After Effects: Performing the Ends of Memory. An Introduction to Volume I

Caroline Wake

Abstract


In 1983, Ronald Reagan claimed to have seen the concentration camps during World War II. When it became clear that he had not done so, that at most he had seen footage of the camps, the condemnation was swift and sharp. However, in her article ‘Performance and Death: Ronald Reagan’, Peggy Phelan takes a more generous approach, arguing that Reagan’s response opens up a profoundly paradoxical space in which to think through ethics, aesthetics, spectatorship and trauma. ‘Performance’, she argues ‘asks its spectators to become witnesses to events that are simultaneously real and indicative, simultaneously empirical and phantasmatic’ (1999: 118).

For this reason, there is a ‘profound ethical challenge and an important possibility in proposing that performance might provide a model for witnessing a historical real that exists at the very edge of the phantasmatic – events that are both unbearably real and beyond reason’s ability to grasp: events that are traumatic’ (118). The scene of Reagan’s false witnessing and the possibilities that Phelan sees within it go to the heart of this double issue of Performance Paradigm, which investigates themes of trauma, testimony, and witnessing as well as notions of liveness, mediatisation, and recording; ethics, aesthetics, and politics; empathy, identification, and imagination. More specifically, this first issue is dedicated to the figure of the witness – Reagan, Phelan, and all who follow – and the function of their witnessing.


Full Text:

PDF

References


Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley University of California Press, 1981).

Butler, Judith. ‘If the Commodity Could Speak ...’ TDR: The Drama Review 53.1 (Spring 2009): 22-23.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Douglass, Ana, and Vogler, Thomas A. (eds.) Witness and Memory: The Discourse on Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2003).

Felman, Shoshana, and Laub, Dori. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Guerin, Frances, and Hallas, Roger (eds.) The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007).

Hartman, Geoffrey. ‘Shoah and Intellectual Witness’, Partisan Review 65.1 (1998): 37-48.

--- The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Kubiak, Anthony. Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

McBride, Dwight. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

Murray, Timothy. Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, and Art (London: Routledge, 1997).

Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997).

--- ‘Performance and Death: Ronald Reagan’, Cultural Values 3.1 (1999): 100-122.

Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Taylor, Diana. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in

Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

--- The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.