Modernism and Genocide: Citing Minstrelsy in Postcolonial Agitprop

Modernism and Genocide: Citing Minstrelsy in Postcolonial Agitprop ALAN FILEWOD The critical field marked by the term "modern drama" has from its earliest authorizations framed an intersection of rehearsable textuality and social subjectivity , or, as Raymond Williams famously put it in one of his earliest works, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, of "convention" (3) and "structures of feeling" (8). The critical texts that have guided the development of the term "modern drama" organize the problem of theatrical modernism as one of giving form to the invisible and the unconscious and, through this, enacting a fantasy of the reclaimed "real" in which revelations embodied in performance supersede the reality of the external world. In this dominant mode, most famously summarized in English by critics such as Williams and Maurice Valency (and by several generations of contributors to Modern Drama), the fundamental subject of inquiry has been the explorations of playwrights and theatrical auteurs as changing material possibilities of theatre practice enable new dramaturgies and new narratives, typically coded as "perceptions" or "insights" into subjectivity. Throughout the past century, these dialogues record a slippage between modern, modernist, and modernity, despite Williams's reminder that "[als catchwords of particular kinds of changes the terms need scrutiny" (Keywords 209). Under such scrutiny, the modem in "modern drama" marks an invented genealogy of critical and artistic practices that constructs a direct relationship between the prophecies of a select group of theatrical visionaries of the late nineteenth century and the increasingly localized and politicized practices of twentieth-century artists. (The definition of that select group, I might add, has been one of the favourite games of the genealogists of modem drama.) Against the recurring temptation to scrutinize "modern" to death, it might be useful to recall Walter Benjamin's caution that "[tlo determine the totality of traits by which the 'modern' is defined would be to represent hell" (544). I want to approach a problem in the representations of race and empire in Modern Drama, 44:r (Spring 2001) 91 92 ALAN FILEWOD late-twentieth-century agitprop with the idea that "modem drama" has functioned as an instrument of canonization that enables structures of value in material practice - and has therefore functioned to disable, de-canonize, and devalue particular modes of production and representation. The texts to which I will refer are three panoramic historical agitprops from Australia, Canada, and Scotland. All three share markedly similar dramaturgical structures and perfonnance strategies. which derive in some measure from a postcolonial populist nationalism produced by a common history of economic dispossession in the hinterlands of the British empire, and a shared resistance to the imperial coding of Englishness. But they also have in common tropes of racial impersonation that derive from the historical relationship between modernism and imperialism. My argument will be in two parts: first, that the decanonized location of agitprop destabilizes "modern drama" as a coherent category ; and, second, that the recirculation of these tropes of racial impersonation reconfinns the imperial precepts of modernism in a narrative of cultural authenticity reclaimed through resistance. This resistance opposes the historical forces that have suppressed the imagined authentic and positions the consciousness of the modern against its invented prehistory. In this narrative, the act - and, through art, the declaration - of resistance proceeds from, recuperates , and witnesses authentic experience: of oppression, of community, of class, of nation. The rediscovery of this lost authenticity in the process of making and experiencing art is one of the defining conditions of theatrical modernism, a condition in which the situational aesthetics of agitprop have always been integral. A longing for a fantasized authenticity, for a lost historical experience that can only be recovered through the nation-building projects of popular art and mass politics, underlies the fundamental precept of modernism in the theatre : that the enactment is in some way more real than the material world that enacts it. The terms of this recuperated reality have been historically variable, but they have in common an equation between recovery and resistance : they were racial for Wagner, national for Hauptmann, spiritual for Appia and theosophists like Roy Mitchell, political for Piscator and Brecht (and, on the other side of the ideological divide, for Coward; consider Cavalcade...