Haunting : Siluetas, La Prieta, and More

Haunting : “Siluetas,” La Prieta, & More


I am interesting in thinking through haunting as a rife hermeneutic for performances and performances studies, particularly the notion of the afterlife of a performance. As Alvarado says of Mendieta’s Rape Scene specifically, “How does a piece like that end? … “We are meant to ruminate on the immediate reception of the performance but also on the encounter beyond the immediate scene. Mendieta’s abject presentation is routed through the formally unbounded, through sublime limitlessness” (42). [This language of “routed through” prompts me to question the mediation of the abject [and object],of the performance, and whether this mediation is contributing to its haunting nature.]


Without theoretically engaging the term, Alvarado utilizes “haunts” once each in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, to discuss different works of art :


1) “As an installation without end, Rape Scene haunts me beyond the writing of this chapter…” (45)


2) “I first encountered Asshole Mural in C. Ondine Chavoya’s essay ‘Internal Exiles: The interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco...The spectral quality of the image -- at that point a photocopy of a photocopy, blurred, it seemed, by rumor and suggestion -- inspired the direction of this inquiry. I am drawn by the way this phantom document haunts the official image…” (59)


3) “Farah’s ‘weird mysterious piece is alluring with its racialized ‘ritualistic’ elements, in addition to its promise of black violence - a promise that haunts the presence of the young black artist and against which his success is measured” (128)


As such, (in the second quote) we see “spectral” deployed in terms of an image at, or almost beyond, remove, a simulacra nearing its fault lines, somehow suggestively “unofficial” -- a double. Meanwhile, in her conclusion, [Alvarado] discusses the world in progress Untitled (skins) (2015-2016) of Xanda Ibarra and Sophia Wang [See Cover Art], as offering a glimpse of the “ghosts of historical meaning” (Rebecca Schneider), which “encircle, indeed haunt, those uneasy feelings around the successes of national incorporation or easy assimilation, and, ultimately, wail against respectability politics: (Alvarado, 163). This “wail[ing]” [of the ghosts of meaning] calls up the sonics of dissent not only as discussed by McMillan (see next), but also by Fred Moten in In the Break : The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (who cites the (in)famous wails of Frederick Douglass’ Aunt Hester, 1845, among many other examples.


Last week, McMillan similarly peppered his texts with notions of haunting: that “Ellen Crafts’ doings...haunt the image, even if they are not immediately visible” (66) and, in references to Joice Heth’s sonic of dissent, Elizabeth Alexander’s words: ‘Hearing, too, is central to witnessing. Heard images haunt the mind as much as visual ones” (170). Moreover, to an arguably limited degree he centralized haunting in his introduction methodology. Firstly, he understands “the concept of avatar production...limns [to draw or paint on a surface; to outline in clear sharp detail; delineate] how experiments in ontological play create haunting resonances in words and images” (13). Secondly, he justifies his organizational traveling “back” to the United States and across as century in order to, in part, “highlight how, in spite of these temporal diverges, traces of coercion and subjugation haunt more recent black female performance art” (19). [Despite ostensibly theoretically centralizing haunting, this doesn’t particularly seem to play out in the rest of the text?]


While Alvarado makes a point not to centralize Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973-1980), that for which she is most recognized, I do want to take a moment to look at some of those images, and to think them in relation to haunting, hauntology, and the following terms: silhouette, absence, presence, vacant, vacated, contours, impression, depression, relic, ritual, iconography, hagiography, hieroglyphic, entombed, enwombed, invaginated [?], enworlded [?], anism, sears, scars, haunts (ie., n) -- herida abierta, open wound.

1976

1976

1977

1980

1985

While I haven’t read the source text (Spectres of Marx), I recently came across Derrida’s articulation of hauntology. As David Rudd states in his unpacking of the Freudian Uncanny (as pertinent to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline), “The double, of course, undermines our sense of individuality, and is often seen to augur death: ontology, as Derrida punningly puts it, becomes upset by ‘hauntology.’” Perhaps rather than understanding the very understanding of the nature of being as one upset by haunting [or sites, sounds, images, figures which haunt], perhaps we can understanding being and ourselves as always already haunted, with ontology asymptotically approached through intra-actions with the spectral, with temporality [and thereby performance] never “done” but always lingering? [As stated in Diane Taylor’s Performance, “Theorists such as Peggy Phelan have posited that performance “disappears” even as it comes into being...It cannot be saved, she argues, or recorded or documented. What that happens, she maintains, it ceases to be performance and becomes something else” (10) -- Do we agree?]


[Footnote: In Translating Time : Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Bliss Cua Lim mobilizes the fantastic (primarily fantastic cinema) to critique homogenous time [she references also Barthes’ notion of “noise of Time”] -- or rather [/simultaneously], posits the Fantastic itself (as a genre) as temporal translation. In the chapter “The Ghostliness of Genre : Global Hollywood Remakes the ‘Asian Horror Film,’” Lim both analyzes the function of ghosts within what have been lumped together as “Asian Horror Films” and the haunting, (nearly-)iterative temporality of remakes (and, she argues, genre itself) She states: “Repetition is the engine of genre. But, given Bergeson’s reminder that ceaseless change makes exact repetition impossible, I would add that generic repetition inevitably encodes difference difference or novelty. Generic repetition is always inexact, never a precise iteration (193)...The genre film is cannibalistic: ‘implicitly, each new film ingests every previous film.’ The centralist of intertextual repetition in genre films is particularly pronounced in the cannibalism of a remake, which even more emphatically ‘ingests’ its precursors [remake, sequel, allusion, rip off, steal, copy]...Faced with such dismissal, it is helpful to bear in mind that the remake, which has also be productively defined as an intensified, hypervisible form of intertextuality ‘problematizes the notion of originality.’ For instance, the supposed inferiority of the imitative text in relation to a prior original is a difficult accusation to sustain in the wake of concentric influences that are transhistorical as well as transcultural” (195)...So perhaps remakes and sequels are not only afterward but also a refusal of the time of afterward...the remake becomes the ground for the reception of the precursor text, introducing instability into the very terms original, copy, precursor, remake, and sequel -- in short, to questions of priority and cultural value in genre studies (221).” While I understand this make seem tangential in terms of the rest of the texts/performances featured this week (hence locating it in a footnote), I am interested in these questions of priority (i.e. a priori, originary, originary moment, “birthing”), mediation, similitude and the uncanny [the slightest “off” in the iterative], and how we may or may not understand cinema and cinematic remakes in terms of the performance theory we are reading.]

Furthermore, in her introduction, Alvarado states: “The deployment of abjection as an irreverent aesthetic strategy unites the artists, performers, and cultural producers profiled in Abject Performances, as does their challenge to a bounded understanding of Latinidad...Collectively, they depict the structures of feeling of a contrapuntal affective terrain that demarcates a complex periphery of political projects as well as the incoherence and instability of interpellativate inditariain categories...Latinidad merges here as a performative utterance that gestures at once to an affective site shared by a diverse community of individuals of Latin American dissent and the challenges of finite denotation” (4-5). That said, does haunting/hauntology do anything to further or upset Alvarado’s goals in Abject Performances of the goals, as she articulates them, of the artists featured therein?

La herida abierta:

Alvarado seems to understand Anzaldúa as codifying/heralding a New Mestica who is “hailed by either side of an artificial U.S./Mexico border...operated in a pluralistic mode that sustains contradictions [and generates] a new consciousness”, while implying Anzaldúa’s sway in Latino Studies to be/to have been problematic (40) [I would love to discuss this further]. References from to Anzaldúa’s theories on this page are from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) rather than Bridge Called my Back (1981), from which La Prieta (recommended reading) is excerpted. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa states:

This is my home


this this edge of


barbwire.


...The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us and them. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants...the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead... (25)



While not dismissing the relevance of the U.S.-Mexican border in particularly of the specificity of [her] racial experience [nor willnilly pathologizing racial or queer experiences], Anzaldúa also understands la frontera and la herida abierta to pertain to multiple sites [one may say intersectional] of liminality and confrontation, including her experiences with trauma. I am interested utilizing the iconography of the Siluetas Series (as above), the notion of haunting, and the notion of la herida abierta to think through each other and performance writ large.

In/upon the first pages of La Prieta, Anzaldúa expresses a tension amongst herself and her mother and her Mamágrande Locha, a seeming simultaneous desire for distancing (verguenza/shame, pg. 224)and honor/affinity. In one fashion, racial haunting bore down generationally through Mamágrande Locha and Mamá upon the body and soul of young Glorita (220). [I would be intrigued to discuss the proposed “racial haunting” more].** Mired in haunting, Anzaldúa at times claims and rejects (particularly her family; we can consider whether this qualified as Muñoz’ disidentification), her autopoiesis both compositional (abrazar/aceptar/aprovechar?) and destructive (rechazar), both inherited and chosen. Regarding the latter:


…Last March my fibroids conspired with an intestinal tract infection and spawned watermelons in my uterus. The doctor played with his knife. La Chingada ripped open, raped with the white man’s wand. My soul in one corner of the hospital ceiling, getting thinner and thinner telling me to clean up my shit, to release the fears and garbage from the past that are hanging me up. So I take La Muerte’s scythe and cut away my arrogance and pride, the emotional depressions I indulge in, the head trips I do on myself and other people. With her scythe I cut the umbilical cord shackling me to the path and to friends and attitudes that drag me down. Strip away -- all the way to the bond. My myself utterly vulnerable…


Additionally, a sharp and stunning line I’d love to give a nod to: “Once again it’s faggot hunting and queer-baiting time in the city” (229).


**See also the poetry of Nicolás Guillén (Cuban, 1902-1989, namely “Abuelo”) or Orlando Ricardo Menes (“Hair”)

https://www.poemas-del-alma.com/nicolas-guillen-el-abuelo.htm

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/hair


Curtain Call : The Tale [Content Warning - Rape and Sexual Assault, Age Range of Survivor- Tween/Teen]

While I’m not going to discuss this further on the blog post (and I won’t be discussing everything from this post overtly in class), I wanted to give a head’s up on the following. In class, I will be showing this trailer (or a similar trailer) and a short clip from the film The Tale (2018). No images of assault or near-assault will be shown. The child actress was not involved in the sex scenes during filming. While I cannot speak to anyone’s experience, personally (as a survivor) the biggest potential trigger is that this tale contends with reliability of memory and the role of narrativization in processing. In my presentation, we will be discussion questions/themes as presented above in the blog post for about the first 10 minutes, and there will be a natural break before transition to The Tale, so if anyone would like to excuse themselves for any reasons, no questions asked. Also, if you’d like more information or to chat, please reach out to me. My email is cbc52@pitt.edu and my cell is 208-585-7552.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af6VbPT5O4k

All My Disidentifications

For my presentation, I will be focusing on one of the recommended readings for the week, the introduction to José Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. The basis of Muñoz's theoretical work that underpins disidentification stems partially from performance art, with the book opening on Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty & Gay, wherein Gomez relates her experience as a kid seeing "lady homosexuals" on David Susskind’s talk show.[1] She recalls performing homophobia with her facial expression to appease her mother, but simultaneously sees herself in the lesbian panelists, even rewriting the script in her retelling to have one of the panelists look at Gomez through the screen and invite her into their community: "At this time we want to say 'hello' to a new friend who is watching this at home with her mom on WNEW-TV in Massapequa, Long Island. Marga Gomez? Marga Gomez, welcome to the club, cara mia" (qtd. in Muñoz 3). This act of interpolation pairs with how the homophobic staging of the episode (which treats the panelists as “other”) becomes a source of positive identity formation for Gomez despite it being designed not to be a source of identification for her. More specifically, Gomez does not identify with the show because it is not meant for her, but does not counteridentify (or reject) its representation out of hand; she disidentifies with it, working with and reworking the material to provide a basis for self-realization in a way that might challenge the normative ideas that underpin it. As Muñoz’s puts it: "Disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship" (4). Gomez's performance both is an act of disidentification, and recollects an act of disidentification.

Muñoz discusses more of the theoretical predecessors of his idea, including Michel Pêcheux’s argument that ideology is constructed in specific material and structural contexts. The framework for how a subject engages with material contexts is roughly what I outlined before: they can identify (assign their self to the constructions built by the ideological framework of power), counteridentify (directly oppose this framework, which thus works within the framework’s confines by working at it from a directly oppositional perspective), or disidentify (neither assimilate or oppose, but instead transform the confines of dominant ideology by working within and against it) (Muñoz 11). 

An additional cornerstone of Muñoz’s framework is work by radical feminists of color. Specifically, the work of contributors to This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (which contains “La Prieta,” another recommended reading for this week), functions within gender studies while also fundamentally challenging the field’s appeal to a de-raced, de-classed, de-sexualized subject—that is, it disidentifies with white feminism to work toward a more radical and contextualized approach to liberation (Muñoz 22). The emphasis on subjects experiencing and living several marginalized identities is fundamental to disidentification as Muñoz describes it, and the emphasis on marginalized groups working within a marginalizing framework is thus necessarily related to the ways radical feminists of color have experienced and theorized hegemonic discourses and structures.

Gomez’s performance provides an example of practicing disidentification (including other examples of performances by namely LGBTQ+ artists of color, including Marlon Riggs and Osa Hidalgo), and I am sure that many of us in this class have done something similar in our lives. Whether it be a piece of performance art or watching a movie that both repels and attracts, the practice of disidentification describes a wide array of experiences: "To disidentify," Muñoz says, "is to read oneself and one's own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to 'connect' with the disidentifying subject" (12). 

Going into Wednesday, I want us to think about how we have each practiced disidentification, or imagine ways that it might be practiced. Specifically, I will be playing a clip from a soap opera that introduces the genre’s first character to explicitly fall in the LGBTQ+ spectrum. I will then have us practice disidentification with this clip in a hands-on activity where people will be able to participate (or not!) in a few different ways, which do not have to stem from one’s personal experiences/identity but absolutely can. I will obviously discuss this in greater depth on Wednesday, but for now I will leave the clip. Do not feel the need to watch it ahead of time, as I will play it in class, but if you want to have an idea of the material before the presentation then please do so. The clip begins at 4:32 and ends at 8:00. Also, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, clarifications, or concerns in the comments or in a direct message/email.

[1] I found no video of Gomez's performance, and the only clip of Susskind that I could find that had lesbian women was from 1971, which does not match the discussion of the scene as pre-Stonewall, so I won’t include it.

Works Cited

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press,  1999. Cultural Studies of the Americas, vol. 2.

Student Blog Post: Troubling Embodiment

by Jonah Jeng

What struck me most about Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars—and what is echoed in the concept of Afro-alienation introduced in Daphne Brooks’ Bodies in Dissent—is the notion that performance art is marked by a desire to be both subject and object at the same time. This impulse flies in the face of Western traditions of art spectatorship, which has historically treated the artwork as a passive object to be looked at (and, historically, the privileged mode of spectatorship has indeed been the visual) while the human subject holds the role of active looker. This sense of a separation between art and viewer is visibly reinforced by the fact that art is often physically marked off from the social world by the presence of a stage, a cordoned off area within a museum, or the impermeable surface of a film screen. So the implication goes, in these spaces art ought to remain, whereas the viewer is free to come and go as they please, to look however and for as long as they want and then move on to the next exhibition with no strings attached.

Performance art, on the other hand, troubles and often downright shatters this dynamic. Performance, at least as described by McMillan and Diane Taylor, is enacted through and embodied by the body of a performer whose very goal is to invite and at times force a breaching of the conventional art/spectator divide. The artist Adrian Piper, mentioned in Chapter 3 of the McMillan book, illustrates this concept clearly. Whether drenched in grease or sporting blaxploitation-inspired drag, Piper ventures directly into social spaces—public squares, subways, etc.—entering the places where “art” is not supposed to be. Absent of external markers of “art” (the stage, the gallery, etc.), her performance fades on some level into the fabric of the everyday. As an embodied individual in the spaces of the quotidian, she has as much agency as anyone else, can and does move wherever and however she pleases. She is, in other words, as much a subject as the traditional Western spectator.

On the other hand, performance art exists to interrupt the everyday, to, in Brooks’ words, defamiliarize the ordinary. It does so through estranging the artist’s body from the flow of other like bodies, through turning subject into object. The aforementioned body grease and drag are the performative elements for Piper, and what they do is catch the attention of passersby, who end up noticing both the spectacle of this out-of-the-ordinary body and the fact that it still resides in the ordinary, intruding upon their space. The artist’s presence in the quotidian comprises an ethical gesture, interpellating the spectator and implicating them, identifying in them a sense of social responsibility. All art affects their beholders, and, through the act of these spectators going out into the world, influences society at large. What performance art does is foreground this affective act and make it its central project, turning a spectatorship model built on one-way content transmission into a fraught interaction between art(ist) and beholder. As McMillan and Brooks both talk about, the dual nature of performance art is appealing to many black American performance artists because it enables an embodied articulation of the experience and reality of double-consciousness, in which one feels like they are constantly both subject and object, uniquely themselves and yet always, on account of the color of their skin, something to be looked at by others.

The question that most interests me now is: given the particular subject/object dynamic that is present in performance art, what do other art forms do that performance art cannot, specifically in terms of their political possibility? It is indeed useful to think of how performance art differs from all other art forms, but to stop there would be to disregard the ample ways in which theater is different from dance, film, sculpture, etc. Specifically vis-à-vis my interests, what can cinema and the subject/object positions it constructs offer that a performance like Adrian Piper’s cannot? To what extent might cinema and performance art be more similar than different? What can we learn about performances through how they are filmed/represented via the moving image? To what degree can cinema itself be called performance art? I have a personal stake in such cinema-related questions, but, as a class, I believe that thinking through not only what performance art has but what it lacks will teach us more about performance in general.

Student Blog Post: Brooks, Critical Race Theory, and Brecht

by Gus Cook

Brooks’s figuration of the “Afro-Alienation acts” observable in 19th and 20th century black performance interacts with both a historical, classical understanding of stage performance and the more contemporary development of critical race theory. In order to more fully understand and appreciate the complexity of this interaction between race and performance, it is necessary to further unpack Brooks’s references to Brecht and the connection this argument holds to critical race theory.

Brooks invokes W.E.B. Du Bois’s question of “double-consciousness,” the enforced development of a form of a model of subjectification that sees black Americans as both “Americans” and “Negroes,” as a defining characteristic of the “discursive [and] embodied insurgency” (3) that lies at the heart of Afro-alienation acts. Brooks’s understanding of race arises not only from its lived experience, but from how race is seen and figured, how bodies are transformed into subjects via a kind of structured spectatorship. By thinking of race via the ways in which it is envisioned, Brooks connects her work to larger questions circling around critical race theory. Critical race theory is concerned with blackness as something “produced,” a method of structuring and control that “comes into being” via an apparatus that transforms visual difference into “race.” This is made particularly apparent in the passages quoted from Hortense Spillers work, in which she describes how the “dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing” qualities of slavery were used to establish a black subject that could have “no movement in the field of signification.” As a foundation of discourse, critical race theory is deliberately placing tension on questions of identity, selfhood, and subjectification in order to reveal how the establishment of such ideas hinges on a practice that uses structures race in order to separate and very literally dehumanize its subjects. While one might assume that this separation occurs in the act of seeing, critical race theory offers an avenue through which there can instead develop an understanding of how the act of “seeing” race is structured. By thinking of blackness as something that has been “circumscribed,” Afro-alienation acts can thus “signify on the social, cultural, and ideological machinery,” the apparatus if you will, that seeks to define blackness as a subject position.

The power that comes from the intervention that Afro-alienation acts provide for a figuration of race is generated not from their capacity to interface with reality, but instead to explicitly appeal to non-realist modes of presentation and performance. As Brooks carefully argues, to “represent” in performance is to “(un)do” oneself, as an appeal to representational realism is ultimately an appeal to a “crisis of representational timelessness projected onto blackness.”(6) Under critical race theory, the realities of the body become prefigured and dictateable, and the reality that we might desire performance to appeal to is a reality that already carries its own ways of seeing and thus ways of subjectification.

To define what a non-realist mode of performance might look like, and in defining what it might mean to be “alienated” within the context of performance acts, Brooks turns to Bertolt Brecht. Brechtian alienation is a very particular mode of presentation and ultimately of discourse, one in which an appeal to empathy, to character, and to a kind of realist verisimilitude is displaced by a much more quotational, gestural style of performance. The actor is encouraged to exist beyond and outside of the character they play, delivering their lines as if they are quoting rather than as if they are their own words. The theater, Brecht hoped, could become a space for argument, one in which audiences were actively encouraged to critique their perspective on the world by seeing it challenged in its representation. In understanding why Brecht’s ideas might help us consider how Afro-alienation transforms the situation of “looking at oneself through the eyes of others” into the “enlivened position of ‘looking at being looked at ness,”(5) it is helpful to see how Brecht detailed the difference between the traditional “dramatic” theater and his alienating “epic” theater:

Epic theater necessarily turns us outward, pushing us away from the confinement of individual identity towards a consideration of how identity itself is formed, asking us to put direct and deliberate tensions on such processes the ways in which it incites our desire to critique our pre-established ways of seeing.

In moving forward, consider how your own expectations for “realism” or “representation” in performance might push you towards the spectatorial position of the dramatic theater. The power of the Afro-alienation act lies precisely in its capacity to challenge our own limited and deterministic conception of reality, and the key to accepting that challenge lies in our capacity to abandon the preconceptions of bodies and of subjectification we naturally carry within us. To drive home the essential importance of the alienated spectatorial position, I leave you with this excerpt from Brecht’s “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction:”

“The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too— Just like me— It’s only natural— It’ll never change— The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable— that’s great art, it all seems the most obvious thing in the world— I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.

The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it— That’s not the way— That’s extraordinary, hardly believable— It’s got to stop— the sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary— that’s great art: nothing obvious in it— I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.”