Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha (review)

Rustom Bharucha dedicates the first chapter of Terror and Performance to Jean Genet and the last to Mahatma Gandhi. In this way, his rich series of reflections is bookended by a literary criminal and political saint, a (former) small-time crook and a (former) lawyer, a champion of stateless nations and a nation-builder, a traitor and a martyr... It seems that oppositions between them could go on forever. Even when Bharucha finally mentions them in the same sentence towards the end of the book, it is to illustrate their opposition, not similarity: here, one G stands for theatrical irony, and the other for sacrificial Truth (165). What brings Genet and Gandhi together is their queerness in relation to the world of letters and the world of politics, respectively. Their simultaneous position of marginality and excess in relation to their own historical and institutional situations came from their unique capacities for self-renunciation, so rare and precious in the contemporary world of literature, politics, and especially theatre. In Bharucha’s book, the route from Genet to Gandhi winds through the treacherous world of contemporary international politics and performance. This itinerary takes the reader away from the beaten paths of scholarly discourse on the two key terms indicated in the book’s title.

I am writing this review in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack on French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, which was followed by massive expressions of support for the journal, its slain authors, and for some of the basic Western values they stood for, such as free speech, journalistic freedom, and secularism. Beneath these very public statements (millions marching in Paris, shrines in front of French embassies world over, etc.) is a second-tier discourse of commentators and pundits, especially in the US, who point out that the Kouachi brothers, who led the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, were on American lists of suspected terrorists, and that the NSA was after all doing something useful and necessary. This is typical for dominant discourses created in Western academia, think tanks, policy-making groups, and mass media, which largely go unchallenged in limiting their definition of terrorism to “non-state actors.” Bharucha offers an important corrective to these discourses. Looking at case studies scattered across the global South, from the Philippines (chapter 1), to India (chapter 2), to Rwanda and South Africa (chapter 3), he argues that atrocities such as the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in 2001, and the 2002 genocide of Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat, are just half of the picture of contemporary “terror.” The other half belongs to the new model of state that emerges across the globe. For example, speaking of the killing of more than 3,000 and displacement of some 100,000 Muslims in Gujarat, Bharucha correctly asserts that this event, largely overlooked in Western media, speaks of “growing Islamophobia among leaders and supporters of the Hindu Right” (94); and in his discussion of the reinvention of the traditional legal form of gacaca as the dominant legal institution in post-genocide Rwanda, he wonders about a certain Rwandan army brigadier general’s boastful claim that these village tribunals represent a “lubricant of the ideology of Rwandanicity” (119). So, what brings together this state-sponsored pogrom and state-facilitated program of forgiveness?

We may find an answer in the final book of Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume work De L’Etat, in which he discusses at length the “intersection of economy and state power,” which he identifies as “the state mode of production” or SMP (1977:253). According to Lefebvre, the main dimensions of SMP are “(a) managerial and administrative; (b) the power to secure; and (c) the power to kill — by means of repression, the monopoly of violence, the army and military spending, [and a] strategy implying the possibility of war” (2009:129). Writing in the mid-1970s, Lefebvre’s main points of reference were the Stalinist state and Western...