Abstract
At the convergence of human rights and performance, expressive acts may founder for a whole host of reasons. They may unravel through a radical disjuncture between intent and impact. They may become ensnared between conflicting desires: on the one hand, to build awareness about real historical events (i.e. genocide, labour abuses, torture, etc.) and, on the other hand, to enjoy the liberties of artistic licence, the prerogatives of the imagination. Mike Daisey’s travails with The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs erupted precisely because of the artist’s conflicting impulses to document and to invent.1 Another shoal that can sink the human-rights-and-performance ship are errors of omission, such as failing to include key voices and perspectives in the creative process. ‘Nothing about us without us’, a phrase from the disability rights movement, can prove a valuable navigational tool in charting the perilous waters of art made in the wake of atrocity. Yet inclusion can threaten long-entrenched values about intellectual autonomy, especially for academics and artists. Since Red Power activist Vine Deloria confronted Margaret Mead in 1970 at the American Anthropology Association, that discipline has had to confront research access as a privilege, not an entitlement.2 Ethical issues in research have led to elaborate university protocols about Human Subjects Review and informed consent to which all researchers at US universities today must comply — all researchers, that is, save artists.3
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Notes
See Sharon L. Green, ‘Review of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by Mike Daisey,’ Theatre Journal 65, no. 1 (2013): 105–6.
Tony Platt, Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past (Berkeley: Heyday, 2011), 156.
Judith Butler, ‘The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique,’ in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 101–27.
Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique,’ Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72; Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Florian N. Becker, Paola N. Hernández, and Brenda Werth, eds., Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Raul Rae, Theatre and Human Rights (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Rustom Bharucha, Terror and Performance (London: Routledge, 2014), 29.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2nd edn (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 6.
Bill Reading, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
See also James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984);
Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Guenter Lewy, ‘Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?,’ Commentary 118, no. 2 (2004): 55–63.
Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 113.
James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), 171.
See Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010);
Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002);
Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985); Platt, Grave Matters.
For a comprehensive summary of key sources on Ishi, see James Clifford, ‘Ishi’s Story,’ in Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 91–191.
Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 11.
Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America, 50th anniversary edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; c. 1961).
Les W. Field, ‘Who is this Really About Anyway?: Ishi, Kroeber, and the Intertwining of California Indian and Anthropological Histories,’ Journal of Anthropological Research 61, no. 1 (2005): 81.
Orin Starn, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last ‘Wild’ Indian (New York: Norton, 2004), 29.
Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 26.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1973; c. 1959).
Suzan-Lori Parks, ‘The America Play,’ in The America Play, and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 174.
Quoted in Jean Berry, ‘When the World Was New: Ishi’s Stories,’ in Ishi in Three Centuries, ed. Karl Kroeber and Clifton Kroeber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 278.
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© 2015 Catherine M. Cole
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Cole, C.M. (2015). Representing Genocide at Home: Ishi, Again. In: Luckhurst, M., Morin, E. (eds) Theatre and Human Rights after 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362308_8
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