Abstract
In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘If you would judge beforehand of the literature of a people which is lapsing into democracy, study its dramatic productions.’1 In line with this book’s central concerns — theatre, human rights and the notion of unspeakability — this chapter focuses on South Africa as a society in transition, ‘lapsing into democracy’, drawing on some of the work that I have been engaged in with my company, Magnet Theatre, since 1994 as a specific instance of dramatic production.2 This chapter examines the relationship between theatre and human rights, not in the overt sense in which theatre addressed human rights abuses under apartheid, but in a much more subtle manner, one that resists the way in which the state foregrounds certain values, ideas, practices and groups while rendering others unspeakable.
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Notes
Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘Some Observations on the Drama Amongst Democratic Nations,’ trans. Henry Reeve, in The Theory of the Modern Stage, ed. Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 479.
For more information on the company, see www.magnettheatre.co.za; Judith Rudakoff, ‘Somewhere, Over the Rainbow,’ The Drama Review 48, no. 1 (2004): 126–63;
Emma Cox, ‘Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I am Walking,’ Theatre Research International 37, no. 2 (2012): 118–33.
Lawrence Hamilton, ‘Collective Unfreedom in South Africa,’ Contemporary Politics 17, no. 4 (2011): 357.
Hamilton, ‘Collective Unfreedom,’ 358. See also Heidi Holland, 100 Years of Struggle: Mandela’s ANC (London: Penguin, 2012);
Nancy L. Clark and William H. Worger, South Africa: The Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Routledge, 2011);
Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011);
Alex Boraine, What’s Gone Wrong? On the Brink of Failed Statehood (New York: New York University Press, 2014).
Rustom Bharucha, ‘The Limits of the Beyond: Contemporary Art Practice, Intervention and Collaboration in Public Spaces,’ Third Text 21, no. 4 (2007): 399.
Here Bharucha is referring to Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–7.
Retort, ‘Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11,’ New Left Review 27 (2004): 7, 5.
Baz Kershaw, ‘Discouraging Democracy: British Theatres and Economics 1979–1999,’ Theatre Journal 51 (1999): 275.
Sarah Ives, ‘Mediating the Neoliberal Nation: Television in Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 1 (2007): 160.
Ron Krabill, Starring Mandela and Crosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 21.
Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, ‘Nation Building, Social Identity and Television in a Changing Media Landscape,’ in Culture in the New South Africa: After Apartheid, vol. 2, ed. Robert Kriger and Abebe Zegeye (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001), 117–37.
Loren Kruger, ‘ “Africa Thina”? Xenophobic and Cosmopolitan Agency in Johannesburg’s Film and Television Drama,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 245.
Loren Kruger, ‘Critique by Stealth: Aspiration, Consumption and Class in Post-Apartheid Television Drama,’ Critical Arts 24, no. 1 (2010): 77.
Nadia Seremetakis, ‘The Other City of Silence: Disaster and the Petrified Bodies of History,’ in Remembering the Body, ed. Gabriella Brandstetter and Hortensia Völckers (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), 302–30.
Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, eds., Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2001), 3.
Steven Robins, ‘Don’t Forget the Unsung Victims,’ Cape Times, 9 April 1997; Veronique Riouful, ‘Behind Telling: Post-Apartheid Representations of Robben Island’s Past,’ Kronos: Journal of Cape History 26 (2000): 26.
SeeCox, ‘Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative.’ For a study of migration issues see Emma Cox, Theatre and Migration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Mandla Mbothwe and Hazel Barnes, ‘Creating Communitas: The Theatre of Mandla Mbothwe,’ in Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows, ed. Mark Fleishman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 17–18.
Jennie Reznek, Mark Fleishman, Faniswa Yisa and Frances Marek, The Magnet Migration Plays (Cape Town: Junkets, 2012), 155.
Miki Flockemann, ‘“Peel the Wound”: Cape Town as Passage, Threshold, and Dead-End: Performing the Everyday Traumas of Mobility and Dislocation,’ in Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows, ed. Mark Fleishman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 10.
Mandla Mbothwe, unpublished post-performance interview, Cape Town, Baxter Theatre, August 2010. On the TRC see Paul Gready, The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the TRC in South Africa (London: Routledge, 2011);
Catherine Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 113.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 197.
Josephine Machon, (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 72.
Susan Broadhurst, Liminal Acts: A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance and Theory (London: Cassell, 1999), 18.
Mandla Mbothwe, ‘Dissecting the Aesthetics of Identity in Isivuno Sama Phupha,’ South African Theatre Journal 24, no. 1 (2010): 241–58.
Ulrich Oslender, ‘The Resurfacing of the Public Intellectual: Towards the Proliferation of Public Spaces of Critical Intervention,’ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 6, no. 1 (2007): 118.
Antonin Artaud, ‘No More Masterpieces,’ in The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1970), 55–63.
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Fleishman, M. (2015). ‘Lapsing into Democracy’: Magnet Theatre and the Drama of Unspeakability in the New South Africa. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Human Rights after 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_4
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