Here, Katerina Paramana introduces the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue. In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making.
Keyword: performance
Affective Economies of Freedom in Paradoxical Times
This article proposes the concepts of “brutal” and “gentle” affects as a critical framework to analyze affective economies of freedom in paradoxical times. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on affect, Sruti Bala’s on participation, and Franco Berardi’s on freedom, it argues that freedom emerges not solely as a historical achievement of an inalienable right, but as an embodied experience enhanced by theatrical dispositifs. I consider forms of celebrating, performing, and capturing freedom in paradoxical times, including the staging of the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution; the production 25th of April 1974 by Portuguese company Mala Voadora; and The Seagull by Argentinian director Guillermo Cacace. I begin with a discussion of the relationship between populism and notions of freedom, describing the nuanced usage and political capture of the latter to examine its paradoxes in the present. I then examine how these productions critically engage with the paradoxes of freedom and reset the conditions of experience of its affective-sensorium.
Review of Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (New York University Press)
In Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation, Patrick McKelvey traces the “confluences and contradictions” at play in disabled performance groups’ relationships to the US government’s vocational rehabilitation programs in the mid- to late-twentieth century. Grounding theatrical performance as an embodied display of and resistance to rehabilitation, McKelvey weaves together performance studies and disability studies to complicate common narratives of disability rights history. In doing so, this book provides a basis for future work that may emerge at the nexus of performance, disability, and history.
Review of Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumacı (Duke University Press)
Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds by Arseli Dokumacı builds upon theories of affordances through the concept of “activist affordances,” which describes the “performative microacts/-arts through which disabled people enact and bring into being the worlds that are not already available to them, the worlds they need and wish to dwell in” (5). Activist Affordances takes a non-Westernized view of disability that makes room for the complexities of pain, illness, and the nonhuman world. Dokumacı’s Activist Affordances is a necessary and fresh expansion of disability—beyond the Western conception of the term—that encompasses the disablement of other species in order to resist human exceptionalism, and to better address the destruction colonization, racialization, and capitalism has wrought on the earth and its inhabitants. Activist Affordances is a widely applicable piece of scholarly literature that offers strategies for survival in our increasingly precarious world.
Introduction – Performance and Political Economy: Bodies, Politics, and Well-Being
In this article, Katerina Paramana introduces Lateral’s special section, “Political Economy and the Arts,” and its first set of articles, “Performance and Political Economy: Bodies, Politics, and Well-Being,” and provides the rationale and context for this section’s topic. In the face of a multiplicity of world-wide problems and suffering, this special section aims at a reinvestment in desire for change in order to resuscitate and reinvest in hope. The articles therein provide insights into the current relationship between politics, human and non-human bodies, and their well-being (and why it is necessary we take action to change it) which might help us steer the wheel before we drive off the cliff.
Racial Capitalism, Refugee Adjudication, and the Performances of Zama Zama
This essay investigates the category of the refugee as an instantiation of racial capitalism. To illustrate this conjunction, it first examines international law that defines refugees and, then, looks to specific national jurisprudence that accords different recognition to them. The national contexts discussed are the United States, given that the racial discourse there serves as a ground for the most widely known theorization of racial capitalism via Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, and South Africa, where racial capitalism was first coined. Robinson’s work is briefly elaborated in relation to subsequent scholarship that has engaged and extended the concept of racial capitalism, in relation to the particularities of South Africa racialization, and in relation to zama zamas (unregulated miners, often perceived as foreigners who threaten the Rainbow Nation’s stability in various ways). Given limitations of space, the essay uses the overview of juridical regimes and the excursus on Robinson to rethink the category of refugee. Zama zamas and the history of the South African mining sector as it informs understandings of race are posited as a fruitful direction for further research because these phenomena help to extend the entwinement of race and refugee and the implications of Robinson’s text for understanding refugees anew.
“A Currency of Happenstance”
Commissioned by Manchester International Festival, The Find (2023) was a participatory art project by conceptual artist Ryan Gander. It distributed non-monetary coin in public space to create what Gander termed “a currency of happenstance,” engaging chance procedures and choice. This essay discusses The Find’s participatory aesthetics and ethical claims, asking what its engagement with coin might elucidate regarding continuities and changes in cultural and economic life, and contemporary political struggles regarding money.
Review of Dancing Indigenous Worlds: Choreographies of Relation by Jacqueline Shea Murphy (University of Minnesota Press)
Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s Dancing Indigenous Worlds deals with her participation in festivals, performances, and conversations with Indigenous dance artists, whose practices enact, register, and experience relationality. Relationality is both an expression of Indigenous ways of being and knowing and an integral part of dance work, including all the activities produced around it. Each chapter of the book explores in depth an aspect of relationality based on the work of an artist and the descriptions of the experiences and sensations that each of these has awakened in the author, both in the author’s voice and that of her interlocutors.
Regional Mobilities, Technology and the Status of Myth in Africa: Retrieving Musical/Creative Codes in KwaZulu-Natal before Colonialism
This article tracks my intellectual journey in trying to understand the role played by craft specializations before the colonial era in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa), which is the area where I come from. I do this by a comparative look at how craft specializations happened in other parts of the African continent, an approach prompted by the absence of older written or documentary sources on KwaZulu-Natal, prior to the advent of European colonialism. A key finding of the research is that the cultural and ritual repertoires of craft specialists reveal conceptual domains of expertise that are derived from intra-African regional dynamics. This contrasts with the colonial belief that implied that notions of expertise were as a result of European or Asian human contacts. In looking at craft guilds, I am interested in how ritual, technological skill and the mastery of certain musical/creative acts played a part in the formation of regional blocs in ancient Africa. Such a historical understanding may be crucial to our present-day understanding of emergent processes of regionalization and identity formation.
Review of Breathing Aesthetics by Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Duke University Press)
Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s Breathing Aesthetics draws our attention to how respiration as a cultural analytic maps the uneven distribution of risk in our contemporary moment. Intervening at the intersection of queer theory and the environmental humanities, Tremblay deciphers an archive of cultural texts that range from CAConrad’s ritualized poetry to Ana Mendieta’s elemental performance art and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In so doing, they reveal an understanding of how breath registers precarity across race, gender, and disability, while also serving as a mechanism for healing and care. This discerning analysis, combined with a focus on the exchange between body and milieu, makes a case for respiration as a distinctly ecological and embodied relation. Ultimately, Breathing Aesthetics provides crucial insight into how aesthetic expressions of respiratory variations evidence a tension between morbidity and vitality within bodies whose ability to breathe is most endangered.
Let’s Relax!
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People’s Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
Let’s Relax!
Andrew Culp and the Cultural Studies Association’s Performance Working Group Co-Chair Hui Peng discuss “relaxed performance” with Leigh Jackson, Director of Accessibility & EDI Programming at People’s Light outside of Philadelphia, and Dr. Hannah Simpson, Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and author of Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave, 2022). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Patrick McKelvey.
Review of Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism by Jeffrey T. Nealon (University of Minnesota Press)
Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism crafts a history of performativity within contemporary theoretical thought. Through the structure of a genealogy, Nealon examines the nascence of performativity and its intersection with biopolitics and neoliberalism to predict not only the future of the performative, but also to imagine new avenues of criticism within the humanities.
Review of The Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment by Jillian Hernandez (Duke University Press)
The Aesthetics of Excess by Jillian Hernandez is a dazzling and provocative book that deploys the aesthetic as a category to grasp with great care the lives and representations of Black and Latina women whose performance of gender exceeds the white middle class norms of feminine comportment.
Review of Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War by Jennifer Ponce de León (Duke University Press)
In Another Aesthetics is Possible, Jennifer Ponce de León looks at recent aesthetic practices in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States that shift the commonsense of history, space, and violence in order to usher in an anticapitalist and anticolonial world. With an expansive archive and a method that combines interviews, journalism, and close formal readings of art–activist practices, Ponce de León demonstrates the importance of aesthetics—and of aesthetic criticism—for making another world possible.