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Addicted to race: Performativity, agency, and Cesaire's A tempest
College Literature, Spring 1998 by Scheie, Timothy
A profound sense of spectacle pervades the dramatic writings of Aime Cesaire. Unabashedly political in their critique of simplistic, accepted readings of racial and national identity, these plays do not preach to the spectator, nor do they purport to mirror a reality through the conventions of mimetic theater. A lucid and frequently ironic deployment of theatricality lends them a complexity that resists a realist mise-en-scene, and that leads theater practitioners and spectators alike to ponder the implications of the foregrounded performance of identity. In both the characters represented and the gesture of their representation, Cesaire questions complex and unstable racial categories inflected by the colonial and national backdrop against which the action of his plays unfolds: King Christophe's Haiti, the newly independent Congo, and most remarkably, the thinly disguised Caribbean island of Une tempete (1969b). Translated as A Tempest, this last play, a rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest, prescribes in its stage indications a selfconscious performance where characters exist only within a play of masks, and the parody of a canonical text generates both humor and a pointed commentary on the factitiousness of familiar racial categories.
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For the 1990's spectator, A Tempest's portrayal of racial identity as performance might evoke the now familiar notion of a performative identity. The idea that identity is not stable or fixed but performative, and that it might therefore be performed differently and presumably in a less harmful or unjust manner, has sparked a great deal of discussion both by zealous subscribers and cautious critics. The theorization of performativity, most extensively articulated in the work of Judith Butler, would seem to inform an assessment of how Cesaire's prescribed staging tactics disturb accepted readings of racial identity.
If the performative has provoked a great deal of excitement, however, the notion has also come under intense critical scrutiny. Caveats concerning the strategic potential of performative acts have been echoing with increasing urgency, effectively tempering the zeal of those who might glibly invoke performativity as a panacea to the ills of patriarchy.l Indeed, one need look no farther than Butler's own writings to find numerous qualifications that sharply restrict the sweeping agency some would attribute to the performative.2 Furthermore, the status of theater in relation to the performative is far from clear. Butler often defines the performative against the conventions of the theatrical performance of a dramatic text, even one replete with apparently subversive staging strategies such as Cesaire's; A Tempest consequently serves as an excellent site for assessing the import of the performative for theatrical practice. Furthermore, if the performative informs our understanding of Cesaire's racial politics, A Tempest's formulation of race through the metaphor of an incurable addiction in turn sheds light on the performative's limits as the theoretical justification for an activist theater's strategy. After articulating the troubled relationship between the performative, agency, and live theater practice, the discussion that follows will explore the potential for a subversive performativity in A Tempest, specifically in the final scene's enactment of racial identity as addiction.
In the fields of literary, cultural, and performance studies, few notions have sparked as much interest as the performative. Launched in the 1950s by philosopher and linguist J. L. Austin, the term served as a target of Derridean deconstruction before achieving wide circulation with the publication of Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990a), and discussions of performativity have been proliferating ever since. The performative's current appeal might not seem evident in its initial formulation. Austin used the word to describe an utterance whose act of enunciation accomplishes something or somehow transforms the world: the priest's act of saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" is often cited as the quintessential example. Butler, however, brings this notion to bear on questions of identity, arguing that gender likewise results from a similar performative gesture, or more precisely from sustained repetition of this performative gesture which generates the illusion of a fixed gendered identity.3 Derrida's earlier deconstruction of the term only furthers her demonstration of gender's instability. The notion that identity results from a performative gesture, rather than being grounded in fixed and stable categories of the subject, offers a much desired theoretical direction for the efforts of writers, critics, and others who seek to change a repressive and patriarchal status quo and who, in our postpoststructuralist world, can neither triumphantly announce the dissolution of subjectivity nor fall back on essentialist or determinist accounts grounded in a purportedly truthful "real."
