Performance, Identity, and Grief
Session Coordinator: Iris Smith Fischer
Department of English, University of Kansas
1445 Jayhawk Boulevard , Room 3114
Lawrence , KS 66045 -7590
ifischer@ku.edu

"Let Us Never Forget": The Role of the Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 in Creating Public Memory

This paper will explore how 9/11 survival narratives perform an adaptation to the trauma and loss of 9/11. According to Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation as a means of cultural self-reproduction, the question isn’t whether change has actually take place as a result of the attacks on September 11, but what the nature of the change has been, and what end it serves. Do these narratives successfully enable the survival of a particular vision of American culture for the victims? These texts contain examples of Roach’s concepts of “orature”, “kinesthetic imagination”, “vortices of behavior”, and “displaced transmission,” which I suspect will reveal much about survivors’ notions of their place in society—and of society itself. I suspect that as they work through the psychological impact of the events, they “invent themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others” (Roach 5). The survivors’ narratives, repeated in an effort to understand or process the horrors, become a form of restored behavior aiding in the process of cultural self-reproduction.

Shelley Manis
University of Kansas
shelleym@ku.edu

(Per)forming the Healthy Subject: Grief, Writing, Healing, and Discourse

Narrative therapists suggest that mourners heal by transforming their “traumatic” memories into “normal” memories through the act of narrative composition, reshaping identity as they reshape their memories. Critics of therapeutic discourse, on the other hand, argue that healing is not the product of individual agency, but is a discursively shaped process that reinforces individualism while deflecting attention from flawed systems of social power. For these critics, therapeutic discourse, not individual agency, wields the power and shapes identity by rewarding subjects when they engage in sanctioned activities.

I propose an explanation between those of the therapists and their critics. Through examining the performance of grief recovery, I demonstrate how power is used at both social and individual levels to shape identity. By evaluating ethnographic interviews and recent newspaper articles, I establish a finite set of actions that form what Richard Schechner calls a “strip of behavior.” I demonstrate that bereavement writers selectively draw from their memories to restore this strip of behavior and reshape their identities. Additionally, I show how this performance of grief recovery is reinforced through American therapeutic discourse in a way that influences, but does not determine, identity.

Ami Marie Sommariva
University of Kansas
amisommariva@yahoo.com

"Abject Idealism" as Ungrieved Loss in Recent U.S. Avant-Garde Performance

This paper examines ‘abject idealism’ in the work of New York theatre company Mabou Mines. These artists seek to subvert forces and institutions they see as responsible for the widespread ‘selling out’ of the avant garde, i.e., its absorption into mass culture. Founded in 1970, Mabou Mines work in the tradition of 1920’s surrealists, and their successors, 1950’s existentialists and absurdists, and are reluctant to become part of a world saturated with ‘media consciousness.’ Former members JoAnne Akalaitis and Philip Glass have adapted to this world by restaging classic works in regional theatres for suburban audiences. Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, and Fred Neumann have remained true to their original intent to transform audiences’ perception in order to reveal the workings of late capitalist society.

Extrapolating from Judith Butler’s discussion of melancholy in The Psychic Life of Power, I ask whether such ‘abject idealism’ is a “refusal of grief and [an] incorporation of loss.” In its regulatory economy of containment and foreclosure, the avant garde retains its cohesive identity as a community of idealists. The price is the community’s abjection in its continuing marginality and lack of economic power.

Iris Smith Fischer
University of Kansas
ifischer@ku.edu