Abstract
This book opened with an image of military actors, in camouflage, standing on a stage set before a borderless world map. The map served much the same function as the backdrops I described in the last chapter. From studio flats to graphics-rich PowerPoints to self-branding websites, these backgrounds define and legitimate the subject standing before it. I have been preoccupied in these pages with self-backdrop interactions because they illustrate, often in explicitly theatrical terms, how identity is constituted through camouflage, here broadly defined as the spatial processes through which we engage, and adapt to, our material surroundings. Further, I have tried to tease out how our positioning relative to our environment is not always ours to determine. While the borderless map may have been designed to situate the United States on the side of the ‘world,’ unifying it cartographically with existing and potential Allies, it was perceived by others as an image of the US’s blindness with respect to how it is globally situated, and more crucially, how that positioning affects its less powerful neighbors.
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Notes
David Simpson, Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 21.
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991) 189.
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 127.
Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) 171.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 21.
In reviews of Eve Ensler’s recent solo piece, The Good Body, critics remarked on the extraneous nature of the set (a fashion-shoot environment with mannequins and umbrellas), which was said to look like ‘so much clutter.’ See David Rooney, ‘Going Solo,’ Variety 26 Dec. 2004. Web. 10 Feb. 2014.
Eve Ensler, The Good Body (New York: Villard, 2004) 70.
W. B. Worthen, ‘Bordering Space,’ Land/Scape/Theater, ed. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002) 282.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959) 252.
Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, ‘Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,’ Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (London: Routledge, 1993) 69–70.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984) 110.
Robert Lepage, The Far Side of the Moon, Working Draft (Québec: Ex Machina Archives, 2002) 3.
For a fascinating discussion of puppets and images of self in solo performance, see Jenn Stephenson, ‘The Autobiographical Body as a Site of Utopian Performativity: Billy Twinkle,’ Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) 103–30.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’ Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 4.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 128.
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Continuum, 2005) 31–48.
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009) 111.
See Silverman, Flesh 111. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1962) 225–8.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) 24.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956) 353.
Parting Memories is based on actions from the first two parts of the BORDER TRIP(tych) Trilogy: Buried in the Body of Remembrance (Enterrada en el Cuerpo del Recuerdo), which was presented in Buenos Aires as a work-in-progress in 2007 and opened in 2010 at San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts; and A Body Parted: Shrapnel of Present Time (Un Cuerpo Partido: Esquirlas de tiempo presente), which was presented as a work in progress at San Franciso’s CounterPulse in 2008, and opened at San Jose’s MACLA in 2011. The CounterPulse showing featured video work by Mickey Tachibana, which appears in Parting Memories. The performance collective’s name, Secos & Mojados, ‘derives in part from the dry-land and wet-land crossings in which many immigrants take part’ (Luna, qtd. in Svich 2). See Caridad Svich, ‘Re-membered Body: An Interview with Violeta Luna,’ Theatre Bay Area (Sept. 2008): 1–4. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.
Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 149.
Jen Harvie, ‘Transnationalism, Orientalism, and Cultural Tourism: La Trilogie des dragons and The Seven Streams of the River Ota,’ Theatre sans frontiers: Essays on the Dramatic Universe of Robert Lepage, ed. Joseph I. Donohue and Jane M. Koustas (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2000) 110.
All quotations from the performance come from: Rosa Molina, Parting Memories, English version (Unpublished Script, 2013): n. pag. Provided to the author by Violeta Luna.
Christina Mendoza, Women, Migration, and Domestic Work at the Texas-Mexico Divide (El Paso, TX: LFB, 2011): 6–7. E-book. 5 Jan. 2014. See, e.g.,
Marcela Cerrutti and Douglas S. Massey, ‘On the Auspices of Female Migration From Mexico to the United States,’ Demography 38.2 (2001): 187–200.
Alicia Schmidt Camacho states: ‘Since 1993, some 370 women have been murdered in Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juárez, of which approximately 137 were sexually assaulted (Amnesty International 2003). … The mothers’ organization Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (Bring Our Daughters Home) estimates that in addition to the killings, 600 women have disappeared from the Juárez/Chihuahua metropolitan areas (Nuestras Hijas 2003)’ (259). See Alicia Schmidt Camacho, ‘Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,’ CR: The New Centennial Review 5.1 (Spring 2005): 255–92.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 227.
Erin Hurley, ‘BLACKOUT: Utopian Technologies in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro,’ Modern Drama 47.2 (Summer 2004): 209. Also see
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993).
Translation provided by Luna. For full Spanish text, see Roque Dalton, ‘Poema de amor [Poem of Love],’ Volcán: Poems from Central America (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2001) 36.
This text is from Roque Dalton, ‘Como Tú [Like You],’ Poemas Clandestinos / Clandestine Poems, trans. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco, CA: Solidarity, 1984) 39.
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© 2014 Laura Levin
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Levin, L. (2014). Epilogue: Situating the Self. In: Performing Ground. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274250_6
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