Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (review)

Editors Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon offer a valuable contribution to performance studies discourse with their anthology of essays exploring the performance of violence. While in no way exhaustive, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict broadly examines the role played by performance and political violence in subverting and reinforcing subnational, national, and transnational boundaries and identities. The seventeen essays span global and conceptual landscapes, ranging from French street theatre focused on the abject, othered status of immigrants to the theatricality of justice in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; from Turkish hunger strikes to the use of Boal's Image Theatre in resolving youth violence between various ethnic and religious groups. The final three essays focus on the Abu Ghraib prison.

Although they do not propose a specific theory of violence, the editors do offer several suggestions for rethinking violence as a performed act. Their propositions, which are starting points for critical inquiry, attempt to reconfigure relationships between violence and performance. First, the editors argue that violent acts are spectacular in their cultural impact and embodied in transaction and effect. Second, violence is an affective and binding experience that not only "cross-cuts the domains traditionally registered and distinguished as the physical, psychic, and the social," (5) but also produces power relations through the resulting trauma. Third, traditional differentiations between "victim" and "aggressor" do not completely explain the effects of violence; rather than confining violence to simplistic binary relations and the uncomplicated framing of victimization, the editors endeavor to situate it within a complex network of conflict. Fourth, representations of violence are not innocent; they risk aggravating the trauma they strive to reveal. Furthermore, representations of violence are both descriptive and performative, "not merely involved in staging and framing specific acts of violence, but also of producing the context in which violence is rationalized and excused as a symptom of inter-cultural encounter" (6). The editors' final point is not about violence as a conceptual, performative act, but rather a call to action for performance studies scholars who "are ethically obligated to explore specific sites of violent acts as well as larger questions about the performative ontology of violence" (7).

Generally speaking, the essays are strong and address the editors' critical points regarding performed violence, but several stand out as truly exceptional. First among them is Barbara Lewis's "Decorated Death and the Double Whammy: Attempting to Erase the Excluded through Minstrelsy and Lynching." In her essay, Lewis analyzes the intersection between lynching and minstrelsy through a photograph from 1900, which depicts the dead body of an old black man slumped in a rocking chair and propped up by a white man using a stick. The old black man, who Lewis names "Uncle," wears a painted clownish face that strips him of his humanity, reducing him to a minstrel caricature. Lewis explores how minstrelsy and lynching are both performances of power and pleasure imposed on "despised and disposable blackness" (113). These violent performances of power and pleasure not only serve to erase the humanity of African Americans, but also to constitute whiteness for (and by) the perpetrators. Using refreshing, jargon-free writing, Lewis weaves through the history and interconnectivity of lynching and minstrelsy in the United States and examines their continuing cultural impact.

Another excellent essay is Mark Phelan's "Not So Innocent Landscapes: Remembrance, Representation, and the Disappeared," which probes the performative aspect of David Farrell's Innocent Landscapes, an exhibit of photographs of the Irish countryside that served as sites for the "Disappeared"—murdered Catholics, victims of IRA internal "policing." Drawing on the work of Sontag and Barthes, Phelan examines intersecting and conflicting Irish Arcadian tropes and the excesses of Republican violence conveyed in Farrell's work. Phelan contends that the photographs are marked by the absence of the Disappeared and calls on the spectator to bear witness.

Although the essays cover a wide and...