Performing Cultures

Session Coordinator: Kevin R. Swafford
Bradley University

Staging a Mutiny; Performing a Nation

For contemporary British observers, the Indian “Mutiny” of 1857 was not so much about India as it was about Britain. Although most contemporary commentators dismissed the notion that the revolt represented an eruption of nationalist consciousness in India, the event became an intensely nationalist moment within Britain. In the aftermath of the Mutiny, public responses to the event (in the form of sermons, news reports, illustrations, novels, and plays), sounded the depths of Englishness itself, reappraising Britain’s relationship with India and interrogating the English national identity.

Dramatists, too, were quick to incorporate the rebellion into plays with titles worthy of newspaper headlines: Revolt in the East; The Storming and Capture of Delhi; The Relief of Lucknow. More than a dozen plays commemorated and celebrated the triumphs of Havelock’s relief force. That so many war plays and spectacles were produced in the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, and beyond, should not be surprising given Victorian Britain’s commitment to militarism as a social, moral, and religious mandate. My discussion will examine the culturally introspective nature of these “Mutiny plays” and their persistent exploration of British manhood. We will see how playwrights transformed a colonial rebellion into an opportunity for metropolitan consolidation. By mobilizing Scottish characters, playwrights forged a greater British identity in the face of an imperial crisis, uniting the people of England and Scotland against the “mutinous hordes” of India. Their plays often exhibit a peculiar cultural compression, as kilts and bagpipes become emblems of Englishness and Hindus swear by Mohammed. Such collapsed racial and cultural identifications transform an imperial crisis into a nationalist construction project which, remarkably, continued long after the Mutiny had been suppressed.

Marty Gould
University of Iowa
MBabble@aol.com

Mardi Gras in the Colonies: Existential Angst and Unraveling Roles in Paule Constant’s Ouregano

Set in the early 1950s, at the height of Existentialism’s “colonization” of French consciousness, Paule Constant’s Ouregano brings together in this eponymous, colonial African outpost the Administrator, the Judge, the Physician, the Teacher, and their Wives, who struggle, and fail, to find the costumes, the props, and the audience necessary for the successful performance of their roles. In much of Constant’s fiction (published over the last twenty-five years), characters confront a world without meaning or values, and often without laws. Their dogged adherence to a role of their choosing (but only among a limited number available to them), despite the destruction this adherence might sow all around them, bears witness to the psychic pain they all experience. The origins of this pain could be called, alternatively, existential angst or the postmodern condition, both of which are at base a recognition of the constructedness– the artificiality–of all meanings and value systems. The pain this condition provokes, however, is due less to such a recognition than to its disavowal and the mauvaise foi that accompanies it. Constant’s characters simultaneously know and deny the meaninglessness of their lives and the roles they have chosen to play in them. While they all discover that living such a contradiction is an untenable position, few of them are able to imagine an escape from it (aside from suicide, to which two of them resort). Yet an escape is in fact proposed in these otherwise darkly pessimistic novels; this escape is love, a love that is not the admiration of a spectator for a performer (the kind of “love” most of these characters seek), but rather a non-specular love that in demanding nothing, gains everything.

Jennifer Willging
The Ohio State University
willging.1@osu.edu

Separation Anxiety: Manzano’s Theatrical Black Aesthetic

Of all the genres of his writing, Juan Francisco Manzano’s narrative Autobiography is certainly the work by the Cuban author that has received the most criticism in the past two decades. This is due largely to the interest in his truncated subjectivity in the creation and editing of a text that, despite its problematic of production, offers a unique historical account of domestic slavery on the island in the nineteenth century. Many readers, however, while also familiar with Manzano’s poetry, are only vaguely aware that he also published a play, entitled Zafira, in 1842. This paper regards Zafira as perhaps the most complexly communicative work created by Manzano, precisely because the genre of theatre allows the author to approach political and historical themes he either chose to avoid or was prevented from treating in his other work.

From a postcolonial perspective, this paper examines the multiple metaphorical levels that exist in Zafira. Manzano cultivates these layers of meaning so that he may mask his sweeping historical criticism of Europe that stretches from the Spanish Reconquest to Cuba’s nineteenth-century struggle for independence and the slaves’ increasing push for freedom. By setting his play in sixteenth century Argel, Manzano taps into a primary historical source of high tension between Europe and Africa. His obvious dialogue with plays about Moors and moriscos by Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, along with his incorporation of a Baroque aesthetic of light and darkness, allow Manzano to make dangerous commentary about tyranny and slavery by displacing nineteenth century Cuba into a sixteenth century idiom and context where most of the protagonists are not black, Sub-Saharan Africans, but rather North African Muslims. The play, however, is not a simple allegory of Cuba and the plight of black slaves transposed into a distinct space and time. It is instead a series of intersecting elements from Manzano’s own life and the transatlantic relationships between Europe, Africa and the Americas across several centuries.

It is ultimately the element of theatrical performance that allows Zafira to reveal its multi-temporality and therefore full critical import. Consistent with Baroque aesthetics, characters disguise themselves, usurp each other’s power both overtly and inconspicuously, and in more ways than one are often not what (or where) they appear to be. Baroque characters have often, for example, made long journeys and experienced difficult trials abroad before returning home, transformed permanently or temporarily, to engage in the drama in which the spectators will now actively participate. What Manzano intended for his audience with Zafira was a cathartic experience that unmasked the Cuban nation, significantly a Cuban nation largely composed of African peoples. His play’s characters are North African (and his actors would certainly have been white or perhaps mulatto Cubans). But Manzano’s aesthetics in Zafira reverberate between notions of black and white, evil and righteous, and value is inevitably placed on the colonized and the enslaved. There is no doubt that he hoped that white Cubans would see themselves in his characters, but that they would simultaneously see their black and mulatto counterparts in them as well, thus creating a common experience of Cuban nationhood.

Margaret M. Olsen
University of Missouri-Columbia