Staging the Polis

In Fires in the Mirror and Twilight Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith works through riots in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to engage an American literary history of representing the collective political subject. Foregrounding politics' aesthetic dimension, she stages the polis as a dramaturgy of dissensus among characters whose monologues present a conflict of worlds. As Smith, onstage, performs the empathy requisite to the repertoire of citizenship, she positions audiences as citizens who must balance empathy and preferential judgment among competing grievances and visions of justice, and who there by discover the role of sacrifice in democratic theory and practice.