metonym for US-Latin American relations at large (Time 1960; Natanson 1963; Donoghue 2014:84–85).1 Discourses of friendliness sustained domestic US support for

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the Canal even as Panama’s anti-US sentiment grew, and the military Canal Zone became the US government’s primary focus on the isthmus. World War II military buildup peaked in 1942–1943: the US Army occupied 134 sites in Panama and comprised 67,000 troops (Lindsay-Poland 2003:45; Enscore 2000:5–5; Johnson 1994:65). If being a “good neighbor” meant refraining from direct intervention in Latin America, then this approach enabled the United States to adopt the role of instructor and mentor to guerrilla fighters, death squads, and authoritarian militaries throughout the region. The most influential training installations—SOA, the Inter-American Air Force Academy (IAAFA), and the Jungle Operations Training Center—were created in the post-war era. After war’s end, more than 24 installations remained active, occupying 68 percent of the Zone’s terrain (Donoghue 2014:30).2 These included Fort Clayton, Howard Air Force Base, and Albrook Airfield— the last host to IAAFA, which graduated over 20,000 Latin American students between 1945 and 1989. At Fort Sherman’s 17,000-acre Jungle Operations Training Center (active 1953– 1999), US soldiers simulated combat in jungle conditions, using “mockups of Vietnamese villages” (“Early Days” 2016; Lindsay-Poland 2003:196). An especially important training site was US Fort Gulick, home to the SOA (1949–1984), which graduated 29,000 Latin American students (Lindsay-Poland 2003:196; see Figure 1.4). These bases composed a changing military landscape: the Panama Canal Department, established in 1917, became US Army Caribbean (USARCARIB) in 1947, part of the US Caribbean Command, which replaced the Caribbean Defense Command (USARSO 2015; Enscore 2000:4–2, 5–5, 6–2). In 1963, US Caribbean Command was renamed Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), an acknowledgment that the Caribbean was no longer its primary sphere of influence—upstaged, as it were, by Cold War counterinsurgency measures focused on Central and South America. USARCARIB became USARSOUTHCOM, or USARSO: the US Army Forces Southern Command (Enscore 2000:6–3).3 The post-war military zone coincided with the rise of “nuclearism,” and the concomitant recognition that the Panama Canal was indefensible from nuclear weapons (Lutz 2002:727). As the US military expanded in Panama, its stated rationale for doing so—Canal defense—became

FIGURE 1.4 Image from Melía Corporation Website showing Sol Melía Panamá (formerly Fort Gulick). Courtesy of Melía Hotels International.

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increasingly tenuous, and Panamanians protested the expansion. Large-scale demonstrations in 1947, and Panama’s rejection of the Filós-Hines Treaty to further extend US military holdings, signaled a dawning anti-US military activism that would foment the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties’ explicit focus on demilitarization (Lindsay-Poland 2003:60–61; Pearcy 1998; Enscore 2000:6–2; Johnson 1994:65). In the late 1970s, West Indian Panamanian scholar George Westerman asserted: “Panama is clamoring for the dismantling of the military apparatus now set up on the Canal Zone and for a new order in which the Canal Zone will be fully neutral, [and] cease being a part of the strategic complex of the United States” (Westerman n.d.:2). Removal of the bases was necessary “to guarantee the dignity of the Republic of Panama as a sovereign and independent nation” (2). While the US Department of Defense argued that the presence of US military bases benefited Panama, “Panama [was] in total disagreement with the concept that the USSOUTHCOM [was] a concrete manifestation of US interest in security assistance matters, not only for Panama, but for all of Latin America” (3). Along with Panama’s military leader General Omar Torrijos Herrera and several US groups, the United States Catholic Conference urged demilitarization, observing in 1975 that “the US military investment in the Canal Zone is more than double the total civil investment, [going] far beyond any notion of mere defense of the canal. In fact, the US Southern Command, located in the Canal Zone, is a training center for military from all over Latin America and a nerve center of military contact throughout the continent” (in Westerman n.d.:1).

“The Social Architecture of Memory”: Forts Clayton and Gulick Key loci of the US military’s “nerve center” were Forts Clayton and Gulick (Figures 1.1 and 1.4). Thousands of US and Latin American soldiers passed through these two bases. Both sites continue to play important roles in Panamanian life: Clayton is now the City of Knowledge, and Gulick is, surreally, a luxury resort. Yet little has changed in the visual layouts of Clayton and Gulick; their mises-en-scène harbor traces of diverse pasts, and continuities of coloniality, which Castro Ríos and Benfield take up in their respective works. Located on opposite ends of the Canal, Forts Clayton and Gulick tell distinct but interlinked stories of the military-civilian isthmus. Clayton was founded in 1919 as a central outpost of Canal defense (Enscore 2000:2– 3, 2–28). Clayton was a base for simulations of tactical maneuvers and ground war, in sand and jungle, by the 33rd Infantry and other units. But Clayton also hosted leisure and festivity, its high quality of life making it “the best infantry post on the Zone” in 1926 (3–5). The 33rd Infantry Band entertained troops in parades and sports events, and soldiers stationed at Clayton invented a holiday, Organization Day, in which they promenaded in carnivalesque costumes. As military historian Susan Enscore notes: “Fort Clayton was not only a place to work and train—it was a place to live” (ibid). Clayton boasted parks, golf courses, bowling alleys, swimming pools, softball fields, a petting zoo, theatres, clubhouses, bars, and even a “model airplane flying circle,” for use by US military families. Radio, television, and newspapers of the Southern Command Network (SCN) emanated from Clayton into Panama and the rest of the Canal Zone. Enscore chronicles Clayton’s transition from “housing” to “home”—a shift that made Clayton look like a US suburb. This was purposeful: the Department of Defense wanted career officers to settle on base, and many did (Enscore 2000:6–8 to 6–10). Enscore notes that Clayton was “a self-contained family-oriented community that is fondly remembered by the many who had the privilege to serve there” (8–3). To former residents, Fort Clayton was “a very special place” (2000:v). Positive views of Clayton abound in Internet

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forums like czimages.com, czbrats.com, and gozonian.com, in which US citizens and former residents of the Canal Zone, or “Zonians,” share memories and photographs. One Zonian, George Chevalier, has posted mementos from Clayton’s official closing ceremony in 1999. His captions recall “eating breakfast in the cafeteria, buying items in the Post Exchange Shoppette,” and “briefing the Commanding General on an up coming [sic] USARSO Special Event.” Chevalier concludes: “What a wonderful place of memories for me and many others. Goodbye Fort Clayton and all your ghosts. . .” (Chevalier 1999). These memorials to Clayton (among other Zone bases) attest to experiences far beyond militarism. They uphold Enloe’s description of militarization as absorbing the banal matter of everyday life: “memos, laundry, lovemaking, and the clinking of frosted beer glasses. Militarization is such a pervasive process, and thus so hard to uproot, precisely because in its everyday forms it scarcely looks life threatening” (Enloe 2000:3). Internet shrines, tinged with nostalgic ideality, reveal the performativity of militarization in the body-to-body encounters and interactions that informed life at Clayton for many of its inhabitants. Non-threatening normative practices to sustain life recall a Foucauldian definition of biopolitics or biopower that places the maintenance of life at the center of the activities of the modern state, so that the state can control the lives and deaths of its citizens—exercising nurturing as well as punitive functions (Foucault 1978:139, 143). Clayton performed the lifesustaining face of the US military—an aspect not often regarded as part of the military’s ability to deal with death. Yet in contrast with accounts of the peaceful Clayton—its sleepy suburban atmosphere—the base is also implicated in combat and counterinsurgency. Clayton initially housed the Jungle Operations Training Center, which later moved to Fort Sherman, becoming “the US Army’s premier jungle training school during the Vietnam War” (Enscore 2000:5–3). John Lindsay-Poland has researched chemical weapons testing, including on human subjects, at Clayton (Lindsay-Poland 2003:49). In 1986, Clayton became the headquarters for the reactivated Major Army Command USARSO; three years later, Clayton was the center of Operation Just Cause, the US invasion of Panama to oust Noriega (Enscore 2000:7–2 to 7–4). These less pleasant histories are occluded within Clayton’s sentimental past as “guardian” of the Canal, and its present as City of Knowledge. In contrast to Clayton’s many eulogies, far less has been written or spoken about former Fort Gulick (Figure 1.4). Established in 1941, in 1949 Gulick became home to the Latin American Ground School (first founded at Fort Amador in 1946) (Gill 2004:62). The Latin American Ground School (LAGS) was the precursor to the SOA and the center of the US Army Caribbean School, “the prime facility for educating Latin American military personnel,” where all courses were held in Spanish after 1956 (Hoffman 2009:89). Renamed the School of the Americas in 1963, the SOA cultivated networks of US officers and Latin American pupils, operating at the heart of the Canal Zone’s “listening post, training center, and staging area for the Pentagon in Latin America” (Donoghue 2014:177). A microcosm and spawning ground of regional Cold War alliances, Fort Gulick, home to the SOA, hosted pedagogies of “civic action” as well as counterinsurgency. “Civic action and security went hand in hand,” and development discourses flourished alongside the proliferation of mobile training teams (MTTs) (Gill 2004:74–75). The dark side of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was his intensification of Special Forces (Green Beret) involvement in and around the SOA. In distinct ways both furthered US Cold War agendas in the Americas. Fort Gulick—the SOA’s location from 1949 to 1984—is a foreboding place, as may be gathered from accounts of the many war criminals (convicted and untried) who were trained there by US instructors in torture, espionage, and guerrilla warfare.4 But daily life at Gulick was

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also thoroughly imbued with the performativity of inter-American friendliness, knowledge transfer, humanitarian outreach, and biopower. The lexicon of Cold War anti-Communism at Gulick, as encapsulated in the US military’s Southern Command News (SCN)—a periodical that reported on the base’s daily life—is crowded with terms like “assist,” “cooperate,” “aid,” and “support.” War is not called war, but “security.” While SCN surely traded in euphemisms, and the newspaper did not highlight the more violent aspects of Gulick, it is also clear that the SOA hosted a flourishing climate of social and pedagogical interchange. The SOA was, after all, a school, “provid[ing] a full field of education in more than 40 courses […] for senior officers to functionally oriented specialized-training courses for cadets and enlisted men” (Westerman n.d.:4). Courses included accounting and fiscal management, administrative theory, weights and measures, and theories of security (SCN 1974f ). Panama’s military dictators, Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, were SOA graduates and CIA allies (Gill 2004:81). Calling the SOA a site of pedagogies is not meant to assuage its horror, but to enlarge the site’s history. Attending only to the violent SOA provides a skewed sense of what actually transpired there, reinforcing a military-civilian divide. Like Clayton, Gulick hosted sports fields, lush golf courses, and entertainments for Latin American students and their US supervisors (Gill 2004:67). US army newspapers SCN and Tropic Times chronicle a variety of leisure and recreational activities at Gulick/the SOA, involving cadets, instructors, and military families. The SOA’s training exercises were elaborate performance games: in these large-scale simulations of combat, US trainers and Latin American students practiced fighting a fictional “enemy”—a role frequently played by Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Forces (SCN 1974b, 1974g). In simulated combat, US instructors adopted mentorship roles, supporting their students’ pedagogical practices of counterinsurgency. Photographs of these jungle simulations show US and Latin American officers “exchanging ideas,” as stated by one caption—with clear overtones of collaborationist Pan-Americanism. Training also included “civic action” trips to sites in Panama and throughout Latin America, where cadets performed humanitarian services—for example, providing medical care and entertaining civilians with parachuting tricks (SCN 1974c, 1974d). Meanwhile, military wives hosted fashion shows, clubs, and amateur theatricals on base, even bringing home Latin American cadets for Thanksgiving as part of a program called RUSH: “Revealing US Hospitality” (SCN 1974a, 1974e). While proponents of the Canal Zone’s military infrastructure at midcentury emphasized the positive connections flowing out of Gulick, Clayton, and other sites, today observers are more likely to remember the violence of their proliferation of state-sponsored terror techniques. Neither narrative provides a balanced view of how life unfolded for residents and employees of the military Zone. As historian Michael Donoghue argues in his multifaceted study of the Canal Zone (2014), we must not downplay the significance of cultural interactions in the military Zone, even at the School of the Americas, because many Panamanians and US citizens viewed (and continue to view) these sites in their multiplicity—a perspective that does not overlook the negative aspects of the military infrastructure but understands the military Zone critically, within contexts of biopolitics and coloniality.

Counternarratives: Toward a Decolonial Aesthesis As the examples of naming and “unconscious revenge” make clear, many Panamanians continue to sustain ambivalent relationships to the former military Zone, in contrast to the state’s official narratives of demilitarization and decolonization after 1999. For some, this “social

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architecture” meant jobs and livelihoods, sex, love, and marriages, friendships, cultural influences, educational transfers, economic transactions, and a multitude of other micro-encounters. Panamanian filmmaker Enrique Castro Ríos approaches the military Zone’s past and present through embodied metrics, to uncover narratives of US military occupation that do not begin and end with nationalist polarities but, rather, detail the inter(in)animations of the military Zone’s material spaces and personal encounters shaped by this social architecture. While Panama’s imbrication with the former Zone occupies a peripheral narrative in Castro Ríos’s film Familia (2007), his 2002 film Memorias del hijo del viejo (Memories of the Old Man’s Son) delves deeply into the personal effects of military Panama-Canal Zone relations. Memorias is narrated by Castro Ríos and built around the stories of his mother and father, América and Memo, whose lives unfold in tandem with the imbricated histories of Panama and the United States. América and Memo are real people and symbols: she represents the Americas, and he “memo/ries” (and lasting traumas) of colonial violence. During Memo’s stroke, “Memo/ry” breaks down; Memo’s death comes one year after the US invasion of Panama. Throughout, Castro Ríos overtly links the “civilian” Panama Canal to the military Zone. Memorias begins with footage of ships passing through the Canal, their stacked crates resembling children’s toys or colorful Mondrian geometrics. These crates are neoliberalism’s golden mean, the monochromatic, minimalist building blocks of modernism and modernity. In temporal and thematic jump cuts, on-screen fragments of text and images repeat, restaging recursive memo/ries that swirl like eddies against the cargo ships’ uncontestable order. Cargo crates—architecture and infrastructure of neoliberal capitalism—replace human stevedores who transited between ships and ports, carrying wares of all shapes and sizes. This cargo is now “standardized”—the same term that US instructors at the SOA used to describe Latin American soldiers once the latter had learned how to use the weapons that their governments purchased from US arms manufacturers (Gill 2004:64). Ríos revisits the lot on which his house formerly stood, now occupied by a toy store. As he plays with plastic toy tanks and trucks, we catch glimpses of historical footage of women and US soldiers, tanks storming through Panama, and dump trucks razing buildings during the 1989 invasion. His house—El Chorrillo, Panama City—is destroyed. “Backwards, forwards, the history of Panama repeats itself. A man (to catch), a plan (to invade), a canal (to protect).” Intermixtures of mundane life with conflict arise throughout the film, as Castro Ríos brings us close to how combat smells, feels, and tastes, in its everyday inflections. Quickly, and without warning, we can shift from an innocuous moment to the terror of violence. For example, we travel from Memo’s hospital bed during his stroke to what seems like lightning and thunder in a torrential downpour during Panama’s rainy season. Yet the noises we hear are not thunder but bombs. “Your thunderbolts fell precisely every five seconds on my shooting-range nation,” murmurs Castro Ríos. Each image segues to another cue, another intertext connecting personal memory (and history) and collective history (and memory)—disabling the “archival logic” that distributes memory across colonized locality and history in the imperial archive— the archive’s etymology as the house of the archon or head of state (Schneider 2011:99–100). Memorias links past with present, as Castro Ríos travels within the military Zone and explores its changed landscape. In one scene, the flesh of embodiment tells us more than the infrastructural bones of former shooting ranges. These abandoned ranges do not communicate the unexploded ordnance that persists within them, but Castro Ríos knows of people who have been made aware of the old landmines and bombshells through deadly contact with them. In an interview with a child, Castro Ríos narrates an absurd commentary on the archive

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as document. As the unseen child reads from a coloring book titled Recognize While Painting the Unexploded Ammunition that Can Kill You. Ríos asks: “What are shooting ranges?” Reading laboriously, the child responds: “These are areas close to your community used for military practices.” More questions follow: “What is unexploded ordnance?” “It is weapon ammunition that did not explode when used and that lies hidden by the vegetation, ready to blow up if a human touches it.” “Where do we find unexploded ordnance?” “Anyplace, within the restricted areas. It is hidden under the soil.” “Who are at greatest risk?” No response. The child’s reading fails to explicate a terrain contaminated with weapons. As we hear facts about ordnance recited, Ríos’s camera picks out monkeys climbing trees, a family picnicking, and tall grasses in the very areas that held (and likely still contain) explosives. Life continues, unknowing, on still-mined ranges. Not all scenes in Memorias unfold with such quietude and subtle irony. After this scene on the “shooting range nation,” we abruptly shift to undisclosed rape and incest, inhabiting the perspective of a small boy being chased through a coffee plantation and violated by his older brother. We hear a hard whisper threaten—“Tocar […] déjame” (“Touch […] let me”)—but we can see only forest. Ríos links this unseen scene to the 1989 invasion, recounting his return to Panama nine days after “500, or 2000, or 4000 Panamanians were killed. Their great nation. Our small nation. Known. Tainted. Can now resonate with memories that have been mute for a decade.” On his return, he cannot stop recording: “I persist in looking, recalling, what lies [in] my mother father land.” His camera documents as if inhaling: grainy images of military planes flash past the window of a moving car. The images are so blurry as to be unrecognizable; what, then, is the value of documentation? In his insatiable desire to take in the invasion, Castro Ríos neglects Memo, who is dying, “undocumented.” Castro Ríos hints that his desire to capture the invasion has almost conditioned the disappearance, in death, of Memo and his memo/ries. “The demand for a visible remain”—and the reframing of the military Zone’s remains after 1999—relegate embodied knowledges of the former bases, and their aftermath, to an exile (Schneider 2011:99). Making a visual-narrative loop, Castro Ríos links this exile back to the swirling waters of the Panama Canal, a contemporary Lethe, water of forgetting. The film ends where it began: in the Canal. The water symbolizes the ablution of multifaceted histories—not a cleansing, as we might have thought, but the forcible scrubbing of archival logic. Yet Castro Ríos does not foreclose the possibility of continuing return to the Zone’s embodied histories; over the waters of the Canal he pronounces: “My invisible Memo—y invincible América— and I, remembering his memories.” Dalida María Benfield told me that in Memorias, she encountered a shared space of overlapping narratives of personal and family histories, which inspired her to continue her own works and deeply theorize the space of what she terms “canal thought.” Benfield approaches this body of knowledge with the explicit desire for a decolonial aesthesis, aiming both to reveal the persistence of structures of coloniality at the Canal and Zone, and to offer alternative modes and epistemologies that can rupture (or disrupt) the hegemonic frameworks in place (Benfield 2013 and 2015). Benfield’s video installations Canal Zone/Zona del Canal (1994) and Hotel/ Panamá (2010–2014) cycle through overlapping thematic histories of labor migration, indigeneity, race, gender, and sexuality at these sites, taking a long view of colonial history from Conquest to the present. Her works are tapestries of multilingual voices, texts, and images, creating intimate counter-genealogies that explore the development of cinematic technologies alongside the racialized inequality of the Canal Zone’s medical facilities and the interiors of the former SOA.

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In Canal Zone, Benfield seeks to recover, or construct anew, gendered and indigenous histories of the former Zone—an important project considering the near-effacement of indigenous peoples’ histories from chronicles of US-Panama relations.5 She interviews her mother, Dalida Quijada Benfield, who is a Ngäbe-Buglé descended woman formerly employed as a maid in the Canal Zone.6 Her mother sits stiffly for the film, seeming somewhat ill at ease, mildly affronted by her daughter’s interest in her life. She recounts her rural childhood and the painful process of urbanization, while abstract cursive text flashes across an unidentified female body—a textocentric history inscribed on the body’s fleshy, undulating curves and shadows. Like Castro Ríos, Benfield narrates the film; she tells us that her mother “wishes to forget an indigenous history buried under assimilation and denial.” The unburying of indigeneity is part of a decolonial aesthesis: as Benfield observes, Panama is “like an exposed seam,” a cut (the Canal) that reveals legacies of coloniality within its seeming scientific and medical modernity. Hotel/Panamá (2010–2014), made nearly 20 years after Canal Zone, outlines further gendered genealogies, this time placing the camera in an anonymous woman’s body. The woman, whom we never see—for her body doubles as the filmic apparatus—walks through the empty Sol Melía Resort, tracing the walls’ contours with her hands. We can see her ghostly limbs and hear eerie sounds, but our gaze is sutured within her torso, allowing only a partial glimpse of the being who haunts the former SOA. It is not clear why the hotel is unoccupied; the absence of guests seems momentary, as signified by a room that the body/camera enters, which holds personal effects. Again, Benfield reinserts embodiment and coloniality’s violence into the modernity narratives surrounding the former Zone: its medical and military uses under US occupation, construed as benign. Hotel/Panamá deconstructs narratives of scientific advancement, beginning with US Army physician William Gorgas’s eradication of yellow fever. Benfield exposes the coloniality of racial logics underlying Gorgas’s advances—the white supremacist edicts of

FIGURE 1.5 Dalida María Benfield. Still from La Zona del Canal (Canal Zone). Single channel video (30 mins) and three-screen video installation with still image projections, dimensions variable. 1994–1997. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Dalida María Benfield. Still from Hotel/Panamá. Single channel video (20 mins) and multiscreen video installation (2–24 channels), dimensions variable. 2010–2014. This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

FIGURE 1.6

tropical medicine, Gorgas’s ambition for the “white race” to “conquer” the tropics, and his dismissal of non-whites as naturally immune to mosquito-borne illness. Benfield lists names from the Gorgas Hospital mortuary and excavates the unanswered questions that ghost this progress narrative—for example, the thousands of deaths of West Indian men and their burial in a cemetery that is itself buried in the jungle and Canal waters. As an emissary of the state, Gorgas allowed white lives to flourish in the Zone while letting black, brown, and indigenous people die. The biopolitical dimensions of the Canal’s technological and engineering apparatuses surge into focus in the film, which represents coloniality visually, through a layering of spoken and written words and imagery. Coloniality also subsists in the former Zone’s post-handover transformation into commercial spaces for tourists and elites—a process seen as benign and peaceful, imperative to life “after” the US military past. From Gorgas we flash to the SOA: In 1946 the Canal Zone is repurposed as a new form of military base. The Second World War has ended, but new wars have begun, with a new role for Latin America. An administration building in the Canal Zone, near Colón, at the Atlantic entrance to the Canal, is converted into a new institution, with a curriculum that would have been familiar to General Gorgas [. . .and] to Bartolomé de las Casas. (Benfield 2010–2014) Coloniality subsists in the legacy of the conquest and its willful forgetting. Benfield enumerates SOA graduates: “the ‘Atlacatl Battalion,’ a ‘Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion’ […]

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responsible for […] ‘Operación Rescate’ [Operation Rescue]. This operation includes the massacre of over 500 men, women and children in El Mozote, El Salvador, in December 1981.” Benfield’s narration of the massacre in El Mozote is accompanied, on the screen, by overlaid, moving strings of text, which snake between the lines of the SOA training manual, in an interpenetration of archive and body. The floating text recalls the ghost’s snaking arms, caressing the former SOA. Like Castro Ríos, Benfield makes abrupt cuts between past and present: historical footage of the Canal and Panama Railroad, current images of the Sol Melía (see Figure 1.6). Spectral hands and dissonant sounds defamiliarize the hotel and jar its placid décor. Her lens zeroes in on a man’s suit jacket hanging in one room—whose? Throughout, Benfield employs cinematic and editing software and technology as a decolonial apparatus, to strip away surface narratives of modernity, uncovering both coloniality and prospects for a decolonial aesthesis (Benfield 2010). She asserts: “Along with technologies of engineering and excavation, the Panama Canal is an archive of […] cinematic images, a visual economy of ghosts. The cinematic apparatus produces and is produced by the canal, a part of its technological ensemble, its biopolitical machine” (Benfield 2012a:68). Film can produce a decolonial machine to undo modernity’s biopower. Benfield’s counter-tellings reveal the Canal’s “decolonial aesthetic territories: sedimented layers above and below the canal’s waters” (68). As she asks, riffing on the Canal’s motto: “What lands? What worlds?” We can add: what life-giving propensities? What deaths? I began this essay by describing a promotional video that circled above the City of Knowledge/Fort Clayton, bringing into focus the site’s civilian future. I conclude with films that take different motion paths through Clayton, Gulick, and other sites in the former military Zone, drawing upon the body’s proportions to do different kinds of memory work and ask important questions about how to remember these military-civilian spaces. There is no clean way to narrativize the shift from a foreign military past to a national, civilian present. The sites’ ongoing privatization obscures the embodied relationships cultivated there, and the continuities of coloniality that lurk beneath the spectacle of decolonization. With multitemporal jump cuts, language play, and free associative segues, Benfield’s and Castro’s intermedial works push against dominant narratives of the Canal Zone’s past and present iterations. They force reckoning with the military-civilian Zone for publics in Panama and the United States who might wish it tethered to a distant, “other” past. The films’ multiple narratives stimulate new opportunities to narrate the interlock of modernity and coloniality of power, of archival logic in the preservation of built spaces and effacement of immaterial, embodied histories. If the archive’s imperial logic has made it “a mode of governance against memory,” then Castro Ríos and Benfield capture and reframe “the overlooked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten” histories, offering routes into “the sedimented acts and spectral meanings that haunt” the former Zone’s social architecture of memory (Schneider 2011:99, 102).

Notes 1 The Canal Zone flag protests were spawned by a conflict over the raising of US and Panamanian flags in the Canal Zone. They spanned 9–12 January 1964, and resulted in the deaths of 21 Panamanians and four US soldiers, dozens wounded, and millions of dollars in property damage. 2 After 1959, troop levels stabilized at around 10,000. 3 USARSO was reactivated as a Major Army Command and the Army component of USSOUTHCOM at Clayton in 1986. In 1999, USARSO moved to Fort Buchanan, Puerto Rico—where soldiers stationed in the Zone were transferred upon the Canal’s handover. USSOUTHCOM moved from the Canal Zone to

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Doral, Florida in 1997. In 2002–2003, USARSO was transferred to Texas, as part of the Pentagon’s aim to shrink its bases abroad and at home. 4 Due in part to Panamanian anger over the US military’s expansion in the Canal Zone beyond its stated mission of Canal defense, the School of the Americas was moved to Fort Benning in Georgia in 1984. After closing temporarily in 2000, in 2001 the SOA reopened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) (SOA Watch 2016). SOA graduates include Augusto Pinochet’s military officers; Argentine General Roberto Viola, Manuel Noriega, Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, leader of the brutal Atlacatl Battalion; Guatemalan Colonel Julio Alpirez of the Kaibiles death squad; Honduran General Luís Alonso Discua (Gill 2004:6). 5 Castro Ríos also focuses explicitly on indigenous lives and sovereignty claims in Familia and other works. 6 Ngäbe-Buglé are indigenous peoples on the isthmus, many living in the Ngäbe–Buglé comarca (autonomous lands) in Panama created in 1997. Benfield’s mother does not have a current tribal affiliation and resides outside of the comarca. The history of Benfield’s mother opens a window to the many indigenous peoples who sought employment in the Canal Zone, in part as a response to Panamanian nationalist anti-indigenous imperialism (see Howe 1998).

References Benfield, Dalida. 1994. Canal Zone. Single-channel video and film/video installation. Accessed 15 June 2015. https://vimeo.com/116926189 (17:46-21:00). Benfield, Dalida. 2010. “The (De)Colonial Apparatus: Rerouting the Panama Canal.” Paper presented at the “Estéticas Decoloniales Symposium,” Universidad San José de las Caldas. 10 November. Bogotá, Colombia. Benfield, Dalida. 2010–2014. Hotel/Panamá. Single-channel video and film/video installation. Accessed 15 June 2015. https://vimeo.com/130814058. Benfield, Dalida. 2012a. “En El Corte, De La Herida.” In Estéticas Decoloniales, edited by Pedro Pablo Gómez and Walter Mignolo, 68–71. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Benfield, Dalida. 2012b. “Ruta del canal de Panamá.” In Estéticas y opción decolonial, edited by Pedro Pablo Gómez and Walter Mignolo, 93–99. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. 2012. https://issuu.com/paulusgo/docs/esteticas_y_opcion_decolonial. Benfield, Dalida. 2013. “Flow.” Periscope article. Social Text, 15 July. Accessed 19 June 2016. http:// socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/flow/. Benfield, Dalida. 2015. Skype Interview with author. 10 June. Bryan, William Jennings. 1899. Republic or Empire? The Philippine Question. Chicago: The Independence Company. Castro Ríos, Enrique. 2007. Familia. Documentary film. Accessed 15 June 2015. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BAfmqzMBYOA. Castro Ríos, Enrique. 2002. Memories of the Old Man’s Son. Documentary film. Accessed 15 June 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM1aKzaxO60. Chevalier, George. 1999. “Clayton Memories.” CZ Images Website. Created 25 March 1998, last revised 12 June 2016. Accessed 8 August 2016. czimages.com/CZMemories/Fort_Clayton/Clayton105. htm. Ciudad del Saber. 2014. “City of Knowledge Institutional Video.” 24 February. Accessed 15 June 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7teeW9vGyjw. Cloud, David S. and David Zucchino. 2015. “U.S. Military and Civilians Are Increasingly Divided.” Los Angeles Times, 24 May: A1. Davis, Tracy C. 2007. Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Donoghue, Michael E. 2014. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Dudziak, Mary L. 2012. War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press. “Early Days” (“Early Days of Fort Sherman.”) 2016. CZ Images Website. Accessed 8 August. http:// www.czimages.com/CZMemories/VAP/Sherman/fort_sherman_index.htm. Enloe, Cynthia H. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Enscore, Susan I. 2000. Guarding the Gates: The Story of Fort Clayton—Its Setting, Its Architecture, and Its Role in the History of the Panama Canal. Champaign, IL: US Army Corps of Engineers. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality,Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. Gill, Lesley. 2004. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Gillis, John R. 1989. The Militarization of the Western World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gómez, Pedro Pablo and Walter Mignolo. 2011. Estéticas decoloniales. Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Bogotá, Colombia. http://issuu.com/paulusgo/docs/est_ticasdecoloniales_gm. Hoffman, Jon T. 2009. The Panama Canal: An Army’s Enterprise. Washington, DC: Center of Military History. Howe, James. 1998. A People Who Would Not Kneel: Panama, the United States, and the San Blas Kuna. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Inglis, William. 1906. “At Double-Quick Along the Canal with the President: The First of Two Articles Dealing with Actual Conditions in the Canal Zone, and the Recommendations Made on the Ground by the Chief Executive after Seeing the Work and Workmen.” Harper’s Weekly, 8 December: 1740–45. Johnson, Suzanne P. 1994. An American Legacy in Panama: A Brief History of the Department of Defense Installations and Properties. Fort Clayton, Panama: Directorate of Engineering and Housing. Leis, Raúl. 2010. Interview with author, Panama City, 28 April. Lindsay-Poland, John. 2003. Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the US In Panama. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Love, Eric T. 2004. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lutz, Catherine. 2001. Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century. Boston: Beacon Press. Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104, 3:723–35. Lutz, Catherine. 2009. The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts. New York: New York University Press. MacLeish, Kenneth T. 2013. Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mahan, A.T. 1911. “Fortify the Panama Canal.” The North American Review 193, 664:331–39. Maurer, Noel, and Carlos Yu. 2011. The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McEnaney, Laura. 2000. Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moraña, Mabel, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui. 2008. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Natanson, George. 1963. “US–Panama Tension Eases under ‘Operation Friendship.’” Washington Post, 17 February: A19. Pearcy, Thomas L. 1998. We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pew Research Center. 2011. “The Military-Civilian Gap: Fewer Family Connections.” 23 November. Accessed 11 June 2015. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/23/themilitaryciviliangapfewer familyconnections/.

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Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge. SOA Watch. 2016. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed 23 May 2016. http://www.soaw.org/ about-us/faq. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974a. “Esposas de Soldados del Ejército de Comando Sur Visitan Centro de Operaciones en Selva de Sherman,” 27 September: 13. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974b. “Guardia Nacional de Panamá Y 193a Brigada de Infantería Realizan Etapa Final de Entrenamiento Conjunto en Río Hato,” 27 September: 12. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974c. “USARSO Parachutists-Musicmakers Perform Specialties at Icacal,” 4 October: 14. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974d. “‘Ambassadors,’ Band Delight Bolivian Crowds,” 11 October: n.p. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974e. “IAAFA Families Taking in Latin American Students for Thanksgiving,” 11 October: n.p. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974f. “Gradúan en Administración en Logística a Oficiales Latinoamericanos en la I.A.A.F.A.,” 18 October: n.p. Southern Command News (SCN). 1974g. “Someten a Riguroso Entrenamiento en Área de Gatún Estudiantes del Curso de Capacitación de Oficiales,” 18 October: n.p. Time. 1960. “Panama: Operation Friendship.” Time Magazine. 3 October: 38. USARSO. 2011. “US Army South (USARSO): Defense and Fraternity.” US Army South (USARSO) website. 28 October. Accessed 18 November 2015. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/ army/usarso.htm. Westerman, George W. n.d. Manuscript fragment. George W. Westerman Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Box 89, Folder 8. ScMG 505.

2 MILITARY AID The Spatial Performances and Performativity of Contemporary Refugee Camps Alexis Bushnell and Justine Nakase

Introduction The etymology of refugee comes from the word refuge, “a place of safety or security; a shelter, a sanctuary, a retreat” (Oxford English Dictionary). The refugee camp is thus seen and literally sold to donors as a site of refuge—a space of aid and compassion that protects and shelters those displaced by crisis and war. However, the contemporary refugee camp is arguably not a space of refuge but rather a space of structural and institutional violence stemming from a militarized genealogy. Descending from concentration camp models codified over two World Wars that were themselves inherited from the camp’s first iteration in the Boer Wars in 1899, the camp space was originally designed as a site of containment and control for displaced persons, political prisoners, and others considered by states as enemies (Packenham 2015; Agamben 1998). Since then the “closed” camp model has been repurposed, now under the auspices of aid. The term “camp space” is used throughout this chapter as a spatial taxonomy describing the closed camp form as it manifests across geographical and historical locations. “Closed” camps enact policies of encampment in which refugee freedom of movement is restricted, as those in the camps either cannot leave the camp or must seek permission from authorities to leave for limited periods. Other refugee camp models do exist, for example self-settlements such as those in Calais and Dunkirk in France, and settlements used throughout the African continent. However, we focus on the closed camp model for three reasons. First, it is the model that fundamentally undermines the basic human right to freedom of movement. Second, it is operated hierachically from above by organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), thus making it an official policy of refugee management. Third, this spatial model has been directly adapted from a historic military genealogy, making this form of refugee camp space in particular a militarized space. Spatial design is purpose-led, and the original purpose of the camp space was military containment and control. Therefore, though the refugee camp operates within a narrative of aid and protection, it performs a militarized history of security and surveillance. Created to house civilians as well as internally displaced persons and perceived enemies, camp spaces frame interpersonal relationships as those between prisoner and guard, now transposed as refugee and aid

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worker. However, humanitarian practitioners rarely understand the genealogy of the refugee camp space and thus miss the relevance of the power dynamics in their work (Hyndman 2004; Malkki 1995). Seen as an unfortunate inevitability of mass displacement, the “closed” refugee camp has become an iconic response by organizations such as the UNHCR in addressing refugee crises. By repurposing rather than redesigning the camp space, the refugee camp continues to perform as it was originally intended, and will continue to do so until it is redesigned to perform as a space of refuge rather than detention. This chapter provides an excavation of the spatial genealogy and performances of the contemporary refugee camp, focusing on Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan as a case study. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s conception of space as a socially constructed product as well as Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, we argue that the camp space is itself performative, reiterating functions according to its design and acting upon the subject formation of the refugee. At the same time, the camp space can be acted upon, “performed” by groups or individuals through strategies of spatial utilization, mobilization, and appropriation. These performances vary depending on the individual’s social relationships in and with that space and often embody competing claims for power and autonomy. Specifically, we read the billboards “advertising” humanitarian aid organizations within the camp and the thriving black market referred to as the Champs Élysée. In our analysis, we focus on the Za’atari refugee camp because Za’atari is representative of a closed camp model that humanitarian organizations around the globe employ to address mass displacement. Za’atari camp is also a response to one of the greatest refugee crises the world has seen since World War II, one to which the global north struggles to find a solution. In this way, the performance of space in Za’atari may be seen as analogous rather than anomalous of the camp space. By focusing on Za’atari we are also able to draw from participant interviews and observation conducted by Alexis Bushnell during her fieldwork in March and April 2015. Interviews with both aid workers and refugees in Za’atari augment a purely historical and theoretical understanding of the spatial performance of the camp. We conclude by advocating for a redesigning of the refugee camp space, drawing on theories of spatial justice.

Framing Za’atari: Functional and Social Performances of Space In his seminal book The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre argues that space exists as a lived social product rather than an empty and abstract category. As it is shaped by social and political forces, Lefebvre proposes that space in turn “serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence domination, of power” ([1974] 1991:26). Further, he argues that a historical understanding of space is vital as “[t]he preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991:229). When we speak of space, then, we are referring to an understanding of space as formed by and reflective of the social and political structures from which it arose, and particularly the ways in which relations of power are articulated through space. Lefebvre demarcates spaces as either dominated or appropriated. According to this binary, dominated spaces are those “transformed—and mediated—by technology, by practice” with “[m]ilitary architecure, fortifications and ramparts” acting as key examples (164). Lefebvre contrasts this with appropriated space which “resembles a work of art, which is not to say that

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it is in any sense an imitation of a work of art” (165; emphasis original). Rather, Lefebvre means that these spaces are naturally reflective of those who inhabit them, “they recount, though in a mumbled and somewhat confused way, the lives of those who built and inhabited them” (165). Space is in this way both imposed and created, operating from the top down and the bottom up in intermeshing spheres of public and private influence. This chapter reads Za’atari as both a dominant and appropriated space. The spatial history of the camp demonstrates how the original dominant spatial model of the military camp continues to shape the humanitarian aid camp as it exists today. At the same time, Za’atari operates as an appropriated space that is manipulated and mobilized in competing discourses of power and agency. The camp space acts as both an agent and a subject of performance. In her article “Spatial Performativity/Spatial Performance,” Jan Smitheram examines how Butler’s theories of performativity have been incorporated into theories of architecture and space (2011). For Butler, gender identities are performative in that they occur through their very expression rather than representing a preexisting or personal truth. She writes, “[gender] acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Butler [1990] 1999:173; emphasis original). For Smitheram, “‘space’ is everywhere in Butler’s work. Space frames her coherent subject institutionally and symbolically. Space, or the three-dimensional space of architecture, allows her to reify her notions of performativity” (2011:56). While Butler is clear in differentiating performance from performativity, Smitheram notes that scholars applying performativity to architecture often fall back on notions of performance, returning a sense of agency to the subject acting in and on space. Smitheram finds this slippage ultimately constructive as, “by framing performativity through the lens of performance, [they] offer a way of understanding gender performance in architecture as reflexive; and also allow architecture itself, materially, an important role within the performance” (64). Space can thus be both constructive and constructed, performative utterance, and performed social stage. Our analysis of the camp space builds on Smitheram’s thesis by examining the camp as both performative and performed. Framing the spatial performances of the camp as functional as well as social, we demonstrate the inter-agency between space and subject as each act upon the other. The military genealogy of the camp space illuminates the performative aspect of that site, which is marked by the spatial functions of security, surveillance, and control. This performative space influences the materialization of refugee subjects as they are forced to enact their refugee identities in spatially specific ways. In turn, refugee subjects perform space in appropriative counter-discourses of agency and self-identity. Most analyses of space and performance tend to focus on sites such as purpose-built theatres, site-specific locations, or repurposed public areas and the ways in which these spaces interact with or influence theatrical performance.1 However, as Michael Pearson writes in the introduction to Theatre/Archaeology, “[a]s performance has grown in importance […] as a means of exploring the myriad ways in which meaning is created and social life is shaped, it is essential to include different histories, genealogies, geographies and politics in the fabric of the academic discipline” (2001:xiii). Thus this chapter seeks to extend the analysis of space and performance to address spatial performance, or the ways in which spaces frame performances of daily life. While those operating within refugee camps such as Za’atari are not performing fictionalized stories with the camp as dramatic backdrop, their appropriated spaces are, in the Lefebvrian sense, nonetheless a work of art.

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Excavating Za’atari: The Architectonics of the Closed Camp Space Lefebvre proposes “architectonics” as a method of investigating and understanding the persistence of history in the production of social space. Architectonics allows us “to analyse and explain this persistence, which is often evoked in the metaphorical shorthand of strata, periods, sedimentary layers, and so on” ([1974] 1991:229). In tracing the architectonics of the camp space—the lineage of functional contexts and spatial designs as iterated and inherited over time—we illuminate how the militarized functional performances of space continue to operate in contemporary refugee camps. Just a cursory excavation of Za’atari reveals these military connections. On the ground level of Za’atari as a physical site is the camp as it exists today: Approximately 9 kilometres of a “ring road,” measuring about 3.5 kilometers east to west and circumnavigating tents and shelters housing anywhere from approximately 80,000 to nearly 120,000 refugees from Syria alone.2 Below the “ground” layer would be the camp as it was initially established in July 2012, lines of tents erected as temporary accommodation for families of approximately 100 refugees displaced by the erupting Syrian civil war, which began in 2011. Below that would be the military airstrip that occupied the site before the camps, former property of the Jordanian Armed Forces. To dig just below the surface of Za’atari, then, is to unearth a military foundation. Yet Za’atari’s military foundation is not simply physical, nor is it coincidental. Rather it speaks to the other layers informing Za’atari as a camp space, layers that stretch over and across historical and geographical locations. Architect and scholar Jean Louis-Cohen argues that the architecture of 20th-century camps are reflections of prisons, military installations, and hospitals conceived of in 18th-century Europe and implemented in European colonies in Africa and America, and should therefore be understood as a space emergent from a genealogy of military control (1995). Liisa Malkki maintains that “[t]he basic blueprint of the military camp and many of its characteristic techniques were appropriated by those new spatial and disciplinary practices that were emerging in the 1940s refugee camps in Europe”—camps that have been reproduced ever since (1995:499). The origins of this militarized blueprint date back to the Boer Wars in South Africa from 1899–1901, where the camp model was used by British armed forces to contain the families of Boer combatants who were displaced by the conflict. It is in these camps that we also first see the conflation of humanitarian aid with military action.3 Billed in the British press as a humanitarian intervention, the Boer camps were actually a tactic of war that essentially held civilians hostage while removing support for guerrilla fighters (Packenham 2015). Physically, the Boer War camps consisted of rows of tents or sometimes barracks and were surrounded with barbed wire, an architecture that would be emulated by the camps of the World Wars (Myers and Moshenka 2011). The use of internment camp spaces as a tool of refugee management by western European states began during World War I.4 Internment during this period was a global phenomenon and was overseen by military operations (see Gatrell and Nivet 2014). The camps continued during the interwar period and are perhaps most commonly associated with their uses during World War II. The purposes of World War II camps were fluid and changed for various objectives and classes of people. The camps often housed a range of individuals, holding “enemy subjects,” “refugees,” groups purposed for extermination, political prisoners, and forced laborers all at once (Wachsmann 2015).5 As in the Boer War camps, states in both

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FIGURE 2.1 Barbed wire and tower within the perimeter of Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell.

World Wars employed barracks as physical spaces of internment as they were readily available and provided structures that lent themselves to monitoring. Watchtowers and rows of barracks were designed to prevent spontaneous gathering and allow enhanced surveillance over those forced into camps, and were spatially controlled by barbed wire (Diken and Bagge Lausten 2005) throughout. This general architectural template was adopted by the contemporary refugee camp, often without a consideration of the space’s attendant functional performances. Indeed, research into the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reveals that after World War II the refugee camp space was not merely predicated on the internment camp but was in fact the exact same space (USHMMA 1944). After liberation, orders were given to establish special camps for refugees who were non-repatriable, those refugees whose repatriation would be long deferred, and stateless persons. Rather than spend time and resources constructing purpose-built refugee housing, the Allied Forces simply repurposed former Nazi concentration camps to serve as refugee camps.6 One example of this was the housing of refugees at Bergen-Belsen after liberation. Thus in some cases, those who had experienced these camps during the war as spaces of incarceration continued to inhabit the same spaces but now under the auspices of aid. Following the blueprint of its military predecessors, Za’atari is designed to function as a space of surveillance, containment, and control. Watchtowers are used within Za’atari, as are military security guards on the perimeters and entrances/exits to the camp. Security guards

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are also stationed outside of the field clinics within the camps, as well as all structures operated by aid organizations. Space is also used to communicate levels of hierarchy. As Robert Skinner tells of World War I British military Chyngton camp: In every unit, the battalion HQ buildings were located away from the barrack blocks maintaining a physical distance between the officers and the men […] food was prepared near the huts and eaten by the men in their individual barracks […] The layout and form of the camp landscape communicated concepts of hierarchy and order. (2011:12) Similar to the hierarchy of space maintained by the higher ranks toward enlisted men of World War I, humanitarian aid organizations demonstrate a hierarchy in the way space is maintained in Za’atari and other camps (see Hyndman 2004 for a discussion of Kenyan camps). Humanitarian aid organizations generally maintain compounds on the perimeter of the camp. In Za’atari, the “Base Camp” of the UNHCR is situated off the ring road on the northern border, near the Jordanian Syrian Refugee Assistance Department (SRAD) compound. The UNHCR and SRAD compounds are kept separate from the population of refugees, with negative space maintained between them and the refugees. Refugees dwell within 12 districts of mostly negative or restricted pathway spaces of tents and caravans within the inner areas of the ring road. The compounds are further separated from the refugee population by security guards at the gates of the aid and other compounds. Therefore, though the camp space is now couched within the rhetoric of humanitarian aid, the spatial design of the camp reenacts its militarized legacy rather than humanitarian goals. The blueprint of the camp space has arguably been passed down through institutional memory (see Kent 2004). The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which had worked with the Allied Forces running refugee camps in the immediate post-war period, was tasked with administering these and other displaced persons camps (USHMMA 1944). The work of UNRRA was then replaced by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and ultimately, by the UNHCR, which was created by the United Nations in 1951 (Gallagher 1989). Since then, the UNHCR has been the primary organization managing global refugee affairs, and the refugee camp model has become ubiquitous as its response to mass displacement. However, this institutional remembering is also an act of forgetting. As Lefebvre notes, “[i]f space has an air of neutrality […] it is precisely because this space has already been occupied and planned, already the focus of past strategies” (2009:170). As noted above, the military legacy of the refugee camp is generally unknown, creating a dangerous acceptance of the closed camp as a “natural” response to mass displacement. By renaming the camp space “humanitarian” while failing to redesign the camp to function as a humanitarian space, aid organizations such as the UNHCR continue to implement militarized spaces with direct ramifications on the lived experiences and identity formation of the subjects contained within.

Performative Za’atari: Camp Space, Functional Performances, and Refugee Subjectivities “That matter is always materialized,” Butler writes, “has […] to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power” ([1990] 1999:9–10). Reading this regulatory power as inscribed in space, Smitheram posits spatialized performativity as

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“the reiteration of pre-existing bodily norms that function to form the subject, which occurs in relation to architecture” (Smitheram 2011:60). In the context of the camp, the refugee is a figure at once abstractly created as a legal classification of a biological person but one that also exists in physical space due to concrete physical and spatial architectures. The camp thus materializes the refugee in a specific way through its production of space and how the refugee must navigate this space in daily life. As the camp space continues to be coded by its military legacy, the resultant performative identity of the refugee is also coded as military, particularly as that of prisoner. Thus refugee as a performative identity is defined by its lack of individuality as well as connotations of suffering, helplessness, and potential threat (see Zetter 1991). The historical experiences of those interned in military camps of the 20th century are directly echoed by the contemporary refugees inhabiting Za’atari. Returning to Skinner’s account of Chyngton, we see how the camp space has been designed with identity formation (or erasure) in mind. Skinner writes: Army life was about relinquishing personal identity for a group identity. This was reinforced through the organisation of inhabited space within the camp with the battalian repeated with little creativity or variation […] Soldiers, fresh from a civilian background, would learn to relinquish individuality, live as a unit and present themselves as a unit in a set fashion on special ground within the sight of their officer’s quarters, their local offices and facilities. (2011:13) Thus space was organized in such a way as to encourage soldiers to identify as a faceless collective and internalize an understanding of strict military hierarchies. The camp architecture is anonymous and repetitive, under constant surveillance from those of higher rank. In Za’atari, there is the same unvaried architecture of tents and caravans; when on the ground in the camp it is difficult to make out where one block ends and another begins. Indeed, it is difficult to make out which district is which without a map of the camp because the districts are not uniformly shaped and there are few clear markers to physically differentiate one from another.7 The camp is visually uniform, giving the impression of a mass; space strips away refugee individuality or uniqueness. Like the military camps on which they are predicated, refugee camps allow for control of the refugee camp population by dictating daily routines, which in turn work to materialize refugee identities. The impact of the performative gestures of navigating space can be seen in the experience of Japanese Americans interned during World War II: Camp life was highly regimented and it was rushing to the wash basin to beat the other groups, rushing to the mess hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner. When a human being is placed in captivity, survival is the key. We developed a very negative attitude toward authority. We spent countless hours to defy or beat the system. Our minds started to function like any POW or convicted criminal. (Ng 2002:42) Through the daily experiences of space—here the navigation of washing and dining facilities— the subjectivities of those contained within the camp begin to reflect and internalize the identity of prisoner.

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Similarly, individuals living in Za’atari expressed that they “feel unfree” in the camp because of the daily processes that they must go through for basic assistance. A refugee must walk to the UNHCR compound and SRAD for permissions and assistance of all kinds. As these structures are on the northern perimeter of the ring road, this walk may take hours, with the farthest districts located a number of kilometers away. Depending on the district of the camp in which refugees reside, it will take mothers and their children numerous hours a day to collect bread from the UNHCR and World Food Program and other NGO distribution centers. One refugee stated that she “reaches the place for bread early, but they [aid workers] make us wait. I go at 5:30 in the morning to get bread early but I still wait. We are suffering from no transportation. They [aid organizations] keep us busy to collect the bread and food. It takes six hours round trip to the mall” (Interview, Za’atari camp, 2015). Indeed, as of 2016 there are only two markets in Za’atari camp at which some 80,000 refugees (UNHCR 2016b) must collect their food and essential living items, with similar issues of access since not all refugees reside near a mall. By enforcing a routine of daily perambulation to centers of aid dictated by the times during which these centers are accessible, the space of the camp reinforces refugee identities as dependent, highlighting the reliance refugees have on aid organizations for food, medical aid, legal status and assistance, and education. The militarized performances of refugee camp space and internment camp space also result in the same kinds of institutional violence, regardless of the stated intentions of the operation. Complaints by civilians documented in camps throughout 1914–15 to officials included “insufficient heating, insufficient lighting, overcrowding, vermin in quarters, lack of periods of exercise, dampness, insufficient food, ill treatment by guards, fire hazards” (USNA 1915). Additionally, internment camps in Europe as well as in their colonial territories lacked healthcare and proper sanitation. In Za’atari, refugees are similarly critical of poor living standards. A particular complaint in Za’atari stems from the camp’s lack of electricity. Since the camp opened in 2012, there has never been a consistent supply of electricity, resulting in unbearable living conditions. One refugee stated that while she felt confined in the camp, her biggest concern was the lack of electricity, as that made the situation one of further precarity for her and her children. Fear and precarity were commonly cited among refugees interviewed, due to a lack of electricity in the camp. These concerns are corroborated by other reports from the camp (see Ledwith 2014). Insufficient food rations, over-crowding and lack of space, ill treatment by aid workers, and an inability to access healthcare are also significant complaints. One woman complained about the small rations of bread they were provided, and that this was not enough to feed her children. She stated “we need vegetables, and fruit and clothing. We do not have these things. And there is not even enough bread, so we must purchase extra bread. The price in the market [Jordanian-run market in Za’atari] is very high” (Interview, Za’atari Camp, 2015). This complaint was common among all of the women interviewed. The processes of attaining permission to leave the camp was expressed as a negative experience by refugees, often comparing it to imprisonment. Refugees wait in queues for hours attempting to obtain permission to leave and return to the camp, but all expressed that it was very difficult or impossible to obtain. One man with a one-month-old disabled infant wanted to find medical attention outside of the camp but was worried if he left he would be sent back to the Syrian border. He said that “[the refugees] are suffering from the checkpoints” and inability to leave and return to the camp (Interview, Za’atari Camp, 2015). By using militarized architecture as a model for the refugee

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FIGURE 2.2 Pigeons kept as pets within a family’s living space in Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell.

camp, states and aid organizations such as the UNHCR perform the same kinds of violence upon those they are professing to protect. Much like the speech acts that define gender performativity, space acts shape refugee performativity within the refugee camp. Liisa Malkki contends that the way in which spatialization is used in camps is necessary for the “regularization” and “normalization” of their status and lives as refugees. Thus the architecture of the refugee camp shapes not only the space of the camp but the inhabitants as well. Rather than an empty or neutral category, the camp space is instead a material agent that is active in shaping the subjectivity of the refugee. By demanding that refugees navigate and experience space in a specific embodied framework, the refugee camp inscribes identity narratives of helplessness and suffering, as well as potential security threats, on to the subject identity of “refugee.” These narratives are the ghosted remains of political prisoners, enemy alien nationals, and others held in similar camp spaces since the turn of the 20th century, just as the refugee camp is ghosted by the military camp spaces that came before.

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Performing Za’atari: Social Performances of Camp Space If the camp space acts upon individual subjects, these subjects are also active agents that can perform in and through space. Thus the performativity of the camp space is both augmented and challenged by the spatial performances of Za’atari. These spatial performances are seen in the ways in which those within the camp interact with, implement, manipulate, or appropriate the space to various and often conflicting ends. Multiple spatial performances can coexist, overlap, or contest each other as refugees, aid workers, security officers, reporters, or government officials necessarily perform within the same space differently based on factors such as profession, nationality, gender, and social status. Particularly, while aid workers and security operators perform within the camp space in ways that reiterate its functional performances of surveillance and containment, refugees seek out opportunities for spatial counter-performances of agency and autonomy. Smitheram notes, “the performance metaphor now feted within discourse for its connotations of change, process and disappearance is still arguably indebted to the connotations of repetition and representation of the theatre” (2011:66). Thus analyses of space and theatre act as constructive analogies through which to read performances within the camp space. Though the spatial performances of camp spaces such as Za’atari are not fictionalized narratives, they are nonetheless performances that are crafted both consciously and unconsciously, with audiences ranging from international media outlets to the self. Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks write that performances “are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible” where “[i]nterpenetrating narratives jostle to create meanings” (2001:23). In this way, the camp space can contain multiple and conflicting performances—including its own—with subjects simultaneously reinforcing and challenging the military nature of the camp. The politics behind the performances of space is clearly articulated by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o when he writes: The main ingredients of performance are space, content, audience, and the goal, whose end, so to speak, could be instruction or pleasure, or a combination of both—in short, some sort of reformative effects on the audience. The state has its areas of performance; so has the artist. While the state performs power, the power of the artists is solely in the performance. The state and the artist may have different conceptions of space, content, goals of performance, either of their own or of the other, but they have the audience as their common taret. Again the struggle may take the form of the state’s intervention in the content of the artist’s work, which goes by the name of censorship, but the main arena of struggle is the performance space—its definition, delimitation, and regulation. (1998:39; emphasis added) By contrasting two social performances of space in Za’atari—the billboards erected by camp operators and the black market district referred to as the Champs Élysée—we see two different performances negotiating the already coded space of the refugee camp. Generally, aid workers perform space in ways that communicate power and privilege over those interned in the camps. In their daily navigation of the camp space aid workers are privileged subjects who have access to vehicles, do not have to navigate the entire space of the camp, and can enter restricted areas such as aid compounds. While the origin of the aid worker’s

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FIGURE 2.3 World Food Programme Board inside Za’atari refugee camp, March 2015. Photo by Alexis Bushnell.

privileged position in the camp lies in the space’s history of military detention, it is further informed today by a neoliberal model of humanitarian aid (see Cottle and Nolan 2007; Goodman 2008; Daley 2013). This new layer of power is spatially performed through aid billboards that can be found throughout Za’atari. These billboards “advertise” to the refugees the organizations and states responsible for contributions to the camp. A large board outside of the wholesale market, taller than the warehouse itself, displays the following in a vertical list on the board: The World Food Programme, United States of America, United States Agency for International Development, United Kingdom, European Commission, State of Kuwait, Canada, Denmark, Japan, Germany, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Finland, France, and New Zealand. There are also billboards that tower over sections of districts advertising the United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) and International Medical Corps. The sign displays the planet Saturn and the logos of both organizations.

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This kind of physically expansive advertising throughout the camp is an indication of the extent of humanitarian governance. The billboards display each particular organization’s control in the camp through funding the space, with donors cited on the billboard. In this way vertical ad space reveals a further strata of internal hierarchies among aid organizations themselves. As Barbara Harrell-Bond notes of refugee camps in general, refugees are keenly aware who is providing for them (1986). Rather than an inheritance from the military lineage of the camp space, these billboards are a social performance of space reflecting the neoliberal values underpinning humanitarian aid. However, refugees often attempt to counter these performances with their own appropriative performances of camp space. Though space is necessarily inscribed with meaning, this meaning is not fixed or complete, allowing for spaces of contention and contention within space. Reflecting on space as means of control and domination, Lefebvre observes that though shaped by power dynamics, space “escapes in part from those who would make use of it. The social and political (state) forces which engendered this space now seek, but fail, to master it completely” ([1974] 1991:26). Thus while the spaces of the camp are often predetermined, the ways in which refugees choose to interact with space open up possibilities of agency and choice. For example, after attempts by UNHCR to dictate their locations were largely ignored, refugees now determine where in the camp they will live. Originally assigned caravans or tents in a particular area mandated by UNHCR, refugees simply found assistance from other refugees to move the physical housing material to the area they preferred. Refugees also have control over how they allocate and organize space within standardized tents and caravans. The tents the refugees are given are basic polyester/cotton plastic tarps that may be fastened to the ground. Those lucky enough to receive a caravan are provided with a prefab 5-feet-by-3-feet container, which may house from one person to ten people, depending on refugees’ circumstances. The caravans in turn may be split into smaller sections of space with makeshift curtains, and some families and neighbors combine tents and or caravans for more space. Like Lefebvre’s conception of appropriated space as private, reflective space, these manipulations of private space to serve personalized needs can be seen as spatial performances that challenge the dominated, standardized space of the camp. In Za’atari, perhaps the most significant social performance of camp space by refugees occurs on the Champs Élysée. The Champs Élysée is Za’atari’s shopping district, a thriving black market offering everything from groceries to cell phones and wedding dresses. Originally a few stalls selling second-hand clothing, as of August 2014 the thoroughfare housed an estimated 3,500 stores including food stalls, bicycle shops, furniture shops, and hardware stores (Garden 2014). The street, like other areas of the camp, originated as negative space which allows for control. However, by reconfiguring the space to resemble the cities that they have fled, refugees in Za’atari challenge the forms of violence and control exerted on them by the camp. Indeed, in attempts to recreate services that are part of home, there are bridal shops, hair salons, perfumeries, ice cream vendors, and a pizza delivery service (Dunmore 2015). The Champs Élysée is operated by individual Syrian refugee inmates of the camp. While it was called Champs Élysée because of its proximity to French-sponsored aid services (Hall 2013), it also had to be structured on one long street, due to the constrictive space of the camp. Located in the older districts, which are also the first districts built, there were more amenities in that section to begin with. As refugees are allotted a strict and finite amount of material to create a residence, in order to create and add to the Champs Élysée refugees must break down structures8 that the aid organizations erect, as they have no other recourse to material. This

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literal act of deconstruction directly challenges the aid organizations’ use of space, material, and rations. The Champs Élysée thus stands in contrast not only to the militarized space of Za’atari but also to the hierarchy of humanitarian aid that is enshrined in the camp architecture. In contrast to the billboards enforcing a hierarchy of humanitarianism, the Champs Élysée challenges a monolithic understanding of the camp space as one of humanitarian aid in which refugees are the passive recipients of care. While the billboards, imposed by the organizations, speak to the power and dominance of international aid organizations, the Champs Élysée allows refugees to exercise their own agency, even if simply through commercial consumption. However, this premise does favor refugees who came to the camp with or are able to acquire money and, as the shops remain illegal and reliant on stolen water and electricity, supplies are not evenly distributed among refugees (Garden 2014). Yet despite UNHCR sanctions, refugees in Za’atari have redesigned this space so that its performance is urban-domestic rather than humanitarian or military. Ironically, while initially appropriated by Za’atari’s refugees, the Champs Élysée has since been reappropriated by the UNHCR. Technically illegal, the district is tolerated by the organization, which has officially acknowledged its existence on their website, and is consistently featured in UNHCR guest tours and human interest pieces (see Dunmore 2015; Lathigra 2014; Mahoney 2013). In articles and photo essays published on websites, the UNHCR uses the Champs Élysée to market their own aid work as positive and supportive. Indeed, UNHCR’s website features a video of the Champs Élysée. In 2013, the camp manager, Killian Kleinschmidt, was quoted in relation to this area as allowing people to enjoy life again: “[t]here is so much to discover here. I was just in a house where the family invest [sic] everything they have into plants and animals. They have two fish tanks, they have rabbits, they have ducks, they have chickens, cats and so on. It’s fascinating” (in Garden 2014). Yet this dynamic use of space, rather than a planned camp design, is a social performance of space seeking to counter the camp’s functional performance as a site of militarized detainment. As Kleinschmidt says, “We built a camp; they built a city” (in Garden 2014).

Conclusion: Redesigning Za’atari Refugee camps such as Za’atari are militarized spaces. Indeed, it is through the space of the camp itself that the camp’s military lineage has been perpetuated, even as it is made invisible by the prevailing rhetoric of aid. The European experience in the interwar and post-World War years established the connection between refugees and camps, as it was refugee and displaced persons camps created during this period that were to be translated into the camp as humanitarian solution (Malkki 1995). Yet these camps were themselves initially predicated on a militarized version of the refugee camp that originated in the Boer Wars. In Za’atari, these spatial performances inscribe camp inhabitants with militarized codes and behaviors. With refugee camp architecture continuing to functionally perform as a military space, those operating in the space continue to embody militarized subjectivities. In this chapter we have traced the military genealogy of Za’atari and contrasted the spatial performances contained within the camp space. Architecture is both physical and performative as it makes the concept and experience of space real (Tschumi 1996). Thus space performs not only in the sense of design and function, but also in that it determines the ways in which individuals interact with space. We argue that while the performativity of the camp

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space shapes refugees’ understanding of themselves and how they perform refugee identities, refugees maintain agency through appropriative spatial counter-performances. However, these counter-performances can only go so far in relieving the violence enacted by the contemporary refugee camp. Simply renaming space does not change the way that space is performed. Rather, refugee space must be redesigned to provide refuge. The UNHCR advocates that, where camps are unavoidable, “the inhabitants should have links with the host communities and access to the local economy, infrastructure and service delivery systems” (UNHCR 2016a). Yet these kinds of accommodations are impossible in the closed camp model that the UNHCR continues to employ. Lefebvre challenges that “[a]ny revolutionary ‘project’ today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make […] the reappropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda” ([1974] 1991:166–167). Theorists of spatial justice seek to find grounded geographical solutions to alleviate social problems such as financial inequality, limited access to services, or diminished quality of life. Yet as Catherine Hamel cautions, “[architecture’s] claim to concepts such as human rights, ethics, and justice exist fluidly in the realm of words but are not easily given form” (2016:205). However, in his book Social Justice and the City, David Harvey advocates that geographers create and advance revolutionary theories that are “grounded in the reality it seeks to represent” and “offers real choices for future moments in the social process by identifying immanent choices in an existing situation” ([1973] 1976:151). To this end he asks “How do we assess social and physical environment difficulty and when is it socially just to respond to it in some way?” (117). Further, spatial justice theorist Edward Soja argues that “[f]ocusing in on specific examples of where and how (in)justice takes place helps to ground the search for spatial justice in socially produced contexts rather than letting it float in idealized abstractions and too easily deflected calls for universal human rights or radical revolution” (2010:31). He continues, “Viewed from above, every place on earth is blanketed with thick layers of macrospatial organization arising not just from administrative convenience but also from the imposition of political power, cultural domination, and social control over individuals, groups, and the places they inhabit” (32). The UNHCR staff at Za’atari said that they would prefer they did not have to use camps, but that camps are inevitable. Yet this inevitability is a false understanding. Or, rather, the camp as a spatial form that enacts violence is not an inevitability. It is true that the refugee camp as it is currently conceived and performed will never be able to be a truly humanitarian space due to its military legacy. Instead, aid organizations need to reconceptualize a space from scratch that would more adequately and humanely respond to these human crises. If these are to truly be humanitarian interventions, rather than just veiled tactics of militarized security systems, then the spatial dynamics need to be redefined focusing on aid rather than security. Following the lead of Harvey and Soja, those responsible for refugee camps must view the camp through a macrospatial lens and identify where change can occur to prevent spatial injustice in the camps.

Notes 1 See, for example, the work of Marvin Carlson (1989); Gay McAuley (2003); Joanne Tompkins (2014); Michal Kobialka (2003); and Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (2001). 2 This number is fluid, changing, and varies depending on the organization consulted, making exact numbers difficult to identify. As of 2016 the UNHCR estimated Za’atari’s population to stand at 79,335 (UNHCR 2016b).

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3 See Chamberlain (1901)—though any humanitarian aid appears to have been offered for the purposes of public relations support. 4 To provide a sense of the proliferation of camps, in a “Letter to Consulate Subject: German and Austrian Interests—Enemy Subjects as prisoners of war” (1914): there were women, men, and children of German and Austro-Hungarian origin in camps in the United Kingdom; civilians interned in France and the French colonies; British civilians interned in Germany and German territories; civilians from Katanga, Belgian Congo, and German Southwest Africa interned in South Africa at Natal; and civilians interned in western and central Europe and Russia as well as Canada, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Malta, and Singapore. 5 It should be noted that the term “refugee” used at this time was not cemented in law nor was there consensus on the term. See Haddad (2008). 6 See ECER (1943) and Harrison (1945). 7 To view or download a map of the camp visit http://reliefweb.int/map/jordan/jordan-al-zaatari-refugee-campgeneral-infrastructure-map-december-2014. 8 The sites and material may have been allocated for a certain service, but refugees repurpose the material for a site they would prefer.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith. [1990] 1999. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge. Carlson, Marvin. 1989. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press. Chamberlain, Neville. 1901. “Sir Neville Chamberlain on the Concentration Camps, letter to the editor.” The Manchester Guardian, 29 August. Cottle, S. and D. Nolan. 2007. “Global Humanitarianism and the Changing Aid-Media Field.” Journalism Studies 8, 6:862–78. Daley, Patricia. 2013. “Rescuing African Bodies: Celebrities, Consumerism and Neoliberal Humanitarianism.” Review of African Political Economy 40, 137:375–93. Diken, Bulent, and Carsten Bagge Lausten. 2005. The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp. London: Routledge. Dunmore, Charlie. 2015. “Syrian Refugee Starts Pizza Delivery Service in Za’atari Camp.” UNHCR. org. 2 March. Accessed 30 March 2016. http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2015/3/54f43af26/ syrian-refugee-starts-pizza-delivery-service-zaatari-camp.html?query=zaatari. ECER (Executive Committee for European Relief ). 1943. “Notes on Lecture Given by Eugen Felix at the City Literary Institute: The Condition of the Austrian Jews.” 22 June. HA/5–1/1/1/A, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Gallagher, Dennis. 1989. “The Evolution of the International Refugee System.” International Migration Review Special Silver Anniversary Issue: International Migration an Assessment of the 90s. 23, 3:579–98. Garden,Sarah. 2014. “Welcome to the Champs Elysee:Za’atari Camp.”Emirates Women online. 30 August. Accessed 30 June 2016. http://emirateswoman.com/welcome-champs-elysee-Za’atari-refugee-camp/. Gatrell, Peter, and Philippe Nivet. 2014. “Refugees and Exiles.” In The Cambridge History of the First World War Vol. III: Civil Society, edited by Jay Winter, 186–215. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, M.K. 2008. “The Mirror of Consumption: Celebritization, Developmental Consumption and the Shifting Cultural Politics of Fair Trade.” Geoforum 41, 1:104–16. Haddad, Emma. 2008. The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Matthew. 2013. “The Syrian Crisis in Jordan.” Middle East Research and Information Project. 24 June. Accessed 30 March 2016. http://www.merip.org/mero/mero062413. Hamel, Catherine. 2016. “Repurposing with a Vengeance: A Dance of Restrained Acts Towards Justice.” In Architecture and Justice: Judicial Meanings in the Public Realm, edited by J. Simon, N. Temple, and R. Tobe, 203–12. London: Routledge.

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Harrell-Bond, Barbara. 1986. Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Earl G. 1945. Report Mission to Europe to Inquire into the condition and needs of those among the displaced persons in the liberated countries of Europe and in the SHAEF area of Germany, Report to the President of the United States, August 1945; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. Harvey, David. (1973) 1976. Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold Publishers. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2000. Managing Displacement: Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hyndman, Jennifer. 2004. “Camps as Conflict Zones.” In Sites of Violence, edited by Jennifer Hyndman & Giles Wenona, 193–213. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kent, Randolph. 2004. “The United Nations’ Humanitarian Pillar: Refocusing the UN’s Disaster and Emergency Roles and Responsibilities.” Disasters 28, 2: 216–233. Kobialka, Michal. 2003. “Theatre and Space: A Historiographic Preamble.” Modern Drama. 46,4: 558–579. Lathigra, Kalpesh. 2014. “David Morrissey in Jordan.” UNHCR.org. 22 may. Accessed 1 July 2016. http:// www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2014/5/56f147af4/david-morrissey-in-jordan.html?query=champs. Ledwith, Alison. 2014. “Za’atari: The Instant City.” Affordable Housing Institute Publication, Boston. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Letter to Consulate (“Letter to Consulate Subject: German and Austrian Interests—Enemy Subjects as prisoners of war”). 1914. State Dept Records Re World War I and Its Termination, 1914–29; Aug– Nov 1914, roll no. 332, call no. 10-16-5, microcopy no. 367; file no. 703. Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 October. Louis-Cohen, Jean. 1995. “‘Death Is My Project’: Architectures Deportation.” In Deportation and the Nazi Concentration Camp System, edited by François Bédarida and Gervereau Laurent, 32–41. Paris: Museum of Contemporary History. Mahoney, Kathryn. 2013. “Virtual Reality.” UNHCR.org. 6 November. Accessed 1 July 2016. http:// www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2013/11/56ec1e4e7/virtual-reality.html?query=champs. Malkki, Liisa. 1995. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:495–523. McAuley, Gay. 2003. “Place in the Performance Experience.” Modern Drama 56, 4: 598–613. Myers, Adrian, and Gabriel Moshenka. 2011. Archaeologies of Internment. New York: Springer. Ng, L. Wendy. 2002. Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. 1998. Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Packenham, Thomas. 2015. The Boer War. London: Hachette UK. Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. 2001. Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge. Skinner, Robert. 2011. Kitchener’s Camps at Seaford: A First World War Landscape on Aerial Photographs, Archaeological Report. Swindon: English Heritage, Research Department Report Series no. 27–2011. Smitheram, Jan. 2011. “Spatial Performativity/Spatial Performance.” Architectural Theory Review 16, 1:55–69. Soja, Edward. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Tompkins, Joanne. 2014. Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tschumi, Bernard. 1996. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2016a. “Alternatives to Camps.” UNHCR website. Accessed 29 June. http://www.unhcr.org/pages/54d9c7686.html. UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2016b. “Syria Regional Refugee Response.” Inter-agency Information Sharing Portal, UNHCR website. 1 June. Accessed 29 June. http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/settlement.php?id=176&country=107®ion=77.

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USHMMA (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives). 1944. “Outline Plan for Refugees and Displaced Persons—All Operations.” Supreme Allied Headquarters Allied Forces, 3 June. USNA (United States National Archives). 1915. Letter to American Ambassador, “Subject: Visits to Camps for Interned Germans and Austro-Hungarians,” 31 January. State Dept Records Re World War I and its Termination, 1914–29; Despatch No. 150 Report of Visits Made by Lieutenant Boyd and LieutCommander Sayles to Camps of Interned German and Austro-Hungarian Civilians at Avignon, Millau, St. Affrique, Espallion, Villefranche, 11 February 1915. Wachsmann, Nikolaus. 2015. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Little, Brown. Zetter, Roger. 1991. “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity.” Journal of Refugee Studies 4, 1: 39–62.

3 SACRED CHILDREN, ACCURSED MOTHERS Performativities of Necropolitics and Mourning in Neoliberal Turkey Eylül Fidan Akıncı

Would it be too dramatic to say that Turkey is turning into a necropolis, a state of the dead, for the Kurdish, the Alevi,1 workers, leftists, the LGBTI community, students, women, and children? Hundreds of occupational deaths of workers, murders of women and trans people, suicide bombings, and the curfews and special force operations in the Kurdish cities and towns in southeast Turkey exemplify how the state jeopardizes and exterminates the lives of its citizens. Through territorialized violence, the prevalent necropolitics renders these appalling deaths acceptable, ordinary, and in certain cases even enjoyable for the “common citizens.” This morbid production of and regulation over death strikingly reveals the necropolitical character of state power. The spectacular dimensions of this power to kill and reign over the protocols of burial attest to the systematic elision of the possibilities of collective life and democratic politics in Turkey. In an attempt to trace how this organized work of death performs publicly in Turkey, I will analyze a child’s murder by the state, that of Berkin Elvan, a 14-year-old boy who was shot by a tear gas canister during the Gezi Park protests in June 2013. His coma, which lasted 269 days, his death on 11 March 2014, and the public mourning processions for him have been of high political value, both for the head representative of the state, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and for the thousands of people who were attacked by the police during the funeral service. In explaining this political aspect of Elvan’s death and his funeral, I adopt Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, which connects exceptional sovereignty, expansiveness of death, and closure of political space (1998). I will briefly explain how the rhetoric of democratization has been employed in order to enable Turkey’s neoliberal transformation and the emergence of a necropower to sustain it. I then provide a close reading of Elvan’s funeral as a performative event that crystallizes this necropower through the dialectic between sovereignty and bare life. I also turn to Achille Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics at the core of normative politics as “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003:39), by which the sovereign produces territorialized and rationalized destruction of human bodies and disposable populations. Necropolitics, I argue, operates in performative and spectacular ways, taking hold of afterdeath in its interventions into dead bodies, burials, and grief. Following Judith Butler’s

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(2004) elucidations on the political power of collective grief, I view Berkin Elvan’s public funeral as a radical performance that could potentially begin to destabilize the established space of necropolitics.

Turkey’s Necropolitical Turn under the AKP’s Promise of Democracy The politics, the promise, and the premise of the AKP’s rule have been situated on decades of military and state violence that preceded it. Beginning with their first term in 2002 and continuing onwards, the AKP’s initial vow to change the 1982 constitution, drafted under a military provision following the 1980 coup d’état, was lauded as a truly democratic turn in the history of Turkish politics. The 1980 coup and the 1982 constitution deeply paralyzed civil and political life in Turkey, mostly at the expense of leftists and other political minorities. The AKP’s ideological positioning as a “conservative democracy” gained them wide appeal as it interwove a contemporary perspective of political Islam, hitherto suppressed by the military and the republican factions in the state, with the precepts of civil democracy in their resistance to previous bureaucratic status quo and military power. However, the AKP’s journey to create its own hegemony and capital intercepted their apparent commitment to democracy, civil liberation, and social equality. Fueled by their forceful implementation of supersized socioeconomic projects and through antiterrorism laws, this corporate-model politics has instead resorted to populism, religious and ethnic polarization, extensive police authority, and wide-scale censorship of civil society, media, and academia. To give some examples, the Reporters Without Borders organization (2012) calculated that 193 journalists and 130 netizens were held in jail in 2012. The Associated Press reported in a 2011 survey that Turkey convicted 12,897 citizens of terrorism, many of whom are Kurdish or proKurdish, leftist activists, or students (Mendoza 2011). With the Kurdish-heavy southeastern region as the concrete manifestation of a state of exception for more than 30 years, it is more fitting to think of the AKP’s authority as an instance of “constituted power,” after Walter Benjamin, in its perpetuation of previous military state tradition through “violence that preserves the law” (Agamben 1998:40).2 However, the party and its leader Erdoğan owe part of their mass popularity to their portrayal as custodians of a powerful “new Turkey” that broke with its militarist past. The corrosion of the AKP’s promise of democracy into an oppressive and factionist rule is not unique in revealing the contradictions of democracy’s unholy marriage with neoliberalism. In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin argues that totalitarian tendencies are not external or in contrast to, but inherent in, neoliberal democracies (2008). With the political government turning into corporatist management instead of a welfare state, the rationalization of social and political sources for profit—and the legislations to ensure its unburdened flow— have required a deeper state power endowed with performances and discourses of security, freedom and flexibility, which Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism” (11). With a similar tenor, Wendy Brown points out that in the global capitalist era, the ideal of democracy has lost its meaning of “people’s rule.” Following the end of the Cold War, the bureaucracy and government principle of Western democracies adopted entrepreneurial and business management models. This means that politics is more concerned with ensuring “market criteria of cost/benefit ratios, efficiency, profitability, and efficacy” in the distribution of material and representational power, rather than with the basic principles associated

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with democracy such as “constitutionalism, legal equality, political and civil liberty, political autonomy, and universal inclusion” (Brown 2009:47). Not only are “people,” as the “free” subjects of politics, removed from the scope of democracy, but also the managerial model of neoliberalism “permits expanded executive state powers at the very moment of declining state sovereignty” that operates through “a range of inadvertently de-democratizing policies, from suspended rights of movement and information access to racial profiling to increased zones of state secrecy and permanent undeclared wars” (Brown 2009:50). Mbembe’s elucidation of necropolitics and necropower posits such logistically economized practices of enmity, exception, killing, and letting die as the prevalent instrumental rationality of politics in modern democracy that goes hand in hand with biopower. The sovereignty that ordains the “nomos of political sphere in which we still live” at once perpetuates itself by, and derives surplus from, “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (Mbembe 2003:14; emphasis original). Likewise, Agamben’s critical analysis of biopower intrinsically deals with neoliberalism and exposure to death under modern democracy’s absorption and generalization of totalitarian state of exception as a way of validating the law that territorializes control over life (17). The neoliberal democracy’s deployment of the “war on terror” as a “democratic mission” therefore sustains political continuity with pre-modern forms of sovereignty as the right to kill.

Acts of Resistance: From Taksim to Okmeydani The Gezi Park protests that erupted in Istanbul in June 2013 and expanded to 79 cities were to date the biggest social reaction to Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s closure of the political sphere for democratic participation, civic deliberation, and local decision-making. Having started as a group of urban and environmental activists’ resistance against the attempted demolition of the city-center Gezi Park for the construction of a shopping mall, the protests turned into a huge sociopolitical rupture when the police violently intervened in the park. The plan to demolish Gezi Park, a rare green area in the heart of the city overlooking Taksim Square, was part of a larger neoliberal project that has been troubling Istanbul’s central districts in recent years. The main nodes of the ever-growing city have been forcefully cleared of their minority, working-class, low-income, and poor populations. With the rapid process of gentrification, massive numbers of hotels, malls, and expensive residences have been built in their places. Erdoğan personally endorsed the rebuilding of Topçu Kışlası, a shopping mall modeled after an Ottoman-era military barracks, on Gezi Park’s land as part of the AKP’s radical replanning of the Beyoğlu area, which was Istanbul’s most vibrant cultural hub. Several activist groups were already watching over the park when the demolition teams entered. In the early hours of 30 May 2013 their tents were set on fire, and the police attacked this small group of people with dozens of water cannons. Environmentalists, feminists, LGBTI organizations, factions of leftists, anarchists, Kurds, and Alevis immediately came together in Taksim Square in solidarity, which turned into an occupation of the park and a protest of the AKP’s overbearing regulations. They were joined by the Anticapitalist Muslims group as well as other groups of republicans, nationalists, and even a small number of discontent AKP voters. Other parts of Istanbul, as well as the rest of the country, became a scene in which this massive collective of people from different backgrounds and ideologies met anew. Their unity went beyond particular political agendas and strongly expressed discontentment against the AKP’s, and particularly Erdoğan’s, authoritative power and intolerance of the demands from

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civil society. For the first 20 days, when the protests and the police violence peaked, unprecedented numbers of people nevertheless went to the streets or opened their houses in support of those escaping from the police. To subdue the protesters, the police were authorized to use excessive force, resulting in the deaths of nine civilians and one policeman, and serious injury of more than 8,000 people via tear gas canisters shot with direct aim, plastic bullets, water cannons, beating with batons, and torture under custody. Besides Selim Önder, İrfan Tuna, and Zeynep Eryaşar, who all died of cardiac arrest caused by excessive tear gas exposure, the extensive police violence killed Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, Ali İsmail Korkmaz, Abdullah Cömert, Ethem Sarısülük, and Ahmet Atakan in different districts and cities—all Alevi youth in their early 20s, openly politicized, and active participants during the protests.3 Berkin Elvan, too, was an Alevi kid. Indeed, urban Alevi communities played an important part in the Gezi protests, especially through their well-organized resistance against police attacks (Mutluer 2016:152). In Istanbul particularly, the police violence was harsher in some Alevi districts such as Armutlu, Gülsuyu, Gazi, and Okmeydanı, where overt and covert state forces have been exceptionally marking, foreclosing, monitoring, and attacking the inhabitants since the 1990s (Yonucu 2014a). Historically very politicized on the grounds of their cultural, religious, and political workingclass identity, Alevis from all over the country have been struggling with systematic violence by the anti-left and Sunni-nationalistic logic of the Turkish State, via physical and symbolic attacks, including but not limited to: massacres, lynching, arson, forced exile and assimilation, criminalization of their urban neighborhoods, marking Alevi residences, hate speech, unequal treatment and misrepresentation of the Alevi belief system by the ministry of religious affairs, and disavowal of Alevi’s cemevis (“cem house”) as places of worship.4 Despite their democratic initiative projects and performed politics of tolerance, the AKP has not only failed to address the democratic demands of the Alevis for unburdened practice of their beliefs and culture, but also further compromised their collectivity through the renewal projects that aim to demolish and gentrify working-class neighborhoods that have fostered Alevi solidarity in urban contexts. In fact, by pigeonholing Alevis’ problems to identity-based injury, the initiative has been concealing Alevis’ socioeconomic precarity (Yonucu 2014b). Therefore, as one of the zones of extreme state violence before and during the AKP’s rule, what took place in the Alevi-heavy Okmeydanı, the district bordering Beyoğlu and less than two miles from Gezi Park, saturates the large-scale political significance of the protests. It was in Okmeydanı that Berkin Elvan was shot on his way to buy bread from the bakery on 16 June 2013, on one of those mornings when the police had just secured Gezi Park and Taksim Square after intermittent clashes with protesters and actually managed to disperse the majority of them. The expert analysis of the video footage of Berkin’s shooting, anonymously leaked to YouTube more than a year later, shows that the protests in the neighborhood were subdued at the time.5 Groups of heavily armored riot police were patrolling the streets at around 7am. A group of inhabitants observed silently in one corner, while policemen advanced one by one to shoot tear gas bombs into the empty streets, throwing more than five bombs in ten minutes. The footage shows one policeman fire a tear gas canister directly at Berkin’s head as Berkin was waiting at an intersection and looking to see what was going on. Although the identities of the policemen could be discerned from their helmet numbers, the ministries of justice and internal affairs denied having any proof of the identity of the shooter for months. Only after Berkin died at the end of a nine-month coma were 18 policemen called to testify as suspects. Four denied allegations, and no legal action was taken against either these policemen or their

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superiors. In March 2016, two years after his death, the policeman responsible for his shooting was identified, but as of June 2016, his name had not been revealed nor has he been put on trial. During Berkin’s coma, his family, parliament members from oppositional parties, and civil activists constantly called for the indictment of those responsible. The Elvan family made a public statement on the 46th day of Berkin’s coma to inform the public about his condition and to demand justice. Before they were able to finish their statement, the police interrupted, shooting tear gas bombs at the family and the small group gathered in front of the hospital where Berkin lay. After 70 days of intensive care, the state hospital wanted to discharge Berkin, but retreated upon immediate public response and interventions of some parliament members. On 9 September 2013, 85 days into Berkin’s coma, the “Human Chain for Justice” meeting by activists and Okmeydanı residents endeavored to stretch from Okmeydanı to Istanbul Çağlayan Justice Palace, to bring attention to the judiciary negligence in Berkin’s case. Once again, police harshly subdued the group with tear gas and plastic bullets, and went on to attack Okmeydanı for hours until the next day, resulting in serious injuries for more than a dozen civilians. A small vigil had been held for several days in front of the hospital when Berkin succumbed to death, his weight down to 35 pounds after nine months of coma, on 11 March 2014. Even as Berkin’s body was sent to forensics, the police did not refrain from using tear gas to disperse

Anti-government protesters run as police fire tear gas to push back thousands of demonstrators close to central Taksim square in Istanbul, 12 March 2014. Then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan criticized protesters who took to the streets of cities across the country in the hundreds of thousands after the funeral of Berkin Elvan, wounded in anti-government clashes in the summer of 2013. REUTERS/Murad Sezer.

FIGURE 3.1

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Turkish police fires water cannons to push back thousands of demonstrators close to central Taksim square in Istanbul 12 March 2014. Then Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan criticised protesters who took to the streets of cities across the country in the hundreds of thousands after the funeral of Berkin Elvan, wounded in anti-government clashes in the summer of 2013. REUTERS/ Murad Sezer.

FIGURE 3.2

the small group. More people immediately met in Taksim to protest the police violence right after the news of Berkin’s death, but were violently chased and scattered with tear gas and water cannons, with one injured. Despite this clear intimidation, thousands of people went to the streets again for Berkin’s funeral the next day. Following the funeral ritual at Okmeydanı Cemevi, Berkin’s body was carried to Feriköy Cemetery, accompanied by thousands marching from Okmeydanı to the neighboring Şişli district where the cemetery is located, and joined by groups from other directions of the city. The flags of various political organizations could be seen in the crowd, while the sheer number of people, as many participants commented, far exceeded any political march ever organized. The crowd was clearly more diverse than Alevis, leftists, and young activists, including, for instance, many middle-aged and older citizens who may not have otherwise attended such public meetings. Both video documentation of the mourning procession as well as my interviews with several participants who joined the crowd, express the overwhelming scale of the funeral communion, which was strikingly harmonious as it came together autonomously and anonymously, without the initiative of one particular organization or a call to action. This spontaneous gathering for Berkin’s funeral was the first of its kind after months of the stifling atmosphere under increasing authoritarianism following the Gezi Park protests and their forceful suppression.

FIGURE 3.3

Images.

Thousands of people attend the funeral of Berkin Elvan. Photo: MIRA/AFP/Getty

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Berkin’s mother, Gülsüm Elvan, put carnations and toy marbles on Berkin’s tomb to symbolize the wish for justice and the innocence of her child. She would later defend these actions in response to Erdoğan’s notorious public attack on her (Söylemez 2014). As soon as Berkin had been buried, the police started to attack with tear gas bombs and water cannons at different points along the long mourning procession, which extended for miles in the avenues that intersected with the cemetery area. With immense force and logistic organization, they managed to scatter the huge crowd of thousands in less than half an hour. What remained of this momentous congregation were the images of people running away in distress, getting injured, or arrested. Later that day, the news of another death circulated the media. Burak Can Karamanoğlu, aged 22, was killed in the environs of Okmeydanı. He was from another neighborhood, Kasımpaşa, a detail that Erdoğan would later use when he referred to this event, since it is home to Erdoğan’s and other mainly conservative families. The first implication in the mainstream media was that Karamanoğlu died in a fight between a group of young men from Kasımpaşa and an Alevi group from Okmeydanı. Although how, why, and by whom Karamanoğlu was killed has not been clarified even after the interrogation of suspects, the news media connected these two unrelated events: the clashes resulting from the police violence on the funeral path, and Karamanoğlu’s death in a fight.6 Two days after Berkin’s funeral and Karamanoğlu’s death, Erdoğan spoke at a rally for upcoming municipality elections in the city of Gaziantep, where he subsequently made use of this civil war mise-en-scène. In his speech he also accused Berkin’s mother Gülsüm Elvan of manipulating her son’s funeral, and invited boos from the supporting crowd. This moment has since become quite emblematic for how excessively the terrorist stigma is used by Erdoğan, the AKP members, and the mainstream media. Hence, Erdoğan’s speech is worth citing at length, an excerpt of which I translate here with comments in brackets: The main opposition party [CHP, “Republican People’s Party”] is supporting and funding these unrests. […] In the meantime, a boy, face covered with a scarf and metal marbles in his pocket, receives the tear gas canister [Berkin was not wearing a face cover, nor did he have metal marbles]. The police had no means to tell the age of this face-covered boy, with slingshot in his hand, throwing metal marbles around! [Berkin did not have a slingshot in his hand.] But this Kılıçdaroğlu [CHP’s leader] is lying by saying that this kid was going to buy bread. What bread! His mother says, “the prime minister is the murderer of my son.” I understand the love of child, but I don’t quite understand your putting carnations and steel marbles on his tomb! [They were not steel marbles but toy marbles.] [The crowd jeers and boos.] Why are you putting them on your son’s tomb? What message are you giving? The father says the same thing. We know other fathers, too! Look, the DHKP-C group [Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front7] comes to my old neighborhood that evening, and in the dead of the night, martyrizes our son, Burak, who came from military duty 3 months ago, unfortunately, right there [Burak was killed in Okmeydanı, not Kasımpaşa]. Burak didn’t have a slingshot in his hand; he didn’t have a gun in his hand. But they martyrized this child there, as he was just standing in front of his house, and the number of barrels found there was 42! They [ambiguous, it could be the CHP members or Berkin’s family] are collaborating with these terrorists! (Cumhuriyet 2014; my translation and emphases)

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Coinciding with this provocative speech, Burak’s father stated that he had phoned Berkin’s family to give his sympathies and express solidarity, claiming Berkin as his son. However, by having his rally crowd boo Berkin’s mother Gülsüm Elvan, Erdoğan symbolically attacked everyone attending Berkin’s funeral. More severely, Erdoğan asserted himself as the arbiter of the grievability of lives and the forms of marking loss. For the collective memory, the physical and symbolic attacks on Berkin, his mother, and his mourners have become representative of the expanded and exceptional state power.

Performativity of Necropolitics Why did Berkin and Gülsüm Elvan, a 14-year-old boy and his mother who worked two jobs, make Erdoğan, who had been ruling the country for a decade, feel so threatened that he constantly needed to slander them in public? To explain the dialectic between sovereignty and bare life, Agamben (1998:15), following Carl Schmitt, reviews the paradox of sovereignty in its capacity to step itself out of the law that forbids killing and to decide who to exclude from the protection of that law. The excluded, ripped from their fundamental political rights and emerging as bare life, does not simply recede out of visibility or existence, but on the contrary becomes the reference point for the sovereign in an originary political relation. Thus, the excluded, homo sacer, whose life cannot be sacrificed but can be killed with impunity, is captured within the sovereign power in its very exclusion. This bare life constitutes the threshold by which the inclusivity of the law is demarcated, and reveals the sovereign’s expansive hold over life in the generalization of the state of exception (Agamben 1998:83–84). In his analysis of the politics of life and death, Mbembe (2003:22) focuses on the subject of necropolitics, the disposable bodies captured by the rationalized and outsourced forms of killing and letting die through “terror formation” under post-colonial capitalism. Agamben discusses the decisions over death, exemplified in the Nazi concentration camps or in the medical determination of a coma, as expressions of biopower. Both Agamben (1998:10) and Mbembe (2003:35) touch on the spectacularity of death within the sovereign right to kill. I choose to emphasize and expand on necropolitics from this perspective, because the state’s interventions and decisions concerning the dead body enact the utmost inclusive exclusion. In other words, necropolitics requires the production of performances towards and after the act of killing and letting die. The space of politics is shaped and re-inscribed by the very spectacle of overtaking death under the sovereign hold. Banu Bargu traces the violent practices by the state forces in the duration of curfews in Kurdish towns, and similarly rethinks necropolitics through the state’s spectacular interventions into dead bodies and rituals of mourning: In distinction from other forms of death-making, I use necropolitical violence to denote those acts that target the dead bodies of those killed in armed conflict, by way of their mutilation, dismemberment, denuding, desecration, dragging, and public display, the destruction of local cemeteries and other sacred spaces that are designated for communication with and commemoration of the dead, the delay, interruption, or suspension of the conduct of funerary rituals, the imposition of mass or anonymous internment, the pressure for clandestine internment, and the repression and dispersion of funeral processions for the newly dead. […] Necropolitical violence, then, refers to an entire ensemble of diverse practices that target the dead as a surrogate for, and means of, targeting the living. (Bargu 2016; emphasis original)

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In Berkin’s case, I slightly digress from Bargu’s focus on terrorization of the living through the spectacle over death and the dead body. As it authors a horizon of significance and semiotics for the organized work of death, necropolitics interpellates publics as well as triggers and responds to counterpublics through the utterances and spectacles concerning the dead. Necropolitics thus needs to be reconceptualized as a performative form of sovereign power that on the one hand presides over life and death in a spectacular fashion by spotting targets, staging their deaths, and consolidating the audiences’ identities. On the other hand, it preemptively or reactively intervenes in the performances that signify and mark the death that that very necropower produces. This performative structure I argue to be inherent in contemporary necropolitics also holds true for the cases in which the deadly remains of state violence are not immediately given to the public view or rendered inconceivable, as exemplified by the “percepticide” of Argentina’s Dirty War (Taylor 1997) or the production of “war porn” (Baudrillard 2006) during the “war on terror” under the Bush regime. As Diana Taylor warns: . . . it is important to realize that dealing in disappearance and making the visible invisible are also profoundly theatrical. Only in the theatre can the audience believe that those who walk offstage have vanished into limbo. So the theatricality of torture and terror, capable of inverting and fictionalizing the world, does not necessarily lie in its visibility, but rather in its potential to transform, to recreate, to make the visible invisible, the real unreal. ( Taylor 1997:132)

The Cast of Necropolitics: Accursed Child, Accursed Mother In the rationality of necropolitics, the visibility, invisibility, or hypervisibility of bare life and death is still highly selective. In his public statements and speeches Erdoğan did not refer to the names of other victims of police violence during the Gezi Protests. It was only Berkin and his mother—neither of whom was protesting that morning or was a threat to the state—whom Erdoğan constantly brought up almost as a metonymy for “Gezi terrorists.” His preoccupation with them could be explained by a perception that a child and a woman are unfit for political subjectivity, as homines sacri that by “nature” are not to be included in the legal category of citizenship (Agamben 1998:130–31). On the other hand, there is an affective weight in the figure of mother and child that Erdoğan had to reverse, to demonize, and to exploit. As Zehra Yılmaz points out, Erdoğan frequently emphasizes the role of family for the righteous government of the state, precisely in order to “compensate the financial losses caused by neo-liberal policies” (2015:156).8 The domestic mother figure has always been strong in the social imaginary in Turkey; but now motherhood and childrearing is essential to womanhood, as Erdoğan stated at the International Women’s Day event on 8 March 2014: I have been repeatedly emphasizing one point anywhere anytime; for me the real peak point for a woman is motherhood alone. That is the sole basis of my ever-great and immeasurable affection and respect towards mothers and the reason why I value women so much . . . Let alone kiss their hands, I keep saying “kiss their feet.” (Yılmaz 2015:166–67)

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In his attempts to justify a child’s death at the hands of state forces and not contradict himself, Erdoğan had to use the anonymity of “terrorist” for Berkin and cast Gülsüm Elvan as having bad intentions rather than those expected from a grieving mother. For Erdoğan, Gülsüm Elvan’s moving cry has to remain exceptional to the category of sacred motherhood. In his understanding, a mother should silently keep her outrage and pain in the domestic setting she belongs to; otherwise, she sheds her motherhood when she calls for justice in public. Only a week after Berkin fell comatose, on 24 June 2013, Erdoğan praised the police for their brave, “epic” actions during the Gezi Park protests, while in his “Respect to the Nation’s Will”9 rally on 26 June 2013, he defended the use of gas bombs stating, “It was I who gave the orders to the police” (Radikal 2013). These statements, this show of force, prompted Gülsüm Elvan to later state that it is Erdoğan who was responsible for her son’s death (Girit 2014). Constantly targeted by Erdoğan as “terrorists and agitators,” and failed by a dysfunctional judicial system, the Elvan family’s life has turned into “living death” (Agamben 1998:99). In Agamben’s configuration of the relationship between homo sacer and its mourners, Berkin’s parents, as “surviving devotees,” literally “[have] entered into an intimate symbiosis with death without, nevertheless, belonging to the world of the deceased” (100). For “[s]acer designates the person or the thing that one cannot touch without dirtying oneself or without dirtying” (79). The Elvan family and everyone else that attended Berkin’s funeral “dirtied” themselves, in the sovereign’s view, by giving Berkin a politically invested funeral procession, by transgressing the ban on the public grievability of his death, and by revolting against the impunity of his murder. The political investment in Berkin’s interrupted funeral, on the other hand, found a striking materialization a year later in a custom-made tombstone for the first anniversary of Berkin’s death. The tombstone visually represents the untimely deaths of Berkin and others during the Gezi Protests: Berkin’s outline running with balloons, his age symbolized by 15 seagulls (that also look like his eyebrows) connecting as the branches of a tree, and eight dots with diameters matching the ages of Gezi victims. This belated tombstone concretely acknowledges the essential political relation of bare life with death in an ontological suspension, acting as a colossus in Agamben’s sense: a “dead person […] belonging properly neither to the world of the living nor to that of the dead” (1998:98). Berkin’s suspension between life and death, literal in his coma, and symbolic in his political afterlife as represented in the people’s slogan at the funeral, “Berkin Elvan is immortal” (Girit 2014), can be seen as an ontological border crossing, which the state did not fail to treat as a transgression. It is that transgressive status that the state at once produces and punishes, generating its own validity and legitimacy to violence each time. Likewise, arriving at Okmeydanı Cemevi from all directions for the funeral on 12 March 2014, various groups of people literally crossed the threshold that supposedly separated this working-class Alevi neighborhood from the city center, while gatherings in other cities (as well as several global capitals such as London and Berlin) crossed the border that separates Istanbul from the rest of the country. This performative action of gathering and walking for Berkin’s funeral from all directions of the city and the country symbolically performed other border-crossings, too, between classes, identities, beliefs, ethnicities, and political views. Most importantly, however, Berkin’s funeral border-crossed from private mourning to political and public performance, and not solely by the mourners’ own verdict: AKP ministers’ and Erdoğan’s announcements during the day framed the crowd as having ulterior motives beyond commemoration. Erdoğan, at that moment holding a rally in Mardin, shouted that “It is not a democratic attitude to set the streets on fire as the elections [referring to municipality elections to

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be held on 30 March 2014] are coming up in 18 days,” while the minister of communication and transportation Lütfi Elvan felt the need to state, “It is wrong to turn this event of death into a political tool, especially before the elections” (BBC Türkçe 2014; emphasis mine).

The City as Necropolitical Stage By insisting on the political manipulation around the funeral, Erdoğan and the AKP members not only tried to evade the responsibility of the state and affirmed its positioning beyond law, they also acknowledged the very political status of Berkin’s death. A statement by Güldal Akşit, the head of the AKP’s Women’s Branch at the time, for instance, testified to the actuality of “the camp,” in Agamben’s sense, under the AKP’s rule: “A child at that age should not be in those squares no matter what. A child at that age should not be pushed to, directed towards, or enticed by the squares” (BBC Türkçe 2014). Akşit’s message implies that a child’s life is and should remain apart from the public and from politics. That is to say, a child cannot claim political rights and protections, thus it has only bare life. A child should abide the condition to stay at its natural realm of the familial home, or expect to be indiscriminately killed by an invisible hand with impunity. Those who really want to commemorate this child’s death, if it is worth mourning at all, should respect the state of exception that has become the law of the city, and do so in the privacy of their homes. They should not go out in the streets, or else they should expect to be attacked by the same invisible hand. The normativity of exception therefore regards “the streets,” “the squares” of Okmeydanı and Taksim, or the entirety of public space, as camp. As Agamben asserts: The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order. (Agamben 1998:168–69; emphasis original) While this generality of the camp exceeds territoriality and binds everybody that occupies public space, the sovereign discursively specifies and locates the unruly bodies under its hold. By ascribing the whole funeral crowd with criminal intent, Erdoğan warned “his” law-abiding citizens against the “anti-democratic” Gezi protesters and “their disregard for the sanctity of elections and the will of the nation” (Diken.com.tr 2014). By mystifying the subject of their allegations in the passive voice, he at once created a mass of “innocent citizens and nation” up against an “ill-intentioned, omnipresent, terrorist mob.” Sara Ahmed’s discussion on the affective politics around the fear of death in the creation of “people” versus “terrorists” for George W. Bush’s “war on terror” functions within this performative interpellation (2004:77). The emotive configurations around “us and them” determine an audience, “us,” as the singular public. Therefore instead of censoring dead bodies from publicity, the necropolitical sovereignty needs the affective surplus derived from publicly defiling “these terrorists” physically or symbolically, as well as from intervening and upstaging the public forms of collective mourning. In order to function “politically” as a technique of government of life through death, the necropower thus generates a reservoir of affects around “bare death” (Bargu 2016), by which it constantly demarcates a particular audience of “common citizens” and re-inscribes their identities.

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Mourning as Resistance to Necropower The police explained their disruption of the funeral crowd with the justification that their instruction for disbandment at 5pm was not followed. They also blamed their actions on the attempt by several different groups to go on to Taksim Square, less than one and a half miles from the cemetery, to leave flowers at Gezi Park in memory of other youths killed during the protests. Notwithstanding the lack of legal basis for the order, the police’s demand was logically and logistically impossible, too. Berkin’s burial was completed within minutes of the stated time. The sheer size of the commemoration crowd would have made it impossible to comply with such ordering of time and space. The crowd did not have to perform any unruly or resilient action to trigger the execution of police violence, which was already present at key points along the meeting route. This collective of people, the “troublemakers” as the authorities referred to them, “push[ed] the aporia of sovereignty to the limit” (Agamben 1998:48) only by virtue of gathering in public, and “forced sovereign power to translate itself into actuality” (47). As they wanted to give a funeral for homo sacer, to “reestablish the proper relation between the living and the dead” (98), the participants opened up the very possibility of politics by transgressing borders of exception beyond the spatio-temporal markers drawn by the sovereign. Butler’s discussion of precarity of life in relation to community and political transformation reveals possible lines of agency in such performances of mourning. Butler discusses the political aspect of grief, as opposed to the assumption that it is a privatizing, solitary feeling (2004:22). Also drawing from the Bush regime’s nation-building around the “war on terror” and official obituaries for 9/11 and war deaths, Butler questions what makes for grievable life, pointing at the derealizations of the “terrorists’” deaths: terrorists do not die, for they do not exist, since they are omitted from the category of humanity in the first place: If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. (Butler 2004:33) Agamben’s deconstruction of homo sacer, bare and “sacred human” life as the basis of political exclusion, cuts across Butler’s grounding of this derealization in opposition to “humanity,” but I think they do make similar points about the sovereign’s gesture of marking and unmarking the lives to be grieved, and the politically in-between status of those who are banned from being grieved. This hovering, inexhaustible non-subject, in turn, constantly demands a new ethical decision to be made about the human life and its political as well as transcendental belonging, a decision that determines the meaning of community. Butler (2004) states that the moment of mourning in public for the lives that are derealized, as an embodied performance triggered by the ban on certain forms of grief, is that decision which calls forth the bodies from their “silence and melancholy,” a call to partake in “common vulnerability” (36–37). The loss implied in the grief for the other, Butler emphasizes, precedes one’s own unity as subject (31). This claim of common vulnerability beyond familiarity of identities, which must be

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performed anew each time, builds into a rupture that transcends the political actions prescribed and circumscribed by the status quo, transforming into a radical political response, or a politics of collective responsibility (Butler 2004:43; Ahmed 2004:13). It is hard to claim a complete political transformation through Berkin’s funeral, but their exposure to the state violence there as well as during the Gezi Protests might have evoked the common precarity for many who were otherwise living in comparable security from or even ignorance of the necropolitical tactics which the Turkish state has employed for decades before and after the AKP’s party-state. This shaking of the ground, “the loss of the prerogative” (Butler 2004:39), might have indicated the beginning of their “agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance” (21). Thousands of people who had never been part of a political organization partook in an unprecedented demonstration when they came together for Berkin’s funeral and marked it by their very presence in spite of the state’s efforts to criminalize such a gesture. Through their performative expression of this loss, and enduring symbolic and physical violence because of it, the participants in Berkin’s funeral experienced the glimpse of a solidarity that, for some, might not have been there before.

Dramaturgy of Mourning If Erdoğan endowed Berkin’s death with unprecedented, albeit obfuscating, visibility, those who mourn for Berkin, in turn, responded to it by creating their own semiotics in their performances. As a result, these interrelated performances around Berkin’s death operated through

FIGURE 3.4 A banner unfurled on the building of Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos, which reads, “The child and the bread are sacred. We won’t forget you Berkin.”

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common references. During his coma and immediately after his death, there was an explosion of images around Berkin that particularly elaborated on his pubescent figure. A striking caption that accompanied one of these images was: “The child and the bread are sacred.” Indeed, many of them made use of a common iconography developed around his prominent eyebrows, the bread he was on his way to get, and his small body with angel wings. These widely circulated images of Berkin, as well as those of his mother crying, however, pose the danger of fixating on the themes of innocence, sanctity, and martyrdom in discussing political deaths,10 which can be equally problematic and politically stultifying as “terrorist.” For some of the mainstream newspapers and television channels, these emotive images helped to obscure the circumstances in which Berkin died as well as the police attack on Berkin’s funeral procession. The AKP’s co-founder and then-president Abdullah Gül and some AKP members, possibly to counterbalance Erdoğan’s aggressive tone and to avoid accountability, mainly referred to Berkin’s innocence and youth in their condolence messages, without commenting on the police’s role and the state’s responsibility in Berkin’s death. I return once more to Agamben, as he underlines how the category of sacred is not only politically inefficient but also selfcontradictory in expressing the value of human life: [S]acredness is instead the originary form of the inclusion of bare life in the juridical order, and the syntagm homo sacer names something like the originary “political” relation, which is to say, bare life insofar as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign decision. Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the sovereign exception, and to have exchanged a juridico-political phenomenon (homo sacer’s capacity to be killed but not sacrificed) for a genuinely religious phenomenon is the root of the equivocations that have marked studies both of the sacred and of sovereignty in our time. (Agamben 1998:85; emphasis mine) The sacredness in fact evokes the extent of sovereign hold over life, instead of implying its limit. The affects around sacredness and innocence remove the question of political subjectivity from view, and in a theological setting turn the demand for justice into a call for mercy. As they further associate childhood with being outside of politics, uncannily grasping its highly political nature, the reverberations of sacredness and innocence erase Berkin’s political consciousness as a child growing up in Okmeydanı, who must have witnessed the regular police harassment and the Okmeydanı community’s constant resistance. In fact, Berkin was very aware of the protests; he had, for instance, read a poem in a small gathering for Ethem Sarısülük on 1 June, on the second day of Gezi Protests when the police shot Sarısülük.11 Subscribing to the categories of sacredness and innocence therefore sabotages the right to political expression, and has the danger of submitting to the sovereign discourse that produces “good citizens” and “terrorist” bodies in order to redistribute the worth and political value of lives and deaths. Hence, in addition to the fundamental question around homo sacer—the question of whose lives are grievable—we also need to ask in what forms the performance of mourning can really challenge the necropolitical performance that summons it. What kind of signification would do that, and for whom would it be effective? Does it overshadow or does it underline the historicity of structural violence that creates the death being mourned? Does participating in this performance require or result in one’s political transformation? Is it powerful enough to confound otherwise disenchanted masses?

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Coda: Tragedy of Mourning in Necropolis These rather dramaturgical questions might seem tangential, yet the problem of how to experience and express collective pain is a long-standing matter. Here I am reminded of Antigone’s archetypal ubiquity in texts that reflect on power, grief, and community. Antigone’s struggle to signify her loss consists of two performances: of giving proper burial and of debating with Creon in front of a silent chorus. The influence of Antigone’s performances on Creon’s and the chorus’ affective world is central to the Sophoclean tragedy’s discussion of the limits of sovereignty. Pushing those limits many times over, Erdoğan strives to assume an unprecedented power in the political history of the Turkish Republic, while unburied, exposed, bare deaths proliferate. Nevertheless, not allowing the dead to be buried in peace has in fact been a long tradition of state hegemony in Turkey. Cumartesi Anneleri (“Saturday Mothers,” inspired by Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina), the mothers and wives of those abducted and “disappeared” by the state forces, have been gathering in Taksim since 1995 to demand judicial inquiry into these forced disappearances and ask the return of their family members, dead or alive. Most of these abductees were politically active Kurdish and Alevi civilians that the Turkish state’s “dirty war” targeted.12 Thus, it felt completely wicked when Egemen Bağış, the then-minister of European Relations, tweeted the following on the day of Berkin’s funeral: “The necrophiliacs who are disturbed by the end of terror and who target the resolution process will get their answers in the election day on March 30th” (Radikal 2014). His scolding words, according to the explanation he had to give soon after, were aimed at the criticisms of the peace negotiations with the PKK (“Kurdistan Workers’ Party”) at the time.13 The “necrophiliacs” in Bağış’s deliberately ambiguous statement could then include the Saturday Mothers, the mourning men and women who challenge these procedural negotiations for not properly addressing the issues that span over three decades. Evocatively capturing the necropolitical trajectory of the Turkish state in one sentence, the minister’s aggressive words immediately after Berkin’s death were not at all off the mark: Berkin’s family as well as the whole crowd that gathered on 12 March were making the same request, against the same sovereign gesture. Two and a half years after Berkin’s funeral, Turkey witnessed horrible scenes under the enclosure of curfews: Emine Çağırga, for instance, had to keep her daughter Cemile’s corpse in the fridge for days (Kamer 2015). Others were shot as they tried to take the dead bodies of their family members and relatives off the streets. Lifeless bodies of guerillas are held, mutilated, exposed naked, or dragged through the streets by the police; families receive bones and flesh of their lost ones in bags; homes and neighborhoods of thousands are destroyed and graffitied with humiliating messages by the special task forces (hence the domestic space is annexed to the camp). All of these are recorded by camera, shared online, and commented on with patriarchal, ultra-nationalist pleasure. While visual exposure of the dead is one method of necropower, the state also wants to get hold of the bodies before the families and hide the traces of its torturous practices. By either lying bare or concealing the dead body, this desire to expand sovereignty over death and to diminish the political potential of grief is perfectly summed up by a recent change in the law as of January 2016: Ordering a 24-hour limit for claiming and burying the dead, beyond which bodies will be held and anonymously buried by the state, the AKP produces and captures new homines sacri through its necropolitical intervention into the terms and conditions of funeral and burial.14 Almost invited by such a ban, the performances of public mourning and

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commemoration, the very corporeal acts of marking death and embodying the memory of the deceased carry utmost significance in the face of the political petrification under an expansive state of exception. In an Antigonean cycle of death and grief, we are now confronting and conversing with a precarity that goes beyond the realm of living. It remains to be seen if strong counterpublics can emerge and transform prevalent definitions and experiences of collectivity and democracy towards a renewed understanding of human life and its value after excessive exposure to death.

Notes 1 While Alevi identity includes subjects from a wide range of economic, political, cultural, and sectarian backgrounds, Alevis can be considered the largest ethnoreligious minority in Turkey. 2 For a detailed discussion of the AKP’s political trajectory in the light of constitutional reforms proper, see Aslı Bâli (2016). 3 For further analysis of the protests and statistics, see Gezi Park Protests: Brutal Denial of the Right to Peaceful Assembly in Turkey (2013) published by Amnesty International, and The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi (2014) edited by Umut Özkırımlı. 4 Maraş Massacre (19–26 December 1978, pogrom), Çorum massacre (May–July 1980, pogrom), Sivas Massacre (2 July 1993, arson), and Gazi Quarter Riots (12–15 March 1995, mass shooting and police attack) are amongst the most violent and visible examples in which systemic injustice and violence peaked. For a recent overview of how economic precarization, coupled with this traumatic history and collective mourning, functions in the dynamic production of political and social identification for Alevi communities, see Mutluer (2016). 5 The footage is derived from the surveillance cameras, the cameras on the police cars, as well as CCTVs of surrounding shops (deniz tunç 2014). 6 “Burak Can Karamanoğlu is killed at a conflict,” reads the caption on one of the mainstream news portals, Haberturk.tv, on 13 March 2014. The report states: “At the demonstrations organized after the funeral for Berkin Elvan, who was injured during the events for Gezi Park and lost his life, Burak Can Karamanoğlu lost his life at a fight between two groups at Beyoğlu.” The pro-government newspaper Yeni Akit presented Karamanoğlu’s death with caption “Çapulcular killed a boy!” (13 March 2014). The word “çapulcular” (“thugs”) is infamously used by Erdoğan to denote the Gezi protesters. 7 A far-left and anti-imperialist paramilitary resistance organization and classified as a terrorist group, DHKP-C has a complex structure and unfathomable courses of action that involve violent means. More often than not, the authorities use the organization as a wild card to attack what they deem to be “dangerous territories,” or for the responsibility of unresolved explosions or murders, as in the case of Burak Can Karamanoğlu’s death. DHKP-C did have an involvement with Berkin’s case, however. In March 2015, two DHKP-C members took hostage Mehmet Kiraz, the prosecutor of Berkin’ case, and demanded the identities of the policemen who are responsible for Berkin’s murder. After the police operation, the militants and the prosecutor died, yet the details of the operation and the deaths are never revealed. 8 Yılmaz’s analysis of the AKP’s biopolitical program on gender roles and family, represented by Erdoğan’s frequent polemics on women’s duty to bear child and put their children before their career, is in close agreement with Brown’s observations on the neoliberal transformation of democracy: “During the neo-liberalization period that gained impetus in Turkey after the AKP, the revitalization of a family and communion interrelation on the basis of a ‘charity’ mission is inextricably intertwined with the loosening of the welfare-state approach” (Yılmaz 2015:156). 9 The name and timing of the rally both reveal how Erdoğan wanted to generate his own crowd against the protesters, through an allusion to their love and respect for democracy and the others’ hatred of it: “Our police, judiciaries and democracy have been direly tested. But, thank god, we passed it with success. We underlined the democracy, justice and basic human rights and freedoms in spite of those

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who want to derail democracy and justice” (Radikal 2013; translation and emphasis mine). His words strangely echo George W. Bush’s 9/11 address to the nation on the terrorist attacks: “These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong” (Bush 2003:1099). “Berkin is a martyr of democracy,” stated Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of CHP, at a meeting in another city during the funeral (BBC Türkçe 2014). Seventy-three people were annexed to the first prosecution against Gezi Park protests in Ankara for attending the funeral procession of Ethem Sarısülük on 16 June 2013. Police had used excessive violence to intervene in Sarısülük’s funeral as well. Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin İvegen captures the performativity of the Saturday Mothers meetings with a particular attention to their urban aspects. See Baydar and İvegen (2006). PKK is a militant organization with a socialist basis that has been in armed struggle with Turkey for Kurdish political autonomy in the southeastern part of the country since 1984. Turkey, the EU, and NATO consider them a terrorist organization. After a hiatus of peace negotiations between 2013 and 2015, the AKP government has reverted back to war with PKK. The cost of curfews and operations between August 2015 and April 2016 in the southeastern region is the deaths of at least 338 civilians including seventy-eight children, the displacement of approximately 400,000, and the destruction of houses and entire districts, according to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey’s report (2016). For further information on the failed negotiation process and the AKP’s political motivations behind the ongoing conflict, see Ertür and Martel (2016). The same law change ensures that “in necessary cases the time period can be extended by the local authority. The funerals that are not buried within the time are taken from where they are and buried by the decision of the local authority.” The justification for the change is implied under the final comments section of the law: “For cases that the local authority determines to affect people’s health and peace as well as public order and security, the local authority can take necessary precautions for the execution of processes stated in this by-law” (in Fincancı 2016).

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Rozaen. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Amnesty International. 2013. Gezi Park Protests: Brutal Denial of the Right to Peaceful Assembly in Turkey. London: Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR44/022/2013/en/. Bâli, Aslı. 2016. “Shifting into Reverse: Turkish Constitutionalism under the AKP.” Theory & Event 19, 1. Accessed 24 June 2016. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610221. Bargu, Banu. 2016. “Another Necropolitics.” Theory & Event 19, 1. Accessed 24 June 2016. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/610222. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. “War Porn.” Journal of Visual Culture 5, 1: 86–88. Baydar, Gülsüm, and Berfin İvegen. 2006. “Territories, Identities, and Thresholds: The Saturday Mothers Phenomenon in Istanbul.” Signs 31, 3: 689–715. doi:10.1086/498986. BBC Türkçe. 2014. “Berkin Elvan’ın cenaze töreni sonrası müdahale.” 12 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/turkce/haberler/140312_canli_berkincenaze. Brown, Wendy. 2009. “‘We Are All Democrats Now . . .’.” In Democracy in What State?, edited by Giorgio Agamben, 44–57. New York: Columbia University Press. Bush, George W. (2003). Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 2001, Book 2, Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1099. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Cumhuriyet. 2014. “Erdoğan Berkin Elvan’ı terörist ilan etti annesini de yuhalattı.” 14 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/video/video/50743/Erdogan_Berkin_Elvan_i_terorist_ ilan_etti_annesini_de_yuhalatti.html.

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deniz tunç. 2014. “Berkin Elvan’ın vurulma görüntüleri.” YouTube, 36:02, posted by “deniz tunç,” 4 December. Accessed 24 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXKgWt8jnik. Diken.com.tr. 2014. “Erdoğan, Berkin Elvan için düzenlenen eylemleri de sandığa bağladı.” 13 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.diken.com.tr/erdogan-berkin-protestolarini-da-sandiga-bagladi/. Ertür, Başak and James Martel (eds). 2016. Theory & Event Supplement. 19, 1 (January). Fincancı, Şebnem Korur. 2016. “Mezarsız ölüye yer yok.” Evrensel.net. 24 January. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.evrensel.net/haber/270857/mezarsiz-oluye-yer-yok. Girit, Selin. 2014. “Police in Turkey Clash with Protesters after Boy’s Funeral.” BBC News. 12 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26540220. Human Rights Foundation of Turkey Documentation Center. 2016. “Fact Sheet on Declared Curfews Between August 16, 2015 and April 20, 2016 and Civilians who Lost Their Lives.” Accessed 24 June 2016. http://en.tihv.org.tr/fact-sheet-on-declared-curfews-between-august-16-2015-and-april-202016-and-civilians-who-lost-their-lives/. Kamer, Hatice. 2015. “Cemile Çağırga’nın annesi: ‘O gece kızımın cesedini koynuma alarak uyudum.’” BBC Türkçe. 13 September. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.bbc.com/turkce/haberler/2015/09/ 150913_cizre_cemileninolumu_hatice_kamer. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, 1: 11–40. doi:10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. Mendoza, Martha. 2011. “Rightly or wrongly, thousands convicted of terrorism post-9/11.” nbcnews.com. 4 September. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44389156/ns. Mutluer, Nil. 2016. “The Looming Shadow of Violence and Loss: Alevi Responses to Persecution and Discrimination.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18, 2: 145–156. doi:10.1080/19448953.2 016.1141583. Radikal. 2013. “Erdoğan: Polise talimatı ben verdim.” 23 June. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www. radikal.com.tr/politika/erdogan_polise_talimati_ben_verdim-1138805. Radikal. 2014. “Egemen Bağış, tepki gören ‘ölü seviciler’ tweetini sildi!” 12 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.radikal.com.tr/politika/egemen-bagis-tepki-goren-olu-seviciler-tweetini-sildi-1180899/. Reporters Without Borders. 2012. “News providers decimated in 2012.” 19 December. Accessed 24 June 2016. https://rsf.org/en/news/news-providers-decimated-2012. Söylemez, Ayça. 2014. “Elvan Ailesi Başbakandan Şikayetçi.” Bianet.org. 26 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://bianet.org/bianet/insan-haklari/154464-elvan-ailesi-basbakandan-sikayetci. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wolin, Sheldon. 2008. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. WorldVid. 2014. “Berkin Elvan’ın cenazesini on binler uğurluyor !! (12.03.2014),” YouTube video, 2:38, posted by “WorldVid,” 12 March. Accessed 24 June 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kY5evZnPW9s. Yılmaz, Zehra. 2015. “The AKP and Its Family Policy in the Re-establishment Process of Authoritativeness in Turkey.” In Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Before and After the Arab Uprisings, edited by Jülide Karakoç, 150–171. http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137445551.0010 Yonucu, Deniz. 2014a. “Türkiye’de Bir Yönetim Biçimi Olarak Mekansal Ayrıştırma: Tehlikeli Mahalleler, Olağanüstü Hal ve Militarist Sınır Çizimi” [Spatial Segregation as a Technology of Governance in Turkey: Dangerous Neighborhoods, State of Emergency and Militarized Boundary Drawing]. In Yeni İstanbul Çalışmaları: Sınırlar, Mücadeleler, Açılımlar [New Istanbul Studies], edited by Ayfer Bartu Candan, Cenk Özbay. Istanbul: Metis. Yonucu, Deniz. 2014b. “Berkin’in cenazesi, AKP hükümeti için oldukça tehditkardı,” interview by Emrah Temizkan. Birgun.net. 30 April. Accessed 24 June 2016. http://www.birgun.net/haber/berkinincenazesi-akp-hukumeti-icin-oldukca-tehditkGaordi-13704.htm.

4 THE FREEDOM THEATRE AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE IN JENIN, PALESTINE Elin Nicholson

“We believe that the third intifada, the coming intifada, should be cultural, with poetry, music, theatre, cameras, and magazines.” Juliano Mer Khamis (in Mee 2012:168)

Introduction This chapter focuses on the Freedom Theatre (TFT) in Jenin Refugee Camp (JRC) in light of their local and international strategies for cultural resistance. In keeping with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s concept of the conflict between the state and the artist being shown through “enactments of power,” I contend that both TFT and the Israeli state enact power within JRC, albeit with varying capabilities and at odds with each other. I examine the testimonies of TFT creative staff and their official statements to highlight the ways in which their theatre practices both complement and escape theoretical framings. In April 2011, an unknown perpetrator shot TFT’s Palestinian-Israeli managing director, Juliano Mer Khamis, seven times in the head directly outside TFT. Two months later, TFT opened a new show, Sho Kman? (What Else?) directed by Zoe Lafferty (UK) and Nabil alRaee with its first-year acting students because, in the words of TFT’s Creative Director Nabil al-Raee: We believed it was the only thing we could do at the time… It was difficult for us to speak, or even discuss things, so we closed ourselves in this space with our students, and we created that play. It was a very strange kind of theatre, it’s like a hard-born child. (al-Raee 2012) Sho Kman? had five performances at TFT in June 2011, with an additional 70 days touring in Western and Central Europe later that year (TFT 2011). TFT actor Faisal Abu ElHeja told me in an interview that the purpose of the tour was to “tell that Juliano is still here, [and] if we want to keep his spirit alive, we must continue” (Abu ElHeja 2012). TFT espouses a clear

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ideology of resistance through theatre, both in Jenin and abroad, whereby the arts can be used as a form of cultural agency to raise international awareness of the situation for Palestinians, whilst also garnering support for their cause. TFT acts in direct opposition to the Israeli military occupation operating within Jenin as throughout the West Bank, as a response to and resistance against its mechanisms of state control. Therefore, its cultural activities operate as a deliberate rejoinder to state power, attempting to subvert and undermine the capacity of the Israeli army to destroy the creative capacities of the Palestinians as it has their infrastructure, economy, and means of living.1 Ngũgĩ wa’ Thiong’o defines these as “enactments of power” displayed simultaneously albeit conflictually by the state apparatus and the artists. As he states: The war between art and the state is really a struggle between the power of performance in the arts and the performance of power by the state—in short, enactments of power. The conflict in the enactments of power is sharper where the state is externally imposed, in a situation where there is a conqueror and the conquered for instance, as in colonialism. (wa Thiong’o 1997:12) In this chapter, I will demonstrate how TFT exists as an artistic antagonist against the Israeli state, provoking creative expressions about their desired freedom through cultural resistance by, with and for Palestinians that deliberately opposes the current state of occupied being.

Contexts I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork on Palestinian theatre for a period of around 12 months between 2011 and 2012, living in East Jerusalem and regularly commuting through the Israeli soldier-manned checkpoints to various cities and towns in the West Bank. As a white, British female with a Western passport, I was fully aware of my ability to move freely between Israel proper and the West Bank, in contrast to the occupied Palestinians, and also aware of how I may have been perceived as holding a disproportionate amount of power relative to the Palestinians. I tried my best to remedy this power imbalance in my interactions with local people through “listening deeply” (DeVault and Gross 2007:182) in order to hear their stories and testimonies of living under military occupation. As a proficient Arabic speaker (both formal and colloquial Mashriqi), I could engage with the indigenous population in their own language and expressions, thus gaining further insight into their predicament. Despite this, due to the high level of English spoken as a lingua franca in Palestine, the majority of my interviews were conducted in English, with smatterings of Palestinian Arabic to emphasize or confirm certain wordings. I visited Jenin three times during this period, for several days each time, in August 2011 and January and July 2012, meeting with various TFT staff, students, and volunteers, and watching their work, both rehearsals and performances. Despite being located only 47 miles from Jerusalem, the journey to Jenin was stressful and took almost an entire day by public transport, involving two different buses via Ramallah and numerous checkpoints. Out of all the theatres in Palestine, TFT is the most researched and written about, due to its international staff members enabling access to research and materials, its desire to engage with the global human rights and Palestine solidarity communities, and because it produces radical

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theatrical productions which offer ample scope for analysis.2 In addition to the proliferation of newspaper and “in memoriam” articles on Mer Khamis, Erin B. Mee has written on TFT, in relation to its recent production of Alice in Wonderland (2011) as a form of cultural resistance (Mee 2012). Julia Hackman talks about TFT in terms of its identity as a form of applied theatre that has multiple uses as “social work, artistic work and resistance” (Hackman 2014:7, 24). In this chapter I offer a close examination of the voices of the Palestinian theatre practitioners. Using transcripts of interviews I conducted with TFT artists and professional staff, my study highlights their conceptualization and performance of cultural resistance—as well as my own conclusions drawn from my fieldwork in Palestine.

The Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp The Freedom Theatre is situated in the heart of Jenin Refugee Camp (JRC), in the northern West Bank, near the Separation Barrier between Israel proper and the nascent Palestinian “proto-state.” At the time of writing, Jenin refugee camp is 0.42 square kilometres, within which there are over 16,000 registered refugees. Of these inhabitants, around 60 percent are aged 24 and under. In addition to a large percentage of the working-age population being unemployed and schools being overcrowded, there is still pronounced infrastructural destruction resulting from the second intifada (2000–2005) (UNRWA 2011). The inhabitants of JRC are mostly impoverished, with a Household Poverty Rate of 60.6 percent, with 46.5 percent living in absolute poverty (OCHA 2008). The camp itself was formed in 1953 by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), following the 1947–49 Arab-Israeli war, during which around 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and became refugees from the nascent Israeli state. Originally housing 8,450 Palestinians from the Haifa and Carmel mountains region in the Galilee, JRC was built “on the site of an old British mandate railway station and military camp” (OCHA 2008:1), thus emerging out of a colonial-military context, one which has been continued by the Israelis to the present day. TFT was established in 2006 by the Palestinian-Israeli Juliano Mer Khamis, SwedishIsraeli Jonatan Stanczyk, and Jeninite local Zakaria Zubeidi. Mer Khamis’ mother, Arna MerKhamis, had been greatly involved in JRC since the late 1980s, when during the first intifada (1987–1993) she set up educational foundations for local children who had no access to formal education due to the violence (RLA 2016). During this time, a theatre was set up in the Zubeidi family home, as their children were involved in Arna’s theatre programmes. Named to commemorate the stone-throwing youths of the first intifada, the Al-Hajar (Stone) theatre was destroyed by Israeli military bulldozer during “Operation Defensive Shield” in 2002, during the second intifada (2000–2005) (Fox 2012). Both historically and currently, JRC has been perceived as the epicentre of Palestinian resistance, simultaneously “both the locus of and the urban condition for the ‘breeding’ of resistance,” as the “main ‘terrorist nest’ from which suicide bombers emerged” from the Israeli military perspective (Graham 2004:208), and as “a site of epic heroism and struggle” by the Palestinians (Tabar 2007:19). Mer Khamis returned to Jenin in 2003, during which time he produced the documentary film Arna’s Children, based on his mother’s work with Jenin’s youth. Using international funds from the United Nations Population Fund, and from organizations such as the Lef Foundation (USA), The British Consulate General in Jerusalem (UK), and the A.M. Qattan Foundation (Palestine) (TFT 2007), he set up TFT in the middle of JRC in 2006 with his colleagues. Today, the purpose-built theatre of the TFT includes a main black box

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stage with seating for 250 audience members, in addition to space for multimedia production and a seating area. When I first arrived in JRC in August 2011, I was struck by how impoverished the camp was, with under-developed infrastructure and visible scars of the armed conflict during the second intifada. In contrast, the liveliness inside TFT was incredible, revealing much energy and passion for theatre amongst the practitioners, students, and professional staff. The usual, warm Palestinian welcome coupled with hot, sweet tea did not disappoint as I relaxed in the foyer and chatted informally with some of the shabab (young people) about their experiences with theatre at TFT. Their enthusiastic responses on how TFT was improving their lives as individuals—reminding them that even though they were physically under military occupation, their imaginations were free—were reiterated during my formal interviews with TFT’s staff. However, the occupation was never far away; whilst interviewing TFT staff members, our talk was frequently interrupted by the intense sounds of the Israeli warplanes overhead, as “a really long process of bothering the people, saying yalla [go on], leave as soon as possible” (al-Raee 2012). The frustration expressed at living under military occupation, which manifests itself in three-dimension, including the airspace above (Weizman 2012:12), is channelled into creative production at TFT. At the time of writing in 2016, TFT offers a variety of theatre and multimedia training programs for Palestinian young people, and produces numerous productions. Of note is their three-year acting program, which commenced in 2008 and which “is not only of a high professional standard, it is a school promoting freedom, unity and struggle against all kinds of oppression” (TFT 2016d). According to its latest published annual report, 2014 was another remarkable year for TFT, with eight new enrolees to their three-year acting program, backed by the Arab American University in Jenin. Their multimedia unit produced two photography exhibitions, works from their Film Unit were screened at international festivals, and two issues of Aswat (Voices) magazine written for and by Jenin’s children and young people were published (TFT 2016a). Although it is important to note these cultural activities and recognize the role that they play in TFT’s cultural resistance, it is their theatre productions for which TFT are most renowned, and deservedly so. According to their 2014 annual report TFT created five original plays and restaged two of their most popular performances, reaching over 7,150 audience members in Jenin and the West Bank alone (TFT 2014). TFT’s productions privilege the voices of the occupied and offer a platform for them to be heard. This can be seen in their recent performances, which follow TFT’s tradition of adapting relevant international works to fit the Palestinian situation, and devising their own theatre pieces, which tend to take a more physical style, “because we are looking for a transcultural language” (Miranda 2012). TFT focuses on producing theatre which presents the Palestinian experience under military occupation, as shown by The Siege (directed by Nabil al-Raee and Zoe Lafferty, 2015), which depicted the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Israeli soldiers and was based on testimonies from the Palestinian fighters involved. Another overtly political production, Suicide Note from Palestine (directed by Nabil al-Raee and Micaela Miranda, 2013), is a darkly satirical, dystopic vision of the contemporary state of Palestine. The protagonist, Amal (ironically Arabic for “hope”), interacts with other characters on stage: the “violent Israeli army, Israel as an occupying power, an agreeable Europe, a paternalistic United States and the hypocritical and self-absorbed Arab world, along with a United Nations medical team in charge of drugging Palestine during her uprisings” (TFT 2013b).

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TFT also specializes in adapting international plays for the local Palestinian context. In 2013, the South African apartheid-era play The Island (directed by Gary M. English (USA), 2013), modified for the Palestinian context, was produced to highlight the abusive conditions experienced by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and to suggest that Palestinians currently exist in apartheid as the South Africans did. The Island is, TFT asserts, “a testament to the importance of culture as a tool for resistance, and for humanity. Despite the prisoners’ circumstances their souls are thirsty and art is the water that keeps them alive. In Palestine, as in apartheid South Africa, we need to keep ourselves alive” (TFT 2013a). To date, The Island has been performed both in Palestine and internationally, as far afield as Sweden and France, the USA, Brazil, and India. Additional adaptations include While Waiting, based on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (directed by Udi Aloni (Israel/USA), 2011) and which discusses how to live under occupation without compromising your ideals of obtaining freedom (TFT 2011g), and Alice in Wonderland (directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Zoe Lafferty, 2011), an admittedly radical interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale (TFT 2011a). Through these cultural activities, TFT, in its own words, “plays an important role in strengthening resilience and contravening feelings of hopelessness by contributing to the enrichment of cultural life” (TFT Annual Report 2011b). By performing these plays in Jenin and around the West Bank, TFT is providing a creative outlet to counteract the negative psychological effects of the occupation in a communal setting, bringing Palestinians together to share in cultural activities that encourage the continuation of non-violent resistance against the occupation.

Enactments of Power in JRC TFT is avowedly political and continuously produces theatrical performances that are artefacts of cultural resistance against the Israeli military occupation. Living, creating, and performing from inside a refugee camp enhances the group’s determination and passion for the creative arts as a tool for cultural resistance. As Theatre School Director and Trainer Micaela Miranda told me during our interview, residents of JRC remain incredibly “proud that they survived” the devastation wrought on their camp during the second intifada, “and they are proud that they were able to resist from their own homes” (Miranda 2012). Likewise, TFT members are proud of their achievements despite suffering from extreme insecurity, including two arson attempts against the theatre itself in 2009 (TFT 2009). In addition to Mer Khamis’s assassination, Nabil al-Raee and TFT actor Faisal Abu ElHeja have been arrested and detained. Zacharia Zebeidi has been repeatedly detained since 2011 by the Palestinian Authority, including one stint of over 140 days in prison in 2011–12 (TFT 2012). Despite these circumstances, TFT members continue to resist their situation and produce high-quality pieces of political theatre, informed by their location—and experiences—within a refugee camp in Palestine. Palestinian cultural agency comes from performing political theatre in Jenin and throughout the West Bank. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o suggests that this political performance space: is eventually transformed into a sphere of power revolving around its own axis like a planet in outer space. This is the real magic and power of performance [. . . It] becomes a magic sphere made still by its own motions—but is potentially explosive, or rather, it is poised to explode. (Ngũgĩ 1997:13)

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TFT belongs to this Palestinian-created space of resistance, for the themes presented on stage are those prevalent in everyday Palestinian existence, focusing both explicitly and implicitly upon the military occupation and the difficulties faced on a daily basis as a result of this, so much so that the distinction between what is presented on the stage and what is happening in real life are for the most part indistinguishable. This is due in particular to the space in which TFT exists. The power of TFT’s productions is in its unceasingly critical visual and aural assault on the forces of occupation governing Jeninite lives. Using the purpose-built theatre to re-produce a space of resistance, TFT ferociously attacks the Israelis as the primary reason for Palestinian suffering.

TFT: Producing Cultural Resistance According to its mission statement, TFT: is developing a vibrant and creative artistic community in the northern part of the West Bank. While emphasizing professionalism and innovation, the aim of the theatre is also to empower youth and women in the community and to explore the potential of arts as an important catalyst for social change. (TFT 2016c) TFT argues for two-pronged approach to cultural activities, intended to provide both individual and collective freedoms. Firstly, TFT stresses the existence of a “safe” space for young people, in which self-expression and creativity can flourish. Secondly, the concept of creating the means for a third intifada as a non-violent “cultural intifada” is explicitly referred to in the theatre’s promotional material. Most recently, this cultural intifada has been defined as: “a movement that harnesses the force of creativity and artistic expression in the quest for freedom, justice and equality,” an “enactment” of the power of cultural resistance (TFT 2016b). In the interviews I conducted with TFT theatre practitioners, this desire to enact cultural resistance is deeply embedded within their demands for the recognition of their individual and collective rights of national self-determination. These are unequivocal, embedded within every cultural activity produced by TFT, explicitly stated and performed. As Rustom Bharucha declares: “There can be no compromise on the demand for this freedom—it is not a freedom-in-waiting, but a freedom which is embodied and lived every single time in the here and now of performance practice” (Bharucha 2014:171). Indeed, the passion for freedom—“freedom from different kinds of occupation” (al-Raee 2012)—embodies itself firstly in terms of individual freedom, whereby, as Faisal Abu ElHeja asserts: “Day by day I start to feel it, how it becomes my character, how it improves my mind” (ElHeja 2012). TFT positions itself as a theatre company of and for every kind of freedom, “a place of freedom where you feel it’s okay for you to express your ideas” (Miranda 2012), enabling the creation of “theatre with a point” which would ultimately lead to “a generation of actors and artists who are also politically involved, changing and making yourself into a bridge for a completely whole [new] generation who will understand how much theatre and art and education and culture are important, in the future” (al-Raee 2012). Secondly, for TFT artists, freedom also means cultural resistance against the Israeli military occupation: I don’t want to face the best army in the Middle East, to throw stones or maybe shoot two bullets as they would kill me in two minutes. This is what [the Israelis] want, they

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want to kill you. But if you keep your culture alive, you’ll keep your society strong. This is the fight between us and the Israelis, it’s not by the checkpoints or by the [Separation] Wall, it’s by culture. (ElHeja 2012) This cultural struggle within a place of militarized violence, however, has a problematic relationship with the language of violence itself. Whilst I am not suggesting that TFT practitioners incite or enact violence, they do use militarized metaphors to describe their resistance, an echo of the armed uprising of the second intifada. Therefore, statements such as: “we are fighters here at the theatre, we are not only artists” (ElHeja 2012) and “we even have kids who were part of the armed resistance who are now saying that they have a powerful gun: the theatre” (Miranda 2012) may initially appear worrisome, but these metaphors are correct—the theatre has for these participants replaced the gun. As Nabil related, as happened with Zacharia Zubeidi, former commander of the armed resistance during the second intifada: “One of our students just graduated, he had joined the armed resistance before. . . After, he just put down his gun and joined the theatre. He said that he believes the theatre is stronger than a gun, and that he can speak about his experiences” (al-Raee 2012). TFT artists are cultural warriors, using theatre as an active instrument for cultural resistance, raising international awareness, and garnering support throughout the globe. Resorting to violence would undermine the very principles and essence of TFT, and destroy the potential for political change that they so sincerely desire. It would also betray Juliano Mer Khamis’s founding principles of individual freedom as the basis for national independence. This notion of individual freedom of choice is one wholeheartedly espoused by the Freedom Theatre, and which the emerging generation of theatre practitioners in Jenin adhere to. These young people congregate within the offered alternative space of the Freedom Theatre in order to create new possibilities for their future, whereby these imagined prospects for existence are created and made physical through theatrical representations. The theatre, as such, becomes a platform for potential, for the expressions of hope and ambitions that they are at present denied through the overbearing, all-pervasive Israeli occupation. TFT’s cultural resistance isn’t confined to the local; it is also an international endeavor. As Ngũgĩ suggests: “The real politics of the performance space may well lie in the field of its external relations” (wa Thiong’o 1997:13), its ability to transcend local physical boundaries imposed by the occupation as well as national borders beyond the state, through regular and lengthy international tours. TFT are acutely aware of their success in raising awareness through cultural activities. As Faisal Abu ElHeja related to me: This is part of our fight, to tell [the international community] that we are not terrorists, we also have dreams, we have artists, we want to live. . . Using weapons [against the Israelis] doesn’t work, we saw this in the second intifada. . . We cannot win by a traditional army, but we can win if we do a nice play, go to Europe, express ourselves about Palestine, to teach the [international] people about us. (ElHeja 2012) Indeed, TFT’s power lies in its ability to gather sympathetic and militant international arts practitioners from all over the world, who will use the power of their Western passport and rights as citizens of those countries to decry the human rights abuses occurring in Palestine. This

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network of educated, influential Westerners—academics, artists, and activists, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Judith Butler, and Peter Brook—turns the spotlight on Israel’s actions, condemning and demanding change.3 Therefore, TFT as a performance space becomes like a beacon of resistance against the darkness of the Israeli occupation—its danger comes from its potential to spread, to encourage more pockets of light, further spotlights of resistance within the Palestinian cantons, which could threaten to provide a sustained and resilient cultural resistance.

Enactments of Power: Where Theatre Meets the State During my interview in January 2012 with Nabil al-Raee and Micaela Miranda, the continuous whine of Israeli fighter jets could be heard overhead, an audible presence which could be both heard and felt by those in Jenin camp. According to al-Raee, this is a constant in the lives of Jenin residents, with his bitterly humorous remark that: “It’s the Israelis—yeah, they don’t need to bother the people in Tel Aviv, so they come to bother the people in Jenin.” The invasive noise from above is an unremitting reminder of the Israeli occupation that extends into the space of TFT in which our interview is occurring, interrupting thoughts and conversation flows. Although it is largely ignored by the actors, and rehearsal processes which I witnessed in July 2012 continue regardless of this aural intrusion, the sounds of actors conducting their work blocking out the drone of the engines, the knowledge that Israeli fighter jets were operating above us, performing their own rehearsals in case of another outbreak of airborne violence, was disconcerting. It had, however, become normal for the actors in TFT, who merely shrugged and continued their work, creating an interesting dialectic between actors rehearsing resistance strategies of theatre practices at precisely the same moment that the Israeli air force was performing their rehearsals for the potential annihilation of Palestinian life through hightech military equipment above. The precariousness of the physical survival of TFT practitioners within the TFT building in JRC, dependent on the whim of the Israeli military, becomes all-too-real when you are experiencing this for yourself. The blurring of boundaries between the ephemeral nature of the performance and the vulnerability of real-life existence creates a pervasive sense of theatricality. Following a marked increase in Palestinians from JRC being arrested—over 30 in one month—TFT put on a Playback Theatre production to “bring attention to Israel’s systematized practice of military rule and arbitrary arrests” on 21 December 2011 (TFT 2011e). TFT defines Playback Theatre as: an interactive theatre approach used in over 50 countries as a tool for community building and community dialogue. In a Playback Theatre performance, audience members volunteer life experiences and watch as a team of actors and musicians transform these accounts into improvised theatre pieces. Playback Theatre helps to foster community strength through the sharing of experiences that remind us of our common humanity and our capacity for courage, creativity and resilience. (TFT 2011e) In response to this display of state power, TFT performed in the streets of JRC, around 500 meters from the theatre building itself. The audience was comprised of local residents, including those who had been arrested and released by the Israeli authorities, and who were invited to share stories about their treatment

FIGURES 4.1 AND 4.2 Playback Theater performance by The Freedom Theater actors in Jenin refugee camp, 2011. Photos courtesy of The Freedom Theater, Jenin.

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whilst incarcerated by the Israeli military (ElHeja 2012). In response to these stories, “actors used Playback Theatre to enact the accounts of those who were impacted by the recent invasions” (TFT 2011c). A video of the performance available on YouTube contains two specific images depicting the violence of the arrests of Jeninites by the Israeli military that have been “played back” to the audience based on stories told. The first image depicts five actors: one stands behind four others, watching, as two actors hold on to the other two by their head and neck, pulling them upwards while laughing. The second image begins with one actor sitting on the floor, a second actor behind him, his hands clasped around the first’s mouth. A third actor joins, roughly grasping his hand around the first actor’s mouth. A fourth actor joins, gripping the third’s shoulder while sinking to the floor despondently. A third image shows the fear felt by an actor, as a second actor watches mournfully before moving away (TFT 2011c). Almost exactly 12 hours after the performance, Faisal Abu ElHeja, who had led the production, told me that he was woken by eight heavily-armed Israeli soldiers. He was marched to the exact place that the Playback Theatre performance had occurred earlier, before being blindfolded and sent to the Jalameh detention center near the Separation Wall between Israel proper and the West Bank. Following hours of interrogation about Mer-Khamis’s assassination and other security issues, Faisal, who had never before been in trouble with the Palestinian or Israeli authorities, was released. Faisal told me that due to hearing the Playback stories, he was prepared for what was to come from the detention and interrogation procedures; however, the brutality of some of the treatment also elicited fear within him that he too could be mistreated (ElHeja 2012). He said that upon being arrested, “I start to remember all the stories from the people in the Playback theatre performance, especial Kamal, who told a story about how the [Israeli] army beat him. I thought now it is my turn, now they will beat me the same way” (ElHeja 2012). This enactment of power by the Israeli state as reaction to Palestinian cultural resistance suggests that the Israelis are as aware of the power of Palestinian theatre as TFT are. In a statement released following Faisal’s detention, and a second performance on 28 December 20114 as an act of resistance against these nightly military incursions, the Freedom Theatre remonstrated that: The people of Jenin are using theatre in a highly innovative way to communicate their story and resist the intimidation of the Israeli military apparatus. Today’s action [the second Playback performance] communicates to the Israeli army that their egregious behaviour will be closely observed, monitored and publicized. (TFT 2011d) TFT responds directly to military aggression through non-violent and creative means. If we accept the premise that the Israeli army re-entered Jenin camp and arrested Faisal at least in part for his participation in the Freedom Theatre in general, and the first Playback performance in particular, then staging a second Playback session could be seen as a direct reaction to these events. Indeed, the statement calls the performance an “action,” thus directly supporting this notion of the JRC residents as active participants fighting against the Israeli military. It also shows the immense bravery of TFT practitioners, who regularly face the threat of arrest or even possible assassination, yet still continue to practice their art. This suggests an intense loyalty to the concept of cultural resistance—of a forthcoming cultural intifada, as espoused by Mer-Khamis.

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Conclusion If TFT poses a threat to the Israelis due to its promises of a third intifada, why does Israel not destroy the building itself? Why just arbitrarily arrest some members of TFT? Why allow the practitioners permits to visit and perform outside of the West Bank, enabling them to highlight not only Israeli abuses but also the existence of Palestinian—and particularly Jeninite—theatrical practices? The Israeli state clearly intends to contain and silence Palestinian resistance. I would argue that due to the notoriety and international support enjoyed by TFT, the Israelis are not able to directly destroy this cultural resistance without facing an outcry from the international community. Whilst the Israeli state can arrest Palestinian individuals at will, it cannot be seen to intentionally demolish an entire theatre without pretext. Whilst Gaza has suffered from numerous high-level Israeli military incursions, the latest being in July 2014, the West Bank remains more stable, albeit with frequent low-level attacks on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and settlers.5 It also fits into the Israeli narrative that they are a modern, democratic country allowing freedom of speech. A full-scale assault and destruction of TFT at the time of writing would be politically unwise for the Israelis; therefore, the most it can do at present is attempt to destabilise and contain theatre activities by detaining members of the troupe, and monitoring the situation6 for signs of a potential cultural intifada. An alternative perspective would be that allowing the fruition of conditions ripe for a new intifada would be within Israel’s interests, not least creating a legitimate excuse to destroy TFT as it did Al-Hajar theatre in 2002, as part of a wider display of military power against the Palestinian resistance. This cultural intifada may well arise, for through creating these displays of resistance through performance, the Freedom Theatre is directly engaging with the Israelis, in a deliberately provocative and vocal manner. Through theatre productions that strike at the heart of the occupation and engender non-violent resistance, the Freedom Theatre is “thumbing its nose” at the Israelis whilst showing local, national, and international audiences the reality of living under occupation through theatrical means. The work of TFT is powerful and dangerous, which is why the Israeli military arrests members of the troupe; why an unknown assassin murdered Juliano Mer Khamis; and why TFT provokes such extreme reactions to its productions.7 The conflict between the Israelis and TFT, therefore, is not just one over territory and nationalism— it is over the nature of political performance itself. As a 2014 statement from the Palestinian Performing Arts Network Programme (of which TFT is a member) articulates: “As artists, the most powerful weapon we have is our ability to play, dream and imagine. The oppressive forces fear this weapon because as long as we are able to imagine another kind of reality, we have the power to pursue it—a free and just Palestine. Together, we can turn hopelessness into determination and the forces of division into unity. It is within our power” (TFT 2014).

Notes 1 Termed “urbicide,” the destruction of the West Bank during the second intifada has been well-documented. Infrastructural problems caused during that active conflict remain visible today. See Abujidi (2014), Coward (2008), and Graham (2004). 2 Palestinian theatre is presently under-researched; however, more scholarship has recently emerged, to complement the scarce material extant in English (Nasser 2001; Snir 2005), including Samer Al-Saber’s (2013) doctoral dissertation on mid-20th century Palestinian theatre in Jerusalem, Ben Rivers’s articles on his use of Playback theatre as activism in the West Bank (2013, 2015), Rania Jawad’s articles on theatre as everyday resistance in Palestine (2011, 2014), Rand Hazou’s articles on theatre practices in

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3 4 5 6

7

Aida refugee camp, Bethlehem in the West Bank (2012), and adapting Shakespeare in Ramallah (2015), and Maurya Wickstrom’s chapter on Palestinian theatre as against the Theatre for Development motif (2012). See http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/friends-supporters/ and https://freedombuspalestine.wordpress. com/endorsements/ for a list of supporters of TFT and the Freedom Bus. No information exists online in relation to this second performance on 28 December. The uploaded YouTube video referred to states that a performance would be held on 4 January 2012. Numerous reports are published concerning human rights abuses in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. See https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/country-chapters/israel/palestine among other sources. Neve Gordon talks at length about the historical and contemporary state of the mechanisms of surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank by the Israeli government, including military-technological and through the settler network (see Gordon 2008). See http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/productions-productions/the-siege/ for press releases and negative media publicity to TFT’s productions in the UK.

References Abu ElHeja, Faisal. 2012. Interview with author. Jenin, 26 July. Abujidi, Nurhan. 2014. Urbicide in Palestine: Spaces of Oppression and Resilience. London: Routledge. al-Raee, Nabil. 2012. Interview with author. Jenin, 8 January. Al-Saber, Samer. 2013. “Permission To Perform: Palestinian Theatre in Jerusalem (1967–1993).” PhD diss., University of Washington. Bharucha, Rustom. 2014. Terror and Performance. Routledge Coward, Martin. 2008. Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. London: Routledge. DeVault, Marjorie. L., and Glenda Gross. 2007. “Feminist Interviewing: Experience, Talk, and Knowledge.” In Handbook of Feminist Research and Praxis, edited by S.N. Hesse-Biber, 143–154. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Fox, Killian. 2012. “Young Palestinians act out their struggle on another stage.” The Observer, 25 March. Accessed 8 August 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/mar/25/young-palestiniansfreedom-theatre-jenin. Gordon, Neve. 2008. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graham, Stephen. 2004. “Constructing Urbicide by Bulldozer in the Occupied Territories.” In Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, edited by Stephen Graham, 192–213. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Hackman, Julia. 2014. “’We’re none of us at peace’: Creating resistance through theatre.” Unpublished paper. Swedish National Defence College, Stockholm, Sweden. Hazou, Rand T. 2012. “Encounters in the Aida refugee camp in Palestine: Travel notes on attending Alrowwad Theatre’s production of Handala (2011).” In Refugee Performance: Practical Encounters, edited by Michael Balfour, 129–155. Bristol: Intellect. Hazou, Rand T. 2015. “Dreaming of Shakespeare in Palestine.” Research in Drama Education 20, 2: 139–154. Jawad, Rania. 2011. “Staging Resistance in Bil’in: The Performance of Violence in a Palestinian Village.” TDR 55, 4: 128–143. Jawad, Rania. 2014. “Aren’t We Human? Normalizing Palestinian Performances.” Arab Studies Journal, 22, 1: 28–45. Mee, Erin B. 2012. “The Cultural Intifada: Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank.” TDR 56, 3: 167–177. Mee, Erin B., Perlstein, J., Chapman, L., Wallace, N., Mitra, S. and Abusrour, A., 2011. “Juliano Mer Khamis: Murder, Theatre, Freedom, Going Forward.” TDR 55, 3: 9–17. Miranda, Micaela. 2012. Interview with author. Jenin, 8 January. Nasser, Hala K. 2001. “Palestinian Theatre: Between Origins and Visions.” PhD diss. Freie Universitat Berlin. OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). 2008. Report: Jenin Refugee Camp Profile. October. Accessed 15 March 2016. www.ochaopt.org/documents/opt_campprof_unrwa_ jenin_oct_2008.pdf.

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Rivers, Ben. 2013. “Playback Theatre as a Response to the Impact of Political Violence in Occupied Palestine.” Applied Theatre Research 1, 2: 157–176. Rivers, Ben. 2015. “Narrative Power: Playback Theatre as Cultural Resistance in Occupied Palestine.” Research in Drama Education 20, 2: 155–172. RLA (Right Livelihood Award). 2016. “Arna Mer Khamis.” The Right Livelihood Award Foundation. Accessed 24 January. http://www.rightlivelihood.org/arna.html. Snir, Reuven. 2005. Palestinian Theatre. Wiesbaden: Reichert. Tabar, Linda. 2007. “Memory, Agency, Counter-Narrative: Testimonies from Jenin Refugee Camp.” Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies 21, 1: 6–31. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2007. Annual Report. Accessed 16 March 2016. http://www.thefreedom theatre.org/news/annual-reports/anual-report-2007/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2009. “The Freedom Theatre under Attack.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 14 May 2015. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news/the-freedom-theatre-under-attack/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011a. “Alice in Wonderland.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 15 January 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/alice-in-wonderland/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011b. Annual Report. The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 8 August 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news/annual-reports/annual-report-2011/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011c. “The Freedom Theatre responds to Israeli military incursions”. YouTube, 23 December. Accessed 02 March 2016. Arabic only. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zdXY_CMfQrE&feature=youtu.be. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011d. “Invasions and Harassment Continue”,23rd December 2011. Accessed 16 April 2015. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news/invasions-and-harassment-continue/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011e. “Military Invasion in Jenin Met by Theatre Performance.” The Freedom Theatre. 21 December. Accessed 12 November 2013. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/ news/military-invasion-in-jenin-met-by-theatre-performance/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011f. “What Else—Sho Kman?” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 16 January 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/what-else/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2011g. “While Waiting.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 17 March 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/while-waiting/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2012. Annual Report. The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 8 August 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/news/annual-reports/anual-report-2012/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2013a. “The Island.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 8 August 2016. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/the-island/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2013b. “Suicide Note from Palestine.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 1 October 2015. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/suicide-note-from-palestine-2014/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2014. Annual Report. The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 13 June 2015. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/annual-report-2014/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2016a. “The Freedom Theatre.” Accessed 15 February 2016. https://issuu. com/freedomtheatrejenin/docs. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). “TFT10.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 17 March 2016. http://www. thefreedomtheatre.org/tft10/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2016c. “Our Mission.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 8 August. http:// www.thefreedomtheatre.org/who-we-are/mission/. TFT (The Freedom Theatre). 2016d. “Theatre School.” The Freedom Theatre. Accessed 12 March. http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/what-we-do/theatre/theatre-school/. UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). 2011. “UNRWA Forced to Suspend Operations in Jenin.” 12 August. Accessed 8 August 2016. www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/ unrwa-forced-suspend-operations-jenin. wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1997. “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space.” TDR 41, 3: 11–30. Weizman, Eyal. 2012. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. Wickstrom, Maurya. 2012. Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5 TACTICAL PERFORMANCE ACROSS A REVOLUTIONARY TIMELINE Bart Pitchford

Introduction In December 2012 Syrian actor/director Nawar Bulbul chose to walk in the street with antiregime protesters. Due to his national popularity, however, this action prompted the state to label him as a threat. Bulbul narrowly evaded imprisonment by being smuggled across the border into Lebanon. Four years later, in a small multipurpose room at the French Institute1 in Amman, Jordan, I watch Bulbul circle an awkward vessel over-constructed for its staging purpose. In the style of a classical al-hakawati (storyteller),2 Bulbul begins the prologue to his newest work, Love Boat: “Kan ya ma kan fee qadeem az-zeman” (There was a place a long time ago) (2016c).3 As he proceeds, Bulbul tells the story of a wonderful theatre group who disbanded during the “Great Syrian Revolution” of 2011. Five years later six members of the group find each other in some unnamed area on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Having endured much suffering at the hands of “the most savage, most despotic, most barbaric, most pitiful dictatorship known to humanity” (2016c), and seeing no end to the war in sight, the six friends decide to set sail for Europe. With three hand claps, Bulbul, like the ancient storm god Hadad, sets the play in motion (2016b). The words “Kan ya ma kan fee qadeem az-zeman,” which preface most childhood stories in the Arab World, form a border around Bulbul’s collage of canonical works and accounts of human rights abuses. Although many of the stories in Love Boat are based on actual events, the need to bracket their telling stems from a long tradition of negotiating censorship under the dictatorial Syrian Baathist Regime. To be a theatre artist in Syria means living under the fear that your work will be declared too critical of the government, a charge that almost certainly results in imprisonment or worse. In other words, playwrights, directors, and actors in Syria must be skilled equally in the aesthetics of theatre and the ability to conceal (or in some cases reveal) hidden meanings. As theatre historian Edward Ziter notes, Syrian theatre over the past 50 years is “punctuated by acts of creative resistance in the face of authoritarian control” (2014:3). Despite living in exile for over four years, Bulbul continues to place dissident “way[s] of operating” (Certeau [1984] 2011) as an immutable fixture in his textual and stylistic choices.

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This chapter discusses Bulbul’s tactical deployment of theatre before, and in response to, the Syrian Revolution, which began in 2011. I will examine the use of these tactics within three dimensions of power: political, religious, and social. Additionally I will explain how Bulbul’s tactics work on a global terrain. By comparing two different performances Bulbul directed— one in Syria prior to the revolution and one in Amman four years after leaving Syria—it is possible to witness his tactical shift in response to both the revolution and his exile. Although I briefly mention other works by Bulbul, my analysis focuses on Bertolt Brecht’s The Informer (1938), which Bulbul directed in 2003 pre-revolutionary Syria, and his most recent work Love Boat, which was produced in Amman, Jordan in 2016 and which I studied through participant-observation. While conducting field research in Amman in 2016, I designed lights and sound for Love Boat. During this time I attended Love Boat rehearsals and grew very close to both Bulbul and all of the actors in the show. By comparing the same artist’s work on both sides of the revolutionary timeline, I hope to contribute to the ongoing conversation about dissident artists’ tactical adaptability. The use of tactics by dissident artists such as Bulbul can best be understood through Michel de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau defines tactics as “the ingenious ways in which the weak makes use of the strong” ([1984] 2011: xvii). He clarifies this subversive process by suggesting that a tactic is “insinuating itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety” (xix). In other words, tactics are individualized co-optive actions performed by those without power in order to temporarily subvert the authority of those with power. Because a tactic has no foothold from which to launch, de Certeau argues that it must be opportunistic. A tactic “must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities” (xix). For de Certeau, a tactic can take the form or shape of everyday activities such as “ways of walking, etc” (30). While in performance this usually includes gesticulation, mise-en-scène, and delivery of dialogue, I argue that it could also encompass securing production space and funding as well as developing the audience. If, as de Certeau suggests, the geography of the tactic is the space of power and the function of the tactic is both “setting and transgressing limits” (123), then tracing Bulbul’s use of tactics should reveal the evolution of his dissident practices as he moves through different spheres of state and international power. Therefore this analysis hopes to extend a conversation initiated by Arab literary expert Miriam Cooke and continued by Ziter in his most recent analysis of Syrian theatre leading up to the revolution. Both Cooke and Ziter examine Syrian artistic works for moments of resistance in order to illuminate for the West “another Syria: a country where dissident patriots seek a space to express their conscience and their creativity in circumstances unimaginable to most outsiders” (Cooke 2007:3). While Cooke published Dissident Syria in 2007, her research and analysis focus primarily on works completed during the reign of former President Hafez al-Assad, particularly the 1990s. Cooke surveys a variety of forms and genres including poetry, novels, short stories, films, and theatre. The primary importance of her contribution is two-fold. First Cooke defines for the West the role of dissident artists in Syria. “Dissidence,” according to Cooke, “confronts and engages with dominant discourse” (84). Additionally, Cooke explains, through a process she calls “commissioned criticism” (72), that the government often co-opted the work of these dissident artists to create a pressure valve of sorts during moments of potential civilian unrest. This moment of relief or tanaffus (breathing) allows the Syrian population to share a collective moment of state criticism, but under the control of the government censors (Cooke 2007:72). As

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Cooke observes, when the pressure is released enough, the government closes the valve and the “reader or spectator can […] then return to life as it was without thinking about changing it” (72). Cooke’s concept of collective criticism builds from the theory of “licensed criticism” proposed by political scientist Lisa Wedeen (1999). Wedeen argues that the Syrian government often pays artists and intellectuals in Syria to perform criticism about the government without implicating the leader (3). Acknowledging the existence of licensed criticism, Cooke argues that in commissioned criticism, the artist is motivated by fear of government reprisal rather than potential profit. The state purposefully manipulates intellectual and artistic censorship to blur the line of what is allowed and what is not. The artists do not know when the state wants criticism and when it does not. Since making the wrong choice often results in some form of punishment, the artists live in a constant state of fear. To put it another way, licensed criticism is usually bought while commissioned criticism is co-opted through coercion. Commissioned criticism as a disciplinary mechanism allows the Syrian government to control intellectual and artistic spaces while also maintaining the facade of democratic practices (72–80). Despite the Syrian government’s refined abilities to license or commission criticism (Wedeen 1999, Cooke 2007), as both Cooke and Ziter note and as I have learned from examining Bulbul’s pre-revolutionary work, there are rifts in the censorship apparatus that allow for opportunistic dissident artists to evade direct critiques of the president and the government’s mechanisms of control. In fact, Ziter uses these improvisatory moments to propose a theatrical genealogy of the “Syrian Uprising”4 throughout the reigns of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. By focusing his analysis on five specific ideas that flow through some of the most popular plays in pre-revolutionary Syria—martyrdom, war, Palestinians, history and heritage, and torture—Ziter reflects on questions about the Syrian national identity performed in these works. The discussions on national identity, Ziter argues, reveal strategies of resistance that eventually become part of the Uprising (2014). While Ziter’s analysis ventures occasionally past the beginning of the current Syrian revolution, most of the work he examines prefaced this pivotal moment. In fact, one of Ziter’s primary arguments in Political Performance in Syria is that Syrian theatre artists engaged in dissident acts against the Baathist Regime long before the Arab Spring. I would like to carry Ziter’s work one step further by following performance of Syrian national identity and the use of revolutionary tactics outside the borders of Syria in reaction to both the ongoing crisis in Syria and the international community’s response. In February of 2011, as the Arab Spring gained traction across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab countries, Syrian police in the town of Dara’a arrested a group of teenagers for spray-painting anti-Assad slogans on their school. The arrest and violent treatment of these teenage boys catalyzed an existing anger for the Assad regime and sparked nationwide protests. Originally, the protesters remained non-violent despite the government’s vicious suppression. By June, however, militarization of many opposition groups escalated in response to increased regime brutality, including imprisonment, torture, and barrel bombings.5 At this point the exodus of Syrians into Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan exploded (Abboud 2015:Ch 2). As of February 2016, the death toll was approximately 470,000 people, with 6.5 million people internally displaced, and almost 4.6 million people seeking refuge in a neighboring country (Ziadeh 2013:93–95; Al-Mohibany 2015; Tisdall 2015; USAID 2015). In view of the massive displacement resulting from the Syrian revolution, reimagining a national identity is a primary concern for Bulbul. In Love Boat, Ziter’s question “what

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[does] it mean[s] to be Syrian” (Bulbul 2016c:12) reverberates in both reflective and refractive ways through Bulbul’s writing and direction. While still implicitly debating the questions of national identity, displaced Syrians are also charged with explaining their identity to populations in countries where they seek to settle. Another mode of creative resistance that Ziter implies but does not directly address is the idea of disappearance in performance as theorized by Peggy Phelan (1993:146). Ziter points out that “Theatre, with its bodily metaphor and contradictory voices, is a valuable storehouse of unofficial beliefs and denied truths” (Ziter 2014:3). He uses this characterization to argue for looking outside the archive at tropes existing in current productions both real and cyber. While tracing disappearances may reveal a theatrical lineage regarding performances of the revolution, we should also explore the original disappearance as a primary tactic in circumventing the state’s authority. But the need for disappearance must be understood here in the context of Syria’s regime of censorship. While theatre artists worldwide insert subtle challenges to power in their works, this practice becomes more urgent in nation-states where the panoptic eye of censorship is at the center of the cultural landscape. In Syria, under both Hafez and Bashar al-Assad censorship begins with the text. All scripts for theatrical production must be submitted to the Ministry of Culture for approval before rehearsals may begin. The state also maintains a tight grip on access to space. For example, Bulbul’s father, Farhan Bulbul, started a company in the mid 1980s. Most of the rehearsals over a 30-year span were in his house in Homs, Syria. Finally in 2010 the state granted him his own space for property storage and rehearsal because his theatre group followed the regime’s limitations on political speech. In 2011, however, according to historian Vanessa Guéno, the Ministry of Culture reclaimed this space ostensibly because the regime forces needed it for security purposes (2016). As Ziter notes, “theatre in Syria is by and large a state-sponsored activity” (Ziter 2014); therefore, at any point from script approval until the curtain falls on the last show the government may choose to close the production.

Censorship and Disappearance It is within the environment of the state-enforced censorship that dissident Syrian artists such as Bulbul practice the craft of disruption. When I interviewed him in 2016 Bulbul referred to his 2003 production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Informer (1938). Bulbul explained how he used small changes to the script and the mises-en-scène to maneuver around the censors in what I would describe as a tactical manner (2016d). The Informer is one of Brecht’s shorter plays; in it, he portrays the life of a middle-class family in Nazi Germany. The entire play revolves around a mother and father worrying that their young son may have left the house to inform the Hitler Youth about a conversation that could be deemed as subversive. This play underscores the threat that many people felt not only from members of the Third Reich, but from their own family members who could report them for anti-Nazi activities at any moment. Bulbul’s primary reason for choosing this text was to implicate the government in its arbitrary imprisonment and torture by drawing a comparison between the Nazi and Syrian regimes (2016a). Syrian citizens faced and continue to face similar circumstances under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. At the time of writing, estimates place those imprisoned by the Syrian government for political reasons anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 people (Mofrej 2015). In fact, Love Boat actor Mohammed Kabbour was imprisoned by Assad’s loyal enforcers

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known as Shabiha.6 When I interviewed Kabbour in 2016 he explained the psychological cost of Assad’s arbitrary imprisonment: Everybody, every person in Syria, they are always afraid from his brother or from his mom, from everybody, from his friends he feels afraid, and he always says, maybe my friend will tell the police or will tell the government about me because I am talking about the government in a bad way. (2016) Producing a play that overtly criticizes arbitrary imprisonment in Syria requires an extensive knowledge of the censorship process and a dexterous ability to maneuver within its limitations. According to de Certeau, ways of operating are “clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike” (Certeau [1984] 2011). When describing his own way of operating to me, Bulbul smirks and then moves his right hand forward from his side in a snake-like motion. This Gestus7 is one that Bulbul repeated throughout our discussions on his work to signal a moment of trickery. To slip between the regulated spaces of censorship, Bulbul found subtle ways to reveal his intentions to the audience without drawing suspicion from the censors. For example, the fact that the play was written by Brecht and was about Germany in 1938 gave Bulbul enough temporal and geographic distance to pass the text through the Ministry of Culture. Bulbul did, however, make a few small adjustments to the script. Although he used an Arabic translation of The Informer, Bulbul altered the names of the characters to blur the geographical and cultural location. First, he changed the boy’s name to Adolf in a direct reference to Hitler. Then “The Woman” and “The Man” became “Abu Adolf ” and “Um Adolf.” The parental titles “Abu” for father and “Um” for mother are considered honorary and respectful in Syria when they appear in front of the oldest male child’s name. Literally the translation is “Father of Adolf ” and “Mother of Adolf.” These titles imply a sense of ownership upon those they signify. Therefore, by conflating these reverential titles with the first name of Hitler, Bulbul accomplished two goals. First, he disrupted the fixed notion of the play’s geography. Although the play still appeared to be set in Germany, the audience had to reconcile the physical location with the linguistic location. To reinforce the geographical ambiguity, the dialogue was translated to Syrian dialect. Second, since the audience was likely to identify with Abu and Um Adolf, they would feel both the fear of being arrested by the Gestapo (Shabiha) and shame of cowering from their son. Finally, to further confuse the location, Bulbul used Arabic music to introduce the show. This minor Arabization was enough to tie the play to the issues in Syria while still creating space for Bulbul to evade the censors. Perhaps the most interesting moment of creative resistance in this play concerns a choice that Bulbul made regarding the mises-en-scène. In all governmental buildings across Syria, pictures of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad must hang in a prominent location. In the theatres, which are all state-owned, the pictures hang directly above the stage. For his past productions, Bulbul successfully lobbied to have the pictures removed during the show, by arguing that the pictures drew the eyes of the audience away from the action on stage. Bulbul confided in me that the real reason for removing the pictures was “because [he] did not want the picture of that khara (shit) leader looking over [his] play” (2016a). For the production of The Informer, however, Bulbul did not ask to have the pictures removed. He simply let them float above the house as

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a watchful eye of the state. It is not too far-fetched to imagine spectators glancing from the action on the stage to the Assad pictures and creating their own connections. Using the state-mandated placement of pictures or choosing to perform a script in colloquial rather than formal dialect are both ways the weak—in this case Bulbul and his theatre company—used the space of the strong—the Baathist regime—in a way the strong had not intended. The space of the strong, according to de Certeau’s theory, was both the theatre where Bulbul’s group performed and the state’s permission to produce the play itself. Manipulating the conditions and the space of the state, Bulbul seized the opportunity to momentarily disrupt the authoritarian discourse. By tactically choosing to leave the images of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad in place when normally he would have removed them, Bulbul implicated the Assad regime in the same crimes Brecht leveled at Hitler. Additionally, since the state must approve all scripts before they begin production on stage, the state, not the artist, owns the rights of performance. Therefore, when The Ministry of Culture gave Bulbul legal permission to direct The Informer, he was operating inside the censorship laws, which are also the space of the state. Bulbul was not acting from a place of advantage. He merely used what the state allowed him to use, but in ways the state did not predict. Part of what allows Bulbul and other theatre artists in Syria to maneuver around and through the censors is the ephemerality of theatre. When Phelan writes, “There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal” (1993:6), she is primarily viewing representation and political power through a Western lens. By this I mean that Phelan is concerned with the political cost of visibility in a capitalist economy where gazing is a way of possessing. But this concept applies equally as well in dictatorial regimes such as the one that exists in Syria, where censorship, which relies on visibility, is also a way of possessing. Under the Baathists, the cost for being visible can be imprisonment or even death. Censorship in Syria is a calculative game constantly played between the censor, the artists, and the public. The state’s political discourse is constantly in flux, responding to external and internal challenges to its authority. Therefore, in order for the state to maintain control over its citizens, the censorship of competing discourses must also remain flexible. Richard Burt claims, “Censorship not only legitimates discourses by allowing them to circulate, but is itself part of a performance” (1994:xviii). The purpose of censorship’s performance is to prevent a subversive discourse from holding stable ground long enough to be institutionalized. The Syrian regime participates regularly in the game of censorship by allowing dissident discourses to surface long enough that the public and the artists feel they have moved the proverbial ball down the field. Then, after tightening the regulations again, the regime resets the ball and the game begins anew. But in order for the state to control the movement of a discourse, they need to know that the discourse exists in the first place. In other words, if the regime does not know where the ball is, then they cannot reset it. This is where the power of theatre’s ephemerality opens space for tactical movements by artists who recognize the game and take advantage of its rules. The text of The Informer, which Bulbul submitted to the Ministry of Culture for approval, speaks more about fear in an authoritarian society than it does about the causes of that fear. So the fact that it was approved is not surprising, given that the Syrian regime is rather transparent about its use of fear to maintain order. After all, Syria operated under state-of-emergency laws which gave the Baathist regime unlimited power to enforce regulations on political speech starting in 1943. But when the words and actions were performed underneath the panoptic gaze of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad’s photos, the play’s text took on a new meaning. These images gave

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a face to the fear. They created a direct connection between the fear and the regime that only existed for the audience during that brief moment when it was performed, and then disappeared. Once the moment disappeared, the censors were unable to reset it; the ball stayed where Bulbul had moved it.

Celebrity as a Tactical Asset In addition to mounting theatre productions like The Informer over the next eight years, Bulbul also gained notoriety by acting in Syrian films and television. Often the plots of these productions were steeped in nationalism. For example, in 2006 Bulbul was cast in the popular Damascene television drama8 Bab al-Hara (The Neighborhood’s Gate) (2006–present) as Abu Yousef, a Palestinian. Bab al-Hara depicts an imaginary Syrian community struggling to resist the forces of oppression under French colonial rule (al-Ghazzi 2013). Media scholar Omar alGhazzi argues that Bab al-Hara is a “symbolic representation of national identity” (588). Bulbul himself ridicules the jingoistic concept behind Bab al-Hara, and admits that he only acted in it as a way to fund his theatre projects (Bulbul 2016a). Equally important as the salary he received, however, was the public visibility Bab al-Hara provided Bulbul. Several times when we walked down the streets of our Amman neighborhood people would recognize Bulbul as Abu Yousef and request a selfie. While his celebrity in Amman vacillated between useful and annoying, back in Syria, before his exile, Bulbul used his privilege to further legitimize the protests in Damascus and Homs. Any time that Bulbul or any other celebrity appeared at the protest, the news focused on their presence (2016d). This became problematic for Assad, who characterized the protests as “motivated and fueled by foreign conspirators” (Abboud 2015:48–82). With famous Syrian television and movie stars joining the protests, Assad’s argument lost validity. Bulbul’s political and performative act of walking in the street with the protesters was a forceful tactic that operated in multiple spaces of regime power. Physically, of course, Bulbul and the rest of the protesters occupied state-owned land in order to oppose the state. Additionally, considering that all broadcast media in Syria is owned and regulated by the government, Bulbul’s appearance in solidarity with the protesters on national television undermined Assad’s mischaracterization of the movement. More significantly, Bulbul’s celebrity itself is the property of the state. The ability to make acting profitable in Syria is heavily dependent on approval from the government. Without the government’s permission, Bulbul would never have attended the state-owned Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts, been employed with the Syndicate of Artists, or been cast for any television show or film. Regardless of his talent, Bulbul’s status as an actor belonged to the state. So when Bulbul chose to walk out into the street and join the people protesting against the regime, he actively turned the state’s asset against the state. Before, when Bulbul directed or acted in shows that critiqued the government or Assad himself, the message was obscured from censorial view by carefully crafted tricks. Conversely, Bulbul’s performance as a protester was both hyper-visible and intentionally transparent. On national television, Bulbul pointedly discarded his state-sanctioned career and fame for what he says was a chance to “finally know what it means to be free” (2016d). Even as he describes the events to me, Bulbul performs the emotional moments, rather than merely saying what happened. For example, he told me about a moment before he decided to join the protests when he was on the roof of his home in Damascus, near where the protests were occurring. In his reenactment, Bulbul paces furiously back and forth with his arms folded

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then stops and peers briefly down as if looking over the roof into the street. With his arms still folded Bulbul brings his right thumb up to his mouth, begins gently gnawing on it and then returns to pacing. This movement repeats three times before Bulbul continues with his story. He recalls another moment at his father’s house in Homs where he and his wife, Vanessa Guéno, were sitting on the front stoop watching the protesters. One person from the crowd walking by spotted Bulbul and accused him of being with the regime. In this moment, he plays the role of the accusing protester jutting out his right arm, index finger extended and exclaiming, “You, Nawar Bulbul, you are with the regime. You are a traitor to your people” (2016d). Instantly, Bulbul switches back to himself and begins pleading nervously with the protester. His words and actions are broken and incomplete. As he alternates between pointing at himself and pointing at some imaginary person, he struggles to dislodge the words stuck in his throat saying, “but. . . I. . . what. . . how. . . I want to. . . I am with you” (ibid). Finally, having failed to convince this phantom protester Bulbul collapses at the waist, slumps his shoulders forward as if defeated by his own indecision. After spending several weeks with Bulbul, it is not surprising to me that he joined the opposition. He makes no attempt to hide his contempt for Assad and his regime. Most of Bulbul’s profanity-laced speeches are in response to news about Syria or the mention of Assad’s name. Even so, making the decision to join the revolution was arduous. There was a lot at stake for anyone who decided to march against Assad. People joining the opposition not only risked their own lives, but also the lives of everyone in their family. Detainment, long-term imprisonment, and torture of a dissident’s family members were and are regular weapons Assad wields against his opponents. For Bulbul, this was no different. Not only did the state terminate Bulbul’s position at the Syndicate of Artists and force him into exile, but the state also regularly questions Bulbul’s family about his actions and whereabouts. Several of Bulbul’s family members have been jailed and at least one died under torture. Given his and his family’s status in the artistic community, it would have been understandable for Bulbul to remain silent. So when I asked Bulbul about his decision to finally join the protests, he again performed for me his reason. Leaning forward from his chair he said, “My whole life I have been like this.” Bulbul covered his mouth with both hands and his elbows raised. Underneath his self-imposed muzzle, Bulbul screamed silently while he lurched his torso forward. Then he abruptly flung his hands forward and bellowed out the words, “but I want to scream. I want to say I am free” (ibid). When he reached this point, Bulbul contacted friends he knew wanted to join the protesters and together they went into the street.

How to Talk About Revolution When I first interviewed Bulbul9 at Kepi Cafe, which is a popular spot for artists in the Jabal Webdeih area of Amman, some 84 kilometers from the Syrian border, it was considerably easier for him to speak openly about revolution against the Syrian regime. Although Bulbul suspected there were Syrian Baathist agents surveilling him in Amman, he spoke with less fear of being detained by the Shabiha because they typically operate only in Syria. Additionally, after Bulbul escaped Syria, he reunited with his family in France. For the next year, they lived with Guéno’s parents near Toulouse. During this time, Bulbul applied for and received French citizenship. So when they moved to Amman in 2014, Bulbul was a dual citizen. Moreover, Guéno’s position with the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (French Institute for Oriental

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Research) meant that Bulbul had connections with the French Embassy. For Bulbul, this meant that he could “say anything [he] want[ed] because [he was] free” (2016d). Even with his newly established freedom, Bulbul remained keenly aware of the political restrictions on speech in the Arab World. Criticism of the Jordanian government is relatively safe so long as it is not leveled directly at King Abdullah II. But the facade of democratic and free speech only extends so far in Amman. As a native Jordanian friend is fond of reminding me, “you can say anything you like as long as it is not about politics, sex, or religion” (Malkawi 2016). For Bulbul, these restrictions on allowable speech are more than just an inconvenience; they are part of the control mechanisms used throughout the Arab world by dictatorial leaders to maintain power. Sitting in his Amman apartment, Bulbul explained to me during a second interview that he refuses to describe the events in Syria, which are now in their fifth year, as a civil war. “It is a revolution,” Bulbul declares. “Not just one revolution, but three” (2016a). Of course there is the revolution against Assad, which Bulbul sees as the last hope for the Arab Spring to fulfill its promise of democracy. “Second,” according to Bulbul, “is the revolution against the religion” (ibid). Here, he is not just speaking of the Islamist, but of any religious doctrine that prescribes specific behaviors and condemns those who fail to adhere to them. Third, and most important to Bulbul’s artistic practice, is the revolution against the society. “Without changing the minds of the religions and the society,” he argues, “another dictator will take Bashar al-Assad’s place when he goes” (ibid). It is no surprise then, that after five years of war and four years in exile, Bulbul used his new work, Love Boat, to expand his geographical discursive focus. During another interview over coffee at Bulbul’s apartment, he explained, “I presented this play for the popular [audience]. For the Syrian popular [audience]. For the Arabic popular [audience]” (2016d). The performance and the script, however, reveal a multivalent story that is capable of existing simultaneously within local, regional, and global discourses. Love Boat is a 90-minute fictitious story of six actors who were part of the same theatre company in Damascus before the revolution. There are seven actors in Love Boat—Mohammed Kabbour, Eman al-Shayab, Adnan Rejjal, Haya Matar, Mahmoud Sa’adiqa, Mustafa Murad, and Bulbul. Of these actors, only Bulbul had any experience on stage as an actor. Each actor used her/his own name in the show except for Bulbul who played the narrator.10 Much like the amateur company Bulbul’s father, Farhan Bulbul, directed for three decades, the company in Love Boat has played together for generations. The revolution, however, interrupted their theatrical life. Five years later, the actors managed to rejoin each other in an unknown location outside of Syria. After sharing a few stories about their troubles over the past five years, the group decides to board a small boat and travel to Europe. Although Bulbul remains intentionally ambiguous about the group’s point of departure and the body of water they will traverse, a basic knowledge of the Syrian refugee crisis leads the viewer to infer that they are crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The actors have two goals in mind for traveling to Europe. The first is “to try their luck, like many of their compatriots, to reach Europe, Paradise on earth” (2016b).11 Ultimately, the actors hope to reach Germany, which corresponds to the real hopes of many Syrians making the perilous trip across the Mediterranean. The second goal is to create theatre in Europe as they once had in Damascus and become famous. Throughout the course of the play the actors pretend that they reach a new destination and, as if rehearsing for the future, they perform a play from that country. They perform The Knights by Aristophanes for Greece, The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni for Italy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote for Spain, Tartuffe by Molière for France, and Goethe’s Faust for Germany. When it is time to imagine the next stop

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after Germany, Eman asks the group, “where to now?” Mahmoud then pulls out a compass and runs between the stern and the bow pretending to measure the direction before announcing that the group have arrived at their destination. Of course, in the reality of the play, they are still in the middle of the sea, but this imagined moment gives the actors a reason to perform the next scene. The prologue and the opening scene where the actors first see each other after five years establishes early Bulbul’s ability to speak simultaneously on multiple levels for different audiences. For the international audience, Love Boat’s prologue presents an image of displaced Syrians that challenges the current discourse. Instead of the face of hopelessness so often displayed for international consumption, the initial coming together of these actors is joyful and energetic. The characters sing and laugh, even as they tell of horrific personal tragedies. Bulbul also places conservative and religious Arabic societies on notice by working across gender stereotypes and economic divisions. The actors in Love Boat are “young men and women, children and adults of all social classes and all religions” (ibid). Furthermore, the male and female actors each exercise agency over their own stories, as well as the characters they play. Bulbul strives to break down the patriarchal ideas that, he argues, have arrested social development in the Arab world. It is for the Syrian audience, however, that Love Boat speaks most directly. Bulbul unflinchingly skewers to the Syrian regime and its supporters. The narrator speaks of the “great Syrian revolution against the most savage, most despotic, most barbaric, most pitiful dictatorship known to humanity” (ibid). In their stories, characters Haya and Mohammed recount witnessing or being injured in barrel bombings. When the rest of the group asks if it was the Syrian regime or the Russians, both nonchalantly answer, “It’s all the same.” While these references are hardly cloaked, Bulbul uses this space to condemn the Syrian regime in a way that was never allowed in his past performances in Syria under the Assad regime. Additionally, while his casual mention of the Russian military implicates Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in the deaths of Syrian civilians, the blasé tone lends an air of absurdity to these violent acts. In fact, most of the personal stories strike an absurd tone that suggests that bombings, arbitrary confinement, and torture are accepted as the new normal. The mainly Syrian audience seemed to agree with this portrayal. Rather than being shocked or dismayed at the offhanded recounting of legs being blown off or friends being bombed, many Syrians in the audience lightly chuckled. Conversely, Western audience members who understood the dialogue were often dismayed to hear of the tragedies. During the matinee on Saturday 9 April 2016 one Western audience member left momentarily during Eman’s story about losing her leg in a barrel bombing attack. Following the performance, she apologized to one of the actors, explaining that she worked with Syrian children in Amman who had lost their legs. The difference in reception between the Syrian audience and the Western audience speaks clearly to the level of resignation many Syrians feel after six years of war. Instead of collectively mourning in this moment, the Syrians in the audience reveled in the ability they had to openly critique the Assad regime. While discussing the events of the revolution over the past five years, Love Boat also memorializes several of the artists who were imprisoned or killed by the Syrian regime. This act of memorialization, especially in the presence of Syrians who know the work of these artists, summoned their presence into the space even in the absence of their physical bodies. Cultural geographer Avril Maddrell describes this phenomenon as “Absence-Presence.” Maddrell argues that when the absent is represented through “visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory,

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emotional-affective and spiritual planes” the memories of those in mourning experience a sense of “continued presence” (2013:505). For example, in her story, Haya tells the group that while in prison she spent several days with the famous Syrian actress Samar Kokash who, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Network for Human Rights, was arrested on 11 November 2013. She was charged with financing terrorism because she helped bring food and medical supplies to the “displaced and wounded population in the besieged areas of the Damascus countryside” (2015). During the production run of Love Boat, many displaced Syrian artists attended the same performance. When Haya mentions her encounter with Kokash, many of the artists who had personal relationships with Kokash began nodding their heads and clapping silently. The same reaction occurred when the names Abdel Aziz al-Houlani, May Skaf, and Zaki Kordilo were mentioned. The relational moment between the actors on stage who were evoking the names of the absent and those in attendance with memories of these artists created a temporary emotional presence despite their physical absence. Venerating the dissident artists and calling into being their emotional presence was both an act of mourning and resistance. These artists will never be honored under the Baathist regime. But in the French Institute during Love Boat, they were treated as heroes. By including the names of political prisoners in the text of Love Boat, Bulbul carved a place in the historical record, protecting their stories from being silenced. In addition to recording individual historical moments in the Syrian revolution, one of the primary tactics that Bulbul employs in Love Boat is the appropriation of canonical texts. The conscription of works by celebrated European playwrights directly challenges a negative stereotype commonly perpetuated in the West about Arab literacy and culture. To answer this charge, Bulbul chose playwrights such as Aristophanes and Molière, thus demonstrating the breadth of theatrical knowledge Syrian artists possess. Bulbul then asserts ownership over these texts by dramatically slicing and rearranging dialogue from them to capture what he feels are the most salient parts to his concept. For example, in Don Quixote, Bulbul excludes everything except Don Quixote’s fight with the windmills—which symbolizes the seemingly quixotic nature of the Syrian revolution—and his meeting with the prisoners— which is a satirical jab at the conservative Arab society’s criminalization of music and sexual relationships. In Love Boat’s version of Don Quixote, Mustafa, who is the youngest member of the theatre company, seizes his lance and leaps onto a table that the group transformed into a horse. After fighting with the windmill for a moment, 15-year-old Mustafa—as Don Quixote—falls to the main deck of the boat where he is temporarily knocked unconscious. This moment, for Bulbul, demonstrates the impulsive and unpractical manner in which the revolution began. Yet, by having the young Don Quixote rise and vow to continue his quest, Bulbul also argues that this battle for justice must continue regardless of the odds. It is also significant to note that Don Quixote, who is typically portrayed as an elderly man, is played by a teenage boy in Bulbul’s play. If Don Quixote is supposed to rise and continue his quest, then it is possible to read Bulbul’s choice in casting Quixote as a challenge to the next generation of Syrians to carry the revolutionary mantle. While Bulbul writes the windmill scene as a self-reflexive moment for the Syrian revolutionary movement, the second scene is an indictment of the entire conservative Arab society. In this scene, Mustafa encounters a group of prisoners in chains, and inquires about their crimes. In both Cervantes’ original text and Love Boat, the two crimes the prisoners confess are being a lover and playing music. This, however, is where Bulbul tactically departs from original authorial intent and appropriates Don Quixote to speak on human rights in conservative Arab

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societies. In Chapter XXII of the original novel, the prisoners are actually guilty of various thefts, but they attempt to couch their crimes in more poetic terms. The prisoner who claims to be guilty of love admits that his love was for a basket of another person’s clean linen. The prisoner who professes the crime of singing is actually guilty of stealing cattle. Singing, in this prisoner’s case, refers to confession under torture (Cervantes Saavedra 2009). Bulbul, however, chooses to leave the actual crimes out of his dialogue so that he can call attention to the banality of political and social imprisonment in Syria and throughout conservative Arabic societies. When Haya confesses to being a lover, she literally means a lover in the romantic and sexual sense. Likewise, Mohammed and Adnan’s confession to being musicians actually means they play music. The ridiculousness of these two crimes causes all of the actors to erupt in laughter. Once again, the moment Bulbul creates, which is based in truth, indicates the absurdity of the situation by inserting joy and levity into an otherwise serious subject. While Bulbul pays homage to Cervantes and the other writers by including their work in his story, diverging from the original scripts disputes their status as sacred and immutable. Bulbul’s curatorial choices repurpose these perennial texts to question normative discourses on political, social, and religious issues regarding global treatment of displaced Syrians. Simply put, he wields traditional Western drama as a weapon to condemn authoritarian violence and confront the feckless international political community. By comparing the textual choices Bulbul makes in Love Boat with those he made in The Informer, it is clear that he feels safer pushing against the borders of acceptability in Amman, Jordan. This is perhaps one of the most noticeable differences in his tactical approach to theatre following his exile. The ability to be more overtly critical in his dialogue, however, has not altered Bulbul’s reliance on the ethereal nature of theatre. Similar to his work in Syria, Bulbul cloaks many of his religious and social criticisms in visual and auditory direction. In fact, the most direct challenge to conservative Arab societies in Love Boat relies largely on the idea of disappearance. During the scene where the actors pretend to reach France, they decide to perform Tartuffe. Similar to the other scenes, Bulbul simplifies the play into two distinct moments from Moliere’s original work. The first scene begins with Tartuffe, played by Mohammed, preaching to the entire family who is seated around the table. In the initial moments of this scene, Bulbul uses costuming and vocality to ridicule religion. The costume design, which Charlotte Sarazin created for Tartuffe, hints at religious ambiguity. Although in the original Tartuffe is clearly posing as a member of the Catholic Church, his costume in Love Boat is an amalgamation of an Orthodox Christian priest, a conservative Sephardic rabbi, and a Salafist imam. Additionally, instead of directing Mohammed to speak Tartuffe’s prayer, Bulbul instructs him to chant it as if he were in a Catholic church. Bulbul does, however, make a small adjustment to the monophonic sounds inherent in the traditional Catholic chant. In order to play with the audiences’ expectations, Bulbul asks Mohammed to gradually shift into the multitoned Arabic maqam.12 The movement between each mode is almost imperceptible, but for people familiar with religious music, particularly in orthodox Christianity or Islam, it is clear enough to signal a change (Bulbul 2016b). Bulbul’s stated goal in this scene is to “show the world that all three of the big religions in the Middle East are like prisons for the society” (2016d). Recognizing of course that Bulbul is oversimplifying the nature of religion in the Middle East, his critique is no less important, considering that Western discourse on religion in the Arab world usually relegates the Christians and the Jewish to the good side and the Muslims, regardless of sect, to the bad. Nevertheless, by blending symbolic elements of these three religions into the unholy character of

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Tartuffe, Bulbul forces the audience to question for a moment whether they should laugh at the caricature of a different religion or if their religious leaders are being used as fodder for the amusement of others. Unfortunately, some audience members were not able to confront this question. During every performance, shortly after the start of the Tartuffe scene, a few people—Christian and Muslim—would quickly gather their belongings and exit. Although none of the people who left early intended to draw attention, the configuration of the performance space forced them to cross directly in front of the boat. Despite their decision to leave, however, the cognitive dissonance at this point of indecision, like the alienation effect in Brecht’s epic theatre, distanced them and those who remained from the story and briefly imposed a flash of introspection. While the opening scene in Tartuffe proved to be the most controversial moment of Love Boat, it was the following scene that drew the most enthusiastic response. Similar to Molière’s original script, Elmire in Love Boat, played by Haya, convinces Orgon to hide underneath the table while she proves that Tartuffe wants to seduce her. After the ruse is in place, Tartuffe enters the playing area. Toying with his desires, Elmire leads him to believe that she will entertain his seduction. The two characters move round the table methodically, slow at first, but then gathering speed as the scene grows in intensity. Elmire becomes increasingly uncomfortable as Tartuffe’s advances turn more forceful. Unlike the original text of Tartuffe, in this scene Orgon never has the opportunity to appear from under the table and catch Tartuffe in action. Instead Tartuffe lunges across the table to grab Elmire’s hand, which triggers a repressed memory, forcing Haya to drop her portrayal of Elmire. She releases a deafening scream followed by an emotional recounting of what happened to her in Assad’s prison. To her shocked friends, Haya roars, “My God, 227 days in detention. They hit me, they tortured me, they didn’t spare me anything. 227 times the shabihas raped me. 227 times!!” (Bulbul 2016b). The emotional recounting of Haya’s experience in prison and the societal scorn that follows prompted a standing ovation immediately following the end of her monologue. It is likely that the Syrian members of the audience connected to the subject of this action because most, if not all, are familiar with female victims of Assad’s brutal regime. In its 2015 report on rape in Syrian security branches, the Syrian Network for Human Rights13 tells the stories of seven women who were raped almost daily while imprisoned in the Hama security branch. Although the human rights group acknowledges the difficulties in obtaining a correct assessment—such as lack of documentation, fear of social stigmatizations, and psychological trauma—they estimate that over 7,500 instances of sexual abuse occurred in this security facility between 2011 and 2015. Many of the recorded stories have similar details to the story that Haya tells in Love Boat. Bulbul’s condemnation, however, does not stop at the regime. Many of the women who spoke about their sexual assaults in Syria’s prisons also express anger at the society that abandons or punishes them for being raped. For Bulbul, this is a crime far worse than the initial assault. Therefore, when Haya screams, “My rape is like a crown on your heads, a crown on the head of your revolution” (ibid), she is accusing all of society in raping her 1,000 times. Bulbul crafted this moment to sharply rebuke those in the revolution, some of whom are his closest of friends, who see freedom as only a reward for Syrian men. The kernel of Bulbul’s revolutionary belief lives in Haya’s story. In order for the revolution to truly succeed, it must be a revolution for everyone. This idea, however, is one that Bulbul feels the Syrian people are ready to accept. “If I’m talking

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about this idea before the revolution,” Bulbul suggests, “maybe I am killed. But now. . .this is the revolution” (2016d). The audiences’ decision to rise and applaud suggests that Bulbul is not alone in his revolutionary philosophy. Given that the dialogue of the Love Boat is completely in Arabic—specifically Syrian dialect—and that most of the critiques are leveled at Arabic society and regimes, it would be a mistake to overlook some of the moments in this play that directly or indirectly address Western audiences. One moment in particular was the source of controversy between Bulbul and some of his European funders. The original script included a lengthy stop in England where the actors were to perform the rude mechanicals play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bulbul determined, however, that this scene was too difficult for the actors and that it would make the running time of the play too long. So early in the process he cut this scene. But it made no sense to Bulbul for the actors to present plays from Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and Germany without mentioning England or Shakespeare. Therefore, Bulbul had the characters celebrate the idea of going to England only to discover that its borders were closed to Syrian refugees (2016b). While he is well aware of the political situation regarding refugee resettlement in England, Bulbul was not attempting to make a grand political statement. In fact, during the play the actors begin to laugh about the situation before happily continuing on to France. Unfortunately, members of the European Union National Institute for Culture (EUNIC), which was one of Love Boat’s funders, were not amused with this scene. Over the course of the next three weeks various administrators from the EUNIC, the British Council in Amman, and the French Institute requested that Bulbul remove this one moment, which Bulbul refused to do. This set off a chain of events that almost caused EUNIC to rescind their funding offer. Fortunately for Bulbul and the play, his wife, Vanessa Guéno, who had diplomatic connections with members of EUNIC, helped defray some of the tension. Additionally, the play’s positive reception was enough to allay British Council concerns. Every performance for Love Boat was filled to capacity and there was a large enough waiting list to add three extra performances. Bulbul was also approached by members of a newly forming theatre festival in Brussels, Belgium requesting a run of Love Boat in the fall of 2017. In the end, EUNIC praised the production and Bulbul received the promised funding. I am setting aside the obvious neocolonialist implications involved in a Western institution using its money to censor the speech of an Arabic artist. Instead I would like to simply point out the irony of this situation. Bulbul, who recently received French citizenship, believed that he now had the freedom to speak about controversial issues without fear of reprisal. So, he was not only stunned, but also disillusioned when the people who were attempting to censor him were from the countries he had so long admired for their freedoms. This is not to suggest that the form of censorship attempted by EUNIC or the British Council is anything close to what Bulbul would experience in Syria under the Assad regime. Obviously to compare the one to the other would be an absurd proposition, especially considering that the penalty for transgressing censorship in Syria carries a far more lethal consequence. I would like to suggest, however, that Western organizations working in the Middle East far too often use funding as a mode of censorship against the very people who need to feel free to speak. When organizations whose mission is to promote democracy and liberty amongst oppressed populations attempt to silence the very people they purport to help, not only do they undermine their own missions, but they also cause grievous harm to the concept of freedom as a whole.

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Conclusion As I write, Bashar al-Assad, with the assistance of Russian war planes, is leveling Syrian cities and killing scores of citizens each week. The Syrian revolution is in its fifth year and still many of the artists that I have been fortunate to meet while living here in Amman are as committed as ever to the idea of a free Syria. Although artists like Bulbul, Syrian actress May Skaf, or singer Ahmed al-Qaseem, are now exiled from Syria, they continue to find ways to influence audiences both inside and outside of their homeland. For example, Bulbul uses Skype to provide assistance to a group of former Free Syrian Army soldiers who are now amateur theatre artists in the besieged town of Saraqib, Syria. The group known as ‫( ﺳﺮاﻗﺐ ﺷﺒﺎب ﺗﺠﻤﻊ‬Sraqb Youth Group) broadcasts a weekly news satire program on their Facebook site that focuses on events occurring in the area immediately surrounding them. Despite the immense safety risks involved, they also perform one live show every year on March 15, the anniversary of the revolution (SYG 2016). Recognizing the tactics used by artists such as Bulbul is more than just a way of admiring a clever trick. Understanding and writing about these tactics both honors the work that these brave artists accomplish under turbulent circumstances and adds to the catalog of tools from which oppressed artists may draw. While under the Assad regime, Bulbul could not use words to openly voice dissent, so he developed a tactical style that imprinted his critiques of the government in the minds of his audience, even after they disappeared from the stage. Despite his tactics, Bulbul lived constantly in fear of being reported to the Syrian intelligence service. Once he went into exile, however, Bulbul responded to his changed environment by experimenting with new tactics. This does not mean, however, that he forgot the tactics that proved valuable to him before the war. Rather, Bulbul has learned to combine them, developing new hybridized ways of operating. This sort of adaptability is essential to the repertoire of a dissident artist.

Notes 1 The Institut Français de Jordanie (French Institute of Jordan) is connected to the French Embassy’s Cultural Affairs section in Amman. It is a center for bringing French and Jordanian cultural practices together. 2 All translations are my own. The first time an Arabic word appears, it will be italicized in its phonetic spelling using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) followed by the English translation in parenthesis. For each subsequent use, only the Arabic word will appear, not italicized unless it is a title. To simplify transliteration, I exclude diacritical markers. 3 I refer to both the performance of Love Boat and to the script. The citation (Bulbul 2016c) refers to the performance and the citation (Bulbul 2016b) refers to the script. 4 The reference to “Syrian Uprising” is Ziter’s terminology. I choose to use “revolution” when describing the events in Syria starting in 2011 because that is the way Bulbul refers to it. 5 Barrel bombings are air offensives that typically use slow moving aircraft to drop unguided bombs, sometimes literally explosive packed barrels, onto designated targets. The Syrian military has frequently used this tactic, resulting in some of the most horrendous civilian casualties. 6 Shabiha ( ‫ )ﺷﺒﯿﺤﺔ‬is a term used primarily in Syria. The literal translation is “ghost,” but it is used to describe Alewite extrajudicial militias under the control of the al-Assad family since the early 1980s. 7 Here, I am calling on Brecht’s use of the word Gestus to describe an embodied attitude that simultaneously externalizes a character’s motivation and enacts social commentary about that character.

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8 “The Damascene milieu [. . .] refers to television series set in an imaginary or an existing neighborhood in [. . .] Damascus, [. . .] during the late 19th or early 20th centuries when Syria was either ruled by the Ottoman Empire or the French mandate authority” (Al-Ghazzi 2013:578). 9 All personal interviews with Bulbul were conducted in a mixture of English and Arabic. Often Bulbul would speak in English and I would speak in Arabic. 10 Throughout the analysis, when I am referring to the actor I will use his/her last name. When I am referring to the character I will use her/his first name. 11 Love Boat’s script is an unpublished work and so I will not include page numbers. 12 Arabic Maqam is a system of melodic scales used in traditional Arabic music. 13 According to the group’s website, the Syrian Network for Human Rights is “an organization [which] documents violations committed by all conflict parties against the Syrian people.” It is registered in the United Kingdom, but relies on a network of researchers and activist from inside Syria to document and confirm daily human rights abuses (2014).

References Abboud, Samer N. 2015. Syria. Cambridge: Polity. Al-Ghazzi, Omar. 2013. “Nation as Neighborhood: How Bab al-Hara Dramatized Syrian Identity.” Media, Culture & Society 35, 5: 586–601. Al-Mohibany, Amer. 2015. “Syria Death Toll Now Exceeds 210,000: Rights Group.” Reuters. Accessed 21 February. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-toll-idUSKBN0LB0DY20150207. Brecht, Bertolt. 1938. The Informer. Translated by Ruth Norden. Vol. 355. Boston: American Periodicals Series II. Bulbul, Nawar. 2016a. Interview with author. Amman, April 5. Bulbul, Nawar. 2016b. Love Boat. Unpublished play. Bulbul, Nawar. 2016c. Love Boat. Performance, French Institute, Amman. Bulbul, Nawar. 2016d. Interview with author. Amman, 11 March. Burt, Richard. 1994. “Introduction: The ‘New’ Censorship.” In Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, edited by Richard Burt, xi–xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Certeau, Michel de. [1984] 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. [1605] 2009. Don Quixote. Translated by James H. Montgomery and David Quint. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Cooke, Miriam. 2007. Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official. Durham: Duke University Press. Guéno, Vanessa. 2016. Interview with author. Amman, April 23. Free Syria’s Silenced Voices (FSSV). 2016. “Samar Kokash.” Free Silenced Voices of Syria. Accessed 9 August. http://free-syrian-voices.org/samar-kokash/. Kabbour, Mohammed. 2016. Interview with author. Amman, 2 April. Maddrell, Avril. 2013. “Living with the Deceased: Absence, Presence and Absence-Presence.” Cultural Geographies 20, 4: 501–522. Malkawi, Qasim. 2016. Interview with author. Amman, 2 February. Mofrej, Alise. 2015. “Inside Assad’s Jails.” New York Times. 3 February. Accessed 9 August 2016. http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/opinion/inside-syrias-jails.html. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Syrian Network for Human Rights. 2014. “About Us.” Syrian Network for Human Rights. Accessed 20 June 2016. http://sn4hr.org/about-us/. Sraqb Youth Group (SYG). 2016. Interview with author. Amman, 2 May. Tisdall, Simon. 2015. “Inside a refugee camp in Jordan three years after the Syrian uprising began.” The Guardian, 11 March. Accessed 9 August 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/11/ inside-zaatari-refugee-camp-jordan-syria-uprising-three-years. USAID (US Agency for International Development). 2015. “Numbers at a Glance.” USAID.gov. Accessed 4 April. http://www.usaid.gov/crisis/syria.

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Wedeen, Lisa. 1999. Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ziadeh, Radwan. 2013. “Revolution in Syria: The Struggle for Freedom in a Regional Battle.” In The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw: Unfinished Revolutions and the Quest for Democracy, edited by John Davis, 93–111. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Ziter, Edward. 2014. Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART II

Militarized History and Memory

6 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH MUSIC CRITICISM Performances of Victory in German Wagner Reception, 1918–1933 Áine Sheil

Wagner: Intersections with Perceived and Historical Militarism “What music goes well with getting angry, riding in helicopters, and destroying villages? This bombastic section from Wagner’s fucking interminable Ring Cycle.” With these words, published in the rock and heavy metal magazine Revolver, Christopher Krovatin dubs “The Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) the second “most metal” piece of classical music (Krovatin 2011). In doing so, he taps into a powerful trope, namely the idea that Wagner’s music is bombastic, brass-heavy, and innately militaristic. The connection between Wagner and militarism is easily made, particularly since Francis Ford Coppola’s use of “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now (1979) at the point when American military helicopters attack a Vietnamese village. Whether this connection is justified is a more complicated matter. Rolf Sternberg labels Coppola’s inclusion of Wagner’s music a “facile appropriation that lacks integrity,” since the point of Die Walküre is, he believes, a reflection on “father-daughter relationships” (Sternberg 1998:347). Family relationships do indeed loom large in Wagner’s Ring cycle, in particular between Brünnhilde (a Valkyrie) and her father Wotan (king of the gods), but so too does the idea of the warrior: the Valkyries enter fully armored into battle in order to collect fallen warriors for an afterlife in Valhalla, while individual characters such as Siegmund and Siegfried are celebrated as unaffiliated but heroic warrior types. When all of the Valkyrie sisters assemble at the start of Act III of Die Walküre, “The Ride of the Valkyries” resounds, with an unusually large brass section carrying the famous theme over a thickly woven sonic background. This section of the opera has often been detached from the enormous Ring cycle and performed or reproduced separately, thus gaining disproportionate exposure and functioning as a shorthand for Wagner’s work as a whole. Given the predominance of the brass instruments in this extract and the battle-related context, one can see why superficial links between Wagner’s music and militarism get drawn. This is in spite of a vast creative output that, if anything, foregrounds the concepts of redemption through sacrificial love (usually the redemption of a man through the sacrificial love of a woman) and compassion (most famously in Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal ), and draws on all sections of the orchestra to create musical climaxes and intensity.

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In a sense, though, any acknowledgement of Wagner’s finely wrought instrumentation or complex dramatic themes pales in the face of one particular association. As is well known, Adolf Hitler was greatly inspired by Wagner, and during Germany’s National Socialist era, certain pieces of music by Wagner were performed regularly on state occasions and at the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg. The Ring cycle was not among the pieces singled out for particular attention,1 although a military band arrangement of some of its motifs (including “The Ride of the Valkyries”) featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). Instead, Hitler particularly favored the overture from the early Wagner opera Rienzi (1842) and the whole of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), a comedy rooted in an actual time and place—16th-century Nuremberg, home to the historical poet and playwright Hans Sachs, and the Mastersinger guild to which Sachs belonged. In August 1933, the first performance at that year’s Bayreuth Festival was of Die Meistersinger, with Hitler in attendance. This annual festival in the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth was founded in 1876 by Wagner himself, and is still in existence. It stages only Wagner opera and has always been artistically directed by a member of the Wagner family. Hitler supported it wholeheartedly, both politically and on a personal level through his friendship with the Wagner family and his regular attendance at festival performances. In 1933, the Bayreuth Meistersinger was broadcast on radio throughout Germany, along with a speech by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels about the significance of the work to Nazi culture. From 1935, Die Meistersinger was staged every year at the Nuremberg rallies; Hitler commissioned and personally approved a new production with sets and costumes by Benno von Arent, who would shortly afterwards become the official Reich Stage Designer. In 1943 and 1944, Die Meistersinger was the only opera staged at the Bayreuth Festival; the performances were intended as a boost to wartime morale and were attended exclusively by “guests of the Führer” (soldiers home from the front and civilians involved in the war effort). My concern in this chapter is with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but not with performances of the opera during the Third Reich, which have already attracted significant scholarly attention.2 Instead, I will trace the work’s intersection with politics and militarism prior to 1933, and consider what made this comedy, which contains no overt references to military matters, and which appears to extol the virtues of art over politics, susceptible to appropriation as a vehicle for militaristic nationalism. Numerous scholars have dealt with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from the perspective of nationalism, with one recent chapter even framing the issue in terms of performance. As Stephen McClatchie argues in “Performing Germany in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg”: Die Meistersinger has been used throughout its history [. . .] to forge collective and cultural memories for and of the German Volk, socially and politically instrumentalized, so that it seems fair to say the work itself “performs” the identity of its author’s nation. Significantly, the work itself thematizes performance and many of its phenomenal performances (such as the “Wach auf!” chorus in Act 3) contribute, in turn, to the sense of the opera as a “performance” of national identity. (2008:135) If McClatchie’s invocation of work and author within a performance-led paradigm appears to jar, one should recall not just W.B. Worthen’s interrogation of the work versus performance dichotomy in 1995, but also the fact that musicology has never entirely discarded

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the concept of authorial intention, even if it too has witnessed its own belated “performative turn.”3 In this chapter, I would like to put the emphasis very firmly on discourse—that is, on the ways in which commentators have written about Wagner and Die Meistersinger and thereby performed not just national identity, but also, in some striking cases, imaginary military victory. I say imaginary because my main concern is with the crisis posed to German Wagner critics by their country’s defeat in World War I. At the same time, it is worth considering the point in German history at which Wagner composed Die Meistersinger, and to note the composer’s concerns with nation and his equivocal position on militarism during and after the composition of the opera.

The 1860s Context of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Although Wagner began a first prose draft of Die Meistersinger as early as 1845, the bulk of his work on the opera, including subsequent prose drafts and composition of the music, was undertaken in the 1860s. During this decade, Germany moved gradually towards unification; under Otto von Bismarck, who was appointed Minister President of Prussia in 1862, Prussia won the Danish-Prussian War (1864) and the Austro-Prussian War (1866), thus emerging as the strongest military power in German-speaking Europe. The outbreak of the FrancoPrussian War (1870–71) provided a pretext to absorb the independent kingdoms of Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg into the North German Confederation; then, following Prussia’s defeat of France, a new and unified German Reich was declared on 18 January 1871 in the Palace of Versailles. Given the consolidation of Germany’s nationhood in this period, it is not surprising that Wagner was preoccupied at the time with the question of what it was to be German. His prose writings from this period include “Was ist Deutsch?” (What is German?), written in 1865 but first published in 1878, and “Deutsche Kunst und deutsche Politik” (German Art and German Politics, 1867/68), in which he argued that there was a true German spirit, and that it was non-materialist, conservative, and most at home in the realm of art, music, and philosophy. Die Meistersinger must also be considered an exploration of German-ness in its setting, its plot, and its allusions. At one level, it functions as classic international comedy: two young lovers (Walther and Eva) desire union, but are thwarted temporarily by an older male figure of some authority (Beckmesser), who has his sights set on the young woman. The young couple overcomes this hurdle with the help of a wise/wily friend (Hans Sachs); the blocking older man is defeated and humiliated, and the young male, who was an outsider, is now absorbed into the community and the two young lovers can marry. On another level, the opera is a parable about the role of innovation and tradition within artistic practice: the cobbler Hans Sachs and his fellow artisan Mastersingers are custodians of an artistic tradition reaching back many generations, and their practice is regulated by a complex set of rules. Walther, a young aristocrat, wishes to become a Mastersinger in order to win the hand of Eva, who has been promised by her wealthy goldsmith father to the Mastersinger who wins a special singing competition. Walther is untutored in the rules of the Mastersingers, and breaks them freely with his unconventional and daring singing. Hans Sachs recognizes his talent and seeks to mediate between him and the suspicious Mastersingers; he protects Walther in particular from Beckmesser, the pedantic protector of the Mastersingers’ rules, who also wants Eva as a bride. In this process, Sachs teaches Walther that both inspiration and form are necessary components of enduring art, and that youthful impetuousness and tradition need to be reconciled. In turn,

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the Mastersingers learn that rules are not enough, and that innovation can help to keep art alive and attractive to the wider community. This was a highly personal matter for Wagner, who was regularly accused by critics of producing unschooled work with scant regard for established practice. In addition to its elements of classic comedy and reflections on artistic creativity, Die Meistersinger also displays a distinctly national flavor in its homage to 16th-century Nuremberg, Hans Sachs, and the conventions of the actual Mastersingers. Although the world Wagner created in Die Meistersinger was an imaginary projection, the composer nonetheless tapped into a very real 19th-century fascination with Reformation Nuremberg as the quintessential preindustrial German city, in which German culture was thought to flourish among the people and German citizens to cohere in apparently natural and unforced community. In addition, Wagner used the final speech in Die Meistersinger, that of Hans Sachs to Walther in front of the assembled people of Nuremberg, to express fears that German people and customs were subject to corruption by foreign ways: Beware! Evil tricks threaten us; once the German people and the German empire fragment under false foreign rule, then soon no prince will be able to understand his people, and foreign delusions and baubles will take hold of Germany; and no one would know any more what was German and genuine, if it did not live on in the tradition of the German Masters. (Wagner 2015:323)4 Wagner uses the word “welsch” for “foreign,” meaning literally “Latin”; the sentiments he puts into the mouth of Hans Sachs are almost identical with those expressed in “What is German?” but the essay is more explicit about the foreign threat, ascribing it above all to the Jews and the French. The words quoted above are some of the most explicitly nationalist in the opera, but four subsequent lines have given rise to as much debate: if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German art! (323) In his lengthy essay “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” (1933)—an essay that led directly to his exile from Nazi Germany—Thomas Mann argued that the latter lines prove “how totally intellectual and apolitical Wagner’s nationalism was: for they speak of a downright anarchic indifference to political structures, as long as German intellectual and spiritual values—‘German Art’—are preserved intact” (Mann 1985:141). Examining both sets of lines together, Thomas Grey notes that the “troublesome resonance [they] have acquired in the wake of the two world wars in the twentieth century overshadows their significance in the 1860s.” “Yet,” he continues, “with the Franco-Prussian War only two years off in 1868, the original significance of the lines is not finally unrelated to that later resonance” (Grey 2002:83).

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That is, tempting though it may be for critics to take up Mann’s position and absolve Wagner of chauvinist nationalism in Die Meistersinger, and reasonable though it may be to argue that nationalist ideas expressed in the 1860s were not the same as those that came later, the political context out of which Die Meistersinger arose included militaristic nation-building in the wake of Bismarck’s so-called “Blood and Iron” speech (1862), in which the politician argued that the fundamental questions of the day would be decided not through speeches and majority decisions, but through iron and blood. Perhaps this is why Grey can conclude that in the Meistersinger lines quoted above, “it is possible to see here the germination, as it were, of a new ‘masculine’ model of German culture that would come to dominate the later nineteenth and, of course, the early twentieth centuries, at least among the most vocal, self-conscious nationalists” (Grey 2002:84). At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Wagner was greatly impressed by Bismarck and the Prussian army: as he himself asked, “What German could have lived through the year 1870 without amazement at the forces manifested here, as also at the courage and determination with which the man who palpably knew something that we others did not know, brought those forces into action?” (Wagner [1878] 1895:167) The German advances prompted him to write the poem “An das deutsche Heer vor Paris” (To the German Army outside Paris), and afterwards he marked the German victory with a “Kaisermarsch” (Emperor March, 1871) for male voices and orchestra. This identification with Bismarck and Prussian military might did not last, however. By 1878, Wagner was fiercely critical of Bismarck and had adopted a decidedly pacifist position. In his 1880 essay “What Use is this Knowledge?” he condemned the Franco-Prussian War as “wantonly provoked,” “terrible,” and likely to cause further war; this meant that there was need for a world peace treaty, so that fortresses could be demolished rather than captured (Borchmeyer 2003:279).

The Effects of World War I on Wagner Reception Dieter Borchmeyer has written in some detail about the relationship between Wagner and Bismarck (279–87), setting out not only the profound changes in Wagner’s attitude to Bismarck, but also the failure of some Wagner acolytes to recognize these changes. Borchmeyer quotes from an article in the 1924 Bayreuth Festival Guide in which August Püringer invoked the “spirit of Wagner and Bismarck,” arguing that they embodied “intellectual and military might” and that “together can they bring salvation to us Germans” (280). This was not an isolated sentiment at the time: the conservative composer Hans Pfitzner equated Wagner with Bismarck in particularly polemical fashion in 1920, suggesting that these two figures belonged together in a patriotic camp of Germans undermined during World War I by those who had “paralyzed German spiritual and physical resistance” and had “bound the hands of fighting Germany” (Pfitzner 1920:126–27). In 1927, Max Koch noted that “within German history two contemporaneous victorious leaders of the German tribes will always belong together, for the unification of the State, and the efforts of the best of the century to create a National Theatre as the peak of the highest expression of German culture: Otto von Bismarck and Richard Wagner” (Koch 1927:82). Unlike Pfitzner, Koch framed his equation of the two men in terms of victory rather than defeat; as I will demonstrate, this emphasis on victory within Wagner and Meistersinger reception was common at the time, suggesting that there was an urgent need to compensate for political realities.

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Unlike the Prussian military victories between 1864 and 1871, World War I proved catastrophic for Germany, inflicting mortality on an enormous scale, as well as the humiliation of defeat after years of fruitless fighting. The words by Hans Pfitzner quoted above reflect a widespread “stab-in-the-back” myth that German troops were undone by left-wing civilians, who surrendered needlessly when German military victory was still possible; in turn, this myth reflected bitter divisions within German society at the end of the war, and the difficulties numerous Germans had in accepting defeat. The Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of the war, imposed yet more humiliation, including territorial losses, severe restrictions on Germany’s military capability, and harsh reparation payments. Economic conditions in the Weimar Republic (1919–33), which succeeded Imperial Germany, were turbulent: hyperinflation in 1922–23 destroyed the savings of many formerly well-to-do Germans, and worldwide depression in 1930–33 generated new crisis conditions from which the fledgling Republic never recovered. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, it was perhaps not surprising that Germans perceived performance-based art as a valuable national asset that could not be appropriated by foreign powers. In “‘The Most German of all German Operas’: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich,” David B. Dennis draws attention to a Völkischer Beobachter article on the 1923 Munich Festival that asserted, “of all our rich possessions, practically nothing is left to us but our holy German Art” (2003:106–107). In 1927, Max Koch extended this idea, arguing that “ever since the destruction of German power we must hope and strive for the restoration of our world status above all through ‘holy German art’” (1927:17). These references to Hans Sachs’s final speech from Die Meistersinger were neither coincidental nor unusual: for those still traumatized by military defeat, Sachs’s lines proved irresistible. If foreign ways amounted to “delusions” and “baubles,” then German culture could easily be regarded as superior and unvanquished, even in the face of a collapsed empire. And if German culture could be regarded as unvanquished, then defeat in the war and the collapse of the Reich could be mentally mitigated. Admittedly the habit of linking Wagner with victorious struggle predated World War I. The writer Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who is now associated with the so-called Conservative Revolutionary movement, included Wagner in his eight-volume history of the Germans, Die Deutschen—Unsere Menschengeschichte (The Germans—Our People’s History, 1904–10). Moeller saw Wagner’s character of Siegfried as the personification of the German hero who knows no fear, but also singled out the character of Walther in Die Meistersinger for his naïve vitality (Moeller van den Bruck [1907] 1961:19–20). Characterizing Wagner as a “a proud, unrelenting personification of the fighting spirit of his people, and their creative hero and trailblazer [Vorkämpfer] in difficult, conflicted times” (11), Moeller declared the composer the only warrior fighting on behalf of Teutonicism at a point when Hellenism seemed to have the upper hand. And, Moeller continued, “Wagner was victorious: for the first time, thanks to him, the almost fantastic struggle between past and future, Teutonicism and Hellenism, was decided to the advantage of the future and Teutonicism” (16). Here, Wagner is framed as a type of cultural soldier with an elite advance mission; although the canvas is broad and unrelated to actual politics, the language of conflict points towards later public rhetoric, including Moeller’s most famous work, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich, 1923), in which the liberalism of the Weimar Republic was resolutely condemned and an alternative authoritarian order was envisaged. The earlier work was written without knowledge of

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the war that was to come, but by the time World War I was underway, many of Moeller’s compatriots and fellow Wagner critics had also adopted the language of struggle and— at least in some cases—victory. In June 1918, the 50th anniversary of the first performance of Die Meistersinger was marked by many German newspapers. World War I had not yet come to a close, and the commemorative articles composed for the occasion were peppered with patriotic assertions. In his comparison of Die Meistersinger with the German approach to war, Richard Sternfeld implied that the war was a cultural crusade, and finished by quoting a line from Die Meistersinger: From the notes of the fine, delicate manuscript rises the same spirit that speaks to us so imposingly, movingly and admonishingly from the buildings and sculptures of old Nuremberg, the spirit of the German bourgeosie and German art, German power and cheerfulness, the German spirit that proves itself in war against a world of enemies and— we hope—will continue to prove genuine and noble in peace. Honour your German Masters! (Sternfeld 1918:n.p.) Writing in Der Tag (Berlin), Richard Graf Du Moulin-Eckart acknowledged the difficulties of Germany’s position in the war, but celebrated the 50th anniversary of Die Meistersinger with the idea of victory. Four of his lines were from Die Meistersinger, which in turn were a direct quotation of the historical Hans Sachs’s celebration of the Reformation in the poem “Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall” (The Wittenberg Nightingale, 1523): The old tune resounds above hardship and distress: “Night is sinking in the west, The day arises in the east, The ardent red glow of morning Approaches through the gloomy clouds.” The celebration song, the victory song, the peace song of the German Nation! (Graf Du Moulin-Eckart 1918:n.p.) There was, of course, no victory for Germany in World War I. Introducing the 1924 edition of his study of Die Meistersinger, Arthur Prüfer lamented the outcome of the “terrible war and the ‘peace’ that followed it,” which, he said, had reminded “our poor fatherland of the truth of the Wagner words: ‘the people [Volk] are the embodiment of all those who feel a common crisis’” (Prüfer 1924:n.p.). Referring to the plot of Die Meistersinger, he compared “that patriarchal time which was still a golden age for workmanship (Sachs and David)” with “our time of class hatred, moral turpitude and irreverent disrespect for everything that was formerly considered holy” (56). These words convey vividly the sense of loss and estrangement that many conservative commentators felt in post-imperial Germany, as they struggled to come to terms with defeat in World War I, the ravages of hyperinflation, the democracy and party politics of the new Republic, and a far less patriarchal social order than they had known in prewar times. Small wonder, then, that those who felt unmoored amid the upheaval of the period desired imaginary certainty, telos, and military triumph. For Wagner critics, words provided a powerful medium to suppress liminality and conjure up not just continuity, but also victory.

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Performative Writing: Wagner Criticism, 1924–33 In 1924, Hans Joachim Moser published his Geschichte der deutschen Musik (History of German Music), in which the development of German opera was described in war-like terms: When Wagner-Hans Sachs finally brought the teutonic, powerful and indescribably rich and detailed work to a close with the proud, earnest warning “honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits!”, that was the triumph song par excellence of German opera, which after two centuries of struggling for its own place had prevailed against the opera music of the whole world. (Moser 1924:269) That same year, the Bayreuth Festival re-opened after ten years of closure initially caused by the outbreak of World War I. Many commentators jubilated at this restoration of familiar prewar opera culture. As Heinrich Chevalley asked in the Leipziger Tageblatt, “how often in these past ten hard years has Bayreuth, Wagner’s Bayreuth, been proclaimed dead by the disbelievers, the cowards and the antagonists, who believed that their hour had finally come[?]” The 1924 festival was triumphantly declared a “resurrection festival” (Chevalley 1924:n.p.). The first performance of the festival was a production of Die Meistersinger directed by Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son. Siegfried had chosen to decorate the festival theatre with the colors of the Wilhelmine Reich rather than those of the Weimar Republic—a provocative gesture when combined with the presence at festival rehearsals of the reactionary General Ludendorff, a leading military figure not only in World War I, but also in the Kapp and Hitler putsches of 1920 and 1923. Siegfried had suffered greatly on account of Germany’s defeat in World War I, his wife Winifred disclosed in Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s 1975 documentary, Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried (Winifred Wagner and the History of House Wahnfried). Given the political backdrop to the occasion, and Siegfried’s patriotism and disdain for the Weimar Republic, the symbolism of the “resurrection festival” almost inevitably became entwined with the idea of victory, at least for German culture. In the Bayreuth Festival Guide, Die Meistersinger was described as a work of radiant, healthy, and victorious power (Seybold 1924:110, 114). During the opening performance, Siegfried Wagner received a telegram from the interior minister, Karl Jarres, in which the resumption of the festival was described as a victory for German art. In the far-right nationalist newspaper Völkischer Kurier, the following remark appeared: The German spirit can be subjugated, it can be broken for a while, but it can’t die! And that’s why today’s start to Germany’s biggest celebration of the arts is a victorious deed of the German spirit—an event that will make the whole world sit up and take notice. (Völkischer Kurier 1924:n.p.) Perhaps it was these performative gestures—both in words, as shown above, and visually, in the flying of the prewar imperial colors—that prompted the audience on opening night to execute a remarkable performance of its own. As Die Meistersinger was coming to a close, the audience stood up and listened in silence to Hans Sachs’s speech about foreign threats and the honor of German art. Once the opera was finished, the audience broke into song with a spontaneous rendition of all three strophes of the German national anthem. At this moment, communal

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nationalist sentiment was performed not by means of words on a page, but in a manner that harnessed or perhaps even hijacked the classical performance setting. For Siegfried Wagner, this show of performative autonomy on the part of the audience was uncomfortable, so in 1925, notices appeared on the doors of the festival theatre, asking audience members to refrain from singing at the close of Die Meistersinger. Within the realm of the printed word, critics continued to associate Wagner and Die Meistersinger not just with the German nation, but also with victory. In a letter from November 1927 to the periodical Die Lesestunde, Thomas Mann declared Wagner “the paradigm of world-conquering artistry,” to which Europe succumbed, “just as it succumbed to the statecraft of Bismarck.” As for Die Meistersinger, Mann declared that it “was a great and universally acknowledged German victory, a total triumph of the German spirit in its opposition to civilization—and will always remain so historically, whatever the circumstances” (Mann 1985:82–83; emphasis original). An anonymous introduction to a 1929 edition of the text of Die Meistersinger suggested that Wagner himself constituted a battlefield: “From now on, the comedy also reflected the earnest, touching on tragedy, but victorious fights in the heart of its creator” (Wagner 1929:7). Hans Tessmer followed a similar line of thought in Richard Wagner. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Richard Wagner. His Life and his Work, 1930), arguing that “Die Meistersinger is a work of a convalescent who has survived the wounds of heavy fighting; it is, if one wants to understand things correctly, a work of inner liberation from Tristan”5 (Tessmer 1930:199). Written as the Weimar Republic was coming to an end, Ernst Bücken’s Richard Wagner (1933) dealt with the premiere of Die Meistersinger not just as a victory, but in terms of an army or battalion responding to good leadership: “On 21 June 1868 [the conductor] Hans von Bülow led Die Meistersinger to victory, which Wagner, applauded more and more from act to act, experienced at the side of his royal friend [Ludwig II of Bavaria]” (Bücken 1933:35). Comparing Wagner with Mozart, Bücken remarked: “They both strove for world experience, but both found their way back to unconditional Germanness, in the spirit of which they fought, suffered and were victorious” (3). If the language of war was as serviceable in 1933 as it had been in 1918, so too was the idea that Wagner and Die Meistersinger stood for German victory. At a time of great crisis for Germany, when the military reputation established by Prussia in the 1860s was undone and the Wilhelmine Reich had dissolved in demeaning defeat, public discourse on Wagner offered some commentators a way to subvert the demilitarization provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and to perform an alternative, successful outcome to Germany’s hostilities with other nations. In particular, the opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg served as an outlet for frustrated nationalist fervor. Stage performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg provided continuity, smoothing over the great fissure of World War I with revivals of prewar productions or conservative, prewar-style new productions. The reception of the work involved different types of performance, including, as seen above, written performances of displaced militarism and imaginary victory. These were not Austinian performative utterances that could bring about change through verbal acts. Nor were they all directly related to military matters: indeed for many critics, the idea that German culture was victorious was consolation enough. Indirectly, though, these performances of victory amounted to an alternative reality, one that was indeed related to military defeat. The resonance of the concept of victory was, after all, directly related to the grinding experience of extended war. The Wagner criticism reviewed above did something in this sense, then: it performed ersatz victory at a time when the reality of military failure was difficult for many to digest. It could not change the

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military outcome of the war, but it could and did perform German triumph in a manner that was inseparable from the context of World War I.

Notes 1 Pamela Potter notes that “[t]he imagery of the sword-wielding, dragon-slaying Siegfried was exploited in war propaganda, and the Ring as a whole was cited by Nazi critics for glorifying the preservation of a pure and noble Germanic race,” but she also argues that “presumptions about Wagner’s potential ideological significance for the Nazis inevitably weaken when one considers the documented decline of Wagner productions on German stages and, with a few notable exceptions, minimal evidence of Nazi exploitation of those productions” (Potter 2008:240, 243). 2 See, for example, Dennis 2003 and Potter 2008. 3 This performative turn is well documented in Cook 2008. Cook 2001 was perhaps the first publication by a musicologist to engage with the discipline of performance studies and to examine points of intersection between performances studies theory and musicology. 4 All translations in this chapter of the text of Die Meistersinger are by Peter Branscombe and can be found in Wagner 2015:81–323. Other translations are mine, except where noted. 5 Within Wagner’s works, Tristan (1865) immediately preceded Die Meistersinger; famed for its chromatic, yearning harmonies, and melancholic, Schopenhauerian-inspired love story, it appeared to many Wagner critics unsuited to a time that required an escape from war wounds and tragedy. Instead, Die Meistersinger was embraced for its perceived “healthiness”, i.e., its basis in the uncomplicated key of C major and its non-tragic celebration of German culture.

References Borchmeyer, Dieter. 2003. Drama and the World of Richard Wagner. Translated by Daphne Ellis. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Bücken, Ernst. 1933. Richard Wagner. Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion. Chevalley, Heinrich. 1924. “Bayreuth.” Leipziger Tageblatt, 26 July: n.p. Cook, Nicholas. 2001. “Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance.” Music Theory Online 7, 2: April. Accessed 8 August 2016. www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html. Cook, Nicholas. 2008. “We are All (Ethno)musicologists Now.” In The New (Ethno)musicologies, edited by Henry Stobart, 48–70. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. Dennis, David B. 2003. “‘The Most German of all German Operas’: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich.” In Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi, 98–119. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Graf Du Moulin-Eckart, Richard. 1918. “Das Werden der ‘Meistersinger.’” Der Tag, 20 July: n.p. Grey, Thomas S. 2002. “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera (1868–1945).” In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 78–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Koch, Max. 1927. Richard Wagners geschichtliche völkische Sendung. Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne. Krovatin, Christopher. 2011. “Final Six: The Six Most/Least Metal Classical Pieces.” Revolver. 25 February. Accessed 4 August 2016. http://www.revolvermag.com/lists-2/final-six-the-six-mostleastmetal-classical-pieces.html. Mann, Thomas. 1985. Pro and Contra Wagner. Translated by Allan Blunden. London: Faber & Faber. McClatchie, Stephen. 2008. “Performing Germany in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 134–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur. [1907] 1961. Richard Wagner, reprint of a chapter of Die Deutschen— Unsere Menschengeschichte. Kiel: Schwentine-Verlag. Moser, Hans Joachim. 1924. Geschichte der deutschen Musik 2, part 2. Stuttgart, Berlin: J.G. Cotta.

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Pfitzner, Hans. 1920. Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz. Munich: Verlag der Süddeutschen Monatshefte. Potter, Pamela M. 2008. “Wagner and the Third Reich: myths and realities.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, edited by Thomas S. Grey, 235–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prüfer, Arthur. 1924. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. 3rd edition. Leipzig: Fr. Kistner & C.F.W. Siegel. Seybold, Walter. 1924. “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.” In Offizieller Bayreuther Festspielführer 1924, edited by Karl Grunsky, 110–114. Bayreuth: Bayreuth Festival. Sternberg, Rolf. 1998. “Fantasy, Geography, Wagner, and Opera.” Geographical Review 88, 3: 327–348. Sternfeld, Richard. 1918. “Richard Wagner und Nürnberg. Zum Fünfzigjahrtag der ersten ‘Meistersinger’Aufführung.” Fränkischer Kurier, 21 June: n.p. Tessmer, Hans. 1930. Richard Wagner. Sein Leben und sein Werk (Richard Wagner. His Life and his Work). Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft. Völkischer Kurier. 1924. “Bayreuther Festspiele 1924,” Völkischer Kurier, 26 July: n.p. Wagner, Richard. [1878] 1895. “What is German?” Translated by William Ashton Ellis. In Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 4: Art and Politics, 151–169. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. Wagner, Richard. 1929. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Vollständiges Textbuch für Theatre, Rundfunk und Opernübertragung durch Fernsprecher. Munich: Verlag der G. Franzschen Hofbuchdruckerei. Wagner, Richard. 2015. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Overture Opera Guides, series edited by Gary Kahn. Richmond, Surrey: Overture Publishing. Worthen, W.B. 1995. “Disciplines of the Text/Sites of Performance.” TDR 39, 1: 13–28.

7 “STOP THE WAR IN CHICAGO PLEASE” Performative Protest and the Limits of Dissensus Susanne Shawyer

On the evening of 28 August 1968, the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” raged in the street outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago. On the broad avenue separating Grant Park from the hotel, chaos reigned as thousands of anti-war demonstrators confronted National Guard and Chicago Police determined to keep demonstrators away from delegates to the Democratic National Convention. The bright lights of television camera crews illuminated the tear gas in the air. Convention delegates watched from their hotel rooms above as tanks advanced below. The security forces charged the crowd, beating protesters, reporters, and bystanders. Eightynine million Americans watching the convention on television witnessed the violence, and heard Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff famously condemn the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” in his convention speech (Lukas 1968b:1). “Horrified and repelled” by what they had seen (Yellin 1968:n.p.), more than 500 people immediately wrote to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, describing their disgust at the police brutality, deploring the militarization of the police, and pleading for their president to “stop the war in Chicago please” (Crespi et al. 1968:n.p.). Of the millions of television viewers, only a small portion were moved to contact President Johnson about what they had seen, to condemn “the brutal display of militarism steel helmets and bayonets [sic]” (Nordenson 1968:n.p.), directed at “people who are exercising their American right to dissent” (Serritella 1968:n.p.). Only a few hundred wrote to appeal to the military authority of their Commander-in-Chief to “use [his] powers to stop this” (Seevers 1968:n.p.). In fact, the White House “Weekly Summary of Presidential Mail” for the week ending 29 August 1968 records a below-average week of correspondence with 14,658 letters, 6,862 cards, and 1,893 telegrams received, which was a typical number for the slow summer months (White House 1968b:1).1 Although this collection of messages fills just three archive boxes at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and does not represent the entire nation’s reaction to the Chicago violence, it nevertheless offers historians useful examples of immediate and affective responses to the clash between protesters and police—a battle that some radical demonstrators argued was a theater of cruelty performance. In his influential book The Theater and Its Double ([1938] 1958), theatre theorist Antonin Artaud imagined that the emotionally devastating experience of a theatre of cruelty performance would shock audiences

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into questioning the society in which they lived; similarly, some Chicago demonstrators hoped that scenes of militarized violence would provoke the American public into revolutionary political and social action. In other words, they hoped that audiences would experience what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls dissensus: the process of recognizing, questioning, and then challenging political ideologies and power structures that contradict democratic ideals ([2010] 2013). By examining the Chicago violence as a theatre of cruelty performance, and then exploring the emotional and at times contradictory audience reactions recorded in the letters and telegrams sent to President Johnson, this chapter argues that the audience reception to “the war in Chicago” was emotionally distressed and also politically confused. Ultimately, this archive of responses reveals the limits of performative protest to inspire political dissensus in a culture already militarized.

Revolutionary Action-Theatre In 1968 the United States was not only fighting a war abroad but also a war at home—from peace marches to sit-ins, student strikes, and race riots, every week saw a protest or demonstration clashing with security forces tasked with keeping civil order. For example, police and demonstrators brawled at the nationwide 27 April peace marches organized by the Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, known as Mobe. In Chicago, police used mace and nightsticks on a crowd of several thousand marchers (NYT 1968c:73), while in New York, plainclothes police wrestled protesters to the ground (Stern 1968b:72). After a spring of student strikes and sit-ins, as well as civil unrest following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, the Pentagon created a Riot Control Unit tasked with readying federal troops “to put down disorders in American cities” (NYT 1968b:35).2 Keeping the peace at home became a military matter. For some Americans, this militarization of civil order echoed the suppressive tactics of World War II and Cold War enemies liked Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Just one week before the Battle of Michigan Avenue, Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia in an effort to stop democratic reforms. Mainstream news media in the United States linked the Soviet occupation of Prague to Germany’s wartime actions: a New York Times editorial described the invasion as “illegal and immoral,” and a return to the “unscrupulous tactics of the 1940s” (NYT 1968a:36), while the CBS Evening News aired images of Czech demonstrators painting swastikas on Soviet tanks (CBS News 1968). With scenes of Czechoslovakia’s new Soviet-sponsored police state filling television screens, and wartime rhetoric circulating in newspapers, it is not surprising that when Chicago’s Mayor Daley called for around 10,000 troops to help protect the city from anticipated convention violence, and spread word that they had orders to “shoot to kill” to prevent looting and rioting, Mobe chairman David Dellinger compared the city’s tactics to Soviet oppression (Lukas 1968a:62). In addition, Mobe peace march coordinator Rennie Davis complained that the overwhelming presence of troops in Chicago was “a concrete manifestation of militarism” (Fox 1968:18). With these comparisons the activists cast the Chicago Police and Illinois National Guard as totalitarian villains, and framed the demonstrators as sympathetic democratic reformists. In reality, only some of the demonstrators on Michigan Avenue were democratic reformers. The crowd represented a wide variety of interests, affiliations, and competing agendas. Although all broadly anti-war, the mixed group of committed radicals and casual observers included long-haired hippies, earnest “Clean Gene” youth supporters of Minnesota Senator

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Eugene McCarthy, Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the more radical Youth International Party, known as the Yippies. The Yippies were a loose network of anti-war activists, political provocateurs, and countercultural revolutionaries whose performative protests condemned the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy and embodied an irreverent embrace of the ridiculous. Their political program was contradictory: they rejected the dominant capitalist system in America in favor of cooperative living and grassroots organizing, but they also advocated for a complete reinvention of American society with an emphasis on radical individualism. Jerry Rubin, one of the founding Yippies, described a Yippie as a misfit, or a “Marxist acid head, the psychedelic Bolshevik. He didn’t feel at home in SDS, he wasn’t a flower-power hippie or a campus intellectual. A stoned politico” (Rubin 1970:82). The Yippies were an anarchic movement inspired by stoner humor: cofounder Abbie Hoffman described their objectives as “the blending of pot and politics into a potlitical grass leaves movement” (Hoffman [1968] 2005:102). Politics and pot formed two pillars of the Yippie movement. The Yippies’ third pillar was performance. In his manifesto Revolution for the Hell of It, Hoffman lists among the Yippie objectives “the need to make some statement, especially in revolutionary action-theater terms, about LBJ, the Democratic Party, electoral politics, and the state of the nation” (Hoffman [1968] 2005:102). To inspire others to embrace their radical ideas, the Yippies turned to theater and devised their own performance form that they termed revolutionary action-theater. Inspired by the guerrilla theatre work of R.G. Davis at the San Francisco Mime Troupe, throughout 1967 and 1968 Yippie cofounders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin staged short, humorous performances in public spaces meant to raise awareness of the Yippies’ anti-capitalist, anti-establishment cause (Rubin 1970:59). For example, Hoffman famously disrupted the New York Stock Exchange by raining dollar bills from the public gallery down onto the trading floor. He created a frenzy among traders eager to snatch the money from the air, and thus his performative protest critiqued the capitalist system that the Yippies scorned (Kifner 1967:23). In another example of revolutionary action-theater, Hoffman staged an exorcism during October 1967’s mammoth peace march to the Pentagon. The press watched agog as Hoffman and his fellow performers, dressed as witches, attempted to levitate the Pentagon and to cleanse the large building of evil spirits and so end the war in Vietnam (see Time Magazine 1967). Several months later in March 1968, and with 3,000 eager participants, the Yippies hosted a party at New York’s Grand Central Terminal. They turned the station’s main concourse into a festive bacchanal, sharing food and drugs, dancing, and playing music to welcome the Spring Equinox (Jezer 1968:1–2). With each event the Yippies repeated their revolutionary action-theater format: first, a brief scripted scenario meant to raise awareness of Yippie politics or philosophy, such as the equinox ritual; second, attention-grabbing theatrical costumes, props, music, and movement, such as the witch costumes at the Pentagon; and thirdly, plenty of room for improvisation, surprises, and chaos. For the Yippies, revolutionary action-theater required both attention-grabbing humor and also unstructured anarchy. They celebrated impulse and improvisation over script and form. In Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution, Jerry Rubin writes that “revolution is theater-in-the-streets” and that “theater has no rules, forms, structures, standards, traditions—it is pure, natural energy, impulse, anarchy” (Rubin 1970:132). Like the early 20th-century avant-garde performances of Dada or Futurism, revolutionary action-theater was meant to be radical and disruptive—to upset social norms, break rules, and rupture conventions.3 Revolutionary action-theatre also required manipulation of the American news media. Thus while its theatricality modeled the spontaneous individualism the Yippies advocated, it also invited responses by security forces

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charged with keeping public order. When the equinox celebrants started to vandalize the clock on top of Grand Central’s information booth, the police used force to break up the party. At least 57 Yippies were arrested and two sent to the hospital; but more importantly for Hoffman and Rubin, the Yippies made the cover of the New York Times the following day (Stern 1968a:1). A forceful reaction by police guaranteed publicity. “Media is free. Use it,” Hoffman advises in Revolution for the Hell of It. “Don’t pay for it. Don’t buy ads. Make news” (Hoffman [1968] 2005:44). News reports were the publicity the Yippies used to spread word of their radicalism to the rest of America. The media’s interest helped further their revolutionary agenda. So why not take revolutionary action-theater directly to the watching media, who would turn it into news? And what better performance location than the entire city of Chicago, where the 1968 Democratic National Convention promised intense media interest? In the spring of 1968, Hoffman and Rubin decided that the “Yippies would use the Democratic Party and the Chicago theater to build our stage” (Rubin 1970:83).

Theatre of Cruelty The Yippies’ revolutionary action-theater goal for Chicago was simple. They planned to use the militarization of convention security to highlight how law and order in America discouraged freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. Rubin explained that they wanted: the tear gas to get so heavy that the reality was tear gas. We wanted to create a situation in which the Chicago police and the Daley administration and the federal government and the United States would self-destruct. We wanted to show that America wasn’t a democracy, that the convention wasn’t politics. The message of the week was of an America ruled by force. (Viorst 1979:459) In other words, their disruptive demonstrations during convention week were meant to incite reactions from the thousands of police and federal troops brought in by the city of Chicago and Mayor Richard Daley to keep civil order.4 As Rubin’s comments indicate, their goal was not just the creation of a situation of militarized violence, but showing America that violence. Clashes between police and protesters were to be the medium for a message about the failure of democracy and the loss of democratic dissent in the United States. Rubin and his Yippies planned an anarchic performance for an audience of national media and the large television audience tuning in to watch the convention proceedings. At the heart of this plan was theatre of cruelty, and its use of shocking imagery and sensory experiences to agitate audiences. Artaud’s ideas appealed to the Yippies as a way to shake the complacency of the American public and spur them to revolutionary action, and Hoffman quotes The Theater and Its Double extensively in Revolution for the Hell of It. Translated from the French by American artist and poet Mary Caroline Richards, The Theater and Its Double was published in the United States in 1958. It soon inspired avant-garde performance experiments by groups like the Living Theatre, whose productions of The Connection (1959), The Brig (1963), and Paradise Now (1968) used theatre of cruelty techniques to provoke audiences and confront them with drug culture, military prison life, and social revolution. Jerry Rubin was inspired by the Living Theatre, whom he called a “far-out guerrilla theater group,” but he was also frustrated that the Living Theatre did not go far enough to instigate revolution (Rubin

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1970:133). In Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution he describes a performance in which Living Theatre cast members encouraged the audience to “take the revolution to the streets” but yet “the cast stopped at the front door” (Rubin 1970:133).5 The anarchist Rubin was discouraged that the Living Theatre’s radical message stayed inside the walls of the theatre buildings in which they performed. “Revolution-in-the-auditorium is a contradiction,” he argued, “The only role of theater is to take people out of the auditorium and into the streets. The role of the revolutionary theater group is to make the revolution” (Rubin 1970:133). The Yippies’ revolutionary action-theater, in contrast, engaged revolutionary ideas in public spaces: the parking lot beside the Pentagon, the main concourse of Grand Central Station, and on the streets of Chicago. The Yippies didn’t just want to encourage revolutionary action; they wanted their performances to be revolutionary action. It is not surprising, therefore, that for their Chicago demonstrations they turned to Artaud’s notion of theatre of cruelty and his passionate call for “a theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart” (Artaud [1938] 1958:84). Artaud argues that Western society is corrupt and its arts removed from real life, deadened by the idolatry of canonical masterpieces. Although he sees theatre as complicit in this process, Artaud nevertheless believes that the theatrical form can be harnessed to protest stultifying Western culture. Theatre can offer a fresh vision of an alternative culture, one that sees no separation from real life (Artaud [1938] 1958:9–10). Artaud argues that theatre can do this by provoking the audience to visceral and emotional reactions fueled by unconscious need or suppressed yearnings. The “cruelty” of Artaud’s theatre refers to this shocking exposure of internal struggles and deep urges, of the doubt and desire and anarchy that lurk behind the polite conventions and rules of civilization. He explains: it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. (Artaud [1938] 1958:79) In The Theater and Its Double Artaud imagines psychologically engaging, enervating, and even cruel plays and performances that call forth deep emotions—just the kind of productions that the Living Theatre toured through Europe in August 1968.6 Unlike the Living Theatre, however, the Yippies’ radical interpretation of Artaud involved actual violence and real physical cruelty, not stage violence and theatrical psychological cruelty. The Yippies anticipated violence on the streets of Chicago because of their experiences at the March 1968 Grand Central Yip-In, the Pentagon’s nervous response to April 1968 riots in the wake of King’s assassination, the enormous number of Chicago demonstrators, and Mayor Daley’s strong-arm “shoot to kill” threat. They also expected the news media to cover clashes on the streets. Therefore they imagined their revolutionary action-theater events in Chicago as mediated theatre of cruelty performances that would use the predicted physical cruelty of police violence to enact emotional violence on the American public. The thick folders of letters and telegrams preserved at the Johnson Presidential Library demonstrate how images of militarized violence at “the Battle of Michigan Avenue” provoked a strong affective response for some audience members. One telegram describes the author as “shocked, dismayed, disheartened” (Elwyn 1968:n.p.), while another refers to the

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police and National Guard actions as “shocking and sickening” (Stevens 1968:n.p.). Words such as “shock” and “outrage” appear over and over, used to depict emotional reactions to the “obscene” and “brutal” violence. In a telegram to the president, C.E. Stockton describes “a most obscene display of wanton, sadistic violence,” that made the author “outraged and ashamed that this happened in America” (Stockton 1968:n.p.). On a similar note, another citizen asserts she is “appalled and outraged by the police brutality exhibited in Chicago right now” (Kundsin 1968:n.p.). Dozens more write simply to register their objection to the police actions in unequivocal language, and a few emphasize the emotional strength of that disapproval using intensifying adjectives and adverbs. For example, one states, “I bitterly protest the police state tactics and repressive measures taken by Mayor Daley in Chicago” (Lum 1968:n.p.). The television coverage of the violence succeeded as a theatre of cruelty performance that provoked deep and strong emotions; however, it is important to note that not all the audience members were sympathetic to the protesters. Some blamed the demonstrators for the violence and chastised them for unsettling the convention. One indignant woman writes: “I resent these few persons being made the misfortunate, misunderstood peoples with a cause. The only cause they have is to divide and disrupt the peace of this nation. How dare they upset the order of a city! How dare any public official condone that disruption!” (Gardner 1968:n.p.). In this letter and others, the desire for law and order, the yearning for a peaceful city, and the demand for orderly policing bubble up through the shock and outrage. Images of the militarized violence not only called forth emotional responses from the television audience but also caused some viewers to reconsider the value of civic order and the purposes of freedoms of speech and assembly. For example, some viewers struggled to reconcile the images on their television screen with their understanding of the United States as a democratic nation, one that values freedoms of speech and assembly. One telegram asks President Johnson: “America the beautiful, land of the free—are these just lyrics and lines of poetry and not truth?” (L. Martin 1968:n.p.). The author combines lyrics from the national anthem and Katharine Lee Bates’s poem, and then links these patriotic lyrics to another symbol of American democracy when she scolds the president for not protecting “the rights of the citizens who believe in the Constitution of the United States” (L. Martin 1968:n.p.). Meanwhile, a self-described “advocate of law and order” asks “is this the United States of America that we all respect and love?” (Brown 1968:n.p.). Her rhetorical question suggests that there is something un-American about the police response in Chicago. Similarly, an American citizen living in Australia responds to news reports of the violence by asking “what has happened to the U.S.?” (McCutchen 1968:n.p.). From these letters and telegrams it is clear that the Chicago demonstrations disrupted assumptions about freedom and shook the meaning of “America” for many audience members. Viewers compared their own vision of the United States with the images on television, and found that the reality did not live up to their expectations. Dismayed by the “horrible brutality being shown to our patriotic youth in the streets of Chicago,” Arnold Reisman tells President Johnson: “as a citizen I object and as a veteran of World War II I strenuously object” (Reisman 1968:n.p.). A poignant message from Thelma J. Maples offers another example of a viewer recognizing a gap between the ideal and real America—she describes how the Chicago violence has made her reconsider the presidential letter of commendation for her husband’s military sacrifice that hangs in her home. Maples writes: Tonight I have turned this framed commendation to the wall, because I knew [my husband] could not face the brutality, injustice and military abuse now being shown on

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television as I write this. President Johnson, have we become not a police state, but a military state given to brutality and utter disregard for the rights of any citizen no matter how little provocation? (Maples 1968:n.p.) Responses by Reisman, Maples, and others are filled with powerful emotions and brimming with questions about American ideals of service, freedom, and democracy. They demonstrate that media coverage of the Chicago violence did convey to some viewers the message that a militarized America contradicted democratic ideals, and that some of the Yippies’ target audience saw instead “an America ruled by force” (Viorst 1979:459).

The Limits of Dissensus In the Chicago demonstrations the Yippies imagined a theatre of cruelty with the power to teach political lessons, a theatre through which audiences would recognize hard and painful truths about the world in which they lived; in other words, both Artaud and the Yippies advocated performances that achieve dissensus—the awareness that politics contradicts itself. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Rancière explains that dissensus “is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself ” (Rancière [2010] 2013:38; emphasis original). Thus the confrontation between protesters and security forces is not in itself dissensus; instead, dissensus is achieved when the confrontation demonstrates to participants or viewers a gap between political ideology (America is free, America is a democracy, America has freedom of expression) and political reality (America is ruled by force, civil order trumps freedom of expression). For Rancière, democracy is rooted in the process of dissensus and the ongoing disruption of power structures. He writes, “since it is continually thwarted, the power of the people must be re-enacted ceaselessly by political subjects that challenge the police distribution of parts, places, or competences, and that re-stage the anarchic foundation of the political” (Rancière [2010] 2013:54). Although Rancière was a contemporary of the Yippies, and had participated in the May 1968 demonstrations in France, he had not yet articulated his major ideas and was not yet widely known outside French philosophy circles. The Yippies in 1968 therefore do not cite him among other philosophers in their writings about the Chicago demonstrations. Instead, they quote philosophers like Albert Camus, Marshall McLuhan, and Karl Marx (Hoffman [1968] 2005:178–79, 181–82; Rubin 1970:116). Nevertheless, a focus on Rancière’s concept of dissensus here offers a means to explore the reactions of audience members to the Chicago demonstrations as they struggled to reconcile the images on their screens with their understanding of American democracy. The letters and telegrams sent to President Johnson in the aftermath of news reports on the Chicago demonstrations show viewers in the process of political dissensus, searching for ways to understand the violence. Some audience members looked to other 20th-century examples of state-sponsored violence as a means of comprehending the perceived failure of their democratic ideals. The Soviet-led invasion of Prague, as well as Senator Ribicoff ’s “Gestapo” comments from the convention, suggested to some viewers a comparison between the Chicago police and the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. For example, a viewer in California who had been watching the police preparations contends that “barbed wire is barbed wire be it on the Berlin Wall or surrounding convention hall. This Orwellian state is further emphasized by police clubbing newsmen and destroying their equipment. If the press

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is not free none of us is free” (K. Martin 1968:n.p.). For this author, the actions of the Chicago Police contradicted her notion of freedom of the press, and she found Orwell a useful metaphor to articulate that dissonance. Other telegrams told the president to publicly condemn the “atrocities” committed by “Mayor Daley and his Gestapo forces” (Meffina et al. 1968:n.p.), or argued that “Mayor Daley would be more at home in Germany with the Gestapo than in the USA” (Halliday 1968:n.p.). While it is likely that Ribicoff ’s widely reported comments brought these associations easily to mind, the comparison with a hated World War II enemy demonstrates the fraught emotional experience of dissensus as viewers faced the harsh reality of Michigan Avenue. The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia was also present in the minds of the many Americans who had watched Soviet tanks roll through the streets of Prague just one week earlier on the same television sets which now displayed images of tanks advancing along Michigan Avenue. “How can we solemnly protest the armed invasion of Czechoslovakia?” E.J. Purdy asks Johnson, comparing the United States to the Soviet Union and implying that international outrage would likewise follow the police actions in Chicago (Purdy 1968:n.p.). Another writer comments “you would think that things like this could only happen in the Communist countries” (Falbo 1968:n.p.). The message is straightforward: police crackdowns on dissent were not only un-American, but also representative of the worst behaviors of Cold War rivals. America had become what it reviled—a militarized totalitarian state. A Chicago couple tells Johnson that the night’s events reminds them “of the Soviet Union way of dealing with people” (Madden 1968:n.p.), while a teenager protests that “I have seen this done in newsreels and television reports from countries such as Germany and Czechoslovakia but never in our great country” (Kiken 1968:n.p.; emphasis original). The confused teen underlined the word “never” three times for emphasis, revealing the affective power of dissensus. These writers assume the American “way of dealing with people” differed from communist or totalitarian methods, and then experienced bewilderment and anger when the television images proved their assumptions wrong. Interestingly, the authors did not or could not articulate what the “American” reaction to civil unrest would look like—they only described what it was not. Many Americans who sent letters and telegrams to the White House knew that something was wrong, but were not sure of the solution. Unlike many of the citizens writing to President Johnson, the Yippies had no doubt about the solution to the militarism in Chicago—for them, the answer was the revolutionary creation of “an alternative society” that rejected capitalism and militarism (Hoffman [1968] 2005:102). But despite the Yippie optimism that their theatre of cruelty would spark social revolution, it is a leap to imagine television audiences so shocked by the Chicago violence that they would join the Yippie revolutionary cause. None of the letters call for immediate revolution and the creation of an alternative society. Instead, the letters and telegrams show a profound political confusion that exemplifies the difficult process of dissensus. Many of the writers experienced dissensus by recognizing gaps between political ideals and lived reality, but in an effort to find a solution, looked to established power structures and the authority figure of the president as the answer. Feeling anger and shame, letter-writers appealed to Johnson, in his role as president and commander-in-chief, to take immediate action. One World War II veteran explains to Johnson that he was “ashamed at this moment” but goes on to ask the President to “please restore my faith in democracy by taking action to punish this brutality” (Klein 1968:n.p.). Some telegrams sent on the evening of 28 August—while chaos still reigned in Chicago—were abrupt and anxious calls for help. For example, pleas ranged

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from “stop this havoc and massacre in Chicago” (Sutthoff 1968:n.p.), or “I implore you to stop the brutality” (McAllister 1968:n.p.), to “Mayor Daley has gone beserk [sic] please send help” (Egan 1968:n.p.), and “please use your influence to stop the brutality taking place tonight in Chicago” (Galss 1968:n.p.). Bewildered by the authority figure of Daley seemingly gone berserk, these authors beseeched a greater authority figure to make things right. Even though the president’s decision not to run for reelection in 1968 distanced him from the convention proceedings and security decisions in Chicago, he was still considered a source of power. “Trust something will be done” writes one American putting his faith in Johnson (Friedman 1968:n.p.), while Chicago resident Paul E. Goldstein asks the president “to do everything in your power to prevent repetition” of the violence (Goldstein 1968:n.p.). These citizens trusted that the leader of the country had both the power and the willingness to call back the Chicago Police and Illinois National Guard. Yet by appealing to the president to end the militarized police violence, the letter-writers inadvertently reinforced the structures that accord such power to the executive position. Even as the Battle of Michigan Avenue shocked viewers, made them question American ideals of freedom or forced comparisons to Cold War enemies, the Yippies’ audience still looked to familiar structures of military authority as a solution to the civil unrest. “As Commander-inChief, call off the National Guard” one telegram urges President Johnson, hoping his federal authority would trump Mayor Daley’s power (Greuling and Atwater 1968:n.p.). The authors ended their missive with the proclamation: “Long life justice, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly in America” (ibid). These authors recognized the disjuncture between the militarized violence in the streets and their understandings of democratic freedoms, but nevertheless regarded the military power of the president as the way to reestablish those ideals. Other writers did the same: Ruth Abrams tells Johnson that “you the President must stop it” (Abrams 1968:n.p.), while similarly Charles Downs reminds him that “as President it is up to you to [put] a stop to this action” (Downs 1968:n.p.). As commander-in-chief, as the highest federal authority, as a senior Democratic party member—the letter-writers appealed to the president’s many intersections with power. “Federal intervention apparently needed desperately” (Neavil 1968:n.p.), writes one concerned citizen, as another pleads “in the name of God Mr President make this stop” (Yates 1968:n.p.). As hundreds of writers appealed to the power of the presidency, they put their faith in the American military and democratic tradition—even as the events in the streets of Chicago questioned that tradition. From living rooms across America, television viewers experienced emotionally profound political dissensus, yet their letters and telegrams did not acknowledge the contradiction of appealing to authority structures for assistance when it was those structures, represented by the police and National Guard, which seemed to be the problem. Although the Yippies would argue that an alternative society is the answer to a militarized culture, the audience for their Chicago theatre of cruelty looked to existing structures to explain and solve the conflict between political ideals and political reality. Ultimately the success of the Yippies’ performative protest was limited: while many viewers experienced dissensus and recognized “an America ruled by force,” the response from many of these ordinary Americans watching from the comfort of their living rooms was not as revolutionary as a radical “potlitical movement” might hope. And while millions of Americans watched the Convention proceedings and reports from Michigan Avenue on television, only a small portion of those were moved to write to President Johnson about the events. A national Harris Poll from one week later noted that while 81 percent of respondents agreed that “law and order

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has broken down in this country,” 68 percent of those interviewed blamed the violence on the “hippies and student protesters” and anti-Vietnam War demonstrators (Harris Poll 1968:n.p.). For a majority of audience members, the Battle of Michigan Avenue showed an America in which the demonstrators were at fault for disrupting civil order and for provoking the military and police to respond. With few calls for radical interventions or revolutionary reimagining of American culture, the letters and telegrams in the White House archive reaffirm that dissensus is a complicated and gradual process, not an immediate solution to political problems or disruptive events. Political change takes time. But change must start somewhere—with small moments of dissonance, contradiction, and questioning. The passion, anger, and confusion of the audience response to the Yippies’ Chicago theatre of cruelty demonstrate that the Battle of Michigan Avenue didn’t change America, but perhaps did offer one example of a “theater that wakes us up” (Artaud [1938] 1958:84).

Notes 1 In contrast, the 12 April 1968 Mail Summary notes that the White House received 22,887 letters, 210 cards, and 6,355 telegrams the week ending 11 April 1968, shortly after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (White House 1968a:1). 2 In the days after King’s assassination, the Pentagon organized seven 2,000-member task forces comprised of regular Army troops trained in riot control. These troops were to be available to work with National Guard and local police if requested by state or municipal authorities (see Sheehan 1968:25). 3 The Yippies were not directly influenced by the European avant-garde and did not cite European theatre artists other than Artaud; however, they were inspired by radical American theatre groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Living Theatre—companies whose founders were familiar with European theatre artists. 4 The Yippies went to Chicago expecting to confront security forces and were later charged, along with other protest leaders, with conspiracy to start a riot. The charged group became known as the “Chicago Eight,” later the “Chicago Seven” when Black Panther activist Bobby Seale was severed from the case for contempt of court. Hoffman and Rubin were acquitted of conspiracy, and their convictions for crossing state lines to start a riot were overturned on appeal. 5 Rubin is likely describing a February 1969 performance of Paradise Now in Berkeley, California. 6 The Living Theatre was performing in Europe during August 1968 and did not participate in demonstrations at the Chicago DNC. They returned to the United States in September to perform at Yale University (Tytell 1995:237).

References Abrams, Ruth. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove. Brown, Helen. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. CBS News. 1968. CBS Evening News, 23 August. Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/tvn-displayfullbroadcast.pl?SID=20160522588897705&code=t vn&getmonth=08&getdate=23&getyear=1968&Network=CBS&HeaderLink=199376&source=Br oadcastSelect&action=getfullbroadcast. Crespi, Robert et al. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

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Downs, Charles. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Egan, Mrs James. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Elwyn, Eleanor. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Falbo, Karen Martin. 1968. Letter to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 66, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Fox, Sylvan. 1968. “Guard Told to Shoot If Defied in Chicago.” The New York Times 24 August: 1, 18. Friedman, Sanford. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Galss, James L. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Gardner, Mrs C.R. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 67, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Goldstein, Paul E. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Greuling, Eugene and Anne Atwater. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Halliday, Virginia D. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Harris Poll. 1968. 9 September. WHCF EX PR16, Box 350, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Hoffman, Abbie. [1968] 2005. Revolution for the Hell of It. New York: Thunder’s Mouth. Jezer, Martin, et al. 1968. “Special Report on the Grand Central Station Yip-In.” Liberation News Service 58: 1–2. Kifner, John. 1967. “Hippies Shower $1 Bills on Stock Exchange Floor.” The New York Times 25 August: 23. Kiken, Claire. 1968. Letter to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 66, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Klein, Albert L. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Kundsin, Ruth B. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Lukas, J. Anthony. 1968a. “War Critics Liken Chicago to Prague.” New York Times 25 August: 62. Lukas, J. Anthony. 1968b. “Police Battle Demonstrators in Streets.” The New York Times 29 August: 1, 23. Lum, Ralph E. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Madden, Mr Clyde, and Mrs Clyde Madden. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Maples, Thelma J. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Martin, Katleen S. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 27 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Martin, Lilyan. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. McAllister, Walter. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. McCutchen, Doris. 1968. Letter to President Johnson, 30 August. WHCF HU4 Box 66, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Meffina, Louis D. et al. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

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Neavil, A. Millard, Jr. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Nordenson, L.A. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. NYT (New York Times).1968a. “Russians, Go Home!” The New York Times 22 August: 36. NYT (New York Times).1968b. “Pentagon Sets Up Riot Control Unit.” The New York Times 27 April: 35. NYT (New York Times).1968c. “15 Hurt in Chicago as Police Break Up an Antiwar Protest.” The New York Times 28 April: 73. Purdy, E.J. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Rancière, Jacques. [2010] 2013. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury. Reisman, Arnold. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Rubin, Jerry. 1970. Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution. New York: Simon and Schuster. Seevers, John. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Serritella, Lolita. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Sheehan, Neil. 1968. “Army Has 15,000 for Riot Control.” The New York Times 6 April: 25. Stern, Michael. 1968a. “Political Activism New Hippie Thing.” The New York Times 24 March: 1, 72. Stern, Michael. 1968b. “87,000 March in War Protests Here.” The New York Times 28 April: 1, 72. Stevens, Mr A.M. and Mrs A.M. Stevens. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Stockton, C.E. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 29 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Sutthoff, Marjorie. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Time Magazine. 1967. “The Banners of Dissent.” Time.com 27 October. Accessed 1 May 2016. http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,841090,00.html. Tytell, John. 1995. The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage. New York: Grove. Viorst, Milton. 1979. Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960s. New York: Simon and Schuster. White House, The. 1968a. “Weekly Summary of Presidential Mail,” 11 April. Mail Summaries Box 5, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. White House, The. 1968b. “Weekly Summary of Presidential Mail,” 30 August. Mail Summaries Box 5, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Yates, J.E. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library. Yellin, Mr Arnold, and Mrs Arnold Yellin. 1968. Telegram to President Johnson, 28 August. WHCF HU4 Box 65, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

8 CHOREOGRAPHIES OF MILITARIZED SPACE US Military Bases, Everyday Life, and Performance in Okinawa, Japan Jessica Nakamura

During my first trip to Okinawa in 2013, I thought the infamous US base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, would be easy to see, especially on a visit to the surrounding town, Ginowan.1 Located in the urban sprawl that extends from the prefecture capital of Naha in the South, Futenma occupies space in a densely populated area—approximately 100,000 Okinawans live in close proximity to the base (see Hateruma 2015).2 Its controversial location leads to encounters between military machinery, soldiers, and Okinawan civilians and prompts calls to remove US bases from Okinawa (see Inoue 2007; McCormack and Norimatsu 2012; Kirk 2013). My trip to Ginowan in 2013 was to visit Ikuko Hanashiro’s artist studio, but I eagerly awaited glimpses of Futenma. Among the houses and businesses of Ginowan, I was surprised that the base remained out of sight. I only understood why when Hanashiro took me to a nearby park; as we climbed up a hill to survey the area, suddenly Futenma appeared, an island of airfield in a sea of small buildings. There, I realized I was always close to the base in Ginowan, but the dense civilian area around Futenma prevented me from seeing it. Futenma’s elusiveness is indicative and illustrative of the relationship between US militarized spaces and Okinawans: bases seem, at times, invisible; yet, they are ever-present and enduring, influencing Okinawan life in multiple ways. Okinawans have been living with US militarized space for decades. In the form of bases, training areas, and communication sites, these large areas of land, air, and sea are claimed by the US military but are off limits to Okinawans. The US began to build bases almost immediately after World War II, when the military retained Okinawa as a separate territory from Japan. After Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, many of the bases remained.3 Today, there are over 25 US military bases, training areas, and communication sites on the main island of Okinawa alone, the largest and most populous island in the prefecture. Elsewhere, throughout Okinawa’s archipelago, the US has designated 20 air spaces and 28 water areas for military training. On Okinawa island the military occupies over 18 percent of the land area (approximately 88 square miles out of 466) (Okinawa Prefecture 2015). Over 25,000 US military servicemen and women live among 1.4 million Okinawans (Hateruma 2015).4 This close proximity erupts in tense, and at times violent, encounters between Okinawans and US military personnel. Since Okinawa’s occupation by the US in the 1950s and 1960s,

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protesters have demanded base removal in rallies, sit-ins, and public speeches (see McCormack and Norimatsu 2012). Continued US base presence results in conflict between Okinawan political leadership and that of Japan and the US, imbricating the prefecture in national and international politics.5 Given the endurance of militarized space in Okinawa, I explore the role of artistic production in offering ways of understanding or disrupting the effects brought about by US bases. In this chapter, I turn to the analytic and interventionist strategies of performance. Based, in part, on my own experiences of Okinawa, I first identify the performative aspects of US military space, examining how militarized space shapes movement in the everyday lives of Okinawans. Then, I interrogate how artistic productions create resistance through strategies of performance to propose, model, and rehearse alternative ways of relating to US bases. I focus on work by two Okinawan artists: Chikako Yamashiro’s video installation Āsa Onna (2008) and Ikuko Hanashiro’s installation Praying—Fleeting Visions (2012–present). Both appear in the museum or gallery space, away from public protests, but, as I will argue, both works engage their audiences to rehearse embodied interactions with militarized space that challenge the everyday oppressions of US bases. To explore influences of bases on Okinawans and performance as a strategy for resisting such influences, I apply San San Kwan’s definition of choreography as a mutual process. Kwan asserts that “bodies choreograph space; space choreographs bodies” (2013:4). On the one hand, choreography is “the conscious designing of bodily movement through space and time” “to impact the space surrounding” (4).6 On the other hand, “space can be an agent that determines movement”; “bodies become choreographed by a collectivity of animate and inanimate objects in space” (4).7 Thus, choreography becomes a lens through which to elaborate on what Henri Lefebvre describes as the “dialectical character” of “‘subjects’ and their space and surroundings” (1991:18). In the case of Okinawa, choreography can describe the ways in which US militarized space exerts influence on Okinawan civilians, determining their everyday movements. In parallel, as Kwan asserts, artistic productions (in Kwan’s case, dance) have “the power to reflect, resist, and reshape urban space” (2013:22). The lens of choreography can describe how Yamashiro’s and Hanashiro’s installations shape viewers’ bodies, re-choreographing them to counter militarized space.

Militarized Choreography and Everyday Oppressions Applying the lens of choreography to the landscape of Okinawa, US military spaces stage a militarized choreography of physical restrictions and embodied oppressions on Okinawans. Militarized choreography results largely from the location of bases in the most populated area of the main island.8 The Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II destroyed dwellings and other infrastructure in the main population areas in central Okinawa. The US built bases randomly over cleared areas, regardless of land ownership, agricultural potential, or historical or cultural significance.9 As Okinawans returned to rebuild their towns, new bases created a high concentration of military space amongst a massive urban sprawl from Naha moving northward to the cities of Urasoe, Ginowan, and Okinawa City. Former Governor of Okinawa Masahide Ōta argues that the physical presence of bases “distorted” the “urbanization process”: “‘cities’—like Naha, the capital, especially, and others like Urasoe, Ginowan, and Okinawa—have come into being as erratic sprawls around the bases, without the benefit of zoning” (1999:208).

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Imperial dynamics between the US, Japan, and Okinawa underlie militarized choreography. Across the globe, the US depends on overseas bases, occupying space around the world and developing what scholars describe as military colonialism (see Lutz 2009; Gerson 2009). Bases demonstrate US military power, affect international and local politics, and utilize natural resources, replicating past imperial relationships. Further, the US military creates cycles of economic dependence—for instance when US bases occupy fertile ground, taking income from farmers while providing economic subsidies to foreign governments.10 In Okinawa, the presence of US bases further manifests the uneven relationship between Japan and the prefecture of Okinawa. Japan annexed Okinawa, formerly the Kingdom of Ryukyu, in 1879. Since then, many have argued that Japan continues to sacrifice Okinawa for the needs of the metropole (see Inoue 2007; Shimabuku 2012).11 US bases in Okinawa are one example of this sacrifice: the post-war security treaty between Japan and the US stipulates that Japan provide land for US bases in exchange for military security. With over 75 percent of Japan’s US bases in Okinawa, a prefecture made up of 0.6 percent of Japan’s land, the rest of Japan is largely free of military presence (133). Because the US military built bases after 1945 without regard for ownership, Okinawan civilians own portions of military land. The Japanese government forcibly leases this land, barring civilians from their ancestral homesteads, further creating economic dependency between Okinawa, Japan, and the US.12 While some civilians have tried to resist renewing these leases, others rely on this payout (see Inoue 2007).13 Okinawa’s sacrifice affects the general public when the close proximity between bases and civilians results in infrequent but violent exchanges. For example, Davinder Bhowmik describes how the 1995 kidnapping and rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by US marines became “a signal event in global politics” because it “painfully underscored Okinawa and its residents’ liminal place in the nation” (2008:13). In 2016, the murder of an Okinawan woman by a US civilian working at Kadena sparked public outrage, leading again to mass protests for the removal of the base.14 Imperial power dynamics filter down to everyday life through the militarized choreography of US bases. My experiences traveling through central Okinawa illustrate the ever-present and oppressive qualities of bases. In 2013, when Hanashiro took me from her studio in Ginowan to Yomitan, the village where US marines landed during the Battle of Okinawa, I saw fences and barbed wire everywhere. From Ginowan to Yomitan, approximately ten miles, there are three bases—Futenma, Foster, and Kadena, along with a US military hospital. Bases like Kadena are so large (approximately 4,900 acres with an additional 6,300 acres adjoining munitions area), that when we drove around Ginowan and Yomitan, we kept encountering the same base— Kadena (USAF 2012). On the way back from Yomitan to Ginowan, we took a different road, to the east of the bases, and when I asked about the base we were driving next to, Hanashiro repeated “Kadena.” Base fences are ever-present and in the way, staging a militarized choreography that limits and slows down movement. Because bases occupy space in the middle of the island, with civilians living both to the east and west of bases, civilians must drive around them. With base land leaving little room for roads, on our trip from Ginowan to Yomitan and back we sat in traffic, a common occurrence in central Okinawa. Bases are not only inescapable, but they are also inaccessible. Base fences carve into the land, creating divisions that restrict access to Okinawan civilians and evoke feelings of segregation. Driving alongside the Kadena base, it looks like a large lawn or golf course; the important machines, buildings, and people are out of sight; we remain separated from it by a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The mixture of the urban sprawl, in which Naha, Urasoe, and

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Marine Air Corps Station Futenma. Photo by Jessica Nakamura.

Ginowan seem inseparable, interrupted by large areas of base land, produces a mottled landscape, a constant reminder of inaccessibility. The contrast between dense urban areas and open base land is apparent in Figure 8.1 of Futenma from above. Seeing these inaccessible large plots of land evokes feelings of restraint, where Okinawans are always on the other side of fences, outside of areas that they once could access. Along with restrictions imposed by base fences, the machinery on US military bases is physically imposing, further affecting Okinawan bodies. Previous scholarship has discussed noise and dangerous machinery and their ill effects on Okinawans.15 This is clear looking down at Futenma in Figure 8.1: the end of the airport landing is perilously close to civilian houses. Residents of Ginowan frequently hear military helicopters, jet fighters, and Ospreys (Kirk 2013:25).16 These machines create a perception of danger, reaffirmed by accidents like the one in 2004, when, during training exercises at Futenma, a US military helicopter crashed into a building on the Okinawa International University campus 300 meters from the base.17 The real potential for accidents and base noise illustrate how militarized choreography has emotional dimensions, evoking unease and fear. Militarized space also affects emotions by sparking memories of past traumatic events. In particular, the bases continue to recall images and sentiments of the Battle of Okinawa. The last major battle of World War II, the Battle of Okinawa took place on the main island from April to June 1945. US and Japanese troops fought amongst civilians; casualties included 120,000 Okinawans out of a population of 460,000 (approximately 94,000 casualties were civilians) (McCormack and Norimatsu 2012:17).18 Seventy years later, the battle remains a highly charged, emotional, and contested event for survivors and their children and grandchildren.19

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The war literally comes back when unexploded shells disrupt everyday activities—when discovered, these shells shut down neighborhoods (Masaie 2001:95–96). Today, noises of military machinery and sights of military personnel contribute to the sense that the war is not yet over. Militarized choreography suspends locals in a wartime temporality, where the battle continually recurs in the present. As McCormack and Norimatsu write: “war for Okinawa is far from being confined to memory” (2012:44).20 While the location, size, and activities of US bases shape movement and emotions of Okinawans, Yamashiro’s and Hanashiro’s pieces provide examples of how artistic productions can counter militarized choreography. Both installations recreate militarized spaces to rethink Okinawan interactions with US bases. In particular, their live qualities choreograph audience bodies, altering movement that militarized space affects on a daily basis and proposing alternatives to living with military bases.

Natural Elements and Resistance in Āsa Onna In contrast to restrictions of militarized choreography, Chikako Yamashiro examines how natural elements freely move between military bases and civilian land. In the video installation Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman), Yamashiro explores the ocean surrounding Okinawa, transforming into a seaweed woman. Partly based on the dugong, a sea mammal that inhabits waters off of Okinawa, and partly Yamashiro’s creation, the seaweed woman takes the viewer on a journey as she travels through open water and encounters patrol boats, protesters, military machinery, and tourists.21 Against the context of militarized space, Āsa Onna presents natural elements of sea, air, and seaweed that defy the impregnability of US bases. By challenging the restrictions of bases,Yamashiro calls attention to the political potential of the natural environment and situates Okinawans between the freedom of nature and the limitations of militarized choreography. Born in 1976, four years after Okinawa’s reversion from a US occupied territory to a Japanese prefecture, Yamashiro was raised and currently lives in Okinawa, and she exhibits her videos and photographs throughout Japan and internationally.22 Past work has explored the Battle of Okinawa, the prefecture’s position as a tourist locale in Japan, and the continued military presence on the island in photographs, short films, and video installations. Yamashiro’s work refuses to be an idyllic representation of Okinawa, challenging the very forms through which Japanese popular media construct images of the prefecture. She questions the tourist gaze in the video I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004) when Yamashiro seductively eats three cones of Okinawan sweet potato ice cream, looking directly into the camera. In Okinawa Tourist (2004), Yamashiro stands in front of the Diet parliament building in Tokyo and, replicating a tour guide voice, describes Okinawa in terms of its colonial injustices instead of its tropical scenery. While her subject matter is diverse, Yamashiro views the problems caused by US bases as central to her work (Yamashiro 2015). Her increased participation in solo and group exhibitions, both in Tokyo and abroad, continues to raise Yamashiro’s profile in the international art world but, for Yamashiro, addressing problems caused by bases prompts her to continue to work and reside in Okinawa.23 Yamashiro premiered Āsa Onna in 2008 as part of the group exhibition “Okinawa Prismed, 1872–2008” at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Typically shown in art galleries and museums, the video installation features Yamashiro, the sole performer, transform into a seaweed woman and travel to different locations off the Okinawan shore.24 The video opens with a series of eight still photographs that trace her metamorphosis from woman to seaweed

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Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman, 2008). Copyright © Chikako Yamashiro, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. Photo by Chikako Yamashiro.

FIGURE 8.2

woman: Yamashiro initially floats in the ocean surrounded by seaweed; it covers her, and she emerges seemingly transformed with a seaweed goatee around her mouth (Figure 8.2).25 After this slideshow, a video begins from the seaweed woman’s perspective that follows her journey as she views a number of different offshore sites, of coast guard boats, protesters, tourists, and military machinery. Apart from a moment when the seaweed woman briefly encounters a Japanese coast guard patrol boat before diving out of sight, she mainly moves as a silent observer. She spends a moment watching a confrontation between the patrol boat and a boat of protesters, but she is quickly off to her next location. Throughout, the only audible sound is the seaweed woman’s breathing. Through point of view, sound, and immediacy, the installation shapes the audience’s experience, leading Rebecca Jennison to assert, “the experience of viewing” Yamashiro’s work “is like that of viewing live performance” (2014:184). In Āsa Onna, military bases are not visible, but their presence is implicit. Here and there, the camera shows glimpses of tanks and camouflage, but these are distorted from the seawater on the camera lens. The Japanese coast guard patrol boat in Figure 8.3 references the recent disagreement between Okinawans, Japan, and the US government over building a new military facility off the coast of Henoko in the northern part of Okinawa. In the 1990s, in response to protests after the sexual assault of a schoolgirl by US Marines, the US Military and Japanese government proposed relocating Futenma. Protesters only increased their activities when they learned that Futenma would be moved to another site in Okinawa, what they saw as a continuation of Okinawa’s sacrifice to Japan (see McCormack and Norimatsu 2012). The proposed site for the new base is partially in the ocean, to be made up of reclaimed land in Oura bay. Locals know the area for its natural resources, including a dugong habitat, and fear a base will negatively impact this environment (Kirk 2013:37).26 Since 2004, a group of protesters have engaged in a sit-in at Henoko to delay base construction; eventually protests

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Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman, 2008). Copyright © Chikako Yamashiro, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates. Photo by Chikako Yamashiro.

FIGURE 8.3

moved to the sea when protesters attempted to stop construction in the bay (Kikuno and Norimatsu 2010). In part, Āsa Onna foregrounds what will be destroyed with the new base. Yamashiro references the dugong in her offshore movements, and her presence in the water anticipates the site of the offshore base, gesturing towards areas that will be off limits to civilians in the future. As the video continues, Āsa Onna identifies natural elements—sunlight, air, water, and seaweed—uncontained by militarized spaces. While the new base in Henoko will create borders in the ocean between base and off-base, in the video, swimming through the open water, Yamashiro demonstrates how water, air, and seaweed can move freely from one place to another. Unlike bodies of Okinawans, restricted by base fences, these natural elements enact their own choreography, crossing over borders and resisting the distinctions of militarized space. Instead of choreographies of restriction, natural elements enact choreographies of freedom. This portrayal of Okinawan nature is multiply coded: while natural beauty marks Okinawa as a tourist paradise for the rest of Japan, Yamashiro turns nature into sites of resistance towards Japan’s continued sacrifice of Okinawa as a location for US military bases.27 Through association with these natural elements, the seaweed woman moves in the same unregulated ways. Āsa Onna jumps from location to location in open waters. Throughout the video, the seaweed woman views one location; then, after diving underwater, she reemerges to show a completely different place, moving from tourist beach to Henoko protests to military scene. Yamashiro shot the video in ten different locations and edited them together to appear as if they are all part of the seaweed woman’s migration (Jennison 2014:188). Besides what kind of location—civilian, tourist, military—it is unclear where exactly the seaweed woman is, suggesting that the seaweed woman can travel anywhere and everywhere. Yamashiro’s transformed body, moving in between military and civilian spaces, counters the choreography of militarized space.

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On the one hand, viewers of Āsa Onna can experience the seaweed woman’s freedom. The natural elements are a point of connection between Āsa Onna and viewers as Okinawans interact with air, sea, and seaweed in their everyday movements. It is possible to read Āsa Onna as sharing this resistant choreography with viewers. Not only does the video give the viewers the seaweed woman’s point of view, but in the gallery the video also encourages the viewer to join her breathing. The only sound in the entire video is the seaweed woman’s breath. This sound is loud and verges on prescriptive, inviting the spectator to breathe with her. In “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory,” Rebecca Jennison describes her physical connection with Yamashiro when viewing Āsa Onna at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art: “I too felt as though I was suspended in the water, mid-breath, tossing in the currents, gulping air one moment and sinking beneath the waves the next—and then looking back at the shoreline of Henoko with her” (2014:187– 188).28 Read through the lens of choreography, Āsa Onna shapes the viewer’s perspective, one that could be carried out of the gallery and into militarized spaces. Considering the interrelationship between spaces and bodies, the video has the potential to prompt Okinawans to engage in counter-choreographies and resist the impositions of militarized space. On the other hand, Āsa Onna, while staging the natural elements’ and seaweed woman’s choreographies of freedom, calls further attention to Okinawan civilians’ restrictions. The video encourages the viewer to share the seaweed woman’s perspective and breathe, but in the gallery space, the viewer sits in front of a screen and hears Yamashiro’s breathing, making the viewer’s encounter with Āsa Onna physically limited. Because the video determines the movements of the viewer’s body, the video replicates the process in which militarized choreography shapes Okinawan bodies. In addition, because Yamashiro transforms into a seaweed woman, the video suggests that such freedoms are unavailable to humans, distinguishing between the seated viewer and Yamashiro as seaweed woman in open water. In the gallery space, the work becomes imaginative; Āsa Onna portrays a fantasy in which a mythical seaweed creature can freely travel in between areas offshore. This complex relationship of the viewer to Āsa Onna highlights the ambiguous position of Okinawans between freedom and restriction: Yamashiro situates the viewer as proximate to unrestrained natural elements but also as physically limited. In so doing, the video thinks through choreographic freedoms, while implying that such freedoms are currently unavailable. Read alongside the anti-base protest movement, the video can work to incite the viewer to action—it not only rehearses choreographic freedoms, but it also works to confront the viewer with her current lack of freedom in everyday militarized choreography. From the gallery space, Āsa Onna encourages a change in perspective—it prompts the viewer to see again anew, to breathe again anew, in the hopes of potential future action.

Military and Sacred Sites in Praying—Fleeting Visions While Yamashiro’s Āsa Onna identifies resistant choreographies of natural elements, her work remains imaginative. Viewers share the seaweed woman’s journey to multiple sites offshore while remaining seated in the gallery or museum. In contrast, in Ikuko Hanashiro’s Praying—Fleeting Visions installation, the gallery space becomes a place in which viewers physically rehearse embodied interactions with bases. The installation consists of a screen on which Hanashiro projects images of militarized, natural, and sacred spaces; in front of the screen, small cloth sculptures shape audience member’s movements in between the projector and screen. An on-going, multiyear project, Praying—Fleeting Visions revises the very structure that distinguishes between militarized and

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civilian space—the base fence. Dismantling the base fence as an impenetrable border, Hanashiro’s installation encourages different physical encounters with the base fence to restage everyday choreographies of Okinawans. Hanashiro’s history growing up in close proximity to military bases informs her work. A generation older than Yamashiro, Hanashiro was born in 1961 and raised in Koza (now Okinawa City) on the eastern side of the main island of Okinawa. At that time, Okinawa was still occupied by the US government, and Koza was a military city near the Kadena military base. Images of military personnel and sounds of machinery left a strong impression on her (Hanashiro 2015). In 1970, Hanashiro was nine when local resentment and distrust of the US military erupted in the Koza riot, a night of civil unrest.29 Images of the aftermath of the riot—overturned cars and influx of military personnel—prompted Hanashiro to begin to think through her Okinawan identity and her relationship to the military. Today, Hanashiro maintains a life connected to the bases: she lives in Ginowan, lectures at Okinawa International University, a block away from Futenma, and currently takes English classes and volunteers at several nearby bases. Hanashiro’s memories of growing up among bases, along with impressions from her daily life in Ginowan appear as the fleeting visions in her installation. Praying—Fleeting Visions premiered at the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum in 2012 as part of the “Women in Between: Asian Women Artists 1984–2012” group exhibition. At the installation’s center is a slideshow of photographs of military bases, religious sites, nature, and the aftermath of the Koza riots. The collection of photographs unfold “fleeting visions”; fading from one to the next, the images play on the way in which disparate Okinawan locations and events become connected. In particular, the installation makes connections between military and sacred, associating the inaccessibility of military bases with religious sites. For Hanashiro, being able to access the bases only on special occasions, usually community days when bases open to the general public, parallels sacred sites that are unavailable for everyday use (Hanashiro 2015). The other elements of the installation further highlight associations between military and spiritual. Praying—Fleeting Visions projects the slideshow onto a large screen made out of fishing net.30 Evoking traditional Ryukyu culture, the net gestures towards the interrelated qualities of the fleeting visions—base and off-base, nature and cultivated, peace and destruction (Hanashiro 2016). According to Hanashiro, the net references the belief of the porous division between this world and the next. Reinforcing spirituality, Hanashiro attached two large cloth sculptures to the net. The white color of the sculptures evokes clothing worn by Shintō shrine maidens, who assist in religious services. On the floor in front of the screen, Hanashiro laid out 15 small cloth sculptures, foot-high versions of the cloth on the screen. The sculptures radiate spiritual connotations while they create paths for viewers. By making comparisons between sacred and militarized, Praying—Fleeting Visions creates new mental approaches to military spaces. Part of Okinawan everyday choreography is seeing base fences—the proximity of military bases to Okinawan civilian structures means that bases are next to houses and businesses; the base fence is a frequent vision. Hanashiro’s installation suggests that, when compared to religious sites, the off-limits qualities of bases make them unique and special. Instead of base fences always projecting restriction and inaccessibility, Praying— Fleeting Visions asserts that it is possible to read the fence in a number of different ways. In so doing, Hanashiro’s slideshow offers new ways of thinking about military bases, not as separate from Okinawan life, but as part of them. Along with projecting images to recast militarized space, the installation re-choreographs the viewer’s movement in relation to bases and the base fence. The small cloth sculptures on the

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floor in the gallery space become scriptive things that rehearse future physical encounters with bases. Robin Bernstein argues that things “are performative in that they constitute actions [. . .] Things script meaningful bodily movements, and these citational movements think the otherwise unthinkable” (2009:70). Like the “things” described by Bernstein, Hanashiro’s sculptures invite the viewer to move around them toward projected images of base fences and religious sites. When viewers move around the sculptures, they do so in between the projector and the screen; the slideshow casts images onto viewers’ bodies, integrating them into these spaces. Within the museum, Praying—Fleeting Visions prompts viewers to consider their embodied participation in militarized spaces. The installation provides viewers with a rehearsal in which to negotiate the borders of off-limits land, physically encountering the base anew. Through these small sculptures, Praying—Fleeting Visions proposes counter-choreographies from those imposed on Okinawan bodies in everyday lives. In the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum exhibition, viewers did not just move through the space; rather, they were asked to pick up the small sculptures whenever they fell over. According to Hanashiro, this request drastically changed the installation’s floor plan over the course of the exhibition (Hanashiro 2016). By situating viewers as both free to wander through and alter elements of the installation, Praying—Fleeting Visions renewed the agency of the viewer in relationship to space. Instead of being shaped by militarized choreography, Praying—Fleeting Visions prompts the viewer to shape her space. To return to Kwan’s definition of mutually determinate choreography, Hanashiro’s installation physically models a different relationship to bases, one in which the Okinawan civilian has more power over her actions and approach to her surroundings. Instead of militarized choreographies of isolation and restriction, Praying—Fleeting Visions works through association and agency to erase boundaries between on and off-base land. Hanashiro continues to explore how bases are incorporated into Okinawan lives in her recent installation Fleeting Visions—The Fence, Grids, Fertility and Sanctions (2016) (see Figure 8.4). In

FIGURE 8.4

Fleeting Visions—The Fence, Grids, Fertility and Sanctions, 2016. Photo by Ikuko Hanashiro.

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this piece, Hanashiro weaves the base fence design directly into her cloth sculptures. Still in development in May 2016, Fleeting Visions highlights the many levels of base influence and integration: on top of the fabric with its fence pattern, Hanashiro projected a photograph of the base fence with a “no trespassing” sign. This new piece locates ways in which the base appears internally—literally integrated into the fabric—and externally—an image of the fence cast on to the fabric—further developing the complex relationship between Okinawans and bases. In this new piece, Hanashiro suggests that the bases are always with us, proposing another perspective to living with bases.

Conclusion The lens of choreography elucidates relationships between US militarized space, Okinawans, and artistic productions. By analyzing the location, concentration, and activities of US military bases, I identify a militarized choreography that enacts limitations and impositions on Okinawan bodies. In contrast, Yamashiro’s Āsa Onna and Hanashiro’s Praying—Fleeting Visions reshape audience bodies to pose new ways of thinking about militarized space. Following Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the “political dimension” of everyday practices (1988:xvii), these works revise everyday embodiment, offering strategies of defiance and support for viewers to take with them outside the gallery and into the spaces of Okinawa. Yamashiro’s and Hanashiro’s installations, therefore, demonstrate how intervention can happen in imaginative and rehearsed ways, highlighting performance as a means of thinking through and dealing with the everyday menaces of US military presence. In revising militarized space, Yamashiro’s and Hanashiro’s pieces also place importance on rethinking Okinawa’s present situation. The US military has occupied Okinawan space for over 70 years, and it does not seem as if these areas will return to civilians in the near future. The construction of the new base in Northern Okinawa is planned but, at the time of writing, is at a stalemate, leaving Futenma indefinitely in operation (see McCormack 2016). Given the foreseeable duration of militarized space in Okinawa, Yamashiro’s and Hanashiro’s installations critically intervene in rethinking the everyday. The installations propose alternative perspectives on military bases and the natural spaces around them and rehearse physical relationships to bases. In so doing, the works provide strategies for living with bases, allowing space for small resistances in, for now, what appears to be an unending military occupation.

Notes 1 Special thanks to Chikako Yamashiro and Yumiko Chiba Associates for their kind permission to reproduce Yamashiro’s works. Special thanks as well to Ikuko Hanashiro for the kind permission to reproduce her work. 2 Okinawa Prefecture consists of 160 islands over an area 1,000 kilometers by 400 kilometers. The main island of the prefecture, the location of the local government and many US Military bases, is also named Okinawa. 3 Eiko Asato explains that the Battle of Okinawa resulted in the destruction of “village, community, and agrarian foundations on which Okinawa society had historically rested” (2003:229). Further, after the war, “the United States turned the islands into a military colony and built military facilities there, compounding the onslaught” (229). 4 Significantly, the Kadena webpage notes that along with the approximately 25,000 military personnel on Okinawa, there are another 25,000 US civilians connected to the bases, as staff or family of military personnel. Population data is from the Okinawa prefecture website, current from 2016.

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5 Takeshi Onaga, the current governor of Okinawa at the time of writing (elected 2014), promised that he will do everything in his power to stop the Henoko construction, the new base proposed in the north of Okinawa island. In late 2015, he cancelled an order to reclaim land in Oura bay for the construction of the new base. Onaga also filed a complaint against the Japanese government, prompting a countersuit settled out of court in March 2016; this settlement suspends construction and sends both the Japanese and Okinawan prefectural governments back to negotiations (see McCormack 2016). 6 Kwan considers this the “most current conventional use” of the term (2013:4). 7 Kwan explains: “in this case, there is no direct or deliberate author of the choreography that happens” (2013:4). 8 Masahide Ōta has remarked that the number of military bases on Okinawa makes it “almost impossible to live as [decently as] humans should” (1999:208). 9 In Dancing with the Dead, Christopher Nelson documents the activities of a group performing the traditional Ryukyu dance, eisā. This group, located in a neighborhood of Okinawa City, was displaced from their village Nishizato by Kadena Air Base. Nelson follows the group as they receive permission to perform eisā in the former Nishizato in Kadena (2008:193–203). 10 In “US Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives,” Joseph Gerson recounts how at a nuclear disarmament conference the Guam Landowners Association presented two maps—one with the best agricultural land and the other with the location of US military bases; “the two maps were identical” (2009:53). 11 According to Donald Kirk, “the theme of ‘military colonization by the US and Japan’ is a constant refrain” of anti-base demonstrators (2013:24). 12 The US government paid for these leases before reversion in 1972. 13 Some civilians are allowed to access their land on bases to farm it (Jennison 2014:189; Hanashiro 2015). 14 On 19 June 2016, tens of thousands of people gathered in Naha to protest US base presence (see Soble 2016). 15 Personal accounts about bases fill Donald Kirk’s discussion of US bases in Okinawa and South Korea, Okinawa and Jeju. In one of them, Kirk relays complaints of elementary school administrators; the school is so close to the Futenma Air Station that children can wave to pilots as their planes take off (2013:24). 16 According to Kirk, of the aircraft that fly from Futenma, jet noise is at 120 decibels, helicopters between 80 and 90, and Ospreys at 120 decibels. The Osprey is a cross between a helicopter and a plane, and there were daily protests before its arrival at Futenma in 2012. Protesters were concerned about the Osprey’s unpredictability and poor safety record (Kirk 2013:10–11). Activities at Futenma include “touch and go” training where aircraft continually take off and land, contributing to noise and danger (Kikuno and Norimatsu 2010). 17 The helicopter fragmented as it crashed; its parts struck 17 houses and 33 vehicles. Fortunately, the university was on break, so no civilians were injured. The members of the three-person marine crew were injured, but they survived (Sanechika 2004). 18 Casualties also included 12,500 American soldiers, over 65,000 soldiers from other Japanese prefectures, and thousands of Koreans, mobilized to serve in the Japanese military (McCormack and Norimatsu 2012:17). 19 Representations of the battle are sensitive issues because, as Matthew Allen argues in Identity and Resistance, “the belief that Okinawans had become part of Japan was shattered in the last months of World War II. Proscriptions against the use of Okinawan dialects were employed on the battlefield, and Okinawans learnt what it meant to be a disposable people, constantly suspected of hypostasy” (2002:7). As Hein and Selden argue, the Battle of Okinawa “troubles” the “official story” that emphasizes the willing self-sacrifice of national subjects to the state and the nation’s postwar gratitude” (2003:5). 20 Artists like Yamashiro and scholars like Tarō Ōta have shared this viewpoint with me in interviews. In “The American Eagle in Okinawa: The Politics of Contested Memory and the Unfinished War”

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Glenn Hook explores the “link between the memories of the Battle of Okinawa and US military accidents in the prefecture [. . .] and the appeals to reduce the US military presence” (2015:301). Rebecca Jennison notes that Yamashiro “has hinted that she was thinking of the endangered manatee” or dugong when performing the “seaweed woman” (2014:188). Yamashiro’s exhibitions include solo exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Gallery Rougheryet in Okinawa and group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Pumphouse Gallery in London, and Fukuoka Asia Art Museum. Since 2015, however, Yamashiro’s interest in military bases has taken her outside of Okinawa to create a piece that explores US bases throughout the world, including South Korea and Hawai‘i (Yamashiro 2015). Yamashiro attends to her viewers’ experiences of her work; she will alter her pieces to suit the space of the museum or gallery (Yamashiro 2015). Depending on the gallery space, these photographs are sometimes exhibited to the side of the video (see Jennison 2014). According to Kirk, villagers of Henoko are divided on their stance on the new base, with some in favor of the base’s potential to boost the economy (2013:34–35). See also Inoue (2007). In “Research Report: Historical Amnesia and the ‘Neo-imperial Gaze’ in the Okinawa Boom,” Oliver Kuhne argues that Japan’s “tourist gaze” towards Okinawa is a “neo-imperial” one: “the impact of mass tourism and its stereotypical, interchangeable ‘tourist gaze,’ especially toward these post colonial minorities of the Pacific, becomes a ‘neo-imperial gaze’ due to the fact that historical trauma and political realities are obscured and replaced by the capitalist commodity of ‘healing’ and stereotypical narratives of ‘island paradises’” (2012:215). For Jennison, the installation in the museum space encourages this connection between video and viewer: “the still photos on the side walls and the full-screen video seemed to propel the viewer into an uncertain state, making it impossible to stand back and look from an easy or safe vantage point” (2014:187). The riot occurred on 20 December 1970. In one night, Okinawans destroyed over 80 official and GI-owned vehicles (see McCormack and Norimatsu 2012). Hanashiro continues to edit Praying—Fleeting Visions, taking new photographs as she goes about her daily activities to find the most effective images to integrate into the slideshow (Hanashiro 2015).

References Allen, Matthew. 2002. Identity and Resistance in Okinawa. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Asato, Eiko. 2003. “Okinawan Identity and Resistance to Militarization and Maldevelopment.” In Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden, 228–242. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bernstein, Robin. 2009. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, 4: 67–94. Bhowmik, Davinder. 2008. Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance. London: Routledge. Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gerson, Joseph. 2009. “U.S. Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives.” In Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts, edited by Catherine Lutz, 47–70. New York: New York University Press. Hanashiro, Ikuko. 2015. Interview with author. Ginowan, Okinawa, 27 June. Hanashiro, Ikuko. 2016. Email correspondence with author, 24 April. Hateruma, Shino. 2015. “Why US Military Bases Divide Okinawa and Mainland Japan.” East Asia Forum. 30 April. Accessed 20 April 2016. http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2015/04/30/ why-us-military-bases-divide-okinawa-and-mainland-japan/.

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Hein, Laura and Mark Selden. 2003. “Introduction: Culture, Power and Identity in Contemporary Okinawa.” In Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, edited by Laura Hein and Mark Selden, 1–36. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hook, Glenn D. 2015. “The American Eagle in Okinawa: The Politics of Contested Memory and the Unfinished War.” Japan Forum 27, 3: 299–320. Inoue, Masamichi S. 2007. Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press. Jennison, Rebecca. 2014. “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory: Performance and Precarity in Recent Works by Yamashiro Chikako.” Kyoto Seika Daigaku Kiyô 44: 181–200. Kikuno, Yumiko and Satoko Norimatsu. 2010. “Henoko, Okinawa: Inside the Sit-In.” The Asia-Pacific Journal. Accessed 17 April 2016. http://apjjf.org/-Kikuno-Yumiko/3306/article.html. Kirk, Donald. 2013. Okinawa and Jeju: Bases of Discontent. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuhne, Oliver. 2012. “Research Report: Historical Amnesia and The ‘Neo-imperial Gaze’ in the Okinawa Boom.” Journal of the German Institute for Japanese Studies 24, 2: 213–241. Kwan, San San. 2013. Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lutz, Catherine. 2009. “Introduction: Bases, Empire, and Global Response.” In Bases of Empire, edited by Catherine Lutz, 1–44. New York: New York University Press. Masaie, Ishihara. 2001. “Memories of War and Okinawa.” Translated by Douglas Dreistadt. In Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), edited by T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, 87–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCormack, Gavin. 2016. “‘Ceasefire’ on Oura Bay: The March 2016 Japan-Okinawa ‘Amicable Agreement’ Introduction and Six Views from within the Okinawan Anti-Base Movement.” The Asia-Pacific Journal. Accessed 17 April 2016. http://apjjf.org/2016/07/McCormack.html. McCormack, Gavin and Satoko Norimatsu. 2012. Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Nelson, Christopher. 2008. Dancing with the Dead. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Okinawa Prefecture. 2015. “US Military Base in Okinawa.” Okinawa Prefectural Government. 22 May. Accessed 14 Dec 2015. http://www.pref.okinawa.jp/site/chijiko/kichitai/25185.html. Ōta, Masahide. 1999. “Testimony before the Supreme Court of Japan.” In Okinawa: Cold War Island, edited by Chalmers Johnson, 205–214. Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute. Sanechika, Yoshio. 2004. “Anger Explodes as a U.S. Army Helicopter Crashes at Okinawa International University.” The Asia-Pacific Journal. Accessed 25 April 2016. http://apjjf.org/-SanechikaYoshio/1816/article.html. Shimabuku, Annmaria. 2012. “Transpacific Colonialism: An Intimate View of Transnational Activism in Okinawa.” CR: The New Centennial Review 12, 1: 131–158. Soble, Jonathan. 2016. “At Okinawa Protest, Thousands Call for Removal of US Bases.” The New York Times, 19 June 2016: A4. USAF (United States Air Force). 2012. “Okinawa Information.” Kadena Air Base website. 15 October. Accessed 16 June April 2016. http://www.kadena.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/ Article/416975/okinawa-information. Yamashiro, Chikako. 2015. Interview with author. Urasoe, Okinawa, 24 June.

9 REVIVING THE TRADITION OF THE BATTLE PAINTING The Militarization of Danish Culture Solveig Gade

In recent years, Danish national culture has witnessed the emergence of a range of militarizing processes through which a distinct militarist ideology has discretely manifested itself.1 Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and particularly in the wake of 9/11, Denmark has joined forces with nations such as the US and the UK in a number of international military coalitions conducted in countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and most recently Northern Iraq and Syria (to fight ISIL). This approach marks a major change in the defense and security policy of a country, which assiduously refrained from participating in outright warfare after the 1864 war in which Denmark suffered a devastating defeat by the Prussians.2 Yet in most instances, this turn in Danish defense and security policy has enjoyed broad support in the parliament, in the national media coverage, and in the eyes of the public (Jarvad and Kristensen 2014:66; Jakobsen and Møller 2012:106–07; Vedby Rasmussen 2011:22). There are various and complex reasons why this national “activist” policy has been able to garner public support,3 but a central factor has been the success of recent Danish governments to promote a value-based politics, which alongside security arguments has emphasized the export of human rights and democracy and not least the admirable efforts of deployed Danish soldiers (Rasmussen 2011:96–102). Consequently, it has been difficult to publicly voice dissent regarding Denmark’s defense policy, since this has become equated with criticizing not only the values affirmed by Denmark and the other nations engaging in international military coalitions, but also the Danish soldiers who risked and offered their lives in defense of these very values (Jakobsen 2013:194).4 Within Danish culture, this momentum has resulted in a range of new initiatives, including the introduction of medals for bravery, a national flag-flying day for Denmark’s deployed, a national Monument for Denmark’s International Effort since 1948, and a national veteran’s policy. An important aspect of these steps has been the observation of a range of official public ceremonies, such as military parades and also funerals, public wreath-laying rituals, and commemorative services. Invoking historian Eric Hobsbawm’s influential concept, these newly initiated practices can be viewed as invented traditions (Sørensen and Pedersen 2012:31). That is, formalized, ritualized, and symbolic practices which respond to novel situations and seek to inculcate certain value

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systems and conventions of behavior, either by referring to past traditions or by establishing their own traditions (Hobsbawm [1983] 2012:2). This line of reasoning can be linked to the thinking of social anthropologist Paul Connerton. He has usefully explored the collective, material mechanisms by way of which certain memories are passed on and maintained, whereas others are excluded. More specifically he has demonstrated how official commemorative ceremonies work as bodily performances, which convey, sustain, and ultimately control the social memory of societies. Thus, through commemorative ceremonies “a community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative” (Connerton 1989:70). I would suggest that alongside honoring the figure of the soldier, the newly invented traditions can be perceived of as militarizing processes intended to reinforce Denmark’s (re)new(ed) identity and also self-identification as a “war-fighting nation.”5 Another way of putting it is to say that by bodily enacting an underlying, discursive militarist script, the invented traditions work to uphold and to spread militarist ideology. This endeavor appears to be undergirded by the construction of a(n imagined) collective national memory6 of Denmark’s engagement in wars and military interventions, whether past or ongoing. However, as observed by social anthropologist Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, it is important to note that whilst the mentioned ceremonies may serve to confirm Denmark’s self-identification as a belligerent nation, the architects behind them have generally refrained from using overtly war-embracing or aggressive militaristic symbols and language, as this could have an alienating effect on a population that habitually perceives itself as pacifist (Sørensen 2015:235). As I turn, now, to explore the revival of the historical genre of the battle painting in current Danish culture, I propose to draw upon Hobsbawm’s notion of invented traditions and Connerton’s conception of ceremonies as memory-controlling, embodied practices. Through a close reading of one of the ceremonies, which accompanied the Danish Museum of National History’s commissioning of three battle paintings portraying a number of Denmark’s recent military engagements, I will discuss the initiative of the museum to revive the historical genre of the battle painting as yet another discrete manifestation of the ongoing militarizing processes. In order to show how the project nonetheless ended up revealing the underlying militarist script, as it were, I will turn to performativity theory, specifically J.L. Austin’s influential concept of misfires. In order to sufficiently set the scene, however, I will first provide a brief overview of the history of the battle painting and the status this genre has traditionally been ascribed at the Danish National Museum of History.

The Battle Painting and National Identity Situated within the historical buildings of Frederiksborg Castle, which in Denmark has come to hold the status of a national monument (Adriansen 2010:26), the Museum of National History was founded in 1878 by brewer and founder of Carlsberg, J.C. Jacobsen. Since Denmark’s defeat in the 1864 war constituted the bleak backdrop for the initiative, Jacobsen overtly stated that the main objective of the museum was to “strengthen the self-esteem and moral powers” (Bligaard 2008:420) of the Danish people by reminding them of their national past through intelligible and appealing artifacts. As a part of this endeavor, the historical painting genre and its subgenre of battle painting were assigned a central position in the museum’s collection (Paulsen 2010:4–5). At its most basic, the battle piece depicts scenes from battles. Ranging from the representation of battle scenes in the art of ancient Egypt, to the mythological battle motifs in the vase

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paintings of the ancient Greeks, to the depiction of historical battles in Roman triumphal columns, and later the Bayeux tapestry of the Middle Ages, to the allegorical battle paintings of the baroque period, to the portrayal of contemporary battles in the Napoleonic era, the genre continues up through the 20th century (Brandon 2007). Typically espousing the point of view of the victor (who often happens to be the authority commissioning the painting), the battle painting has habitually been used as a vehicle to express ideology and to glorify heroes (Osborne [1970] 1993:117). Yet, parallel hereto runs a “war-critical” vein, which up until the 20th century surfaced perhaps most notably within visual art in works such as Jacques Callot’s The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1632–1633) and Fransisco Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810–1820) (Brandon 2007:26–33). Echoing this trajectory, in the first part of the 20th century, the horrors of industrial warfare experienced during World War I came to substitute the old verities of honor and glory (which still stood in 1914), with a modern, fragmented sensibility focusing on the devastating effects of war rather than on heroes and glorious battles (Fussell [1975] 2013). In painting, this shift—embodied by the search for new forms of expression, which has become synonymous with modernism—is epitomized by landmark works such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Otto Dix’s Der Krieg (1929–1932).7 With respect to visual representations of war and conflict, however, it seems that over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries the medium of painting has become if not exactly displaced, then certainly overshadowed by other media such as photography, film, and more recently private recordings circulated on the internet. Returning to the specific instance of 19th-century Denmark, the genre of the battle painting did not enjoy nearly the same status as elsewhere in Europe until the war of 1848. Resulting in a Danish victory, this war gave rise to a great number of paintings depicting not only victorious battles but also jovial soldier life.8 Conversely, the 1864 war triggered significantly fewer, as the traumatic defeat endured by Denmark in this war did not conform well with the heroic quality of the traditional battle painting (Adriansen and Christensen 2013:32). However, Niels Simonsen’s grisaille painting The Retreat from Dannevirke (1865) has become iconic for its ability to capture the enduring loyalty and also heroism of slain Danish soldiers. In the painting exhausted Danish soldiers are retreating, but doing so whilst pushing a heavy cannon through a snow-covered forest in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Prussians. The painting hangs in the Museum of National History alongside battle paintings from the 1848 and 1864 wars. Subsequently, the genre almost vanished from Danish culture (Skougaard 2014a:163–64):9 a visual parallel of the fact that from 1864 until the late 20th century Denmark resolutely avoided taking part in any military endeavors with the exception of UN peacekeeping missions. However, in 2011, the recent turn in Danish security and defense policy prompted the director of the Museum of National History, Mette Skougaard, in tandem with then Chief of Defence Knud Bartels, to launch an initiative to revive the tradition of the battle painting. Financed by the museum, together with donations from private funds, obtained through the assistance of the military and business community network Mars Mercurius10 (Lerche 2014), the initiative resulted in the commissioning of three battle paintings to depict the efforts of the Danish Army, the Danish Air Force, and the Danish Navy in, respectively, Afghanistan, Libya, and off the coast of Somalia. As for the distribution of roles in the somewhat curious alliance between the museum and the military, the former was assigned the role as the art specialist and commissioning authority, whereas the latter, who aside from offering to embed the contracted artists with Danish Forces, undertook to advise them on “military matters.”

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(Malacinsky 2014). The two artists, who depicted the efforts of the Danish army and the navy, both undertook research trips to Afghanistan and the Gulf of Aden during which they were embedded with the Danish forces. The artist, portraying the effort of the Danish Air Force, however, chose not to travel to Libya, as it did not make much sense to him to go there two years after the Danish contribution to the international air campaign had taken place.11

Three Paintings Danish artists Mathilde Fenger, Peter Carlsen, and Peter Martensen were commissioned to complete the three paintings. Fenger was an obvious choice. Back in 2010 she had applied for and obtained permission to become embedded with the Danish troops in Afghanistan in order to depict their everyday life when deployed. Subsequently, she painted and also exhibited a range of realist-style paintings on the topic and was thus well known as someone engaging with the genre of the battle painting. Peter Carlsen had likewise engaged with Denmark’s (re)new(ed) status as a belligerent nation, but from a highly critical stance. Since 2004 a recurrent motif in his work has been that of former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen— emblematic of the activist defense and security policy launched in Denmark in the wake of 9/11—depicted with symbolically charged red paint running down his face and suit.12 A powerful example of Carlsen’s use of the motif is the historical painting Denmark 2009, which is owned by the Danish National Museum of History. In the work, Carlsen has inserted the figure of the bloodstained Rasmussen into a paraphrase of Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty leading the People. In Carlsen’s work, however, Marianne has been substituted by a shirtless man, who wearing a tropical helmet carries a shopping bag in one hand and swings the Danish flag in the other. The revolutionary crowd has, in turn, been replaced by a group of aggressive-looking Danes, including Rasmussen, a citizen raising a golf club and a football fan clinging to a baseball bat. So much for Danish values, symbols and national identity in an era of global warfare and consumerism! Recently, Carlsen has expanded his critical engagement with Denmark’s current military endeavors in two paintings depicting a Danish soldier dying in Afghanistan (modeled on Robert Capa’s photograph The Falling Soldier) and one lying dead on the desert ground in Iraq (building on Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador).13 The final artist, Peter Martensen, had engaged with the theme of war in a number of works, perhaps most notably in the series Process Images, which takes its point of departure in visual footage of the Nuremberg Trials held between 1945 and 1949. Another aspect of his work well worth noting in this context is the recurrent motif of anonymous men dressed in identical white shirts and dark trousers. Appearing in groups, but absorbed in themselves and carrying out identical, often rather enigmatic activities, the marionette-like men seem to embody the impotence of modern man caught up in the mechanisms of an in-transparent apparatus of power.14 In their renderings of the battle painting, the three artists all deployed a figurative approach. They also held in common that they distanced themselves from the tradition of the battle painting in that none of them depicted grand-scale battles with armies confronting each other. This should come as no surprise given the fact that today’s asymmetrical warfare is exactly defined by its absence of grand, turning-point battles settling the conflict between parties, thereby upholding the distinction between war and peace. Instead, the post-9/11 era could be said to feature a scenario of permanent global war and conflict fought by Western coalitions

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of “the willing” and actors of more or less interconnected global networks in a seemingly endless series of violent events spanning terrorist strikes, military interventions, and drone attacks (Hardt and Negri 2004; Virilio [1983] 2008; Münkler 2015). In keeping with this style, in her depiction of the efforts of the Danish Army in Afghanistan15 artist Mathilde Fenger chose to focus on “the hidden enemy” (Skougaard 2014a:166) rather than the motif of battling armies. Entitled Transition—Danish Forces in Afghanistan (2013), the painting portrays the so-called transition phase of the campaign in Afghanistan, namely, the handing over of security responsibility to Afghan forces. This crucial event is symbolized by a Danish and an Afghan soldier walking calmly towards the spectator in the foreground of the painting, whilst absorbed in conversation. Behind the two soldiers an Afghan village is depicted, featuring soldiers and civilians, military vehicles, and the Danish flag swaying in the wind. In the very background of the painting, explosions stemming from bombing planes and IEDs light up the landscape. At first glance, the three layers of the painting seem to suggest that Afghanistan and the international community is moving away from war and chaos and into a common peaceful future. Yet, in front of the two soldiers, hidden between beautiful poppies, which in turn remind us that opium production constitutes an enduring problem in Afghanistan, an IED has been placed by “the hidden enemy.” It is left to the spectator to speculate what will happen when or if one of the two soldiers stumbles upon it. Libya 2011 (2014), Peter Carlsen’s portrayal of the efforts of the Danish Air Force in Libya,16 features an enormous, blue sky in which two F-16 fighter jets are located in the upper left part. The jets have left a column of smoke behind on the distant ground where one of them has recently dropped a bomb. Painted from the slightly tilted perspective of a cockpit, the painting invites the spectator to sense the distance and emotional detachment that the fighter pilot might be experiencing with regards to the effects of the mission on the ground. Underneath the painting, a predella consisting of four small-scale paintings is positioned. While the first depicts Danish fighter pilots entering F-16 jets at the Sigonella Air Base in Italy, the second features Moammar Gaddafi (whose assaults on the civilian population officially caused the international military intervention). The third image represents an aircraft refueling in the sunset, whereas the last one depicts the chaos on the ground in Libya, epitomized by an armed and masked insurgent in front of an explosion. The last image especially stands in stark contrast to the “cleansed,” strangely neutral expression of the main painting and the notions of precision bombing and clinical war that it seems to harbor. As a reminder of the lethal nature of war, and possibly also of the transitory nature of both the Gaddafi regime and the international coalition, Carlsen has placed what could be interpreted as a skull, a memento mori, on the top of the frame of the painting. Blue Shield (2014) by Peter Martensen documents the role of the Danish Navy in the international efforts to counter maritime piracy off the Horn of Africa.17 Dominated monochromatically by the blue color of the ocean and deploying the structure of the triptych, the painting is divided into three sections, which from different angles document the mission of a Danish combat vessel in the Indian Ocean. The left-hand section features two images: one depicting an armed soldier observing activities from the deck of the ship, another showing the operation room inside the vessel where officers are busy surveying the seizure of a crew of pirates on their computer screens. In the middle section of the painting the dramatic capture of the pirates by the Navy’s amphibious attack and infiltration unit is depicted from an outdoor perspective. Finally, in the right-hand section of the painting, the Somali Coast is depicted from high above with a Danish helicopter surveying the scene. Except for the last image, all

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the motifs in the painting are experienced from the embedded perspective that Martensen was granted in 2013 when he was allowed to join the Danish Navy on a mission in the Indian Ocean (Martensen 2014). Nonetheless, every single one of the images implicitly draws attention to the asymmetrical relation between the well-equipped, heavily armed Danish vessel and the impoverished-looking captured African pirates. As Martinsen himself observes: “It (the painting) is also a narrative of power and impotence; it points to the fact that the three young men (the pirates), who have probably been lured into the raid by some Somali Mafiosi [. . .] are basically chanceless.” (Martensen, 2014:14–15; my translation). Furthermore, even though the actions of the navy officers are extrovert and far from enigmatic, their anonymous, disciplined bodies nonetheless bring to mind Martensen’s aforementioned portraits of de-individualized prototype men functioning as docile cog-like wheels within a larger power apparatus. To sum up, then, the three artists all fulfilled the assignment of depicting the efforts of Danish troops; but they clearly did so while contesting and negotiating the heroic virtues, which have traditionally adhered to the battle painting genre.

Ceremonies and Militarist Scripts In 2013 and 2014, the battle paintings described above were officially unveiled at three different ceremonies at the Museum of National History. In what ensues I will be drawing on Connerton and Hobsbawm in a discussion of the ceremony conducted in relation to the unveiling of Libya 2011.18 Attended by a mix of civilians and military personnel, the unveiling ceremony took place within the majestic Angels’ Hall at Frederiksborg Castle on 10 April 2014. The setting discretely established a dialogue between Carlsen’s painting and the historical paintings populating the room. For instance, flanked on the left of Libya 2011 was Danish artist Carl Neumann’s depiction of a turning point episode from the Swedish siege of Copenhagen in 1658–1660, namely the arrival of the Dutch fleet in support of Denmark. Set against this symbolic historical backdrop, in her opening address the director of the museum, Mette Skougaard, elaborated on the museum’s reasons for wanting to document the recent chapter of Danish warfare through the genre of the battle painting. More precisely, she pointed to the battle painting as a privileged site to which we might turn when looking for historical accounts of the ways in which both the victories won and the defeats suffered by the Danish people have helped shape the identity and self-understanding of the nation. Finally, after stating, “historical consciousness is key to understand the reality of which we are part,”19 she expressed hope that alongside the two other commissioned battle paintings, Carlsen’s piece would help sustain the historical consciousness of the Danish population “now as well as in the future.” Former Commander of Fighter Wing Skrydstrup, Lars Smedegaard Kjøller, was next. In his speech, he stressed the humanitarian motivation behind the international military intervention in Libya the aim of which was “to protect the civil population in Benghazi against Gaddafi’s forces.” Along the same lines, he drew attention to the fact that the intervention was approved by the UN and fully backed by the Danish parliament, before he finally lauded the Danish Royal Forces for having succeeded in avoiding collateral damage throughout the campaign. After a live musical interlude performed by organist Anders Koppel and cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen, Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Carlsberg Foundation, Flemming Besenbacher, continued the national historical perspective adopted by Skougaard. In his speech, he reminded the audience of brewer Jacobsen’s desire to broaden individual horizons

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by connecting them to a larger collective memory through the evocation of history. He also emphasized the importance that Jacobsen ascribed to artists who could invoke a sense of national community by creating reflective, historical images, as well as works capable of apprehending the contemporary historical context in which the artists themselves were embedded. The painting was then unveiled by Captain Møller Kristensen, who had participated in the Libya bombing campaign. In his speech, he complimented Carlsen for having successfully captured the experience endured by the fighter pilot: “In the jet you are detached from the events on the ground,” he stated. “You can neither hear the screams, nor smell the atrocities of war.” Finally, after another musical interlude, the artist gave a speech in which he jokingly dwelled on the strange fact that he, as a former conscientious objector, had actually taken on the assignment. But as he stated, “Initially, I didn’t feel it (a battle painting) was ‘my thing,’ and therefore I accepted! Because, in fact, you rarely know beforehand whether something is ‘your thing,’ or where it might take you.” Recalling Hobsbawm’s framework, the ceremony held for the unveiling of Libya 2011 could—together with the overall initiative of reviving the genre of the battle painting—indeed be construed as a way of responding to a “novel situation,” as Hobsbawm calls it (Hobsbawm [1983] 2012:2), namely Denmark’s (re)new(ed) status as a “war-fighting” nation. However, as Hobsbawm indicates, the invention or re-evocation of traditions is rarely neutral, but tend to be driven by political agendas rooted in the present (4). In keeping with this, I would contend that even though in her speech and also elsewhere (Skougaard 2014a; 2014b; 2014c), Skougaard has been careful neither to endorse nor to condemn the activist defense and security policy recently adopted by Denmark; it remains an open question whether the act of addressing this policy within the heroically charged genre of the historical battle painting can be considered a politically neutral act, especially when the initiative is undertaken in close collaboration with the Danish Defence. In this connection, it is noteworthy that the commissioning of new battle paintings did not entail a portrayal of the internationally highly contested and controversial military intervention in Iraq (in which Denmark participated). Instead, only UN-sanctioned missions were portrayed and commemorated. In keeping with these choices, viewed through the lens of Connerton, the Libya 2011 ceremony could be construed as a performance that, by conveying and enacting selected and strictly positively charged memories of the Libya intervention, sought to control the collective memory thereof. Thus, what was being emphasized in the speech by the military delegate, Smedegaard Kjøller, were stories which upheld consensus, success, and human decency: the fact that the mission was approved by the UN, that Danish participation was fully backed by the Danish parliament, and that the Danish Air Force allegedly did not cause any collateral damage. The fact that Libya has remained in a state of lawless chaos ever since the killing of Gaddafi by the international coalition, or the fact that at least 72 civilians were killed by NATO air strikes (Abrahams and Kwiram 2012) were not mentioned. Applying Connerton’s concept further, I would contend that another important aim of the ceremony was to unite the spectators in a common feeling of belonging to a national identity, which in turn was propelled by the construction of a(n imagined) collective memory. More to the point, the aforementioned discrete dialogue between Carlsen’s painting and the historical paintings of the museum could be said to symbolically link the present, including Denmark’s current activist defense and security policy, to a larger national history. Importantly, though, unlike the earlier mentioned historical battle paintings (those depicting the 1848 and 1864 wars) hanging elsewhere at the museum, the battle paintings by Carlsen, Fenger, and Martensen did not focus only on national concerns. Instead, through their

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depiction of “distant wars” surrounded by transnational discourses on freedom, humanitarianism, and security, they drew attention to Denmark’s positioning in the intersection between national and international interests in a globalized world. In that sense, the battle painting project certainly also served to situate Denmark as a nation to be reckoned with internationally, dedicated to the same values (freedom, democracy, human rights) as the US and other main representatives of the international coalitions in which Denmark has engaged over the past years.

Contesting the Conventions and Frames of the Militarist Script However, as it turned out, the battle painting project ended up being partly overshadowed by the controversy between the museum (aligned with the Danish Defence) and the artist Simone Aaberg Kærn, who was initially assigned to depict the Danish effort in Libya. Due to her longterm engagement with war and conflict, Kærn would at first glance appear to be an obvious choice for the project. From a feminist and conceptual position she has explored the dynamics of war and conflict in a range of different media, perhaps most notably in the acclaimed 2002 flight performance Smiling in a War Zone (documented in the 2006 documentary film of the same name). In this work, she crossed the highly restricted post-9/11 airspace between Copenhagen and Kabul in a tiny 61 piper colt plane in order to find a young Afghan woman she had read about in a Danish newspaper. In the newspaper the woman had expressed her dream of becoming a fighter pilot, and so Kærn set out to help her fulfill this wish—and she actually ended up finding the Afghan woman and taking her on a trip in the small plane. Kærn was later chosen to paint the official portrait of Denmark’s former Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and to design the mission combat patch to be worn on the uniform sleeves by Danish fighter pilots partaking in the Libya campaign. While both works were embraced by the commissioning authorities—the portrait of Fogh Rasmussen hangs in the Danish parliament today and the combat patches were accepted by the Air Force—they could nevertheless be read as subtle critiques of the efforts of these very authorities. Thus, the rather kitschy portrayal of Fogh Rasmussen in front of a green Danish beech forest and a Danish military transport aircraft overflying a rocky Afghan landscape can be construed as a sarcastic comment to the former prime minister’s obvious pride in having ensured the reputation of Denmark as a nation to be reckoned with, when US-led international coalitions embark on military missions. Likewise, the depiction on the mission patch of a falcon gripping the olive leaves of the United Nations’ logo in its beak, can be read as an ironic comment to the UN-sanctioned strategy of “bombing for peace” (Kærn 2012) in Libya. While in the mentioned works, Kærn succeeded in maintaining a subtle balance between an affirmative and a subversive stance, which in turn allowed for conflicting interpretations, her critical approach to the international intervention in Libya came to dominate the sketch she proposed to the Museum of National History, and she ended up being fired from the project. Briefly stated, the divisive events evolved as follows.20 In September 2011 Kærn went to Libya after having accepted the proposal of the Museum of National History to carry out a battle painting of the mission. However, as neither the funding of the project nor the contract were settled at this stage, Kærn could not be “invited” to be embedded with the Danish Forces. Determined to go before “the sand turned cold” as she put it,21 she therefore—with the museum’s acceptance—funded and organized the trip herself. She flew to Tunis and then

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travelled by car to the last two major battle sites in Sirte and Bani Walid. In total, she spent ten days on the front line and in various cities where she had the opportunity to speak to both insurgents and civilians. On the ground, where the bombs did not appear distant (as in Carlsen’s painting), she carried out a number of preliminary studies for her painting. The sketch she ended up proposing to the museum differed from the other commissioned battle paintings, in so far as it did not spare the spectator the bloody and unpleasant details of war. Thus, in the foreground of the sketch wounded and dead bodies are clustered in a heap. Behind them chaos rules: Surrounded by explosions and military tanks and vehicles on fire, Libyan insurgents are fighting against Gaddafi’s forces. On the left-hand edge adorning the middle area of the sketch Danish F-16 fighter jets appear, one of them in the process of dropping a bomb. Portrayed on the right-hand edge a Danish F-16 jet is about to take off from the Sigonella air base in Sicily. When presented with the sketch Inspector General Per Ludvigsen (who had taken over the role as consultant on military matters from Knud Bartels) expressed various concerns. Amongst others he noted that a Libyan fighter jet flying at a low height in the middle section of the sketch could be mistaken for a Danish aircraft bombing civilians. Kærn was then encouraged to present an altered version of her original sketch, and she did so in October 2012. In the new sketch various changes had been made; for instance the fighter jet in the middle section had been taken out. However, Ludvigsen still objected that “one is left with the impression that the widespread death and destruction [. . .] could be or is indeed caused by The Danish Air Force.”22 Instead, he encouraged Kærn to depict the “actually quite happy story” of the Libya campaign. Doing so could include representing “The people rising up

FIGURE 9.1 Detail from Simone Aaberg Kærn’s Skirmish—The Danish Participation in the Libyan War (Sketch 2), 2012. Mixed Media on Paper. Courtesy of the artist/Peter Lassen. Photo: Anders Madsen.

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against the tyrant” or “the granting of freedom and future to the people.” As Skougaard concurred with Ludvigsen’s objections, the museum decided to turn down Kærn’s proposed sketch, but they allowed her to hand in yet an alternative proposition. Kærn, however, did not wish to do so without having been given an artistically qualified reason for this request, and thus the collaboration between her and the museum was finally broken off. Subsequently Peter Carlsen was invited to do the job instead. In order to grasp the underlying reasons for the disagreement described above, I wish to invoke J.L. Austin’s conception of misfires as explained in How to Do Things With Words ([1962] 1975). After distinguishing between constative statements (descriptive utterances) and performative statements (utterances that, as it were, perform actions in social reality when being uttered), and claiming that the latter cannot be judged as true or false but instead by their felicitous or infelicitous outcome, Austin lists a number of conditions that must be fulfilled in order for performatives to succeed.23 The first rule, on which we will concentrate here, specifies that: “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances” (Austin [1962] 1975:14). Violation of this rule leads to what Austin dubs misfires, meaning that the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed and our act “void” or “without effect” (16). Returning to the “Kærn controversy” I suggest that Kærn deliberately sought to misfire in relation to the assignment she had accepted from the Museum of National History. Rather than adjusting or accommodating, she quite clearly sought to contest or even violate the allegedly “accepted conventional procedures” and “conventional effects” associated not only with the genre of the heroic battle painting, but in a wider sense also the militarist script discretely propagated by Danish decision-makers and enacted in public ceremonies, including the aforementioned military homecoming parades and national flag-flying days for internationally deployed personnel. With regard to the conventions of the battle painting nominally dictated by history, it is telling that instead of depicting the Danish effort in Libya from the viewpoint of the contracting authority, she did it from the perspective of the civilian population. By the same token, instead of foregrounding the ostensibly noble and humanitarian endeavor of the international coalition to protect the civilian populace against the tyrant Gaddafi, she took the heroic out of the battle painting by populating her sketch with dead and mutilated bodies in a landscape shattered by air strikes carried out by invisible agents from high above.24 As opposed to Austin, whose interest lies in investigating the conditions that performatives must fulfill in order to be felicitous, Kærn is invested in challenging these very conditions and the nominally shared values associated with them. This is why her misfired sketch cannot be brushed aside as being “without effect,” as Austin would deem it. Quite on the contrary, by ultimately questioning the “frames of war” (Butler 2009) that decide what we can hear, see, and apprehend as life worthy of grief, Kærn’s depiction of dead Libyan civilians at the expense of heroic Danish soldiers is indeed imbued with a potentially explosive effect. Conversely, one could claim that in her endeavor to depict the situation on the ground in Libya, Kærn ended up losing sight of her initial assignment, and further, that she failed to uphold the balance between an affirmative and a subversive stance necessary for her sketch to “pass” as an official, national battle painting. In any case, the explanation given by Mette Skougaard for Kærn’s sketch to be turned down was that it did not fulfill the given assignment, namely to convey the efforts of the Danish forces (Skougaard in Lerche 2014).

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The Surfacing of the Militarist Script The three parties involved in the battle painting project—the Danish Defence, the artists, and the Museum of National History—were situated differently in terms of expectation and artistic tradition. They related differently to the two trajectories of the battle painting genre mentioned previously: the approach, which associated with a heroic vision of war, serves the contracting authority versus the approach, which indebted to the war-critical legacy of Callot and Goya is rooted in a modern conception of the autonomy of art. The representatives from the Danish Defence emphasized that it was the museum that was the contracting authority, not them. Yet, the Kærn controversy clearly shows that the delegates from the military were, perhaps unsurprisingly, rather determined to ensure that the artists conveyed a narrative of the represented military interventions, which did not conflict with the value-based and humanitarian arguments for these campaigns espoused by Danish politicians. In terms of the artists, all four of them clearly subscribed to a modern conception of art ideally granting them full artistic freedom. Finally, as an institution dedicated to conveying the national history of Denmark through cultural artifacts, the museum had to mediate between the military and artistic positions and to seek some means of reconciling them. One could claim that the museum did in fact succeed in doing so, given that the paintings of Fenger, Carlsen, and Martensen are complex and ambiguous negotiations of the battle painting genre rather than uncritical celebrations of Denmark’s recent activist defense and security policy. Conversely, one could argue that the firing of Kærn provides an all too apt illustration of the shortcomings and conflicts entailed when an institution dedicated to the construction of (an imagined) collective national memory sets out to pair the logic of art with that of a military institution. In the public reception of the battle painting project a number of voices subscribed to this latter argument about irreconcilable modes of thinking. For instance, in January 2014, the newspaper Weekendavisen broke the story about the Kærn controversy in an article, which clearly favored Kærn’s perspective and more than hinted that the museum and the military in concert had deprived her of her artistic freedom of expression. A similar critique emerged when Carlsen’s (and subsequently Martensen’s) paintings were unveiled later that year. Thus, in a series of articles, the newspaper Information implied that at the end of the day the battle painting project and thereby also the artists were ultimately in the service of the military power (Villesen 2014; Ullman 2014). This view was encapsulated by the heading of an article commenting upon the presentation of Martensen’s painting: “A selfie of the military power?” (ibid).25 I would argue that given the complexity of the three battle paintings, it is overly simplistic to discard them as purely symbolic vehicles for military power. Yet, I do contend that the initiative to revive the battle painting genre undertaken by the Museum of National History in collaboration with the Danish Defence is indicative of the general militarization of Danish culture happening currently. However, as shown above, as it turned out the initiative did not materialize as yet another discrete enactment of an underlying militarist script. Quite on the contrary, I would argue that the fight over the writing of history—more precisely, Denmark’s recent history of warfare—which in the final analysis constituted the kernel of the Kærn dispute, did in fact cause the otherwise rather discrete militarization of Danish culture to surface. Furthermore, the controversy actually allowed opportunities to engage critically with this history in public discourse. As noted, doing this has been notoriously difficult due to the

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success of political decision-makers in conflating critique of the militarist ideology presently prevailing in Denmark with a morally deplorable lack of respect for soldiers, who bravely risk their lives for the nation. To sum up then, as envisaged by Skougaard, the battle painting project did indeed bear witness to some of the crucial recent changes in Danish foreign policy and history of warfare. However, the project and its concomitant ceremonies and controversies also provided a thought-provoking example of the ways in which the writing of this history is a highly charged enterprise in which issues of collective memory, national history, and institutionalized control all intersect.

Post scriptum After this chapter was written, it turned out that Kærn had succeeded in finding a patron willing to provide her with the financial resources for her to complete her battle painting. After the seven-meter-long and more than two-meter-tall painting, entitled Skirmish, had been completed, it was exhibited from October 2016 through to January 2017 at the prestigious exhibition space for contemporary art in Copenhagen, Kunsthal Charlottenborg. The two rejected sketches were also exhibited. Furthermore, as part of the exhibition a website (www.krigogkunst.dk) documenting the disputes surrounding the painting was created. The exhibition enjoyed massive media coverage and audience interest, and in a series of well-attended public debates organized by Kunsthal Charlottenborg issues of art and censorship were discussed. As I suggested in one of these debates in which I participated as a panelist, the exhibition and the reactions sparked by it can be considered as yet another element in an ongoing series of performative events unleashed by Kærn’s strategy of misfiring. While in the case of the exhibition, a spatial as well as discursive framework for engaging critically with the militarization of the Danish cultural sphere investigated in this article was actually established, it shall be interesting to see what the next turn in the “battle painting affair” will bring. Finally, I would like to point to the fine irony in the fact that while this chapter is illustrated by Kærn’s sketch, which has only become publicly accessible very recently, it has not been possible to obtain permission to reproduce the three “official” battle paintings within

Simone Aaberg Kærn, Skirmish—The Danish Participation in the Libyan War (Sketches 1 & 2), 2012. Mixed Media on Paper. Courtesy of the artist/Peter Lassen. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

FIGURE 9.2

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the context of this book. However, Fenger’s can painting can be viewed at http://dnmskole. dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2_transition-e1406669426474.jpg; Carlsen’s at http:// dnmskole.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/DNMSKOLE_Peter-Carlsen_Libyen-2011.jpg; and Martensen’s at http://forsvaret.dk/MST/Nyt%20og%20Presse/oevrigenyheder/PublishingImages/Maleri%20web.jpg.

Notes 1 By militarism I refer to an ideology, whereas by militarization I point to the processes by way of which this ideology is being channeled into civil society, thereby discretely reshaping cultural values and re-orienting the society’s collective worldview (Bernazzoli and Flint 2009:393–395). 2 It should be noted, though, that throughout the Cold War Denmark participated in UN-peacekeeping missions. However, the country was renowned for—and took pride in—being regarded as better than most when it came to achieving its mission without opening fire (Jakobsen 2013:183). 3 For explanations of the Danish success in terms of mobilizing public support for Denmark’s recent military endeavors, see Jakobsen and Møller (2012); Jakobsen (2013); Jakobsen and Ringsmose (2015); Rasmussen (2011). 4 I would like to thank Laura Luise Schultz for providing helpful comments and suggestions for earlier drafts of this essay. Research for this chapter was funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research. 5 See also Christensen (2015); Sørensen (2015); Sørensen and Pedersen (2012); and Martinsen (2013). 6 With the notion “imagined collective national memory” I am drawing on the theoretical concepts of, respectively, sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and anthropologist Benedict Anderson. Defining memory as a socially constructed reality driven by predominant agendas of the present, Halbwachs contends that individual and social, collective memory are mutually constitutive. As such there is no “pure” individual memory and no “pure” collective memory, but instead different collective frameworks through which individuals remember (Halbwachs 1992:39–40). Consequently, there may exist just as many collective memories as there are social frameworks. From an equally constructivist position, Anderson has famously conceived of the nation as an imagined political community: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation 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” (Anderson [1983] 2006:6). In my analysis, the combination of the two concepts help to demonstrate how the idea of nationality feeds on an idea of a shared memory, and how both notions are essentially constructivist. 7 The attitude of focusing on the devastating effects of war rather than on its heroic aspects did not only come to prevail in the works of war-critical artists such as those mentioned above; it also applied to the works of officially commissioned war artists, including British Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer (Brandon 2007; see also Bruckner 1984 and Tolson 2014). 8 Some of the most prominent Danish battle painters at the time were Jørgen Sonne and Niels Simonsen, who both obtained permission to travel to the front in order to depict events witnessed there (Paulsen 1951:33–34). 9 A few exceptions are The Engagement at Hokkerup (1946) by Anne Marie Mehrn depicting the sparse Danish resistance against the German invasion in 1940, and Thomas Kluge’s A Short Stay (1998), portraying Danish UN-soldiers in Bosnia. Kluge’s painting was commissioned by the American ambassador at the time, Edward Elson, who later donated the painting to the Museum of National History. 10 Mars-Mercurius Denmark is an off-shot of a European network comprising top business and military leaders, aimed at enhancing the dialogue between the business and military sectors (Johansen 2004:7).

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11 In the catalogue accompanying the painting, the artist, Peter Carlsen, explains his reasons for not going to Libya: ”My intention quickly became to paint an image, which captured the distance between the devastations caused by the fighter jets in Libya and the Danes involved (. . .). I figured that a tourist trip to the sandy Libyan desert landscape conducted two to three years after the air campaign had been completed would not be able to capture that. At the most, it would make me as an artist appear ridicuously heroical. As I had no intention of appearing so, I nicely turned down the offer I was given to go to Libya.” (Carlsen, 2014:8, my translation). 12 The motif refers to an event in March 2003, where Rasmussen was attacked by activists. Protesting the Danish government’s impending decision to participate in the war in Iraq, the activists poured red paint over Rasmussen, whilst shouting “You’ve got blood on your hands.” 13 For further reading on the work of Peter Carlsen, see for instance Mansa and Jeppesen (2015); Mentz (2009), and Klindt (2004). 14 For further reading on the work of Peter Martensen, see for instance Bonde (2006); MøllerWitt (2013); and Sanderhoff (2007). 15 In the period between January 2002 and May 2014 approximately 10,000 Danish soldiers were deployed in Afghanistan, resulting in 43 Danish fatalities. Since January 2015 around 161 Danish soldiers and police officers have participated in NATO’s training, assistance, and advice for the Afghan security forces. 16 Denmark contributed six F-16 fighter jets and approximately 110 staff to the UN-approved intervention in Libya in 2011. The decision to partake in the mission was unanimously passed by the Danish parliament on 18 March 2011. 17 In December 2009, the Danish parliament decided to join NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield to support the efforts of the international community to combat piracy off the Horn of Africa. Since then, Denmark has contributed with the support ships Absalon and Esbern Snarre and the frigate Iver Huitfeldt. 18 The ensuing discussion will be based upon a full audio recording of the ceremony, made by journalist Otto Lerche as part of his background research for a radio program on the battle painting initiative (the program aired on Danish Radio24Syv on 15 April 2014). In addition to the recording, which Lerche has kindly provided me with, I will be drawing on photographic documentation of the ceremony appearing in the local paper Hillerød lokalavis on 12 April 2014. 19 This quote comes, as do the other quotes appearing in this section, from the full recording of the ceremony mentioned in the previous note (my translations). 20 What follows will be based on unpublished documents concerning the case to which I was granted access by the Danish Defence whilst writing this chapter. As a public institution the Danish Defence is in possession of all the email exchanges, letters, and accounts given by the parties during the Kærn controversy. And as a public institution the Defence is obliged to gain access for citizens to these documents upon request. Kærn’s sketch, which is otherwise not accessible, appears in these documents. (Kærn’s and Ludvigsen’s statements in the main text are my translations.) 21 This quote from Kærn appears in an unpublished, written account (dated 26 January 2013) of the interaction between the Danish Defence and Kærn provided by lieutenant commander and caseworker at the Danish Defence, Simon E. Schultz-Larsen. 22 Per Ludvigsen’s response to Kærn’s sketch and the cited statements appear in an email from Ludvigsen to Mette Skougaard, dated 15 October 2012. 23 In the course of the book, Austin feels compelled to drop the constative-performative distinction, as he comes to realize the inherently performative aspect of all utterances. Instead he suggests distinguishing between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary speech acts (Austin [1962] 1972:94–120). 24 After having had her sketch turned down, Kærn felt compelled to give an account of the events of the “battle painting controversy” as experienced by her. Thus, in “Redegørelse for bataljeforløbet” (account of the course of the battle painting project) dated 20 November 2012 and addressed to the museum and the Danish Defence, she explicitly states that from the beginning of the project she was, as opposed to

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Mathilde Fenger, distinctly interested in the battle motif. She also expresses her indebtedness to the warcritical trajectory of the battle painting represented by figures such as Goya and Paul Nash. 25 Journalist Otto Lerche deployed a similar critical approach in his broadcast programme on the battle painting project (Radio24Syv on 15 April 2014).

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Mansa, Sandhoff, M. and L. Jeppesen (eds). 2015. Peter Carlsen: Realitymaleri. Randers and Kastrup: Kastrupgårdsamlingen and Randers Kunstmuseum. Martensen, P. 2014. “Blue Shield.” In Blue Shield: Peter Martensens bataljemaleri af søværnets indsats mod pirateri I farvandet ud for Afrikas Horn, edited by T. Lyngby, 7–16. Hillerød: Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg. Martinsen, K.D. 2013. Soldier Repatriation. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Mentz, S. and P. Carlsen. 2009. Danmark 2009: et historiemaleri af Peter Carlsen. Hillerød: Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg. Münkler, H. 2015. Kriegssplitter: Die Evolution der Gewalt im 20. Und 21. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Rowohlt. MøllerWitt (ed.). 2013. Recovery: Peter Martensen. Aarhus: Gallery MøllerWitt. Osborne, H. (ed.). [1970] 1993. The Oxford Companion to Art. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press. Paulsen, J. 1952. Billeder fra treaarskrigen. København: Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg and Hassings Forlag. Paulsen, T.D. 2010. Et samliv med fortidens minder: En undersøgelse af artikuleringen af national identitet og kulturel erindring i relation til Carl Blochs historiemaleri Christian II i fængslet på Sønderborg slot (1871). MA thesis, University of Copenhagen. Rasmussen, M.V. 2011. Den gode krig? Danmark i Afghanistan 2006–2010. København: Gyldendal. Sanderhoff, M. 2007. Sorte billeder: Kunst og kanon. København: Rævens sorte bibliotek. Skougaard, M. 2014. In Lerche, O. ”Bataljemaleriet på Det nationalhistoriske museum.” Radio24Syv, 15 April. Accessed 6 June 2016. http://www.radio24syv.dk/programmer/ak-24syv/9711456/ ak-24syv-15-04-2014-2/. Skougaard, M. 2014a. “Transition.” In Carlsbergfondet årsskrift, edited by L. Kyhse Bisgaard, L.B. Pedersen and A.M. Nielsen, 162–169. København: Naryana Press. Skougaard, M. 2014b. “Forord.” In Libyen 2011, edited by T. Lyngby, 3–4. Hillerød: Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg. Skougaard, M. 2014c “Forord.” In Blue Shield: Peter Martensens bataljemaleri af søværnets indsats mod pirateri I farvandet ud for Afrikas Horn, edited by T. Lyngby, 3–4. Hillerød: Det Nationalhistoriske Museum på Frederiksborg. Sørensen, B.R. and T. Pedersen. 2012. “Hjemkomstparader for danske soldater: Ceremoniel fejring af krigeren og den krigsførende nation.” Slagmark 63: 31–48. Sørensen, B.R. 2015. “Veterans’ Homecomings: Secrecy and Postdeployment Social Becoming.” Current Anthropology 56, supplement 12 (December): 231–240. Tolson, R. 2014. Art from the First World War. London: Imperial War Museum. Ullman, A. 2014. “En selfie af militærmagten?” Information 30–31 (August): 12–13. Villesen, K. 2014. “De pæne historier om krigen dækker ikke længere.” Information, 17–18 (May): 14–15. Virilio, P. (1983) 2008: “Impure War: Introduction to the New Edition.” In Pure War, P. Virilio and S. Lotringer, 7–13. Los Angeles: Semiotext.

PART III

Performing the Soldier

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Theater of War On a hot calm night in early 2004, a Marine infantry battalion lumbered down a desert highway across the border from Kuwait into Iraq. They were headed north for Baghdad. I was among them as the unit’s assistant operations officer. The American invasion the previous year had sparked an insurgency and the bulk of military forces that had been sent home during the summer of 2003 were now being ordered back to Iraq to form a counterinsurgency. Our mission, in short, was to “win the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people and draw their support away from opponents to the US occupation. For the American military, this was a new “theater of war,” and indeed, a very different kind of performance. Theater as a lexical designator for military battle space has been in use for nearly two centuries (Clausewitz [1832] 1976:280), but never before has the word been so congruous with the reality of American wars as it is today. War as “theater” is more than a clever metaphor, especially in the realm of counterinsurgencies such as Iraq and Afghanistan; it provides a useful framework for understanding the relationship between soldiers, the texts they embody (or attempt to), and the audiences for whom they perform. This analogy enables access to discourses and perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked and may enhance our understanding of the American soldier’s experience in contemporary armed conflict. In the case of Iraq, especially prior to 2006, a minority of senior US military commanders advocated an emphasis on establishing rapport with the local populace to get them to favor us over the insurgents and recognize the American presence as legitimate. If this could be accomplished, they argued, the insurgency would lose its support base and collapse. This is the central premise and main effort of counterinsurgency doctrine. Fighting is anticipated, of course, but combat operations are regarded as more detrimental than constructive and, therefore, secondary to building popular support. So in Iraq, “winning hearts and minds” was more than a dubious slogan dished out to the American public, or even a specious gesture of good will; it was in fact the very heart of our military strategy, quite literally the objective of our return mission.

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In this “hearts and minds” spirit, our division commander, General James Mattis, issued a rather unusual order before we entered Iraq in 2004. He told us that whenever we passed by any locals, we should smile broadly and wave at them from our gun trucks as we proceeded north to reinforce the occupation of their country. General Mattis called it “wave tactics” and insisted in all earnestness that this was how we were going to win the war—we were going to wave at them. Moving northward, we were not unaware of the doctrinal contradictions that we embodied. Waving with one hand and wielding a weapon with the other sounded and felt every bit as absurd there in Iraq as it appears here on the page. Perhaps the extent to which this concerned us as individuals was revealed only subtly in our faces and the complex arrangements in our affect. Each hand was connected to an opposite affective intention. “Wave tactics” was, of course, only symbolic of the greater effort at hand, but it perfectly epitomized our paradoxical relationship to the Iraqi people. Suddenly the term “theater of war” seemed to correspond very well with what we were actually doing—performing for an audience. This was by no means the first time a military ever performed power; however, the notion of seeking audience approval—getting them to believe us and believe in us rather than simply capitulate—and, that such approval was the cornerstone of mission accomplishment, was, in my mind, a unique situation that prompted a much higher level of self-conscious theatricality than normal combat operations ever would. Suddenly it mattered how I acted in front of civilian observers, and it mattered equally how they reacted—I needed them to like me. At that point in my military career I was certainly accustomed to playing different roles in various positions, roles that didn’t necessarily encapsulate my “total” worldview or my sense of identity, and yet this performance of congeniality struck me (and I think a great many others) as quite contradictory to the truculent affect that we’d habituated for so long as marines. And while this may have only been a matter of adaptation on our parts, there was a more serious dilemma emerging as well, a dilemma that was ultimately codified in the military’s newest edition of the counterinsurgency manual. Of course, I understood well enough that we needed to portray ourselves in an endearing manner toward the Iraqi people to elicit a friendly response and achieve our strategic aims. To that extent, the general’s orders made sense. Where they made less sense was in the problem of survival and the crucially important, though seldom-mentioned, detail that our very presence had inspired significant hostility among Iraqis and had prompted many of them to attack us. The very real possibility of being killed made “wave tactics” more than just absurd; it elevated the problem to a cognitive impossibility and, therefore, rendered counterinsurgency doctrine an unperformable method.

Soldier Street Theater From the collapsing narrative of a “war on terror” that made the entire world its theater emerged act two: counterinsurgency. In 2006, when public support for the war in Iraq had fallen to its lowest levels (Pew 2008), a field manual was drafted by the US military (resurrected, really, from the sepulcher of Vietnam War doctrine), a rewrite called Counterinsurgency, and was given the shorthand nomenclature FM 3-24. This was the doctrinal basis for President George W. Bush’s “new strategy” in Iraq in 2007, popularly dubbed the surge.1 Politically, the FM 3-24

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was offered to the American public as a narrative explanation and solution for the troubles in Iraq.2 But militarily it was an instructional document for soldiers,3 to be implemented in theaters of operation. When counterinsurgency doctrine was built into the “war on terror” narrative, it could be regarded as mere rhetoric, that is, the “story” of American foreign policy. But when that same doctrine was handed to soldiers to perform in theaters of war, it was transformed into a script of sorts. More than simply a field manual with instructions on what to do in any given circumstance, the FM 3-24 functioned more like a set of scenarios, guiding soldier performance in the “field”—the “theater.” In this sense, the doctrine functioned somewhat like theatrical dramaturgy, directing the actions, words, and arguably the thoughts of its performers. Soldiers became characters in the counterinsurgency story—actors in a theater of war. Counterinsurgencies such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, though commonly referred to as “wars,” are conceptually and performatively very different from conventional battles. In one important respect, however, the two modes of conflict do not greatly differ. Both are, whether acknowledged explicitly or not, ultimately struggles for political and physical control over a territory, whether it is a country, a province, or a hilltop, and more specifically over the people who inhabit it. The FM 3-24 notes, “the long-term objective for all sides [of a counterinsurgency] remains acceptance of the legitimacy of one side’s claim to political power” (US Army 2007:3). It is the manner in which power is gained and maintained that most distinguishes conventional wars from counterinsurgencies. Among the obvious distinctions between conventional wars and counterinsurgencies, there are two that are especially relevant here. First is the contrasting sense of the word occupation. In conventional warfare, the “occupation” of an objective—that desired piece of ground or point on the map—generally implies success; it is the end state of the operation. Conversely, in counterinsurgencies, occupation is the starting point, a permanent and ineluctable condition of the tactical environment. The second distinction, which emerges from “occupation,” is the presence of an audience. In conventional warfare, military commanders do not consciously take into consideration an external “audience.” Spectators viewing from home via the media are only peripherally considered in military strategy and the presence of civilians on the battlefield is, at best, an inconvenient reality of the terrain. But in counterinsurgencies, local civilians are the focal point or the “bid for victory” as it is called. They are the audience. “Winning hearts and minds” is the essence of counterinsurgencies and the central message of its doctrine (US Army 2007:294). Further, local civilians are expected to become performers themselves, through the performance of their own acquiescence to the legitimacy of the counterinsurgency. But this theater is not, like in previous wars, played out in the jungle, the mountains, or in the open desert. This theater brings soldiers into local neighborhoods, street corners, market places, villages, and wherever else they might find an audience to perform their roles. So counterinsurgency becomes something like street theater—performances, often informal or improvised, that happen in the streets and other open public spaces. The premise of counterinsurgency doctrine relies upon cognitive antipodes that make the text, like contradictory stage directions, impossible to fully embody; counterinsurgency is, in essence, an unperformable script. But since, as with theater, “the show must go on,” and since soldiers on the battlefield cannot simply walk away or stop acting, they must do something—so they improvise. I call this improvisational performance Soldier Street Theater.

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The Double Improvisation Counterinsurgency turns out to be a double improvisation. Surrounding the soldier’s individual performance, the framework of the operation itself is constructed very much like improvisational theater. Improvisation is a key concept and the intended method of counterinsurgency doctrine; it is the fundamental mode by which insurgents are defeated: [Insurgents] will do anything to preserve their greatest advantage, the ability to hide among the people. These amoral and often barbaric enemies survive by their wits, constantly adapting to the situation. Defeating them requires counterinsurgents to develop the ability to learn and adapt rapidly and continuously. (US Army 2007:52) The FM 3-24 often characterizes the counterinsurgency environment as fluid and rapidly changing, and urges leaders to be ready to adapt it without guidance from higher headquarters. Likewise, in dramatic theater—especially in devised theater—improvisation is a method often used for developing productions with less authorial guidance or constraints, expanding the meaning of a text (if there is a text), or providing directors and actors increased initiative. Counterinsurgency doctrine is prescriptive; however, the text itself is not typically consumed in the rank and file. The FM 3-24 is written primarily for leaders and planners at the battalion level and above, who then propagate its principles among the troops through training programs, directives, procedures, operations orders, etc. This is not unlike a director and dramaturg developing scenes of a play through improvisation workshops and exercises rather than sending actors home to memorize lines in a script (Spolin 1963:15; Scholte 2010:24). Military training, especially counterinsurgency-specific training, often includes performing practical scenarios (like dress-rehearsals), in which soldiers learn their roles through practicing interactions.4 The most essential parallel between improvisational theater and counterinsurgencies is the prioritization of audience approval over a specifically predetermined denouement. Both performances allow the actors a great deal of flexibility to carry out their roles as they choose, within given constraints, with one central task: delight the audience, or, in counterinsurgencyspeak, win their hearts and minds. Political leaders (behind the scenes, so to speak) who deploy troops into these roles clearly have broader objectives in mind; however, the same might be said of theater producers and owners. My central concern here, however, is the nature of the performance itself. Despite the improvisational intention of counterinsurgency doctrine, there is a secondary improvisation that is produced, which is not in the design but results instead from a gap between the text and its performance. Generally speaking, a performative gap might result in situations where a text exceeds the capabilities of its contemporaneous technology, where the text is not physically achievable by its performers, or where the text has simply not given clear enough instructions or accounted for variable circumstances (Perl 2011:221).5 In all of these situations, improvisation is not directed by the text, but is nonetheless required by the inherent performative gaps produced by the text (Boudreau 2008:41). In counterinsurgencies, these are moments when soldiers cannot cognitively align themselves with the text; that is to say, they cannot perform the text literally. The performative gap, in which I argue their consciousness remains, is a gap precisely because of the hard edges of the text and the streets that hold them in.

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Ambitious as a soldier might be to deliver a great performance, this gap cannot be avoided. The improvisation—the filling in for inadequate text—occurs in the ways that soldiers relate physically and interpersonally with locals and in the ways they relate to themselves and their use of force. No matter who the soldiers are, or what their attitudes, they cannot be fixed by or located within the doctrine; therefore, these improvisational actions must be characterized as extra- or non-doctrinal—they exceed the text. Performances of counterinsurgency doctrine are therefore constrained to varying degrees by the text, stage direction, and space, much like theater performances are, but the question of textual “authority” seems less complicated for military performers. For example, when the counterinsurgency manual was first published, General David Petraeus was both the primary author of the text and the commander of all troops in theater. In that position, he exerted about as much authority as any author ever could—he was author, director, auteur. And with all the restrictions placed on soldiers by FM 3-24—physical, cultural, legal, etc.—there was not a great deal of latitude for radical interpretation. General Petraeus could specify how the text should be understood and then order it to be performed exactly as he intended. But could he really? Orders or not, different commanders and soldiers, under different circumstances, will understand the intent of counterinsurgency doctrine (and associated orders) differently, especially when the words are embodied and performed. No matter how authoritative a text may be, no matter how faithfully one attempts to interpret and perform its lines, there is a fundamental difference in the way meaning is processed in consciousness and how it is felt in the body. This is where we hear that common sentiment (often from veterans): “You can’t understand unless you were there,” which points to the undiminishable distance between text and body, and likewise between script and performance. W.B. Worthen put it this way: “Performing reconstitutes the text; it does not echo, give voice to, or translate the text [. . .] The meaning of theatrical performance cannot be attributed to the sovereign control of the dramatic text” (1998:1098). Alex Ferguson notes accordingly, “the performance isn’t ‘read’; it’s created neuromuscularly” (2010:40). Therefore, however counterinsurgency doctrine is read, whatever explanations have been provided, or orders have been issued, the soldier’s understanding of them will be greatly impacted by the sheer embodiment of that text and, further, by the inescapable and terrifying reality that their textual bodies might then be killed in its performance. Still, this is just the beginning of the problem, the first fissure in the widening gap between counterinsurgency doctrine and the operations it ostensibly guides. What is of greatest interest to me here are the “moments” in counterinsurgency doctrine that cognitively resist “faithful” performance and consequently compel certain individual improvisations within the larger improvisational framework that leave soldiers disconnected from the doctrine, from their audiences, and from themselves. This is the double improvisation.

Cognitive Unperformables In the theater of counterinsurgency, the action is on the street. US soldiers (particularly combat and military police units) spend the majority of their time roving through cities and towns on “presence patrols” on foot or in vehicles, conducting house searches, and manning security checkpoints. They may also be involved in municipal development projects to restore essential services, build schools and roads, or provide medical treatment, or they may be training local military and police units (US Army 2007:156). But no matter the task or its purpose, each

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involves daily interactions with the local populace, so soldiers are “in character” all the time. Cognitive unperformables involve the difficult conditions that are constantly present throughout an occupation and point to the conflicts inherent in modes of interaction with the local populace and the opposing psychological strategies required to enable operations. The crucial problem is, as the counterinsurgency manual points out repeatedly, it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Moreover, US military units may face popular resistance in their areas of operation with varying degrees of violence directed against them through roadside and car bombs, rocket and mortar attacks, ambushes, and bombings of facilities or infrastructure. What these types of attacks have (most importantly) in common is that they are all conducted from remote or concealed positions, so insurgents very often cannot be seen or identified and are frequently never found. A soldier’s cognitive orientation toward the indigenous people is thrown into conflict. Who is friend? Who is foe? Survival, combat training, and warrior culture all urge a default to suspicion and the use of force; doctrine, however, often suggests otherwise with surprising maxims like, “Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is”; “sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction”; and “some of the best weapons for counterinsurgents do not shoot” (US Army 2007:47). At the heart of these admonishments is the proposition that soldiers are tasked to befriend the local populace, to improve their lives, to empathize and build rapport, and at the same time survive. This is the core of the turmoil from which Soldier Street Theater emerges. As I’ve noted earlier, the authors of the manual are not cavalier about the use of force in a counterinsurgency environment, but neither are they squeamish. Refer to the following passages from the manual: Counterinsurgents often achieve the most meaningful success in garnering public support and legitimacy for the [local] government with activities that do not involve killing insurgents (though, again, killing clearly will often be necessary). Not only is there a moral basis for the use of restraint or measured force; there are practical reasons as well. Needlessly harming innocents can turn the populace against the COIN effort [. . .] Kindness and compassion can often be as important as killing and capturing insurgents. (US Army 2007:49, 167) The message in short: Killing may be necessary, but compassion is the route to victory. The manual’s foreword by Generals David Petraeus and James Amos captures this tension in a single line: “[Leaders] must ensure their Soldiers and Marines are ready to be greeted with either a handshake or a hand grenade” (US Army 2007:xlvi; emphasis added). And co-author Colonel John Nagl articulates the point equally succinctly in his 23 August 2007 interview with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show: “If I could sum up the book in just a few words it would be: Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.” It’s interesting to note that Jon Stewart’s studio audience laughed at that remark. Perhaps they found humor in its irony or its cynicism, or maybe they detected its inherent disingenuousness. Politeness that foregrounds a sincere willingness to kill must, if nothing else, render the politeness itself insincere. Advocates of the doctrine may argue that the politeness is only nullified once hostility has presented itself. But this cannot be so; if it were, then soldiers would never be truly prepared to kill. They would never be ready for the hand grenade.

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Being prepared means activating an attitude of aggression before it becomes necessary to use it, and this sensibility is reflected in military training, in which a kind of bloodlust culture is cultivated.6 And conversely, being ready for a handshake requires no particular preparation at all. So the maxim “be ready for a handshake or a hand grenade” can be reduced to “be ready for a hand grenade” without altering its meaning. The same reduction can be applied to John Nagl’s comment. He need only have said: “Be prepared to kill.” A counterinsurgent’s polite veneer cannot conceal his mistrust because the mistrust is the engine of his survival. Nobody is fooled by courtesy that comes at the end of a machine gun. To make better sense of this disparity as it plays out in the individual consciousness, we need to understand just what is meant by the phrase, “be prepared to kill.” What exactly does that entail? The essential cognitive strategy for being prepared to kill, which the US military trains its officers and troops for vigorously, is frequently referred to by observers outside the military as desensitization. The military may prefer a more euphemistic term like “mental toughness,” but the object remains the same. A soldier is conditioned to use weapons instinctively and without sentimentality to avoid the reluctance to kill. They rehearse in order to ensure that their spontaneous—improvisational—response in the war theater will be appropriate. Whether this reluctance is naturally human or socially constructed is immaterial; the objective of combat training is to dismantle it. Connected to desensitization is dehumanization. I distinguish the latter as the negation of other people’s humanity, while the former as a negation of one’s own. Dehumanization is not a term used as part of official military doctrine but it is, nevertheless, an unavoidable attribute of the warrior culture and product of the fact that soldiers are fighting people who are trying to kill them. Training recruits to turn away from their own humanity and the humanity of the enemy is simply the most efficient way to get more soldiers to fight, kill, and ultimately to win battles. This disconnect between soldiers and themselves and between soldier and enemy is only compounded by their martial comportment and all the body and vehicle armor that lies between soldiers and the people whose “hearts and minds” they are trying to win. Conversely, in order to connect with other human beings, to befriend them, to earn their trust or respect, the fundamental skill required is empathy, that is, the ability to imagine oneself in another person’s shoes, recognize their humanity, share their points of view, and feel their emotions, or at least to make space in one’s imagination for these “other” views and emotions. These two modes of relation, desensitization and empathy, are not simply difficult to do simultaneously; they are entirely antithetical, sitting on opposite ends of a human relation continuum. The harder soldiers try to identify and connect with local people, the more vulnerable they become to attack. The more they protect themselves with armor, weapons, sunglasses, etc. and a desensitized, dehumanized view and the world, the less able they will be to ever build the kind of rapport that the FM 3-24 calls for. Balance between these extremes is an illusion. The combined pressures of military culture, combat training, and a desire to stay alive will always draw soldiers toward desensitization. The FM 3-24 reveals some recognition of this problem when it points out that counterinsurgents must assume greater personal risk to effectively maintain the peace. For example, the section on “leadership” includes a vignette, in which three soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in an area where other soldiers had been walking the streets for months without incident. This event angered the rest of the unit and tempted them to go into town looking for payback. From the manual: “A squad leader stood up in their living quarters and asserted that there would be a pile of dead Arabs on the street when the platoon went out the next day.” The commander,

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however, convinced these soldiers that revenge was not honorable and ultimately did not serve their mission of “winning the respect of the populace” (US Army 2007:244). The emphasis of the story, of course, is to remind leaders to maintain their soldiers’ patience and a temperate view of the locals; however, it also highlights the natural tendency in soldiers under these strained circumstances to gravitate toward anger, fear, or hostility, rather than empathy. If that were not the case, it would not have been necessary to include this vignette in the text. It is certainly possible, though probably unusual, for an individual soldier to lean toward empathy and ignore his/her personal safety, but because such a choice would compromise security, the empathetic soldier would likely be viewed as a liability to other soldiers focused more on their own survival and that of their comrades than on the feelings of the locals. Empathy implies, in essence, combat ineffectiveness. During my own time in Iraq, “wave tactics” continued until a roadside bomb detonated near one of our vehicular patrols. A marine standing in the turret of a gun truck was hit by a small piece of shrapnel; it entered his body through the armhole in his flak vest and sliced into his lungs. We’d been in Iraq for one week. One week and all the paradoxes of counterinsurgency doctrine faded away and our psychological conflict was resolved. There was no longer any question how we should respond to the Iraqi people and no longer much concern about how they responded to us. After that, there was no more mention of “wave tactics” and not much use for the “winning hearts and minds” philosophy, not in the common sense of soldiers on the street. Given these conditions—the danger on the street, the unidentifiable enemy, the combat training, the warrior culture, and the natural (and reasonable) interest in survival—it is unrealistic to suppose that soldiers will not be suspicious of and closed off toward the local people, among whom insurgents lurk, especially when those soldiers start taking casualties. It would be militarily imprudent for them to be otherwise. However, this problem, which is pervasive in the occupation environment, does indeed culminate in physical behavior, not just ideations. Choices are made and actions are taken. When the real-life dilemma arises for soldiers, to shoot or not to shoot, there will be resolution and usually within seconds of the potential threat presenting itself. This is the moment of commitment to one course of action that utterly excludes the other. There is no reversing this commitment once it’s been made. Similarly, though of course with less dire consequences, an actor on stage may improvise a performance, but each movement or utterance that is made represents an irreversible commitment from which further improvisation must proceed. For soldiers and actors alike, each and every commitment functions to solidify their trajectories. Past actions form constraints that limit the possibilities for future actions. In other words, once a deed has been done, the world, the theater, and the individual will be forever altered. In a counterinsurgency, the terrible difficulty is knowing on each occasion which commitment to make—to shoot or not to shoot. Oftentimes soldiers will not know if they’ve made the right choice until after the choice has already been made and the blood has been shed. For example, there were an alarming number of cases in Iraq, referred to as “escalation of force” incidents, in which soldiers harmed noncombatants in what they perceived as acts of self-defense through varying degrees of violence.7 In my own experience, these incidents outnumbered the occasions where the threat turned out to be real. I can attest that procedural measures were taken at the command level to reduce these violent misidentifications. As an assistant operations officer, I was often tasked to confirm that the battalion’s checkpoints were established in accordance with the guidance from higher echelons

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of command. And I believe further that these tragic incidents weighed heaviest on the soldiers themselves.8 The pressure I received to look closely at these scenarios came increasingly from the soldiers who stood at the checkpoints even after higher command was satisfied that all that could be done to minimize misidentifications was being done.9 But the very nature of the problem that I’m describing here precluded any procedural remedy, save an outright end to the occupation. And with every incident, whether the threat was real or mistaken, whether the choice to shoot was right or wrong, the tension between the cognitive antipodes—empathy and desensitization—was made all the more taut and the doctrine all the more unperformable. If uncertain circumstances arise, if a potential threat is perceived that compels a soldier to use force, to kill, to strike, or to handle roughly a local inhabitant, in that moment, the “winning hearts and minds” effort is subordinated to the practical necessity of the soldier’s own survival. Soldiers are then left with the disconcerting and rather unanswerable question: Did I kill a friend or a foe? The inadvertent killing of non-combatants may, of course, occur in any type of warfare—conventional or irregular—but what makes these incidents within a counterinsurgency particularly insidious is how integral they seem to the program. In counterinsurgencies, “escalation of force” incidents must be thought of as occupation(al) necessities, not “incidental” at all, but systemic. They are as inevitable as the threats that soldiers are trying to protect themselves from when the incidents occur. This systematicity combined with its inherently deleterious effects on counterinsurgents’ task to win hearts and minds makes the killing all the more difficult to justify. In such circumstances, soldiers have no doctrine, no mission, and no greater cause to lean on, to justify their killing. They are, in essence, alone with their deeds and have only their lives to show for it. In whatever ways soldiers find to resolve this moral dilemma, however they get themselves through, mentally and emotionally, their strategies will be utterly their own, not scripted for them in the FM 3-24. This pushes soldiers’ moral judgments into contexts other than counterinsurgency doctrine and forces the subsequent improvisation. The improvisation lies in the judgment itself and the manual becomes a meaningless prop in the theater of counterinsurgency. Cognitive improvisation is required in every moment of a counterinsurgency operation by every individual soldier, whether commander or troop. And when counterinsurgents must improvise individually, the organizations they comprise must improvise as well—that is to say, operations inherently reflect the human capabilities of the people carrying them out. Just as an individual soldier chooses, moment by moment, whether to empathize with a man on the street, or prepare to kill him, a unit commander must also base his operations on that inflexible reality—a reality that he will have already internalized and fully understood himself because he too is subject to the same human cognitive limitations. Insofar as counterinsurgency doctrine is cognitively unperformable, the tactics employed in such an operation must, to the same degree, be improvisations. So we may think of counterinsurgency operations as both cognitively and tactically improvisational outside the constraints of the text. And to the extent that counterinsurgency operations cannot be fully aligned with the tenets of the FM 3-24, they cannot be characterized as doctrinal. Even partial alignment separates them entirely from the logic of the text because “being compassionate” while simultaneously “being prepared to kill” is the essence of counterinsurgency strategy; it is, as John Nagl notes, “the sum” of the doctrine (US Army 2007:xiii–xx). Removing either term changes the bottom line.

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Anti-Performance, Anti-Audience, Anti-Theater The term Soldier Street Theater is delivered here with intentional irony and may even be thought of as somewhat oxymoronic because street theater is often understood as a form of political theater performed, in particular, by people resisting or expressing dissatisfaction with the state, its policies, or its social or cultural practices (Boal [1979] 1985; Schechner 2006; Lumbera 2010). Augusto Boal, for example, is well known for his theater of the oppressed, which was often performed in the street and created specifically as a result of his concerns about the tendency in traditional theater to reproduce and reinforce the power structures of society. Similarly, the term guerrilla theater, another brand of street theater, was coined by R.G. Davis in the Vietnam War era as a type of anti-war demonstration (Carlson 1996:180). Davis writes in an article for the Tulane Drama Review that guerrilla theater is so called to connote the struggle with an oppressive regime. Like guerrilla fighters, he says, “Guerrilla theater travels light and makes friends of the populace” (132). US counterinsurgents would likely say the same of their military patrols. Guerrilla theater has survived the decades and is still practiced today in various forms of reality theater but most often with political aims in mind. Street theater is often impromptu and improvised very much like Soldier Street Theater. And both are politically driven, though clearly the two performances are not the same. Soldier Street Theater is more like a negative projection of guerrilla theater; everything is reversed into a sort of anti-theater. While the most common street theater performers are typically agents for the oppressed, soldiers are essentially agents for power, performing on behalf of the state. They carry guns and use them. They seek popular support but offer no referendum—they’re not leaving if they don’t get it. They are immune from local law, though they retain the authority to enforce it. They are very nearly perfect opposites of those small powerless groups who typically perform street theater. And yet the soldiers are indeed on the street, they are performing, they are improvising, and to varying degrees they are trying to appeal to local audiences. This makes counterinsurgency soldiers different than other military forces that are exclusively performing power. US soldiers are performing something else, something not easily defined: a rather awkward friendship through firearms. Ironically, there are friendships that do emerge between counterinsurgents and locals at every level from riflemen to commanders. What can we say about this? Surely these kinds of relationships must be accounted for; they are often the source of American soldiers’ deepest pride. It makes sense that they should be; such friendships are emblematic of the winning hearts and minds mission and in a sense living “proof ” that it was achieved. But do these relationships truly demonstrate the doctrine’s validity? Do they negate my claims of its unperformability? It may be safe to assume that once a soldier has personally befriended a particular member of local populace that that soldier will no longer be cognitively divided. Survival will not be at stake and the skills required for staying alive including “being prepared to kill” can be set aside with respect to that particular person. Winning the hearts and minds of those specific individuals in personal relationships becomes a more manageable affair. However, the existence of personal relationships between some soldiers and some locals does not alter the broader performance in counterinsurgency theater. Even if every last soldier in the country developed at least five personal friends among the locals, which is implausible in the best of circumstances, that total would still represent an inconsequential figure. In Iraq, for example, five friendships for each of 150,000 troops would only amount to roughly 5 percent of the overall population,

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leaving the other 95 percent of Iraqis not in personal relationships with soldiers, all of whom would witness the counterinsurgency soldier-performers as strangers. And, therefore, all of those millions of Iraqis remain, from the perspective of the soldiers, a potential threat requiring all the warrior vigilance survival demands. There are other unsettling aspects of these “friendships” between soldiers and locals that also deserve attention. Heartfelt testimonies by soldiers about their close ties with particular locals are convincing, as they should be. There is no reason to doubt their sincerity; nothing particular is gained by fabricating such a bond. And yet, relationships between counterinsurgents and local citizens are deeply problematic in ways that are seldom mentioned in mainstream discourses. These friendships must, by virtue of the political circumstances that have thrown them together, be unbalanced, resting on the condition of American power. So a friendship can be sustained only as long as the local concedes the political, legal, and perhaps even moral authority of the US military. If the local “friend” challenges the authority of the counterinsurgent, then the friendship will dissolve. This reality is exemplified well in Iraq in 2011, when the Iraqi government asserted that any US troops remaining in country after the November withdrawal would lose legal immunity. The US called that a “deal breaker.” The same result would have to occur at the personal level if a local were to suggest that his counterinsurgent “friend” should, for example, surrender operational control of a given area or operate under local legal authority. Counterinsurgents will always insist that they want to transfer authority to the local government as quickly as possible—such a shift would signal success. However, such a claim comes with the presupposition that the transfer occurs within terms acceptable to the United States. If the locals don’t perform the script provided by the counterinsurgents, the performance fails. For better or worse, “friendships” in a counterinsurgency will always be subordinated to US authority. This casts a dubious light on the testimonies of such relationships. It doesn’t necessarily suggest disingenuousness on the part of the soldiers as much as it reflects the nature of power itself. “Power” is never introspective; its gaze is always directed outward. Likewise, agents of power such as counterinsurgents are very typically unaware of their own privilege within interpersonal relationships that they may regard as equitable or benign. Soldiers performing their street theater exert power over the locals by occupying their space. US counterinsurgents often characterize themselves as arbiters or facilitators of security and ultimately of peace in a given region but seem to pay little attention to the impact that such self-proclaimed and violently obtained authority might have on the local population. Ultimately, the very proclamation of friendship turns out to be just another means by which Americans can declare their performance a success without ever truly seeing the audience. The point of any performance is to engage an audience. Viola Spolin once remarked, “The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater” (1963:15). That observation would be equally apt in counterinsurgency theater. The FM 3-24 notes, “At its core, counterinsurgency is a struggle for the population’s support” and “arguably the decisive battle is for the people’s minds” (US Army 2007:51) For counterinsurgents, audience is everything. In counterinsurgency theater, the performance is in the streets, in the markets, in the homes, in the hospitals, in schools, and in neighborhoods. Soldier Street Theater is everywhere and so the audience has no choice but to show up. Counterinsurgents already have power over the people’s bodies; therefore, the decisive battle must be for their minds. One of the fundamental concerns for Augusto Boal in the Theater of the Oppressed is giving agency to spectators. Following Brecht, who strove to alienate his audiences from his

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characters to enable a more active social critique, Boal advanced this idea so that audiences did more than just critique; they actually participated as “spectactors.” The goal, foremost, was to deliver a sense of empowerment and equality to all those involved in the performance—players and spectators alike—until everyone was both, and those demarcating lines were vanished (Boal [1979] 1985). Another more recent example along these lines comes from Louis-Martin Guay, who created the “Theater of the Unexpected,” also politically oriented and driven by an interest in social justice. Guay uses improvisation as a central method for creation. He notes, “spontaneity gives birth to a unique connection between actor and spectator,” rendering the stage/house dichotomy obsolete (2010:6). That connection is made possible by an atmosphere of equality. Here again, Soldier Street Theater appears as a negative image of such productions. The performance is surely interactive; the locals are necessarily spectators and participants but the relationship is utterly unequal—politically, legally, and physically. Perhaps the most important freedom that soldier performers enjoy that local audiences do not is the freedom to leave when the show is over. Soldiers will return home to the safety and comfort of the US while their audiences will remain locked in the “theater of the aftermath” to live out their lives in whatever ruins and death were left in the wake of their performance. There is a natural indifference built into this arrangement that may very well be the most decisive and ineradicable demarcating line between counterinsurgents and the populace. With these paradoxes in mind, I suggest that soldiers are in fact engaged in a sort of antiperformance. Their improvisations alienate the audience, but unlike with Brecht, the alienation is not intended, not pedagogical, and certainly not desirable; it is, however, inevitable. As soldiers build up their defenses, emotionally, physically, and morally, an impenetrable barrier is created between themselves and the populace. The soldiers may be physically safe from harm (or safer, anyway, than they would have been without such defenses), but through the barriers they’ve built they can neither see, nor hear, nor feel the humanity of the people whom they’ve shut out. And the audience, likewise, is no more able to feel or empathize with the actors than soldiers can feel or empathize with the locals. Regardless of either one’s political disposition, it is difficult, probably impossible, to connect with each other through all the suspicion, the fear, the hostility, the caution, the protocol, the culture, the armor, and the violence that divides them. After all the bombings, raids, and patrols, the type of empathy that actors and audiences seek simply cannot be achieved. The ultimate question of any performance is always this: How did the audience respond? And in counterinsurgencies the answer is always vague. Apologists for American occupations will generally tout unconvincing benefits of the mission—freedom and democracy, physical security, improvements to political and economic infrastructure, and development of municipal services. But none of these can be taken out of the larger context of a violent invasion and a lengthy occupation, both of which comprise considerable bloodshed. The FM 3-24 offers two measurements for success in counterinsurgencies: First, the Measure of Performance (MOP), how well an operation is executed; and second the Measure of Effectiveness (MOE), how well that operation achieved the unit’s larger goals. American counterinsurgents tend to focus on the former, leaving the question of effectiveness almost entirely un-discussed. It is, in fact, quite difficult to measure effectiveness in a counterinsurgency and there’s no single way to do it. But there is a list of indicators available in the manual that can be referenced for estimation. At the top of that list of ways that one might tell if a performance is effective or not is by the number of “Acts of Violence” that have occurred in a given region.

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The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report (2006), a critical analysis of the progress of the US occupation at that time, describes “significant underreporting” in Iraq as a serious problem, a point they illustrate through “acts of violence.” They note, “On one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” To this, I would add that it’s difficult to render a good performance, or improve that performance, when the audience’s response is systematically ignored.

The Performance Goes On It has been argued, perhaps over-optimistically, that the US will no longer take on such massive counterinsurgency campaigns in the future. In a speech at the Pentagon in 2012, President Barrack Obama declared “the end of nation-building with large military footprints” and that “US forces will no longer be sized to conduct large scale prolonged stability operations” (Obama 2012b). This, however, does not guarantee the US will not find itself, intentionally or not, in exactly this kind of large-scale counterinsurgency again. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have certainly demonstrated that these situations tend to creep up unanticipated. On the other hand, the United States Government Counterinsurgency Guide predicts, “Whether the United States should engage in any particular counterinsurgency is a matter of political choice, but that it will engage in such conflicts during the decades to come is a near certainty” (Cohen 2009:n.p.).10 A 2012 Defense Department document titled “Priorities for 21st Century Defense” signed by President Obama noted, perhaps with this possibility in mind, that the military would remain “ready to conduct limited counterinsurgency and other stability operations if required,” and therefore would “retain and continue to refine the lessons learned, expertise, and specialized capabilities that have been developed over the past ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan” (Obama 2012a:6). Those lessons learned have been consolidated in the FM 3-24 (its most recent edition released in May 2014), and that manual remains the primary source of knowledge for the US military should such an operation come about in the future. The doctrine found in the FM 3-24 is not in any sense obsolete. But counterinsurgency doctrine, whether or not it appears to be politically or strategically effective, cannot be valid as a doctrine if it does not actually guide what soldiers are doing in theaters of operations. These operations may resemble the doctrine but only superficially. In terms of their own principles, the two are incompatible. I want to emphasize here that I am not arguing whether or not counterinsurgency operations can be tactically efficacious or whether they might be able to achieve some political objective; rather, those operations are fundamentally disjointed from the central tenets of the FM 3-24 and, therefore, cannot be thought of as doctrinally driven. This is an important point, I believe, since the counterinsurgency manual was sold, quite literally, to the American public as the rationale for continued operations in Iraq and for its continued use today.11 The manual was dubiously employed by the Bush administration in a public affairs maneuver to obtain support for its policy objectives through the rhetoric of military tactics. So if the logic of the doctrine fails, then support for the operation should certainly be called into question. The unperformability of the FM 3-24 lies foremost in soldiers’ embodied understanding of the text; that is to say, interpretation arrives through acts of encountering and judging local people in a physical environment (friend or foe), and choosing moment to moment whether

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to be compassionate or prepared to kill. This is the disparity between an unperformable script and the improvisations that follow in the theater of counterinsurgency. It is the inevitable gap that grows in the theatrical performance of soldiers attempting to win hearts and minds and simultaneously stay alive. It is an anti-performance for an anti-audience, in which all the physical and emotional barriers that stand between soldiers and locals are like a curtain that never goes up, dividing actors from audiences, and preventing any meaningful exchange of humanity. Under these circumstances, soldiers are left without any firm basis upon which to make sense of their own deeds and, consequently, the FM 3-24 forces them into ethically ambiguous terrain. That is a desperate place to be after a war and is certainly a source of emotional turmoil. The FM 3-24 does not, in itself, create these circumstances; it is merely a textual artifact of the struggle between a political narrative and the military’s attempt to perform it. The doctrine cannot be modified or repaired; it cannot be set aside. It is a fundamental expression of empire in the political and cultural context of the 21st century, in which earlier, more overtly aggressive forms of military conquest are no longer in fashion. The narratives and performances of American domination must generally resonate with its citizens’ sense of national identity. If they do not, political leaders will find themselves unable to effectively gain popular support for military operations and, consequently, be unable to marshal the human, fiscal, and material resources required to conduct such operations. Even the word itself—empire—now carries a negative connotation in the public, where in former empires this was not the case. The American story of itself does not include foreign conquests, so when America’s leaders find it necessary to militarily dominate another country, the performance of domination must look like something else. For the moment, that something else is called counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency doctrine does not produce ideology; it re-produces ideology. It is a natural manifestation of a system of values already in place, of a narrative already in motion. Soldier Street Theater can be best understood, I think, in terms of Boal’s critique of traditional dramaturgy: It’s not the performance itself that is the problem; it’s the entire structure of the theater that produces a particular kind of performance and a particular relationship between performers and audiences. There is no value in rewriting the script; the power dynamics remain unchanged. The FM 3-24 is a contemporary rendition of an old play. It’s imperial conquest with “wave tactics.” The only solution then, however difficult, must be to tear down the theater—the theater of war.

Notes 1 President Bush introduced the “new way forward” in a speech to the nation on 10 January 2007. The Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24) was published just a few weeks earlier in December 2006. 2 See Sarah Sewall’s introduction to the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” (2007). She writes, “The official story is simply that US doctrine needed updating to help US forces combat insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this can hardly explain the voracious public appetite for 282 pages bristling with acronyms and numbered paragraphs. With over two million downloads after its first two months on the Internet, the counterinsurgency (COIN) manual clearly touched a nerve” (2007:xxi). 3 I use the word “soldier” as a generic designator for all US military personnel, irrespective of branch of service. 4 See Packing Inferno where I describe Marine Corps training at “Matilda Village,” a simulated Iraqi village in California (Boudreau 2008:25).

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5 See Perl (2011) for some specific examples of music texts that were altered in performance due to physical limitations of instrument, performer, or text. 6 For a discussion of Marine Corps boot camp training, see Packing Inferno: “Manufacturing Killers” (Boudreau 2008:79). 7 The simplest example of this is the “checkpoint scenario” where soldiers are forced to discern carbombers among the many vehicles that approach their position. 8 I think the alarming veteran suicide rate reflects a great deal of moral angst among service members (see Ungar 2012; Kristof 2012; and AP 2013). 9 For an example of my experience of the escalation of force problem, see Boudreau (2008:167). 10 The US Government Counterinsurgency Guide (US Government 2009) is also referred to as the United States Interagency Counterinsurgency Initiative. Contributors which include the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Treasury, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and Transportation, USAID, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 11 The University of Chicago Press 2007 commercial edition of the counterinsurgency manual was marketed and sold successfully on Amazon.com among many other booksellers. US Army Colonel John Nagl made appearances around the country and on many television programs in a curious “book tour” meant to bring attention to, and support for, the newly drafted doctrine.

References Associated Press (AP). 2013. “Court Nixes VA Appeal in Case of Low IQ Inmate.” 25 February. Accessed 26 July 2016. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/ci_22663571/court-nixes-va-appeal-case-low-iq-inmate. Baker, III, James A. and Lee H. Hamilton. 2006. The Iraq Study Group Report. New York. Vintage Books. Boal, Augusto. [1979] 1985. Theater of the Oppressed. New York: Theater Communications Group. Boudreau, Tyler E. 2008. Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. Carlson, Marvin. 1996. Performance: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Clausewitz, Carl. [1832] 1976. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Eliot Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, Eliot A. 2009. “Preface.” In US Government Counterinsurgency Guide. Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. January. Accessed 5 August 2016. www.state.gov/documents/organization/119629.pdf. Davis, R.G. 1966. “Guerrilla Theater.” The Tulane Drama Review 10, 4: 130–136. Ferguson, Alex Lazaridis. 2010. “Improvising the Document.” Canadian Theater Review 143: 35–41. Guay, Louis-Martin. 2010. “Theater of the Unexpected: When the Spectator Becomes Actor.” Translated by Jacqueline Dinsmore. Canadian Theater Review 143: 6–10. Kristof, Nicholas. 2012. “A Veteran’s Death, the Nation’s Shame.” New York Times, 14 April. Accessed 26 July 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-a-veterans-deaththe-nations-shame.html?pagewanted=all. Lumbera, Bienvenido. 2010. “Philippine Theater in Confinement: Breaking Out of Martial Law.” Kritika Kultura 14: 97–102. Obama, Barack. 2012a. “Priorities for 21st Century Defense.” Department of Defense. January. Accessed 5 August 2016. archive.defense.gov/news/defense_strategic_guidance.pdf. Obama, Barack. 2012b. “Remarks by the President on the Defense Strategic Review.” 2012. The White House,5 January. Accessed 26 July 2016. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/05/ remarks-president-defense-strategic-review. Perl, J.M. 2011. “Between Text and Performance [special section].” Common Knowledge 17, 2: 221–347. Pew (Pew Research Center). 2008. “Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 2003–2008.” Pew Research Center. 19 March. Accessed 4 August 2016. http://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/ public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/. Schechner, Richard. 2006. “Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theater.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 462–481. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Scholte, Tom. 2010. “The Stanislavski Game: Improvisation in the Rehearsal of Scripted Plays.” Canadian Theater Review 143: 24–28. Sewall, Sarah. 2007. “Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual.” In Counterinsurgency Field Manual by the US Army and Marine Corps, xxi–xliii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spolin, Viola. 1963. Improvisation for the Theater: a Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ungar,Rick. 2012. “The Veteran Suicide Explosion andYou.”Forbes 7 May. Accessed 26 July 2016. http://www. forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/07/the-veteran-suicide-explosion-and-you/#62d7e94ab2fc. US Army (United States Department of the Army). 2007. The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: U.S. Army Field Manual no. 3–24: Marine Corps Warfighting Publication no. 3–33.5. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. US Government (United States Government). 2009. US Government Counterinsurgency Guide. Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. January. Accessed 5 August 2016. www.state.gov/documents/organization/ 119629.pdf. Worthen, W.B. 1998. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance.” PMLA 113, 5: 1093–1107.

11 NO EASY MISSION Zero Dark Thirty and Gendered Heroism in the Post-Heroic Age Lindsey Mantoan

Heroism Made Visible In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, partisans in the US were divided on many issues of foreign policy and military engagement, including the necessity and legality of detaining “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. There was general consensus, however, when it came to Osama bin Laden: he was an exceptionally evil enemy, and it was a primary military objective to capture or kill him. A few months after 9/11, an American-led team of Special Forces tracked bin Laden from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, into the White Mountains, and finally to the caves of Tora Bora. According to the BBC, over 900 Al Qaeda fighters guarded the caves, and despite calling for air strikes, the 100 coalition forces present at the Battle of Tora Bora were unable to break through to bin Laden—in part because they were told to wait for backup (Corera 2011). Bin Laden escaped; years passed. In 2007, the CIA uncovered the name of bin Laden’s courier. In 2009, agents located the courier, tracking him through an affluent Pakistani suburb to a large compound with no internet or phone connection. Concrete walls 18 feet high, coupled with carefully placed foliage and a 7-foot privacy wall, blocked sightlines into the compound. There were no windows facing the road, and the inhabitants burned their trash. Careful surveillance determined that a man paced the grounds for an hour or two each day; the CIA named him the Pacer. On 1 May 2011, President Obama addressed the nation and the world with news that the US military had conducted a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. Named Operation Neptune Spear (ONS), this raid has been shrouded in secrecy; official accounts of it have been contradictory and the details of the raid remain highly classified. The dominant documentary image of the raid isn’t from the Abbottabad compound, but from the Situation Room in the White House, where President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of Defense Gates, Secretary of State Clinton, and other civilian and military leaders waited for news as the raid unfolded. There’s no documentary footage for CNN to broadcast on repeat, or for terrorists to rally behind. In this void of images and footage, representations of the raid have filled the public’s imagination, and cultural objects representing it have come to stand in for actual documentation.

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The blockbuster Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT), and two memoirs by former Navy SEAL “Mark Owen” (a pseudonym), provide detailed, if censored, descriptions of the operation at bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. These narratives valorize a range of Americans, including the Navy SEALs who conducted the raid; the CIA agents, particularly an anonymous woman that ZDT calls Maya; and President Obama and his political and legal team who made the gutsy call to invade Pakistan’s airspace and assault the compound. These accounts eschew moral and legal questions about assassination and focus instead on the single-minded determination it took to locate and kill bin Laden. While some, mostly non-American, critics have condemned the raid, to date there has been no significant theatrical response about the legal, ethical, or performative issues raised by it; it is noteworthy that theater artists—especially those critical of the war on terror—have refrained from responding to this operation. Performance studies scholars haven’t rigorously engaged with this event either, despite dedicating significant attention to contemporary warfare. Plays like George Brandt’s Grounded (premiered in 2013) and essays by scholars such as Scott Magelssen (2009) and Sara Brady (2015) critique the rise of what Brady calls “drone culture” (Brady 2015:38); drones seem to be the warfare of the future, happening today. The bin Laden raid shares many traits with the targeted strikes of drone warfare, and yet evidence suggests this event is uniquely difficult to critique. Perhaps this difficulty stems from bin Laden’s status as an exceptional enemy. Many liberals laughed at the old west image President George W. Bush conjured days after 9/11 when he said he wanted bin Laden dead or alive, but the fact remains that even before 9/11, President Bill Clinton called bin Laden Public Enemy No. 1 (Zernike and Kaufman 2011). Criticism of ONS makes some Americans—especially liberals—uncomfortable. On the one hand, bin Laden was an exceptional enemy—one whose (untried) crimes justified exceptional steps to at least capture, if not kill, him. On the other hand, the drastic and extra-ordinary steps taken by the US government to complete such a mission seem, well, un-American to some critics—just as extraordinary renditions, enhanced interrogation, and indefinite detention of enemy combatants do. As Zero Dark Thirty and the Navy SEAL memoirs suggest, the reality and representations of ONS perform a highly gendered heroism in a post-heroic age of warfare. Taking out an enemy such as bin Ladin called for an exceptional feat of bravery, and the raid marked not only the end of the Al Qaeda threat, but also an iconic moment of heroism in an era where drone pilots kill without risking their own lives. Although ONS required bravery, this valor couldn’t be seen, which compelled representations of it in order to make visible US heroism—a masculine heroism directed at reaffirming the US’s place atop the world order. The masculine heroism of the SEALs who conducted the bin Laden raid sits in sharp contrast to the mundane and tedious military assignments executed by drone pilots and (often female) intelligence analysts. After significant debate among military brass and two different Secretaries of Defense, the Pentagon declared in 2016 that drone pilots are ineligible for combat medals. Rather than creating a new “Nintendo” medal specifically for cyber warriors, the Department of Defense instead created a pin that could be affixed to non-combat medals to recognize “remote but direct impact on combat operations” (Military Times 2016), deciding that medals of valor in combat cannot be awarded to drone pilots whose bodies are not put at risk as part of their participation in military violence. Sunera Thobani contends, “The relationship between masculinity and the nation has historically been deeply significant, with the ultimate mark of masculine valor being the willingness of men to die in the service of the

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nation, sacrificing their own lives to protect its interests” (2010:62). As the product of both technology and an increased aversion to casualties in war, drones have come to represent postheroic warfare, a type of militarization that lacks masculine bravery. It is significant that the most successful theatrical play about drones, George Brandt’s Grounded, features a female drone pilot rather than a male one. While drone pilots may endure trauma as part of their military labor (and even this is somewhat contested),1 they remain safely inaccessible from their targets, and the violence they enact cannot be viewed as representative of the hypermasculine military ideal. With drone warfare, combat skills give way to hunting (Chamayou 2015). In 1995, Edward Luttwak argued that western societies’ enthusiasm for sacrifice in war was declining, producing a post-heroic age of warfare (1995). Following his lead, Christopher Coker predicted less restrained warfare in light of the rise of un-heroic methods of fighting; however, he “saw a glimpse of hope in the Special Forces units of western militaries, in which the warrior ethos has survived” (Scheipers 2014:2). While drone warfare forecloses the possibility of traditional military values of courage, sacrifice, and heroism, Special Forces such as Navy SEALs are deployed to especially dangerous situations to perform tasks we haven’t been able to train machines to do. Drone warfare eschews the warrior ethos; Special Forces missions require and reaffirm it. The bin Laden raid shares many characteristics with drone missions: both are considered “targeted” strikes, both have sketchy legal frameworks, and both direct military violence at a person on the so-called “kill list” (Becker and Shane 2012). Additionally, both involve the US enacting military violence in a foreign country not currently at war with the US. Contemporary warfare, defined in large part by drones and surgical operations such as the bin Laden raid, draws on “the idea of an invasive power based [. . .] on the rights of pursuit; a right of universal intrusion or encroachment that would authorize charging after the prey wherever it found refuge, thereby trampling [. . .] state sovereignty” (Chamayou 2015:53). The fact remains that “[i]nternational law does not recognize the right to kill with battlefield weapons outside an actual armed conflict. The so-called ‘global war on terror’ is not an armed conflict” (59). These commonalities between drone strikes and the SEAL assault on bin Laden’s compound raise a question about why Obama preferred a Special Forces mission to the drone bombs that often take out high value targets. I contend that part of this decision involved the desire to return to a more heroic kind of warfare in order to defeat the man who symbolized the biggest threat to the US. According to Chamayou, “one of the troubles with unmanned aerial vehicles is literally the peril of becoming ‘un-manned’ in every sense of the term, including ‘emasculated’” (100). By putting the lives of US military men on the line, Obama authorized a heroic, high-risk operation in order to reclaim the masculine American hero; invading Pakistan’s sovereignty with SEALs framed this hero as part vigilante and part soldier, a representative of American military exceptionalism. At its most basic level, American exceptionalism is the belief that the US is unique and superior to other nations. Explaining this exceptionalism, Michael Ignatieff argues that, in a complex and ambivalent pattern, the US under some administrations “has promoted human rights as if they were synonymous with American values, while under others, it has emphasized the superiority of American values over international standards” (Ignatieff 2005:1). Stanley Hoffman finds that the US considers itself exceptional because of the universality of its values, and that it “has tried to develop foreign policies that reflect such exceptionalism,” creating a “lofty feeling of democratic superiority and universal relevance” (Hoffman 2005:225). In 1992, Dick Cheney, together with civilian and military officials from the Department of

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Defense, drafted a “Defense Planning Guidance” doctrine, which formed the basis of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war. Hoffman argues that Cheney’s document marked a turning point in American exceptionalism: “there is something wondrous about its new incarnation, for it is an exceptionalism based almost exclusively on military domination” (229). With the evolution of American exceptionalism from a values-based attitude to military might, shows of force become, in a significant way, the means through which the US maintains its exceptional status. Surgical operations such as the bin Laden raid combine a values-based exceptionalism with military might. In other words, not only is America morally justified in killing a terrorist in another country’s land, it is uniquely capable of doing so. These shows of force matter in terms of major combat operations, and individual heroes executing them— both must be made visible in order to reassert American exceptionalism. In the context of the bin Laden raid, the public can’t view documentary footage of the raid or name the SEALs and CIA operatives integral to its execution,2 so representations of the raid stand in for actual evidence.3 It comes as no surprise, then, that it has been widely reported that the CIA not only endorsed Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow’s representation of it, ZDT, but also provided access to classified accounts in order to help the film accurately represent the raid (Leopold and Henderson 2015). This connection between the government and Hollywood vis-à-vis the war on terror continues a collaboration that began with Karl Rove’s 2001 “Beverly Hills Summit,” where, surrounded by Hollywood elites, Rove instructed directors and producers to give the impending war a narrative that would reassure Americans and call them to national service (Brady 2012:111–112). In this case, both ZDT and Owen’s memoirs are framed as history and homage, but they really operate as a way to reassert exceptional, masculine American heroism by tightly focusing on the unique precision and skill that went into the raid.

The Raid as Performance Operation Neptune Spear is most commonly called a raid. Scholars Syed Hussain Shaheed Soherwordi and Shahid Ali Khattak, among others, call it an assassination (2011:349–365). While the response from the US public was varied, including impromptu celebrations at Ground Zero and considered reflection from religious leaders (NPR 2011), most Americans agreed with President Obama that “justice ha[d] been done” (White House 2011). As a performance studies scholar, I view it as, in addition to a covert military operation, a distinctly performative response to 9/11. This performance was staged in complete opposition to the visual and theatrical nature of 9/11; while bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon incinerated mass numbers of people for international television audiences, the US attack on him was a targeted, stealth mission deliberately executed in such a way as to avoid spectacular news media coverage. On 9/11, bin Laden killed thousands; during ONS, the US military killed few. Bin Laden achieved spectacularized violence against the US via mass murder; the US denied him the same spectacularity in death, reportedly taking photos of his dead body but refusing to release them to the public. Regardless of the lack of visual spectacularity associated with killing bin Laden, the raid demonstrated US military prowess and produced iconic representative images through Hollywood. This violence needed bodies—the body of a villain and at least one hero—and representations of the raid produced images of both. These copies became more real in the public imaginary than the event itself. When counterterrorism authorities amassed enough sound intelligence to determine that bin Laden was the man pacing the compound in Abbottabad, Obama and his advisors

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considered two scenarios for killing him: a B-2 stealth bomber strike and a special forces-led mission (Klaidman 2012:235). Ultimately, Obama opted to send in SEAL Team Six, a decision that some have said stemmed from the president’s desire to affirm beyond doubt that bin Laden had been killed (in other words, he wanted a body as proof, not body parts that had been blown to pieces) (20/20 2011). Others said Obama worried that a bomber strike would produce too much collateral damage (Klaidman 2012:241). Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said of Obama’s decision to send in special forces: “I worked for a lot of these guys and this is one of the most courageous calls [. . .] that I think I’ve ever seen a president make” (248). Regardless of the administration’s party line, the US went out of its way to avoid an act of violence that would bear any visual resemblance to the collapsed buildings and debris bin Laden produced in lower Manhattan. At every step of the process, the principle decision-makers who created and executed Operation Neptune Spear, whether consciously or not, generated an act of violence that looked and felt nothing like 9/11. In this sense, the raid represented a kind of anti-theatricality, and so did the US’s denial of a trial for bin Laden, which would have no doubt been seeped in spectacle. Like any theatrical performance, trials are available for interpretation and appropriation by audiences both live and mediated. Indeed, as the Obama administration has alternatively advocated for military tribunals and Article III trials for terrorists, lawyers for the State, Defense, and Justice Departments have struggled to articulate a clear framework for what to do with captured Al Qaeda operatives. Daniel Klaidman lucidly demonstrates in Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency that, in the absence of a politically and legally viable framework for detaining and trying terrorists, the Obama administration increasingly preferred surgical “kinetic operations” that kill terrorists to missions that capture them. These covert missions against individuals that lawyers for the US government have deemed appropriate to kill—a determination that changes mission language from “assassination” to “targeted strike”4—have produced very few images that could be circulated and not much in the way of spectacle that could flood televisions and other screens the way a trial would. Opinions differ widely as to whether ONS was a kill-or-capture mission, or only ever a kill mission. According to Klaidman, “One contingency discussed was the highly unlikely event of a capture. Everyone involved regarded the undertaking as a kill mission, but international law required a capture option in the event that bin Laden managed to surrender or if he did not die in the attack” (Klaidman 2012:245). Steve Coll finds that “American government officials have made false, confusing, and incomplete public statements about what, exactly, happened at Abbottabad. They have also dissembled about how Operation Neptune Spear [. . .] planned for the possibility that bin Laden might be taken alive and put on trial” (Coll 2012). It seems clear that any discussions about taking bin Laden alive were held as performances intended to satisfy domestic laws forbidding US agents from participating in assassination and international laws regarding surrender, rather than meaningful tactical discussions of how best to elicit a surrender in order to detain bin Laden. In other words, those performances became evidence in the event that the domestic or international legal community might question whether the US violated the law by killing bin Laden. Rather than meaningfully leaving open the possibility for surrender, the mission to kill bin Laden seems structured to provide the utmost satisfaction for Americans. A study entitled “Vicarious Revenge and the Death of Osama bin Laden” persuasively demonstrates that Americans wouldn’t have been satisfied with learning bin Laden had died of, say, liver failure; his death needed to be the result of intentional action by someone who had been wronged

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by him.5 The study doesn’t examine whether Americans would have been satisfied if another country had killed bin Laden, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that Americans would have felt some level of disappointment in bin Laden’s death if it had been dished out by, for example, a Canadian. American exceptionalism rests on the belief that no one else should or even could do what the US can, and when it comes to the country’s most infamous enemy, I would argue that that includes vengeance. Bin Laden had done the unthinkable—not only had he attacked Americans on US soil, but he had done so with tactical innovation, eluding the country’s intelligence agencies and permanently altering the country’s approach to security in ways both significant and mundane (airport security, for example). When President Bush said on 20 September 2001 that al Qaeda terrorists “kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life” (Washington Post 2001), he implicitly referred to American exceptionalism. Defeating bin Laden with a bomb or a drone would not have satisfactorily reasserted US military and intelligence expertise. A team of highly trained SEALs risking their lives in a covert mission on foreign soil to deal the final blow to al Qaeda, on the other hand, demonstrated the superiority of the US military and intelligence agents. This vengeance—and indeed, American exceptionalism—is highly gendered. President Bush’s statements about bin Laden after 9/11—“I want justice. There’s an old poster out west that said, ‘Wanted, dead or alive’” (Knowlton 2001)—set himself up as a cowboy sheriff, the epitome of old west masculinity. Obama, the softer, more analytic president, had to confront this brand of hypermasculinity established by Bush as fundamental to the fight against terrorism, and he did so by channeling it into a focused mission to capture the man who had eluded his predecessor. In their study of the media coverage of ONS, Lori Poloni-Staudinger and Candice Ortbals find that “Masculine gender frames regarding President Obama [. . .] shift in the newswires about the raid. In relation to killing Osama bin Laden, Obama is portrayed as taking decisive action, hence meeting the hegemonic masculine ideal; whereas bin Laden is portrayed as weak and as a ‘lesser man’ or ‘coward’” (Poloni-Staudinger and Ortbals 2014:53). Ordering soldiers to assault the compound in Abbottabad reestablished the military dominance of the US in the wake of the Iraq War, and asserted Obama’s masculinity. This gender dynamic matters because in public statements, bin Laden had taunted the US for being feminized and weak. Indeed, Hélène Cixous posited that bin Laden’s leveling of the World Trade Center towers was a kind of castration (2002:431). To symbolically reclaim both its masculinity and its exceptional status, which are inextricably linked, the US, led by a cadre of political and military men, needed to penetrate Pakistan and the compound at Abbottabad. Indeed, the gender dynamics of this operation, coupled with vigilantism and military prowess, both of which read as prototypically masculine, reaffirm the character of the US soldierhero as male. The only female in the narrative of bin Laden’s death is the CIA analyst who, by some accounts, single-handedly located the Abbottabad compound and ascertained that it was bin Laden pacing its upper levels.6 The principles involved in the creation and execution of ONS were, with the exception of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, men—and Clinton’s posture in the famous Situation Room Photo, with her hand over her mouth, drew fire as a distinctly feminized and therefore weak response to an otherwise masculine demonstration of strength.7 We will likely never know which SEAL took the kill shot,8 or all of the identities of the men who assaulted the compound, “clearing” rooms and killing bin Laden’s son; his courier, the fateful Abu al-Kuwaiti; and al-Kuwaiti’s brother. But we do know that every US soldier who flew into Pakistan on the night of 1 May 2011 was male. Jon Robert Adams defines “soldierly masculinity” as “the particular brand of traditional male function associated

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with heroism—courage, suppressed emotion, strength, and clearheaded decisiveness [. . .] men who exhibit these behaviors are soldier-heroes” (2008:12). The narratives and visual representations of ONS, particularly ZDT and Owen’s books, laud this soldier-hero while feminizing bin Laden. Further positioning women on the margins of this narrative, when Obama green-lighted the mission he instructed the SEALs that they were to minimize collateral damage and to avoid killing women and children in particular. To the extent that the women in Abbottabad have been discussed in relation to the raid, they are seldom given names. Further, hundreds of news articles reported that bin Laden hid behind one of his wives, using her as a shield, despite the government refuting this claim (Poloni-Staudinger and Ortbals 2014:51). Recalling Gayatri Spivak’s famous phrase “white men save brown women from brown men,” Obama’s directive continues one of the driving forces of Bush’s war on terror, treating women as objects to be rescued and not subjects with agency (Spivak 1985:7–8).

Heroism, Represented Before a single frame or sound reveals the content of Zero Dark Thirty, the film asserts its claims to accurate representation of the bin Laden raid with the words, in black and white, “The following motion picture is based on first hand accounts of actual events.” In darkness, we hear audio phone calls from those trapped in the towers on 9/11, which situate the events that follow in the context of a decade-long war with al Qaeda and its mastermind, bin Laden. The harrowing phone calls remind viewers of the horrors bin Laden spearheaded against the United States and its citizens, leaving no room for sympathy from anyone who thinks we should have taken him alive. In addition to ignoring any voices opposed to assassination, the film erases any allies or other countries who might have helped the US in its mission to locate and terminate bin Laden, and it ignores completely the issue of invading Pakistan’s airspace. If films are symptomatic of cultural concerns and beliefs, ZDT indicates that the US is the only country with the right and ability to conduct such a raid. The film’s central character, Maya, embodies the US, its intelligence, and its sense of justice—all of which are historically feminized. When audiences meet Maya, she’s wearing a mask during an interrogation, and for the first couple of scenes she is visibly uncomfortable with torturing a detainee; she flinches and squirms. Much like the US developed a covert system of torture after 9/11, Maya evolves quickly from a masked assistant to a lead interrogator. It’s a film with few words, and the brief dialogic exchanges reveal how much the mindset of Washington has changed in the aftermath of 9/11. During a conversation in the CIA’s station headquarters in Pakistan, a fellow agent named Jessica suggests to Maya that bribing detainees might yield intelligence. Maya disagrees, quickly dismissing this tactic as Cold War thinking; in this new world of terrorism, ideology will always trump greed. Maya’s words prove prophetic as Jessica offers a potential terrorist massive sums of money and he responds by showing up for a meeting with explosives, killing her and the other CIA agents present. Bribes, we learn, are unworthy forms of intelligence-gathering for the world’s most exceptional military power. America, ZDT seems to say, is unique in its ability to evolve its responses to new threats; rather than bribes, Maya—and by extension the US—relies on a combination of torture, technology, and innovative thinking to track down bin Laden’s courier, who leads them to the Abbottabad compound. Much has already been said about the film’s depiction of torture and the role enhanced interrogation played in locating bin Laden, and because I’m interested in the

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portrayal of heroism related to this event, I won’t rehash those critiques here. Suffice it to say, the film dramatizes the raid as the culmination of an almost messianic mission in which the ends justified the means. Indeed, when another agent questions Maya’s resolve, she responds, “a lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared to finish the job” (Bigelow 2012:1’17”). This line and other bits of dialogue regarding Maya, such as, “If you’re right, the whole world’s gonna want to know this, so you’ve got to stick to your guns now,” and “it’s her against the world” (Bigelow 2012), could just as easily be said about the United States as about this single character. Indeed, it’s difficult to call Maya a fully realized character; rather, she operates as a stand-in for the United States itself. Charles-Antoine Courcoux argues, “Unlike their male equivalents, heroines often functioned for instance as allegories of the Nation (Mother Russia, Mother Norway, the Marianne in France, etc.); that is to say women with a powerful national aura but deprived of any form of genuine life” (in Scheipers 2014:225–226). Maya lacks access to the kind of military heroism that the male SEALs claim when they complete their raid, and it’s difficult in some ways to even call her a hero. The New Yorker says of Maya’s character: “There’s no ideological context for bin Laden or those suspected of association with Al Qaeda; there’s also no doctrinal, or, for that matter, personal context for the protagonist [. . .] The character isn’t just a cipher but a filtered-out cipher, reduced to her function as the chief bin Laden hunter” (Brody 2012). Without personality traits that could identify her as relatable and sympathetic, Maya has one character trait: determination to get bin Laden at all costs. Contrast this gendered conflation of heroism and nation in the character of Maya with the way bin Laden was framed. The US had to walk a fine line when it came to handling bin Laden’s image with respect to the raid: if he was cast as too weak, the US mission would be less impressive; if he were framed as the continued operational mastermind of Al Qaeda, the US will have given him too much clout, making him a martyr that could be used for terrorist recruitment. News media representations after 9/11 emphasize his soft-spoken style and his long robes that, in the West, read as feminine. In “Vigilante Masculinity and the ‘War on Terror,’” Sunera Thobani explains that bin Laden is said: to hide in caves, an implication being that he flees the battleground and does not stand and fight like a ‘real’ man [. . .] Post September 11th, white American masculinity came to re-cast itself as manly primarily in relation to the Muslim men whom it sought to defeat and the Muslim women whom it claimed to ‘save’ [. . .] the vigilante form was fed by fantasies of Islam as violent, and hence requiring a greater violence to be vanquished. (2010:62, 65; emphasis original) In the film, bin Laden hides from the SEALs on the top floor of his compound while his courier and son are killed before the SEALs reach him. When they finally draw him out, he’s unarmed. A SEAL shoots him multiple times, he falls lifeless to the ground, and another SEAL shoots his prone body. The implication here is that a real man would fight back; bin Laden, however, offers no defense of either himself or his family. Indeed, Owen’s No Easy Day represents bin Laden as a weak, effeminate old man who in no way threatened the SEALs who killed him: “He hadn’t even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly plans into buildings, but didn’t even pick up a weapon” (Owen and Maurer 2012:249).

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If Maya is a symbolic, female representation of the nation and bin Laden is the feminized and weak enemy, then the male SEALs represent the soldier-hero. When the raid itself happens in the film, the SEALs are wearing heavy gear, making it impossible to distinguish between them. The camera angles during the assault on the compound and the killing of bin Laden put the audience in the position of the SEALs; we see the rooms and “enemies” through the green of the night-vision goggles. The SEALs in this scenario represent individual and collective heroism, and through them the viewer becomes the hero, too. As with the Situation Room photo, ZDT “made American exceptionalism visible, concretizing and materializing the deep-seated myths that allowed many to be vicarious participants in the capturing of bin Laden” (Hasian and McFarlane 2013:17). The warriors in the film are highly trained and well rehearsed, and camera angles placing viewers in their shoes make audiences feel like part of something larger—like exceptional warriors themselves. The relation between individual heroism and national exceptionalism comes to a head in Mark Owen’s two memoirs, No Easy Day and No Hero. The first half of No Easy Day contains Owen’s personal history, including his childhood in Alaska, his training as a SEAL, and some of the missions he completed (such as the rescue of Captain Phillips). Owen’s description of himself sums up the quintessential American man: “From the time I was a little kid, I was comfortable using a gun and moving in the woods, and being responsible for myself ” (2012:72). After devoting most of the book to his personal history and other missions he completed, Owen’s narrative of the raid itself reads as almost perfunctory; adhering to Adams’s definition of the soldier-hero (courage, suppressed emotion, and strength), Owen seems to go out of his way to resist any kind of sentiment when describing the preparation and execution of the raid. For Owen, the emotion comes after the completion of the raid, and in the book he details multiple instances of acknowledgement he received. When the SEALs landed in Jalalabad with bin Laden’s body, a first sergeant grabbed Owen’s shoulder and said, “You’ll be my son’s hero for the rest of his life.” (2012:263). Owen describes his homecoming back in the US, where 200 of his teammates were lined up to greet him: “it started to sink in. This was pretty cool. It was the kind of mission I’d read about in Alaska as a kid. It was history. But just as quickly as those thoughts crossed my mind, I forced them out. The second you stop and believe your own hype, you’ve lost” (283). This final line reads like protesting too much: if he didn’t believe in his own hype, he wouldn’t have penned a book explaining his role in what happened. The day after Owen arrived home, he was taking out his trash when his neighbor came over to him and gave him “a huge hug. She knew I was a SEAL and noticed I had been gone for a few days. ‘You never really know what your neighbors do for a living, do you?’ she said as she smiled and walked back to her house” (287). Clearly Owen’s neighbor put two and two together and concluded that Owen was on the mission to kill bin Laden; what’s more significant is that Owen included this moment of recognition in his memoir. Indeed, the relation between warriors and heroism is a fraught one, and many service members are uncomfortable when civilians eagerly label them heroes (Sledge 2016). This tension is apparent in Owen’s memoirs, works that demand recognition for the expertise and skill of SEALs, even while Owen titles one of the two No Hero. Owen’s contradictory attitude about his own heroism reflects something I think is inherent in the US soldier-hero: he must be exceptional, and simultaneously humble. Owen’s ambivalence about his two memoirs is evident in the writing; after narrating the SEALs return to the US after the raid, he explains: “we’d kept this whole thing under wraps for weeks. . .it felt like it was only a matter of time before some of our names appeared on the news. We just killed the number one terrorist in

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the world. The last thing we needed was our names attached to it. We simply wanted to fade back into the shadows and go back to work” (2012:287–288). Owen cites government officials talking publicly about the raid as his impetus for the book, contending that their public statements essentially granted him permission to write about it: “Since May 1, 2011, everyone from President Obama to Admiral McRaven had given interviews about the operation. If my commander in chief is willing to talk, then I feel comfortable doing the same” (297–298). In this way, the hero-soldier narrative is simultaneously extraordinary and mundane, with humility and cooperation signifying the ultimate heroism. The contradiction between Owen wanting “to fade back into the shadows” and being comfortable talking about the mission gets at the root of the relation between heroism and performance. According to Sibylle Scheipers, heroism ought to be understood as “a continuous process of social construction rather than the performance of an individual courage act” (2014:5). And yet, in an era of post-heroism, constructing heroes seems impossible. For the SEALs who executed ONS, national security requires that they keep their names secret—as does their warrior code, which states: “I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. [. . .] I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life” (in Magelssen 2009:n3). The SEALs might express concerns about the intelligence behind this mission—and indeed, in both ZDT and Owen’s memoirs, they do challenge Maya’s assertion that the Pacer is bin Laden—but they never express fear or doubt about their ability to successfully execute the mission. Given their anonymity, however, the public still cannot place the label of hero on these specific individuals. Owen writes in the introduction to No Hero that after the bin Laden mission, “I don’t know how many times I’d heard the word ‘hero’ thrown around. ‘Hero’ is not a word we use easily, and it had gotten to the point where it had lost all meaning in our community” (2015). Although he proclaims his discomfort when it comes to wearing the mantle of hero, he nevertheless devotes chapter after chapter to his individual fortitude and the inner strength he had to survive his career as a SEAL. It is impossible to read the memoir and not be impressed with the abilities Navy SEALs possess. It would be difficult to read of the feats he accomplished and not consider him a hero—in no small part because the title almost ironically begs for it. It’s difficult, of course, to leave aside moral ambiguity, and yet that’s precisely what Owen and ZDT do. Despite depicting torture and assassination, ZDT offers only one real moment of ambivalence. After bin Laden’s body has arrived in Pakistan and she has confirmed his identity, Maya rides back to the US in a military transport, the lone passenger. The pilot says to her, “You must be pretty important. You’ve got the whole plane to yourself. Where do you want to go?” (Bigelow 2012). She doesn’t answer, tears filling her eyes. She’s emotionally and mentally exhausted after her grueling multiyear hunt for the 9/11 mastermind. The film offers no answers for where the US wants to go next. One could probably convincingly argue that this moment suggests that the war on terror is over; someone else could offer equally as persuasive arguments that in this moment, Maya is gearing up for the next battle in the war on terror. In the wake of such a narrowly focused film, this moment of ambiguity rings not as profound or poignant, but empty. In an age of warfare where moral ambiguity abounds, Americans seem not to question the moral rightness of the mission that killed bin Laden. While many servicemen prefer not to

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be called heroes, those who conducted the bin Laden raid could more comfortably wear the mantle, were it not for the security concerns that keep their identities hidden. The bin Laden raid stands out as an epic triumph of American valor enacted by men who put their bodies on the line, and representations unequivocally frame it as such. Nevertheless, these texts offer a complicated vision of heroism in an era where warrior-heroes are becoming unrecognizable. They seem to produce nostalgia for a time when narratives of heroism were more easily constructed and consumed.

Targeted Strikes After four days of press conferences and speeches from the Obama administration in the immediate wake of the bin Laden raid—speeches which contained numerous contradictions— the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Martin Scheinin, issued a joint statement demanding that with “respect of the recent use of deadly force against Osama bin Laden, the United States of America should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards. For instance it will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture Bin Laden” (UN 2011). In a written response, the US pointed out that under the law of war, bin Laden was a legitimate target, and that the mission took great pains to distinguish between “legitimate military objectives and civilians and to avoid excessive incidental injury to the latter,” and maintained again that “U.S. forces were prepared to capture bin Laden, if he surrendered” (USSD 2011). Why does it matter that bin Laden, by most accounts, was unarmed when he was killed, and the US seemed, at best, disinclined to take him alive? It matters both legally and in terms of the kind of heroism the raid produced. Legally, Obama struggled while in office to establish civil trials for terrorists, as he promised to do when campaigning for president. When congress thwarted the administration’s attempts to use Article III courts rather than military tribunals, Republicans held that “the 9/11 attacks were an act of war on the United States. To treat them like conventional crimes would be to perilously misunderstand the existential nature of the threat.” Further, according to Senator Lindsey Graham, “There’s a difference between a common criminal and a committed warrior” and he was not about to see the country return “to a pre-9/11 mindset that saw terrorism as a law-enforcement matter” (Klaidman 2012:152). But while Republicans in the legislature accused the administration of criminalizing terror, their solution essentially militarizes the US judicial system. By favoring military tribunals over civilian trials, Congress, and then the Obama administration, transferred authority formerly residing in the judicial system to the military. And by engaging in targeted killing, whether via special operations teams or drones, the executive has taken upon itself war powers formerly reserved for Congress and the judiciary. According to Klaidman, “As a legal matter, targeted killings were acts of war—not assassinations—permitted under the authority Congress had given the president after 9/11 to ‘use all necessary force’ against al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated groups” (203). While changes to US law in the wake of 9/11 may have made the bin Laden raid legal, it’s essential that we examine the ways that these new structures for capturing or killing terrorists are transforming the balance of powers within the US government, and among the branches and the military.

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In his analysis of Zero Dark Thirty, Lloyd Isaac Vayo writes of the film’s ending: “Torture and President Bush are in the rearview mirror, with only clear skies ahead (though skies with drones); once the celebration at the World Trade Center site and the White House, spurred by news of bin Laden’s death, dies, 9/11 is no more. The question then becomes: now what?” (2015:114). Vayo contends that the closing scene in which a pilot asks Maya where she wants to go now, and she doesn’t answer, denies the public a sense of closure: “Though not as omnipresent in political rhetoric as it was during the Bush administration, we remain in the 9/11 moment” (116). Vayo points to the detainees still languishing at Guantánamo and the lingering threat of terrorism as evidence that we are still in the 9/11 moment. I disagree: bin Laden’s death symbolically marked the end of the 9/11 moment, and cemented the next moment in the trajectory of American exceptionalism: covert militarization enacted through surgical, targeted strikes, the uses of which skyrocketed under the Obama administration. In their “Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy,” co-chairs General John P. Abizaid and Rosa Brooks remind us, “While our military and intelligence communities have grown increasingly adept both at identifying and confirming the identities of al-Qaida affiliates and at precise and careful targeting, the criteria used to determine who might be considered targetable remain unknown to the public” ([2014] 2015:12). If the bin Laden raid was really the end of the 9/11 era culturally, it needs to also be the end of it legally. In other words, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) ought to be viewed as an expired authorization. Abizaid and Brooks report that: unmanned aerial vehicle strikes also raise questions about the continued efficacy of traditional congressional oversight mechanisms. The Obama administration continues to rely on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as the primary domestic legal basis for US targeted strikes outside of ‘hot’ battlefields, but the administration’s interpretation of the AUMF is extraordinarily broad—and even many former executive branch officials question whether Congress intended to authorize such an unbounded conflict when the AUMF was passed in 2001. (13) Bin Laden did profoundly terrible things, the US was justified in labeling him an enemy, and he died years ago at this point—why should we care, now, about how he died? Because liberals and artists are taking a firm stand against drones; but that position needs to also understand targeted assassinations, including bin Laden’s, as performances of American herosim and exceptionalism that are altering the cultural and legal fabric of the US. The bin Laden raid stands out as an exceptional instance of US heroism in the age of drone pilots. Drone warfare produces anxiety because, by not putting their bodies at risk, those who conduct this kind of warfare might be more inclined to engage in acts of violence than they would in more traditional combat. There’s a kind of heroism that goes unrecognized in all these narratives: the kind that turns to less violent, more diplomatic and legal, encounters with percieved enemies. At this point, the US has proven it can fly stealth planes (manned or unmanned) into another country to kill an enemy. If the US wants to return to the brand of exceptionalism grounded not in military might but moral authority, it now needs to prove that it won’t—that it respects domestic and international law, the judiciary, and its own integrity. Perhaps heroism in the post-heroic age

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doesn’t happen on battlefields or drone control stations; perhaps it happens in situations where civilian and military actors choose less violent means of engagement.

Notes 1 In A Theory of the Drone, Gregoire Chamayou contests the popular argument that drone pilots experience significant trauma (2015:106–113). 2 Over time, journalists have uncovered and revealed the names of some of the SEALs and CIA analysts involved in ONS, which some experts consider dangerous and possibly illegal. I will not give their names here. 3 The lack of documentary evidence has given rise to a number of conspiracy theories about the raid, including questions about whether Pakistan actually knew in advance that the US was going to fly into its airspace, and whether the entire raid was a fabrication. 4 According to Klaidman, “As a legal matter, targeted killings were acts of war—not assassinations— permitted under the authority Congress had given the president after 9/11 to ‘use all necessary force’ against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated groups” (2012:203). 5 The study also details how missions of revenge function to feed a hunger for it, rather than providing satisfying closure. Put another way, cowboy justice like killing an unarmed bin Laden might feel intensely satisfying for a moment, but it’s a fleeting kind of healing (see Gollwitzer, Skitka, Wisneski, et al. 2013:1–13). 6 Coll writes that “a team of analysts, many of them women, persisted painstakingly until a few disparate clues about one of bin Laden’s couriers came together and the courier was located in Pakistan” (2012). Owen writes of a single CIA analyst, a woman who was “100%” sure that “The Pacer” was bin Laden (2012:5). 7 In their article “Gendering Abbottabad: Agency and Hegemonic Masculinity in an Age of Global Terrorism,” Lori Poloni-Staudinger and Candice Ortbals synthesize media responses to the bin Laden raid with respect to gender, pointing out that “Secretary Clinton was variously described as ‘scared, anxious and emotional’ while President Obama had a ‘death stare’ during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden” (2014:35). 8 There is now public controversy over who actually shot bin Laden, and whose shot was the fatal one. See, for example, Cole (2014).

References 20/20. 2011. “Kill Shot: The Story Behind Osama bin Laden’s Death.” Video. 6 May. Accessed 19 August 2015. http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/kill-shot-the-story-behind-osama-bin-ladens-death/. Abizaid, John P. and Rosa Brooks. [2014] 2015. “Recommendations and Report on the Task Force on US Drone Policy,” 2nd edition. New York: Stimson. Accessed 23 August 2015. https://www. stimson.org/sites/default/files/file-attachments/recommendations_and_report_of_the_task_force_ on_us_drone_policy_second_edition.pdf. Adams, Jon Robert. 2008. Male Armor: The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Becker, Jo and Scott Shane. 2012. “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” New York Times, 29 May. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamasleadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=0. Bigelow, Kathryn. (Dir). 2012. Zero Dark Thirty. Sony Pictures. Brady, Sara. 2012. Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: “Whatever it Takes.” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brady, Sara. 2015. “God, the Pilot, and the Bugsplat: Performance and the Drone Effect.” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization 8, 2: 34–54. Brant, George. 2013. Grounded. London: Oberon Books.

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Brody, Richard. 2012. “The Deceptive Emptiness of Zero Dark Thirty.” The New Yorker, 19 December. Accessed 18 August 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-deceptiveemptiness-of-zero-dark-thirty. Chamayou, Gregoire. 2015. A Theory of the Drone. New York: The New Press. Cixous, Hélène. 2002. “The towers: Les tours.” Signs 28, 1: 431–433. Cole, Matthew. 2014. “Who Shot bin Laden? A Tale of Two SEALs.” NBC News, 6 November. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/who-shot-bin-laden-tale-two-sealsn241241. Coll, Steve. 2012. “Dead or Alive.” The New York Review of Books, 25 October. Accessed 19 Aug 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/25/bin-laden-dead-or-alive/. Corera, Gordon. 2011. “Bin Laden’s Tora Bora escape, just months after 9/11.” BBC News. 21 July. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14190032. Gollwitzer, Mario, Linda J. Skitka, Daniel Wisneski, Arne Sjöström, Peter Liberman, Syed Javed Nazir, and Brad J. Bushman. 2013. “Vicarious Revenge and the Death of Osama bin Laden.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40, 5: 604–616. Hasian, Marouf A. and Megan McFarlane. 2013. Cultural Rhetorics of American Exceptionalism and the bin Laden Raid. New York: Peter Lang. Hoffmann, Stanley. 2005. “American Exceptionalism: The New Version.” In American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by Michael Ignatieff, 225–240. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ignatieff, Michael. 2005. “Introduction: American Exceptionalism and Human Rights.” In American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, edited by Michael Ignatieff, 1–26. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klaidman, Daniel. 2012. Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing. Knowlton, Brian. 2001. “Terror in America / ‘We’re going to Smoke them Out’: President Bush Airs His Anger.” The New York Times, 19 September. Accessed 30 March 2014. http://www.nytimes. com/2001/09/19/news/19iht-t4_30.html. Leopold, Jason and Ky Henderson. 2015. “Tequila, Painted Pearls, and Prada—How the CIA Helped Produce Zero Dark Thirty.” VICE News, 9 September. Accessed 1 May 2016. https://news.vice.com/ article/tequila-painted-pearls-and-prada-how-the-cia-helped-produce-zero-dark-thirty. Luttwak, Edward. 1995. “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare.” Foreign Affairs, May/June. Accessed 1 May 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/chechnya/1995-05-01/toward-post-heroic-warfare. Magelssen, Scott. 2009. “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos’: ‘Theater Immersion’ and the Simulation of Theaters of War.” TDR: The Drama Review 53, 1: 47–72. Military Times. 2016. “DoD Rejects ‘Nintendo Medal’ for Drone Pilots and Cyber Warriors.” 6 January. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2016/01/06/ dod-rejects-nintendo-medal-drone-pilots-and-cyber-warriors/78364208. NPR. 2011. “Is it Wrong to Celebrate Bin Laden’s Death?” 2 May. Accessed 10 August 2016. http:// www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135927693/is-it-wrong-to-celebrate-bin-ladens-death. Owen, Mark and Kevin Maurer. 2012. No Easy Day. New York: Penguin. Owen, Mark and Kevin Maurer. 2015. No Hero. New York: New American Library. Poloni-Staudinger, Lori and Candice Ortbals. 2014. “Gendering Abbottabad: Agency and Hegemonic Masculinity in an Age of Global Terrorism.” Gender Issues 31: 34–57. Scheipers, Sibylle. 2014. Heroism and the Changing Character of War: Towards Post-Heroic Warfare? Edited by Sibylle Scheipers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sledge, Benjamin. 2016. “The Conversation about war and Our Veterans We Refuse to Have.” Blog post, May. 27 Accessed 27 May. https://medium.com/@benjaminsledge/the-conversation-about-war-andour-veterans-we-refuse-to-have-a95c26972aee#.1oot1wpbb. Soherwordi, Syed Hussain Shaheed and Shahid Ali Khattak. 2011. “Operation Geronimo Assassination of Osama Bin Laden and its implications on the US-Pakistan relations, War on Terror, Pakistan, and Al-Qaeda.” South Asian Studies 26, 2: 349–365. Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice.” Wedge WinterSpring: 120–130.

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Thobani, Sunera. 2010. “Vigilante Masculinity and the ‘War on Terror.’” In Islam in the Eyes of the West: Images and Realities in an Age of Terror, edited by Tareq Y. Ismael and Andrew Rippin, 54–75. New York: Routledge. UN (United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights). 2011. “Osama bin Laden: statement by the UN Special Rapporteurs on summary executions and on human rights and counterterrorism.” 6 May. Accessed 19 August 2015. http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/Display News.aspx?NewsID=10987&LangID=E. USSD (United States State Department). 2011. “Intervention: Report by Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.” Accessed 22 August 2015. http://www.state.gov/documents/ organization/194032.pdf. Vayo, Lloyd Isaac. 2015. “‘I’m the Motherfucker Who Found This Place:’ Locating Post-Bin Laden America in Zero Dark Thirty.” In Representing 9/11: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature, Film, and Television, edited by Paul Petrovic, 105–118. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Washington Post. 2001. “President Bush addresses the Nation.” 20 September. Accessed on 1 May 2016. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001. html. White House. 2011. “Osama Bin Laden Dead.” 2 May. Accessed 15 September 2015. https://www. whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead. Zernike, Kate and Michael T. Kaufman. 2011. “The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism.” The New York Times. 2 May. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/02osama-binladen-obituary.html.

12 GOING OUTSIDE THE WIRE Service Members as Documentary Subjects in Black Watch and ReEntry Sarah Beck

During the Cold War era, Michael Mann defined militarism as “a set of attitudes and social practices which regards the preparation for war as a normal and desirable social activity” (1987:35). In the aftermath of the catastrophic spectacle of the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, grief was quickly replaced by a heightened sense of militarism in the United States. By waging a moral war of good versus evil, the Bush Administration, Mann argues, pitted the United States against a plethora of “terrorists” and “rogue” leaders— indistinguishable enemies that required stopping by any means necessary (Mann 2003:9). Mann describes the extension of American power in the post-9/11 era as the beginning of “the new militarism,” whereby US military capabilities and political rhetoric were exercised offensively with the intention “to remake the world into a better place” (2003:8–9). Under the Bush administration, militarism became more brazen and to some extent hostile, permeating popular culture. Casual signs of everyday militaristic ideology abound from country music artist Toby Keith’s revenge ballad “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)” (2002) to the proliferation of “support the troops” yellow ribbon car magnets across US highways. Militarism extended rapidly into the television and the film industry, as evidenced in the series of meetings Pentagon officials held with screenwriters, directors, and producers in 2001—a collaborative effort between the US government and Hollywood to rally public support for the “war on terror” (Brady 2012:12; Westwell 2014:8). War preparation became literal in American football (Butterworth 2008; Butterworth and Moskal 2009) with the televised broadcast of the 2006 Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl featuring a smiling young boy seated “behind a Cadillac Gage gatlin [sic] gun” on a tank at the stadium (426), thereby demonstrating that exhibiting military prowess was just another part of the game.1 The integration of subtle military themes in these seemingly normal social activities which escalated in the 9/11 era is indicative of Mann’s “spectator-sport militarism” metaphor whereby “the audience is incited to cheer on its own team at no possible risk to itself and with no real view of the actual horrors of war” (2003:101). These acts of normalizing war as commonplace appear so ordinary and benign that they are intertwined into our “leisure experiences” (Lutz 2001:248). Considering how the mass media shaped the public discourse to mobilize support for the “war on terror”—often obscuring any opposition to the new

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militarist ideology—what better apparatus than theatre and political performance to complicate the rousing war-readiness of the post-9/11 era embedded into everyday life? The period also spurred a subset of verbatim plays of the documentary genre exploring the war on terror. Interview-based approaches to recording and mediating war narratives became standard practice in political theatre in the US and UK. This chapter considers how theatre practitioners within the post-9/11 period employed and reimagined documentary techniques to explore the entanglement of everyday militarism within the wider social fabric. In an effort to untangle the “war on terror” discourse, practitioners sought out firsthand perspectives from those directly engaged in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so, theatre practitioners have inadvertently adopted the role of ethnographers, interviewing members of the military community as facilitators and secondary witnesses to personal testimonies imbricated in conflict. The appropriation of war-related testimony for the purpose of creating a play entails an intricate process of negotiation between the playwrights and interviewees that has real-world effects. In the space between “real” and “fiction” lies the potential of performance platforms to express personal narratives of conflict and survival to an audience. Balanced against this is the risk that the trauma of others will be exploited for spectacle. Ethical and aesthetic tensions arise when personal testimony from military personnel is mined for theatre of the “real.” The military expression “going outside the wire” reflects the unpredictable time when troops leave the safety of their operating base.2 I borrow this expression, not to trivialize war, but to convey metaphorically the series of unknowns and possibilities that emerge when theatre practitioners enter the terrain of ethnography to collect and collate the war-related experiences of others for performance. To critically understand the balance between sensationalizing traumatic experiences and communicating lived experience effectively in the age of new militarism, it becomes necessary to examine how theatre practitioners negotiate responsibilities to the service members as documentary subjects with their prospective audiences in the dramatization of war. My analysis explores two central issues: to understand more deeply the interchange of military culture and documentary theatre-making throughout the research and creative process, and to critique the theatrical possibilities and limitations of conveying war-related experiences to an audience in the context of the new militarist ideology of the post-9/11 era. Examining the intricate process of facilitating war-related testimony and performing narratives of war for an audience, this chapter critically considers two plays: Black Watch (2006), a documentary play based on the experience of Scottish squaddies’ (British slang for soldiers) deployment in Iraq, and Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez’s verbatim play ReEntry (2009), based on the testimonies of US Marines about their reintegration into civilian life. For the purpose of this analysis, I integrate Carol Martin’s functions of documentary theatre as a framework to help assess how both plays respond to the new militarist ideology.

New Militarism and the Post-9/11 Resurgence of Documentary and Verbatim Theatre The relationship between trauma, testimony, and performance is complicated. Theatre of the “real” that originates from “the life experiences of vulnerable and marginalized individuals” (Stuart-Fisher 2011:193) becomes all the more complex when interviewees have been impacted by war.3 Alison Forsyth argues that the repetition of traumatic images indicative of the post-9/11 rolling news footage, married with the pressure for dramatists to respond to

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distressing events, “presents the risk of emotionally anaesthetizing the very people [the audience] that documentary theatre attempts to communicate with and inspire” (2009:140).4 This is particularly pertinent regarding the dramatization of war experiences, since emphasizing the exactness and authenticity of testimony devoid of theatricality risks making personal experiences appear banal.5 While the use of testimony in performance as an entry point to examining the repercussions of war is not a new phenomenon (testimonial Vietnam War plays Still Life (Mann 1982) and Tracers (DiFusco and Caristi 1986) being cases in point), the spread of militarism in the post-9/11 era precipitated a new wave of documentary, verbatim, and applied theatre projects addressing the experiences of military personnel. Mary Luckhurst contends that the appeal of verbatim theatre in western countries stems from a “widespread suspicion of governments and their ‘spin’ merchants, a distrust of the media and desire to uncover stories which may be being suppressed, and a western fetishization of representations of ‘the real’” (2013:200). Julia Boll correlates this approach to performing soldiers’ narratives as a response to war, observing, “it appears a natural development that the war traumata of soldiers and civilians inside and on the periphery of the war zone should find an adequate means of representation in the documentary dramatic mode” (2013:80). Despite the form’s seemingly ideal means of conveying war-related testimony to an audience, I share Boll’s concern that a preoccupation with others’ testimonies detailing suffering “can feed a sinister public appetite for stories of loss and suffering” (80). However, applied theatre projects responding to the aftereffects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan disrupt preconceptions that documentary subjects are fragile and easily exploited. For example, The Two Worlds of Charlie F (2012), about the reintegration of British service members, as well as Australian productions The Return (2014) and The Long Way Home (2014), featuring stories from Australian veterans, all dramatized personal experiences of military personnel—many of whom went on to perform alongside professional actors. What warrants further examination, then, is how trauma and spectacle are negotiated within the process of gathering and interpreting testimony in the research process. Assuming that the process of performing testimony is ever an authentic, transparent representation of documentary subjects’ experiences is problematic. The operation of recontextualizing testimony for performance is a highly curated process, from the manner in which testimony is gathered— including the interaction between documentary subjects and practitioner-researchers and how questions are posed by the interviewee in the research process—to the interweaving of stories from a multitude of documentary subjects in the organization and writing of the script; to the conception of the theatrical text in the rehearsal process; and finally to the production stage where it is reinterpreted by an audience. While definitions of documentary and verbatim theatre have been contested, the latter is the preferred term in the UK to describe the direct inclusion of spoken testimony as part of the text for the play (Bottoms 2006:59; Martin 2006:13). The problem concerning scholars is the connotation of the term verbatim itself. Deirdre Heddon has argued the term “verbatim” implies “the ‘authentic’ and ‘truthful’” (2008:130) and David Lane suggests verbatim’s claim to “promise to present unmediated truth” (2010:66) is not plausible. A preoccupation with presenting testimony as authentic and an unfiltered truth tends to curtail theatrical technique (Salverson 2001:125). I use the term verbatim, though not unproblematic, to refer to the explicit use of words spoken by interviewees and quoted within the play. The term documentary theatre, by contrast, is much broader in terms of conveying representation of the “real” onstage.

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“Verbatim” and “documentary” both describe the two plays I examine below: Gregory Burke and the National Theatre of Scotland’s (NTS) Black Watch and Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez’s ReEntry. Both productions examine militarism in the post-9/11 period, employing interviews with members of the armed forces as part of their methodology, but Black Watch and ReEntry approach the documentary form with different aims.

Black Watch Since the play’s debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006, Gregory Burke and the National Theatre of Scotland’s (NTS) Black Watch has completed several international tours, bringing Scottish working-class soldiers’ narratives to the forefront of the Iraq War debate. The play follows an awkward and at times tense meeting between a group of macho ex-Black Watch soldiers and a civilian writer who attempts to document their firsthand accounts of war. The main character Cammy, a disillusioned veteran, and his fellow squaddies Rossco, Granty, Stewarty, Macca and Nabsy, struggle with the presence of the writer and the task of articulating their war experiences. Flashback scenes of the soldiers’ deployment at Camp Dogwood in Iraq in 2004 are interspersed throughout the play—inspired by Burke’s interviews with soldiers—which coincided with the amalgamation of their beloved Black Watch regiment (Burke 2010; Cooper 2004; Fisher 2008).6 The scenes in Iraq are designed to show, rather than tell, what happened to Cammy and his mates in Iraq, and what happened to the friends they lost during the war. In its theatrical approach to testimony, Black Watch illustrates the complicated relationship between glory, tradition, and deception—but the theatrical allure of the proud military history of the Black Watch (referred to in the play as the Golden Thread) results in an emotional tug of war for the audience and ultimately romanticizes the soldiers’ sacrifice. The production does not so much unravel Mann’s “spectator-sport militarism” but rather illustrates the seduction of—while at times playing into—everyday militarism, showing the duality of its allure and betrayal. Fusing together documentary materials, dialogue inspired by interviews with soldiers, and fictionalized scenes, Black Watch employs folk songs, humor, and physicality to contextualize the accounts of local soldiers caught up in a foreign policy disaster.7 Though originally intended to be a verbatim play employing word-for-word accounts from Black Watch soldiers, director John Tiffany embraced physical sequences and sound to contextualize what it meant to be a soldier during and after the Iraq War.8 The departure from verbatim dialogue was partly due to the fact that soldiers did not want their testimony recorded, but also because Tiffany’s aim was to create a theatrical play, rather than perpetuating the artifice of presenting the precise exactness of the soldiers’ spoken language without mediation. To achieve this, Tiffany worked with Steven Hoggett, movement director and cofounder of Frantic Assembly (Graham and Hoggett 2009) and musical director Davey Anderson, whose influences became important in developing the physical, visual, and aural expression of the play. These elements of the play’s theatrical language are as important as the spoken text. The lure of militarism manifests itself in the play most potently in the sounds of massed pipe and drums, war ballads, and military parades, but does not pass without scrutiny. The set is purposefully reminiscent of Edinburgh, where international tourists flock to see the spectacle of military tattoos to probe the spectator-sport fascination with war. In the research phase of the play, playwright Gregory Burke’s accessibility to soldier/interviewees and their testimony had a significant impact on the play’s dramaturgy. To assess how

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Black Watch operates in the documentary genre, I draw on Carol Martin’s framework. She identifies six functions of documentary theatre: “1. to reopen trials [. . .] 2. to create additional historical accounts [. . .] 3. to reconstruct an event [. . .] 4. to intermingle autobiography with history [. . .] 5. to critique the operations of both documentary and fiction [and] 6. to celebrate the culture of theatre” (Martin 2006:12–13). Director John Tiffany’s original plan was for Burke to interview and draw from the soldiers’ experiences, spoken in their own words, which Burke would shape into a verbatim play, thus utilizing testimony to create “additional historical accounts” (Martin 2006:12; Tiffany 2012). Burke first met with a group of Black Watch soldiers at the local pub for their “Sunday sesh” (a time for socializing and drinking alcohol) where the ex-Black Watch soldiers would regularly watch football matches and play pool (Tiffany in Burke 2010:x).9 Although a stranger to the soldiers, Burke’s locality was an entry point for gaining the soldiers’ trust. Having grown up working-class in Rosyth, not far from Dunfermline, Scotland, where many of the soldiers were raised, Burke shared the same accent as the soldiers and used the same turns of phrase. Burke had even once considered enlisting in the armed forces because the career options in Dunfermline were limited (Fisher 2008).10 However, despite the rapport between Burke and the soldiers, they refused to have their words recorded due to concerns that their statements could be held against them by the Ministry of Defence (Tiffany 2012). This obstacle momentarily interrupted Tiffany’s original plan to integrate verbatim material. Without the digital recordings, Burke created fictional scenes based on their conversations, changing the names of the soldiers interviewed but using their descriptions of arriving at Camp Dogwood in Iraq as a starting point for recreating fictional deployment scenes. The negotiation between voyeurism and compassion became a defining thread in the creative process and the play itself. During the workshop phase of Black Watch, the creative team was confronted with their own preoccupation with killing as an act of spectacle. For example, Tiffany invited the soldiers into the rehearsal room during the workshop phase to answer the cast and creative team’s questions. Originally, he had planned on asking the soldiers, “‘What’s it like to kill somebody?’” as he anticipated that audiences would wish to know.11 Despite his initial interest, Tiffany, upon meeting the ex-Black Watch soldiers, refrained from asking the soldiers about killing directly, explaining “when I met them, when I met the soldiers, it was the question I realized I had no right to ask” (ibid). Tiffany’s probing question aligns with Julie Salverson’s concerns, whereby traumatic experiences are carelessly sought after by artists to satisfy audiences’ underlying desire—albeit temporarily—to experience the pain of others (2001:124). The thoughtlessness evidenced by Tiffany’s initial approach indicates a wider problem in theatre whereby personal testimony is utilized as a vehicle to sensationalize trauma. The impulse for theatre practitioners to gravitate to the most harrowing aspects of war trauma for spectacle diminishes service members’ multifaceted experiences, conflating events on the battlefield and the reintegration into civilian life. Three through-lines that operate within Black Watch examine the overarching question of the play: What are the recurrent lies told about war? The through-lines are: the presence of the playwright in the pub with the soldiers, the soldiers’ deployment at Camp Dogwood in Iraq, and the Golden Thread—the illustrious history of the Black Watch (Archibald 2011:93). The pub scenes set in the present illustrate the challenges the playwright faces, including recording war-related trauma and translating it into performance, the functions of which I examine later. The deployment scenes feature soldiers’ moments of boredom, strain, and vulnerability, punctuated by elaborate movement sequences animated by Hoggett’s highly stylized choreography.

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For example, the scene “Ten Second Fights” features the revved up soldiers fighting each other to beat the boredom. In this celebration of machismo, the soldiers’ bodies are expertly flipped and maneuvered, glorifying “idealized militarized masculinities” (Via 2010:44) that normalize violence as a man’s expression of bravery and courage. At the same time, the scene “Blueys” illustrates the soldiers’ correspondence with loved ones back home through a series of blue letter mimes. “Blueys” allows the audience a rare glimpse of the soldiers in their private moments when the sign language–like gestures convey the soldiers’ complex feelings of longing and vulnerability that are shielded by their day-to-day displays of masculinity. The Golden Thread through-line is accentuated by the inclusion of Scottish folk songs, the appearance of Lord Elgin, and the striking movement piece “Fashion.” During the slick, threeminute, ballet-like sequence, the lead character Cammy delivers a potted 300-year regimental history of the Black Watch, ranging from the formation of the regiment to the war in Iraq. Throughout Cammy’s explanation of the evolution of the Black Watch regiment, he is acrobatically lifted by other soldiers and dressed in various versions of the Black Watch uniform. Hew Strachan (2006) suggests that the regimental identity of the Black Watch is intertwined with Scotland as a nation—a tie that has been damaged by the unit’s recent amalgamation. The historical scenes in Black Watch are juxtaposed against the deployment scenes to highlight the ambiguity faced by soldiers fighting in the Iraq war as their regiment is being amalgamated. The through-lines are designed to critique the cyclical nationalist discourse that promises young men glory in war, a lie told to soldiers throughout history. The pride of the Black Watch regiment as part of Scotland’s national identity resonates with Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 2006) critique of nationalism. Anderson explains nationalism as a “process” not defined by geographical borders, but by cultural “imaginings” that compel strangers to die for one another out of a presumed kinship. He explains: [R]egardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. ([1983] 2006:7) In Black Watch, physical sequences and sound are used to illustrate the allure of the Golden Thread and underscore the betrayal of these “imaginings,” the glory for which soldiers are willing to die. These national imaginings were further distorted during the US-led invasion of Iraq, whereby coalition forces were deployed to “advance liberty and peace” in the region (Bush 2003). However, the play’s emphasis on military tradition at times idolizes warfare as a defining aspect of Scottish identity; therefore, critical reflection on the failure of the Iraq War is clouded with nostalgia for the Black Watch regiment. The push and pulls against militarism continues, as moments of pageantry are interrupted by displays of agitation and miscommunication. At the beginning of the play, Cammy directly addresses the audience, making a strong caveat for watching a play about combat soldiers’ stories: Cammy: See, I think people’s minds are usually made up about you if you were in the army. Beat. They are though ay?

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Beat. They poor fucking boys. They cannay day anything else. They cannay get a job. They get exploited by the army. Beat. Well I want you to fucking know. I wanted to be in the army. I could have done other stuff. I’m not a fucking knuckle-dragger. (Burke 2010:3–4) In this way Cammy’s speech upsets the spectator-sport of the audience’s gaze, making clear that we are not welcome to sympathize with soldiers. The effect is one of purposeful discomfort for the audience, whose bogus pity is being called into question, an effect accentuated by the traverse stage. This complex relationship between audience, soldiers, and identification, a recurring tension throughout the play, manifests itself in the form of the writer character. Here the play “intermingle[s] autobiography with history” (Martin 2006:13). The writer character in Black Watch is utilized to illuminate civilian spectators’ underlying enthusiasm for hearing war stories, often hidden behind a mask of good intentions. Tiffany made the decision to integrate the playwright as a theatrical device to confront his initial question, “What it’s like to kill somebody?” In doing so, the writer character became representative of the audience. As Tiffany explains: [T]he writer’s story, is for me about the audience—I think we have this insatiable desire to hear these war stories. Almost to be voyeurs. And “Did you kill anybody?” And that’s interesting because that’s the question, “What’s it like to kill somebody?” (2012) The writer/soldier dynamic highlights the frustration felt by soldiers towards a public that sympathizes with their experiences of war without reflecting on how they are implicated in the wars fought in their name. Moreover, the writer character is also used to critique contemporary plays that imply that the testimonies of others, particularly those affected by war, are shared effortlessly. In an effort to “critique the operations of both documentary and fiction” (Martin 2006:13), Black Watch complicates popular assumptions that verbatim theatre is somehow a more transparent or truthful approach through its use of the writer character. This indication is significant as it alerts audiences to the level of mediation that occurs in the interview process of verbatim theatre making. What’s more, it highlights the reality that approaching living subjects in an effort to extract personal experiences for public performance is more ethically complex than editing verbatim material from public transcripts. Burke (2011) describes the inspiration for the writer character as “a nice liberal guy who’d feel their pain,” echoing Stephen Bottoms’s (2006) critique of verbatim plays that purport that playwrights have unprecedented access into the private lives of others, and are somehow equipped to speak on behalf of verbatim subjects’ innermost feelings. The interviewer/ writer fails many times to connect with soldiers, who resist being reduced to victims of the war on terror agenda. Bottoms insists that the “emphasis on the verbatim tends to obscure the world-shaping role of the writer in editing and juxtaposing the gathered materials” (59). Bottoms contends that theatre practitioners, and particularly playwrights, should be more

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textually reflexive of their positioning when mediating spoken testimony “by the way of reminding audiences that history itself is necessarily complex, uncertain, and always already theatricalized” (67). The presence of the writer is designed to alert audiences that trauma, like history, is a heavily mediated process. For the most part, the writer/soldier division is effective in challenging audiences’ relationships to soldiers, but the play veers into the new militarist ideology through Burke’s cinematic approach to the soldiers’ characterization. For example, in the scene “Pub 4,” Stewarty, a soldier who suffers from PTSD, threatens to break the writer’s arm. The scene is used to heighten the dramatic tension between the writer—“us” and the soldier—“them,” but the device has moral implications. This particular uncritical portrayal of Stewarty forecloses opportunities to consider the complexity of the soldiers’ experience. It risks, in its clichéd representation of the soldier, perpetuating the impression that combat veterans are volatile, dangerous, and broken. This depiction stems from Burke’s approach to generating fictional characters to enhance the play’s narrative as he explained in our interview: They’re recognizable stock-in-trade war movies characters [. . .] You have to have stock characters—you have the funny one, you have the psychopath and the one who’s not coming back. The guy who everyone’s gonna feel sorry for—who’s going to die. (Burke 2011) By ditching constructions more representative of the real soldiers interviewed in favor of war movie archetypes to suit dramatic purposes, Burke evidences a level of disregard for the individual experiences of the soldiers interviewed. Furthermore, the Hollywood stereotypes become more problematic in the play’s attempt “to reconstruct an event” (Martin 2006:13) in its emotive retelling of the blast that killed three Black Watch soldiers in Iraq in 2004 (BBC News 2004). Karen Hall (2007) criticizes how soldiers’ deaths are appropriated in television and film for audiences’ indulgence by depicting the loss of “our boys” (101) as heightened in popular culture in the aftermath of 11 September. The loss of “our boys” is most prominently felt in the scene “Casualties.” Tarp falls from the scaffolding, revealing the inert bodies of the comical Fraz, the new recruit Kenzie, and the formidable sergeant. Suspended by strings, their lifeless bodies descend in slow motion, accompanied by Margaret Bennett’s rendition of “A Thearlaich Òig” (Oh Young Charles Stewart) (Bennett and Bennett 2010:24) sung in Gaelic.12 While prior to “Casualties” the integration of fictional scenes, physical sequences, songs, and textual reflexivity was used to interrogate the spectacle of militarism, the combination of the hanging bodies of the soldiers on display, accompanied by the Gaelic lament, appeals to the audiences’ desire to mourn their fallen heroes. Fraz, Kenzie, and the sergeant’s deaths were supposed to arouse a sense of responsibility amongst the audience for real Black Watch soldiers who were killed. The deaths of Fraz, Kenzie, and the sergeant are representative of Black Watch soldiers Sergeant Stuart Gray, Private Paul Lowe, and Private Scott McArdle who, alongside an Iraqi interpreter (not represented in the play), were ambushed by a suicide bomber at a roadside checkpoint in Iraq on 4 November 2004 (BBC News 2004). Tiffany himself explained how the scene “Casualties” was inspired by the footage from an insurgent’s camera capturing images of the attack as it unfolded. Tiffany (2012) expressed that he felt a sense of responsibility to the mothers of the soldiers killed to represent what happened in a way that would affect the audience.

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However, the Iraqi translator, who died alongside the Black Watch soldiers—though mentioned in passing by the soldiers in the play—is never represented onstage. Highlighting the play’s ethnocentrism, David Archibald poses the question: Why are there only three bodies? The translator is also killed: but he is rubbed out, literally and metaphorically. Again, conscious or otherwise, it erases the Iraqis (even the ones fighting with “our boys”) from the narrative. (2008:11) Building on this, the erasure of the Iraqi translator resonates with Judith Butler’s concept of precarity. In response to US political rhetoric and the invasion of Iraq, Butler (2010) examines how the personhood of others (including the lives of Iraqi and Afghani civilians) is downgraded in times of war, whereby US mass media framed certain lives to be more grievable than others. Butler contends, “without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than a life” (15). The imbalance of personhood featured in the scene “Casualties,” in its prioritizing of the Black Watch soldiers as lives worth grieving in comparison to the absent Iraqi translator, parallels the same rhetorical strategies of the Bush administration. Although the Bush administration restricted coverage of the deaths of US soldiers (see Kennedy 2008), on occasion certain US soldiers’ deaths were politicized; individual soldiers were celebrated for their battlefield heroics (as seen in such cases as Pat Tillman and Paul Ray Smith) (Sjoberg 2010:209–218), while at the same time civilian causalities were dismissed as collateral damage. This inability to recognize our mutual precarity is problematic. As long as lives are skewed to be more or less grievable, a cycle of violence, as Butler suggests, will continue. In this way, the ability of Black Watch audiences to comprehend the human cost of war, beyond western normative frames, is limited.13 As a result, the emotive climax of the play depicted in “Casualties” complicates the creative team’s aim to critique the British and American public’s participation in the war in Iraq. Fundamentally, the aim of Black Watch is to analyze militarist attitudes regarding the Iraq war, but its rousing climax, fueled by popular archetypes in war films, in favor of more pragmatic representations of the real soldiers interviewed, further separates military personnel from civilians. We feel sympathy for the soldiers depicted, but, as Susan Sontag suggests: So far as long as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering [. . .] to set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering. (2003:91) The emotive Hollywood character types—though dramatically appealing—encourage the audience to lament the deaths of “our boys,” despite the intentions of the creative team, anesthetize audiences and, at times, fall short of challenging audiences’ relationship with the Iraq war, particularly since Iraqi soldiers and civilians rarely cross the audience’s radar. At the heart of Black Watch is complexity of the romanticized military tradition and the national lies told at the expense of soldiers’ lives.

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ReEntry Adopting a more ethically considered approach to engaging combat veterans, Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez’s play ReEntry features verbatim dialogue taken directly from interviews with US Marines as a means of deconstructing spectator-sport militarism. Counteracting civilians’ fascination with battlefield heroics, ReEntry questions the notion that there is a civilian/marine divide or a “warrior culture” (Sanchez 2011) where US marines are prone to kill as easily as civilians kill in a videogame. Rather, the play highlights that the intricate relationship between civilians and US marines requires understanding, not sensationalizing. While less theatrical in its approach to testimony than Black Watch, ReEntry serves a clear purpose—to enhance communication between members of the armed forces and civilian audiences. Moreover, Emily Ackerman and her fellow cowriter and director, K.J. Sanchez, did not intend to show the spectacle of war, but to tell, via the use of marines’ spoken accounts, how militarism is integrated into our daily lives. First commissioned by Two River Theatre Company in 2008 for a production in Red Bank, NJ, ReEntry has been performed at Urban Stages in New York and Baltimore’s Center Stage, and has also been featured at military conferences and Marine Corps bases for the benefit of service members and marine families (Sanchez 2011). As Sanchez explains, “My hope is that they see the characters in the play and say, ‘I recognize that, I’m going through that. Yep, I’ve seen that.’ And then they know that they’re not alone. That’s the single most

FIGURE 12.1 ReEntry at Baltimore’s Center Stage, 2010. Left to right: Bobby Moreno, Joseph Harrell, and P.J. Sosko. Written by Emily Ackerman and K.J. Sanchez; directed by K.J. Sanchez; scene and costume design by Marion Williamson; lighting design by Russell Champa. Photo by Richard Anderson; courtesy K.J. Sanchez.

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important message, that you’re not alone” (Sanchez in Ibarra 2011). ReEntry exemplifies a crossover between applied theatre and verbatim theatre. In the spirit of applied theatre—a term commonly associated with “forms of activity that are specifically intended to benefit individuals, communities and societies” (Nicholson 2014:3), Ackerman and Sanchez’s aim was to create a piece of theatre that improved communication between combat veterans and civilian audiences via the use of verbatim dialogue from interviews. In this way, ReEntry “elaborates on the oral culture of theatre” (Martin 2006:13) by interweaving verbatim monologues compiled from the recorded interview material as a means of conveying marines’ war-related experiences. The presentation of verbatim dialogue delivered by actors is not excessively hyperrealistic, where the inclusion of every tic, cough, and tremble is intended to convey the most precise delivery of the interviewees’ words. Rather, actors present the dialogue more loosely, employing a sense of the interviewees’ mannerisms without ventriloquizing. In the playwrights’ notes on the play text, while conscious not to “anesthetize” (Forsyth 2009:140) audiences with relentless renderings of traumatic accounts, Ackerman and Sanchez advise, “self-pity and sentimentality should be avoided while performing ReEntry, even when discussing a difficult subject matter” (2010:5). Actors perform a multitude of roles, often changing clothes or acquiring props to indicate a new character. ReEntry integrates multimedia, projecting images and text to contextualize scenes. Footage and snapshots provide atmosphere; military paraphernalia displayed on walls conveys location and popular rock songs such as The Raconteurs’ “Salute your Solution,” blare between scene changes. Minimal in comparison to the choreography of Black Watch, physical military-style “interlude[s]” are utilized minimally to contextualize scenes (Ackerman and Sanchez 2010:10). Titles of scenes are projected in order to introduce characters. For the creation of the play, Ackerman and Sanchez, who both had previous experience in verbatim theatre as associate artists of the New York–based investigative theatre company The Civilians (Sanchez 2011:56–57), interviewed more than one hundred marines at military conferences, at their homes, and in bars as part of their research. Ackerman, whose two brothers had been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Sanchez, who had five brothers who served in the Vietnam War, had an advantage over Gregory Burke, as they proceeded with the project having more familiarity with military culture (Sanchez 2011:56–57; Levin 2011; Pressley 2010). Ackerman and Sanchez were tactful in their interview approach, exercising sensitivity to marines’ experiences of war and reintegration. In comparison to Tiffany’s initial desire to hear soldiers’ experiences of killing as an extension of what he thought an audience wanted to hear, Ackerman and Sanchez were less concerned about satisfying the spectator-sport desires of an audience. In Ackerman’s own words, she contends, “we knew that you don’t ever ask someone if they killed anyone” (Ackerman in Bartel 2010). Rather than seeking out traumatic experiences to sensationalize, Ackerman and Sanchez asked broader questions to allow for more complex and nuanced responses. Meeting with marines returning from deployment, Sanchez explains the central question driving the interview process for the play: [W]e asked them one simple question “What is it like to go from being downrange, to be standing in line at the grocery store?” “What is it like to re-integrate with your families, with your community, your country?” (Sanchez in Ibarra 2011:00:00:36–00:00:46)

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By casting a wider net in terms of the range of research questions and participants (from servicemen and women to marines’ family members), Ackerman and Sanchez acknowledged that the effects of war are imprinted on the wider social fabric of American culture. Even though Ackerman and Sanchez had family members who were marines, they had to confront their own preconceptions regarding military culture and develop rules in the field for improving communication with service members. Sanchez contends that understanding basic military language proved valuable, especially knowing something as basic as never referring to a marine as a soldier, as well as refraining from expressions of veneration towards the marines for their service, a gratuitous conversational convention that triggers an array of complex emotional responses from service members (such as embarrassment, resentment, confusion, and frustration) (Sanchez 2011:57). Underpinning Ackerman and Sanchez’s creative methodology was the use of theatre as an apparatus to raise awareness of service members’ experiences preparing for war, and more substantially, the challenges those who served in uniform face reintegrating into civilian society. The names of the interviewees were changed to protect their identities. ReEntry “intermingles autobiography with history” (Martin 2006:13) to illustrate how militarism affects families—and, more widely, civilian audiences—in addition to marines. The play focuses on a marine family’s journey, following the deployments and reintegration of marine brothers John and Charlie, their mother, and their sister, Liz—who is representative of Ackerman. In this way, ReEntry drifts into the realm of autobiography, as the main characters Charlie and John represent Ackerman’s brothers (Levin 2011). Deirdre Heddon (2008) suggests that in autobiographical performance, the ethical investment of practitioners can be higher than in verbatim theatre, as the playwright/performer is more intimately involved in representing partners, parents, siblings, and close friends in performance; therefore, the playwright/ performer is more exposed and liable for their construction of personal materials. As Heddon explains, “[a] sense of betrayal is, perhaps, also greater, given that trust is a key component of most intimate relationships and it is within such relationships that one can arguably become most exposed and therefore ‘known’” (143). Ackerman is perhaps more ethically implicated in the representation of her verbatim subjects than fellow verbatim playwrights, as she represents the experiences of those close to her. In the same way that playwright Burke becomes an interrogatory character, Liz functions as a bridge between civilian audiences and service members, as she describes herself as an anti-war, liberal artist from New York trying to come to terms with her brothers’ career decisions (Ackerman and Sanchez 2010:10). While Ackerman and Sanchez emphasize a respect for the verbatim subjects they interviewed, the process of generating testimony is not critiqued in the play as effectively as it is in Black Watch. The character of Liz, representative of playwright Ackerman, speaks to the audience with a unique expertise being a sister of marines, but the playwrights’ own mediation of material is not addressed. Although there is the inclusion of the tape recorder clicking on, and the occasional question repeated by the characters—indicating the presence of the playwrights at the original interview—any tension or forewarning of how the stories will be used is omitted. Instead, actors representing the verbatim subjects directly address the audience, positioning the audience as the interviewer (5). In this way, Ackerman and Sanchez fall prey to Bottoms’s critique of verbatim theatre—namely, that their work encourages audiences to watch with the assumption that the authors have unprecedented access to traumatic experiences. The lack of textual reflexivity, in my view, is due to Ackerman and Sanchez’s complacency about being personally invested in military culture through their familial relationship with marines.

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The play interrogates the circulation of the “support your troops” rhetoric, thereby revealing war veterans’ impression of public displays of reverence towards military personnel. This is realized in the bar scene, where marines (who pause for a photo opportunity with the occasional passerby, the images of which are projected on large screen) express their mixed feelings about civilians’ veneration for the military—from gratitude to frustration, embarrassment, and perplexity (Sanchez 2011:57). In the post-9/11 new militarism, service members on the ground became symbolic of moral righteousness, as seen in Michael Silk’s critique of Fox News portrayals of “frontline troops as heroes and liberators” (2012:17). The language of sacrifice and veneration for the military became a central part of the Bush mythology to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Butterworth 2008). Additionally, coalition forces service members deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq became enmeshed in the cultural production of political rhetoric. In ReEntry, the circulation of the “support the troops” rhetoric, sometimes vexing for service members, is addressed directly in the story of Pete, a marine who was injured in 2004 after an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) exploded on his head in Fallujah. Pete explains how peculiar he felt when invited to attend a boxing match promoted by Don King, where he was introduced to and applauded by the crowd for his service (Ackerman and Sanchez 2010:11). Pete’s story resonates with Michael Butterworth (2008) and Laura Sjoberg’s critiques of Pat Tillman as one of the “stars of the ‘war on terror’” (Sjoberg 2010:210). Tillman was a former NFL player for the Arizona Cardinals who left his promising professional football career to enlist in the US Army and was killed in Afghanistan. Tillman’s death, as Butterworth explains, “condensed a symbol of American heroism and sacrifice” and he subsequently became “a metonym for all of the 4,000 Americans who have died in the ‘war on terror’” despite the fact that he had been killed by friendly fire (2008:321). Extending beyond the frames of a militarism that naturalizes war as an exclusively masculine activity, ReEntry embraces women’s experiences of militarism, with military families’ knowledge of deployments and reintegration providing “additional historical accounts” (Martin 2006:12). This is realized at the start of the play, which features a lecture given by a marine CO (Commanding Officer) played by a former marine drill instructor and actor, Joseph C. Harrell (Piepenburg 2010) as a framing device. The CO directly addresses the marine families—now the civilian theatre audience—about what to prepare for throughout their veteran/loved one’s journey ahead. Acknowledging that the experiences of military families are critical, Nancy Sherman writes: Families at home are also under severe stress, emotionally, psychologically, and financially. With daily e-mail and cell phone conversations between soldiers and their families, stateside family members suffer combat fatigue in real time alongside their loved ones on the battlefield. (2010:81) Including marine families’ perspectives provides audiences the opportunity to consider how troops’ deployments and subsequent return from the battlefield permeate the domestic realm. The effect of war at home is brought to bear more fully in the experiences of the character Liz, who, alongside her mother, explains how her older brother John and younger brother Charlie have struggled with PTSD. Liz describes an evening where John’s paranoia escalated, leading him to contemplate suicide. “Mom,” the mother to Liz, Charlie and John, adds, “I was furious when it happened. I was furious that anybody would be in that position to become

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so emotionally harmed by what they have been through” (Ackerman and Sanchez 2010:34). Combat-related experiences, from sustaining injuries to killing, do impact service members. Rather than depicting combat veterans as archetypes such as heroes, protectors, or psychologically damaged warriors (as evidenced in Black Watch where Stewarty threatens to break the writer’s arm), the audience is called upon to grasp, via a family’s point of view, the scars that war leaves behind. Service members’ war wounds require acknowledgment and compassion from civilians instead of superficial acts of veneration. The marine family depicted in ReEntry bridges civilian life with warfare, and subsequently deconstructs ordinary citizen/warrior dichotomies by integrating women’s narratives of war, while at the same time grappling with stereotypes that perpetuate male troops as inherently primed for violence and heroics. ReEntry effectively undermines the spectacle of warrior character clichés indicative of the heightened militarism of the film industry by emphasizing the idiosyncrasies of the verbatim subjects depicted. In contrast to Burke’s (2011) method of framing soldiers as “stock-in-trade war movies characters” in order to intensify drama, co-writers Ackerman and Sanchez focus on the knowledge combat veterans can impart concerning war-related experiences. I contend that Sanchez and Ackerman’s more ethical approach to characterization was informed by the responsibility they felt towards service members trying to reintegrate into civilian life after war. Sanchez reflects on how detrimental Hollywood clichés affected combat veterans’ initial perceptions of her and her writing partner Ackerman, explaining: Most military personnel saw us as “Hollywood,” and many feel that warfighters are often grossly misrepresented by Hollywood—either via the figure of the emotionally damaged, distraught and abusive vet, or the “lone wolf,” fighting off the bad guys single-handedly. (2011:57) The marines’ resistance to easy stereotyping reflects a wider concern for how service members are exploited as ideological figures in popular culture. This is what Michael Butterworth and Stormi Moskal call a “culture of militarism” where American society is entangled by “a structural relationship between government, the military, and entertainment industries to the extent that it has become functionally impossible to live outside the rhetorical production of war” (2009:413). Distancing themselves from identifiable stereotypes, Ackerman and Sanchez acknowledge the complexity of the marines’ experience, rather than encouraging portrayals of service members as broken or stoic warriors regularly depicted in popular culture through films and news items.

Conclusion: Service Members as Documentary Subjects in War Plays With regard to the relationship between militarism, service members as subjects, and the functions of documentary practice, both Black Watch and ReEntry invite audiences to consider their relationship to war via the experiences of service members as subjects. While Black Watch excels in its use of theatrical techniques to demonstrate the allure of militarism and at the same time critique the mediation of “true” stories, the play’s dramatic ambition to hold the attention of the audience falls prey to perpetuating limiting stereotypes of soldiers. In contrast, ReEntry lacks the theatrical spectacle in its less aestheticized approach to personal testimony, yet the words of servicemen and women are carefully framed so as not to sensationalize heroics and

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the tragedy of war. ReEntry employs documentary techniques to convey that combat veterans’ knowledge of war is complex and warrants critical listening, not pathologizing (Levin 2011). What’s more, the working processes of practitioners in Black Watch and ReEntry evidence the importance of social proximity and contact between playwrights and documentary subjects in the interview stage. The tension between fetishizing war trauma and communicating service members’ lived experiences effectively manifested itself most prominently in the way practitioners approached war veterans’ experiences of combat in the interview process. While Black Watch director John Tiffany learned in the rehearsal process that the topic of killing was off limits, co-writers Ackerman and Sanchez approached the interview stage of ReEntry with sensitivity to the complexity of killing. These self-reflexive moments, where practitioners questioned their own approach in the presence of military personnel subsequently informed the theatrical translation of the testimony. In closing, articulating the negotiations that occur within the process of adapting narratives from military personnel for performance—particularly the ethical considerations, communication failures, and theatrical possibilities—provide critical insights for narratives of war via documentary and verbatim theatre. Giving consideration to how these narratives operate within Mann’s conceptualization of everyday militarism and taking into consideration lessons learned from theatre practitioners in the field might aid in evaluating how war-related testimony is framed in the dramaturgy of the play and thereafter effectively conveyed to theatre audiences. These insights might also improve understanding between service members as documentary subjects, theatre practitioners and audiences, and via the performance of lived experiences, provide new pathways to communicate the lasting aftereffects of war.

Notes 1 The broadcast aired on ESPN on 23 December 2006 (Butterworth and Moskal 2009:426). 2 In my own work conducting interviews with US military personnel for the verbatim play Yardbird, Janine, a female naval medical logistics officer, who deployed in Iraq in 2008, used the expression in our interview in 2011. Janine explained the adrenalin-fueled experience of preparing to go outside the wire: “In Iraq we used to run supply convoys, we went to different camps, Fallujah, Al Asad. And when you go outside the wire-when you leave the base you go outside the wire and you have your weapon in position Code 1, locked and loaded, you’re like, ‘Holy Shit!’” Incidentally, Outside the Wire is also the name of a theatre company based comprised of military personnel who perform classical plays (see Kaufman 2011). 3 These “fetishizations” of “the real” (Luckhurst 2013:200), particularly in verbatim theatre, are often equated with casual solidarity rhetoric, whereby theatre practitioners often speak uncritically on behalf of verbatim subjects as the marginalized other (Heddon 2008; Salverson 2001). For instance, the playwright David Hare has claimed that verbatim theatre is the ideal medium to “give a voice to the voiceless” (Hare in Soans 2005:112). Despite theatre practitioners’ good intentions, claims to give voice to the other tend to mask the subjective process of mediating personal testimony for performance. 4 For scholarship dealing more closely with the politics of post-9/11 theatre-making see Thompson, Hughes, and Balfour (2009); Boll (2013); Brady (2012); Colleran (2012); and Hughes (2011). 5 Sara Brady critiques post-9/11 verbatim drama, observing: “In its quest for the truth, verbatim theatre, a genre criticized for being a text-heavy project devoid of spectacle and theatricality, can fall short of doing what theatre does best—that is, offering to audiences an experience that rings true, that is filled with meaning. Ironically, the hyperrealism of testimony plays can lead to disappointing nights in the theatre.” (2012:29).

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6 While the Black Watch soldiers were stationed at Camp Dogwood in Iraq, Secretary of Defence Geoff Hoon announced the amalgamation of the Scottish regiments. This restructuring meant the independent regiments would “form a five-battalion regiment, The Royal Regiment of Scotland” of the British Army (Strachan 2006:332). 7 Inspired by traditional forms of Scottish theatre as seen in John McGrath and 7:84 Scotland’s documentary play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973) and Bill Bryden’s The Ship (1990), director Tiffany’s artistic intention was to counter the trend of verbatim plays that privileged antitheatricality and hyperrealism (Tiffany in Burke 2010:ix–x). 8 As a documentary play Black Watch integrates minimal verbatim dialogue. Aside from the inclusion of leaked emails from a commanding officer of the Black Watch, James Cowen (Burke 2006; Higgins 2007); news clips; and the barbed political exchanges between former Scottish national party leader Alex Salmond and Secretary of Defense Geoff Hoon, the majority of the dialogue is not verbatim. Rather, the banter shared between soldiers is loosely inspired by Burke’s observations of the squaddies’ interaction in their local pub. 9 At the start of the project, the National Theatre of Scotland hired several television researchers to find soldiers who would be willing to be interviewed by Burke for the creation of the play. After months of rejections from service members, researcher Sophie Johnston was able to secure an interview for Burke with a group of ex–Black Watch soldiers (Tiffany in Burke 2010:x). 10 Burke (2008) has described his hometown, recalling that Dunfermline “didn’t even have a bookshop, let alone a literary scene” (Burke in Fisher 2008: 00:18:57–00:19:03). 11 The same probing question, “what happens to a man when he kills,” is used as the framing question of Jeremy Weller and the Grassmarket Project’s applied theatre play Soldiers, which debuted at the Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1998 (Cavendish 1998). The production featured war veterans (including members of British Army and the Bosnian Croatian Army) who performed their stories. 12 “A Thearlaich Òig” is about a bereaved woman’s grief for a loved one killed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 (Brown and Innes 2012:32–34; Sheridan, MacDonald, and Byrne 2011:176–77). 13 Jenny Hughes’s critique of verbatim theatre resonates with Butler’s concept of precarity. Hughes questions the process of selecting testimony in verbatim theatre and questions the efficacy of the form to express verbatim subjects’ experiences beyond the frames of sameness, where western voices or the voices of those who reflect ideals take precedence (2011:113).

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Mann, Emily. 1982. Still Life. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Mann, Michael. 1987. “The Roots and Contradictions of Modern Militarism.” New Left Review 162: 35–50. Mann, Michael. 2003. Incoherent Empire. London: Verso. Marks, Peter. 2011. “Review of ReEntry at The Roundhouse Theatre.” The Washington Post. Accessed 10 November 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/review-of-reentry-at-roundhouse-theatre/2011/10/23/gIQAZgflAM_story.html. Martin, Carol. 2006. “Bodies of Evidence.” TDR/The Drama Review 50, 3: 8–15. Martin, Carol. 2010. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Helen. 2014. Applied Drama. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 2007. “The Frustrations of Geopolitics and the Pleasures of War: Behind Enemy Lines and American Geopolitical Culture.” In Cinema and Geo-Politics, 1st edition, edited by Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton, 160–181. London: Routledge. Piepenburg, Erik. 2010. “Five Questions about ‘Reentry.’” Arts Beat. Accessed 11 November 2015. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/five-questions-about-reentry/. Pressley, Nelson. 2010. “‘Reentry’ Finesses the Appeals, Hazards of a Military Lifestyle.” The Washington Post. Accessed 21 November 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/21/AR2010112104064.html. Reid, Trish. 2013. Theatre & Scotland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Salverson, Julie. 2001. “Change on Whose Terms? Testimony and an Erotics of Injury.” Theatre 31, 3: 119–125. Sanchez, K.J. 2011. “When Theatre Artists and Military Personnel Come Together, Assumptions on Both Sides are Transformed.” American Theatre 28, 6: 56–59. Sheers, Owen. 2012. The Two Worlds Of Charlie F. London: Faber and Faber. Sheridan, Mark, Iona MacDonald and Charles G. Byrne. 2011. “Gaelic Singing and Oral Tradition.” International Journal of Music Education 29, 2: 172–190. Sherman, Nancy. 2010. “The Guilt They Carry: Wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Dissent 57, 2: 80–84. Silk, Michael L. 2012. The Cultural Politics of Post-9/11 American Sport. New York: Routledge. Sjoberg, Laura. 2010. “Gendering The Empire’s Soldiers: Gender Ideologies, The U.S. Military, And The ‘War On Terror.’” In Gender, War, and Militarism, edited by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, 209–218. Santa Barbra, California: ABC-CLIO. Soans, Robin. 2005. Talking to Terrorists. London: Oberon Books. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding The Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Strachan, Hew. 2006. “Scotland’s Military Identity.” The Scottish Historical Review 85, 2: 315–332. Stuart-Fisher, Amanda. 2011. “‘That’s Who I’d Be, If I Could Sing’: Reflections on a Verbatim Project with Mothers of Sexually Abused Children.” Studies in Theatre & Performance 31, 2: 193–208. Sydney Theatre Company. 2014. “The Long Way Home.” Accessed 22 November 2016. https://www. sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/productions/2014/the-long-way-home. Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, James, Jenny Hughes and Michael Balfour. 2009. Performance in Place of War. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Tiffany, John. 2012. Skype interview with author, 15 February. Via, Sandra. 2010. “Gender, Militarism and Globalisation: Soldiers for Hire and Hegemonic Masculinity.” In Gender, War and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via, 42–56. Santa Barbra, California: ABC-CLIO. Westwell, Guy. 2014. Parallel Lines. New York: Columbia University Press.

13 CHALLENGING THE CHARACTERIZATIONS OF MILITARY SERVICE A Critical Comparison of British and American Counter-Recruitment Efforts Cami Rowe This chapter considers efforts by veterans groups to challenge the characterizations of military service in pursuit of broader counter-recruitment goals. With a focus on the marketing of military service to young people, the analysis centers on the capacity for counter-recruitment campaigns to offer meaningful performative challenges to the dominant cultural stereotyping of military personnel in the United States and Britain. Increasingly, activists are recognizing the need to challenge the fundamental characterization of the military in the public consciousness. As Matthew Rech states, counter-recruitment is about “challenging the core myths of military service” (Rech 2014:254). Recognizing that these myths are often rooted in cultural stereotypes about war heroes and veterans, many organizations now seek to problematize the typical representations that suffuse popular culture and military propaganda. According to War Resisters International, “Knowing that militarism is the leverage used to sell the military, counter military recruitment is a direct response which counters the perceptions of the military as a sacred cow, or a pillar of our society, and that which keeps us free” (Castro 2008). Scott Harding and Seth Kershner discuss “symbolic recruitment,” whereby the celebrated character of the military is instilled in young minds through school and community programs. These initiatives include invited talks about “freedom” by military personnel and projects in which school children send care packages to soldiers serving overseas (Harding and Kershner 2015b:15). Given the pervasive means by which the military becomes celebrated in the minds of the citizenry, “counter-recruitment” is now a body of practices that reflect the multifaceted nature of military recruitment. Campaigns now reach beyond the traditional agenda of dissuading young people from military enlistment and incorporate efforts to educate the public about the complex nature of war service. Frequently this entails taking issue with the toys, games, and other entertainment products that play a vital role in shaping the attitudes of young people and predisposing them toward careers in the military. In this chapter I discuss some of the ways that young people are deliberately targeted by American and British military recruiters, and provide a brief historical overview of military toys and games in both countries. This summary illustrates that entertainment products provide a crucial means for young people to role-play the stereotypical characteristics of military

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service, thereby perpetuating celebrated perceptions of military heroism and sacrifice. Furthermore, such characterizations are an essential component to the construction of sovereign power and biopolitical exclusions, and the phenomenon of entertainment-based recruitment tools operates within this dynamic. This approach facilitates a critical reading of two specific counter-recruitment actions: Iraq Veterans Against the War’s War Is Not a Game protests in St. Louis, Missouri and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and UK Veterans for Peace’s Action Man series. Both of these campaigns were conceived as part of traditional counter-recruitment efforts, and both directly engage with the characterizations of military veterans in popular entertainment products. To conclude, I discuss an alternative action, Aaron Hughes’s Tea Project, performed primarily in the United States. This example takes issue with the depiction of the military in popular entertainment and commercial products, but it differs from more traditional, persuasive counter-recruitment campaigns by privileging dialogue over influence. In doing so, this performance engages with some of the root elements of the militarization of culture, and might serve as an illustrative model for future campaigns.

Recruitment of Young People and Entertainment-Based Recruitment Tools The first element of my analysis is the context of military recruitment in the United States and United Kingdom, which, I argue, aims to target children and adolescents. A brief discussion of relevant examples from both countries reveals the similarities and subtle differences in the performative environments within which recruitment and counter-recruitment take place. In both countries, modern-day recruitment practices have responded to the absence of military conscription and the subsequent need to depict the military as an appealing vocational avenue for potential volunteers.1 As Stuart Tannock argues, when universal conscription was replaced with a reliance on voluntary enlistment, military recruitment began to follow the same principles as other kinds of consumer marketing (Tannock 2005:165). One way of increasing the uptake of their product has been to target younger segments of society with pro-military campaigns. The United States military identifies individuals between the ages of 13 and 17 as “preprospects” (HR 2012; Philpott 1999). These are young people who have not yet reached the required age for actual recruitment, but whose attitudes toward military careers are still malleable (Harding and Kershner 2015a:5). In recent decades, American military recruiters have been facilitated in this approach by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), a policy primarily aimed at improving teaching and learning in American schools. Within the depths of this legislation, the military was granted access to the names, telephone numbers, and addresses of all children in American secondary schools. Any institution that failed to comply risked losing their federal funding (NCLB, U.S.C. 20 (2001), §9528). In December 2015, this act was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which—despite long campaigns by counter-recruitment organizations and concerned parents—replicates the language of NCLB with regard to military recruiters2 (ESSA, U.S.C. 20 (2015), § 8025). Army officials refer to the data collected through NCLB and ESSA as “the primary lead generation source for military services” (Coleman 2014). Combining the contact data provided by schools with other demographic details acquired through market research and purchased data sets, recruiters are able to develop the most profitable approach for particular geographic areas. They subsequently pursue a carefully devised operational strategy to deliver

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“targeted prospecting operations” aimed at the student population (USAREC 2014:13). The manuals that govern such practices borrow heavily from the discourses and concepts of battlefield strategy, combined with language more familiar from commercial marketing and management materials. For example: Prospecting is the key to mission success since it puts recruiters in contact with many individuals who may agree to hear the Army story. Many prospects are the result of leads. Leads can come from a variety of sources such as student and organizational directories, referrals and face-to-face encounters. (USAREC 2014:21) This language highlights the performative aspects at work in youth recruitment strategies. Clearly, the story told about the army and the characters it might contain is an essential component to successful campaigns. In the United Kingdom, teenagers and school children are no less a target of military recruitment. The context is slightly different, not least because one quarter of Britain’s annual military intake is comprised of 16-year-olds (McVeigh 2015). Despite the fact that no other European or NATO country currently allows minors to enlist, the Ministry of Defence has suggested that the recruitment of 16- and 17-year-olds is essential to maintain personnel levels (ibid). When these young people sign up, they must initially complete a six-month trial. If successful, they are then committed to service for the next five and a half years, until the age of 22. This minimum period of service is longer than the usual four years that applies to individuals who join at the age of 18 or above (CSI 2016). Despite the lower minimum enlistment age in the UK, the Ministry of Defence insists that it does not recruit children in schools. However, it does have an active presence there if invited by head teachers (BBC News 2015). More directly, a military influence is felt in many schools through the use of curriculum materials that provide an MoD-authored history of the Armed Forces for children from the age of five onward (British Army Website 2016; FW 2015). In addition, the UK government has spent nearly £36 million on the Military Ethos in Schools program, which places former military personnel in schools to help pupils improve their basic skills and overall approach to learning (Gilmour 2015; DfE 2013). The physical presence of military personnel among young people is only one piece of the recruitment puzzle. Like other profit-making businesses, the American and British militaries seek to represent their product in the most appealing way to their target consumers. The content of recruitment materials—websites, posters, brochures, and television advertising— typically promotes a heroic, adventurous characterization of soldiering that encourages young people to think favorably of careers in the military. Traditional print and televised marketing media are supplemented by films, games, social media, and live community engagement activities, but perhaps most controversial are the highly popular toys and videogames that seem to depict war as a glorified, exciting challenge that leads to victory if only the appropriate costume is donned or the right button is pressed. It is essential to consider the effect of these entertainment products when evaluating campaigns to challenge public perceptions of the military. Much has been written about the shrewd use of toys and games to popularize the military as a career path in the minds of young people (e.g., Huntemann and Payne 2010; Stahl 2006; Woodyer 2012, 2014). By introducing young children to attractive military characters

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that illustrate exciting and heroic stereotypes, military institutions instill admiration and respect for military culture that will prove useful in later recruitment efforts. The relationship between military institutions and commercial toys and games is a complex one, as commercial game developers often work on projects for the military, and military officials often serve as consultants for private game development. Furthermore, given the profit-making consumerist agenda that the military follows in a postconscription age, the discourses and characterizations of military recruitment are cyclically both generated by and constitutive of cultural trends and appetites. As a result, military recruitment must be understood as a continuous process that is wholly enmeshed with cultural trends. This is an illustration of the seepage between military interests and cultural practices that is consistent with the militarization of culture and the growing military-industrial-entertainment complex (see, for example, Der Derian 2001; Enloe 2000; Stavrianakis and Selby 2012). David Allfrey, the UK Army’s Head of Recruitment Strategy, has suggested that effective recruitment relies on the inculcation of attitudes in young children: Our new model is about raising awareness, and that takes a ten-year span. It starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an airshow and thinking, ‘that looks great’. From then the army is trying to build interest by drip, drip, drip. (in Armstrong 2007) This approach goes hand in hand with the consumerist climate of recruitment, and gives rise to an imperative to influence potential recruits over the course of their lifetimes—an agenda that is further facilitated by militaristic toys and games that provide crucial role-playing opportunities to impressionable users. In the case of toys, parents may choose from a wide variety of games, dolls, and devices that effectively inculcate their children with pro-military attitudes. Since the production of American GI Joe action figures in the 1960s, anti-war activists have campaigned against the promotion of war violence through toys and games. A full history of these toys and their critics is not possible here, but a brief summary illustrates the close relationship between mass market toys and cultural perceptions of the military. Although there is evidence of war toys dating back to ancient times, according to historian Roger Chapman it was the innovations of plastic toy manufacturing and the controversies of the Vietnam War that gave rise to concerted opposition to such products in this era (Chapman 2014:597). These toys have ranged from the traditional GI Joe “Real American Hero” to “Rambo” action figures and intergalactic warriors. Throughout history, war toys have altered to respond to cultural trends. For example, in the late 1970s and 1980s these products took a notably futuristic turn. The emphasis on space-age technology and interplanetary warfare in products such as Masters of the Universe and Transformers echoed the popularity of “Star Wars”—both the George Lucas-blockbuster film franchise and Ronald Reagan’s nicknamed Strategic Defense Initiative. The Cold War weaponization of space and the associated fictional adventure tale undoubtedly fueled the imaginations of children engaged in role play with these futuristic action figures. At the same time, the commercial popularity of these toys was bolstered by changes made to children’s television regulations. Throughout the Reagan administration, an emphasis on deregulation led to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) taking an increasingly passive approach to the content of children’s television programming. In contrast to earlier

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decades when advertising in children’s programming was more tightly regulated, programlength animated commercials became commonplace from 1984, when the FCC ceased to place specific limits on the duration of product advertisements. These commercials often featured militaristic characters like GI Joe and Transformers, and included a significant amount of violent content3 (Lazar 1994:70; Chapman 2014:709). In more recent years, military toys in the United States have aligned with the realities of the war on terror. In addition to characters and weaponry that represent combat scenarios in Iraq and Afghanistan, playthings now include “Forward Command Post,” a bombed-out dollhouse marketed by JC Penney, and a simulated post-9/11 airport scanner manufactured by Playmobil recommended for ages four and above (Martin and Steuter 2010:69–92; Newman 2009). In the United Kingdom, an overt relationship exists between toy production and military recruitment. This relationship has grown from more informal cooperation between the military and toy producers in earlier decades, as exemplified by the Action Man figure—the British equivalent to GI Joe. Tara Woodyer provides a detailed account of this figure’s historical evolution, from its debut in 1966 to the successors that filled the gap after Action Man’s discontinuation in 1984. Although manufactured and marketed by an independent producer (Palitoy), the toy was deliberately designed to represent the details of British military characteristics, and it remained consistently militaristic throughout the 20th century. Whilst GI Joe went through periods in which military action was deemphasized in favor of adventure and athleticism, the UK Action Man exhibits an ongoing celebration of military service. This Action Man has included highly detailed military uniforms and a line of figures that illustrate familiar military ceremonial displays, including the Changing of the Guard and the Trooping of the Colour. According to Tara Woodyer, these creations were facilitated through cooperation with British armed forces regiments, and military personnel accompanied the manufacturers to promotional toy fairs. In the 1980s, Action Man, too, turned toward representations of space-age warfare in the guise of Captain Zargon, space pirate (Woodyer 2014). More recently, official Armed Forces toys are being produced under license from the Ministry of Defence, with a share of all profits going to the MoD and its related public relations activities (HM Armed Forces 2015). The website for these toys states that “the primary aim is to raise the profile of the Armed Forces” (ibid). The toys are aimed at children from the ages of five upwards and include the “Character Building” series of mini figures, a Predator drone kit, and a wide range of realistic weaponry. In addition to “action figures,” both militaries make wide use of videogames for the dual purposes of recruitment and training. In the United States, America’s Army is perhaps the most controversial example. This game, which cost more than $32 million to develop, was released in 2002 and is regularly updated (most recently in May 2016). It provides players with an opportunity to immerse themselves in fantasized landscapes of war and collaborate with other anonymous players to defeat opponents through simulated military tactics (Allen 2010). The game aims to convey appropriate soldierly values, because players must navigate basic training and learn “army values”—including loyalty, respect, duty, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage (Mead 2015:76). Much of the controversy surrounding the game stems from its amorphous function as both an entertainment platform and an advertising campaign for the US military. Players always take on the role of US soldiers, with no option to play the “enemy.” The game ostensibly serves multiple functions at once—promoting an ideology that pits a consistently good American foreign policy against multiple other enemies; entertaining players and compelling them to

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play more; and preparing potential consumers of the Army message for the experiences they might face if they enlist (Brady 2012). The game is made more problematic by its tendency to promote the more appealing or exciting aspects of military service (through highly realistic depictions of weaponry and landscapes, for example) whilst obscuring the true nature of war violence. Figures in the game do not bleed or vocalize pain upon death, but simply fall limply to the ground (Derby 2014:21). The game has proved highly successful as a recruiting tool; Corey Mead reports on an MIT study that showed 30 percent of American 16–24 year olds having a favorable opinion of the Army as a result of the game (Mead 2015:75). In the UK, the game Start Thinking Soldier provides players with a similar opportunity to experience a variety of training and combat situations—described by the producers as “first person soldier’s perspective” (Hendey and Smith 2015). Like America’s Army, the game presents a sanitized version of warfare, designed to attract potential recruits by appealing to their desire for adventure, skill-development, and adrenaline-producing activities. Targeted at ages 17–21, Start Thinking Soldier was developed in 2009 with direct input from high-ranking Army officials. In the online platform, players can experience simulated operational maneuvers, sniper fire, bomb disposal, armored vehicle driving, and various tactical challenges (ibid). The marketing team provides insight into the intentions behind the creation of the game: We were very aware we would be hitting our target audience at a time in their life when they were making many important choices about their future. We were able to tap into research which outlined self-discovery as a primary hook for 17–21 year olds and it seemed a natural progression to construct an experience placing the user in control of their self discovery, an experience which allowed them to also find out about the typical roles they would have access to in The Army and the kit they would be using. We also made sure we offered the possibility for human contact every step of the campaign—be that speaking to someone over the phone, finding their local recruiting office or attending a Start Thinking Soldier event. (Hendey and Smith 2015) This game and its publicity campaigns have attracted similar criticism to that leveled at America’s Army. Critics argue the game trivializes war and presents an incomplete picture that downplays the realities of violence and brutality. Formal complaints have been made to the Advertising Standard Agency (ASA) which allege that the Start Thinking Soldier TV ads liken war to a video game. However, the ASA has not followed up with a formal investigation, in part because the producers have carefully avoided promoting Start Thinking Soldier as a “game” (Ramsay 2009). Instead it is referred to only as a recruitment tool or a series of online tests designed to diagnose an individual’s aptitude for military service (Hendy and Smith 2015; Ramsay 2009). As a result, the ASA has decided that the promotional materials are not misleading or offensive, because they: “do not mention the word ‘game’ or anything similar. They simply highlighted that you can go online to test whether you have the relevant skills that may help you become a soldier (ibid). Start Thinking Soldier is indeed very different than America’s Army insofar as it is comprised of individual mini tasks that assess a player’s decision-making processes and other skills relevant to military service. Many of the scenarios relate to strategic decision-making, embedded within an ethical framework that informs the correct course of action—for example, retreat from objectives is deemed appropriate in some circumstances for the purpose of safeguarding

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others’ lives. There are important similarities however, in the way that players experience the action. The player’s character primarily remains invisible, and the angle of view suggests the immediacy of first-person experience. In addition, live-action footage of simulated combat situations (including authentic military weaponry and other details provided by military advisors) is seamlessly blended with the Start Thinking Soldier game footage. The implied overlap of reality with play is a key element, and in this respect the distinction between “game” and “recruitment tool” becomes moot. Start Thinking Soldier deliberately—according to one of the game’s developers—“create[s] the kind of experience our audience [. . .are] used to in digital gaming” (Clement 2010). This correlation between videogame experience and successful marketing was not incidental. The promotional video for the game is revealing: it opens with information about the shortage of military personnel in the UK, before showing a bored teenager slumped in the rear of a bus. The accompanying caption reads, “How do you get someone like THIS. . .to want to do a job like THIS,” before switching to an image of a camouflaged unit blowing up a building in a desert warfare environment. “We had to talk to them in a language they understood,” the captions continue. We are then shown a close-up image of a videogame controller, followed by a rapid sequence of game play footage including violent combat scenarios. The celebratory video champions the fact that more than 500,000 people played the game in the first six weeks, and “as they discovered their strengths and skills, so did we. . .and the more they gave us, the more we gave them. . .the best were invited to do it for real” (ibid). The toys and games discussed above are simply a few illustrative examples of the widespread use of entertainment products as recruitment tools. They demonstrate the prevalence of stereotypical characterizations of the war hero, and they are also experienced through frames of performance that blur entertainment and reality. These are two key performative elements to take note of, particularly given the acknowledged impressionability of the young audiences targeted by the toys’ and games’ producers. Yet a closer look at counter-recruitment activities demonstrates that these performative elements can also provide fecund material for resistant performance. Before focusing on such actions, this chapter will briefly consider the ways that performances of war hero stereotypes are complicated by the politics of sovereign power and exclusion.

War Heroes and Veterans in the Context of Sovereign Power and Exclusion A range of scholarly approaches has revealed the extent to which military characters uphold state authority and elite political aims. In particular, studies of national identity demonstrate the link between ritualized soldier-sacrifice tropes and the public’s perceived obligations to present-day military institutions and practices. For example, Robert Pogue Harrison has theorized that commemorative military cemeteries convey ownership and politically characterize the geographies that contain them (Harrison 2003). George L. Mosse suggests that the voluntary nature of military service underpins what he terms the “cult of the fallen soldier,” which results in a quasi-religious legitimization of war experience, detached from embodied experiences of warfare (Mosse 1990). Kelly Denton-Borhaug has analyzed the increased rhetoric of sacrifice that facilitated support for war in post-9/11 America (Denton-Borhaug 2011). All of this adds up to an environment in which the social characterization of the military is a complex phenomenon, incorporating the representation of heroic national ideals alongside sacrificial vulnerability.

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This linkage is given added weight when considered through lenses of sovereign power and biopolitical vulnerability. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben and others, we can understand military characterizations to occur within the context of sovereign power and its ability to confer differentiated homo sacer status on particular members of the governed collective. This is understood as the condition of susceptibility to being killed but not sacrificed—that is, excluded from the ordinary civic realm of law in a process which both exercises and obviates state authority (Agamben 1998:47–74). This is particularly relevant to military personnel because, although the military institution itself is most often an arm of sovereign power, individuals within its ranks typically face exclusion from the ordinary rights of citizenship (Rowe 2016). This is linked to the ways that military enlistees lose their ability to perform individual selfhood in public. From the time they join the military, they are inscribed with the symbolic character of heroism, as a direct result of their voluntary decision to engage in military service (see Astore 2010). This justifies the temporary removal of many of their individual rights, and the obfuscation of their individual agency. Symbolically, soldiers are only considered to be susceptible to violence from the enemy, not the state, and their death is always an honorable sacrifice. Therefore, in the case of military characters, I suggest that we might invert Agamben’s depiction of homo sacer and consider the war hero character as one who may only die through sacrifice—cleanly, symbolically, and disembodied—and not be killed in the lived physical realm where violence, bodily harm, and pain are experienced. In this way, the war hero character is one who may be sacrificed but not killed. However, we must also attend to the fact that sovereign authority and exclusion are experienced in complex and messy ways in the present age. I suggest that processes of biopolitical differentiation also result in an alternative characterization of military personnel, particularly in the case of military veterans. Having served in a role that publicly conforms to the stereotypical war hero character, past service members are subsequently confronted by a cultural environment in which their behaviors are subject to a narrower range of acceptability. Now considered war veterans, they fall into popular stereotypes of the vulnerable individual who has paid a price for service to the country. Their political speech becomes controversial, as demonstrated by the potential revocation of military benefits for veterans who speak out against foreign policy.4 Their voices typically resonate widely with the public only if they are speaking about veteran-specific issues such as healthcare policies or financial benefits. This particular differentiation suggests a second category of military homo sacer: that of the marginalized war veteran. As a result of these dynamics, there are two primary characterizations that render military roles visible in the public imaginary. The first of these is the heroic, sacrificial war hero, which is most evident in the recruitment materials discussed above. The second characterization is a stark contrast: the neglected or suffering wounded veteran. Both are similar in their political ineffectuality, the first only intelligible as a mouthpiece of the state and the second a figure of social and political vulnerability. These two stereotypes pervade popular culture and therefore affect the degree to which stories about war and warfare—especially those told by members of the military—will resonate with public audiences. It is no surprise then that much counter-recruitment activism draws on these characters to present compelling political actions. However, it might be the case that both of these stereotypes support the perpetuation of cultural ideals and norms relating to military service, militarism, and foreign policy, whilst also pointing back to the underlying sovereign authority to differentiate and exclude. As a result, it seems pertinent to interrogate whether military personnel and war veterans might

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develop strategic performances that make use of familiar military characters, but destabilize these biopolitical dynamics.

Examples of Counter-Recruitment Performance Given that young people are a primary target of military recruiters, it is logical that the majority of counter-recruitment campaigns have traditionally focused on undoing the myths of military service within school settings. These campaigns typically take the form of information distribution, wherein veterans provide detailed accounts of the reality of war—including the physical and psychological traumas—and also elucidate the financial and educational benefits offered by the military, which are frequently not as attainable or sizable as recruiters suggest (Rech 2014). However, the repertoire of counter-recruitment is growing ever more creative in the post-9/11 era, and with this in mind I have chosen to highlight three performances that demonstrate some of the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the entertainmentbased approach to recruitment outlined above.

War Is Not a Game In 2007, a small group of American veterans devised a creative protest to directly confront the practice of using video games as military recruitment tools. In response to America’s Army, a number of activists from Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) devised their War Is Not a Game action. It was initially performed in St. Louis, and later attracted wider publicity as part of protests against the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia. IVAW is perhaps one of the most well known anti-war groups currently active in the United States, having been established in 2004 as an offshoot of Veterans for Peace. Their efforts have encompassed a wide range of anti-war tactics, and the group has shown a consistent concern for educating the public about the violent and inhumane nature of war (see Rowe 2013). The War Is Not a Game protest was first held at the Missouri Black Expo in St. Louis, Missouri, an event that was primarily designed as a job fair in the interest of “African American empowerment” (King 2011). In August 2007, one of the event’s exhibitors was the US Army, which displayed its promotional materials alongside a Humvee and a booth in which individuals could play America’s Army before speaking to recruiters (Levinson 2014:xi). In the midst of this otherwise ordinary event, 90 IVAW members entered in drill formation, all wearing identical black t-shirts bearing the organization’s name in white letters. These shirts were a mirror of the black-and-white GoArmy.com banners that adorned the Army’s exhibit (IVAW 2007). As the event attendees watched with curiosity, the IVAW members approached the army stand in a quasi-ritualistic marching drill, where they halted and sounded off the following call-and-response: Iraq Veterans Against the War: What have you learned?! War is not a game! This chant was repeated three times before the group about-faced and marched back out of the exhibition hall (IVAW 2007; Sultan 2007). According to IVAW, their action was met by cheers from the public (IVAW 2007). This protest was relatively impromptu, having been devised only the day before when a few IVAW members—in St. Louis for their third annual

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organizational meeting—heard about the job fair and the Army’s recruitment booth (Levinson 2014:xi). Despite its lack of preplanning, the event gained significant publicity in local media, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the local NBC News affiliate (Sultan 2007; AP 2007). War Is Not a Game provides a useful example when considering military characterizations in the context of counter-recruitment because the initial protest performance largely upheld the stereotypical traits associated with the military. Despite the passionate claims that “war is not a game,” the participants otherwise conformed to cultural norms of soldiering. Their blackand-white shirts functioned as uniforms, marking them out as a unified group but separate from others. Their actions were directed by a single member who led the company formation and sound off, and commanded the group to “fall out” on his cue (IVAW 2007). Studies of school-based counter-recruitment efficacy have suggested that young people are most likely to be receptive to anti-militarization messages if delivered by a veteran (Harding and Kershner 2014:254). In a similar fashion, the War Is Not a Game action attempted to command attention and respect from the public based on the participants’ identities as veterans. This was undoubtedly a wise approach to take in terms of the immediate desired audience response. However, it presents a dilemma with regard to the action’s capacity to challenge the cultural underpinnings of military recruitment, because it largely relied on stereotypes of military authority to influence the public. Related protests have since been repeated in a number of cities across the United States, and these have been marked by slightly more nuance. In Philadelphia in 2009, the message “War is not a game” was enacted at the Army Experience Center (AEC) at Franklin Mills Mall. The AEC has been rigorously analyzed by Sara Brady, who emphasizes its role in the cultural overlap of war and games. For the purposes of this chapter, my focus is on the protests that occurred in response to the AEC, but it is crucial to position this focus against the immersive performative recruitment environment that Brady outlines (Brady 2012). In the 2009 Philadelphia protests, a large contingent of anti-war and pacifist activists engaged in ongoing rallies and other activities in efforts to shut down the AEC. The protesters included veterans from IVAW and Veterans for Peace, but they were joined by peace activists from a wide range of backgrounds, most of whom bore the War Is Not a Game slogan on their clothing (Fulton 2009). In these later actions, there was a greater effort to draw attention to the personal impact of military service. For example, some signs displayed suicide statistics, pointing out that more soldiers had taken their own lives in the first half of 2009 than had been killed in combat. The Philadelphia protesters succeeded in shutting down the Army’s exhibit for a few hours, as in fact the entire mall was closed while several protesters were arrested (Hoak 2009). This was a well-planned collaboration of multiple anti-war groups, and one of the key organizing principles was that no particular organization should be overtly highlighted or promoted, but the voices of veterans were very much included in the overall narrative. Sandy Fulton, a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and a former military recruiter, was chosen to speak directly to the army recruiters. In her explanation of the protests, she cited her experience as a naval recruiter during the Vietnam era, and the effect of this experience on her present-day anti-war views (Fulton 2009). However, despite the inclusion of many veterans’ viewpoints, the protests overall were performed by a diverse collective of individuals, and thereby avoided replicating the celebrated characteristics of military authority and leadership. This latter example suggests that collaborative efforts with non-veteran counterrecruitment organizations might prove highly useful in efforts to challenge military stereotypes amidst anti-militarization activism. Whilst embodiments of heroic military stereotypes might

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immediately command the public’s respect, the Philadelphia AEC protests demonstrate the impact of collaborative performances where veterans appear in a horizontal sharing of authority with others. In addition to countering the stereotypical characterizations of the military, both the St. Louis and Philadelphia protests illustrate efforts by war veterans to counter the collapse of gameplay fantasy into real-life war experience. This is a difficult issue for protesters to confront, given the increasing quasi-ritualistic and mediatized nature of protest, which is often framed as something separate and distinct from real life itself. However, by bringing first-person testimony and autobiography into focus, the Philadelphia protest was more successful in highlighting authentic lived experience. That said, public disruptions and activist rallies are expected tactics of anti-war protest in the post-war on terror age and there remains a danger that they too might be interpreted as a moment of suspended reality.

Action Man: Battlefield Casualties In 2013, the UK branch of Veterans for Peace (VFP) launched one of its most vividly creative counter-recruitment campaigns, entitled Action Man: Battlefield Casualties. VFP is an international organization, founded in 1985 to promote a “culture of peace” and an end to all wars (VFP n.d.). With more than 140 chapters worldwide, this group is one of the most well recognized in anti-war and counter-recruitment circles. Their activities range from truth and reconciliation campaigns to counter-recruitment and anti-war protest. For the past three years, the UK branch has attempted to challenge military stereotypes through an artistic collaboration with artist Darren Cullen and filmmaker Price James (McVeigh 2015). In a series of short films, comics, and accompanying dolls, the organization presents a scathing parody of the Action Man toy figure and the associated traits of the war hero stereotype. Displayed for the past two years at various galleries in London and promoted through online materials, the campaign targeted a wide sector of the public through its chosen venues, primarily located in highly diverse, up-and-coming areas of London. Its most recent run was at the Red Gallery, a community arts space in Shoreditch known for its highly diverse programming that attracts multiple sectors of the public (Red Gallery 2015). The objective of the campaign has been to highlight Britain’s recruitment of 16-year-olds. This goal was pursued through a satirical approach to the militarization of youth through toys and games. In Cullen’s artistic take on Action Man, the figure is available in a number of character varieties. These include PTSD Action Man, Paralyzed Action Man, and Dead Action Man (Gilmour 2015). Each of these characters is embodied in a carefully crafted action figure, with all of the detail normally associated with commercial toy manufacturers. These antimilitary Action Men are depicted with accessories that speak to the less heroic but perhaps more common experiences of war: it is suggested that purchasers might kit out their Action Man dolls with anti-depressants, wheelchairs, body bags, and letters confirming the cessation of their military benefits (VFP 2015). The displayed toys are accompanied by a series of short promotional films that further align with the consumerist entertainment context of their mainstream commercial counterparts. With the help of the filmmaker Price James, the figures are depicted in advertising clips that are strikingly reminiscent of those that advertise war toys during children’s television programming. Interspersed with mashed-up clips of ads featuring sugary breakfast cereal, ice cream products, familiar cartoon characters, and the rolling credits of an animated program, the

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Action Man: Battlefield Casualties toys are demonstrated by a boy and girl of about eight to ten years of age, who gleefully engage in role play. A sensational and forceful male voiceover exclaims the attractions of the toys: For PTSD Action Man, danger lurks at every turn! He never feels safe, not even in his own home!. . . Do what you can to block out the memories. The young boy holds a toy beer can to the figure’s face and joyfully says, “glug, glug, glug!” Later he places a tiny noose around the figure’s neck and pushes a chair out from under his feet. He turns to the camera with a wide grin and says, “let’s get out of here!” (VFP 2015). Each of the dolls is accompanied by this type of parodic promotional film. Paralyzed Action Man is shown in constant pain, and the children enjoy dressing him up with a colostomy bag before roleplaying his return to work following the cessation of his welfare benefits. Dead Action Man is shown decapitated and covered in spurting blood, before the children act out a ceremonial military funeral. The artist Darren Cullen, interviewed by the Huffington Post, explained the motivations behind the often-gruesome work: Neuromarketers talk a lot about “first-imprint,” the first time you experience a product has a large effect on how you view it through life. That’s the reason the army has its own line of toys, it presents armed conflict to children as a positive experience full of fun and adventure. The reality is that war is hell and that if you’re lucky to come back alive with all your limbs and organs intact, there is often serious psychological trauma to deal with. (in Nelson 2013) First and foremost, Action Man: Battlefield Casualties highlights the second popular characterization of soldiering outlined above—that of the vulnerable, wounded veteran. The toys and films depict the post-war exclusion of veterans from society, as a result of the war hero–based recruitment discourses that obscure negative experiences of war. In doing so, the campaign certainly disturbs the war hero stereotype, but in its near-exclusive focus on the suffering of war veterans it does little to disrupt the dichotomy between the celebrated war hero and the suffering wounded veteran. In other words, the soldiers depicted in this revised Action Man series are rendered as traditional homo sacer figures who may be killed but not sacrificed, perhaps because they have failed to live up to the ideals of military service. They are therefore excluded from society, but by implication there remains a possibility of “good soldiers” who do their job well and continue to enjoy the full participatory privileges of citizenship. Despite its parodic brilliance, the VFP Action Man doesn’t fully succeed in challenging sovereign power, nor the associated stereotypes of military service.

The Tea Project The final performance to be discussed exemplifies a more sophisticated approach to counterrecruitment through its emphasis on dialogue and interaction. In contrast to more traditional campaigns that seek concrete outcomes, this example aims to achieve open, collaborative conversations about war experience and the characterization of soldiers. The Tea Project was conceived and enacted by Aaron Hughes, a veteran of the United States National Guard who served in Kuwait and Iraq from 2003 to 2004 (Mirra 2008:33).

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Like many soldiers who participated in combat operations in Iraq, Hughes joined the military with expectations that varied dramatically from his actual experience. When signing up for the National Guard in 2000, he expected to most likely be assisting on the domestic front in the event of natural disasters like the floods he had experienced in his home state of Illinois as a child. He certainly didn’t seriously envision the possibility of supporting US combat operations overseas (Mirra 2008:34). Hughes was also an art student, and upon his eventual discharge from the National Guard in 2006 he returned to this vocation and secured a Masters degree in art theory. He also joined Iraq Veterans Against the War, and spearheaded some of its most high-profile activist actions (Hughes 2008). Hughes has completed a variety of visual art and performance pieces, particularly paintings and performed poetry. These works all comment on his lived experience of war, and offer insightful challenges to the heroic military veteran myth. The Tea Project is one of his most recent works and it has perhaps been the most successful in terms of reaching wide audiences and provoking critical reflections on war experience and militarization. In 2009, Hughes returned to Iraq as a civilian and it was during this trip that he first experienced the ritualistic Iraqi tea traditions. Combining his sensitivities to the impact of US military interventions with the desire to convey the true experience of war to the American public, Hughes developed The Tea Project that same year. This combination of activism and performance art has been staged in galleries and public spaces in several cities across the United States as well as Japan, Lebanon, and other locations (Hughes n.d.). Audiences vary significantly depending on the site of the performance, but the aim of the project overall is to access as many diverse perspectives as possible. The performance draws on the widespread Iraqi tradition of sharing tea. Hughes typically begins by laying out a Persian carpet on the floor and sitting cross-legged before a hot plate and kettle. He wears the shirt of his military uniform, left unbuttoned with the sleeves rolled up. The audience—whoever chooses to participate in any given location—sits in a semicircle around him. One side of the space is occupied by rows of ceramic cups, which have been crafted to look like Styrofoam, but are etched with intricate patterns of flowers and geometric shapes. Over the course of the performance, Hughes makes and shares tea with his audience, whilst relating his experiences of war in Iraq. He invites people to contribute their own stories and reflections, creating a dialogue (Avila 2015). Throughout, he goes to some lengths to include stories drawn not only from his personal experience, but from wars and conflict zones around the world. For example, at one stage Hughes explains to his listeners that each of the ceramic cups they drink from represents one of 279 men imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay. The artist had learned from a friend and fellow IVAW member, Chris Arendt, about the detainees’ habit of decorating their Styrofoam cups as an escape from boredom and their only means of personal expression. In addition, Hughes actively seeks contributions from the audience about their own perceptions of war—even, or especially, when they disagree with his own. In this way, Hughes manages to complicate ideas about military service from multiple perspectives at once. Significantly, Hughes arrived at this approach having previously participated in Truth in Recruiting campaigns that conformed more closely to traditional “counter-recruitment.” However, he notes that he is increasingly aware of the need to create a space for dialogue, specifically as a response to what he perceives to be the changing nature of military recruitment in recent years. In conversation with the author in August 2016, he noted that the American military has actually decreased its membership quota in recent years, yet the drive to promote military values in various cultural spheres has, in his view, increased. He suggests that the

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military has positioned itself as an embodiment of progressive politics, including human rights and gender politics, as a means of making its values more broadly acceptable to the American public (Hughes 2016). With regard to the military’s consumer marketing agenda discussed above, Hughes would suggest that the product being sold is no longer enlistment alone; instead military institutions are marketing their own existence as a beneficial and ubiquitous presence throughout society and culture. This is an incisive view of cultural militarization, and it has led Hughes to seek new approaches to activism that can challenge military values in this increasingly diffused environment. The Tea Project is the result of this nuanced perspective. It is unique because of the way that it confronts the characterization of war heroes and veterans, but also avoids slipping into any concrete characterizations at all. Hughes describes it this way: The Tea Project is an ongoing dialogue that traverses a variety of landscapes, from the tea sipped on a Chicago sidewalk, to a quaint coffee shop, to a cage in Guantanamo Bay, to a motor pool in Iraq; tea is not only a favored drink but a shared moment that transcends cultural divides and systems of oppression. (Hughes n.d.) The performance deliberately avoids attempts to persuade audiences of a particular viewpoint and instead focuses on interaction and collaboration. Although developed and performed from his perspective as a war veteran, Hughes is keen to stress the need for militarization to be considered as a phenomenon that traumatizes all people, rather than military veterans alone: I look at it as if I could say, instead of, “I’m a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder,” I could say “our society is traumatized.” [. . .] To me it’s about creating a space where people can find words, find sensations—whether that’s the tea, the cups, other people’s stories that are shared, the silence that exists in those spaces—because there’s a lot of awkward silence—that allows people to reflect. (Hughes 2016) The key to the rich potential of this performance is the way that it deliberately complicates the characterizations associated with militarization and brings them into a space of fluidity and dialogue, where the representation of the military escapes recuperation into the logics of sovereign power and biopolitical exclusion. In its celebration of storytelling as a negotiating and healing medium, the performance blends reality and play, but in a way that stresses shared creativity and discovery as opposed to individual escapism or persuasive messaging. It furthers the goals of counter-recruitment and offers a performative contrast to pro-military toys and games, but it does so in a way that is truly responsive to the complexities of diffused militarization in contemporary Western cultures.

Confronting Military Stereotypes in the Present Day and Beyond It is clear from the illustrative examples at the start of this chapter that the characterizations of military service in American and British culture are driven by twin forces: first, the need to uphold the symbolic heroic nature of war participation that provides the cultural

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underpinnings of sovereign authority; and second, the need to appeal to the consumers of simulated war experience to generate new recruits and proponents to act as agents of that sovereign authority. It therefore follows that the performative approaches taken to counterrecruitment must carefully navigate the dominant social stereotypes of war that are instilled through processes of militarization, because they are otherwise at risk of feeding into the market-driven reinforcement of sovereign power and militarization. Because of the propensity for young people to be highly receptive to the messages conveyed by war veterans, there is a temptation for counter-recruitment practices to make use of the war hero stereotypes to gain adherents to their point of view. However, if veterans wish to deliver a message that goes beyond counter-recruitment and tackles militarization more broadly, they need to engage in critical performances that dismantle military stereotypes, whilst also addressing the blurring of play and reality that is increasingly the result of militarized popular culture. In the analysis above I have touched upon some of the potential and pitfalls inherent to counter-recruitment activism by war veterans. Ultimately, this demonstrates the need to pay further heed to the performative elements at work in recruitment and counter-recruitment practices, as well as more complex campaigns to dismantle the social constructs underpinning militarization more broadly.

Notes 1 Military conscription was last enacted in 1960 in the United Kingdom, and in 1972 in the United States. 2 NCLB and ESSA both contain the following language: “each local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students’ names, addresses and telephone listings” (NCLB, U.S.C. 20 (2001), §9528; ESSA, U.S.C. 20 (2015), § 8025). 3 According to Roger Chapman, one Transformers cartoon averaged 83 acts of violence per episode (Chapman 2014:709). 4 US Military regulations restrict the speech and actions of veterans, especially when in uniform or when speaking as a representative of the military. One of the most widely publicized cases of this nature was that of IVAW member Adam Kokesh, whose discharge status was downgraded following an anti-war protest in military uniform. For further details see Rowe (2013:71–73).

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14 STRATEGIC SIMULATION AND THE AMERICAN MILITARY IMAGINARY Michael St. Clair

Introduction In preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military war-gamed conflicts with a variety of Middle Eastern actors. The Millennium Challenge ’02 (MC02) was the largest such game. It included both field maneuvers and computer-aided strategic simulation. The US Joint Forces Command described it as an “experiment” that “simulated a high-end, smallscale contingency that had the potential to escalate to a major theater war” and “represented a critical building block of future military transformation,” using a “joint experimentation” methodology focused on “exploring the threats of tomorrow today” (USJFCOM 2002). The particular explorations the USJFCOM engaged in, however, have been subject to some controversy. According to Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who played Saddam Hussein, its controlling parties reset the game and changed its rules after, in a first trial, he used guerrilla tactics, improvised explosives, World War II-era optical signaling mechanisms, and bottom-up swarm attacks controlled by communications from mosque loudspeakers to halt American military operations and even destroy a carrier. On their second life, with these plausible but excessively creative tactics banned, US forces won (Borger 2002). Formal post-mortem reports remain classified. Since World War II, this sort of military simulation gaming has become increasingly central to American power and everyday life. It has two primary forms: strategic role-playing exercises and immersive simulators. Immersive simulators, ranging from first-person-shooter-style training videogames to meticulously reconstructed Iraqi villages, tend to receive the most attention from popular media, befitting their generally more spectacular and theatrical qualities. Strategic role-playing exercises are less flashy. They often look more like board games, boardroom conversations, or PowerPoint presentations. However, they remain central techniques of military planning and preparation, particularly in war colleges and at higher levels of command. Simulators tend to compel players to experience distant environments and thereby train them to perform particular tasks. By contrast, as the MC02 suggests, strategic simulations tend to confront their players with intellectual labor that allows them to perform possible—or

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impossible—futures. They work to make some things thinkable and some things—like a successful attack on a carrier group by fishing boats—unthinkable. Understanding the late modern military imaginary requires understanding about how strategic simulation thinks. In this chapter, I provide several lenses on military strategic simulation that elucidate its place in post-World War II American power and consciousness. I begin by providing conceptual and historical background on military simulation gaming. I then consider the performativity of innovative strategic simulation in the post-World War II American context, particularly via the RAND Corporation’s crisis games of the 1950s and ’60s. These games are the proximate source for later influential American strategic simulations. They differ from earlier wargames by linking quantitative approaches from operations research with a qualitative, psychological approach that relied on live performance in the form of role playing. There are two major concepts I want to tease out here. The first is that strategic simulation play forms a critical node in militarized culture. The second concept is that strategic simulation is a kind of therapeutic performance. The playful aspects of strategic simulation are central to its function. As role-playing game historian Jon Peterson argues in his 2012 Playing at the World, simulation games flow from an intellectual tradition reaching to the late 18th century in which hobbyists and military professionals have often traded techniques. This set of exchanges forms a crucial piece of the “military-entertainment complex,” a phrase snowcloned from “military-industrial complex” by Brenda Laurel in the early 90s1 and more fully articulated by Henry Lowood and Timothy Lenoir (2005). This phrase names an interdependence between military and entertainment organizations and technologies, particularly after World War II. More broadly, strategic wargames participate centrally in what Sara Brady, partly generalizing Lowood and Lenoir, calls the “new technological age of the militarization of culture,” designed to enable permanent low-intensity war and based on rapid, comprehensive versions of the ancient “loop between play and combat” (Brady 2012:66). Strategic simulations exemplify playful post-war research and development; they give military organizations a quantified imagination. Moreover, strategic simulation is not only play; it is also an exemplar of the kind of therapeutic and visionary performance near to the hearts of many art scholars and practitioners. It enacts its visionary therapeutics by incorporating novel possibilities—and, crucially, impossibilities—into institutional bodies. These novelties work to counteract the effects of past traumas (or otherwise formative experiences) on institutional decision-making processes. This incorporation relies on a mode of performativity I gloss as counterfactually conditional, in the sense that it relies on causal statements with premises known to be false. Visionary encounters with the impossible are staples of aesthetic criticism in late modernity, and strategic simulations deserve to be included in this category. They too are exemplars of post-modern virtues like “creativity” and “innovation.”

Categories of Simulation: Simulators and Anti-Immersive Simulations “Simulation” needs more elucidation. This term denotes a wide variety of artifacts and practices, and scholars often do not clearly distinguish them. Some additional distinctions are important for my current discussion. So, what is a simulation, generally speaking? The Department of Defense (DoD) provides some assistance, defining a simulation as “a method for implementing a model over time.” A model, in turn, is “a physical, mathematical, or otherwise logical representation of a system, entity, phenomenon, or process” (2009:10). To expand: simulations

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are implementations of models, which are fake things that logically represent real counterparts, with “fakeness” marked by relative cheapness, safety, impermanence, and accessibility. Modelling’s unique quality, among modes of representation, is that models have some isomorphism to their represented counterparts. In serious simulations, these isomorphisms have causal or predictive qualities. This isomorphism need not be perfect, so long as users can perceive meaningful correspondences between a simulation and its counterpart. Simulation is to model as performance is to script. Indeed, all simulations are performances; they are ostensive enactments of absent referents that take place in a subjunctive mood. However, many and perhaps most simulations are not human performances. Simulations that do not depend on human participation after runtime are ubiquitous in technical fields—much computer-aided design software, for instance. There are two subsets of simulation that do consistently involve human performance: simulators and anti-immersive simulations. By “simulator,” I mean a system or device that provides users with an artificial experience of some referent. In military contexts, simulators tend to be associated with training and the individual or squad scale, while anti-immersive simulations tend to be allied with strategy and the operational or larger scale. Translated into military jargon, the category of simulators mostly corresponds to the “virtual” component of the DoD’s live-virtual-constructive (LVC) simulation classification model. In the LVC model, virtual simulation involves “real people operating simulated systems” (DoD M&SCO 2013). Flight simulators are the archetype of these technologies, and the historically first category of modern simulators (versions of the concept are of course ancient—practice weapons, for instance). Since the late 1980s, the variety and prevalence of simulators has vastly increased in both civilian and military application. This expansion has relied on technical advances driven by civilian actors in the tech and entertainment industries. The cheap, fast graphics technologies that have produced 3D videogames and pervasive computer-generated imagery (CGI) have been central, although other technologies have also been significant, especially smart embedded systems and wireless networking. In military contexts, this simulator boom has produced immense improvements in tactical training. First-person shooter-style videogames—in many cases, directly derived from civilian-market videogames2—can impart tactical skills cheaply and safely. The perceived costto-training-outcome ratio of such games is so high that some US military simulation specialists have expanded the LVC simulation model to an LVCG (live-virtual-constructive-gaming) model, considering first-person shooters as a top-level simulation category.3 Videogames are, moreover, not the whole story of the tactical simulator boom. These technologies have also enhanced the scope and realism of live tactical training environments—constructed physical environments for immersive field exercises. Simulators, generally speaking, are much more unambiguously recognizable as performance— and even theatre—than anti-immersive simulations. For instance, in Scott Magelssen’s 2009 “Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos,” anti-immersive simulations appear as non-performative counterparts of the theatre immersion simulators (large-scale recreations of Iraqi and Afghan villages) he analyzes. Magelssen emphasizes the fundamentally theatrical logic of these simulators and their relationships to conventionally construed theatre practice. Conversely, he depicts anti-immersive simulations and especially strategic wargames as their performance-free precursors: “generals in a locked room with miniature armies” (50) (in other words, strategic wargames) are on the extreme end of a set of pre-theatre-immersion practices that attempt to “avoid factoring in the human

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elements altogether” (51). For Magelssen, human performance enters military simulation along with sensory immersion. I disagree: anti-immersive simulations involve a great deal of human performance. However, their performances produce precisely the opposite effect: they abstract, contextualize, and provide critical distance. This is most readily discernible through their characteristic top-down or isometric visual perspective. This is useful, unlike the characteristic first-person perspective of immersive simulation, for thinking about events on a large scale. Tactical simulators, as Magelssen observes, immerse their participants in a military theatre of operations that is also an arena of theatrical performance. Conversely, as Navy Captain McCarty Little said in 1912, strategic simulation “offers the player the whole world as a theater” (in Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016:339). Ghamari-Tabrizi, following Little’s claim, goes so far as to suggest that a basically dramaturgical approach is useful to thinking about wargame documents: they are literally as well as metaphorically theatrical scripts. However, they script events at a much larger scale than theatre as it is ordinarily defined. When games like this model military matters and especially combat, they correspond to what the LVC model calls “constructive simulations,” or, more specifically, “stimulated” constructive simulations: “Simulations involving simulated people operating simulated systems. Real people can be allowed to stimulate (make inputs) to such simulations” (DoD M&SCO 2013). Contemporary constructive simulations include the high-level Joint Theater Level Simulation (JTLS) and the operations-level Joint Conflict and Tactical Simulation (JCATS). They at once look simpler than graphics-rich simulators and model a much wider scope of events. JCATS, for instance, can model a battlespace of over 7 million square kilometers in which “the player can zoom in and out [. . .] from a view of the entire terrain box down to a specific room on a specific floor in a building at 1m accuracy”; however, it generally renders all of this as “a simple 2D view that replicates a commander’s map view” (LLNL CSL 2014). Such games teach players to act from the perspective of a map, a satellite, or a drone; they present the world as Marshall McLuhan’s “global theater,” inaugurated when “Sputnik put the globe in a proscenium arch” (1970:12). Simulators are limited to the tactical level of war; anti-immersive simulations can encompass tactical, operational, and strategic levels. This difference in scope and, in professional contexts, the hierarchical relationship between these categories of simulation, becomes very clear in large exercises that use a variety of simulations. The director of the National Simulation Center describes the structure of such an exercise: The ITE [integrated training environment] is an asset that gives commanders the opportunity to execute concurrent, multi-echelon leader and collective training. Through the use of virtual simulators and gaming tools, crews and squads can be trained while constructive simulations are training battalion and brigade staffs, all in the same exercise using the same scenario. (Janiszewski 2014) In modern integrated exercises, simulators train subordinates to carry out orders, while antiimmersive simulations train superiors to give orders. Simulators train warfighters in making correct reflexive responses to stimuli; anti-immersive simulations help officers to assess chains of events, guide operational outcomes, and even develop doctrine for emerging modes of conflict.

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Professional Strategic Wargames through the 1960s The serious use of military strategy games reaches into ancient history, but the proximate source of strategy games for modern militaries is the German and Prussian kriegsspiel tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.4 These games are the intellectual origin for modern militaries’ attempts to understand the world as a manipulable, logically consistent map; their direct derivatives were the raw material for RAND’s 1950s crisis games. Briefly examining these games provides an important basis for understanding how strategic simulation thinks now. Kriegsspiel (literally “game of war”) describes a family of board games derived from a combination of chess, maps, and military science intended to simulate military engagements. Their designers did not typically title them beyond “das Kriegsspiel,”5 and I follow the general practice of referring to them by the name of their designer: for instance, “Hellwig’s Kriegsspiel.” Between roughly 1780 and 1820, kriegsspiel designers made a rapid set of developments in representation of military conflict. These developments were both part of and dependent on what J.L. Heilbron calls the “rapid increase in the range and intensity of mathematical methods” (1990:2) of the later 18th century. As Jon Peterson notes, Hellwig’s Kriegsspiel, published in several versions from 1780 to 1803, contained many of the fundamental elements of later strategic wargames. Perhaps most importantly, it moved away from the abstract chess grid towards real-world space: unlike the abstract two-tone setting of the chessboard, each square in his [Hellwig’s] grid contains one of a set of terrain types, coded by color [. . .] His game thus allowed players to approximate real or fictional territories as desired for any given battle scenario. By 1782, Hellwig had already received notice of players recreating with his game the Battle of Krefeld (1758), an important encounter in the Seven Years’ War. (2012:§3.1.2) Such a game collapses the concepts of game board and map. It allows a wargame to convincingly model real conflicts. This is conceptually close to how we now simulate military operations. Hellwig produced the first modern strategic simulation. In 1812, Georg Leopold von Reiswitz produced the kriegsspiel that would become the direct model for modern strategic wargames. He vastly reduced the scale of his game from earlier versions. His game board is still a grid, but with more detailed terrain—Georg Leopold designed it as a cabinet with interlocking wood pieces that allowed players to assemble maps on the cabinet’s surface. This reduction in scale, as Phillip von Hilgers notes, permitted Georg Leopold’s game to incorporate both “strategic and tactical space” distinguished only by “degrees of abstraction from signifiers” (2000:63; my translation); in other words, how closely they could correspond to survey maps of Prussia, then undergoing extreme improvement. This incorporation of all military scales, verified by cutting-edge quantitative methods, remains crucial to present-day wargames. Georg Leopold directed his game more successfully to powerful people than did any previous kriegsspiel designer. He initially designed his kriegsspiel for his student, the Crown Prince Wilhelm (later William I, first Emperor of unified Germany), which brought it to the attention of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. His son, Georg Heinrich, further made it massproducible. Georg Leopold’s game required his special cabinet; Georg Heinrich reduced it to printable, military staff-friendly form. He did so by adapting it to paper and increasing its

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scale to one that, though still more detailed than Hellwig’s, was playable on command-room planning maps (see von Hilgers 2012:51–57). In this way, wargames entered general staff offices. Kriegsspiel trickled down in Prussia. It became generally popular in military academies by the mid-19th century, especially after the invention of the “free” method, which loosened its rules by adding an interpretive referee role. Kriegsspiel was taken up by other modern militaries after the Franco-Prussian War as part of a general adoption of Prussian practices. Military historian Charles Shrader relates its 1870s reception among American officers to the vogue for Prussian costume: “free Kriegsspiel became popular along with such Prussian Army accouterments as the Pickelhaube, or spiked dress helmet” (2006:113). As Shrader further relates, multiple American officers published kriegsspiels over the course of the 1870s and ’80s, and they quickly became popular among more than a Prussophilic avantgarde. In 1887, the Naval War College adopted it as a core curricular component, followed by the Army Staff College in 1904. Here I skip ahead, following a general tendency in the historical literature to regard American wargaming pre-World War II as sterile and imitative.6 Most commentators agree that, while wargames were important parts of all American officer training programs by the early 20th century, they were only consistently used as planning tools prior to World War II by the Navy7—which used fairly traditional kriegsspiel techniques—and virtually never as research tools. They came into their own more fully when combined with the budding discipline of operations research. What is operations research? An often-quoted definition reads: “the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions” (Horner 2003). This ambitious statement points to the fact that operations research is one of a large and often interchangeable group of totalizing disciplines, including systems engineering and cybernetics, that became influential after World War II. An attempt to seriously grapple with the intellectual history of the “operation” or the “system” is beyond the scope of this chapter. It suffices to say that these disciplines attempt to abstract and model activity in general, and that their models tend to place technological systems and natural phenomena on an ontological plane with human bodies. It is also useful to note that scholars of performance and allied subjects have recognized the emergence of these disciplines—and especially their period of rapid development post-World War II—as a rupture in culture and consciousness. They are the intellectual basis for the historical situation Lyotard (1984) describes in The Postmodern Condition, in which a concept of technological performance based on efficiency becomes universally applicable, in which cybernetics comes to provide models for everything else. Their rise parallels the cementation of Jon McKenzie’s “performance management” paradigm (2002:55) into Western institutional practice; their moment of extreme ferment is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “cybernetic fold,” the gap between modernist and post-modernist ways of thinking about difference and the mind (2003:105). Operations research methodology concentrates on abstraction and metamodeling. Its uptake in particular domains has often been driven by recognition of the irreducibly interdisciplinary aspects of that domain’s problems. This was the case for the US military. Shrader writes: Operations research, systems analysis, and cost-effectiveness analysis are all aspects of “scientific” management and as such are closely related to older techniques of business management and industrial engineering, such as time and motion studies. For many

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years, military operations researchers failed to appreciate the degree to which OR, industrial engineering, and business management had shared interests and techniques, and it was only after World War II that the close relationship of these three aspects of management science was recognized. (2006:8) Post-World War II, operations research was the primary site of intentional knowledge circulation between military, engineering, and corporate domains. More descriptively, operations research was the nascent self-consciousness of the military-industrial complex. The influence of this growing self-consciousness on wargaming was not limited to the technical innovations familiar from the kriegsspiel tradition. It also made wargaming more persuasive. It could now be backed by the prestige of American science, engineering, and management. The RAND Corporation was the foremost organization in this expansion of persuasive strategy gaming.8 RAND, the first modern military think tank, remains one of the most powerful private policy analysis bodies in the world. It originated in Project RAND, a 1946 Air Force effort to apply operations research methods to study future weapons. Douglas Aircraft Company won the Project RAND contract, but in 1948 spun RAND off as an independent non-profit to avoid potential conflict of interest issues. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, RAND became increasingly influential, but remained self-consciously separate from military institutions. They formed what Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi calls a “Cold War avant-garde” (2005:46) that developed the “real stage for the ascendancy of simulation” (48). When John F. Kennedy appointed Robert McNamara Secretary of Defense in 1961, RAND-style simulation took control of the DoD along with him. McNamara was an icon of scientific management, long famous as one of the “Whiz Kids,” Army Air Force Statistical Control officers recruited after World War II by the foundering Ford Motor Corporation to reform its practices. He put operations research at the center of DoD reforms, where he rapidly installed an inner circle of advisors, largely RAND alumni. Remaining resistance to simulationbased planning techniques from military officers (largely based on perceived disregard for combat experience) vanished before pressure from the Pentagon. This mandate for simulation sparked widespread adoption of wargaming for strategic planning among American military agencies. Wargames had wide application; military organizations used them to research problems ranging from inventory optimization to the feasibility of “winning” global thermonuclear war. The highest-profile wargame methodology of the period was the politico-military crisis game. Air Force colonel Arthur Banister, composing an argument for their further adoption in war colleges in 1967, summarized crisis games like this: The foundation for much of the present cold wargaming activity in the military service lies in the political game developed by the RAND Corporation in the mid-fifties [. . .] This game is also called the “crisis game,” the “reality game,” the “political-military exercise,” and the “politico-military desk game” by various practitioners. [. . .] The main thrust of the game is the testing of preconceived strategies against intelligent opposition, in an environment of maximum realism. [. . .] This artificial environment of living under stress seems to be particularly appropriate for the training of military officers and responsible government officials. (1967)

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The crisis games were role-playing games: games where players stood in for some other people in a hypothetical scenario. Their play consisted of a refereed negotiation of talking and listening, reading and writing, predicting and interpreting. Crisis games, like other simulation methodologies, were and are not limited to military use; RAND used related games successfully in university and corporate contexts. However, they were especially popular in military applications. This is certainly in part, as Banister suggests, because of their ability to deliver the experience of high stakes. This search for artificial military experience was especially pressing given the new military realities of the nuclear age. As RAND planner Herman Kahn wrote in his notorious 1960 On Thermonuclear War: “In some ways the unrealized and unexperienced, but historically plausible, problems of World Wars III and IV are more valuable than the experienced problems of World Wars I and II” (416). Nuclear warfare rendered prior military experience obsolete and necessitated a turn towards simulated futures.

Crisis Gaming in Detail Digg ing into the RAND-style crisis games helps further explain the conceptual basis of contemporary strategic simulation and, by extension, how it thinks. Strategic wargaming in the kriegsspiel tradition was present at RAND from the beginning. In the mid-1950s, RAND’s Social Science Division, especially Herbert Goldhamer and Hans Speier, made several innovations—most importantly, the addition of role playing, supported by a general move towards rules flexibility and interpretive refereeing, often seen as analogous to the mid-19thcentury movement towards “free” kriegsspiel. These innovations were a response to Goldhamer and Speier’s frustration with what Speier privately called the “ignorant mathematicians”9 who refused to understand the “psychological difficulties and contingent circumstances” that guide real diplomatic decisions (in Bessner 2014:97). In response, as Ghamari-Tabrizi writes, Goldhamer suggested a less formalized game that would “reproduce the ferment and disorder of history” (2000:174). Over the next five years, this concept of the crisis game became popular among American military (and to a lesser extent, corporate and academic) institutions. The SIERRA project is exemplary of the crisis games of this era—so much so that RAND analyst Milton G. Weiner used it in 1959 as a case study for explaining crisis games to naive users. SIERRA was a set of games “developed for the study of possible limited wars in the period from 1955 to 1960 in Southeast Asia, the Far East, and the Middle East” (Weiner 1959:iii). Its games were led by RAND Mathematics Department fellow Ed Paxson and played between 1954 and 1958, using the Korean War and the First Indochina War as primary source material. In retrospect, SIERRA appears as a foundational precursor of American attempts to game strategy in Southeast Asia over the course of the subsequent two decades, and low-intensity war up to the present day. Mai Elliott notes a relationship between SIERRA and the development of American counterinsurgency doctrine, and observes that “one of SIERRA’s Vietnam war-game scenarios involving large-scale guerrilla warfare by the communists very nearly anticipated the circumstances of U.S. direct involvement” (2010:10). SIERRA thus also serves as a precursor to many other American wargames that have identified unconventional threats and been ignored. Weiner provides a close look at the performance conventions of RAND-style crisis games, highlighting the importance of adding human factors to wargaming. SIERRA divides participants into three groups: RED, BLUE, and CONTROL. The BLUE team plays “at least one

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country that is the object of Communist action, plus the United States after it has intervened;” the RED team plays “the country or countries carrying out the action, plus any Communist support from outside” (1959:27). Members of the CONTROL team act as referees and arbitrators. The physical space of play rigorously enforces the Cold War assumptions and generally uncertain, anxious atmosphere of the game. Player teams work in carefully separated rooms. Only small windows serve as channels for them to pass messages to CONTROL, and for CONTROL to pass communications, game results, and often-misleading intelligence back to them. CONTROL can alter the game clocks at will, stuttering players forward in time. Though one of SIERRA’s obvious outputs is a war narrative that may well involve victory for one team, winning is not the principal goal. SIERRA is intended to create what Weiner calls “synthetic experience” (74). Although it places many people in a shared high-stakes environment and focuses on their mutual performance and intersubjectivity, unlike a simulator, it does not attempt to create experience through sensory immersion. For instance, it includes no visual representation of its simulated environment other than maps and photographs. It attempts to create experience through minimal distillation of human performance in the form of role-playing. Again, role-playing is the factor that most sharply distinguishes the crisis game from earlier purely military strategic simulations. RED and BLUE players are intended to assume not only the strategic positions but also the subject positions of persons in the scenario. They are meant to take scenario actors’ politics, priorities, and sometimes personalities into account with respect to decision-making, even if this might lead them to make militarily unsound decisions. In this way, as Daniel Bessner argues, the crisis game functioned as an extension of the Weimar-era work of Karl Mannheim, a founding figure in the sociology of knowledge (Speier and Goldhamer both studied under Mannheim). Driven by the crisis of democratic legitimacy in the Weimar Republic, Mannheim attempted to formulate what Bessner calls a “pedagogy of simulation that reproduced the ‘atmosphere’—i.e., the structures of interaction—of democratic politics” (2014:93). Mannheim, like Speier and Goldhamer, reacted against purely quantitative approaches to social phenomena he saw as fatally flawed. Bessner writes that “it was against this eradication of the human that he posed his rationalizing but non-positivist science of politics” (101). The specific methods of this non-positivist science remained sketchy for Mannheim, however, and the crisis game may have been the first serious attempt to engage in this kind of rehearsal of politics—though weaponized and applied on a geopolitical scale. The significance of including—even centering—human psychology and behavior in strategic wargaming is difficult to understate. As an anti-positivist intervention in a basically rationalist framework, the crisis game is exemplary of the tendency in RAND (and other post-war security) thought Ghamari-Tabrizi describes towards “endlessly and compulsively” emphasizing “the role of intuition and artfulness in model design” (2005:130). The crisis game is a manifestation of the imagination of the military-industrial complex. It points to an anti-rationalist streak at the heart of post-modern power: a fetish for creativity and the more-than-possible that tempers its drive for the quantification of human endeavor. It functioned as a productive fusion of a performance-based research methodology with the hyperrationality of operations research, mediated by the flexible quantification of the free kriegsspiel tradition.

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The Performativity of (Strategic) Simulation What is the performativity of this kind of strategic simulation—or, for that matter, strategic simulation in general? It is clear that strategic simulations, though they do not involve the kind of gross physical motion that simulators do, are nevertheless performances. But what do these performances produce? Some simulations work to prepare users for future situations that, although hypothetical, are similar to situations that have already happened. These sorts of simulations promise to predict general future events and prepare their users for them. They are playful practice or rehearsal, and are performative in the sense that they transform their users by building experience and sometimes even, when embedded in formal training practices, producing qualitative changes in social status. Some strategic simulations do work in this way, especially those that model events at the operational level and below. Kriegsspiel, in its classic war college usage, for instance, assumes a canon of tactical problems and prepares its players to solve variations on them. Problems arise when considering more complex strategic simulations. This is especially clear when considering simulations of intentionally improbable, knowingly untrue, or fantastical “realities.” Such examples abound. In strategic simulation, they are normal. Relatively mild examples, in the sense that they model merely extremely unlikely realities, include the kinds of strategic games based on “ersatz history” that Robert Levine excoriated in his 1964 internal RAND memo “Crisis Games for Adults.” By “ersatz history,” he means possible but extremely unlikely events. (For instance, he gives a scenario in which Russia invaded Northern Finland several months ago and NATO is just getting around to doing something about it.) ([1964] 1991:2–3) Stronger examples, in the sense that they model realities known to be contingently or physically impossible, are more common outside the strict crisis game genre. They include historical wargames generally—in the sense that they can and generally do produce alternate history— and the kinds of fantastic simulations common in recreational wargaming. Though they exist in both professional and recreational contexts and are often taken very seriously in both, such simulations are neither misguided good-faith attempts to prepare players for plausible futures nor simple invalid instances of such preparatory simulations. Such simulations demonstrate an aspect of the subjunctive mood often neglected by performance scholars: the counterfactual conditional. All predictive simulations, of course, contain counterfactuals in some sense. “If X, then Y” is counterfactual if X is a hypothetical future event that has not yet happened. But there is some epistemic distance between the just-at-present counterfactual and the permanently, even necessarily, contrary-to-fact. So what is the performativity of a simulation of Levine’s Finland scenario—or, worse, Germany’s 1941 invasion of Switzerland? David Lewis’s account of the truth values of counterfactual conditionals as denoting relations of “distance” between possible worlds provides one useful approach to this subject. His extended description is written in the modal logic of possible-world semantics, so I will simply quote his famous introduction to the topic: “If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over” seems to me to mean something like this: in any possible state of affairs in which kangaroos have no tails, and which resembles our actual state of affairs as much as kangaroos having no tails permits it to, the kangaroos topple over. (Lewis 1973:1)

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In the case of counterfactuals generated by performances about entities known to be fantastic or absurd (not merely silly, as the tailless kangaroo), we might usefully read Lewis’s criterion as including a sense of impossible-world distance. The statements generated in many simulations are fantastic counterfactuals, melancholy performatives that continuously fail to bridge the gulf between the real world and their impossible referents while getting as close as (not) possible. This type of continuously failed enactment of a hypothesis is a staple of performance studies. It is a basic quality of, for instance, the gender performative as described by Butler: “this failure to become real and to embody the ‘natural’ is [. . .] a constitutive failure of all gender enactments” ([1990] 2010:200). It is also a central theme in game studies: Jesper Juul goes so far as to call videogames “the art of failure, the singular art form that sets us up for failure” (2013:30). This type of stumbling repetition-drive appears as a crucial supplement in the literature on strategic gaming. It is the basic character of Weiner’s emphasis on what he calls “the integrity of the play” (1959:51). Despite RAND’s quantitative rigor, “integrity” does not name strict naturalism, but rather a capitulation to gaming’s limitations as a research methodology. Weiner recognizes that though wargames may be based on the best models available, contingent events remain uncertain and arbitrary. “There is no single realism in a wargame,” he writes; it cannot define “THE reality” or truly engage in “predicting the future” (61). This serves as a justification for referees to exclude game-changing events like “some novel tactic for delivering weapons” or “assassination of political or military leaders” (70). In this way, they can ensure that a game outputs as much simulated data as possible that is relevant to its sponsors’ interests. In quite practical terms, the drive for repetition inside strategic simulations provides obvious opportunities for manipulation by parties who want them to output particular answers. This manipulation has a special tendency to minimize or dismiss apparently small threats, like guerrilla warfare. I have mentioned SIERRA’s predictions of stalemate in Vietnam, and the reset of the MC02 in response to its unwelcome claim that improvised explosives might pose serious threats to American materiel. On the other hand, while there is certainly a long tradition of using strategic wargames to help form military plans and policy recommendations, most post-1950s American supporters of professional wargames—Weiner above is an example—do not argue that they are good tools for minutely predicting or prescripting the future. Rather, they emphasize strategic wargames’ capacity to transform conceptual systems by confronting players with radically unfamiliar thinking. The economist-strategist Thomas Schelling, a partisan of RAND-style wargames from the 1950s on, provides one of the most elegant expressions of this argument in a 1987 essay: Games, however, have one property that separates them qualitatively from straightforward analysis and permits them to generate insights that could not be acquired through analysis, reflection, and discussion. That quality can be illustrated by an impossibility theorem: one thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of the things that would never occur to him! (436) If we are to believe Schelling, the reach for impossible worlds fails, but enacts cognitive transformations in its failure.

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Calculating the distance to impossible worlds can give access to hidden truths—even if in abstract or garbled form. Crucially, it does so in large part by freeing players from their own pasts—from the chains of history, memory, and existing knowledge in general. As Schelling wrote in 1964, in response to Levine’s concerns about ersatz history: There are some people who think that President Eisenhower was overly impressed with his experience in World War II, and less well equipped to be president in the nuclear age. All kinds of people have been through some one experience that left too strong a mark on them, an experience by which they judge all the problems that arise. One can go off the deep end by taking seriously a single simulated limited war in the Far East that is generated by a team of gamers, but statistically one can make the same error by studying the Korean War in detail. It, too, was just one observation drawn from a potentially larger universe. (26) Wargames appear here as something close to therapeutic constructs.10 They work to ameliorate the emotional and cognitive dysfunction generated by a person or organization’s traumatic experiences of war. They moreover perform visionary therapy: by treating trauma, games will enable players to see hidden truths. Naturally, like all therapeutic processes, they are deeply imperfect and their lessons do not always translate well to other contexts. After all, calculating impossible-world distances relies on ideas about the existing world. And so this is an impossible task in another sense: projective wargames struggle against hegemonic ideologies they are themselves embedded within. The particular point of predictive failure I noted earlier regarding asymmetric warfare may be related to an assumption that makes up a large part of the ideological basis of the militaryindustrial complex: that the sophistication and cost of materiel determines its operational effectiveness. Some recent calls for wargaming reform, like Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work and General Paul Selva’s “Revitalizing Wargaming is Necessary to Be Prepared for Future Wars,” nevertheless argue that only strategic simulation can help American military planners think into asymmetric warfare. As Work and Selva write: wargames must resist the tendency to feed our ingrained biases for a preferred American way of war or our embedded preferences for certain styles of warfighting. Instead, they should explore entirely new ways of operating. America’s adversaries and competitors have spent decades studying the American way of war, and developing asymmetric approaches to thwart it. (2015) They charge many existing strategic games with holding a merely propagandistic function, and note that it’s useless to wargame if you’re just “rigging games to favor a specific outcome” (here they link to commentary on the MC02) or creating “self-fulfilling, self-congratulatory, self-deluding, or self-limiting prophecies” (2015). Developing the military imaginary of the future requires acceptance of a durably unthinkable thought: the vulnerability of American military power in the face of conventionally inferior forces.

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Art, Performance, and the Unthinkable Strategic games are imperfect and, even when professionalized and heavily funded, their more humiliating and surprising lessons are often ignored—much to the dismay of strategists like Work and Selva. Nevertheless, this kind of defense-oriented visionary therapeutics through simulated encounters with impossible worlds forms a perennial concern in late modernity, including modalities of futurism from strategic simulation to cost projection to existential risk mitigation. We might, considering the press and prevalence of these practices, consider that the category of the fantastic includes the merely unimaginable, and that the merely unimaginable is a staple of the reality of industrial civilization. The Bomb was the avatar of unimaginable change for the Cold War crisis gamers; it had already created historical change and could create far more. Herman Kahn, for instance, used “the unthinkable” as metonym for future thermonuclear war (1962). For other thinkers, technologies from the railroad to the airplane to the telephone to the digital electronic computer to the (still hypothetical) general artificial intelligence have served this function. In 1968, Marshall McLuhan attempted to read history through Finnegan’s Wake in War and Peace in the Global Village and derived the term “thunders” to describe these sorts of traumatic technological ruptures. For McLuhan, these ruptures are simultaneously perceptual and material, denoted both by new artifacts and shifts in human consciousness. The post-war era contains many other suggestions that the aesthetic realm—and perhaps even performance—is specially tied to previously unthinkable changes in the technological world. We might think of the popular notion that including play and artistic expression in educational practice promotes development of what is called “creativity,” often associated with an ability to adapt to the consequences of new technologies and even to devise new technologies. Jacques Rancière’s notion that art practice works to redistribute the sensible, to enact “a recomposition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying” ([2000] 2013:42), offers a close analog to this idea. Even more strongly, we might consider Victor Turner’s classical association of performance (especially in the form of play) with the antistructural, with “liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints” (1982:44), an association that is readily applicable to changes in warfare. What I am getting at, in the final analysis, is that strategic wargames are fundamentally aesthetic as well as therapeutic. They are manifestations of the transformative power of performance tempered in quantitative fire and applied to military imagination rather than the cultural sphere in its usual sense. They are not only crucial components of militarized culture; they are themselves visions of a contrary regime and possible future of aesthetic performance.

Notes 1 According to McKenzie Wark’s account of SIGGRAPH ’91. See the endnotes to section 79 in Gamer Theory (2007). 2 Most notably, Bohemia Interactive’s Virtual Battlespace series, widely used by Western militaries, is built directly on the engines of its hobbyist Arma games. 3 See for instance Maj. Gen. Stephen R. Lanza’s 2013 “Training to focus on enhanced LVCG capabilities.” 4 I provide only a cursory overview of kriegsspiel. My principal guides here are Phillip von Hilgers’s 2012 Wargames: a History of War on Paper and Jon Peterson’s 2012 Playing at the World. Von Hilgers provides an excellent overview of the topic; Peterson provides a complementary perspective, more concerned with game-mechanical details.

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5 When kriegsspiels were published, designers titled these books, but these titles gave descriptions, rather than names, of the kriegsspiels. 6 For more detail on American wargaming pre-World War II, see for instance Peter Perla’s 1990 Art of Wargaming, which, although dated, remains the canonical history of wargames in the American military through the 1970s. There has also been a recent resurgence of academic interest in historical strategic wargames; useful perspectives can be found in the 2016 MIT Press volume Zones of Control (edited by Pat Harrigan, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and James F. Dunnigan), in Martin van Creveld’s 2013 Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes, and again in von Hilgers (2012). Closer to the post-war moment, Francis McHugh’s 1966 Fundamentals of War Gaming provides an example of how 1960s US Army officers saw the legacy of pre-World War II wargaming. 7 This statement applies only to the American military. Gaming as a method of planning army operations was extensively practiced in some nations during the interwar and World War II era, notably Germany and Japan. 8 Detailed histories of RAND, especially through the Vietnam era, are numerous. For a few good examples, see Martin Collins’s Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950 (2002), David Hounshell’s “The Cold War, RAND, and the Generation of Knowledge, 1946–1962,” (1997), and Mai Elliott’s RAND in Southeast Asia (2010). 9 These “ignorant mathematicians” were most likely the major game theorists at RAND: John Von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, and, interestingly, John Nash, whose experiences later in the 1950s and ’60s were fictionalized in the film A Beautiful Mind (2001). 10 Sara Brady has noted the recent (post-2005) development of a sector of the military-entertainment complex whose institutions use combat videogames to treat PTSD symptoms in veterans. This final step in what she calls “the soldier cycle” (2015:194) has similar goals, but different targets and almost opposite methods, to strategic wargaming.

References Banister, Arthur W. 1967. “The Case for Cold War Gaming in the Military Services.” Air University Review (July–August). Accessed 14 July 2016. www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1967/jul-aug/banister.html. Bessner, Daniel. 2014. “Weimar Social Science in Cold War America: The Case of the Political-Military Game.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement 10: 91–109. Borger, Julian. 2002. “Wake-up call.” The Guardian, 5 September. Accessed 14 July 2016. www. theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq. Brady, Sara. 2012. Performance, Politics, and the War on Terror: “Whatever It Takes.” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brady, Sara. 2015. “The Soldier Cycle: Harun Farocki’s Images of War at a Distance.” In The Performance Studies Reader, 3rd edition. Edited by Henry Bial and Sara Brady, 193–201. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. [1990] 2010. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Collins, Martin. 2002. Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. DoD (Department of Defense Instruction 5000.61). 2009. “DoD Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Verification, Validation, and Accreditation (VV&A).” 9 December. Accessed 14 July 2016. www.dtic. mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/500061p.pdf. DoD M&SCO (Department of Defense Modeling and Simulation Coordination Office). 2013. “DoD Modeling and Simulation Glossary 2013.1.” Accessed 14 July 2016. msco.mil/MSGlossary.html. Elliott, Mai. 2010. RAND in Southeast Asia: a History of the Vietnam War Era. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2000. “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War in the 1950s and 1960s.” Social Studies of Science 30, 2 (April): 163–223. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2005. Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2016. “Wargames as Writing Systems.” In Zones of Control, edited by Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, 331–353. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Heilbron, J.L. 1990. “Introductory Essay.” In The Quantifying Spirit in the 18th Century, edited by Tore Frängsmyr, J.L. Heilbron and Robin E. Ryder, 1–23. Berkeley: University of California Press. Horner, Peter. 2003. “The Science of Better.” OR/MS Today December. Accessed 14 July 2016. www. orms-today.org/orms-12-03/frmarketing.html. Hounshell, David. 1997. “The Cold War, RAND, and the Generation of Knowledge, 1946–1962.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 27, 2: 237–267. Janiszewski, John T. 2014. “Q&A: Colonel John T. Janiszewski, Director, National Simulation Center.” Military Training International, 10 February. Accessed 14 July 2016. www.mti-dhp.com/ interesting-post/qa-colonel-john-t-janiszewski-director-national-simulation-center. Juul, Jesper. 2013. The Art of Failure. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kahn, Herman. 1960. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kahn, Herman. 1962. Thinking About the Unthinkable. New York: Horizon Press. Lanza, Stephen R. 2013. “Training to focus on enhanced LVCG capabilities.” army.mil, 12 March. Accessed 14 July 2016. www.army.mil/article/98372/Training_to_focus_on_enhanced_LVCG_capabilities. Levine, Robert. [1964] 1991. “Crisis Games for Adults.” In Crisis Games 27 Years Later: Plus C’est déjà vu, edited by Robert Levine, 1–21. The RAND Corporation. Lewis, David. 1973. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. LLNL CSL (Lawrence Livermore National Laborator y Conflict Simulation Laboratory). 2014. “Joint Conflict and Tactical Simulation (JCATS) Capabilities Brief.” Accessed 14 July 2016. csl.llnl.gov/ content/assets/docs/JCATS-Capabilities-Brief-Update-20DEC2014.pdf. Lowood, Henry, and Timothy Lenoir. 2005. “Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex.” In Collection, Laboratory, Theater, edited by Helmar Schramm, Ludgar Schwarte and Jan Lazardig, 427–456. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Magelssen, Scott. 2009. “Rehearsing the ‘Warrior Ethos.’” TDR 53, 1: 47–72. McHugh, Francis. 1966. Fundamentals of War Gaming, 3rd edition. Newport: US Naval War College. McKenzie, Jon. 2002. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. New York: Routledge. McLuhan, Marshall. 1968. War and Peace in the Global Village. New York: McGraw-Hill. McLuhan, Marshall. 1970. From Cliche to Archetype. New York: Viking Press. Perla, Peter P. 1990. The Art of Wargaming: A Guide for Professionals and Hobbyists. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. Peterson, Jon. 2012. Playing at the World. E-book. San Diego: Unreason Press. Rancière, Jacques. [2000] 2013. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Schelling, Thomas. [1964] 1991. “An Uninhibited Sales Pitch for Crisis Games.” In Crisis Games 27 Years Later: Plus C’est déjà vu, edited by Robert Levine, 22–38. The RAND Corporation. Schelling, Thomas. 1987. “The Role of Wargames and Exercises.” In Managing Nuclear Operations, edited by Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner and Charles A. Zraket, 426–444. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shrader, Charles R. 2006. History of Operations Research in the United States Army, Volume I: 1942–1962. Washington, DC: Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for Operations Research. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications. USJFCOM (United States Joint Forces Command). 2002. “Millennium Challenge ’02.” 1 October. Accessed 14 July 2016. web.archive.org/web/20021001031208/http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/ mc02.htm. Van Creveld, Martin. 2013. Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Von Hilgers, Phillip. 2000. “Eine Anleitung zur Anleitung. Das taktische Kriegsspiel 1812–1824” Board Games Studies: International Journal For the Study of Board Games 3: 59–78. Von Hilgers, Phillip. 2012. Wargames: A History of War on Paper. Trans. Ross Benjamin. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Wark, Mckenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weiner, Milton G. 1959. “War Gaming Methodology.” Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Accessed 14 July 2016. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM2413.html. Work, Bob and Paul Selva. 2015. “Revitalizing Wargaming is Necessary to Be Prepared for Future Wars.” War on the Rocks, 8 December. Accessed 14 July 2016. warontherocks.com/2015/12/ revitalizing-wargaming-is-necessary-to-be-prepared-for-future-wars.

15 PERFORMING FLIGHT Test Pilots, Commercial Airlines, and the Cold War Scott Magelssen

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States,” writes Tom Wolfe in his National Book Award winning bestseller The Right Stuff, “soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot. . .coming over the intercom. . .with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself.” So begins not only Wolfe’s famous analysis of the voice of the American commercial airline pilot but a narrative of its primordial origins deep in the landscape of American folklife. “Well!—who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it!” Wolfe continues. It’s the calming voice that tells you, even as the fuselage bobs and plummets with the thundercloud charged turbulence, to check your seatbelts because “it might get a little choppy.” If the voice may strike you as “vaguely Southern or Southwestern” writes Wolfe, it is because of its specific fountainhead deep in the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia coal country, “so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’” From there, in an extraordinary smalltown success story, the folksy regionalism made its way to “all phases of American aviation” in very short order. “It was amazing,” Wolfe exclaims. “It was Pygmalion in reverse.” The drawl can be tracked to a single individual, asserts Wolfe, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager” (Wolfe 1979:34–35).1 We’ve all heard the voice Wolfe is talking about: The captain comes on over the plane’s PA system. His is just one of several of the flight’s cast, and while he has relatively little airplay compared with that of the head flight attendant, his dialogue commands our attention more (my gender pronouns are intentional: only 5 percent of commercial airline pilots are women; fewer than 1 percent are captains [FAA 2015]. It is true that the pilot’s information is more specific to our needs than the flight attendant’s. She (female flight attendants outnumber males three to one2) will remind us of our role in the general order and comportment expected of all passengers, when we can turn on our devices, and when we must turn them off. He, on the other hand, will tell us whether we will be experiencing a degree of turbulence; our current success in reaching our destination; what we can expect, weather-wise, when we get there; and, on occasion, a point of interest out the starboard or port windows. She tells us to put our seat and tray tables up. He tells us we can sit back and relax and enjoy the flight. But it is not just the content that separates the captain’s voice from that of his crew. It’s also his delivery.

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Whereas the flight attendant’s scripted dialogue is crisp, efficient, and eminently rehearsed, the pilot’s voice is relaxed and casual, extempore, generously saturated with leisurely pauses. At times it seems he may be choosing his next word, vocalizing the selection process not with an uncertain “er” but a confident, back of the throat “uhh. . .” as if enjoying the folksy pleasure of wordsmithing in shooting the breeze with old acquaintances. Often, passengers can detect that hint of a drawl. I, like many theatre and performance scholars, travel two or three times a year by plane. But how often do we actually focus our discursive attention on these performances, which do nothing less than maintain and police the behavior of hundreds of thousands of travelers a day, not only ensuring the narrative of safe travel, but reifying it through maintaining the template of passengers’ bodies’ performance of travel industry payload? Air travel has always brought a degree of risk, but the stakes were heightened with the increase in hijackings starting in the late 1960s, and all the more so with the passenger plane attacks of 11 September 2001. Key to this repertoire of safety is the captain’s voice, which must maintain the impression of relaxed confidence even in the face of technical malfunction or severe weather in order to instill the same in his passengers. Implicit in his performance is a form of soft propaganda, producing a template of “keep calm” that evokes the wartime posters of World War II, which, contemporary popcamp commodification aside, guaranteed civilian complicity with the military agenda in a time of crisis (i.e., the German Blitz’s bombing of London from September 1940 to May 1941). The pilot’s role in a kind of civil defense leadership, however, is not new with the foment of the modern age of terrorism, but can be traced to the beginnings of the explicit construction of pilot from the first decades of the twentieth century. In the narrative above from The Right Stuff, Wolfe links the pilot voice most specifically with West Virginian fighter pilot Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier at Muroc Army Air Field in 1947 (renamed Edwards Air Force Base the following year). Yeager was afterward cinematically linked with cowboy actor and playwright Sam Shepard through his Oscar-nominated role as Yeager in filmmaker Philip Kauffman’s take on The Right Stuff in 1983. This chapter fleshes out some further genealogical and performative roots of the commercial airline captain’s presentation of self within the episteme of Cold War and military-industrial complex performance. To fully consider the pilot’s role in this implicit performance of war, we need to look more closely at the processes through which he has been constructed over the past half century. For this project I consulted government studies and training manuals, as well as online forums frequented by pilots and aviation buffs. In addition, I conducted several interviews, including with retired military fliers who now serve as docents at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, and commercial pilots at US airports served by major carriers (in cases where my interview subjects granted permission to include their name and airline, I do so; many preferred to remain anonymous). I asked them whether they thought there was a special-sounding “pilot’s voice” to be used with passengers, and, if so, the rationale for using it and how it came about. In the following pages, I discuss some of their responses, and then draw connections to the larger relationships between war, industry, and air travel.

Keep Calm We rehearse for the war on terror every time we fly. We remove our belts and shoes and separate our three-ounce containers of liquids and gels into little plastic bags at security. We consent to ever-more revealing body scans. Moreover, we are trained to be suspicious of our fellow

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passengers: our active vigilance is encouraged by airport sound system reminders to watch out for suspicious individuals and unattended bags. “If you see something, say something” is the TSA’s mantra, enlisting us as fellow and necessary players in the fight for freedom and security. “You are the first line of defense against acts of terrorism on our country—and we need your help” (US Department of Homeland Security n.d.) As Tracy C. Davis writes in Stages of Emergency, our rehearsed complicity at airport checkpoints is simply a redirection of our anxieties to new “shibboleths of terror” that were once accommodated by mid-century duck and cover drills that purported to offer protection against an atomic strike (2007:336). Just as hiding under a desk would do little to save us from nuclear war, so removing one’s shoes at security is revealed in the bright light of day to be a Deleuzian ritornello, a “rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable center in the heart of chaos,” that allows us to carry on in the face of an otherwise existential dread of annihilation (Deleuze 1993:201). To be sure, the captain’s voice on the PA system is required in this state of perpetual war and vigilance to be calming, professional, and authoritative. Many of the commercial airline pilots with whom I spoke put it simply: the goal in speaking to passengers is instilling confidence in their command. John Caplinger, who flies for Alaska Airlines, told me he aims to convey comfort and to avoid technical terminology, “[e]specially,” he added, “when there’s something going, you know, the way it’s not supposed to be” (Caplinger 2015). A young pilot I interviewed outside the gate area at SeaTac International Airport also cited the need to speak in everyday terms and added that it is important to be clear and direct, since there is little interaction time between pilots and passengers. Most of what needs to be communicated to the passengers, he leaves to the flight attendants, “because they’re right there and they can have a face to face conversation instead of this voice over the top of the PA.” But the pilots come in when a more authoritative voice is necessary. “[T]echnically we’re in command of the flight. So especially if there’s something of a negative nature—like if we’re letting the passengers know that the flight attendants won’t be able to perform a service or something like that—we’ll get on the PA so that it doesn’t just sound like the attendants are lazy” (Young Pilot 2015). Frank K. Naahielua, who was introduced to me by his daughter (one of my students), ran flight simulator training for Jet Blue in Florida for several years. Naahielua confirmed the need to avoid technical terms. It is not helpful to passengers, he says, to give them information in the argot pilots use with each other on the flight deck or in communications with the tower, so he advises pilots to engage a real-time translation into more simple terminology when speaking to passengers over the PA (Naahieula 2014). As Naahielua points out, the voice the pilot uses to talk to the passengers is different from that used to speak to the tower. While the leisurely paced delivery peppered with pauses may be familiar to travelers, the pilot’s communication with air traffic control needs to be clear, efficient, and precise. It must be free of pauses, and relies heavily on specialized language (Prinzo 1996).3 The point here is that the voice passengers hear over the PA is part of a repertoire of communicative practice, performed for the occasion and with its own performative strategies, and not just the everyday speech of a particular pilot. It should be said too that, while it strikes many of us as impressive that a pilot can manage to convey a calm and collected demeanor during episodes of turbulence or technical malfunction, the most likely case in most of these situations is that the pilot really is calm. Heavy turbulence, bad weather, and even mechanical failure are fairly minor problems to commercial pilots. In his book Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know about Air Travel, commercial pilot

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and Ask the Pilot columnist Patrick Smith writes that, “from a pilot’s perspective [turbulence] is ordinarily seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue” (2013:32). And while it sounds like a miracle to most of us to, say, land a 747 when all four engines have failed, it’s not uncommon for a commercial jet to go through the entire landing procedure without really even using the engines anyway, a state called “flight idle” in which the engines are run back to zero thrust (a state that, if started at 30,000 feet can be maintained for at least a hundred miles). “You’ve been gliding many times without knowing it,” writes Smith. “It happens on just about every flight” (40).4 The calm and confident demeanor in a pilot’s vocal performance, then, need not in most cases be taken for granted as pretense or dissimulation. Not every pilot will tell you that there’s a specific voice they use with passengers. Some pilots were outright dismissive of the idea. One even laughed in my face, then threw over his shoulder “We practice it at home!” as he walked away down the concourse at Denver International Airport (Dismissive Pilot 2015).5 But many others confirmed that there was indeed a distinct voice that pilots put on over the PA, which differs from their “ordinary” voice. A female pilot riding as a “non-rev” passenger (“deadheading” is the colloquial term), with whom I chatted on a Seattle to Denver flight, confirmed that she’s heard some of her male colleagues use it. “It’s the deep professional voice,” she said. “I’ve heard ’em do it!” She did a quick impression to illustrate. “I’m like (pantomiming a double take) ‘Who are YOU?’” (Female Non-Rev Pilot 2015).6 Patrick Barry, who flies for Delta Airlines said he thought there was definitely a pilot voice. He calls it “airplane talk.” “I think there’s an attempt to have the authority that people [want]. . . They don’t want to be second guessing the guy up there at the controls doesn’t know what he’s doing” (Barry 2015).

True Brotherly Stuff It makes absolute sense, then, as the pilots with whom I spoke confirmed, that the pilot needs to sound in control, professional, and clear. But if Tom Wolfe’s description of the pilot’s voice and my own experience is to be believed, then certainly the pilot, as professional speaker, has a signature voice that goes against convention in other public speaking venues. In fact, it would seem to run counter to the best practices we pick up in our own training. The long pauses, the ahs and uhs, the downplaying of stakes, the lullaby tones—all are antithetical to persuasive speaking, advertising, TED Talks, and classroom lectures. In Wolfe’s Shavian framing, it is Pygmalion in reverse: Shaw’s Henry Higgins attempts to pull Eliza Doolittle from the lowly folk to the realm of gentility by coaching her out of her cockney dialect. In “airplane talk,” the language of gentility is the language of the folk, perhaps even the up-hollow folk of Appalachia. So where did this kind of professional voice come from? Tom Wolfe’s Chuck Yeager origin story is indeed perhaps the most trenchant of explanatory narratives. In Wolfe’s account, the pilot’s voice jumps meme-like from Yeager to his fellow test pilots, to fighter pilots at Edwards Air Force Base, and from there to the rest of the pilots in the armed forces and then on to commercial airlines. Wolfe maps the dissemination as emanating from Edwards, where Yeager was a military test pilot and where he broke the sound barrier in his experimental Bell X-1 jet, Glamorous Glennis (named after his wife): [N]o one would contest the fact that as of that time, the 1950s, Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Brothers. [. . .] At first the tower at Edwards began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots

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up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. [. . .] And then that lollygaggin’ poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter. [. . .] And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear that awshuckin’ driftin’ gone-fishin’ Mud River voice coming from the cockpit [. . .] “Now folks, uh, this is the captain. . .ummmm. . .We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not. . .uh. . .lockin’ into position. . .” But so what! What could possibly go wrong? We’ve obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn’t have a nerve in his body! He’s a block of ice! He’s made of 100 percent righteous victory rolling True Brotherly stuff. (Wolfe 1979:51–52) At the time Wolfe was writing, most commercial airline pilots came up through military training, so his theory of the transmission of the Chuck Yeager voice from Cold War test pilots to commercial airline PA systems might hold up. The macho unruffled cowboy mystique of the fighter pilot is certainly epitomized, if not sired, by Yeager, and its pop culture traces attest to its resilience through what Diana Taylor calls “acts of transfer,” her term for performance as transmission of “social knowledge, memory and a sense of identity” through reiterative behavior (Taylor 2003:2–3). Sam Shepard’s Yeager in The Right Stuff embodies the hero as what director Philip Kaufman envisioned as a kind of hipster Gary Cooper “with the collars up” (Kaufman n.d.), a manner Alex Von Tunzelmann, writing for The Guardian, calls nothing less than “[t]otal badass” (Von Tunzelman 2014). Repertoiric traces of the smooth American cowboy pilot can be found from Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun to Tom Hanks’s Jim Lovell in Apollo 13 (Lovell memorably delivered the understated line “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” when his crew’s spacecraft lost its oxygen tanks and two of its three fuel cells). The long list of super cool Hollywood aviators includes John Wayne (Flying Tigers), Dean Martin (Airport), Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High), Tom Selleck (High Road to China), Robert Downey Jr. and Mel Gibson (Air America), and Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Air Force One). Some of these movies, most notably Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Top Gun (1986), have in turn been identified as long expensive commercials for the air force—a way for the military-industrial complex, as the crowd sourced slang index Urban Dictionary frames it, “to con our children into joining the military” (Bruckheimer 2011). Even if one cannot with certainty trace the origins of the cowboy pilot drawl to one specific military test pilot like Yeager, there are other narratives that similarly situate its beginnings in military airbases. In September 2015, I spoke with a number of retired pilots at the Museum of Flight, where they now serve as docents. According to one of these pilots, Bob Salling, the vast majority of commercial pilots in the mid-20th century came out of military training, and the reason they have southern or western accents is that the vast majority of those pilots were trained in Texas. About ninety percent of the pilots in World War II trained in the southern United States, because of the weather conditions.[. . .] When you drive through Texas, there’s not a county you go through that did not have a military airport during World War II.[. . .] Whether they were Navy or Air Corps they trained in Texas[. . .]. And yet these were a

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bunch of bachelors, away from home, and when they would have the dances they would literally bring the ladies in by the busload, the local girls. And they met them and they got married to them. (Salling 2015) In other words, according to Salling, commercial pilots in much of the 20th century spoke with a drawl because, as military airmen, they picked it up from their wives and their wives’ families. The military origins of the pilot’s voice would certainly find symmetry in the military origins of the pilot’s appearance. As with commercial sea captains, the military look and bearing of pilots’ forebears are tacitly referenced in their uniforms. The trim-cut dark suits with stiff shoulders and stripes on the epaulets, as well as the brimmed captain’s hat with braid design on the visor, were introduced by Pan Am in 1931 for their Clipper floatplanes. With Pan Am’s fleet of Sikorsky S-38 and S-40 flying boats, and later the B-314 flying boats, it made sense for commercial passenger pilots, in the course of still being invented in real time, to wear uniforms based on naval uniforms rather than fighter pilot gear (see Conrad 1999). Before this, commercial pilots, nearly all of whom would have been military fliers before entering the commercial travel industry, favored leather bomber jackets, khakis, and scarves. (Some airlines, like Southwest and JetBlue, outfit their pilots with leather fighter pilot–style jackets (“Airline Pilot Uniforms” 2015). Since then, the trappings of militaria in the cut of the dress shirts, blazers, and captain’s hat have denoted the pilot’s social position and authority.7 The braids on the cap are a holdover from sleeve braids on older naval uniforms. The captain’s insignia featuring the star and laurel wreath are similar to those worn by air force command pilots. And the wing badges on the chest and the stripes on the shoulders and jacket cuffs correspond to features of the navy dress blue uniforms (four stripes for captain, three for first officer/co-pilot). A necessary disclaimer before I go much further: It is not my aim for this chapter, as a constructivist history project, to trace a single, linear cause-and-effect trajectory of the pilot as such from a single point of origin to the contemporary captain who ferries us from gate to gate. An individual pilot’s performative affect is informed by a multiplicity of factors, too complex to parse. Moreover, identifying pilots as a single “type” within an ensemble of professional characters is, to be sure, not only futile, but also misguided. At the same time, the performative conventions of commercial airline pilots’ demeanor, comportment, posture, delivery, material, and appearance are enough of a familiar trope in contemporary life and media representation that they bear scrutiny. The stereotype is easy enough to confirm with a quick web search with the key words “pilot” and “voice.” “CK Dexter Haven,” a contributor to “Straight Dope,” an online message board maintained by The Chicago Reader, wrote, “I’m [. . .] convinced they all (well, the ones in the US anyway) have fake Southern accents, because they think that is more soothing to the passengers.” Multiple posters responded to “CK Dexter Haven” with their own stories of pilots’ “aw shucks” drawl in times of hairy patches during flights” (CK Dexter Haven 2001).8 Secondly, changes to the airline industry have brought shifts in the backgrounds and training from which pilots emerge. It’s true that throughout most of the 20th century, when arguably most of our pop culture associations with the pilot were cemented, aviators got their training in the military and so came from a regimented culture of the armed services. Today, however, most pilots get their schooling as civilians, through private lessons, professional and college programs, and company training (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015). It can be argued

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that the way today’s pilots speak is informed as much by their particular racial and socioeconomic background than by any specific individual’s legacy. They talk like white and comparatively rich men. In a sense, they are today’s gentry. Aviation has likely always been achievable only by those of means. The most famous flyers in American history have been from the upper classes. Charles Lindberg, Howard Hughes, and Amelia Earhart all came from families of prominent bankers, businessmen, and politicians. The same was largely the case in Europe. In Jean Renoir’s 1937 film La Grande Illusion, the French prisoner of war pilots routinely have drinks with their German officer captors, even after multiple escapes and recaptures, because, after all, they’re all aristocrats. The bulk of contemporary commercial pilots, it can be argued, while not aristocrats, are also of a privileged demographic. To begin, almost all are white. Just over 2 percent of commercial airline pilots are black (Aziz 2013); Hispanic or Latino pilots account for five percent and Asian pilots for only 2.5 percent (Zirulnik 2014). Nearly all (95 percent) are male. Do passengers put the same amount of trust in a female pilot’s voice as a male’s? There is an argument that female voices are the best for cutting through chatter and noise during emergencies. Early studies concerning the perceived authority of digitized voice warning systems on the flight deck and female air traffic controllers found that female voices (referred to in airline slang as “Bitching Betty”) more quickly got the attention of male pilots and flight crew, though subsequent studies, concomitantly with more females being employed as pilots and air traffic controllers, have determined a negligible difference in perceived authority between male and female voices, and in some cases that male voices are perceived as more authoritative (Smith 2013; see also Magnanti 2013; Edworthy, Hellier, and Rivers 2003; Arrabito 2009; Wolford 2013). But a 2013 British survey of about 2,400 travelers conducted by Sunshine.co.uk found that 51 percent of airline passengers trust a male voice over a female’s, due in part to its lower register, but also a cited perception that they trusted male pilots were more skilled and doubted that a female pilot could handle the pressure of an emergency situation (O. Smith 2013). Twenty-five percent of respondents answered that a pilot’s gender did not matter to their feelings of trust, while only 14 percent said they’d trust a female pilot more than a male. To fight such perceptions, advocates have suggested a range of strategies, from making the career path to commercial piloting easier and more attractive to women, to voice training for female pilots to get them into a lower, more authoritative register (See P. Smith 2013; O. Smith 2013; Magnanti 2013). The pilot’s higher status is also reified in the repertoire of air travel, and rehearsed in the space of both the aircraft and the airport. The passengers make way for the poised, crisply uniformed pilots and their retinue as they glide through security and the terminal with their roller bags. Pilots now often join the flight attendants in receiving passengers as they enter the plane from the jet way, the tiny threshold serving as a kind of ad hoc parlor. To put an even finer point on it, the pilots board before everyone else on the plane. Next come the active military personnel: servicemen and women. Thereafter, pending accommodations of any special needs passengers, the plane is boarded by class, from highest to lowest. The hierarchy delimited by the order in which one’s boarding pass determines her or his social status makes it clear who possesses the most cultural currency, the most puissance. Class and wealth is trumped by role, or, as it were, chain of command. In the heterotopia informed by the aesthetics of ascension, then, the pilots and their crew are at the top of the chain of being. Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton captures a bit of this in A Week at the Airport, his experiential survey of Heathrow Terminal 5 as the airport’s first “writer in residence.” “I felt like a child unsure of his father’s affections,” he writes of his

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meeting with Senior First Officer Mike Norcock. “I realized that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them—their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance. [. . .] a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know” (de Botton 2009:75–76). Lastly, the aviators we associate with the kind of repertoiric pilot performance cemented in the middle of the second half of the 20th century have been of a particular generation. In 1980, when the number of commercial aviators peaked at 827,000 active aviators, the senior pilots were “pilots of the Greatest Generation, born between 1901 and 1924, and the so-called Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1945.” Since then, the number of active aviators has declined, not only because of cutbacks to personnel and flights in times of recession, but, as these older pilots have retired at age 60, baby boomers and Gen Xers have found it more difficult and expensive to enter the profession (Spangler 2013). In other words, airplane talk was invented and disseminated through acts of transfer by the cool guys who modeled the dialects spoken by characters in the movies about World Wars I and II, and who likely served in those conflicts themselves.

Repertoiric Performance and Pilots’ Community of Practice Now, while many actual pilots may not be quick to confirm that they and their colleagues use a Chuck Yeager voice, they will admit it is a trenchant assumption in popular culture. “Yeah I don’t know where that came from,” pilot John Caplinger told me. “That’s not my experience here in Seattle anyway” (Caplinger 2015). I mentioned the Hollywood pilot voice to the pilot I met outside the security area at SeaTac. “Yeah,” he said, “and I know a number of pilots who speak like that,” but he doesn’t attribute the voice to any explicit source. “I think that’s just their personality” (Young Pilot 2015). As with the learned language of any social group, a meta-awareness of the particular patterns, lilts, or origins of accents is unnecessary, and therefore not often conscious, as the case may be above. Nels Kristenson, a pilot who flies firefighting airplanes in Canada and Alaska during wildfire season, but who has also flown commercial passenger planes, described to me the way junior pilots pick up the cadence and dialect from their superiors on the flight deck: “Pilots come into the job as first officers and they haven’t had much experience talking to passengers. They look to the captain, how they talk, how they handle themselves, and they emulate him, since there’s no formal training to speak of ” (Kristenson 2015). Affect theory would suggest that repertoires of pilot performance, as in any group, are transferred affectively, that is, through a kind of preverbal, preconscious communication that nevertheless can be just as firmly established in practice as verbal language. Amy Cook, drawing on the work of Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, notes how emotion can be caught and spread, like a contagion, and can adapt and synchronize through social groups as easily as it adapts to an individual. This happens, she writes, not through any kind of “conscious attempt to reflect or match the feelings of another but rather an automatic mirroring” of relational signals. “What this suggests,” says Cook, “is that we are not separate and contained individuals; we are porous and seeping. According to emotional contagion theory, we ‘synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently [. . .] converge emotionally’” (Cook 2011:77, citing Hatfield et al. 1994:5). To apply this back to the Chuck Yeager theory of origin, or any theory maintaining a kind of identifiable repertoiric

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performance of “pilot” for that matter, the voice, demeanor, delivery, timing, and, indeed, affect of the pilot may not ever be a conscious attempt to imitate, but always already a mirroring of relational signals of a community that has been converging emotionally for decades. To put this another way, pilots are not so much carriers of affect as nodes through which airplane talk is affectively transmitted. In the pilot’s world, you hang out with pilots, and, aspiring to be one yourself, you spend countless hours with them in instruction, flight hours, ground school, onthe-job training, and in the pilots’ lounge at airports. It’s picked up as a repertoire and sought after by employers as a “soft skill,” as one pilot I interviewed called it. In turn, it is transferred to the next generations of pilots. Educational researcher Kevin M. Corns, drawing on the work of educational theorist Etienne Wenger, identifies the commercial airline pilot demographic a “community of practice,” a naturally evolving community as knit together by shared interests, existing alongside more formal administrative or corporate hierarchies (Corns 2014:14). Communities of practice, writes Corns, allow adult learners to informally acquire necessary knowledge and skills that are not always explicitly taught by formal structures of training (in this case, ground school or company orientation). Corns finds that the knowledge and skills shared by pilots in their community of practice is essential and even makes up for gaps perceived by the FAA in formal structures of pilot training, because such learning is allowable only through “initiative, self-efficacy, love of learning, interest in the profession, and professionalism” (138ff ). I would add that pilots’ community of practice includes not only colleagues, but also the aviators and otherwise authoritative figures they admire and aspire to be like in society, history, and the media (e.g., Chuck Yeager, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Tom Hanks, and so forth). Eco-critical scholar Wendy J. Arons invites us to look toward meme theory as we negotiate the future of theatre historiography. We can speak of these facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, movements, and voice patterns as transferrable memes that, in Richard Dawkins’s terms, “propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Arons 2010:54, citing Dawkins 1976:206). Arons points out how Kate Distin has more recently suggested that the most adaptively advantaged memes not only survive through natural selection, but that they, in fact, create culture itself: “Culture [. . .] is ultimately the product of human minds, but the preservation of information in representational content ensures that the culture we encounter today is largely composed of memes produced by human minds of long ago” (Arons 2010:155, citing Distin 2005:203). If human culture comprises a preponderance of memes originating far back in time, it is not such a leap to think of today’s “airplane talk” being a composition of memes produced in the Cold War nodes of the mid-20th century: military air force bases, fighter pilots, radio, television and movie westerns, commercial airliners, the grown-ups who fought in World War I, and fellow veterans of World War II and Korea. The pilots I interviewed confirmed that the way they speak to passengers on the PA or in greeting them at the beginning or conclusion of a flight was not the result of formal instruction, but rather is something that they have simply acquired. As far as the commercial pilot’s confidence is concerned, there’s a certain natural selection that takes place at the point of hire. How-to manuals for prospective airline pilots, such as Airline Pilot Interviews: How You Can Succeed in Getting Hired, stress the importance of strong communication skills, a professional appearance, and above all, projecting “self confidence.”9 Best practices are inseparable from vocal presence and delivery. “You must sound clear, sincere, confident, and credible. Often how you say something can be more important than what you have to say” (Jasinski 2002:200,

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emphasis original). Another manual, Airline Pilot: Let the Pros Show You How to Launch Your Professional Piloting Career, recommends how prospective commercial pilots ought to carry themselves professionally in the interview: “positive and confident without being cocky [. . .]. [N]ot too solemn. Let a little personality show and reveal your enthusiasm” (FAP 1990). Dan Hagedorn, former chief curator at the Museum of Flight, credits successful job interviews with the confidence pilots are “charged” with conveying. “Frankly, when the airlines are hiring pilots, they’re not looking for timid milquetoasts. They want someone who can project confidence both in their persona and in their spoken word, because you got a guy up front who’s responsible for a couple two or three hundred people, they don’t want somebody coming across the PA system that doesn’t project that. And I think that’s what the public quite frankly demands [. . .]. At some level that has to do with that confidence that pilots have been charged with” (Hagedorn 2015). There is something to be said about airplane talk being transmitted through informal means, a skill to be “picked up” vs. formally learned. I asked the young pilot I interviewed at the SeaTac exit whether pilots get formal training in the actual manner in which they speak to and the words they use with passengers. “Not formal,” he answered. “It’s informal,” he continued, . . .in that we have constant conversations about communication. But there’s no part of ground school, at least in my case, where they’re like “lets talk about communications” directly from the pilot and the passenger perspective. I mean, we’re all professionals and we operate at a professional level and they expect us to be able to handle that. It’s kind of a soft skill that they would anticipate you bring to the table already. (Young Pilot 2015) John Caplinger describes the transfer in similar terms: “I think in my case it was picked up from experience and talking with people who have been doing it for a long time” (Caplinger 2015). Scott Rosenberg says, “it’s generally just picked up along the way,” though he added that his company, Alaska Airlines, gives “maybe a little written guidance on just kinda how to get you started” when welcoming passengers aboard. “But other than that there isn’t really” (Rosenberg 2015). “Picking up,” here, is perhaps the closest we can get for now to pilots’ acknowledgement of an affective transfer of memes or of relational signals of community of practice. The Hollywood Cold War Cowboy Pilot, in the manner of Chuck Yeager, is perhaps more rarely encountered these days due to generational shifts, budget cuts, natural attrition, and changes to the cast of authority figures in the pilots’ community of practice, though his legacy continues in media and the pop culture imaginary. It’s not taken for granted anymore, either, that the pilots who shepherd us into our future need to be men. A recent study found that the astronauts for a mission to Mars should not be pulled from the ranks of top gun fighter pilots, as were the astronauts from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo Missions. Rather, women are best suited for interplanetary flight because of their size, physiology, and metabolism.10 The affective atmosphere of air travel is slowly changing, too. In the past few years, commercial airlines have been doing more to inject some levity into the formal proceedings of air travel, and even the traditional conventions of commercial flight are sometimes the subject of ironic meta-commentary. Safety information videos screened during takeoff may include visual gags or surprises to lighten the mood (and to promote attention to the safety procedures, since passengers can tend to tune out).11 Flight attendants

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may mix up their scripted announcements with jokes (“Secure your own oxygen mask first before assisting your child,” began an attendant on a Southwest flight to Chicago in January 2015. “If you have more than one child [pause], choose the one with the most potential.”12 In my experience, however, pilots for the most part still maintain the official no-nonsense folksy decorum, casual but informative (leave the jokes to the flight attendants, seems to be the watch word; passengers do not want their pilots to pull their leg). By some accounts, too, the mystique once enjoyed by commercial pilots is rarer these days. “In the old days, a pilot could walk into a bar and walk out with anyone he wanted,” Nels Kristenson told me. “Pilots were once revered. There was a mystique. Part of this was that it was so new, so different from anything else. Now that it’s become routinized, and flying is much more mundane. Pilots don’t enjoy that same mystique, and people know what they actually make for a salary and they’re all of a sudden not as interesting!” (Kristenson 2015). In my conversation with “old timer” pilots who serve as docents at the Museum of Flight, it became apparent that the poise and bearing of commercial pilots who came up through the military is not found as often today. Whereas for much of the 20th century, 80 percent of pilots had military training and 20 percent came up through civilian routes, the ratio has now completely reversed. Only 20 percent of pilots in the air have military backgrounds. As the military generation retires from flying, it’s being replaced by a corps of civilian pilots (Salling 2015; Fitzpatrick 2015; Paul 2015). The effects are perceivable. During a long connection at Denver International Airport, I noticed a generational shift in some of the young first officers I watched go by in the Gate A food court. While I’d seen several older pilots in their trim suits and regal bearing, there was one young copilot (identifiable by the three stripes on his shoulders) who sauntered past, sunglasses perched atop his gelled hair, hands stuffed in his pockets. Not long after that, a second one passed, again with shades pushed back on his head, an Adidas sport sack with string straps on his slouched back, right hand in his pocket, and a bit of a gut hanging over his belt.

Sit Back, Relax. . . The folksy, relaxed “pilot voice” we associate with commercial airline pilots can be understood as a real phenomenon insofar as it is practiced and perceived by many members of the industry. Further, the pilot voice, whether it started with Chuck Yeager or with military airmen’s Texan brides and their families, endured and thrived over the decades, crossing military and private sectors, seemingly without explicit professional training or indeed formal acknowledgment. Finally, the pilot voice is part of a concomitant genealogy of military practices, namely the mobilization of commercial passengers to assist in the Cold War and the War on Terror, even if assistance means keeping calm and “saying something” when our fellow passengers act outside of the enforced template of behavior. In spite of the inspiring, feel-good nature of accounts of pilots like the one above, they are predicated on a relationship between pilots and passengers defined by power and access to information. The pilot shares or withholds information as a way of policing behavior. When information is shared with passengers, it is packaged in a way gauged to shape and delimit our responses. Changing the tone or delivery of updates on weather or technical proficiency of the aircraft, or framing the situation with airplane talk keeps us complicit with our own naiveté. He knows what’s best. We’ll put our trust in him. To return to the theme of propaganda with

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which I began this chapter, the pilot’s role, similar to that of all leadership in the militaryindustrial complex, is designed to convince us that it’s not our place to take action. As much as the TSA says it needs our help, our role as passenger is to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight, to keep calm and carry on. This may be one of the oldest and most resilient memes of wartime and militarized cultures.

Notes 1 Special thanks to my fellow participants in the American Society for Theatre Research working group, “What is Worth Fighting For? Debating the Stakes within Theatres of War” convened by Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix and Jenna L. Kubly (Portland, 2015), for offering helpful comments and suggestions for this chapter; especially Jay Ball, John Fletcher, Lindsey Mantoan, Elizabeth A. Osborne, and Catherine Schuler. Thanks also to Henry Bial, and Seth Margolis, and Melanie Kwong at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. 2 For the purposes of this chapter, I will for the most part not be treating flight attendants’ performance, which is also a compelling and rich subject. See, for instance, Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, which treats the way flight attendants’ “emotional labor,” up to the 20th century confined largely to the private sphere, has been professionalized, commercialized, managed, and policed by the airline service industry. This in turn can result in flight attendants’ detachment and alienation from their own emotional habitus; and Heather Poole’s Cruising Altitude, an autobiographical tell-all account of one flight attendant’s performative enterprise in dealing with unruly passengers, dangerous flying conditions and onboard crises, drama in the ranks of the flight crew, and the competitive and rigorous vetting and training required for the job. 3 O. Veronika Prinzo finds that “message content errors” or “Speech Act Communication Errors,” like non-use of the phonetic alphabet [“alpha,” “bravo,” and so forth], omission, substitution [“o” for “zero” or “nine” for “niner”], or partial delivery of numbers or words in accordance with FAA regulations can compromise efficiency and air safety. Included in this list of errors is “Dysfluency” including “Pause(s), stammer(s), utterance(s), that add no meaning to the message (e.g., “uh,” “ah,” or “OK” when not used as a general acknowledgment” [Prinzo 1996:9]). The non-verbal accentuations or flourishes that make the pilot voice distinct and calming (pauses, “uhs”), in other words, have no place in communications with the tower. “It is intuitively obvious,” finds Prinzo, “that excess verbiage lengthened the amount of time required to transmit, understand, and respond to a message by pilots and controllers. Yet, an examination of the verbal content of requests reveled that requests such as ‘say again,’ often clarified who was on frequency, who was the intended recipient of a transmission, and improved overall understanding. However, these additional communications also contributed to frequency congestion by increasing the number of transmissions needed to create a mutual understanding (or common ground) of the pilot’s intentions. Without these additional communications, the pilot and controller would not have reached a mutual belief, called the ‘grounding criterion,’ that the receiver had understood what the speaker meant. . . These types of errors can result in trade-offs between frequency congestion and failure to reach a common understanding, both of which can lead to problems” (1996:30 citing Clark and Schaefer (1989); Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986)). “Effective and accurate communication,” continues Prinzo, “are crucial to air safety. As aircraft approach their destination airport, they converge and operate under reduced separation minima. Commercial aircraft may be flying at speeds in excess of 380 knots during their en route phase of flight and reduce to speeds of 180 knots [i.e., traveling at speeds greater than 3.5 nautical miles per minute] in the terminal environment. Under these circumstances, there is little margin for error. When ambiguities arise from poorly constructed messages, it is critical for pilots and controllers to transfer information to one another as quickly and as efficiently as possible so as to maintain or re-establish a common ground of understanding and to maintain their margins of safety” (30). 4 Arthur Bednar, an educator at the Museum of Flight, chalks the pilots’ calm demeanor up to their training, Bednar works with ex-fighter pilots, and recalls conversations he’s had with them as well

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as what they’ve written in their memoirs. “Someone’s trying to literally kill them, and they’re not freaking out about it. They’re going through their training, step by step, to handle it. . .It has a lot to do with military training, pilot training. Thousands of hours of training that kind of get people prepared. Whether they’re astronauts, pilots, they’re doing a lot of training so that they’re prepared for certain situations and they kind of remain even keel the entire time” (Bednar 2015). Most others who did not believe in a standardized “western” or “cowboy” pilot voice simply suggested it was a matter of regionalism. One pilot in the SeaTac gate area answered, “I don’t think that’s true [that there is a pilot voice]. It depends on where they’re from.” Then, in a Chuck Yeager drawl, he added, “I reckon” (“I reckon” Pilot 2015). I only met one other female pilot during the fieldwork for this essay, who had “had a long day” and apologetically declined to participate. Paul Fussel, who uses Erving Goffman’s frame analysis to describe the “dramaturgy” of pilot’s uniforms (and the cockpit as the “back region” where the pilots often quickly take off their ties and jackets as soon as the flight deck door is locked), writes that “[i]n view of September 11, 2001 [. . .] [t]he more they resemble military and police personnel, and of the toughest and most disciplined kind, the better” (Fussel 2002:88). It is poignant to note that this conversation happened just a month before the September 11 attacks. Personal impressiveness “ingredients” for the interview described in chapter three of Airline Pilot Interviews include: a strong positive attitude, a pure love of flying, a strong safety-conscious attitude, captain potential (good judgment, motivating people around you, integrity, relat[ing] well to passengers/customers and other airline employees). The future captain “performs well under stress,” is team-oriented, looks, acts, and “dresses and speaks professionally on and off duty.” In all, the future pilot “creates a good public image” and projects “self-confidence” (Jasinski 2002: 12–15). Kate Greene, who participated in the study, writes about the findings in “An all Female Mission to Mars” (Greene 2014). Virgin America’s 2006 animated safety video, Delta’s safety information series of videos (2012ff ) featuring a traditional flight attendant narration but with visual puns and quirky vignettes illustrating the rules of conduct, and Virgin America’s musically choreographed 2013 video are stand out examples in the US. Gizmodo contributor Alissa Walker compiles several in her post “The 12 Best Airline Safety Videos, Reviewed” (Walker 2013). Other quips included “We never anticipate a loss of cabin pressure. If we did we wouldn’t have come to work today,” and that the refreshment service included beverages for purchase: “Five dollars for beer, liquor, and cheap wine.” She finished her safety demonstration by asking those who were paying attention to raise their hands. “Good luck to the rest of you,” she said in mock sympathy.

References Arons, Wendy. 2010. “Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide: Challenges from Ecocriticism and Evolutionary Biology for Theater Historiography.” Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, edited by Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen, 148–161. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Arrabito, G. Robert. 2009. “Effects of Talker Sex and Voice Style of Verbal Cockpit Warnings on Performance,” Human Factors 51,1: 3–20. Aziz, Nicolas B. 2013. “The Anomalistic Life of an African American Pilot.” Huffington Post 21 March. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicolas-b-aziz/african-americanpilots_b_2895993.html. Barry, Patrick. 2015. Personal interview. 5 September. Bednar, Arthur. 2015. Personal interview, 24 September. Bruckheimer. 2011. “Top Gun” post. 23 July. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=Top+Gun. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2015. “Airline and Commercial Pilots.” Accessed 7 September 2015. http:// www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/mobile/airline-and-commercial-pilots.htm.

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Caplinger, John. 2015. Personal interview. 5 September. Clark, H.H., and D. Wilkes-Gibbs. 1986. “Referring as a Collaborative Process,” Cognition 22: 1–39. Clark, H.H. and E.F. Schaefer. 1989. “Contributing to Discourse.” Cognitive Science 13: 259–294. CK Dexter Haven. 2001. “This is Your Captain Speaking.” The Straight Dope message board. 7 August. Accessed 5 September 2015. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=80864. Conrad, Barnaby. 1999. Pan Am: An Aviation Legend. Emeryville, CA: Woodford Press. Cook, Amy. 2011. “For Hecuba or For Hamlet: Rethinking Emotion and Empathy in the Theatre.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25.2: 71–87. Corns, Kevin M. 2014. “Examining Informal Learning in Commercial Airline Pilots’ Communities of Practice.” Dissertation, Capella University. Davis, Tracy C. 2007. Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. Durham. Duke University Press. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press de Botton, Alain. 2009. A Week at the Airport. New York: Vintage. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. “Music and Ritornello,” The Deleuze Reader, edited by Constantine Boundas, 201–203. New York: Columbia U Press. Dismissive Pilot at Denver International Airport. 2015. Personal Interview. 20 September. Distin, Kate. 2005. The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press. Edworthy, J., E. Hellier and J. Rivers, J. 2003. “The Use of Male or Female Voices in Warnings Systems: A Question of Acoustics.” Noise & health 6.21: 39–50. FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). 2015. “US Civil Airmen Statistics.” Accessed 7 September 2015. https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation_data_statistics/civil_airmen_statistics/. FAP (Future Aviation Professionals of America with David Massey). 1990. Airline Pilot: Let the Pros Show You How to Launch Your Professional Piloting Career. New York: ARCO. Female non-rev pilot. 2015. Personal interview. 18 September. Fitzpatrick, Pat. 2015. Personal Interview. 24 September. Fussel, Paul. 2002. Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Greene, Kate. 2014. “An all Female Mission to Mars.” Slate, 19 October. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/space_20/2014/10/manned_mission_to_mars_ female_astronauts_are_cheaper_to_launch_into_outer.html. Grok. 2001. “This is your Captain Speaking.” The Straight Dope 8 August. Accessed 5 September 2015. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=80864. Hagedorn, Dan. 2015. Personal interview. 24 September. Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo and Richard L. Rapson. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. [1983] 2003. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. “I reckon” Pilot. 2015. Personal Interview. 18 September. Jasinski, Irv. 2002. Airline Pilot Interviews: How You Can Succeed in Getting Hired, Revised and Greatly Expanded Edition. Escondido, CA: Career Advancement Publications. Johnston, Bill. 2014. “The Chuck Yeager Voice.” Prehospital Wisdom blog, 28 January. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://prehospitalwisdom.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-chuck-yeager-voice.html. Kaufman, Philip. N.D. “The Right Stuff.” Sam Shepard fan site. Accessed 7 September 2015. www. Sam-Shepard.com/rightstuff.html. Kristenson, Nels. 2015. Personal interview, 28 November. La Grand Illusion. Dir. Jean Renoir. Réalisations d’Art Cinématographique (RAC), 1937. Magnanti, Brooke. 2013. “Could Women’s Squeaky Voices be the Reason Many Brits Don’t Trust Female Pilots?” The Telegraph, 5 November. Accessed 15 December 2015. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/women/womens-life/10427208/Could-womens-squeaky-voices-be-the-reason-many-Britsdont-trust-female-pilots.html. Morshed, Adnan. 2004. “The Aesthetics of Ascension in Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63.1: 74–99. Naahielua, Frank K. 2014. Personal interview, 16 June.

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Paul, Dick. 2015. Personal Interview. 24 September. Pawlowski, A. 2011. “Why Aren’t More Women Airline Pilots?” CNN website. 18 March. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/03/18/female.airline.pilots/. Poole, Heather 2012. Cruising Altitude. New York: William Morrow. Prinzo, O. Veronika. 1996. “An Analysis of Approach Control/PilotVoice Communications,” a Final Report to the Federal Aviation Administration (U.S. Department of Transportation. October. Rosenberg, Scott. 2015. Personal interview. 5 September. Salling, Bob. 2015. Personal Interview. 24 September. Smith, Oliver. 2013. “Majority ‘don’t trust’ female pilots.” The Telegraph, 4 November. Accessed 15 December 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/10425135/Majority-dont-trust-female-pilots. html. Smith, Patrick. 2013. Cockpit Confidential: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks. Spangler, Scott. 2013. “Pilot Population & Demographic Stability.” Jetwhine. 20 March. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.jetwhine.com/2013/03/pilot-population-demographic-stability/. Stone, Sam. 2001. “This is your Captain Speaking.” The Straight Dope 7 August. Accessed 5 September 2015. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=80864. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke University Press. US Department of Homeland Security. 2015. “United We Stand Campaign.” Accessed 6 September 2015. http://www.securetransit.org/. Von Tunzelmann, Alex. 2014. “The Right Stuff: Authenticity that’s Out of This World,” The Guardian 2 July. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jul/02/the-right-stuffreel-history. Walker, Alissa. 2013. “The 12 Best Airline Safety Videos, Reviewed.” Gizmodo 1 November. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://gizmodo.com/the-12-best-airline-safety-videos-reviewed-1454868194. Warplane. 2006. Documentary. Educational Broadcasting Company and Thirteen/WNET NewYork. Wenger, Etienne. 2008. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wikipedia. N.D. “Airline Pilot Uniforms.” Accessed 13 December 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Airline_pilot_uniforms. Wolfe, Tom. 1979. The Right Stuff. New York: Picador. Wolford, Ben. 2013. “Most Passengers Don’t Trust Female Pilots; 28% Question Women’s Ability To Handle Pressure.” International Science Times. Accessed 15 December 2015 http://www.isciencetimes. com/articles/6275/20131105/passengers-distrust-female-pilots-stereotypes.htm. Young Pilot outside Seatac Gate Area. 2015. Personal interview, 5 September. Zirulnik, Michael L. 2014. “Airlines’ Flight Decks Lack Diversity.” The Hill 22 September. Accessed 7 September 2015. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/transportation/218401-the-companyisnt-going-to-hire-black-pilots-anymore.

PART IV

The Militarization of the Everyday

16 PICKING UP THE GUN Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement Lindsay Adamson Livingston

With weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects, but their equals. –Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1973:120)

Armed members of the Black Panther Party stand in the California State Capitol on 2 May 1967. They were protesting a bill that would restrict their rights to carry arms in public. AP Photo/Walt Zeboski.

FIGURE 16.1

Epigraph: With weapons in our hands, we were no longer their subjects, but their equals. Source: Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1973:120)

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On a bright spring day in 1967, 24 men and six women, all members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), marched toward the state capitol building in Sacramento, California.1 The group was conspicuously armed with .45-caliber pistols, .357 Magnums, and 12-gauge shotguns. They carried their legal firearms in a non-threatening manner, some pointed up toward the sky and others down toward the ground, as they had been taught by Panthers cofounder and Black gun rights advocate Huey P. Newton—meticulously following the law was a vital part of their direct action that day, and it was illegal in California to point a weapon at another person for any reason other than self-defense (Seale 1970:155; Leonardatos 1999:n131). As the group advanced through the capitol building itself, a scrum of cameramen gathered around them. Taking advantage of the free publicity, Bobby Seale, the other cofounder of the BPP, read a statement of demands on behalf of the Party. The event was broadcast on the evening news that night, and splashed across front pages of the nation’s newspapers the next morning. Newton, who planned the Sacramento event but was unable to attend, reflected in his autobiography that the performance was meant to fulfill two primary goals. First, the march on the capitol was meant to protest the California legislature’s consideration of the Mulford Act. Don Mulford was the conservative Republican state assemblyman from the district that included Oakland, the home of the Black Panther Party. On a local radio show, Mulford had recently promised to end the Panthers’ armed patrols of the police; his proposed legislation followed shortly thereafter (Winkler 2011:239; Hilliard, Zimmerman, and Zimmerman 2006:62). The second goal was to use the media gathered at the capitol to “deliver the message to the people” through a public, televised reading of the Executive Mandate #1, which articulated the BPP’s complaints about and demands to the local and federal governments (Newton 1973:149). The transmission of the mandate was, according to Newton, more important than the protest of the gun control bill, and he was pleased that Seale was able to read the mandate twice in front of the cameras. In the end, however, these two stated purposes were eclipsed by the visual spectacle of a heavily armed group of young Black men and women occupying the capitol. The Panthers’ spectacular performance of gun ownership introduced the group to a national audience. Responses to this protest performance were polarized: while the striking image of armed Black dissidents encouraged new recruits from disaffected Black communities, white communities nationwide reacted with panic. National newspaper headlines captured this sense of alarm, reporting that the Panthers were “invaders,” “raiders,” and “militants” (The Boston Globe 1967:2; New York Times 1967:4; Zeman 1967:3). The planned performance—a protest of the Mulford Act and a reading of the Executive Mandate—was overshadowed by a less intentional, if not unintentional, one: the guns themselves, transmitted through images on televisions and in newspapers nationwide, actually performed. How this performance was received and interpreted depended upon the racial communities with which the observer aligned. A “right to bear arms” is enshrined in the US Constitution. So, too, is systemic anti-Black racism. During what Jacqueline Dowd Hall has termed “the long civil rights movement,” personal firearms represented many things to many people (Hall 2005:1235). In several instances, they were brandished by agents of the state intent on thwarting public protests of a status quo that entrenched governmental policies built on centuries of subjugation of Black Americans. As such, guns represented the preservation of a white supremacist order. In other instances, such as the Panthers’ march on the Capitol, guns were wielded by Black

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Americans intent on resisting that status quo. As such, guns offered the potential for changed racial relationships. The Panthers’ use of guns as threat and symbol of empowerment drew on long legacies of both gun ownership and racial relations within the US, extending from before the American revolution up through the present. Firearms, however, have a tendency to escape the boundaries of a user’s intention: they become agential and perform meaning that exceeds their functionality. Guns, especially within the singularly US American context of a pervasive gun culture, constantly tread on a blurry edge between performing as things, or objects that have exceeded their representative qualities and taken on performative life of their own, and as material archives that hold within them complex histories of US militarization, racialized oppression, and attitudes towards violence.

Racialized Cultures of Gun Ownership: Things, Archives, and Performances Guns are made for a singular purpose: when they function correctly, firearms hurl a projectile with enough speed and force to tear through flesh. With appropriate aim, the shot can kill; as long as it hits some part of the target, it will almost certainly maim. Though many people own and use guns primarily for target shooting or other practice, ontologically the gun is a tool invented by humans to end or at least enervate life. While these may be the most fundamental purposes of guns, they do not encompass nor even approximate the full power of a firearm as an object that performs multiple functions, contains multiple meanings, and yet exceeds all of these in a metaphysical way. A gun is, then, a “thing.” We can identify things, Bill Brown contends, “as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems” (Brown 2001:5).2 While the gun is a material object and can be utilized as such, it also holds and projects a sensual power that is often embodied through performances of gun ownership. Guns—particularly when used or displayed in public—bristle with the possibility and even probability of violence. In this, they are objects that are always simultaneously performing and on the edge of performance, seething with what Jane Bennett calls a “vibratory vitality,” an “indefinite or nonpurposive suspense” (Bennett 2010:55). When a gun “performs,” it can mean that the firearm fulfills its operational imperative; that is, a bullet is expelled from the chamber and lodges elsewhere. But the gun also performs simply by being displayed. In such instances, the gun hangs, suspended, in a space between stillness and action; it could fire at any instant. It is at this moment that the firearm is most representationally potent; as Alfred Hitchcock famously quipped, “there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it” (in Glassner 1999:3). To perform its high wire act as a thing, the gun must contain both its present and possible future(s) in a moment. While it operates as a thing, the gun also functions as a material archive, harboring within it the past, present, and potential future. A gun owner wielding a firearm draws on long histories of racialized violence facilitated by widespread gun ownership; these histories determine how she encounters a situation of threat and how she uses her gun in that moment. Because the decision to use a gun often happens in a split second, it is less a decision than a reaction that is conditioned by cultural, historical, and performative factors. In Archive Fever, Jacques

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Derrida argues that “the notion of the archive seem[s] at first, admittedly, to point toward the past.” He changes course almost immediately, however, and complicates this idea of the archive: “As much as and more than a thing of the past [. . .] the archive should call into question the coming of the future” (Derrida 1998:33–34). In this way, the archive is tied to what he calls “a very singular experience of the promise” (36). A firearm, at the moment of either display or firing, likewise performs as a fulcrum between past and present, an action that pulls from past uses of guns while holding in it the promise of a future firing and thus a future death or injury. These concepts of the gun as thing and as material archive rely on a flexible notion of time and how cultural values are transmitted intergenerationally—a folding of time that allows for cultural sentiment to strengthen rather than weaken. The philosopher Michel Serres has challenged a more traditional notion of time that flows, ever moving forward, arguing instead that “time doesn’t flow; it percolates. This means precisely that it passes and doesn’t pass. [. . .] In a filter one flux passes through while another does not” (Serres 1995:58). Public attitudes towards guns have shaped the lived experience of race in the United States. Considering time something that percolates rather than flows, a filter that concentrates meaning rather than diluting it, can elucidate one of the primary ideological debates at the center of contemporary US life—the individual right to keep and bear arms—and how performance structures the radicalized contexts of that debate. The culture of guns in the United States is a fraught one. The everyday influence of firearms and the increasing polarization of opinions on gun rights between gun owners and non-gun owners is such that even the term “gun culture” is controversial, viewed by many enthusiasts as a pejorative term propagated by anti-gun writers and activists (Tillman 2015). But the United States as a whole is saturated with guns, practically and imaginatively. It is a society whose public life is compromised by the ubiquity of firearms, whose history is rooted in gun violence, and whose entertainment continues to mine both the present and the past for romanticized representations of gun use. It is also a society whose founding documents enshrine an enigmatic “right to bear arms,” the meaning of which continues to be debated within state and federal legislative bodies and in the larger cultural conversation. In terms of the pervasive presence of guns, the United States is unparalleled. In 2012, there were an estimated 310 million firearms in the country—more than one gun per person (Krouse 2012:8). The manufacture of firearms, particularly handguns, more than doubled between 2009 and 2013, from 5.6 million to 10.9 million per year, increasing the number of circulating firearms in the US to around 357 million in 2013 (ATF 2015:1; Ingraham 2015). As a result, the United States of America is the most heavily armed country in the world, both in terms of total firearms and the number of guns per capita.3 Somewhat counter intuitively, while the sheer mass of firearms in the US has increased, the number of households that own guns has declined. A 2015 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago indicates that currently, approximately 35 percent of US households own guns, down from a high of over 51 percent between 1976 and 1982 (Smith and Son 2015:1).4 This data suggests that people who own guns own more than one. Even as the number of guns per household has apparently increased, the popularity of hunting has dwindled and the demand for handguns has risen, which represents a shift from guns used primarily for outdoor sporting activities (though certainly many gun owners use their handguns recreationally—at a shooting range, for example) to guns used as tools to facilitate home defense. As ownership of guns has become concentrated into fewer

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households, public debate on the veracity and usefulness of these things has become more polarized as well. People who own guns, as well as those who do not personally own them but support others’ right to do so, ground their beliefs in the text of the Second Amendment, which states, “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Though the amendment no doubt affirms some right for people to “keep and bear arms,” it does so in language that law scholar Adam Winkler calls “maddeningly ambiguous” (Winkler 2011:4). Winkler points out that gun rights advocates often emphasize the individual right suggested by the second half of the amendment, to the exclusion of the first; proponents of gun control, on the other hand, privilege the “regulation” and collective nature of the first clause. Each group argues that their interpretation of the statute encompasses the intent of its authors, focusing either on the limitations of a wellregulated militia or the expansiveness of the people’s right to bear arms. In reality, Winkler argues, gun rights and gun control have been intertwined from the beginning, each serving as a check on the other (1–14). In many ways, the Second Amendment was intended to thwart militarization in the fledgling nation. By ensuring that state militias were able to maintain lay armies of non-military men, James Madison and the other founders intended to curb the potential for the federal government to create and maintain a standing army. And yet, by including the terminology of “a well-regulated militia,” the amendment ensconces governmental protection of war readiness. But readiness for war does not explain why the US has remained a country bristling with guns, long after individuals bearing arms could have a chance of defending themselves against the US army. A more sweeping definition of “militarization” is instructive here. Historian Michael Geyer extends the concept of militarization to encompass “the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence” (Geyer 1989:79). Militias were part of this process; in particular, they were seen as necessary to protect white Americans from slave revolts and uprisings (Hadden 2001:17–18). From the beginning, legal provisions for who was allowed to own guns supported a social system organized to produce violence against Black bodies. The thread of expansive militarization weaves through US history, enumerated in the Second Amendment, used to surveil and control Black Americans, and, later, embraced by an armed and angry Black resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. The Black Panthers articulated a platform that placed them at military odds with the federal government; in his public speeches, Huey Newton argued that “the time has come for Black people to arm themselves” against the “racist American Government [. . .] before it is too late” (Newton 1972:8). When the BPP took up a similar cry as the colonial revolutionaries—that an armed citizen is one protected from the excesses of his government—legislative bodies responded with increased measures to control gun ownership in African American communities. The militarization of the US and the proliferation of guns, from the colonial era to the passage of the Mulford Act, like so many US policies that appear to have developed organically but are, in reality, carefully structured to preserve white supremacy, disenfranchised Black Americans and prevented them from exercising their constitutional rights. The Second Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, emerged as the result of a compromise between federalist and anti-federalist forces during the process of ratification of the US Constitution. Madison’s original wording of the amendment includes a provision excusing those who would decline to serve in a militia on religious grounds; it thus contains simultaneously the right to bear arms but also the right to refuse to bear arms: “The right

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of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person” (Annals of Congress 1789:451). This wording would seem to root the amendment deeply in a culture of compulsory militia service. It also implies a collectivist interpretation of the amendment’s meaning; that is, an argument that the right exists only within the context of collective militia service. It remains clear nevertheless, that the government would not provide guns to the militia, therefore indicating that personal, private ownership of “arms” is, at least in some fashion, protected in the Constitution. The US House of Representatives accepted the final version of the amendment—without the provision for religious refusal of service in the militia—on 21 September 1789. In the early days of the new nation, there was little legal disagreement over the meaning of the amendment. Indeed, the only amendment that received less formal legal scrutiny is the third. In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, the concept of the right to bear arms has been at the center of many heated public policy debates in the 20th century, even if the Supreme Court itself has remained largely silent on the issue of the individual right to bear arms until very recently. The court’s landmark decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which declared unconstitutional a Washington, DC law that banned handguns and required guns in the home be kept non-functional, and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), which affirmed that the amendment applied to states as well as the federal government, represent a clear shift in the court’s willingness to address the Second Amendment. Before these two decisions, the Supreme Court’s rare assessment of an individual’s right to keep and bear arms generally supported a collectivist, or militia-based, interpretation. The court’s earlier decisions also tended to fall along depressingly predictable lines of racial discrimination. In one of the earliest decisions to tangentially address an individual’s right to keep and bear arms outside of a state- or federally-sponsored militia, the Court determined in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be considered citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. In the written decision, the court narrated the white establishment fears associated with granting full rights of citizenship to African Americans: It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State [. . .] without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation; [. . .] and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. (Scott v. Sandford 1857:77) Several of the fears enumerated in the decision had to do with the unfettered movement of Black Americans and their right to occupy space. The decision also articulates the measure of the Bill of Rights and its inapplicability to people of African descent in the United States, situating many of these rights in the realm of public performance—the liberty of speech, of holding public meetings, and of openly carrying a firearm. Importantly, the decision’s description of the right to keep and carry arms implies a legally accepted individual right to possess a gun and to perform that ownership by carrying the weapon openly.

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Although the Dred Scott verdict obliquely affirms an individual’s right to bear arms, other decisions, such as United States v. Cruikshank (1876), argue that the Second Amendment serves only to restrict the powers of the federal government and does not guarantee an individual right to own and carry firearms. This case was brought following the 1872 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, in which partisan fighting over a local election led to the massacre of over 100 Black freedmen. The federal government charged three of the white instigators of the violence with 32 counts of conspiring to deprive the Black citizens of their constitutional rights, including two counts of depriving them of their individual right to bear arms. The guarantees in the newly passed 14th Amendment conferred citizenship on and guaranteed equal protection under the law for freed men and women; Cruikshank took up the question of what rights the amendment actually guarantees. The Supreme Court’s ruling stated that the protections of the Second Amendment applied only to the federal government; that is, while it was illegal for federal forces to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, including the right to assemble and the right to bear arms, it was perfectly legal for states to do so. The ruling also declared that individuals must entreat the state for their own protection rather than providing for their own self-defense. The court’s language on this point is unequivocal: [The right to bear arms] is not a right granted by the Constitution. [. . .] The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed, but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress. This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation [to the state]. (US v. Cruikshank 1872:17) This was a particularly damaging decision for Black men and women in the South, as it put them at the mercy of increasingly hostile state governments in the aftermath of Reconstruction, governments that were not only unwilling to protect Black victims from white perpetrators of violence, but were actively engaged in curtailing the rights of recently enfranchised citizens. The decision also continued the long tradition of US law being used to enshrine racial controls masquerading as public policy. Law scholar Carl T. Bogus even goes so far as to argue that the Second Amendment itself is just such a racial control, claiming that the Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights to appease white slaveholders and assure them that the federal government would not use its military power to disarm the South, which would leave them vulnerable to slave revolts (Bogus 1998). In the ensuing century, Black codes, Jim Crow laws, and other legal measures led to the legal disarmament of Black citizens, dissuaded Black participation in civic life, and placed the disenfranchised and brutalized US Black population at the mercy of a police state intent on maintaining white privilege (Blackmon 2008). The coordinated suppression of African Americans in both the North and the South served to reinforce a system of subjugation that had been in place since long before the drafting of the Constitution. As historian H.M. Henry argues, “slavery was not only an economic and industrial system [. . .] it was a giant police system” (Henry [1914] 1968:154–155). This giant police system continued to thrive unfettered for decades after emancipation and Reconstruction, and the militarized system of surveillance and domination denied African Americans the right to self-determination and self-protection and curtailed the ways in which they could publicly perform the rights of US American citizenship.

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A Natural Accessory: Spectacular Performances of Gun Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement The animosity between Black communities and the government that excluded them manifested in riots and other civil disturbances and culminated in the battles between the state and Black activists during the long Civil Rights Era. In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to protect Black communities against police brutality. In its official platform, the Black Panther Party argued for the right of Black communities to defend themselves: We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense. (Newton [1966] 1970:3) Newton saw this program of arming for self-defense against the state as a nation-wide effort, arguing, “Black people can develop Self-Defense Power by arming themselves from house to house, block to block, community to community, throughout the nation” (Newton 1967:4). The Black Panthers’ project blended two distinct notions of the Second Amendment’s guarantees—both as an individual right to bear arms and a collective right. As Christopher Strain writes, “The Black Panthers shouldered the burden of defending the Black community of Oakland, and in doing so they transformed self-defense from a personal prerogative to a civic duty. With the ascendance of the Panthers, self-defense was no longer an individual act, but rather a collective measure of survival” (Strain 2005:163). This civic duty and collective measure for survival convened in several public performances of gun ownership leading up to the confrontation in Sacramento. Newton argued that, in the militarized culture of the United States, Black Americans had a right, guaranteed by the constitution, to keep individual arms and to publicly display them in self-defense (Bloom and Martin 2013:47; Strain 2005:153). He and Seale characterized the struggle between the US government and its Black citizens as a “political-military whole” that required Black Americans to think of the police as “occupying our community like a foreign troop that occupies territory” (in Seale 1970:117, 97). At public gatherings that closed down street corners and thoroughfares, Panther leaders integrated guns into their performances of community cohesion; former Panther Party chairman Elaine Brown described the theatrical function of the guns in her autobiography. “Guns were the natural accessory of the new Black militants,” she writes, “who were determined to claim their manhood ‘by any means necessary’” (Brown 1992:107). In this way, firearms were things that facilitated a claim to “manhood”—a theatrical display that announced a willingness to fight for the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. As the events were costumed, they were also scripted: Black Panther Party leaders, especially Newton, couched their rhetoric of self-defense in references to the US Constitution. When a police officer intruded on one of the events and insisted on seeing Newton’s weapon, he refused to comply. “Ain’t you ever heard of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States? Don’t you know you don’t remove nobody’s property without due process of law? What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be

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people enforcing the law and here you are, ready to violate my constitutional rights” (in Seale 1970:97). Newton encouraged others to learn gun laws by heart and be prepared to recite them at an instant. The Panthers’ use of firearms as props tread the slippery line between the gun as a representational archive of past meanings and the gun as a thing vibrating with a menace that exceeds human intention. As archive, the gun held the deep and sickening echoes of the long centuries of white supremacist control of the United States and a militarization that extended from slave patrols to mid-century police forces. By taking up the gun, the Panthers were inserting themselves into a narrative of citizenship and constitutional ownership which had as a corollary the right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the guns as materiality broke free from their meaning as objects, challenging representation or ownership in a metaphysical sense. This object that sometimes functions as an archive displayed the “energetic vitality” that Bennett identifies with “thing-power”: the gun became a “vivid [entity] not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them” (Bennett 2010:5). This theatrically potent movement between object and thing haunted nearly all the Panthers’ public performances, but none more so than the march on the capitol. Once the Panthers had arrived at the capitol on 2 May 1967, they headed toward the chambers of the State Assembly, where they anticipated finding news cameras covering the legislative session. The armed group of young Black men and women attracted attention from guards and media alike as it traveled through the capitol halls, and by the time they had reached the assembly chamber, a scrum of reporters buzzed around them. When the knot of news cameras and about half a dozen protesters with guns pushed into the assembly chamber, the entire group was summarily ejected; though sessions were open to the public, only lawmakers were permitted on the assembly floor (Bloom and Martin 2013:59). As the Panthers were driven out of the assembly chamber, capitol police confiscated some of their weapons (Rankin 1967:3). Bobby Seale remembers 17-year-old Bobby Hutton, whose 12-gauge shotgun had been confiscated, roaring at police: “What the hell you got my gun for? Am I under arrest or something? If I’m not under arrest, you give me my gun back. You ain’t said I was under arrest” (Seale 1970:159). Hutton was legally permitted to carry a firearm in the state capitol, and, as he had been instructed by Newton, he forcefully stated this right. The police, determining that no laws had been broken, returned all of the Panthers’ guns, including Hutton’s. Taking advantage of the bank of cameras and reporters that had collected around the protestors as they moved through the capitol, Seale read the Black Panther Executive Mandate #1. This pronouncement demanded attention to “the racist California Legislature now considering legislation aimed at keeping Black people disarmed and powerless” (Newton 1973:7). The mandate also condemned the war in Vietnam and argued that the United States government perpetrated policies of genocide against people of color. Finally, it argued that all Black Americans must arm themselves and fight against governmental attempts to take away their constitutional right to carry firearms. After reading the Mandate and retrieving their weapons, the Panthers strode out of the capitol building, got in their cars, and drove away. Newton and Seale saw in the march on the capitol an opportunity to gain publicity for the BPP while simultaneously protesting the Mulford Act. But the optics of young, proud Black Americans openly displaying weapons drew on genealogies of racial fear, and white people in Sacramento and across the country identified not the protest but the threat inherent in the performance. The thing-ness of the guns spoke loudly, spectacularizing the performance of ownership meant to protest the proposed gun control law. The following day, the headline

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on the front page of the Sacramento Bee encapsulated people’s shock at seeing guns brandished in the state capitol: “Capitol is Invaded” (“Capitol” 1967:1). The militaristic language of an “invasion” emphasized the fact that the protesters’ words had gone largely unheeded, while their display of armed citizenship had not. Newton himself bemoaned his miscalculation of the performative impact that the firearms would have in this space: The message was definitely going out. Bobby read it twice, but the press and the people assembled were so amazed at the Black Panthers’ presence, and particularly the weapons, that few appeared to hear the important thing. They were concentrating on the weapons. We had hoped that after the weapons gained their attention they would listen to the message. (Newton 1973:149) In this complaint, Newton articulates the status of the Panthers’ guns as performing objects that have escaped the realm of controllable discourse and taken on a material agency. The firearms had superseded their function as tools or as representative objects and had begun to function as “things.” Although he was disappointed by the public’s focus on the weapons, Newton nevertheless recognized the performative power of Black men and women carrying guns into the physical space that represented governmental power in California. “Sacramento was certainly a success, however, in attracting national attention,” he argued. “Even those who did not hear the complete message saw the arms, and this conveyed enough to Black people” (Newton 1973:150). The power conveyed by the guns as things demonstrated the potential for Black resistance. Newton, Seale, and the other Panthers had crafted a visually arresting spectacle made for television, the success of which relied on the execution of traditional elements of theatricality such as staging, a script, and props. After the event, however, Newton recognized that the weapons, which were meant to attract attention to, not divert it away from, the reading of the mandate, had taken on a communicative agency of their own. Newton and the other Panthers of course recognized that the guns were not props in the strictest sense; that is, they were real, working firearms. Realizing that the protesters who converged on the capitol that day may have to actually use their guns for self-defense, Newton gave Seale and the others explicit instructions “not to fire or take the offensive unless in imminent danger” (Newton 1973:149). In acknowledging that the guns may have to actually be used for self-defense, Newton was admitting that guns are never just props, but always, also, things. In openly displaying their guns and performing their right to bear arms loudly and publicly, the Panthers were drawing on a long tradition of Black Americans taking up weapons in self-defense (Johnson 2014). Historical narratives of the civil rights movement often privilege a division of the era into pre-1965, a period exemplified by non-violent resistance, and post1965, a time highlighted by the emergence of an armed and vociferous Black insurgency. Such a neat division, however, obscures a lineage of armed Black resistance that extended back into the beginning of African slavery in the pre-Revolutionary English colonies (see Johnson 2014; Strain 2005; and Umoja 2013). But what Newton, Seale, and the other Panthers hoped would be a show of strength in the face of governmental overreach backfired, and instead of entering the national discourse as discontented soldiers in a fight for freedom, the Panthers became a symbol of how Black Americans publicly brandishing weapons—that

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is, emphatically performing their right to own and display arms—was threatening, an act in need of regulation. As a result of the Panthers’ performance, the Mulford Act was quickly signed into law in California. The statute’s primary purpose was to prevent the Black Panthers from openly carrying weapons, but it limited all gun owners. One year later, the US Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, a law that journalist Robert Sherrill argues “was passed not to control guns but to control Blacks” (Sherrill 1973:280). According to Jill Lepore, the Gun Control Act “was intended to fight crime, control riots, and solve what was called [. . .] the ‘Negro problem’” (Lepore 2012). The “Negro Problem” was not just a problem of urban violence; it was also a problem of the optics of an increasingly armed, and subsequently empowered, minority that had been suppressed for centuries. By emphasizing the Black rioter as the target of the legislation, this law reaffirmed a long-standing racial prohibition on performances of armed Black power like the one staged at the California State Capitol in 1967. While guns function by projecting a small piece of metal into flesh, they can, alternately, work in performative ways that draw on centuries of fabricated and exaggerated racialized threat. This becomes particularly clear in examples like those discussed above, where gun legislation, both pro- and anti-gun control, is used to subjugate Black communities. The gun control legislation of the 1960s and 1970s was in direct response to armed Black resistance; scholars have argued that earlier pro-gun legislation supported state militias that participated first in slave patrols and later, following emancipation, in the continued oppression of newly freed Black Americans.5 These imagined threats comprise some of the material archive that guns contain, preserving a racialized past while simultaneously providing potential futures. When those futures are so closely tied to violence perpetrated by firearms, it can create a dire situation indeed. While the militarization of US American culture has accelerated in the mid- to late-20th century, the militarized surveillance and control of Black bodies in North America has been underway since long before the United States of America was founded (Browne 2015). It is this pernicious effect of militarization that is often elided, as Catherine Lutz suggests. “Militarization is intimately connected not only to the obvious increase in the size of armies and resurgence of militant nationalisms and militant fundamentalisms,” she argues, “but also the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action” (Lutz 2002:723). The long history of gun rights in the United States—who can openly perform the right to carry a firearm and whom the armed person is threatening—has functioned as a state-sponsored tool aiding in this project of deformation, even as the gun performs its own meanings and contains its own histories and futures.

Notes 1 My depiction of the Black Panther Party’s march on the Sacramento Capitol is based on The Black Panthers: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale—A Compelling Study of the Angry Young Revolutionaries Who Have Shaken a Black Fist at White America (Marine 1969:63–64); Revolutionary Suicide (Newton 1973:148–151); and Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Bloom and Martin 2013:57–62). 2 For other theorists who engage with the object as thing, see “The Thing” (Heidegger [1971] 2001); What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Mitchell 2005); Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Bennett 2010); A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Brown 2003); and Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (Bernstein 2011).

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3 Assessments of the number of guns circulating in the US indicate that, though US gun manufacturers do export a portion of the firearms they produce (393,121 in 2015), far more are imported into the US from foreign manufacturers (3.6 million in 2015), increasing the number in domestic circulation (ATF 2015:3). 4 In their methodological notes on the survey, Tom Smith, Faith Laken, and Jaesok Son suggest that some of this total could be non-functioning guns, such as those in need of repair or ornamental or antique guns. Depending on how questions on the survey are phrased, non-functioning firearms could account for anywhere from 0.4–13 percent of household firearms (Smith et. al. 2014:3). 5 For descriptions of the anti-Black goals of state militias, see A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (Cornell 2006); Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Hadden 2001); and “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment” (Bogus 1998).

References Annals of Congress. 1789. A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates. Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 1st Congress, 1st Session. Accessed 4 April 2016. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&file Name=001/llac001.db&recNum=227. ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). 2015. “Firearms Commerce in the United States: Annual Statistical Update.” Accessed 1 May 2016. https://www.atf.gov/file/89561/download. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press. Blackmon, Douglas. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday. Bloom, Joshua and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. 2013. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bogus, Carl T. 1998. “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” University of California at Davis Law Review 31: 309–408. Boston Globe, The. 1967. “Armed Negro ‘Panthers’ Invade Calif. Legislature.” 3 May: 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers (366982216). Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, 1: 1–22. Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brown, Elaine. 1992. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. New York: Anchor Books. Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. “Capitol is Invaded.” 1967. Sacramento Bee, 2 May: 1. Cornell, Saul. 2006. A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford. 1857. 60 U.S. 393, 19 How. 393, 15 L.Ed. 691. OpenJurist. Accessed 30 November 2015. http://openjurist.org/60/us/393. Geyer, Michael. 1989. “The Militarization of Europe, 1914–1945.” In The Militarization of the Western World, edited by John Gillis, 65–102. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Glassner, Barry. 1999. The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books. Hadden, Sally E. 2001. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Hall, Jacqueline Dowd. 2005. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” The Journal of American History 91, 4:1233–1263.

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Heidegger, Martin. [1971] 2001. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 163–184. New York, HarperCollins. Henry, H.M. [1914] 1968. The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina. New York: Negro Universities Press. Hilliard, David, Keith Zimmerman and David Zimmerman. 2006. Huey: Spirit of the Panther. New York: Basic Books. Ingraham, Christopher. 2015. “There Are Now More Guns Than People in the United States.”Wonkblog (blog), The Washington Post. October 5. Accessed 2 May 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/ wp/2015/10/05/guns-in-the-united-states-one-for-every-man-woman-and-child-and-then-some/. Krouse, William J. 2012. Gun Control Legislation for Congress (CRS Report No. RL32842). Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. November 14. Accessed 14 April 2016. https://fas.org/sgp/ crs/misc/RL32842.pdf. Johnson, Nicholas. 2014. Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Leonardatos, Cynthia Deitle. 1999. “California’s Attempts to Disarm the Black Panthers.” San Diego Law Review 36: 947–996. Lepore, Jill. 2012. “Battleground America: One Nation, Under the Gun.” The New Yorker, 23 April. Accessed 3 May 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america. Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104.3 (September): 723–735. Marine, Gene. 1969. The Black Panthers: Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale—A Compelling Study of the Angry Young Revolutionaries Who Have Shaken a Black Fist at White America. New York: Signet. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. New York Times, The. 1967. “Hoover Links Carmichael to Negro Leftist Group.” 17 May: 30. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (117582417). Newton, Huey P. (1966) 1970. “October 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program: What We Want, What We Believe.” In The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner, 2–4. New York: J.B. Lippincott Company. Newton, Huey P. 1967. “The Functional Definition of Politics.” Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 15 May: 4. Newton, Huey P. 1972. To Die For the People. New York: Random House. Newton, Huey P. 1973. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Rankin, Jerry. 1967. “Heavily Armed Negro Group Walks Into Assembly Chamber.” Los Angeles Times 3 May: 3. Seale, Bobby. 1970. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. New York: Random House. Serres, Michel with Bruno Latour. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sherrill, Robert. 1973. The Saturday Night Special. New York: Charterhouse. Smith, Tom W., Faith Laken and Jaesok Son. 2014. “Gun Ownership in the United States: Measurement Issues and Trends.” GSS Methodological Report No. 123. National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://gss.norc.org/Documents/reports/methodological-reports/MR123%20Gun% 20Ownership.pdf. Smith, Tom W. and Jaesok Son. 2015. “General Social Survey Final Report: Trends in Gun ownership in the United States, 1972–2014.” National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Accessed 14 April 2016. http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS% 20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in% 20Gun%20Ownership_US_1972-2014.pdf. Strain, Christopher B. 2005. Pure Fire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Tillman, Barrett. 2015. “Why Do We Shoot?: A Culture of Marksmanship.” AmericanHandgunner.com. 22 March. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://americanhandgunner.com/why-do-we-shoot/.

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Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 2013. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press. United States v. Cruikshank et. al. 1875. 92 U.S. 542, 23 L.Ed. 588. OpenJurist. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://openjurist.org/92/us/542/united-states-v-cruikshank-et-al. Winkler, Adam. 2011. Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Zeman, Ray. 1967 “Major Steps Taken to Guard Capitol from Any Raiders: Security Steps.” The Los Angeles Times. 12 May: 3, 20.

17 FAILURE TO ADAPT Affect, Apathy, and Doomed Reenactments in American Theatre’s Militarized Dystopias Emily Klein

The US’s involvement in 21st-century international military conflict and its attendant domestic responses of political resistance have both been represented amply in contemporary American drama.1 The theatre’s well-defined spatial setting grants artists and audiences a unique mode of investigation into the affective and embodied experience of being at war.2 Recent theatrical productions have leveraged the sensory to activate and politicize audiences: What does war feel like? How does war look and sound? How do popular perceptions of military life compare to its actual lived experience? Through the real and the imagined—military service, video games, and artistic and media representations of war—most Americans know well the gestures, postures, and formations that both war and its resistance entail. Our bodies can readily perform the stance and salute of the soldier or the raised fist of the militant protester; sometimes the lines of embodiment even blur as being at war and organizing to end war come to resemble one another. After all, Aristophanes’ classical peace protester, Lysistrata, has a name that means “the disbander of armies,” despite the fact that she is also an army recruiter in her own right. Putting pressure on the performative binary of being either for a war or against it, her play is all about assembling and training troops to win her peaceful war on war. This chapter investigates a handful of recent plays that consider further the liminal space between embodied military engagement and corporeal acts of protest. Neither soldiers nor activists, the ambivalent millennial anti-heroes of the four plays examined here experience failure, apathy, and resignation as highly sensory affective responses to what historians and critics might define as a decades-long process of cultural militarization in the US. Exhibiting a popular familiarity and fascination with systems of war, these protagonists easily traffic in the language and rituals of organized state violence, and see little possibility or motivation for its resistance. In his 2012 New York Times article, “The Permanent Militarization of America,” Aaron B. O’Connell explains this social phenomenon in relation to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s prescient

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warning about the increasing force of this country’s military-industrial complex. “Our culture has militarized considerably since Eisenhower’s era,” O’Connell writes, and civilians, not the armed services, have been the principal cause. From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas. (O’Connell 2012:A27) Similarly, these plays remind us that as daily life becomes increasingly occupied with the idioms, images, and ideologies of modern warfare, we all become subject to the totalizing reach of its symbolic and structural violence. Ben Anderson explains that through both state and cultural apparatuses these effects extend throughout the spaces of the economy and leisure, reaching “every sphere of life and all life must, consequently, be mobilized for, and subordinate to, the war effort” (Anderson 2010:170). Thus, the works by Jennifer Haley, Anne Washburn, Bekah Brunstetter, and Douglas Carter Beane examined here take audiences off the grid along with young protagonists who struggle to make sense of a militarized world they know primarily through live streams and gaming simulations. Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2009); Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2013); The Oregon Trail (2015); and Lysistrata Jones (2012) all use stylized forms of song, dance, and physical embodiment to ironically deploy a new kind of apocalyptic and survivalist theatre. Complete with wandering pioneers, zombies in streets, and Greek columns in ruin, these shows call for an urgent examination of digital modes of both cultural militarization and democratic participation. Where do we locate home, community, and civic responsibility in an era eclipsed by the local-global spectacle of September 11th, and enervated by distant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these plays ask. They answer by introducing audiences not to brave new worlds, but to futures of shell shock and decay in which today’s defunct way of life gives rise to new bravado, ubiquitous militarism, bad translations, and missed opportunities. These performances allow us to glimpse combinations of hubris, agonism, and ignorance that should produce spectacular devastation and cathartic life lessons, according to the classical Aristotelian model. Flawed tragic protagonists should inspire such pity and fear that audiences would weep at their demise. Yet, these performances, amped up on irony and self-mocking sarcasm, offer pageants of failure so weightless and inevitable that they almost seem not to matter. Met with either unblinking apathy or naïve perseveration, the crises in these plays illuminate all the ways their young dystopian protagonists are ill equipped for the demands of their roles3. Allusions to the Peloponnesian and Trojan wars in Lysistrata Jones and Mr. Burns, as well as the struggles for manifest destiny and territorial expansion in Oregon Trail and Neighborhood 3, reference epic odysseys of heroic survival. But the characters in these plays can live up to neither their adaptational legacies nor the formal demands of their own narratives. Performing what Peggy Phelan has called a post-traumatic climate of Freudian “afterwardness,” these shows seem to implore, “Don’t forget the future!” from their chronologically distended vantage points (1998:6). As I read and watched this accidental agglomeration of local productions and standard syllabus texts with my students during the spring of 2015, our

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class began to sarcastically caption the semester’s emergent theme. “Here comes the death of culture again,” we chuckled at the start of class. “Remember to fear our looming and imminent ruin!” the shows whispered sadistically from some barricaded outpost. “Please recall the always ongoing demise of theatre as a medium!” the scripts’ self-reflexive cynicism reminded us. We attended American Conservatory Theatre’s San Francisco production of Mr. Burns and Impact Theatre’s fully staged workshop of Oregon Trail in Berkeley. Some of my students also attended the production of Neighborhood 3 at The Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival at Central Washington University. And we discussed Lysistrata Jones in anticipation of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and our upcoming campus production of Ellen McLaughlin’s Lysistrata. Once our ironic semester of post-historic doom ended, I continued to explore the shows’ shared structure of feeling, perhaps related to the same “dramaturgy of threat” that Jill Stevenson identifies in her recent study of apocalyptic medieval theatre (2015:275). Just as the theatrical power of absence fosters collective anxiety among spectators in her study, I argue for a consideration of these adaptations’ ironic pastiches and parades of glorious and war-ravaged end-time failures as a kind of nostalgia gone wrong. Collectively, they imagine the annihilating impact of militarism on cultural memory and the social contract. They constitute an anticipatory archive of dangerous futures in waiting. But unlike the medieval plays in Stevenson’s study, these shows aren’t sounding a warning call to try and spur audiences to social action. Instead, they mock their own bad rewrites and invite us to scoff alongside characters as alienated coconspirators, inevitably united in cultural decay.

Been There, Done That: Role Playing, Repetition, and Rehearsal in Neighborhood 3, Mr. Burns, and The Oregon Trail One key feature of these texts is their characters’ meta-theatrical and self-reflexive awareness of their own derivative roles within their plays’ adaptive frameworks. In various ways, many of these characters know they are re-enacting old parts. Like the litany of prior Priors in Tony Kushner’s famous epic of American afterwardness, Angels in America, the protagonist of The Oregon Trail lip-synchs and head bangs with her homesteader doppelganger; the characters of Mr. Burns show each other how to steeple their fingers like The Simpsons villain; Lysistrata Jones compares her struggle to her ancient namesake’s; and the kids of Neighborhood 3 plan and deploy attacks like the coordinated military units in their video games. All discuss how their survival stories mimic their classical counterparts. Their self-awareness demonstrates years of training, to the extent that they often seem jaded in considerations of their own postness. In Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom Jennifer Haley takes us into the minimalist “netherworld of a video game or modern day suburbia” (2009:7). Narrated via robotic instructional gaming voiceovers, the show positions its audience as fellow first-person players in the online role-playing game that structures its plot. We are informed in eerie verse-like staccato, “the house you want is third from the left / [. . .] you will see on the sidewalk / a Claw Hammer / pick this up / you will need it later” (9). In this mirror-reality, players work to create virtual simulations of their real neighborhoods. Within labyrinthine on-screen maps of residential blueprints and community plans, players use personalized avatars to do their virtual bidding to collect tools, weapons, nutrients, and clues as they kill neighbors turned zombies and fight for final possession of their territory. Repetitions of uncanny originals abound.

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FIGURE 17.1 Bjorn Ahlstedt and Tami Dixon in Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, closing scene. Courtesy of Bricolage Production Company and jasoncohn.com.

At the play’s outset, when high school gamer Trevor enthuses “I’m dying to play Neighborhood 3,” his friend Makaela coolly retorts, “ha / that sounds like something / out of a horror movie / like you’re about to play a video game / and you think it’s just a game / but actually it’s real / and these teenagers don’t know it / but the audience knows it / and this one kid’s like / I’m dying to play / and it’s like ooooo foreshadowing” (15). Seven pages into the World of Warcraft-based script of Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom, Haley’s teen sardonically narrates the whole plot of her hundred-page play and anticipates its repetition of a familiar formula. I read this blasé performance of rote participation in the predictable terror plot as a kind of gallows humor—a wink at the culture of militarism that pervades Haley’s script. In fact, Neighborhood 3 maps some of the very mechanics of cultural militarization and robotic role-playing throughout its form and plot. For example, Haley’s published production notes indicate that characters should “sound almost natural” and that their movement might sometimes resemble the “AFK (away from keyboard) characters in World of Warcraft,” one of the earliest and most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games involving first-person combat and quests (7).4 With its characteristically exaggerated rhythmic breathing and stiffly militaristic posture of Hulk-like aggression and readiness, this AFK reference serves as another inside joke for gaming fans who would be well acquainted with the laughably awkward appearance of the heavily breathing avatar paused mid-game during his player’s absence.5 Yet, it is significant that the avatars’ inhumanity suggested by this detail also offers some insight into the powers of dehumanization required for success in all forms of combat—both online and actual.

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Learned dehumanization is part of a much larger process of cultural militarization, which social scientists understand as a form of life-long conditioning for war through an array of social and infrastructural channels including educational and religious institutions, sports, popular music and entertainment, consumer marketing, and even gender norms. For Americans, our internalized aptitude for conflict and oppression is part of an ideological system that erodes our powers of empathy and, as Elaine Scarry puts it, makes it difficult to imagine the pain of others. As Scarry says, the ability to objectify and injure others comes from the socially conditioned inability to see them, “For if they stood visible to us, the infliction of that injury would be impossible” (Scarry 1999:282). Though these invisibilities may emerge as byproducts of American exceptionalism and ethnocentrism, they are highly useful to a military training program that depends on the totalizing de-humanization of enemy forces, and sometimes whole populations. Scarry draws a clear connection between the individual act of causing another person bodily harm and the larger military-industrial practice of injuring whole groups of people through warfare, sanctioned physical torture, or laws that deny access to safety and well being. According to Scarry, our willingness to cause harm to other persons, whether on the individual or national level, is predicated on our inability to perceive them as fully human. Thus, Haley’s script frequently reminds us of the videogame’s flattening effects, which help to maintain a tone of distanced, robotic neutrality among her violent player-characters. In addition to its stylized performance directions, Neighborhood 3 also shows how stereotypes and flat, stock characters become easy (if not necessary) stand-ins for realistic, rounded characters as play warfare turns real. For example, instead of offering any background information about the script’s 16 roles, the playwright simply groups them into four nuclear family “types”: “father type,” “mother type,” “son type,” and “daughter type” (6). The generic nature of these familial parts pervades the script as characters attempt to interact in ways that suggest banal suburban normalcy: mowing the lawn, leaving notes on Post-its, going to baseball practice. But for all their efforts to appear typical, each generic family unit is quickly revealed to be in deep distress, with their outer identities barely concealing internal struggle. Steve, a “father type” coolly reveals, “i’m a / corporate manager / i manage people at all levels / and when they’re not up to task i just / fire them / but you know / you can’t fire your only kid / even when she comes out of her room / looking like some kind of / monster” (26). “Mother type” Leslie responds that her own daughter “won’t allow me / in her room / she calls me / leslie / she won’t call me / mom” (27). Beneath their all-American middle-class facades, the generic characters’ problems take on an air of eerie suburban predictability. Delivered by actors performing in the uncanny valley between theatrical realism and the simulated reality of first-person avatars, these lines keep audiences suspended in uneasy anticipation of the play’s slippery descent into acts of violence. For many scholars of cultural militarization, this generic repetition is also symptomatic of trends in war play and fictional war narratives. International relations researcher Joshua S. Goldstein interprets these layers of replication using Dave Grossman’s analysis of cultural militarism’s “virus of violence” in the US: Regarding video games in particular, Grossman notes the shift in military training from firing at fixed bull’s-eye targets to “man-shaped silhouettes.” [. . .] As technology advances, “virtual reality” programs offer to replicate realistically, in three dimensions,

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“all the gore and violence of popular violent movies, except now you are the killer.” [. . .] Compared with a generation ago, war play has changed. The play is more “repetitive” rather than elaborating themes over time. It is based on characters seen on TV, and often on scripted scenarios. “Many children no longer seem to be in full charge of their play.” [Whereas] in the previous, long-standing tradition on war play with cap or water guns, children had to create their own play (characters and scripts). (Goldstein 2001:295–296) Neighborhood 3 performs exactly these elements of surrogation and repetition as the characters’ highly militarized and simulated lives are rendered as expendable as those of their first-person shooter avatars. Doug, another “father type,” has a heart-to-heart on the matter with his “son type” Ryan: DOUG: death comes to everyone think of it as something really democratic like our country RYAN: or as warren leblanc said life is like a video game everyone must die DOUG: who is warren leblanc RYAN: he got caught up in this game called manhunt and killed his fourteen-year-old friend with a Claw Hammer. (Haley 2009:46) Here, the real history of a 2004 gaming-inspired murder in England is transposed onto the history of American democracy. As the play unravels through a series of violent acts that merge the mirror-worlds of game and neighborhood, the teenage characters continue their murderous gaming binge, unable to distinguish simulations from reality. Preferring virtual interactions to lived experience, and recent events to cultural history, the parents and children share an aversion to the weighty presence of the past. Noting the way her beloved ceramic garden gnome’s cheeks stay warm for a little while, even after the sun stops shining, Leslie gushes, “so you have a history / but only a recent history / just the past hour / instead of the crushing history / of your lifetime / or your country / or hominids” (Haley 2009:31). History is similarly warped, condensed, and revised in Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. The three-act show introduces us to two generations of post-apocalyptic survivors: “This play is set in the very near future / Then 7 years after that / Then 75 years after that,” Washburn’s notes instruct (2014:7). We first meet a handful of intrepid campers only a few months after they escape the chaos and destruction of a global nuclear collapse. ACT’s 2015 production in San Francisco initially revealed these characters gathered around a campfire, still homeless, separated from loved ones, and reeling from the recent tragedy. The strangers get to know one another and keep themselves distracted and amused by collaboratively reconstructing old television episodes of The Simpsons. By the time we rejoin the characters seven years later during act II, they have become a fully-fledged performance troupe, part of

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a competitive entertainment marketplace in which established companies of actors produce a broad range of pre-apocalyptic TV and cinema texts mostly reconstrued through collective memory. The rehearsal we encounter begins with TV commercials like the ones the characters remember from before the nuclear collapse. As they give each other notes, they contemplate TV advertising’s intended effects on audiences: “The point of a Commercial is to create a reality which is welcoming, not challenging,” Jenny insists. Gibson responds: Yeah but what about that whole, I feel like we’re failing to exploit, you know, in commercials, it’s not just about feeling cozy, and bounty, there was that whole other thing commercials used to do, like there always used to be that question of identity. Like, it’s not just what is the desire, it’s who has the desire. (Washburn 2014:53) Here Gibson critiques the group’s failure to capture an aspect of the commercial they are adapting just as Makaela from Neighborhood 3 cynically critiques the overused horror film formula—even as she actually participates in the formula’s adapted reuse. The characters are awash in their own self-reflexive awareness of adaptive failures. Though perhaps the least overt in its attention to issues of cultural militarization, Bekah Brunstetter’s The Oregon Trail figuratively circles its wagons around latent themes of survival, self-defense, individualism, and territorial expansion. By pairing Jane, a contemporary young protagonist, with Then Jane, her aptly named pioneer doppelganger from Independence, Missouri in 1848, Brunstetter places questions of repetition, surrogacy, and adaptive failure at the show’s thematic center. Just as Washburn’s Mr. Burns compresses a futuristic 82-year history of dystopic nuclear fallout, Brunstetter’s play compresses 149 years of frontier history by permitting 1997’s Jane to walk in the shoes of 1848’s Then Jane. Along her personal journey from middle school to young adulthood Jane wrestles with both characters’ personal failures to adapt to new life circumstances as well as her own utter failure as a new (but not improved) version of her historical forbearer. The educational computer game The Oregon Trail, popular in school computer labs throughout the 1980s and 1990s, figures as the play’s virtual aperture through which today’s Jane accesses her predecessor. Called “The Omnipotent Voice of the Oregon Trail” in the play’s cast list, the game’s voiceovers instruct contemporary Jane to play the part of Then Jane by making Choose Your Own Adventure-style decisions about her family’s westward travel, including their schedule, route, ammunition, and provisions (Brunstetter 2015:2). For example, when Jane loads and boots the game disc at the beginning of the play, the voiceover starts, GAME: THE OREGON TRAIL! You May: 1. Travel the Trail. 2. Learn about the Trail. What is your choice? (2015:3)

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FIGURE 17.2

Now Jane and Then Jane in The Oregon Trail. Courtesy of Chesire Isaacs Impact Theatre.

But as Jane’s jocular familiarity with the game is revealed through her choices and banter, the game’s tone changes: GAME: Before leaving Independence, you should have equipment and supplies. NOW JANE: Really? Cause I was going to traverse the country with NOTHING! GAME: Just as you are unequipped to traverse life. NOW JANE: Touché, game. (2015:11) Now Jane’s immaturity and naïveté is mapped on to Then Jane via the game’s ironic taunts. As both Janes confront their inabilities to navigate life’s challenges, the game increasingly becomes an anthropomorphized agent of control. It willfully rules out options and tricks its player. Like the teenagers trapped in Haley’s simulated mirror world in Neighborhood 3, Brunstetter’s two Janes also find themselves cornered by a videogame simulation gone rogue. The first moment when the Janes’ lives become directly interlaced is when Then Jane sets out on the four-month journey to Oregon with her broken family while Now Jane “leans in and kisses [a boy] which she’s never done, and has learned mostly from episodes of My So-Called Life” (2015:26). When the boy spurns Jane’s teen drama-inspired advances, she chooses to “1. Wallow in this moment” from the game’s list of options. As the wallowing takes the form of an angst-fueled rendition of the first verse of Bush’s 1994 rock ballad, “Glycerine,” Then Jane, in a parallel moment, “trailing behind the wagon, joins her,

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exhausted, singing to herself ” (27). In a tandem belting of doubled lyrics such as “I’m never alone / I’m alone all the time” the two doleful Janes spiral into an ironic musical moment of internal negation. On the rocky trail toward their twinned adulthoods, both Janes march into a future that feels like a hopeless TV re-run. With their paired trails pre-ordained by the booming voice of the game, it seems impossible for either character to escape the shadows and mirrors of her dark past. While Brunstetter’s The Oregon Trail and Haley’s Neighborhood 3 both use old videogame plots as the basis of their plays, adapting digital media’s early participatory storylines and first-person avatars for contemporary dramatic use, Beane’s Lysistrata Jones and Washburn’s Mr. Burns reinterpret classical Greek war narratives for audiences located squarely in the second decade of the 21st century. All four plays ask us to consider questions about survival: what makes stories last, what gives them cultural staying power and what makes them seem dated, or worse, become defunct and lost altogether. They ask these questions by situating the action of their shows in looking-glass worlds—uncanny “nows” with a twist—nows just a little more overrun by technology, nows on the verge of nuclear meltdown, nows with a more highly militarized police presence, nows with more anomie and less civic engagement.

Over It: Arrogance and Apathy in Lysistrata Jones and Mr. Burns Just as Haley and Brunstetter’s dark scripts achieve moments of grim dystopic pathos, Beane and Washburn produce narratives with a similar affective charge while also giving us characters that believe their off-kilter adaptations, bad translations, pastiches, and bricolages really are affecting positive change in their worlds. Beane creates a post-modern Lysistrata who fights for basketball points instead of a peace treaty and Washburn imagines a post-apocalyptic Homer who survives an odyssey and imagines himself an epic hero, but is blinded by hubris and easily slaughtered by his enemy on the high seas. These characters inhabit musical scripts that play fast and loose with the adaptational mode. As Rebecca Schneider reminds us, the work of revisiting sources and “troubl[ing] linear temporality [. . .] is peppered with its own ongoing incompletion” and “is to court the ancient (and tired) Western anxiety over ideality and originality” (2011:30). These plays’ messages seem to feign hope, but layered under their eerie reconstructions of Greek classics are haunting gaps and disturbances that tell us something crucial has been lost in translation. Lysistrata Jones, written by Douglas Carter Beane, deals with young characters who score high on indicators of apathy and angst, and low on political consciousness. Evacuated of Aristophanes’ sociohistoric context, the 2012 musical pushes war and feminism far from the thematic spotlight. When I saw the show at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre, the set revealed a Greek university in ruins with crumbling columns and a marble quad overtaken by weeds and dust. Although the characters spoke of Twitter and Facebook, their world was both ours and not ours—technologically saturated but culturally and historically drained. Staged mainly on the dilapidated campus of long-defeated Athens University, this adaptation depends on the transformative leadership of a prototypically blonde and bubble-headed cheerleader named Lyssie. Her mission, as conveyed through catchy pop songs and hip-hop choreography, is to unite campus women in a sex strike until the basketball team at least tries to win a game. Once dressed in their protest gear, the women’s costumes combine camouflage and bandoliers with sportswear and chastity belts.

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Military gear is inverted as the fetish fashion for an aggressive pursuit of basketball points. With a story that lauds the faux-heroics of active choices like making an effort and pursuing goals, the political potential of Aristophanes’ anti-war work seems to all but disappear. Like her classical predecessor, Lyssie Jones yearns—nay, joneses—for change, but the source of that impulse eludes her: I don’t know why but you know, I just want to go for it. Everybody’s all—“you can’t,” it’s too hard,” it’ll never work,” “why bother?,” Whatever.” My last school was all about the whatever [. . .] I am so over “whatever”. I want this team to win, they can, they’re good enough. And I want to fight for it. (Beane 2012:16) Fighting for something—anything—becomes the musical’s central motif, with a climactic protest scene culminating in the unraveling of a sixties-style flowered banner that reads, simply and ambiguously, “I CARE.” Again and again, throughout the script, the cast grapples to connect their contemporary yearnings for change with historical activist movements. But in lyrics like “I hear the ghost of Susan B. Anthony blowing in the wind” and “they’ve marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, ‘Plant a tree, make it clean, no more carbon, keep it green,’” even the most civically minded characters can’t help but conflate suffrage, environmentalism, civil rights, and the anti-war movement into an earnest mishmash of activist malapropisms (69–70). In this context, a slew of 20th-century countercultural movements become a jumbled and overgeneralized inspiration for resistance. Yet, strangely, these characters still resort to combat gear and the choreography of military marches and formations in order to try to shift the status quo. By responding to apathy with tactical advances on the basketball court and in the

FIGURE 17.3

Lysistrata Jones. Courtesy of Joan Marcus.

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residence hall bedrooms, Lyssie and her fellow protesters wage a trite war for change. Their deeply gendered, vaguely militarized, and naïvely historicized mode of resistance merges many forms of social activism within one unilateral song and dance attack. A similarly queasy musical pastiche appears in Washburn’s Mr. Burns when Jenny, Gibson, and the characters from the re-enacted commercial perform a medley of millennial “Chart Hits” that blend Britney Spears, Eminem, and Ricky Martin into one toxic, minor chord-laden lament on “the end of everything” (Washburn 2014:67). Interestingly, haunting pop music appropriations in both Lysistrata Jones and Mr. Burns help to mark the shows as earnestly and naïvely youthful. As Washburn’s directions indicate, “bravura dancing” and “worrisomely sexy outfits” help to create an “overall effect” that is “highly choreographed, polished, entertaining, and without irony” (66). Another meta-dramatic element shared by these dystopic texts is their consideration of the theatre’s value in an era of afterwardness, defeat, and failure. As the characters of Mr. Burns continue their multi-genre rehearsal in the play’s second act, we learn that their performance centers on an adaptation of The Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which, itself, is based on the two Cape Fear films—the 1962 original and its 1991 remake. Throughout the rehearsal process, the cast’s discussion engages questions of authenticity, reception, aesthetics, and exigency. Gibson, Colleen, and Matt debate: GIBSON: But Springfield Files was a great show. People remember loving that episode. COLLEEN: Back in the day. Yes. Our version sucks you know it does. If we don’t play it we lose right to it anyway and every single time we do play it we diminish our reputation [. . .] MATT: Look our episodes are getting pretty good, we’re putting together a rather accurate show. (58, 63) Similarly, in Lysistrata Jones, we learn a bit about the protagonist’s relationship to the dramatic arts. “Go Lysistrata. Love that name, by the way,” a bookish college girl says to Lyssie Jones, who replies, “My parents, when they were in school, they were on the fringe of society. They were theater majors.” ROBIN: Yes, it’s from a play by Aristophanes. LYSISTRATA: I never go to the theater. I think it would upset me. ROBIN: But I thought your parentsLYSISTRATA: Oh they gave that up. [. . .] ROBIN: Oh Lysistrata, you should join my women’s study group and read the play “Lysistrata.” (she holds a hardbound script up for Lysistrata. Who stares back) There are also the Sparknotes on line. (Beane 2012:16–17) Lysistrata takes to her laptop, skimming the plot summary page in a way that suggests she has never before considered the origins of her name. While Oregon Trail and Neighborhood 3 don’t reference the theatrical medium directly, they do imagine a world in which computer and television screens become part of a looping, self-referential system of knowledge. Replacing many other forms of embodied experience, computer games are

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represented as a hollow repository of history and a contemporary adaptation of social and civic participation.

I Can’t Even: Adaptation, Proximity, and Knowability in Lysistrata Jones, Mr. Burns, Neighborhood 3, and Oregon Trail In these plays the theatre’s liveness—its corporeal proximity bringing unfamiliar bodies together in one shared space—makes it a kinetic place to imagine a daunting futurity in which young people conduct their civic and social interactions through screens. In Lysistrata Jones, the choral figure/brothel madam Hetaira sings with the cast and explains the show’s origins in light of its contemporary context: ALL: It’s a little like [repeated] HETAIRA: Some play by Aristophanes He’s dead, so we do what we please Something that’s old and so arcane So sue us, ALL: It’s public domain ALL: Right Now! [repeated] HETAIRA: We’re gonna free your mind Just leave your cell phone behind (Beane 2012:2–3) Hetaira’s lyrics dismissively gloss the backstory of the show’s authorship and jokingly instruct audiences on the etiquette of theatrical reception—particularly critical at the moment of the show’s Broadway debut in early 2012 when many other theatres along the Great White Way were just beginning to experiment with instituting audience sections for live tweeting during shows. As Lyssie J walks us through her Google searches, Mr. Burns characters re-enact old TV shows and commercials, and computer voiceovers narrate gaming choices in The Oregon Trail and Neighborhood 3, the audiences of all these plays are bathed in the exaggerated glow of screens. Watching protagonists watch their computers reminds us, as audience members, that our acquaintance with these protagonists occurs not by seeing them interact with provocative human foils, but by watching how they navigate technology. In essence, “click through activism,” multiplayer gaming, and Facebook “likes” become high-stakes artifacts of a depleted brand of couch-bound critical engagement in these shows. Through both satirical adaptation and unsettling parody, Washburn, Brunstetter, Haley, and Beane’s adolescent characters offer us dull and careless palimpsests of Aristophanes and Homer, manifest destiny, war, and the American dream. Placing these crudely drawn ideals and icons of the Western canon alongside videogames and animated sitcoms establishes what Linda Hutcheon terms a “politics of intertextuality,” in which the “implicitly negative cultural evaluation” of the secondary text is challenged by millennial characters that aren’t familiar with the source texts they half-knowingly borrow and steal (2006:xiv). As Simpsons news anchor Troy McClure robotically stutters in Washburn’s final act, “You you you you you may know me / You may have known me / Maybe you knew me / Now there’s no knowing me,” history seems to vanish before our eyes (Washburn 2014:77). Although the

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characters long for the cultural authority of canonical texts, they fetishize contemporary cultural objects, even in spite of those objects’ own smart and frequent moments of historical referentiality. In their self-reflexive examination of the relationship between contemporary and classical storytelling these shows quietly, modestly, posit the theatre’s long legacy of localized efficacy as one possible antidote to a generational surge of political dislocation and indifference. Apathy and illiteracy render the past nearly unknowable in Lysistrata Jones while in Mr. Burns characters are so hungry for, but chronologically distant from, source texts that they become dependent on an emerging but dangerous commercial market that controls their commodified exchange. Unlike the characters in Lysistrata Jones who have—but don’t care much about— technological access to older cultural forms, the players in Mr. Burns put their lives at risk as their Simpsons episode rehearsal is ambushed by gun-toting renegades on a mission to raid the scripts of rival TV show performance troupes. In other words, both plays “illustrate again the strange temporal economy in which we live. What we carry in our ‘post’ is a series of transpositions, transcriptions, transfigurations” (Phelan 1998:9). These plays also have in common some meta-theatrical considerations of what it means to know an original text and how that familiarity operates in terms of an adaptation’s reception. For both Washburn’s plot as well as Beane’s, the creative labor of adaptation is central. Characters discuss their awareness of the original texts as well as the limitations of their awareness. In Mr. Burns, Quincy reprimands his fellow thespians: “This is a cartoon. That’s what we’re doing. A cartoon. You keep trying to turn it into a Drama. [. . .] No motivation, no consequence, that’s the point of a cartoon. Where else do we get to experience that, nowhere” (70).

Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, Act 1. Courtesy of Kevin Berne and American Conservatory Theatre.

FIGURE 17.4

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FIGURE 17.5 Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, pre-production. Courtesy of Kevin Berne and American Conservatory Theatre.

Julie Sanders argues that the “pleasure involved in the action of assessing the similarities and differences between texts, between source and imitation” is “fundamental to the reading and spectating experience of adaptation” (2005:120). These performative “oscillations” (to use Hutcheon’s term) between present and past, source and innovation, illuminate what Peggy Phelan calls “the congenial, albeit often secret, relation between futures and ends” (1998:5).

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“Those pasts that we have still not encountered we label ‘ends’ so that we might one day reach them. For we know that there is no future that remains untouched by the whispering pass of our many pasts” (6). But unlike Phelan’s optimistic love of futurity, which undergirds “the heroic act of belief in a recoupable past,” these plays treat the past as a fossilized wasteland, a largely indecipherable temporal locale with its few redeemable cultural objects scattered among ruins (ibid). Beane and Washburn play with their characters’ distance from their source texts, and thus complicate the kinds of pleasures they are able to take away from the adaptive process. The characters are good at borrowing, stealing, plagiarizing, chewing up and spitting out, reducing, reusing, recycling, and sometimes throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in part because they are operating at such a remove from their source texts. But they are even better at recounting immersive narratives from other media forms; they have highly developed media literacy skills, but they share an underdeveloped cultural and historical awareness. Their repurposing skills are framed as a sign of contemporary postness, semiotically standing in for our overflowing dumps, the valuelessness of physical textual relics, library cleanouts, vinyl sales, CD purges, dollar bins. Compellingly, the plays remind us that adaptation inherently implies failure of some kind or another: brokenness, worn-out-ness, the state of being too depleted or obsolete to use as-is. Adaptation is about breathing in new life, but it also marks a kind of death. This tension also pervades the characters’ attitudes toward the future in these plays. There is a longing for the past—its perceived clarity, safety, efficacy, and purposefulness. In other words, this longing is to some extent naïve because it is grounded in an imagined past—a fantasy of a better yesterday. But the plays also tentatively dream a questionable tomorrow through their adaptive work. In The Oregon Trail, Then Jane’s sense of doom as her family starts its ill-fated journey west is later supplanted by contemporary Jane’s more honed pioneer spirit: CLANCY: We’ll send letters. THEN JANE: No we won’t. MATT:( joking): Oh yeah, why not? THEN JANE / Now JANE: Because we’ll / you’ll never make it. THEN JANE: Because America ends after Missoura. It drops off like the lip of a table into a fiery sea. Because there is no place in the world but Missoura, where what’s left a my Ma’s body lay in the ground. (Brunstetter 2015:13) By comparison, the Jane of 1997 sees future challenges a little differently, telling a classmate to appreciate threats to his well-being: “Now you have something to overcome. Instead of just like, being fine. Which is the real tragedy. When you have nothing to overcome” (25). Similarly, in Mr. Burns, Bart sings about his imminent murder at the hands of the show’s title villain: There’s no one looking after me Just shadows and their history There’s nothing for me up ahead The rivers curves and then I’m dead But I believe that I’m going to stick around For another second or two

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Because I’ve never done what I’ve been told And Burns you don’t want me to I believe I’m going to stick around For another second or two I’m going to make a little trouble Gonna cause a hullabaloo! (2014:92) Adaptation and survival may be futile in the long run, but these characters still sense that it is their legacy to try to endure for a while, if only to briefly live up to the destiny foretold by their predecessors.

Or Not: Negation, Survival, and Failure in the Theatre Ultimately, these plays offer a new rendition on an old theme: that structure of feeling that coolly negates feeling itself, the affective praxis of apathy. Just as Joshua S. Goldstein writes in War and Gender that today’s first-person shooter games train players “to associate the detailed horrible suffering and killing of human beings with [. . .] their favorite soft drink, their favorite candy bar, and the close, intimate contact of their date,” Haley’s young characters are blasé about the way war simulation games appear to be ravaging their neighborhood (2001:295). A neutral voiceover instructs, “as the job / of the Neighborhood Association / is to protect the Zombies/ consider the forces they deploy / to be your / enemy”; a “mother type” observes “they’re sending out / swat teams / you’re wearing all that / armor” (2009:64, 84). Interactive video games, Goldstein claims, enable careless, random acts of violence because they train players using “the same methods as the military but without ‘stimulus discriminators’ that allow firing only under orders” (2001:295). In their consideration of the tension between critical attention and apathy, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth write that affect theories, “whatever their multiple trajectories, must persistently work [. . .] toward a style of being present to the struggles of our time” (2010:12). But as they discuss that call to awareness and engagement in relation to Lauren Berlant’s work in Cruel Optimism (2011), the open and ironic persistence of what Berlant calls “habituated indifference” clings to every phrase, with each hopeful revisioning punctuated by their phrase, “or not” (Berlant in Gregg and Seigworth 2010:12). “Maybe that’s the ‘for now’ promise of affect theory’s ‘not yet,’” Gregg and Seigworth shrug. “There is also the lingering, numbing downside,” they admit, “that even though a propitious moment ‘could become otherwise, [. . .] shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world’” (Berlant 2010:116 in Gregg and Seigworth 2010:12–13; emphasis added). I would argue that such inadequacy is even woven into the lexical fabric of the growing field of adaptation studies. As Verna Foster suggests in her survey of prominent texts, adaptation scholars have identified a “dizzying proliferation of terms associated with adaptation, distinguishing among the nuances of ‘alteration,’ ‘spinoff,’ ‘tradaptation,’ ‘offshoot,’ ‘appropriation,’ and ‘adaptation,’ but finding all of these terms [. . .] deficient in some way” (Foster 2012:2). That our lexicon has so many terms and clichés for making old new again (or new-to-you) is repeatedly addressed by adaptation scholars. Here language itself fails to sufficiently name

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either the half-work of adapting or the Franken-texts that work engenders. Although Foster notes that Linda Hutcheon and Timberlake Wertenbaker both acknowledge the positive Darwinian resonance of “adaptation” as a process whereby the fittest texts evolve in order to sustain their lineage, the implications of survival here still implicitly encapsulate the struggle to endure as the surrounding environment renders endurance increasingly difficult. These plays remind us that adapting is about the struggle for persistence in the midst of widespread extinction. Like literary adaptations, haunted by loss as well as the impulse to acclimate, the antiheroes of these plays, in all their simulated and surrogated futurity, carry with them the burdens of the past. As they soldier on through their cross-temporal journeys, the millennial protagonists of all four shows are faced with a common choice: do they resist systems of control to fight for a better future, or play their prescribed roles within a larger social structure of violence and decay? For many characters, the answer seems to be “neither.” Through various ironic, cynical, and darkly comic negations these characters embody the apolitical, performing the distance and apathy essential to their own survival in a militarized culture. Jeanne Colleran explains that within such systems of structural violence, “as the distance between discursive and material forms of violence narrows or disappears, the possibilities of ethical and political action also seem to diminish” (Colleran 2012:10). The plays’ protagonists are all too aware of such diminished options, sometimes played out literally by the foreclosed choices of the video game and TV show plots in which they exist. Their theatrical worlds are entrenched in the concrete historical conditions of “total war,” a term popularized during World War I, a “‘war of nerves’ that alters ‘the character of peace’” (in Anderson 2010:169). This apparatus of the militarized state impacts every aspect of daily life and: extend[s] to the traumatic experiential geographies of suffering or loss that can haunt the victims and sometimes perpetrators of the multiple relations and forms of violence that make up “total war.” [. . .] War is “total” then because it involves a “total” mobilization. This mobilization extends to the affective realm and makes morale a key resource of the nation-state to be “secured”: “The circumstances of modern warfare require the collaboration of practically everyone. Ineffectual persons anywhere in the social organization are a menace to the whole.” (in Anderson 2010:170-171) Thus, we might read the pervasive apathy, despondency, willful ignorance, and naïve arrogance of the futuristic protagonists as the only forms of resistance left in their dystopic worlds. Going numb is both part of their militarized cultural training, and their only accessible mode of survival. Layered beneath their eerie song and dance pastiches and their obsessive game playing and TV watching, these characters have what the Janes of The Oregon Trail call “a sorrow, in us” (Brunstetter 2015:43). Lysistrata Jones’ “whatever,” Neighborhood 3’s teenage zombies on anti-depressants, and Mr. Burns’ Bart with “nothing for me up ahead” are all a piece of the military conditioning (and the failed adaptation to it) that defines these shows. Despite some of their efforts toward revision and adaptation, these new versions of old characters can’t help but sag with all the baggage of their pasts. They march into bleak futures armed only with what

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Eisenhower called the “lingering sadness of war” and the “certain agony of the battlefield” (O’Connell 2012:A27).

Notes 1 These themes have been taken up most recently in plays and documentary theatre pieces by Eve Ensler, Coco Fusco, Ellen McLaughlin, Emily Ackerman, and K.J. Sanchez. Also see my chapter “Antiwar Activism and the Structures of Trauma in the Plays of Eve Ensler and Kathryn Blume” in Jenny Spencer’s anthology Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2012) and my monograph Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in Performance 1930–2012 (2014), where some of this research originated. Interestingly, female playwrights and performers are at the forefront of this current wave of theatrical explorations of American militarism and war. 2 Sections of this chapter were presented as part of “Bad Translations: Adaptations and Apathy in PostPolitical Dystopias” at the Women and Theatre Program Pre-Conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in 2015. Many thanks to the panelists of “Translating Politics across Borders, Bodies, and Genres” for their insightful feedback on the project. Thanks also to Routledge for their permission to use elements that appear in my chapter “Opting Out and Giving (it) Up: The Uncoupling and Lysistrata Jones” (2014). 3 In keeping with the “Failure to Adapt” military discharge clause for which this chapter is named, these characters have trouble adjusting to their increasingly stark, dehumanized, or modernized environments; some demonstrate a “lack of reasonable effort” to fit in, while others make futile attempts at resistance (Army Regulation 635–200 2016:87). 4 It is worth noting that much of the first-person shooter simulation technology used in these online games was originally developed for military combat training purposes. 5 This stylized delivery is consistent with productions my students and I attended at Bricolage Theatre in Pittsburgh, PA in 2009 and the American College Theatre Festival in Ellensburg, WA in 2015.

References Anderson, Ben. 2010. “Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘Total War.’” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 161–85. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Army Regulation 635–200. 2016. Personnel Separations: Active Duty Enlisted Administrative Separations. Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 19 December. Beane, Douglas Carter. 2012. Lysistrata Jones. New York: Tams-Witmark. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. “Cruel Optimism.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 93–117. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brunstetter, Bekah. 2015. The Oregon Trail. Unpublished script. Colleran, Jeanne. 2012. Theatre and War: Theatrical Responses Since 1991. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, Verna A. (ed.) 2012. Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairytales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Goldstein, Joshua S. 2001. War and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth. 2010. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. 1–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haley, Jennifer. 2009. Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom. New York: Samuel French. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Klein, Emily. 2012. “Antiwar Activism and the Structures of Trauma in the Plays of Eve Ensler and Kathryn Blume.” In Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent, edited by Jenny Spencer, 111–126. London: Routledge. Klein, Emily. 2014. Sex and War on the America Stage: Lysistrata in Performance 1930–2012. London: Routledge.

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O’Connell, Aaron B. 2012. “The Permanent Militarization of America.” New York Times. 5 November: A27. Phelan, Peggy. 1998. “Introduction: The Ends of Performance.” In The Ends of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, 1–22. New York: NYU Press. Sanders, Julie. 2005. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Scarry, Elaine. 1999. “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons.” In Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, edited by Carla Hesse and Robert Post, 277–312. New York: Zone Books. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Spencer, Jenny. 2012. Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent. London: Routledge. Stevenson, Jill. 2015. “Poised at the Threatening Edge: Feeling the Future in Medieval Last Judgment Performances.” Theatre Journal 67, 2: 273–293. Washburn, Anne. 2014. Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

18 WEAPONIZED BUREAUCRACY Kill-Chains, Drones, and Tethers Asher Warren

On the dark winter evening of 8 May 2014 a small audience gathered outdoors in Melbourne, Australia to witness Aerial ReCreation, a performance billed as “an expansive demonstration of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in a sales pitch to the public” (Next Wave 2014a). The performance was scheduled to run from 6–8pm in the small car park behind BUS Projects, an artist-run gallery, and intended to investigate the incursions of military technologies and techniques of surveillance and control into civic society. A white, 1990 Nissan Pulsar hatchback was parked near the center of the space, a bank of laptop screens glowing from within. Walking around the perimeter of the car park, a figure projected sound from a hyper directional speaker mounted on a pole. Just above the car, a small UAV hovered, a mass of wires, sensors, and lights about two feet wide, held aloft by six whining propellers. Built by the artists from commercially available parts, this domestic drone was attached to the car with a short rope. Beside the car another drone of similar design was suspended from a tightrope, above a sixsided star made of light-emitting rods. The two drones performed a somewhat claustrophobic choreography within the limits of their tethers. The demonstration was anything but expansive. It was not meant to be this way. This performance of Aerial ReCreation was a far cry from the work planned by the artists, who had intended to automate three drones to fly—untethered—on a pre-programmed route above the car park following GPS coordinates. Emitting dance music from hyper directional speakers (originally developed for military use), these drones would create a moving sonic enclosure. Playing on the fear and fascination drones evoke, the artists attempted to invert the atmosphere of apprehension projected by military UAVs by seducing the audience to willingly gather under these drones for the hedonistic pleasure of partying. The group behind the work, Golden Solution, was comprised of Andrew McLellan, Michael Candy, and Kiah Reading, are all early-career interdisciplinary artists who predominantly exhibit and perform in gallery contexts, and have worked together in various capacities before. Aerial ReCreation was the second of a three-part project titled Altertruism, which they presented at the 2014 Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, Australia.

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The makeshift drone “control room.” Aerial ReCreation, part of the Altertruism series by Golden Solution. Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2014. Photo by Jesse Hunniford; courtesy Next Wave Festival.

FIGURE 18.1

Parts one and three of Altertruism were held some blocks away in the Goodtime Studio Gallery. The first, Shower Party, was a durational interactive installation, and the third and final part, Altertruism Demos, was a roundtable discussion about the issues raised by the project. The focus across Altertruism was systemic design—how technologies and bureaucracies distribute responsibility and entrain behavior, with Golden Solution attempting to create technologically mediated systems designed to encourage and reward participant hedonism and excess. However, answering audience questions during the roundtable discussion, the artists acknowledged that neither Aerial ReCreation nor Shower Party went according to plan. In fact, the artists seemed fatigued and perhaps even dejected. What went wrong? This chapter is an attempt to answer this question. As an autopsy of sorts, this chapter investigates the military technologies these artists were trying to repurpose and the structures they worked within. My argument is that through a bureaucratic process of risk management and organizational distribution of responsibility, the Next Wave festival furtively adopted many of the militarized techniques that Golden Solution attempted to critique. To make this case, I will discuss both Aerial ReCreation and Shower Party, exploring the risks inherent in these works, and the management of these risks. To contextualize this process of risk management, I will consider the Next Wave organization and festival and their curatorial statements regarding risk. To theorize the production, distribution, and management of risk, I draw on Ulrich Beck’s concept of “risk society” (1992) and the emergence of pre-emptive risk-management throughout both civic and military cultures. Connecting this concept of risk to the technology of the drone, I will

One of the tethered drones. Aerial ReCreation, part of the Altertruism series by Golden Solution. Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, 2014. Photo by Jesse Hunniford; courtesy Next Wave Festival.

FIGURE 18.2

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then discuss the military drone and its weaponization through the so-called kill chain. Finally, bringing these concepts back to the work and the Next Wave festival, I will draw attention to the discrepancies between the communication and hidden management of risk in Altertruism. I will argue that the festival exercises a form of contemporary power, entraining the behavior of audiences, artists, and employees—a power that, as Benjamin Noys observes, takes the drone (both military and civic) as its signature device (2015).

Altertruism The ambitions surrounding Altertruism provide some insight to the sense of disappointment I perceived at Altertruism Demos. The artists had attempted to hack or repurpose aspects of the military drone, adopting techno-positivist salesmanship to demonstrate how military technologies and cultures might be incorporated into civic life. In Aerial ReCreation, as I have already noted, they attempted to alter the affective qualities of the drone, and in Shower Party, to reorganize the operational logic that controls and legitimates the drone strike. As the first step in this autopsy, I will consider each work in turn to highlight the gap between what was attempted and what was achieved. In Aerial ReCreation, the drone is transplanted from the theatre of war and its capabilities repurposed toward ambient performance. It was only during informal conversations months later with artists Andrew McLellan and Michael Candy that I learned of their original plan to incorporate hyper directional speakers and GPS software—technologies which both originated from military research and development, that have since been transformed for civic use. At the actual event, which ran for less than an hour, this ambitious technological choreography was not performed. Instead, two drones were flown on short tethers. They did not fly in formation or between programmed waypoints, nor did they carry hyper directional speakers, which were instead mounted on a pole wielded by McLellan, who patrolled the perimeter and projected his voice, delivering a series of statements and commands to the audience. At the final point of the demonstration, a makeshift human dummy was positioned on the bonnet of the car, within reach of one tethered drone, which was piloted to attack the dummy by striking at it with its propellers. While it was interesting to see these technologies, and the considerable technical expertise of the artists in building these drones, in action, it was frustrating not to see their full capability. The work felt incomplete, like a developmental showing. As I learned more about the planned work, I became curious about how the actual presentation deviated so far from these ambitions. In response to this line of questioning, however, information was less forthcoming—even when off the record, the artists chose their words quite carefully. There were two planned performances of Aerial ReCreation, on 6 and 8 May, the first of which was canceled due to rain. While I have not been able to ascertain an exact chain of events, I learned there were a number of factors involved, including organizational failures, technical problems, and risk-averse management. First, it would seem both the artists and the supporting festival were guilty of inadequate planning, as the timeframe for the artists to build and test the drones was rushed due to a lack of funding, and the short time allocated (three days) to onsite testing and rehearsal. During this truncated preparation, a technical problem emerged: the buildings surrounding the performance site compromised the GPS signal, and the only effective solution, given the timeframe, was to fly the drones manually. Finally, even though the work had been through a series of risk assessments with adequate lead-time, one last evaluation was carried out the day of the canceled performance (6 May) by the festival’s

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risk management consultant. As the artists were unable to guarantee the safety of their audience or themselves, the risk posed by the manually flown drones was considered too great. This final evaluation occurred at such a late stage that there was little choice for the artists but to cancel, or hurriedly alter the work to avoid these risks. As the work was already publicized, the artists felt obligated to present something, thus for the 8 May performance, the work was modified, and the tethers were attached. This tangle of circumstances makes any clear failure difficult to attribute—with both Golden Solution and Next Wave guilty of failing to plan and prepare for such contingencies. One of the artists, Andrew McLelland, acknowledged that “we did underestimate the amount of work we were undertaking and it led to some pretty sub-par outcomes” (McLelland 2016). However, the tethering of these drones also shows the overriding importance of risk management, and how, when faced with these circumstances, safety was prioritized above artistic considerations. Surprisingly, missing from any discussions I had with the artists and festival organizers was acknowledgement of the Australian civic regulations regarding UAVs. Some of these regulations were met; since this performance was free and provided no commercial gain for the artists, it was legal to fly the small drones without accreditation. The artists also had secured permission from BUS Projects to fly in their car park. However, it was, and remains, against regulations to fly a drone at night, or closer than 30 meters to people and buildings (horizontally measured).1 It would appear that the Next Wave festival was also unaware of the these regulations—the festival website warned that the show “contains a flying craft” (Next Wave 2014a).

Shower Party Six days prior to Aerial ReCreation, the group presented Shower Party, a four-hour indoor event held at Goodtime Studios on the night of Friday 2 May. The ambition for this work was to reengineer the “kill chain” of the military drone strike. By kill chain I refer to the hierarchical decision-making process, an assemblage of human and non-human actors that Grégoire Chamayou (2015) and Derek Gregory (2011; 2014) have investigated extensively. As Gregory explains: The kill-chain can be thought of as a dispersed and distributed apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects, practices, discourses and affects, that entrains the people who are made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds of subjects. (Gregory 2011:196) Gregory’s description is helpful in explaining Shower Party, an assemblage that brought together participants, a technological apparatus, and social practices associated with gallery exhibitions and nightclubbing. The technological apparatus included four self-serve drink dispensers placed around the walls of the moderately sized gallery, and filled with alcoholic cocktails. These were wirelessly connected to a large fish tank in the center of the room that held a single goldfish. As Sarah Werkmeister explained in a promotional listing on prominent Melbourne event website Three Thousand: The premise of the shower party is that you drink, but you’ll have to drink conscientiously because the more you drink, the more water is drained from a fishtank (with a goldfish in it). If only anti-drinking campaigns made you feel this guilty. (Werkmeister 2014)

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The system was configured so that the water was drained proportionately to the alcohol, which meant that if all the alcohol was consumed, the fish would asphyxiate and die. In the gallery notes handed to every participant, Golden Solution specifically stated they would not intervene. The gallery was lit like a nightclub, and dance music was pumped through a powerful sound system. In essence, the work sought to test if participants could be induced to enter such a system, and the type of subjects such a systemic design might produce. Shower Party was free to attend and attracted over 160 participants, who, from my own observation, were predominately aged 18–30. During the event, a small number of participants complained directly to the artists and festival staff about the use of a live animal in the artwork. However, the majority of participants interacted with the work by pressing the buttons and drinking the cocktails. A substantial number took full advantage of the free drinks. As the event wore on, rather than reaching a collective decision about an appropriate time to stop drinking, as the gallery notes intimated was one possible outcome, participants continued to drink until all of the alcohol was consumed—sentencing the goldfish to death through the mediation of the technical system. The alcohol ran out around midnight, and most participants left to continue their revelry elsewhere. However, because the artists had overestimated participant concern for the fish, they had not prepared for such a rate of consumption. This meant the gravity fed drainage of the fish tank was not able to keep up, so even though the alcohol had been consumed, the tank still contained ample water for the fish. At this point, the venue lights were turned on, and the event wrapped up. As the remaining participants were ushered out, some attempted to poison the fish by spitting and pouring whatever was at hand into the tank, including leftover drinks and breakfast cereal. After these participants left, the fish was rescued by one of the artists, escaping the fate the participants had now twice consigned it to. With Shower Party, there was a much smaller gap between the attempted work and what actually transpired. The techno-social assemblage created for this work—the repurposed kill chain—did seem to entrain a particular behavior: a bacchanalian recklessness. But by rescuing the fish, the provocation of risk that was central to the work was ultimately undermined. By this, I mean to draw attention to the publicity for the work, which clearly communicated that participants were responsible for the outcome of the event. Yet, with the drainage design flaw and the final respite for the fish, the proposed danger of the kill chain was neatly short-circuited; participants were no longer held accountable for their actions—or even able to exercise their agency to willingly kill the goldfish. These initial observations and perceptions raised a number of questions. Was this risk ever real to begin with? Did this last minute intervention turn Shower Party into an apologia for the kill chain, asserting that it would protect innocent life despite human errors? Just who and what were entangled as part of this kill chain? Before responding to these questions, however, it is important to provide some context regarding the unique platform that is the Next Wave festival.

Next Wave Festival The Next Wave festival is a publicly funded biennial arts festival for young and emerging artists across a range of disciplines, and presents a broad program of gallery based work, dance, theatre, and performance art. The organization is overseen by a board and appoints an artistic director for four years (two festivals), with most other staff employed in project-based positions and turned over more rapidly. Originally founded in 1984, Next Wave was established to foster creativity and experimentation in the arts, and over its 30-year history has developed a series of programs that

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run both alongside and independently of the festival to aid the development of emerging Australian artists. Their flagship program, Kickstart, offers early-career artists a two-year development process for their work and careers. This includes workshops covering creative development, budgeting, marketing as well as a mentorship program, and administrative support from the festival. Around half of the final works programmed in the festival are developed through the Kickstart project. In light of this, it becomes clear why, in a statement of intent for the 2014 festival, we find the sympathetic but rather unambitious line: “[w]e support what is attempted over what is achieved” (Next Wave 2014b). It was in fact this statement that drew my attention to the gap between the attempted and achieved in Altertruism, and the role the Next Wave organization played in these attempts. Artist and critic Jana Petrovic, in her review of the 2014 festival, puts it another way when she describes Next Wave as “a major, well-funded biennial curatorial project which commissions and develops innovative work by young artists” (Petrovic 2014). What is notable about this statement is that it serves as a disclaimer for her evaluation that the final works are “often variable in their execution” as “[t]he level of risk involved in working with very inexperienced artists on extremely ambitious projects is extremely high” (ibid). The festival’s role of curation, commission, and support suggests a kind of collaborative effort between artist and festival. At the center of Petrovic’s statement, however, is the issue of risk. The extremely high level of risk that Petrovic evokes here seems to exceed the artists simply failing to achieve what they have attempted, and spill over as risk taken by the festival itself in working with inexperienced artists. Petrovic never specifically identifies this risk as artistic risk, and even if we accept this as implied, the boundaries of artistic risk are by no means easy to define. We might consider a number of recent artworks where the artistic risk was transformed into physical and legal risk. For example, the arrest and detention of artist and academic Steve Kurtz by the FBI on bioterrorism charges in 2004 for growing bacterial cultures (Munster 2005), or the deportation and barring of artist Luiz Hernandez from the US for five years by the Department of Homeland Security, who determined his artwork, an interactive videogame, was a threat to national security (Raley 2008). At the very least, these examples show the interpretation of risk in militarized societies is contingent on varying institutional frameworks, and can have very real consequences. With this in mind, it is particularly interesting to note that despite a regular turnover of artistic directors, Next Wave consistently defines itself in relation to risk. The 2010 festival ran under the theme “No Risk Too Great,” and the vision statement for the 2016 festival aims to “EMBRACE RISK: We are courageous. Our artists and our audiences are instinctive risktakers, and they trust our leadership” (Next Wave 2015). The 2014 festival phrased it this way: “We believe in risk as the crucial ingredient in every artistic endeavour, and with clarity of intent we think anything is possible” (Next Wave 2014b). In these statements, the Next Wave organizers appropriate the language of risk to identify themselves as producers of radical, transgressive, challenging, and future-oriented art. Next Wave uses risk to legitimate itself. And while the festival is defined in relation to risk, they do not offer an interpretive framework or limit to this risk—a tactic that I will argue is part of a larger institutional strategy to control and monopolize the production, identification, and communication of risk.

Managing Risk To develop my argument, it is necessary to consider risk in broader sociological terms, following a thesis first developed in the late 1980s by sociologist Ulrich Beck, that risk has become the dominant preoccupation of advanced capitalist societies, and has driven new and expanding

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modes of technological militarization. In Risk Society, Beck argues that the concept of risk has become “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself ” (1992:21). Risk society shifts focus from the production of “goods” to the avoidance of “bads,” from the issue of hunger being replaced by the issue of obesity, and from challenges in the distribution of wealth to a defensive logic of risk distribution (20). The rapid development of affordable domestic drones offers a contemporary example, as the risks of safety and privacy have come to dominate public debate—exemplified in a 2014 governmental inquiry titled Eyes in the Sky: Inquiry into Drones and the Regulation of Air Safety and Privacy (Commonwealth of Australia 2014). Central to these changes is a reflexive awareness of the impossibility of avoiding risks, and a greater focus on the management of risk. To this end, the risk society expands the actuarial calculus that has its origins in mercantile insurance and extends into what fellow sociologist of risk Anthony Giddens terms a “colonisation of the future,” and Beck comes to term “real virtuality” (Giddens 1991:119; Beck 1999:136). As these expressions suggest, the idea of causality is reversed and the means-ends rationality is inverted: future scenarios determine action in the present, in other words, risk management legitimizes pre-emptive action. Ulrich Beck is optimistic about the potential for a reflexive risk society to take action against environmental degradation. The logic of pre-emptive action can and has led to political and industrial action on climate change. However, as political scientist Mikkel Rasmussen argues in The Risk Society at War (2006), these new ways of perceiving and managing risk have, since the 1990s, come to replace the cold-war defensive logic of deterrence. The fundamental difference is the paradoxical unknowability of risks—exemplified in a 2002 news briefing by US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who referred to “unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know” (Rumsfeld 2002). These “unknown unknowns” include the potentially catastrophic risks first theorized by Ulrich Beck in relation to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, that can spread across sovereign borders and impact generations—they are uncontrollable and unquantifiable. It is, of course, impossible to manage unknowable risk—yet in order to avoid a crisis of legitimation, governments and other organizations must, as Beck phrases it, “feign control over the uncontrollable” (Beck 2002:41; emphasis in original). To feign this control, technical and scientific risk management techniques are augmented with the imagination of possible scenarios—a melding of science with fiction. Importantly, the role of imagination here cannot be underestimated. One of the failures identified in the findings of the The 9/11 Commission Report, the official investigation following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, was a failure of imagination, with the authors arguing it was “crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination” (Kean and Hamilton 2004:344). Nowhere, I would argue, is the bureaucratic imagination harder at work than in the military drone, which, as Benjamin Noys observes, through its projected omniscience and omnipotence embodies the “dreams of transcendence and destruction that have haunted the Western imagination” (Noys 2015). Implicit in Noys’s observation is the two sides to this imaginary: the dream of wielding such power and the nightmare of being subject to it.

Risk and the Drone To understand the connection between risk and drones, and their relevance to Altertruism and the Next Wave festival, it is important to look more closely at the military drone and the kill chain as an instrumental bureaucratization of imagination. As Grégoire Chamayou suggests in his expansive A Theory of the Drone, the drone entails “the elimination, already rampant

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but here absolutely radicalized, of any immediate relation of reciprocity” (2015:14). As an information technology—a machine for sight—the drone (in both military and civic use) is effectively a one-way mirror, the pilot sees without being seen. In their military use, the drone is first and foremost an intelligence technology, and in gathering intelligence it is also able to project power, enforcing, as Derek Gregory calls it, a “scopic regime” (Gregory 2011:203) or as Noys posits, a “mobile panopticon” (Noys 2015). The intelligence gathered by the military drone is just one part of a larger intelligence gathering assemblage, which includes field intelligence, intercepted communications, and network surveillance. This information is analyzed and risks identified through a particular militarized form of social network analysis, using computational logics so that “[f]rom the mass of information collected about a particular individual, group, or place gradually emerge patterns, or traceable themes” (Chamayou 2015:48). These patterns form the necessary evidence required under international law to argue a target constitutes an imminent threat to national security. Yet, as the intelligence and targeting criteria is kept from scrutiny, “the whole problem—at once epistemological and political—lies in this claimed ability to be able to correctly convert an assembly of probable indices into a legitimate target” (49). As Chamayou points out, the signals intelligence and surveillance data are probable indices; they seek to determine future behavior and act preemptively, the product of an instrumentalized imagination. In his account of an attack that killed 23 civilians in Afghanistan, Derek Gregory illustrates how such imaginations can be influenced by their position with a techno-cultural system. In his analysis, Gregory observes how a military culture of camaraderie influenced the reporting of drone pilots: “objects become rifles, praying a Taliban signifier, civilians ‘military-aged males,’ and children ‘adolescents’” (2011:203). While human error does occur, the worrying point for Gregory is that these tragic mistakes are “also produced by the operative function of a techno-cultural system whose dispositions facilitate such outcomes” (2014:10). While the individual drone operators and their immediate technological apparatus form one part of the techno-cultural system, the system also includes a “chain of command” that is supposed to provide accountability. In fact, the chain of command serves to distribute risk and accountability rather than consolidate it. Like any bureaucratic structure, its instrumental logic serves as a justification of its outcomes; not in spite of, but precisely because responsibility for those outcomes has been broken up and distributed across its network, with an increasing proportion delegated to simulation, aggregation, and modeling technologies. The Predator and Reaper drones are weaponized not simply with hellfire missiles, but through the complex institutional bureaucracy of preemptive calculation that legitimates targets through the logic of risk management. Moreover, it is nearly impossible to evaluate such risk management strategies, as a prevented risk will never materialize. Thus, in order to justify such policy, it becomes paramount that these prevented risks are communicated convincingly.

Next Wave and Risk How do these techniques of risk management, which are applied across commercial, ecological, and military spheres, relate to the contemporary arts festival? And of what relevance is the bureaucratic imagination embedded in the military drone to its civic cousin? To trace these links, I want to draw attention to how Next Wave productively exploits the ambiguity surrounding artistic risk. To begin, it is important to note that risk was central to the

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provocation of Shower Party, with the imaginary scenario of the event preceding the actual staging. Through the curatorial description, promotional media and even the gallery notes, the risk of the artwork was clearly communicated. The importance of communicating this risk was vital to Golden Solution’s intent to demonstrate how the kill chain blurs moral and legal responsibility, “as part of a techno-social assemblage in which it becomes impossible to isolate human from non-human agents” (Schuppli 2011:4). Importantly, this problem of sorting through the various responsibilities extended to the festival—most clearly visible in another programmed work, The Club 3.0. The Club 3.0 by Dutch company New Heroes was not part of the Kickstart program, but exemplifies the ambiguity of risk. A theatre performance with some audience participation, The Club 3.0 took Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel (and subsequent film) Fight Club as its point of departure. One part of the performance invited audience members to fight amongst themselves, and I, as part of my research into participatory performance, was foolish enough to volunteer. During the “fight,” my opponent threw me to the ground and inflicted a painful and debilitating injury to my acromioclavicular joint. The artistic aspect of this risk was critically dismantled by reviewer Alison Croggon as “a miasma of homilies and cliches” (Croggon 2014). I, on the other hand, was collaterally damaged by this hybrid artistic/physical risk, a risk that had been managed by the festival through legal waivers, which I had signed as an audience member, absolving Next Wave and the artists of responsibility for my safety. Following Schuppli’s point about sorting through moral and legal responsibility, The Club 3.0 demonstrates how the organizational bureaucracy of Next Wave clearly identified their legal responsibility, and managed that risk through waivers, while asserting the moral value of taking this risk by claiming the performance sought “to explore new visions for effective political change” (Next Wave 2014c). However, in both The Club 3.0 and Shower Party, one could argue that the artists and festival were morally culpable of generating the risk by building each particular participatory framework and producing the events. Furthermore, identifying the legal responsibility that was waived in this example helps bring to light other legal risks that were much less openly communicated. In Shower Party, the two main legal risks related to the service of alcohol and animal cruelty. First, as alcohol was being served, the event was limited to those legally allowed to consume alcohol (age 18 in Australia), and even though the alcohol was self-served, each of the four dispensers needed to be supervised by an attendant holding a Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) certificate. While there is of course a gap between the policy and the reality of policing the alcohol consumption of attendants, the legal obligation was met through a discreet—but not invisible—network of surveillance. Second, leaving a goldfish without water would fall under the definition of cruelty under the 1986 Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, section 9C, where a party “does or omits to do an act with the result that unreasonable pain or suffering is caused, or is likely to be caused, to an animal” (State Government of Victoria 2014). As I talked with participants on the night of the show, one confided that she knew the organization (Next Wave) wouldn’t allow the goldfish to die. In the subsequent discussions with the artists, her suspicion was confirmed. The risk intended to motivate the work—to draw participants to collectively moderate their consumption—was a ruse, an imaginary future scenario that would never be allowed to happen, as mandated by law and enforced by the producers, managers, and volunteers working for Next Wave. The risks of serving alcohol to underage or intoxicated persons, of being charged with animal cruelty, and even of participants putting themselves at risk by drinking too much—like the risk of accidental injury in Aerial ReCreation—were all managed risks.

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These examples from Altertruism and The Club 3.0 demonstrate a novel inversion of the regular risk management practices of organizations while still adhering to the basic principle, as Mikkel Rasmussen explains, of adopting “reflexive strategies in order to deal with the risks produced by their own existence” (Rasmussen 2006:34). To return to Ulrich Beck’s phrase that risk management is a way “to feign control over the uncontrollable” (Beck 2002:41 emphasis in original), the feint by Next Wave involved the communication of risks that the festival could not manage, while in fact working through a rigorous institutional and bureaucratic process of risk management to identify and prepare for myriad of risk scenarios. In the case of almost any other organization, “accepting responsibility for the manufacture of risks and admitting inability to contain hazards would lead to a crisis of legitimation” (Mythen 2004:60). Yet, the arts festival legitimates itself through such a feint, taking Beck’s notion of “organized irresponsibility,” creating “an elaborate labyrinth [. . .] of simultaneous liability and unaccountability: more precisely, liability as unaccountability” (Beck 1995:61). Through this organized irresponsibility, the festival positions itself as cutting edge, challenging, and culturally relevant. These legal, physical, technical, moral, individual, and institutional risks weave a complex and contradictory assemblage. What emerges are a number of similarities between the military cultures that Altertruism seeks to interrogate and the bureaucratic structures of arts administration and event management. Both attempt to project certain risks above others (through press conferences, releases, or other media engagements) and both trade on risk as the source of their legitimacy: the military to secure risk, and the emerging arts festival to embrace it. Both organizations produce, through the communication and management of risk, certain types of capital: the military creates political capital, and the state-funded arts festival creates cultural capital. Yet their processes of risk management are complex, Byzantine, and secretive; deliberately hidden from view lest they undermine their own legitimacy. This brings us to the drone, which highlights the differences and dissonances between military and civil processes and criteria of risk-management. In the first case, the military drone is legitimized in its use against probable threats, while the risks of failure (technical, operational, and institutional) and subsequent risks to civilians are justified through a vast institutional apparatus. Within the civic sphere, these risks of failure—of drones falling from the sky—are not only legislated against but made convincingly imaginable by media reports. In the months prior to the Next Wave festival, two such reports circulated widely in the Australian media. On 6 April, an athlete was hospitalized after an incident during a competition in Geraldton, West Australia. During the race, a drone filming the event fell from the sky. The athlete claims she was hit by the drone, and the pilot claims it fell nearby and startled her, but in either case the event and its reporting drew attention to the dangers of civic drones (Taillier 2014). The same month it was also reported that a rescue helicopter flying over Newcastle in New South Wales was forced to take evasive action to avoid collision with a recreational drone flying at 1,000 feet, well above the permitted limit for unregistered drones of 400 feet (Frazer 2014). For Next Wave and Golden Solution, these risks were deemed too great, and the drones put on a leash. While I have drawn attention to these similarities, it is important to recognize that the threat of international terrorism poses a series of risks to be balanced that are radically different to those in a participatory artwork. But what this comparison does highlight is how these different regimes of risk management produce conflicting values for civilian welfare. Clearly underprioritized are the civilian populations at risk by military drone strikes, who are unrecognized

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or misrecognized by the kill chain. While exact numbers remain unclear, exhaustive investigation by journalists has brought to light considerable collateral damage wrought by drone warfare. In a 2014 paper by UK human rights group Reprieve, which only focused on US drone strikes within Pakistan and Yemen, while hunting 41 individuals, “strikes targeting the above individuals killed on average 28 other people each before they actually succeeded in killing their target” (Reprieve 2014:6). Leaked military documents published by the Intercept in 2015 revealed that during a five-month period, nearly 90 percent of those killed by airstrikes were not the intended targets (Scahill 2015). The horrific and sobering causalities inflicted by military drone programs offer an important opportunity to shift perspective, and to acknowledge the radical difference between the effects of military drone operations and the artistic and institutional performances that I have interrogated here. My aim is not to compare in any way these military drone programs with the Next Wave festival. Nor is it to blindly argue for the practice of risky behavior that endangers audiences, artists, or animals. Rather, my argument is that the attempts in Altertruism to engage artistically with military cultures draws attention to the techniques, cultures, bureaucratic structures, and risk matrices of the Next Wave festival, which supported and produced the work. And this larger assemblage, as Derek Gregory observes of the military kill chain, operates to engender certain subjects and produce certain imaginaries. Thus, drawing on these examples, I want to question what kinds of subjects and imaginaries are created by these structures, taking up the terms offered by Steve Goodman, who in Sonic Warfare addresses the issue of pre-emptive action in terms of effect: Effect becomes autonomous from cause. Unlike earlier modes of management of the future such as deterrence, preemptive security does not prevent but rather induces the event, no longer warding off its arrival in a negative anticipation; preemption positively actualizes the future in the present, or at least the effects of events yet to come, to the extent that the cause of the effects, that is, the event, need not necessarily happen. (Goodman 2010:71) To begin, we might ask what is pre-empted of the audience. The tethering of the drone in Aerial ReCreation suggests that the audience needs to be protected. In the case of Shower Party, the provocation asks them to make a choice, and identifies them as individuals who, through their actions, might effect change. Yet at the same time their entry is controlled and their drinking monitored. In light of these protections, we might read the choice to consume excessively and condemn the fish to death as a form of “risk compensation.” As risk theorist John Adams describes it, risk compensation is a side effect of risk reduction—that encourages people to engage in more risky behavior. Adams’s example is the use of automotive seatbelts, where research suggests the sense of safety they provide results in more reckless driving (Adams 2001:114). It would seem, in light of the behavior of the participating audience, that Next Wave was right to foresee and prepare for such an event. Yet, following Goodman, one could argue that the preemption of this scenario actually induced the audience toward it. I would suggest that this preemptive imagination and protection not only predicts, but creates an audience that is predisposed to act selfishly and irresponsibly. The artists are also in many ways protected by this larger institutional apparatus. Clearly framed by the festival as emerging and inexperienced, their development is the intended purpose of both the Kickstart program and the Festival. As such, they are developing the skills to

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navigate the complexity of contemporary art production in what is now, particularly in Australia, the primary platform for performance: the festival. They are figured as vital to the future of the arts industry as the source of new ideas and possibilities—both in terms of cultural and economic capital. They are also, however, made dependent upon the festival. They depend on the festival to program their work and provide visibility, to whose terms they must submit. As Altertruism demonstrates, these terms include sacrificing a degree of artistic autonomy—such as agreeing to tether the drones—which lowers the physical risk at the cost of an artistic one: while nobody was hurt, their artistic ambitions for the work were suppressed. Finally, by supporting the attempt over the achievement, it would seem that failure is not only acceptable, but perhaps even expected. While the tone of this chapter has been critical of the arts administrators, managers, and producers—including artistic director Emily Sexton and risk management consultant Bill Coleby who oversaw the creation, communication, and management of risk in the 2014 Next Wave festival—I want to acknowledge their particularly difficult position. In fact, of all the subjects created by this assemblage, the employees of Next Wave are most heavily pressed upon. With their employment at stake, they find themselves the agents of an organizational framework that is required to take responsibility for both artists and audiences. Thus, they must take up the negative logic of risk management and actively imagine and prepare for worst-case scenarios, balancing the legal and bureaucratic requirements against their artists’ projects. They must serve as the human interface that enforces the particular utopia imagined by bureaucracy, “an abstract ideal that real human beings can never live up to” (Graeber 2015:26–27). They are swept up in the institutionalized culture of complicity, forced to become what Judith Butler terms “petty sovereigns”: “reigning in the midst of bureaucratic [. . .] institutions mobilized by aims and tactics of power they do no inaugurate or fully control” (Butler 2004:56). They must perform as administrators of imagination, charged with the governance of expression and experience.

Conclusion: A Contest of Imaginations Risky performance is nothing new. Throughout the 20th century, artists pushed the boundaries of risk conceptually and physically. The exposure of audiences and participants to these risks raises questions of ethics and responsibility, but throughout modernity, these risks have always been taken to bring about change. With the shift to a “risk society” this means-end rationality has been replaced by more reflexive reasoning, arguing for present action to prevent future consequences. As future consequences are in many ways unpredictable and incalculable, technical and scientific risk management institutionalizes and bureaucratizes the imagination. Yet, as political scientist Mark B. Salter argues, imagination alone is not enough. The scenario that al Qaeda might commandeer domestic aircraft had been imagined by security analysts prior to 11 September 2001, and Richard Clark, the former US National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism had held concerns “about the danger posed by aircraft since at least the 1996 Atlanta Olympics” (Kean and Hamilton 2004:345). In light of this, Salter suggests that “it is not imagination per se that was lacking—but rather a lack of convincing imaginings” (Salter 2008:236). Governments around the developed world have placed upon themselves a responsibility to provide security that necessitates an active and fervent imagination. Not simply to imagine worst-case scenarios, but to imagine and communicate them convincingly.

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We see in Altertruism a contest play out between imaginations. An alternate vision of military technology and culture as an effective and affective experience of immersion and implication is overpowered by the robust frameworks of risk management that imagines the worst-case scenario of injured audiences and suffering animals, compensation claims, fines, lawsuits, and negative publicity. It is through these robust frameworks that we are able to observe their formation and disciplining of subjects—the administrators, managers, and directors forced into roles as petty sovereigns, whose strategic vision, directed to worst-case scenarios, pre-empts the behavior of audiences. These audiences are then protected in such ways as to encourage risk-compensating behavior, and likewise, artists entrained to accept failure as a result of dependence. Framing Altertruism as both an attempt to critique and subvert military cultures and technologies in performance and as a product of the institutional constraints placed upon it, produces an answer to the theme of the 2014 festival: the new grand narrative is one of risk. Risk management, as a set of tactics and techniques, has become ubiquitous throughout military, government, corporate, and artistic organizations—a situation that creates a new set of challenges for performance: to reclaim the power of convincing imaginings. To conclude, I offer an example of a more successful drone artwork, which achieved the affective resonance that Golden Solution hoped to create. A Drone Opera, by Matthew Sleeth, premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in September 2015. It was a spectacular indoor multimedia performance, scored and choreographed for a number of custom-designed drones and three opera singers in an otherworldly lighting environment. Here, the audience was subject to an impressive exploration of the implications of this new technology for our civic life. A Drone Opera not only addressed issues of privacy and security, but astutely, the militarized bureaucracy of risk, manifest in the protective cage the audience was required to watch from. The cage kept the audience safe, kept the risks managed, while the drones, using night vision video cameras in the dark theatre, surveilled the audience. With their footage projected in real time on a screen at the back of the stage, as reviewer Andrew Fuhrmann notes, “[w]e are made witness to our own captivity” (Fuhrmann 2015). Rather than covertly administered and secretive in its engagement with risk, with its wire cage, A Drone Opera makes tangible the connections between risk, militarization, and society, holding captive individuals, artists, and artistic institutions to the increasingly ubiquitous processes of risk-management.

Note 1 These regulations are soon to be updated by Civil Aviation Standards Australia (CASA) and in fact cover all remote controlled model aircraft. While violating these regulations risks an $850 fine, the rules are very difficult to enforce, and only a small number of infringements have been recorded, the first in January 2015 (Long 2015).

References Adams, John. 2001. Risk. London: Routledge. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter. London: Sage. Beck, Ulrich. 1995. Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2002. “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited.” Theory, Culture & Society 19, 4: 39–55. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life. London: Verso.

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Chamayou, Grégoire. 2015. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press. Commonwealth of Australia. 2014. “Eyes in the Sky: Inquiry into Drones and the Regulation of Air Safety and Privacy.” July. Canberra: House of Representatives, Standing Committee on Social Policy; Legal Affairs. Croggon, Alison. 2014. “An Adventure in Art: Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival.” ABC Arts Online, May. Accessed 30 May 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/blog/Alison-Croggon/next-wave-festival-anadventure-in-art/default.htm. Frazer, Simon. 2014. “Mid-Air Near Miss Raises Concerns over Regulation of Drones (Transcript from ABC Radio Program AM).” ABC News Online. Accessed 21 October 2015. http://www.abc.net.au/ am/content/2014/s3978175.htm. Fuhrmann, Andrew. 2015. “Targeted by Art Drones.” RealTime, 129. Accessed 14 March 2016. http:// www.realtimearts.net/article/129/12073. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare. Cambridge: MIT Press. Graeber, David. 2015. Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House. Gregory, Derek. 2011. “From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War.” Theory, Culture & Society 28, 7–8: 188–215. Gregory, Derek. 2014. “Drone Geographies.” Radical Philosophy 183: 7–19. Kean, Thomas H., and Lee H. Hamilton. 2004. The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Long, Trevor. 2015. “QLD Man First in Australia to Be Fined for Flying a Drone.” news.com.au. Accessed 8 March 2016. http://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/qld-man-first-in-australiato-be-fined-for-flying-a-drone/news-story/a5d630388fb10fd4c9748c7f646a88b1. McLelland, Andrew. 2016. Email correspondence with author. 28 March. Munster, Anna. 2005. “Why Is BioArt Not Terrorism?: Some Critical Nodes in the Networks of Infomatice Life.” Culture Machine 7. Accessed 9 March 2016. http://www.culturemachine.net/index. php/cm/article/view/31/38. Mythen, Gabe. 2004. Ulrich Beck: a Critical Introduction to the Risk Society. London: Pluto Press. Next Wave. 2014a. “About Next Wave.” Nextwave Festival website. Accessed 20 September 2014. http://2014.nextwave.org.au/about/. Next Wave. 2014b. “Altertruism: Golden Solution.” Nextwave Festival website. Accessed 25 September 2014. http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/altertruism/. Next Wave. 2014c. “The Club 3.0.” Nextwave Festival website. Accessed 25 September 2014. http://2014.nextwave.org.au/events/the-club-3-0/. Next Wave. 2015. “About Next Wave.” Nextwave Festival website. Accessed 14 November 2015. http://nextwave.org.au/about-next-wave/. Noys, Benjamin. 2015. “Drone Metaphysics.” Culture Machine 16: 1–22. Accessed 16 January 2016. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/595/602. Petrovic, Jana. 2014. “Next Wave: Risk Yields New Forces.” RealTime 121: 34–35. Accessed 1 December 2015. http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue121/11595. Raley, Rita. 2008. “Border Hacks: the Risks of Tactical Media.” In Risk and the War on Terror, edited by Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, 197–217. London: Routledge. Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby. 2006. The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprieve. 2014. “You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the US Drone Program.” Reprieve website. Accessed 3 March 2016. http://www.reprieve.org/uploads/2/6/3/3/26338131/2014_11_24_pub_ you_never_die_twice_-_multiple_kills_in_the_us_drone_program.pdf. Rumsfeld, Donald. 2002. “Briefing to the US Department of Defense.” Washington DC: Department of Defense. Salter, Mark B. 2008. “Risk and Imagination in the War on Terror.” In Risk and the War on Terror, edited by Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, 233–246. London: Routledge.

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Scahill, Jeremy. 2015. “The Drone Papers: The Assassination Complex.” The Intercept. Accessed 5 March 2016. https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/. Schuppli, Susan. 2011. “Deadly Algorithms: Can Legal Codes Hold Software Accountable for Code that Kills?” Radical Philosophy 7: 2–8. State Government of Victoria. 2014. “Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1986.” Ministry of Agriculture. Amended 1 July 2014. Accessed 25 November 2015. http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/ agriculture/animal-health-and-welfare/animal-welfare/animal-welfare-legislation/preventionof-cruelty-to-animals-legislation. Taillier, Sarah. 2014. “Triathlete Injured as Drone Filming Race Falls to Ground.” ABC News Online. Accessed 2 March 2016. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-07/triathlete-injured-as-dronefilming-race-drops-to-ground/5371658. Werkmeister, Sarah. 2014. “Next Wave Festival: Altertruism Shower Party.” Three Thousand. Accessed 20 October 2015. http://thethousands.com.au/melbourne/calendar/altertruism-shower-party.

19 RE-STAGING SURVEILLANCE TRAGEDY AS CRITICAL RESISTANCE Jacqueline Viskup

To analyze the narrative tendencies1 of some US Supreme Court justices’ opinions about Fourth Amendment “search and seizure” laws,2 legal scholar Lawrence S. Zacharias turned to the theatre. He coined the term “surveillance tragedy” based on his interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play rife with questionable surveillance practices that trigger tragic ends for the court of Elsinore. According to Zacharias, a surveillance tragedy narrative first presents increasingly insidious surveillance methods enacted by government agents. It then projects that stretching the limits of legal surveillance will lead to citizens enacting likewise questionable counter-surveillance tactics, in an attempt to maintain the freedom and autonomy they value. All of these surveillance measures and counter-measures will escalate until society becomes devoid of privacy and individual autonomy, and will, tragically, collapse (Zacharias 2011). Zacharias’s adoption of tragic drama to analyze judicial decisions is an intriguing move toward identifying the increased militarization of contemporary American society. This intensified militarization has progressed in part because of the widespread implementation of surveillance as both military and civilian defense against terrorism. Hamlet is Zacharias’s onstage referent to surveillance tragedy particularly because the possibility of surveillance propelling the court toward tragedy within the world of Hamlet would deeply resonate as a warning to an Elizabethan society ruled by insipid surveillance tactics such as espionage in exchange for authority and prestige. Likewise, in a post-9/11, post-Patriot Act America, military tactics, discipline, and control have rooted themselves in civilian society. In an increasingly militarized society, where insidious surveillance tactics are legalized in support of the US government’s decades-long “war on terror,” expanding on Zacharias’s definition of surveillance tragedy by examining how it manifests in contemporary American theatre can help interpret how acutely audiences feel the threat of militarization. Surveillance tragedies place the utmost importance on warning audiences. These narratives use stories of government intrusion ripped from the headlines to impress upon their audiences that they are losing privacy and autonomy, and must respond. In this chapter I propose a new definition of surveillance tragedy that expands Zacharias’s articulation by incorporating dramatic theory on the social function of tragedy in order to prompt audiences to harness their autonomy and agency and judiciously resist a decline into a fully militant society.

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In order to explicate this new dramatic definition of surveillance tragedy, I analyze two plays about military service members: Pugilist Specialist, by Adriano Shaplin (2003), and Grounded, by George Brant (2012). Expanding the definition of surveillance tragedy through an analysis of plays about the US military is a worthy place to begin because it is often assumed, by soldiers and civilians alike, that one voluntarily submits a large portion of their individuality and autonomy when they join. However, the surrender of autonomy in service of defense is not so unlike the autonomy civilians give up when they, as Tracy C. Davis argues, “execute [their] part in the new protocols of civil defense” by presenting their bodies and belongings for scanning at airport security checkpoints, submitting to metal detectors in federal buildings, and critiquing others’ responses to the latest terrorist threat (Davis 2007:135). In both Pugilist Specialist and Grounded, the dramatic conflict is the characters’ struggle between adherence to command and individual choice. These plays allow us to understand the ethical dilemmas central to a surveillance tragedy. And because these plays are about service members in specialized military occupations but marketed to a wide range of theatre-goers, they open up possibilities for critical response.

Re-Staging Surveillance Tragedy Lawrence Zacharias fashions Hamlet as the most refined form of surveillance tragedy because the action of the play is directly motivated by the deployment of surveillance. Claudius sends agents of Denmark to monitor Hamlet and report back; Polonius volunteers to entrap Hamlet by spying on him in Hamlet’s mother’s bedchamber. In response to increased surveillance of his every move, Hamlet enacts counter-surveillance measures: feigning madness, keeping secrets, and teaming up with the ultimate spy, the ghost. Zacharias argues that the informal surveillance tactics of Hamlet’s characters would have served as a recognizable warning to Elizabethan audiences familiar with agents of the monarchy using the domestic servants, lovers, and friends of perceived enemies to gain intelligence about Spanish, Catholic, and Irish insurrections in exchange for prestige and authority (2011:88–89). For Zacharias, Hamlet most accurately dramatizes government excess, its intrusion into citizens’ private lives, and the resultant paranoia, psychological imprisonment, and loss of citizen autonomy that will eventually lead to the corruption and destruction of the nation. In real life, a surveillance tragedy can be difficult to recognize, as surveillance often muddies the line between public and private, autonomous spaces. Woven together with Zacharias’s discussion of Hamlet is an assessment of a 1928 Supreme Court case, Olmstead vs. United States.3 Olmstead challenged the legalities of wiretapping to surveil notorious bootlegger Roy Olmstead. Chief Justice Taft ruled that technological advancements did not fall under the purview of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore the amendment’s protection could not be extended to Olmstead. The Chief Justice took what Zacharias calls a “conceptual approach,” or a strict textual analysis of the Bill of Rights. Taft argued that if a person installs a telephone in their home knowing that their words are transferred along telephone lines outside the home, then they are opening themselves up to lawful search and seizure (Zacharias 2011:84). Alternatively, Justices Holmes and Brandeis used a narrative approach to argue in favor of a citizen’s right to privacy. Their narratives warned against Justice Taft’s decision, by projecting a pattern of government intrusion leading to loss of individual citizen autonomy and eventual social collapse. This pattern became the elements of Zacharias’s surveillance tragedy.

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The pre-Patriot Act narrative interpretations in Olmstead predict a pattern of illegal government intrusion and likewise illegal citizen countermeasures, leading to a collapse of a balanced legal system. The introduction of the Patriot Act in 2001 became the first act of America’s contemporary surveillance tragedy, giving the US government free reign to intrude into citizens’ private spaces, including their communications through the telephone and/or internet. The 2001 Patriot Act, George W. Bush’s expansion of the act to include telephone record metadata in 2006, and Edward Snowden’s exposure of the extent of government surveillance in 2013 (Diamond 2015) collectively enact Zacharias’s surveillance tragedy. In 2015, as Congress incorporated many aspects of the Patriot Act set to expire that year into the USA Freedom Act, the dramatic conflict of the surveillance tragedy continued (Nelson 2015). Congress’s debates about the allowable extent of sureveillance and bulk data collection leave citizens and non-citizens in America teetering precariously between autonomy and full-scale government regimentation. Interestingly, though Zacharias penned his analysis in 2011, he does not reference any postPatriot Act cases. But his analysis is useful in the era of the Patriot Act because it helps to explain how narrative interpretation of these laws casts civilians in the role of the surveillance tragedy protagonist. The Department of Justice champions the Patriot Act on a webpage from their site titled, “Preserving Life and Liberty”: The Department of Justice’s first priority is to prevent future terrorist attacks. Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Patriot Act has played a key part— and often the leading role—in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life. While the results have been important, in passing the Patriot Act, Congress provided for only modest, incremental changes in the law. Congress simply took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network. (Department of Justice 2016) The narrative here compels spectators to believe that the government acts only in their best interest, and only by intruding “incrementally,” bolstering ethics of government protection by trivializing government intrusion. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) opposes the Patriot Act with equally compelling narratives critiquing the ethics of increased government surveillance under the guise of domestic defense, even creating a handy infographic to explain the intrusions the act allows. The ACLU’s graph operates as a flow chart explaining what personal data is collected on approval from national security letters issued by the FBI, and how law enforcement officials use the data collected. The flowchart begins with a gnarled shadow hand pinching the first box between its thumb and index finger, creating an ominous vibe for the reader. Each information box contains short facts on how the Act infringes on personal privacy, or numerical data on the activity prosecuted via data collection and surveillance—which happen to be mostly non-terrorist criminal acts. Halfway down the infographic is a cartoon of a woman’s face, eyes downcast and mouth taped shut, to illustrate the “gag order” provisions prohibiting those who receive national security letters from informing their clients and personal contacts (ACLU 2016). Fear of government power endowed by the Patriot Act sets the tone of the ACLU’s infographic.

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These two narratives write a surveillance tragedy with American citizens cast as the protagonists who must make a decisive choice between individual autonomy and protection from terrorism. Both narratives rely on potential threat, as do the narratives of Zacharias’s court case. But when American citizens become locked in a battle of surveillance measures and countermeasures, they lose the autonomy the surveillance tragedy is trying to save. They become just like Hamlet or Oedipus, forced to face the fatal consequences of their choices with no positive alternative. And this is why surveillance tragedy in the theatre must be realized and defined as such. In doing so, citizens are re-cast as audience members, able to learn from the fatal choices of the tragic heroes, and make decisions that maintain autonomy and prevent the social collapse projected in Zacharias’s definition of surveillance tragedy. My call to re-cast civilians as audience members in a surveillance tragedy is inspired by Augusto Boal’s impulse to return the power of theatre to the people. While, for example, Hamlet’s fate within the world of the play will not change, the play’s audiences can learn from the protagonist’s fate and alter the pattern of surveillance tragedy in the real world. They can do so through a renewed effort to critically oppose insidious surveillance tactics in order to protect their autonomy and resist collapse into a fully militant society. Tragic action and audience reception are interdependent in surveillance tragedy. Dramatic theory about tragedy depends on audience reception. Surveillance tragedy depends on projection and reception in order to mobilize audiences. Though Aristotle was more interested in the poetic structure of tragedy than its social function, he does address social function in his descriptions of pity and fear, as well as with the vital goal of catharsis. Aristotle felt that engaging audience emotions was positively beneficial because the emotions were exorcised within the confines of the theatrical event, leaving audience members to return to a balanced emotional state before exiting the theatre (Murray and Dorsch 2000). But what if a tragedy engages our emotions in a non-cathartic manner? In other words, rather than expelling emotions within the theatre space (as Aristotle desires), the action of the play is meant to rile audiences, and send them out of the theatre still agitated, seeking catharsis through social change. Zacharias’s surveillance tragedy projects social collapse, and in doing so elicits fear without the promise of catharsis. In “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller states: The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens—and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. (Miller 1949) Miller’s assertion of tragedy’s function retains the status of the autonomous individual, encouraging audiences enlightened by tragedy to respond to the enemies of their individual freedom. Because of the importance placed on warning audiences in surveillance tragedy, the learning process must not be confined within the performance event. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal takes Aristotle’s Poetics to task for the disciplining quality of his tragic theory. Boal argues that when Aristotle touts catharsis of pity and fear as an essential function of tragedy, Aristotle is actually championing the purgation of “extraneous, undesirable elements” that are contrary to the law (Boal [1979] 1985:32). Boal argues for audiences to reject the passive

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role assigned to them by Aristotle, and instead become spect-actors in a performance event. He states: the poetics of the oppressed focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change—in short, trains himself for real action. (Boal [1979] 1985:122) In the two theatrical examples I analyze, the audiences never become spect-actors in the Boalian sense of taking on a protagonic role. But by witnessing surveillance tragedy onstage and being encouraged by the play to make connections to real life, surveillance tragedies prepare audiences to leave the theatre and “train for real action” in real life. The action of a surveillance tragedy is predicated on projection of action, reaction, and collapse. In Zacharias’s description of Hamlet, government intrusion, citizen counteraction, and social collapse are all staged within the plot. In Zacharias’s court case example, Olmstead, the judicial narratives project the possibility of these three plot points in real life. But contemporary surveillance tragedies onstage, because of the importance they place on audience reception, enlightenment, and active response, leave the denouement open to audience reaction. In the plays I discuss, audiences witness the extreme (yet legal) surveillance tactics the government enacts; they witness the characters’ reversal of fortune or peripeteia caused by this intrusion; and they witness the fatal choice, or hamartia, the characters must make. Countering the disciplining influence of catharsis, the surveillance tragedy incites audiences to oppose this path in real life.

Surveillance as Propaganda in Pugilist Specialist In July of 2003, right on the heels of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W. Bush’s May 2003 aircraft carrier victory speech declaring the swift end of the Iraq War, San Franciscobased theatre company The Riot Group opened its newest show, Pugilist Specialist, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Pugilist Specialist’s plot concerns four Marine Corps officers recruited for a black-ops mission to eliminate a prominent male Arab leader dubbed “The Bearded Lady.” The play juxtaposes surveillance-as-social-discipline with the secrecy of the current wars in the Middle East to force audiences to recognize that a) they must question everything they see and hear about our contemporary wars; and b) as spectators they are implicated in the politics of these wars by how they respond to the information they receive. In performance, Pugilist Specialist emphasized surveillance on two fronts: visual and aural. In the 2004 production I saw at the SoHo Theatre in London, the minimalist scene design consisted of two backless benches and a single microphone hanging from the ceiling, hovering just above the actors’ heads. The actors moved the benches around the stage from scene to scene, but the microphone remained fixed center-stage. As if recording a radio play, the performers delivered all of their lines to the audience, with only minimal gestures to accompany their lines. This non-realist staging prioritized the audio of the performance, as if the audience was listening to the playback of taped recordings. By facing us, the actors acknowledged that we were watching them. By emphasizing the audio recording, they acknowledged that we were also, importantly, listening to them. The minimal movements and stage design allowed the

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audience to focus on the characters’ words as the primary indicators of the play’s action. This is an important provocation on the part of the artists, because words become powerful tools in surveillance practices. What we read, write, and say is scrutinized to determine our level of threat to the country. While the characters in Pugilist Specialist are not subject to targeted ethnic and religious profiling that government agencies use to determine potential threats, they are part of more widespread formal and informal surveillance of all American civilians, legalized under the cloak of anti-terrorism. The emphasis on everyone being watched and listened to can be read as a critique on the liberties the US government takes with bulk information gathering under the Patriot Act, and the way citizens are becoming increasingly accepting of ever-expanding intrusive policies. The plot and dialogue of the play also emphasize the intended use of the often unreliable record. Lieutenants Emma Stein, “Harpo” Studdard, and Travis Freud are summoned to a briefing for a mission shrouded in mystery. The only prior instruction given is to Lt Studdard, a specialist in audio surveillance, who was ordered to install the central microphone in the briefing room prior to the briefing. Lt Freud, a young, cocky, sarcastic sniper will assassinate “The Bearded Lady” after Lt Stein, a female Marine whose gender is often paraded in front of the media, deploys explosive devices around the target’s mansion to take out any guards. The entire mission will be audio recorded, officially, according to Col Johns, to aid in future black-ops training. The recording is a performance of false transparency, intended to convince anyone raising concerns about a mission intentionally shrouded in secrecy.4 Col Johns declares repeatedly throughout the play that “victory forgives dishonesty,” implying that recorded history matters more than truth or context. The record is more about advertising than accuracy. But Lt Stein’s zeal for accuracy becomes a threat to the mission. She pushes for more and better training, she asks many detailed questions about the mission, and she criticizes Lt Freud’s juvenile desire to kill without discretion. She questions the probability of successfully eliminating the Bearded Lady where, she notes, the military has failed four times before. When the Colonel’s answers are unsatisfactory, she quits. Col Johns calls her into his office to convince her to stay, using her declining reputation, earned by a failed mission, and because she complained publicly about harassment, to coerce her into staying. Calling her out on her sense of superiority, Col Johns tells her she has no need to impress anyone, and asks her if he should shut off the tapes, in an attempt to elicit a less-censored response from her. She responds, “No sir. I refuse to exist off the record” (Shaplin 2003:61). This statement, whereby Lt Stein arms herself with the record, changes the course of the mission. Instead of allowing her to quit, Col Johns makes her the leader of the mission. Lt Stein seems to believe the record keeps her safe. In some ways it has protected her, for example using civilian news media to accuse her former co-workers of harassment kept the disciplining committee from forcing her out of the military (15). In this case, however, it makes her a target. In the very next scene, Col Johns informs Lt Studdard that the mission goals have changed. Lt Stein’s precision and perfectionism have made her too eager to complete the mission, so Col Johns makes her the new target. “I can’t let her finish the mission, Harpo. We need the target more than we need her [. . .] It isn’t pretty, Harpo. You understand. Don’t you? No more targets, no more history” (80). The mission goals must change to resolve the conflict between success and continued operation. Dialogue throughout the play implies that a record of this mission is being created because the mission will achieve national media attention. If the Bearded Lady dies, that victory runs the risk of halting funding and support for further missions. The Bearded Lady’s death will be a sensation, it will be celebrated, and then it will

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take its place in the shadows of history. The story will end, much like interest in Afghanistan tapered after Osama bin Laden was killed (Khan 2011). Lt Stein becomes the more ideal target because she represents a pure morality of some soldiers who commit to tasks only when an enemy and their remedy can be clearly defined. The moment the mission became murky Stein resisted command. She argues, “Shouldn’t the wisdom and logic of any mission be selfevident? I don’t want to waste a perfectly good instrument on a half-baked grudge killing that is in constant need of cosmetic tinkering” (Shaplin 2003:54). Stein wants transparency in the goals and outcomes of this mission, and this is why she refuses to exist off the record. But the politics of this war are, in many ways, “half-baked” as Lt Stein calls them. Surveillance can be manipulated to convey contrived visibility, and never carries the pure transparency Stein longs for. If she comes out of this mission alive, she may expose the failures of the mission, and therefore she becomes a more serious threat to the longevity of support for the war than the Bearded Lady. In the eyes of the military Stein is a threat because she asserts her individual agency against the abstruse commands and obedient mentality of the military. Surveillance tragedy’s prophecy that loss of autonomy leads to social collapse comes true when Col Johns’ order to kill Lt Stein is carried out by Lt Freud. Like the Patriot Act narratives I mentioned earlier, the narrative of the mission is altered to maintain a cycle of surveillance, violence, and fear. Lts Studdard and Freud are left with no clear moral choice. Either they sacrifice Lt Stein in an adherence to command, or they reject this new command and increase the risk to all of their lives. Lt Freud chooses adherence to command, and kills Lt Stein. The single microphone hanging from the ceiling symbolizes the power the government has over these characters’ ability to make any choice, as all options lead to tragic outcomes. While the characters in the play have no moral choices, in breaking the fourth wall and facing the audience, the conflict of agency and choice spills over into the audience. In his review of the New York production of Pugilist Specialist, Allen J. Kuharski describes the language of the play and acting style of the troupe as “aggressive” and “competitive” (2005:525). He states that the aggressive interaction of the characters (and by extension the actors those characters were written for) “ultimately extends to the direct confrontation of the actor/character with the audience” (525). My companions and I certainly felt challenged by the performers and the material. The intentional aggression of the words coupled with the actors’ direct address of the audience probably left many audience members feeling similarly provoked. As the play convinced me of the unreliability of the record, the only thing grounding me was my sense of my agency as a spectator, able to make choices about how I interpreted the story in front of me. With the surveillance tragedy narrative of Pugilist Specialist, The Riot Group calls upon the audience to harness their individual agency. In fact, the only certainty the play provides is the powerful force of spectator agency. In the performance notes of the published script, playwright Adriano Shaplin states that the script is not necessarily a faithful and accurate transcript of the performance. The Riot Group devises their productions, collectively gathering material and creating performances that are unfixed. The record of the performance can never be an accurate accounting of the event. As Peggy Phelan states, “representation follows two laws: it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing” (Phelan 1993:2). She explains that the “excess” conveyed in representation offers the possibility of multiple and resistant meanings. By referencing the “excess,” The Riot Group is harnessing the power of that which “spills over” in any representation. Throughout the play audiences witness Col Johns turn the audiotape on and off as he revises the mission, so

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they see and hear some of the excess. Likewise, surveillance can never encompass a full realization of that which it observes. The excess, that which cannot be grasped in the representation, is rife with possibilities of resistance. The audience in the surveillance tragedy can claim its power by making strategic use of the excesses of the initial representation. Government surveillance depends on records. The image, the travel bill, the license: all build a portrait of one’s identity from which officials interpret threat. Surveillance (like all intelligence), claims to mitigate future threat by looking at the past, but is really just a mode of managing present moments in order to sustain support for continued surveillance operations. Pugilist Specialist toys with reality’s relation to documented records in order to question the productivity and purpose of surveillance. Though the Brechtian quality of audience address within the action of the play was meant to privilege the audio, having actors look directly at the audience while performing implicates them in the surveillance. I felt confronted by uncertainties similar to the characters’, but in witnessing their tragedy I saw an opportunity to learn and work to avoid my own potential tragedy, that of living in a fully militant society. Within the world of the play this record was made to convince Americans that military engagement overseas was mostly transparent. But the play on space, time, and documentation caused me to question my own visual interpretation of the events of the play. The Middle Eastern Other was not the core antagonist in this play. Col Johns manipulated his lieutenants, but their apathy and deafness to the record caused them to be willing participants in the tragic outcome. By implicating the audience as witnesses in the action of Pugilist Specialist, The Riot Group recasts them as activists who can learn from the fatal choices of the characters and promote an alternative conclusion in real-life referents to the themes of the play.

War Comes to American Soil in Grounded While Pugilist Specialist stages the ways American civilians comfortably witness militarization abroad, George Brant’s Grounded brings the war to American soil. The US Department of Defense tucks away drone warfare mere miles from a land of fun and frivolity—Las Vegas, Nevada. Due to increased media coverage of drone warfare and its casualties, Americans know drone facilities exist, but these facilities, and those who work in them, remain distant desert sites in our imaginations. Drone warfare fulfills the yellow-ribbon impulse to support US troops by presumably keeping them out of harm’s way, while still fueling the propagandist heroism of winning the “war on terror.” Grounded brings drone warfare and its operators into the forefront of our imaginations through the story of Pilot, a female Air Force fighter pilot who is grounded when she becomes pregnant. After a period of maternity leave she is sent to work as a drone operator. The war overseas is part of Pilot’s daily life on US soil. She kisses her husband goodbye in the morning, spends 12 to 14 hours surveying and bombing suspicious Middle Easterners, and comes home to tuck her daughter into bed. In Grounded, Brant poetically articulates the delicate balance between specificity and abstraction resulting from a society increasingly living on one side or the other of a camera lens. In the published script, Brant pens an incredibly specific character description of the sole character, Pilot, to include height, body fat percentage, fitness capability, and educational success. In contrast, the stage design should be intentionally abstract, so that Pilot’s evolving mental landscape can be expressed through lighting and projections. Like the characters in Pugilist Specialist, Pilot addresses the audience directly throughout the production. However, unlike

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The Riot Group’s minimal gestures, Pilot moves dramatically about the stage and engages intimately with the audience, her “confidante” as Brant encourages in the stage directions. In the 2013 Borderlands Theater production of Grounded in Tucson I attended, I felt as if I were alone in a room with one of the many female service members I know, listening to her speak not only about her career and love for flying, but also hearing her candid thoughts on love, sex, and motherhood. Though Pilot lured me into a seemingly intimate face-to-face encounter, Grounded is haunted by cameras. The backdrop to Pilot’s monologue was a screen that at times projected the images she would have seen on both her fighter jet HUD and her drone’s underbelly camera, and at other times projected grainy abstractions, visual white noise like the kind on an old television screen when the antenna loses its signal. In addition to the constant presence of the screen, the intimate moments of Pilot’s personal life are described via cameras: her pregnancy ultrasound, her relationship blossoming over Skype, sex with her husband in the light of their television screen. Fear of the surveillance cameras at the local mall capturing her and her daughter and deeming them enemy targets remind Pilot of the increasing blur of her domestic and military lives. Even as Pilot directs the drone that feeds surveillance of alleged terrorists, surveillance of her civilian life encroaches on Pilot’s psyche. Just like her Middle Eastern targets, Pilot must constantly evade the threat of the camera: I look up/ See the little black circle in the corner of the wall/ They’re watching us/ Someone is watching us/ That’s fine/ Fair enough/ But Attention People of the Boulevard Mall:/ My Daughter is Not the Guilty and her Stroller is Not a Jeep/ We are the Innocent/ You Let Us Pass/ I go into a changing room/ Take off my shirt/ Look for the camera/ Can’t find it/ But there’s always a camera right/ JC Penny or Afghanistan/ Everything is Witnessed. (Brant 2013:48) Here the script implies a change in tone, an urgency to the storytelling through capitalized words in the middle of sentences. This moment, where Pilot recognizes that she and her family are under surveillance in their civilian lives, causes a psychic break. The grey camera screen of her drone leaks into her senses. She sees her daughter’s skin in grey, and shakes her awake, prompting her husband to insist on therapy. But therapy only angers Pilot, who sneers that if she were really fighting in a war she would have separation, and no need for therapy. Again, the script indicates a change in tone, as this rant is part of a monologue that breaks the poetic structure of most of the piece. Here the audience begins to witness Pilot’s tragic descent as she recognizes the excess of government surveillance and her own participation in those excessive practices. At this point Pilot begins to recognize her reversal of fortune: she is losing the autonomy of her private life to the imposing culture of her professional life. Pilot’s home life soon bleeds into her work when she sees her own daughter on the drone camera screen, and refuses to drop her bomb on “Number Two,” the high-level target they have been tracking for months. Pilot pulls back hard on the throttle and redirects her drone up into the sky. But when her screen goes black she looks around to find her team focused on another screen, where the little girl she thinks is her daughter Sam is locked in an embrace with Number Two. Pilot realizes another drone was flying just above hers, as “Everything is Witnessed,” including her erratic behavior leading to this break from chain of command. She

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watches helplessly as her team bombs their target and the man and child on the screen explode. By refusing to engage her target Pilot is trying to take a moral stand. As it turns out, there was no moral choice available to her; in her attempt to make an alternative choice, she causes her own downfall. But that does not stop her from continuing to fight. The lights shift, as does Pilot’s demeanor, from defeat to quiet victory. She states that she is now court-martialed and speaking from military prison. She pauses, and surveys the audience silently. Once Pilot’s confidante, the audience becomes her antagonist: You/ You who watch me/ Who observe me watch my every move here and I know/ you watch me I know there is a camera somewhere for/ Everything is Witnessed/ You who have slaughtered my child/ Sealed me in this tomb/ Away from my husband/ My blue/ You who seal me in a tomb and think you are safe/ Know this/ Know that You are Not Safe/ Know That You Can Keep Me Here Forever You Can Bury Me in a Bunker of Grey But That Does Not Protect You For One Day it Will Be Your Turn Your Child’s Turn and Yea Though You Mark Each and Every Door with Blood None of the Guilty Will Be Spared/ None/ None/ None/ boom. (Brant 2013:70) The monologue begins as a warning, and escalates into a battle call against surveillance. Because everything is witnessed we—the watched—have the power to proactively witness and respond. Though the lack of separation between war and civilian life threatens Pilot’s psyche, her experience offers a provocative alternative to the apathy of Aristotle’s prescription for the experience of tragedy. Pilot’s mantra, “Everything is Witnessed,” references Phelan’s assertion of the potential of representational excess. We have the capability of seeing more than what is presented to us, and this may be a step toward maintaining autonomy. Surveillance leached into Pilot’s private world, denying her autonomy in her personal life in the same way her military activities were monitored. Her attempt to enact countermeasures to protect her personal privacy led to her downfall. But in the final scene of Grounded Pilot’s mantra embraces the notion that there is always more to witness. An individual’s attempt to see beyond the representation offered, and to critically respond to what they see, might finally heed the warnings of contemporary surveillance tragedy.

Resisting Tragedy Through Critical Spectatorship Sadly, with the expansion of government surveillance power through legislation like the Patriot Act, Americans are currently engaged in a contemporary surveillance tragedy. The 2015 Freedom Act restricts certain Patriot Act laws such as mass collection of data, except in emergency situations, but the Freedom Act still evinces a struggle in balancing national defense and individual autonomy.5 But when audiences witness surveillance tragedy onstage, it offers them opportunities to be critical spectators rather than tragic heroes. In both Pugilist Specialist and Grounded the characters directly confront the audience to show that while the characters have no power to break from their scripted stories, spectators do. Surveillance tragedies use their characters’ stories to warn audiences that increased surveillance leads down a dangerous path to militarization, one that they do not have to be subsumed by. Audiences can still feel the same kind of emotional turmoil for the tragic heroes as Aristotle desired, but instead of experiencing

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catharsis to balance and make them docile agents of the state, surveillance tragedy audiences can be mobilized through Arthur Miller’s call for enlightenment and Augusto Boal’s provocation of theatre as a rehearsal for revolution. Both Pugilist Specialist and Grounded embrace Phelan’s spirit of excess. The mantra “Everything is Witnessed” espoused in Grounded is initiated in Pugilist Specialist by foregrounding the acts of watching and listening, and exposing the inability of the representation to embrace all of its excess. The characters in Pugilist Specialist and Grounded are each locked in a battle that rids them of autonomous choice. They must choose between two evils: adherence to command and individual dignity. Either choice leads to their downfall. But audiences do not have to be locked in this same battle. They can harness the power of their role as witness, and act according to not just what they see and hear, but the knowledge they have gained from recognizing that there is always more than what is represented. They can leave the theatre space not balanced, but full of the excess that leads to political resistance.

Notes 1 Lawrence Zacharias (2011) argues that US Supreme Court judicial opinions follow two practices: conceptual approaches focused on close text analysis of laws, and narrative approaches that use stories, both real and projected, to introduce social norms into the decision-making process. 2 The Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons of things to be seized.” This amendment is called upon in court cases involving conviction based on evidence seized during investigations. Referencing two Supreme Court cases regarding fourth amendment rights, Zacharias examines how the judicial writings determine adherence to protection against violation of a person by unlawful search and seizure (in these cases seizure of phone conversations). 3 In his introduction Zacharias mentions another Supreme Court case, Katz vs. United States (1967), which involved the surveillance of a public phone booth used to make illegal gambling wagers. His introduction states an intent to discuss both Katz and Olmstead, but it seems that over the course of the article the judicial writings of Olmstead offer the necessary example for his arguments about surveillance tragedy and judicial narrative strategies, and he never returns to a discussion of the latter case, Katz. 4 Another production about military engagement that does not follow the surveillance tragedy narrative but is of note for her satire of surveillance and the performance of transparency is Coco Fusco’s A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America (2006), where Fusco fuses live performance with video streaming to critique the misuse of employment equality in the military through a performance about a female military interrogator. Fusco’s character gives audiences access to a videostreamed interrogation of a Pakistani prisoner to further the female interrogator’s argument about the potential for women to claim space in America’s dissemination of “democracy” and “freedom.” 5 Select sections of the Patriot Act were set to expire in June 2015. On 2 June 2015 the USA Freedom Act was signed into law by President Obama after being passed with a majority vote by both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Freedom Act amends the Patriot Act by ending bulk collection of records (originally legalized in 2006 by President Bush), and allowing challenges to national security letter gag orders (which previously denied individuals the right to speak about the information they were required to turn over to the government). The act creates venues for reporting how national security operations interpret their adherence to the law. The Freedom Act still allows the government to track potential terrorist threats, and expands the government’s right to track foreign terrorists on US soil (originally there was a loophole restricting the government from tracking foreign terrorists when they enter the US). The government is also allowed to invoke Section 215 of the Patriot

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Act—the collection of bulk data—in situations they deem as emergencies. While sources state that the government must apply for a FISA court application to use this information, and must destroy the information if the application is denied, the sources imply that the government can still gather the bulk information prior to submitting an application to the courts (See House of Representatives Judiciary Committee 2015; Diamond 2015; Washington Post 2015).

References ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). 2016. “Surveillance Under the Patriot Act.” Accessed 29 March. https://www.aclu.org/infographic/surveillance-under-patriot-act. Boal, Augusto. (1979) 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theater Communications Group, Inc. Brant, George. 2013. Grounded. London: Oberon Books, Ltd. Davis, Tracy C. 2007. Stages of Emergency. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Department of Justice. 2016. “The USA PATRIOT ACT: Preserving Life and Liberty,” 27 January. Accessed 25 March 2016. https://www.justice.gov/archive/ll/highlights.htm. Diamond, Jeremy. 2015. “Everything You Need to Know about the Patriot Act Debate.” CNN, 23 May. Accessed 10 May 2016. http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/22/politics/patriot-act-debateexplainer-nsa/. Fusco, Coco. 2008. “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power In the New America.” TDR 52, 1: 139–153. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. 2015. “USA Freedom Act.” Accessed 23 May 2016. https://judiciary.house.gov/issue/usa-freedom-act/. Khan, Huma. 2011. “War in Afghanistan: Osama Bin Laden’s Death Spurs Debate Over Troops’ Future.” ABC News, 4 May. Accessed 15 May 2016. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ war-afghanistan-osama-bin-ladens-death-spurs-debate/story?id=13521073. Kuharski, Allen J. 2005. “Pugilist Specialist (review).” Theatre Journal 57, 3: 524–525. Miller, Arthur. (1949) 2016. “Tragedy and the Common Man.” New York Times. 27 February. Accessed 3 August. https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html. Murray, Penelope and T.S. Dorsch, translated 2000. Classical Literary Criticism. London: Penguin Books, Ltd. Nelson, Steven. 2015. “Senate Passes Freedom Act, Ending Patriot Act Provision Lapse.” US News and World Report. Accessed 16 July 2016. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/06/02/senatepasses-freedom-act-ending-patriot-act-provision-lapse. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Shaplin, Adriano. 2003. Pugilist Specialist. London: Oberon Books, Ltd. Washington Post. 2015. “USA Freedom Act: What’s in, What’s out,” 2 June. Accessed 23 May 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/usa-freedom-act/. Zacharias, Lawrence S. 2011. “The Narrative Impulse in Judicial Opinions.” Law and Literature 23, 2: 80–128.

20 THE TIME TO BREAK (SILENCE) Disavowing the Affects of Militarization and Death through the Performance of Black Existence Kashif Jerome Powell

The call from my mother seemed to cut through the gentle chatter of the coffee house with the acute intensity of a switchblade. Before I could say a word, I was met with a mad flurry of questions—“Where you at?!! Where in California is your writing thing [retreat]? You okay!? You heard they shootin’ up crowds of folks out there in California, right?! It’s in Sansomething, San, San. . . . . .” Her words faded into an unbroken moment of thankful silence, until she quietly confessed: “I just needed to hear your voice.” I assured her I wasn’t in danger; the posh SANta Monica coffee shop I frequented during my writing retreat was 70-plus miles away from SAN Bernardino, where just 30 minutes prior police reported a “possible terrorist threat” as two active shooters of Pakistani descent, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at a lunchtime gathering of employees of San Bernardino County’s Department of Public Health. The details of the shooting spilled over into our everyday, irrupting in between the slow, consistent pulls on my e-cig and the equally repetitive melodrama unfolding between Victor and Nikki on my mom’s soaps. The news seemed to build a bridge between the 2,232 miles that separated us. As my mother anxiously flipped between Young and the Restless and Atlanta’s local news station, I combed the internet for up-to-the-minute reports, and together we learned that 14 victims lost their lives and another 21 were critically wounded (Karimi 2015). As political pundits began to conceptualize the attack, parallels were quickly drawn to the November 2015 terrorist-motivated attacks in Paris that resulted in 130 fatalities. “Be safe,” my mom pleaded after a cup and a half of conversation, “and call me tonight to let me know you good” she said, ending our talk and allowing me to return to the other half of my chocolate croissant, and the noiseless buzz of Caffe Luxxe. I didn’t call my mother that night because I was absorbed by a different news story that took a backseat to the firestorm raging in San Bernardino. As CNN and other news agencies kept a steady camera on Chief Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino Police Department, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were set ablaze by the shooting death of Mario Woods, a 26-year-old black man shot dead by police on the day-lit streets of San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood. Bystander videos show Woods, the prime suspect of a stabbing that occurred earlier that day, armed with a kitchen knife and surrounded by upwards of ten officers. One video in particular captured the anxious exchange between Woods and the officers, before

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it cut away from the scene as the eyewitness reeled back in stunned surprise by the officers’ gunfire; the witness’s high-pitched disbelief—“Oh my God! Oh my God!”—can be heard as 15 shots aimed at Woods rang out. San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr initially reported that deadly force was used as a means of self-defense. “We were able to enhance one second of the tweeted video” Suhr claimed, “which shows the officer engaging with Mr. Woods and Mr. Woods’ arm with the knife outstretched. The officer fearing for his safety [. . .] fired in defense of himself and the other four officers fired in defense of that officer” (Barba 2015.) A decelerated version of the video released by the Woods family’s civil rights attorney John Burris however, refutes Suhr’s claim, revealing that the officer’s first shot is heard before any movement from Woods is seen (Lee 2015). I sat in stunned silence staring at the last frame of Woods’ YouTubed death, sticking to my computer screen like hot tarmac. While the sound of Woods’ firing squad, executionstyle death continued to throw itself against the back of my throat, across the living room images of Farook and Malik’s gunshot-tattered SUV looped on the television. I was overwhelmed by the awareness that my mother’s prayer for safety was threatened not only by (presumed) acts of extreme terrorism, but also by the radical force of inhumanity projected upon black citizens daily. Though the acts of violence enacted in San Francisco and San Bernardino are separated by time, distance, and political circumstance, both insistences are nevertheless structured through an American culture of militarization that projects affects of dehumanization on to a community, and uses those projections to justify acts of state violence exercised upon that community. This culture of militarization has come to overdetermine America’s social and political consciousness, a culture birthed through a national spirit of militarism that uses ideals of liberty and freedom to camouflage indefensible acts of state violence. In her article “The Hidden Politics of Militarization and Pop Culture as Political Communication,” International Relations scholar Linda A. Hall outlines the defining distinction between militarism and militarization. While she acknowledges the many ways the terms have been defined by military historians, Hall cites militarism as the “belief that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests,” and militarization as “the action of making military in character or style” (Hall 2015). As a result, Hall concludes, militarism is positioned as a belief, and militarization a process. America’s belief in militarism is no doubt an inherited one, passed from our mother country and ratified by the genocide of North America’s indigenous people, and in equal measure, by the document that founded our country. The deliberate process of forging the social and political fabric of America in the style and character of the military, however, primarily begins with America’s Cold War with the former Soviet Union. As the global structure was reconstituted in the years following World War II, two opposing world superpowers emerged. The geopolitical struggle between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America furtively ushered in an era of defensive escalation, which led to militaristic conflicts in Berlin in 1948, Korea in 1950, the Gaza Strip and Egypt in 1956 and in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs in 1961.1 The competition of militaristic might reached an apex in 1955 when the Soviet Union and communist-controlled North Vietnam squared-off against the United States and the anti-communist forces of South Vietnam. The war in Vietnam marked the completion of America’s transition from the national belief of militarism to militarization as a national process—a transition confirmed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation:

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Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry [. . .] But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions [. . .] This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. (Eisenhower 1961) The transition from militarism to militarization, as Eisenhower points out, produced effects on an economic, political, and most damagingly, a spiritual level; the result of making war “the very structure of [the American] society” has led to implications that American ideology can only coalesce through the existence of a common enemy, who too often does not fit within nostalgic images of a pearly-white America. Though the war in Vietnam ended on 30 April 1975, the cultural process of militarization and the dehumanizing effect upon racialized communities have persisted through invasions in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), the Gulf War (1990), “interventions” in Somali (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994), Serbia (1998), and wars in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Pakistan (2004), Libya (2011), and Syria (2014), among others. Perhaps more disturbing is how the cultural processes of militarization have seeped into the ideological foundations of American consciousness, infiltrating the social arena through Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty (1964) and War on Crime (1965), Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs (1971), and George W. Bush’s War on Terror (2001), each (un)intentionally waging “war” against a specific non-white enemies/communities. Though these ideological wars are not explicitly defined through terms of race or ethnicity, their detrimental effects are felt most by America’s non-white communities, whether its unjustly targeting our Muslim population in the wake of heightened security alerts, or condemning low-income black communities as the source of crime and drugs in America. The current war efforts against ISIS further entrench the American psyche in a culture that sacrifices the quality of life of racialized communities and prioritizes heightened levels of surveillance and augmented exertions of military force to protect national interests. The recent assaults upon black life in the United States cannot be divorced from this history. The social and political move toward militarization has carried tainted conceptions of race and nationality, as Eisenhower 1961 put it, into “every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government”; racial otherness is unglued from American-ness through statesanctioned acts that create separate-but-(never)equal conditions for non-white communities. The distinction between “America” and “black America” is performed through an exhausting record of police-involved killings, acts of racial profiling that testify to black Americans’ state of being out-of-place, the racial disproportion of the prison-industrial complex, political gerrymandering that attempts to quell black participation in systems of government, and openly grotesque acts of gentrification. Blackness in America is governed by a set of cyclical performances—what I refer to as historical performatives—which assume the inequality and otherness of the black body. I began writing this chapter to articulate the weighted permutation of these performatives. Moved by my mother’s double-edged prayer, I am forced to face the overwhelming matrix of

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rage, fear, and hope I feel tightening around my throat as a result of the inconceivable cartulary of black citizens in particular, and people of color in general, whose public death reinforces the algorithms of militarization that position bodies of color as a threat to American safety and security. In many respects, I follow Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, who, exactly one year prior to his assassination, articulated the dynamic interplay between the evolving culture of militarization and the racial configurations of the American society in an address to members of the collective, The Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (King 1967). “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values” King said. “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” King used the war in Vietnam as a catalyst to challenge the nation to understand how performances of race and nationality are mobilized within US policy, both at home and abroad, to deny basic human rights to people of color. “These are revolutionary times,” King professed, “All over the globe men [sic] are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born” (ibid). I place King’s articulation of critical race theory into conversation with Marxist-centered considerations of the laws of dialectics to understand how the logics of militarization operate through sociopolitical performatives that not only dehumanize black bodies, but also creates the conditions for their elision. I take specific interest in how contemporary black liberation efforts in the United States are influenced by the nation’s effects of war and militarization. Ultimately, I write in hope of giving birth to an expression of justice that emerges from the timeworn cultures of militarization. Extending my mother’s prayer, which is rooted in Dr King’s dream, this chapter tackles “the triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” to articulate the processes of militarization that continue to have authority over political, social, and performative imaginings of what blackness is, and expose the revolutionary possibilities of what blackness could be.

“Something in the Water”: The Rising Tide of Racism, Materialism, and Militarization Early during our coffee house conversation, my mother posed a question that framed our discussion. Agonizing over the possibilities of Farook and Malik’s motive, she asked: “What would cause someone to do that, to kill like it was nothing? There must be something in the water.” Though she responded to my instinctive laughter with a chuckle of her own, she insisted, “I’m serious. There must be something in the water we drinking, chemicals or something, ’cause this is just crazy. . .stuff like this don’t just happen. They [the government] not telling us [the people] something. . .” In the weeks that followed, the incredulity expressed by my mother would be discredited by reports that found Farook and Malik’s actions to be intimately linked to the guerrilla warfare tactics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the insurgent group that has taken occupation in lands stretching from northern Syria to central Iraq. Joint investigations by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and US Customs and Border Protection outlined Farook and Malik’s “dark path of radicalization” and intentions of jihadist violence that were made evident by the 19 pipe bombs found in the couple’s Redland, California home, as well as a routine of target practice at Los Angeles-area gun ranges,

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and Facebook messages authored by Malik that pledged allegiance to the ISIS spearhead, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Nonetheless, my mother’s insistence that “stuff like this don’t just happen” intuitively implies that these acts of violence are more complex than differing philosophical viewpoints that isolate Farook and Malik’s actions from the overarching influences of US imperialism. President George W. Bush’s 14 September 2001 declaration of a war on terror, and the state of emergency that followed, plays out the mendacious catch-22 articulated in Eisenhower’s farewell address, exercising forces of militarization in an effort to preserve American ideals of freedom, but doing so by placing “freedom” in opposition to the potential threat of nonAmerican communities and populations. The performances of race and nationality enacted through the events of San Bernardino are wedged within this dichotomy, positioned between the expressed needs for security, and the fear of the foreign/other that threatens the US psyche and society. But Farook and Malik cannot be understood solely as bodies acting in the name of terrorism, but bodies acted upon, washed over by waves of racist othering, materialistic assertions of US governance, and militarized force experienced domestically and abroad. In equal measure, the nearly 350,000 Syrian refugees bold enough to face the uncertain waters of the Mediterranean in an effort to escape the ISIS regime, and in particular the 3,770 found lifeless on the shores of Turkey, Lebanon, and the Greek islands over the course of 2015, are the performative manifestation of affects of racism, materialism, and militarization (BBC World News 2016). Farook, Malik, and the political situation of the Middle East stand as a testament to the racial performatives that are bred within the American-inspired culture of militarization, and subsequently performed through bodies deemed as “other.” These events, alongside my mother’s insistence of “something in the water,” are echoed in Dr King’s 4 April message: “The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued [the] self-defeating path of hate” (King 1967). The carnage left in the aftermath of the San Bernardino massacre embodies the rising tide of racism, materialism, and militarization that notably begin to threaten US shores during the war in Vietnam. In 1967, King attempted to unravel this giant triplet by articulating the performatives of race and nationalism at play in Vietnam through a surprising turn toward Marxist dogmas of historical materialism. He contended, “It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency [. . .] and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit.” King invests his rhetoric in Marx’s assertion that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness” by documenting how the changing social dynamics that privileged American comfort and safety not only perpetuate global inequality but also deeply ground the national consciousness in performatives of racism, materialism, and militarization (ibid). King’s articulation of the cyclical performances of racism, materialism, and militarization enacted by the state that perpetuates inequality in order to ensure American safety is intimately bound to Marx and Engels’ articulation of the first two laws of dialectics.2 King builds his primary argument upon the first law of dialectics, the Law of the Unity of Opposites. This law, which identifies the mutually constitutive nature of social forces, holds that development occurs as binary forces work in concert to constitute the other. Historical materialism mobilizes this law to describe the development of sociality, explaining how

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political orders climb to power by developing internal contradictions that bolster the authority of the political structure while simultaneously contributing to its decay. The unity of opposites King attempts to unknot operate as a set of performativities that manifest through the dynamics of race and nationality: “we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch [these soldiers] in brutal solidarity,” he continues, “burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Chicago” (ibid). King was aptly aware of “the cruel irony” that functioned at the core of the Vietnam War, pinpointing the internal contradictions that worked to promote US nationalism by cementing racial division. The nationalistic dynamics that played out on the racialized bodies of the “Viet Cong,” as well as the throngs of Vietnamese civilians who suffered first-hand the atrocities of war, are the same forces at work on domestic soil that attempt to protect US ideology through overt acts of militarization that preserved the rule of Jim Crow, and allowed for widespread segregation in schools and housing projects. In both cases, acts of militarization are enacted to crystalize racial otherness as a threat to US security— race is functionally positioned as a performative, oppositional force to US ideology. The consequences of defining race through acts of militarization are made apparent through the second law of dialectics, The Law of the Passage of Quantity into Quality and vice versa. Here, Engels and Marx describe the progression of social development through the joining of quantitatively separate forces into one united force that is qualitatively different than its parts. An example of this law occurs in chemistry when two hydrogen atoms bond with one atom of oxygen. The result is water, a liquid substance that qualitatively differs from its three gaseous parts. The philosophical twosome further explain that the process may proceed in reverse, where the qualitative weight of an entity may be dissected into various quantitative values, i.e., when water evaporates, reverting back to its separate gaseous forms. Dr King acknowledges the practices of quantitative reduction authorized by American forces during the Vietnam War as he sketches the scant quality of life experienced by Vietnamese citizens, avowing, “[The Vietnamese] move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps [. . . Soldiers] wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals” (ibid). These same performativities of race and militarization are also delicately woven into the process of quantitative dehumanization experienced by American blacks during the 1950s and ’60s. Jim Crow laws, housing and institutional segregation, and separate-but-equal doctrines all work to cement entire communities of racialized citizens within quantitative regimes of the less-than-human. Once quantitatively reduced, America’s black community was systematically subjected to acts of militarized violence performed through high-powered water hoses and attack dogs, laws that sent non-violent protestors to prison for days, weeks, or months at a time, and mob violence encouraged by the governors of various Southern states that led to the assassination of civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers, shot to death in 1963 just steps away from the front door of his Mississippi home; Fred Hampton, killed in 1968 during a police raid while sleeping in his Chicago apartment; and in that same year, Dr King, murdered outside of his room at Hotel Lorraine in Memphis. As we consider the current state of American race relations, King’s Marxist-influenced articulation of the performatives that arise from the clash between race, nationality, and militarization can be used as a guide to understand the philosophy of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Since its inception in 2012, Black Lives Matter has become a platform not only to expose how state-sanctioned militarized acts are used to exert control over America’s black

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populace, but also to reveal how these acts of violence carry damaging ideological effects that influence how blackness is conceived, practiced, and performed. Architects of the hash tag #BlackLivesMatter, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, have explicitly stated that the moniker, and the movement crafted in its wake, “is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza 2014). What began as an open (love) letter to the black community in the wake of national tragedy has flowered into a worldwide movement, which mobilizes King’s nascent articulation of the laws of dialectics to reveal how the “giant triplets” are used to politically reject black agency and socially dehumanize black bodies. The movement was specifically initiated to counteract the social workings that resulted in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. His death highlighted how the mechanics of racism, materialism, and militarization undergird the nation’s social, political, and legal structures. The dehumanizing acts that rendered Trayvon a menace to society and ultimately led to his death brought specific attention to Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, which grants citizens the right to use deadly force if they reasonably believe doing so would “prevent death or great bodily harm” (Florida Statute 2016). The law, upheld by the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watch coordinator responsible for Trayvon’s death, authorized Zimmerman’s use of deadly force to preserve the security of his community from the “threat” of (racial otherness embodied by) Trayvon. The “Stand Your Ground” law demonstrates how race continues to operate through the first law of dialectics, as it upholds blackness as the mutually constitutive “other” that bolsters the authority of its white—or in the case of Zimmerman, de facto white—counterpart.3 Through reciprocal performances of race that place white security in opposition to black threat, acts of violence like Zimmerman’s, followed by legal justification, allow the force of black life to diminish in favor of its socially protected equivalent—white life protected by US doctrines of safety and security. In the wake of Trayvon’s death, black scholars and activists voiced their concerns via Twitter through retweet after retweet of bell hooks’s 2000 explanation of the process by which blackness is positioned on the fringes of the social structure as an always-already threat to the US psyche and security. Using a hypothetical example eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding Zimmerman and Trayvon, hooks explains: White supremacy has taught him [retroactively read: George Zimmerman] that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression [. . .] Mass media then brings us the news of this in a newspeak manner that sounds almost jocular and celebratory, as though no tragedy has happened, as though the sacrifice of a young life was necessary to uphold property values and white patriarchal honor. . .This is what the worship of death looks like. (hooks 2000:194–195) Conjuring memories of the 14-year-old Emmett Till and his acquitted executioners, Trayvon’s death and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal signaled a regressive shift in contemporary understandings of race by reigniting the social conditions that resulted in the death of black citizens during America’s cultural transition to militarization in the 1960s.

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The regressive shift marked by Trayvon’s death is fueled by the logics of the second law of dialectics, which allow for the amplified use of state-sanctioned militarized force as a mechanism of dehumanization that transfigures the qualitative value of black life into quantitatively reduced, expendable enemy threats. The second law of dialectics, the Law of the Passage of Quantity into Quality, has been made increasingly more evident in conjuncture that followed the death of Trayvon. Since then, the nation has witnessed an insurmountable number of black citizens publically slaughtered through extreme acts of militarized violence exercised by police force, several of which made national headlines: Eric Garner in July of 2014, Michael Brown in August 2014, Freddie Gray in April 2015, as well as the cryptic death of Sandra Bland, who was mysteriously found hanged in her jail cell in July of 2015 after being arrested for failing to signal a lane change while driving. In each case, the justice system failed to find the officer(s) in question (Daniel Pantaleo who was responsible for the chokehold death of Garner; Darren Wilson who shot and killed Brown; William G. Porter and Caesar Goodson Jr, two of the officers who neglected to provide medical attention to Gray; and the collection of officers employed by the Waller, Texas County Police Department who defaulted on their promise to offer Bland adequate supervision and protection) legally responsible for the deaths of these individuals. The imperfections of the justice system were further compounded by a series of vicious macro-aggressions performed against the black community by American civilians, the prime example unfolding in June 2015, when Dylann Roof murdered nine members of the congregation attending bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. In the days leading up to the massacre, Roof authored a manifesto that was released via social media where he outlines his motive: I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is [the] most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me. (in Mother Jones 2015) Roof ’s intentional or unintentional use of capitalization gestures toward the presumed authority of “White” existence over “black” existence. And though he speaks for himself, the aforementioned police-involved murders of unarmed citizens testify that he is, in fact, not alone. The lack of options presumed in Roof ’s manifesto—“I have no choice”—echoes the lack of alternatives announced by Eisenhower—“But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense”—that necessitated the US turn toward militarization. Faced with limited options, Roof engaged in an act of war against the black community to defend the whitewashed history of this country. Roof ’s assault against the black community, embodied by the murder of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Middleton Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Reverend Daniel Simmons Sr, and Myra Thompson, reveals just how deep the nation’s culture of war has seeped into the American psyche. The national culture of militarization sets the stage for performances that couple acts of violence with sentiments of racism that showcase the “bravery” to “go into the ghetto and fight” for the preservation of American ideology, which is enduringly colored with white—in lower case!—supremacist principles that negate the quality of black life. Citing the high ratio of blacks to whites in Charleston, Roof reduced the black community to a

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set of percentages and numbers, instead of recognizing the historical, social, and material value yielded through efforts of (black) liberation. Perhaps the most theatrical manifestation of the suffocating knot of racism, materialism, and militarization came after a grand jury failed to indict Michael Brown’s shooter, police officer Darren Wilson. On the night of 24 November 2014 the streets of Ferguson, Missouri had again become a site of urban warfare. Larger and more organized than initial protests that erupted in the wake of Michael’s 9 August shooting, citizens gathered to denounce the gross neglect of a justice system that failed to defend an unarmed 18-year-old boy who was killed because his body was preconceived through dehumanizing notions of threat and criminality. The imagery of streets lined with police officers in tactical fatigues, and manned armored cars with artillery aimed at the collection of activists, symbolized the death-driven algorithms of racism, materialism, and militarization that are used to render the black body as an entity that is criminal-therefore-threating, subhuman-therefore-expendable. In his testimony to the grand jury, Wilson cited these very sentiments to render Michael a sub-human threat and justify the use of deadly force: “he looked at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon” (in Calamur 2014). Wilson’s testimony and subsequent no-indictment ruling representatively justify the use of state violence against the black community. This justification was further confirmed by the actions of Ferguson police who littered the night sky with tear gas canisters that fell at the feet of peaceful protestors. Lined from sidewalk to sidewalk, deploying recycled military weaponry acquired through the Department of Homeland Security, platoons of police swept through the streets of Missouri in the style and character of soldiers moving through a foreign and hostile territory. The state-sanctioned acts of militarization performed by Ferguson police produced a response from the protestors that led to demolished buildings, overturned cars, and a troubled national consciousness desperately wanting to find a footing in rising tide of racism, materialism, and militarization. In an instant, the city of Ferguson transitioned from municipality to battle zone, officers of the law became legions of soldiers, and citizens were transfigured into enemy combatants. Similar to the events of San Bernardino, the Ferguson unrest is positioned in G.W. Bush’s catch-22, wedged between the desire for security and the fear of the other that threatens to “disrupt” the safety of US citizens. In the case of America’s War on Terror that fear is directed toward global citizens of the Muslim faith—a widespread fear that is epitomized by the Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s December 2015 proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States. According to a March 2016 poll conducted by YouGov and the Huffington Post, Trump’s proposal is supported by 51 percent of Americans, an increase of 6 percentage points since its introduction in December 2015 (Hussain 2016). Like my mother’s prayer, the affects of racism and militarization are double-edged; while the outward projection of those affects inform American fears of the Islamic faith, inward projections are used to extend state power through an over-militarized police force that consciously and/or unconsciously targets the American black citizenry. The connection between American foreign policy on terrorism, over-performed acts of militarization, and state-sanctioned assault against the black community is made abundantly evident through the uptick in militarized weaponry, like those seen in Ferguson, distributed to police units in the wake of 9/11. In 1991, the Pentagon initiated the 1033 Weapons Transfer Program to forward surplus military gear to state and local police agencies, primarily on the Mexico/US border, to implement the War on Drugs (Wofford 2014). After 9/11, the increased fear of Islamic terrorists shifted the priority to a different social war, the War on

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Terror, which allowed the Department of Homeland Security to dish out nearly US$34 billion dollars in weaponry to police forces throughout the country. The guns, flash bombs, and tear gas grenades used to combat terrorists in Baghdad, Ramadi, and Raqqa are the same used in Ferguson, Baltimore, and New York. Not only are the armaments used in the Middle East the same as in the United States, but so too are the tides of racism, materialism, and militarization that ravage communities and dehumanize citizens fighting for the right to live.

The Quiet of Drowning: Needing a Radical Revolution of Values (or) A Ready-to-Die Politics The first time I saw my mother after the attacks in San Bernardino was on Christmas morning; her hug radiated with the knowledge that the prayers for her son’s safety were answered. That night, my mom, my sister and I lingered around the dinner table catching up over a second dinner of cold mac n’ cheese and collard greens. She asked how my writing was going. I had hit a roadblock with this chapter; I was drowning in the seemingly endless white noise of black death, and because of that, “I don’t know how to end.” “Just say what you want to say, son,” she said effortlessly while eyeing the penultimate slice of Patti LaBelle’s infamous sweet potato pie. Visibly contemplating whether to make her move on the pie before my mom could, my sister chimed in, “Did you talk about the boy who got shot back home [West Palm Beach, Florida]?” I hadn’t heard of Corey Jones, a 31-year-old church drummer from Boynton Beach, Florida who was shot three times in October 2015 by an undercover officer while waiting next to his broken-down car on Interstate 95. As I unlocked my phone to investigate yet another police-involved shooting, I fell speechless as I read the news of the police-inflicted death of a black, 19 year-old student, Quintonio LeGrier, and a black, 55 year-old mother of five, Bettie Jones, in my new home of Chicago. Their deaths were not only magnified by the presumed merriment of Christmas day, but also by the ongoing citywide protests of the death of Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old shot 16 times in October 2014 by Officer Jason Van Dyke, who continued to fire his weapon for 15 seconds after McDonald lay dead on the frigid Chicago asphalt. The fear shot from my mother’s eyes, posing the question that eventually spilled from her lips: “The part of Chicago you live in is the good part, right?” The deaths of McDonald, LeGrier, and Jones occurred in Chicago’s Westside, an eternity from my far Northside Rogers Park apartment. Yet, despite the militant persistence of black public execution and the knowledge that my safety was not a priority for officers of the state, I hoped to ease my mother’s fears by cutting through the silence with an averse, “Yeah, I’m good.” The cruel reality of the current state of black America, however, spoke a truth I was not yet willing to admit; I didn’t want to bring into consciousness the deeply resonant affects of racism, militarization, and death that are constructed within structural, social, and performative facets of American society. It is difficult not to subscribe to pessimistic ideologies expressed by Frank B. Wilderson, who argues that the notion of blackness is undergirded by a “palpable structure of feeling, a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture” (2009:119). Given the violent ghosts of the black past that materialize through acts of militarization, how do we reach back towards this history of violence and death, while simultaneously

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stretching forward to (re)shape future instantiations of blackness? If, as I have worked to demonstrate, the affects of militarization and violence are announced through the performativity of the body, then performance, as a constant and conscious reworking of those historical performative narratives, is granted the unique agency of imaginative escape. By embodying a revolutionary politics, we can begin to see the black body as more than an entity over-determined by its sociohistorical roots; to rather understand it as a site, a text, an entity that possesses an ability to forge its own existence by using the haunted history of death as its primary tool. Such a system of belief was announced by Dr King over 50 years ago: “Our only hope today, lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism” (King 1967). I, alongside Dr King, mobilize the third and final law of dialectics, the law of the negation of the negation, which catalyzes the conditions for change by finding the emergent possibilities that exist within the very contradictions of society. This law of dialectics was expressed through the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement that galvanized change by submitting to the violence of the attack dogs, the threats of ignorantly incensed mobs, and the humiliation experienced during lunch-counter sit-ins to expose society’s underlying contradictions. Embodying such a politics, in turn, expressed the need to dismantle the structures of injustice, and the ability to do so by meeting the superficially immovable object of subjugation with the categorically unstoppable force of black existence—a brand of fighting fire with fire that denied the conditions of black non-existence by forwarding the undeniable force of black life. These politics are capable of recapturing the revolutionary spirit that negates the negation of black life. Jonathan Butler embodied such a politics. In November of 2015, he began a week-long hunger strike on the campus of the University of Missouri to call attention to the racially biased actions of then-Missouri University System president, Tim Wolfe. “From the moment I made my announcement,” Butler explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “people thought I was a dead man walking [. . .] they thought I was going to die from Day 1. For me,” he continued, “I really didn’t look at it from a deficit approach that I would die—even though I took precautions that I might—I really did come at this with an approach of victory, knowing that the fact that the harder we fight, the greater the reward” (in Ford 2015). The power of the hunger strike arose from its explicit articulation of the way Butler’s (black) body was/is socially and politically forced into an intimate relationship with death. Employing logics of the law of dialectics, Butler used his proximity to death to perform a counter-investment in his body that denied the conditions of his diminished quality of life by asserting the authority of his existence. This revolutionary spirit is equally present in one of the anthems of the Black Lives Matter Movement: Janelle Monae and the Wonderland Records Collective’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout?” In the words of Monae, This song is a vessel. It carries the unbearable anguish of millions. We recorded it to channel the pain, fear, and trauma caused by the ongoing slaughter of our brothers and sisters. We recorded it to challenge the indifference, disregard, and negligence of all who remain quiet about this issue. Silence is our enemy. Sound is our weapon. They say a question lives forever until it gets the answer it deserves [. . .] Won’t you say their names? (Monae 2015) The aptly named anthem voices the persistence of black life that state-sanctioned violence attempts to erase by encouraging us to embody the magnitude of death, voicing the dehumanizing affects of racism, materialism, and militarization that is carried in a name—Walter

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Scott, Jerame Reid, Phillip White, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Freddie Gray, Aiyana Jones, Sandra Bland, Kimani Gray, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Sharonda Singleton, Emmett Till, Tommy Yancy, Jordan Baker, Amadou Diallo. To the list of names voiced through Monae’s song, I add Corey Jones, Laquan McDonald, Quintonio LeGrier, Bettie Jones, Mario Woods, Rekia Boyd, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Yvette Smith, Kajieme Powell, Tarika Wilson, Vonderrit Myers, Antonio Martin, Pearlie Golden, Dontre Hamilton, Milton Hall, Chavis Carter, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Oscar Grant III. While these names carry with them the heartache of black death, they also contain a powerful revolutionary potential that is performed in their very utterance. “Kashif,” my mother said softly, moving toward the kitchen to end our conversation, “just make sure you do what you need to do to protect yourself. Don’t let nobody tell you you ain’t who you know you are.” As I sit facing the realities of death that swirl around the uncertain future of blackness, her words continue to encourage me to move with the grace and resilience of that which I am: a man, brother, uncle, son, a lover who coats the rage of his (non)existence and the palpable fear that I may lose my life, or worse the life of someone I hold dear, with a smoldering hope for a better tomorrow. A scholar who struggles to weigh the privilege of his education against the overwhelming force of militarized violence experienced by his community. A global citizen who watches police line downtown boulevards as protestors gather in the name of basic human rights. One who questions what kind of threat, of criminality, is presumed in struggles for justice that it evokes this sort of preemptive force. One who knows that the power of blackness resides in its ability to reveal the false binaries that circulate around understandings of what it means to “be” (human). All of the many fragments coalesce in this dire moment to be the manifestation of a revolutionary politics that meets the hostilities of this world with an equally resilient tenacity that screams, “I am ready to offer my life, for my existence!”

Notes 1 I am respectively referring to the “Berlin Blockade” of 1948–1949; the Korean War in 1950–1953; the Suez Crisis, which lasted just over a week in 1956; and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. 2 Between material forces of reality—knowledge is produced when the human realm of ideas meets the practical realm of material interaction. Engels identifies three primary laws of dialectics that govern the development of “nature, human society and thought:” 1) the Law of the Unity of Opposites, 2) the Law of the Passage of Quantity into Quality, and 3) the Law of the Negation of the Negation. The three laws of dialectics, when taken in concert, express the process of knowledge production by first identifying the origins of natural variance, the catalytic force of transformation, and finally the direction in which new forms of knowledge move. With more specificity, the first law Engels describes is The Law of the Unity of Opposites, which explains the mutually constitutive nature of reality. In nature there is no light without dark, and in sociality, no bourgeois without the working class; though they operate as separate entities, the forces work in deferred unity to define the essential elements of the other. The second is the Law of the Passage of Quantity into Quality, an example of which is found in chemistry. When one atom of sodium is combined with one atom of chlorine, the result is a compound that is qualitatively different than its parts: salt. The last law Engels designates is the Negation of the Negation, which expresses the processes production and appropriation. Such a cycle is pronounced through natural processes of birth and re-birth. For instance, the seed that is planted to grow tomatoes is ultimately negated by the fruit of its harvest: the tomato. The tomato is in turn consumed, the seeds re-planted, and cycle of negation continued. Historical materialism grows from this philosophy to explain the progression of social history through the economic practicalities of class struggle. 3 Zimmerman’s proximity to whiteness is both literal and symbolic; Zimmerman is legally categorized as a mixed-race Hispanic American; his mother is Peruvian and his father is a white American of

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German descent. However, the circumstance surrounding Trayvon’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal is squarely placed within American discourses of race that privilege and protect white Americans by creating conditions of social, political, and economic inequality. Zimmerman’s verdict rendered him a beneficiary of institutionalized white privilege and state protection, testifying to his symbolic proximity to the safeguard that is whiteness.

References Barba, Michael. 2015. “Suhr Claims Video Shows Mario Woods with Raised Knife; Community in Disbelief.” Examiner, 2 December. Accessed 27 December 2015. www.sfexaminer.com/ suhr-claims-video-shows-mario-woods-with-raised-knife. BBC World News, 2016. “Migrant Crisis: Migration to Europe Explained in Seven Charts.” BBC News, 4 March. Accessed 19 March 2016. www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911. Calamur, Krishnadev. 2014. “Ferguson Documents: Officer Darren Wilson’s Testimony.” National Public Radio Online, 25 November. Accessed 27 December 2015. www.npr.org/sections/ thetwoway/2014/11/25/366519644/ferguson-docs-officer-darren-wilsons-testimony. Eisenhower, Dwight D. 17 January 1961. “Farewell Address.” Speech, National Televised Broadcast. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, Washington, DC. Florida Statute. 2016. “Title: XLVI, Chapter 776: Justifiable Use of Force; Section .013: Home Protection; Use or Threatened Use of Deadly Force, Presumption of Fear of Death or Great Bodily Harm.” Ford, Dana. 2015. “Jonathan Butler: Meet the Man Whose Hunger Strike Flipped the Script at Mizzou.” CNN, 10 November. Accessed 27 December 2015. www.cnn.com/2015/11.09/us/ jonathan-butler-hunger-strike-missouri-profile. Garza, Alicia. 2014. “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” The Feminist Wire, 7 October. Accessed 9 December 2015. www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2. Hall, Linda A. 16 May 2015. “The Hidden Politics of Militarization and Pop Culture as Political Communication.” Pop Culture and World Politics. Accessed 21 March 2016. http://www.e-ir.info/2015/05/16/ the-hidden-politics-of-militarization-and-pop-culture-as-political-communication. hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: HarperCollins. Hussain, Murtaza. 2016. “Majority of Americans Now Support Donald Trump’s Proposed Muslim Ban, Poll Shows.” The Intercept, 30 March. Accessed 12 May 2016. www.npr.org/sections/ thetwo-way/2014/11/25. Karimi, Faith. 2015.“San Bernardino Shooting: Who Were The Victims?” CNN, 7 December. Accessed 27 December 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/san-bernardino-shootings-victims/. King Jr, Martin Luther. 1967. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech, Meeting for the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, Riverside Church, 4 April, New York, NY. Lee, Vic. 2015. “Graphic New Video Released in Fatal Police Shooting of Mario Woods.” ABC 7 NewsSan Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, 11 December. Accessed 27 December 2015. www.abc7news.com/ news/graphic-video-released-in-fatal-sf-police-shooting-of-mario-woods-/1119055. Monae, Janelle ( janellemonae). 2015 “Hell You Talmbout.” Instagram, 7 September. Accessed 27 December 2015. https://www.instagram.com/p/6VNc3hn_m1/. Mother Jones. 2015. “Here’s What Appears to Be Dylann Roof ’s Racist Manifesto.” Mother Jones, 20 June. Accessed 19 March 2016. www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2009. “Grammar & Ghosts; The Performative Limits of African Freedom.” Theatre Survey 50, 1: 119. Wofford, Taylor. 2014. “How America’s Police Became An Army: The 1033 Program.” Newsweek, 13 August. Accessed 27 December 2015. http://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-police-becamearmy-1033-program-264537.

AFTERWORD Constitutive Performances: Human Rights in a Militarized Culture Wendy S. Hesford

At first, I dreamed about being home. . . but then my dreams took a turn, and I found myself . . . incarcerated in my dreams. Prisoner Testimony 6 x 9 ( Guardian 2016) Violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture. Frank Wilderson III “Grammar and Ghosts” (2009:119) Fragments of prisoner testimonies comprise the audio track and graffiti the grey walls of the solitary confinement cell of The Guardian’s first virtual reality project, 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement. 6 x 9 is based on the testimonies of seven former inmates from California and New York prisons, footage from actual segregation units, and footage shot for the PBS Frontline documentary Solitary Nation. To access the virtual project, viewers download a Guardian mobile app on their smartphone and use VR goggles or a Google Cardboard headset (see Guardian 2016). 6 x 9 focuses on the consequences of long-term solitary isolation, which includes a host of physical and psychological problems, such as hypersensitivity to external stimulation, hallucinations, panic attacks, cognitive deficits, and paranoia. 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement was featured at the 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival (HRWFF) in New York. I encountered 6 x 9 at the Walter Reade Film Theatre’s exhibition hall, after attending a HRWFF panel discussion on empathetic media and human rights and while drafting this Afterword. As you enter the virtual cell, the actual voice of a former prisoner greets you: “Welcome to your cell. You are going to be here for 23 hours a day.” The second-person address enhances the visceral connection. The virtual room is comprised of a thin mattress on a concrete platform, a metal washbasin and toilet, a metal door with a small slot for food deliveries, and four walls that close in on you as you tilt your cardboard headset. 6 x 9 attempts to mimic physical and psychological disequilibrium through monotonous stress sounds, unsettling syncopated flashes of bright light, and an audio backdrop of prison cell doors slamming shut and prisoners’ chants and cries. The second-person address hails us as both subjects and as witnesses of the state, and in so doing draws attention to the

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risks of representing human rights abuses and to the ethics of immersion technologies and the witnessing contexts they create. At one point during the 6 x 9 virtual experience, we hover ghostlike over the empty prison cell bed, listening to the voice of a former inmate describe the experience of psychological detachment. How are we to interpret our hovering? Is our hovering a simulation of the disembodied yet self-surviving prisoner? Does our hovering simulate the position of the citizen witness? Or does our hovering simulate the ever-present surveying gaze of the penal state? Like the virtual psychologist who, through disciplinary classifications and taxonomies, translates prisoners’ testimonies as evidence of the psychological effects of isolation, as scholars we too are engaged in a translation process, and similar to the psychologist, we too run the risk of positioning ourselves at the disciplinary center. An estimated 80,000–100,000 people in US state prisons have been in some form of solitary confinement, a figure that excludes data from local jails, juvenile, military, and immigration facilities. Inmates are isolated in closed cells, generally measuring 6 x 9 feet, for 23 hours a day, with one hour outside for exercise, for periods ranging from days to decades. Inmates in solitary are typically denied reading materials, radios, televisions, telephone calls, visitations, and opportunities to participate in prison programs. With little to no external oversight, prison officials place inmates in solitary for both violent and non-violent acts, which can include possessing contraband, testing positive for drugs, or ignoring prison officials’ orders. I begin with 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement because the project simulates both the optics of social control as well as the invisible appendages of penal power, and thereby draws attention, as do many of the works in this book, to how visual technologies and spatial rhetorics mediate our relation to the incarcerated body, militarized state, and human rights. As an immersive human rights storytelling project, 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement is part of a human rights mediascape and solidarity activism that increasingly turns to immersive video and “co-presence” technologies to create a “sense of shared space and presence” and to “bridge geographical and temporal barriers” (Gregory 2015:1386). For example, civilian witnesses and activists use live-streaming technologies to “narrate and engage a distant audience with the visceral realities of what is happening on the ground, create deeper engagement, and occasionally ask them to do something” (ibid). “Alongside synchronous co-presence,” Sam Gregory, Program Director for Witness, notes, “there is also the ambient co-presence experience [. . .] that can come from following the Twitter or Instagram feed of someone across the world” (ibid). Immersive journalism may strive to “move the participants in the distributed networks beyond that of the viewer, the voyeur, the commentator” (1387), but possible aims aside, ethical questions haunt immersive technologies, including the risk of reproducing the human rights subject as spectacle (Hesford 2011), and the inadvertent contribution of episodic witnessing, as Gregory rightly notes, to the “ongoing challenge in human rights discourse of communicating structural violence, hidden violence, and underlying causation” (2015:1389). Of late, several prominent international and national media outlets have launched virtual reality news films. Earlier this year, The New York Times introduced the VR film The Displaced, which is set in a Syrian refugee camp. The Public Broadcasting Service released a VR film about the Ebola outbreak, and the UN launched the VR film Clouds Over Sidra about a 12-year-old Syrian refugee girl. Virtual reality pioneers such as Sarah Wolozin, director of the Open Documentary Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims that the power of immersive journalism lies in its ability to create multisensory experiences that enable a “different kind of knowledge and understanding of the story” (in Davies 2016). One of the

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assumptions underlying empathetic media, and VR projects such as 6 x 9, is the idea that immersion fosters identification, identification fosters action, and individual action leads to social change. Clearly, 6 x 9 seeks to unsettle the hegemonic field of the penal state by exposing its invisible tentacles of power; yet, we must ask to what extent virtual human rights projects such as 6 x 9 may “falsely promise a sharp picture of structural violence’s source and scope” (Berlant 1999:54). For example, while 6 x 9 animates the penal state’s optic regime, in not visualizing the bodies of prisoners, the VR project distracts attention from the constitutive classification systems (gender, race, sexuality, ability, and age) that are governed by the militarized state, and thereby risks accentuating the experience of the participant at the expense of the incarcerated. 6 x 9 therefore does not simulate the experience of solitary confinement but the experience and ethical ambiguity of mediated witnessing, co-presencing technologies, and cultural performances of violence, captivity, and resistance.

Constitutive Performances: Violence, Captivity, and Resistance Contributors to Performance in a Militarized Culture likewise critically engage the ethical and political ambiguities of human rights representation and witnessing. Performance in a Militarized Culture powerfully illuminates the expansion of militarized state power through the manipulation of geographical boundaries, restrictions of mobility, and legal classifications, such as that of refugee, as well as through the management of representations of violence, captivity, and resistance. In what follows, I focus on four chapters that explicitly draw attention to the spatial rhetorics of dispossession and state power, namely racialized state violence, and to constitutive performances of human rights and humanitarianism in militarized cultures. In Chapter 2, “Military Aid: The Spatial Performances and Performativity of Contemporary Refugee Camps,” Alexis Bushnell and Justine Nakase present a performative view of the refugee camp as a reiterative space that “act[s] upon the subject formation of the refugee” (31), and in this way they highlight the constitutive function of the space of the refugee camp. Constitutive rhetoric illuminates the capacity of language and symbols to call into being collective identities through a “process of identification in rhetorical narratives that ‘always already’ presume the constitution of subjects” (Charland 1987). International humanitarian narratives constitute the figure of the refugee as a mass of suffering bodies deserving of rescue. But this constitution is contingent, as the differing international response to the current Syrian refugee crisis illustrates. Although the etymology of refugee comes from the word refuge (e.g., shelter or protection from danger), refugee camps do not automatically function as spaces of refuge. Rather, like the 6 x 9 prison solitary cells, refugee camps encumber refugees’ basic human right to freedom of movement and often cast refugees as an undifferentiated mass, at once helpless and potentially threatening. The architecture of 20th-century refugee camps, Bushnell and Nakase point out, echo early military iterations in the Boer Wars in South Africa (1899–1901), where “camp space was originally designed as a site of containment and control for displaced persons, political prisoners, and others considered by states as enemies,” as well as with 18th century prisons and hospitals of the European colonies (30). The authors studied the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, which, like refugee camps across the globe, “operates within a narrative of aid and protection, [yet] it performs a militarized history of security and surveillance” (30). At Za’atari, refugees withstand unbearable living conditions, including insufficient food rations, overcrowding, ill treatment by aid workers, lack of electricity, and lack of access to healthcare.

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In contrast to spatial control that communicates power over the refugees (officials survey refugees’ movements and daily routines), Syrian refugees at Za’atari exert spatial control by determining where in the camp they will live and how spaces will be allocated. Moreover, refugees have acted upon the camp space by creating a black market district, ironically referred to as the Champs Élysée. The Champs Élysée features stalls and shops that resemble home to refugees (barbershops, computer arcades, and so on). “While the performativity of the camp space shapes refugees’ understanding of themselves and how they perform refugee identities,” Bushnell and Nakase note, “refugees maintain agency through appropriative spatial counterperformances” (43). The authors do not uncritically celebrate these counter-performances however, which, in this case, exercise agency in the form of commercial consumption. Rather they importantly recognize “counter-performances can only go so far in relieving the violence enacted by the contemporary refugee camp” (43). In Chapter 4, “The Freedom Theatre and Cultural Resistance in Jenin, Palestine,” Elin Nicholson focuses on acts of cultural resistance in the Jenin refugee camp in Palestine, which the Israeli military has characterized as the “epicentre of Palestinian resistance,” and Palestinians view as a “site of epic heroism and struggle” (68). Nicholson highlights conflicting enactments of power by the Israeli state and the Freedom Theatre, a production company that works with refugees to enact cultural resistance and individual and collective rights of national self-determination. The Freedom Theatre’s productions privilege the voices of the occupied and, as Nicholson describes the plays, provide a “creative outlet to counteract the negative psychological effects of the occupation in a communal setting” (70). The Freedom Theatre seeks to provide the “means for a third intifada as a non-violent, ‘cultural intifada’[. . .] that harnesses the force of creativity and artistic expression in the quest for freedom, justice and equality” (71). But, as Nicholson notes, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict is not just over “territory and nationalism” but also about “the nature of political performance itself, including the performance of state violence against artist-activists.” (76). After one production, Faisal, who led the production, told Nicholson in an interview that he was woken the next day by eight heavily armed Israeli soldiers, was blindfolded, sent to a nearby detention center, and interrogated before being released. Finally, Nicholson argues that the Freedom Theatre’s “power lies in its ability to gather sympathetic and militant international arts practitioners” and a network of “educated, influential Westerners—academics, artists, and activists, such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Judith Butler, and Peter Brook [. . .] who will use the power of their Western passport and rights as citizens of those countries to decry the human rights abuses occurring in Palestine”(72). In this regard, the effectiveness of the company’s cultural performances appears to lie elsewhere. But what are the consequences of looking elsewhere? Does locating the power of the political performance elsewhere risk the construction of refugees as subjects deserving of our recognition but not as human rights agents? Indeed, as this chapter importantly demonstrates, power also lies in the political performances of cultural resistance that emerge from within the liminal spaces of the refugee camp. In Chapter 8, “Choreographies of Militarized Space: US Military Bases, Everyday Life, and Performance in Okinawa, Japan,” Jessica Nakamura examines the endurance of militarized space in Okinawa and the role of cultural productions in counteracting the oppressive effects of US bases. Nakamura discusses the inaccessible and yet inescapable quality of US bases (barbed wire and fences everywhere) and their placement in the middle of the island, which requires civilians to drive around them. In contrast to the militarized choreography

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of US bases, art-activist Chikako Yamashiro’s video installation Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman) moves fluidly between the military bases and civilian land and sea (126). In the installation, Yamashiro transforms into a seaweed woman who travels along the Okinawan shore (127). Although military bases are not visible, in Āsa Onna their presence is implicit. “Here and there, the camera shows glimpses of tanks and camouflage, but these are distorted from the seawater on the camera lens” (127). The only sound in the video is the seaweed woman’s breath. While viewers may breathe with the seaweed woman, as Nakamura notes, their engagement is physically confined by the gallery space itself (129). Nevertheless, Nakamura espouses the hope and potentiality—as does Nicholson, that art enables action (129). But this chapter also prompts us to consider the critical limitations of the implied causality between performance and emancipation. In addition to the need for follow-up studies that focus on the reception and remediation of cultural productions, a constitutive rhetorical analytic can help us to better understand how enactments of state power constitute subjectivities, and draw attention to the moral heuristics that promote causal conceptions between art and liberation and constitute our ethical obligations to others. Constitutive rhetoric prompts us to examine these constitutions at multiple levels, not only at the level of discourse but also at the level of the relationship among interlocutors constrained as they are by the norms of sociopolitical intelligibility (Mills 2007:150). In Chapter 20, “The Time to Break (Silence): Disavowing the Affects of Militarization and Death Through the Performance of Black Existence,” Kashif Jerome Powell notably emphasizes the normative regimes of legibility in his analysis of assaults on black life in the United States. State violence against black communities, he argues, is “structured through an American culture of militarization that projects affects of dehumanization on to a community, and uses those projections to justify acts of state violence exercised upon that community” (317). The militarized police response to the organized protests in Ferguson after the non-indictment ruling of an officer who killed Michael Brown illustrates the “suffocating knot of racism, materialism, and militarization” (324). Powell asks, “how do we reach back towards this history of violence and death, while simultaneously stretching forward to (re)shape future instantiations of blackness?” Powell rejects the “pessimistic ideologies,” which he attributes to scholars such as Frank B. Wilderson (see epigraph), who imply that the black body is over-determined by its socio-historical roots. Here Powell exposes the haunted by history trope as constitutive rhetoric that delimits black subjectivity. Alternatively, Powell embraces the black body as a “site, a text, an entity that possesses an ability to forge its own existence by using the haunted history of death as it primary tool” (326)—a perspective that the Black Lives Matter exemplifies (321–22). In closing, I turn to the personal anecdote with which Powell opens his chapter about a telephone call between he and his mother. “Where you at!! Where in California is your writing thing [retreat]? You okay!? You heard they shootin’ up crowds of folks out there in California, right!” his mother exclaims (316). Powell reassures his mother that he is safe in a coffee house in Santa Monica, 70 miles from San Bernardino, and he agrees to call her later. But absorbed by another news story about the shooting death of Mario Woods, a 26-year-old black man shot by police in San Francisco, he doesn’t call her that evening. Instagram, alight with bystander videos of the exchange between the officers and Woods, a suspect from an earlier stabling, followed by 15 gunshots, sets up an ambient witnessing experience for Powell. He writes, “I sat in stunned silence staring at the last frame of Woods’ YouTubed death, sticking to my computer screen like hot tarmac. While the sound of Woods’ firing squad, execution-style

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death continued to throw itself against the back of my throat, across the living room images of Farook and Malik’s gunshot-tattered SUV looped on the television” (317). Although Powell does not concentrate on immersive technologies and civilian journalism, the opening anecdote demonstrates how in witnessing, we translate visual and audio human rights testimonies into subjective experience. Inundated by news footage of both events, Powell, while not in immediate danger, is also “not okay,” but besieged by the social and psychological toll of militarized enactments of power. The YouTube video of raw footage is an efferent experience that aspires to evidence, but like 6 x 9, it is no less experientially mitigated. Finally, the cultural productions discussed herein call attention to militarized state performances of power but then point to someone’s agency—viewer, incarcerated inmate, and refugee—all of whom have different options. The refugee can create the semblance of commerce, but the inmate might get a longer sentence for having too much toilet paper. On the other hand, the semblance of commerce makes a refugee camp into something much more permanent than a “camp.” In 6 x 9, the psychologist points to high rates of suicide and selfharm by inmates in solitary; former inmates testify to hallucinations and despair: “You see the paint on the wall, the paint maybe been there 50 years before you got there, so you start to see figurines [. . .] The toilet that drips [. . .] sweats and hits the floor [. . .] People turn on themselves. They want to treat us as animals; we might as well act as animals.” In sum, while the agency of inmates and refugees is delimited by dehumanizing circumstances, our agency is constituted by the humanizing contexts of witnessing that these dynamic cultural productions create.

References Berlant, Lauren. 1999. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.” In Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, 48–84. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Charland, Maurice. 1987. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73: 133–150. Davies, Caroline. 2016. “Welcome to your virtual cell: could you survive solitary confinement?” The Guardian 27 April. Accessed 26 August. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ apr/27/6x9-could-you-survive-solitary-confinement-vr. Gregory, Sam. 2015. “Ubiquitous Witnesses: Who Creates The Evidence and the Live(d) Experience of Human Rights Violations?” Information, Communication, and Society 18, 11: 1378–1392. Guardian, The. 2016. 6 x 9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement. The Guardian. 27 April. Accessed 26 August 2016. www.theguardian.com/solitary-vr. Hesford, Wendy S. 2011. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, Catherine. 2007. “Normative violence, vulnerability, and responsibility.” differences 18, 2: 133–156. Wilderson III, Frank B. 2009. “Grammar and Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom.” Theatre Survey 50, 1: 119–125.

INDEX

6x9: A Virtual Experience of Solitary Confinement 329–30, 334 9/11 2, 5, 59, 64, 65, 136, 139, 143, 171, 172, 174–178, 180–189, 198, 200, 203, 208, 210, 212, 286–7, 295, 302, 304, 324 Action Man: Battlefield Casualties 205, 208, 214–15, 219–21 Afghanistan xv, 2, 136, 138–40, 149–151, 155, 157, 167–8, 171, 187–8, 196, 198, 203, 208, 270, 296, 310, 312, 315, 318 Agamben, Giorgio 30, 44, 47–9, 55–9, 61, 64, 211, 218, 221 AKP (Turkey) 48–50, 54, 57–8, 60–5 America’s Army 208–9, 212, 218 Antigone 62–3 Arab Spring 2, 81, 87, 95 Architecture 4, 16, 19, 22, 26, 28, 32–3, 36–8, 42–45, 78, 331 Āsa Onna (Seaweed Woman) ix, 123, 126–9, 132, 332 Austin, J.L. 107, 137, 145, 149–50, 318, 334 Authoritarian/ism 4, 18, 52, 65, 79, 84, 90, 104, 116 Batalje ix, 144, 147 Battle painting/s vi, 5, 136–9, 141–7, 149 Benfield, Dalida María DIACRIT “I” vii, 16, 19, 23–7 Biopolitics 20–21 Biopower 20–1, 26, 49, 55 Black Lives Matter/#BlackLivesMatter xiv, xv, 7, 321–2, 326, 328, 333 Black Panther Party ix, 112, 119, 255, 259, 261–7 Black Watch vi, 5, 186–7, 189–97, 199–202

Boal, Augusto 164–6, 168–9, 307–8, 314–15 Boer Wars 30, 33, 42, 45, 331 Brown, Wendy 48, 64 Bulbul, Nawar 4, 79–94 Bush, George W. 58, 64, 156, 172, 306, 308, 318, 320 Butler, Judith 6, 31, 47, 73, 194, 300, 332 Camp v, viii, ix, 4, 17, 30–55, 58, 62, 66, 68–70, 73–5, 77–8, 94, 103, 169, 189, 190, 200, 201, 321, 330–2, 334 Canal Zone/Zona del Canal viii, 23–4 Castro Rios DIACRIT “I”, Enrique viii, 14–16, 19, 22–4, 26–7 Censorship 39, 48, 79, 81–4, 92, 94, 147 Chemical weapons 14, 20 Choreograph, choreography vi, 5, 122–8, 129–33, 190, 196, 227–8, 250, 288, 291, 301, 332 City of Knowledge viii, 11–12, 14, 19–20, 26–7 Cold War vii, 2, 6, 18, 20–1, 27, 48, 111, 117–18, 135, 148, 177, 186, 207, 228, 230, 234, 235–6, 238–9, 242, 246, 247–8, 251, 295, 317 Colonization, coloniality 12, 15–16, 19, 21, 23–6, 28, 133 Communist, Communism 14, 21, 117, 229–30, 317 Counter publics 56, 63 counterinsurgency 2, 5, 12, 18, 20–1, 155–60, 162–70, 229 Counterinsurgency Manual 156, 159–60, 167, 169 Cultural memory 5, 271 Davis, Tracy C. 16, 240, 306 de Certeau, Michel 80, 83–4, 132 Decolonization 12, 15–16, 21, 26

336

Index

Defense, defence 16–19, 27–9, 77, 136, 138–9, 142, 146, 167, 169, 174, 207, 234, 239–40, 251, 255, 258, 260–4, 267, 270, 275, 295, 304–6, 313, 317–18, 323–4 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg xiii, v, 100–9 Dirty War (Argentina) 56, 65 Documentary theatre 5, 187–8, 190, 202, 296 Drone vii, x, 2, 73, 140, 172–3, 176, 181–4, 208, 225, 288–92, 295–6, 298–303, 311–12, 406 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 233, 269, 270, 286, 317–18, 320, 323, 328 Entertainment 14, 21, 199, 202, 204–208, 210, 212, 214, 223–4, 235–6, 257, 273, 275 Erdogan DIACRIT G, Recep Tayyip vii, ix, 5, 47–9, 51–2, 54–8, 60–5 Familia viii, 14–15, 22, 27 Freedom Theatre, The v, ix, 66, 68, 72, 74–8, 332 Fort Clayton 11–12, 14, 18–21, 26–8 Fort Gulick viii, 18, 20 Games/gaming xiii, 5, 21, 204, 206–8, 210, 212–14, 217–19, 222–37, 269–74, 279–80, 284, 286 Gezi Park 47, 49–50, 52, 57, 59, 63–4 GI Joe 207–8 Grounded 6, 172–3, 183, 305, 311–15 Guns v, vii, 1–2, 6–7, 17, 54, 72, 156, 161–2, 164, 178–9, 186, 242, 247, 250, 255–68, 274, 281, 317, 319, 325, 333 Hero, heroine, heroism vi, 5–6, 68, 89, 99, 104, 138, 141–2, 145–6, 148–50, 171–85, 193–5, 198–9, 204–7, 210–11, 213–18, 232, 242, 269–70, 277–8, 283, 307, 311, 313, 332 Homo sacer 44, 47, 55, 57, 59, 61, 64, 211, 215, 218 Hotel/Panama DIACRIT ON LAST “A” viii, 23–5, 27 Human rights vii, xi-xii, 6, 30, 43, 63–5, 67, 72, 77, 79, 89, 91, 94, 136, 143, 150, 173, 181, 184–5, 217, 287, 299, 319, 327, 329–34 Humanitarianism, humanitarian aid 14, 21, 31–3, 35, 40–5, 77, 141, 143, 145–6, 331 Ideology 3, 67, 116, 136–8, 147–8, 168, 177, 185–7, 193, 208, 318, 321, 323 Improvisation 5, 112, 157–9, 161–3, 166, 168, 170, 318, 323 Installation/s, installation art vii, 11–12, 17–18, 23–5, 27, 123, 126–7, 129–32, 134, 289, 332 Iraq xi, xv, 5, 136, 138, 142, 149, 155–7, 162, 164–5, 167–9, 171, 176, 187, 188–91, 193–4, 196, 198, 200–3, 205, 208, 212, 215–18, 220, 222, 224, 235, 270, 308, 318–19

ISIS, IS, Daesh xv, 318–20 Israel xii, 4, 66–73, 75–78, 332 Japan vi, xii, 5, 36, 40, 45, 122–8, 133–5, 216, 235, 332 Jordan xiii, 4, 31, 33, 35, 37, 44–5, 79–81, 87, 90, 93–4, 331 Kill chain vii, 6, 288, 291–3, 295, 297, 299 King, Dr. Martin Luther Jr. 111, 119, 319 Kriegsspiel 226–31, 234–5, 237 Lefebvre, Henri 31–3, 35, 41, 43, 45, 123, 135 Leis, Raul DIACRIT on U 11, 14, 28 Love Boat 79–82, 87–94 Lysistrata Jones ix, 270–1, 277–81, 285–6 Mbembe, Achille 47, 49, 65 Memorias del hijo del viego 22–3 Militarism 3, 7, 12, 16, 20, 99–101, 107, 110–11, 117, 148, 150, 186–9, 191, 193, 195, 197–200, 202–4, 211, 219–20, 270–3, 286, 317–19, 326 Military-entertainment-complex 207, 223, 235–6 Military-industrial complex 207, 223, 228, 230, 242, 270, 273 Mr Burns, a Post-Electric Play ix, 270–1, 274–5, 277, 279–83, 285, 287 Narrative/s 3, 6, 12, 16, 21–6, 30, 38–9, 76, 78, 134, 137, 141, 146, 150, 156–7, 168, 172, 174, 176–7, 179–82, 187–9, 193–4, 199–200, 213, 230, 238–9, 241, 242, 262, 264–5, 270, 273, 277, 283, 301, 304–8, 310, 314–15, 326, 331 National identity 81–2, 85, 100–1, 108, 137, 139, 142, 168, 191, 210 Necropolitics v, 4, 47–9, 55–6, 64–5 Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom ix, 270–7, 279–80, 285–6 Neoliberalism 22, 48–9, 78 Newton, Huey P. 255, 259, 261–5, 267 Ngugi wa Thiong’o 38, 45, 66–7, 70, 78 Nuclear war 229, 240 Obama, Barack 167, 169, 171–7, 180–4, 314 Occupation, occupied territories xii, 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 16–18, 22, 24, 49, 58, 67, 69–73, 76, 77–8, 85, 111, 122, 126, 130, 132, 155–7, 160, 162–3, 165–7, 262, 270, 305, 319, 332 Okinawa vi, 5, 122–35, 332 Oregon Trail, The ix, 270–1, 275–7, 279–80, 283, 285–6 Palestine v, 4, 66–70, 72, 76–8, 332 Panama Canal v, vii, xiii, 4, 11–15, 17–18, 22–3, 26–8 Patriot Act, The 304, 306, 309–10, 313–15

Index

Performativity v, 4, 16, 21, 30–2, 35, 38–9, 42, 45, 55, 64, 137, 170, 223, 231, 236, 326, 331–2 Phelan, Peggy 82, 84, 94, 270, 281–3, 286, 310, 313–15 Post-colonial/ism 13, 16, 28, 55 Praying–Fleeting Visions 129–32 Prison 33, 70, 89–91, 113, 313, 318, 321, 329–31 Propaganda 100, 108, 204, 239, 248, 308 Publics 26, 56 Pugilist Specialist 6, 305, 308–11, 313–15 RAND Corporation 223, 228, 235–237 Reagan, Ronald 207 Recruitment (military) vi, 6, 178, 204–20 ReEntry vi, ix, 5, 186–7, 189, 195–203 Refugee/s v, viii–ix, xi, 4, 30–46, 66, 68, 70, 74, 77–8, 87, 92, 95, 320, 330–2, 334 rehearsal, rehearsing 16, 67, 73, 80, 82, 87, 106, 123, 129, 131–132, 158, 161, 170, 179, 183, 188, 190, 200, 224, 230–231, 246, 239–40, 244, 271, 275, 279, 281, 291, 314 “Ride of the Valkyries” 99–100 Roach, Joseph 15 Robots, robotics xiv, xvi, 271–3, 280 Scenario 112, 114, 121, 139, 157–158, 163, 169, 175, 179, 208–10, 225–6, 229–31, 274, 295, 297–301 Schneider, Rebecca 16, 22–3, 26, 29, 277, 287 School of the Americas (SOA) 12, 18, 20–9 Script 2, 5, 16, 82–4, 87, 90–4, 112, 131, 137, 141, 143, 145–6, 157, 158–9, 163, 165, 169, 170, 188, 224–5, 239, 248, 262, 264, 271–4, 277–9, 281, 310–13 Seale, Bobby 199, 255, 261–5, 267 Second Amendment xv, 258–61, 266 Security 3, 16, 19–21, 27, 29–30, 32, 34–5, 38–9, 43, 48, 60, 64, 70, 75, 82, 91, 110–13, 116, 118–19, 124, 136, 138–40, 142–3, 146, 149–50, 159, 162, 165–6, 169, 176, 180–1, 230, 239–40, 244–5, 252, 258–9, 268, 294, 296, 299–301, 305–6, 314, 318–22, 324–5, 331 Site-specific (performance); site-specificity 16, 32 Solitary confinement 329, 331, 334 Start Thinking Soldier 209–10, 219–20

337

Surveillance vii, xiv-xv, 2, 6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 39, 63, 77, 171, 261, 265–6, 288, 296–7, 304–14, 318, 331 Syria xiii, 4, 33, 35, 37, 41, 44–5, 79–95, 114, 136, 318–20, 330–2 Taylor, Diana 56, 242 Tea Project, The 205, 215–17 Terrorism 2, 48, 65, 78, 89, 174, 176–7, 181–5, 239–40, 294, 298, 300, 302, 304, 307, 309, 317, 320, 324 The Right Stuff 238–9, 242, 251–2 Theatre of Cruelty 110–11, 113–19 Torture 12, 14, 20, 50, 56, 81, 82, 86, 90–1, 177, 180, 182, 273 Total militarization 2 Total war 285–6 Tourist/tourism 25, 126–8, 134, 149, 189 Trauma/s, traumatizing, traumatic 2, 3, 5, 22, 63, 91, 104, 125, 134, 138, 173, 183, 185, 187–90, 193, 196–7, 200, 202, 212, 215, 217, 223, 233–4, 270, 285–6, 326 Turkey v, 4, 5, 47–8, 56, 62–5, 81, 320 UNHCR 30, 31, 35, 37–8, 41–5 United Nations xi, 30, 35, 40, 45, 68–9, 78, 143, 185 Verbatim theatre, verbatim plays, verbatim dialogue xi, 187–90, 192, 195–7, 199–203 Videogame/s 195, 206, 208, 210, 222, 224, 232, 235, 273, 276, 277, 280, 294 Wagner, Richard vi, xii, 5, 99–109 War Is Not a Game 205, 212–13, 220 War on Terror xi, 2, 4, 49, 56, 58–9, 156–7, 172–4, 177–8, 180, 183–7, 192, 198, 202–3, 208, 214, 219–20, 235, 239, 248, 302, 304, 311, 318, 320, 324 World War I, WWI 17, 33, 35, 45–46, 101, 103–8, 138, 246, 285 World War II, WWII xii, xiv, 6, 18, 31, 33–4, 36, 45, 111, 115, 117, 122–3, 125, 133, 222–3, 227–8, 233, 235, 239, 242, 246, 317 Yippies 112–14, 116–19 Za’atari refugee camp viii, 31–45, 331–2 Zero Dark Thirty vi, 5, 171–2, 177, 182–5