Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York

Diaspora 1:2 1991 Apartheid on Display: South Africa Performs for New York Loren Kruger University of Chicago In the metropolitan context, South African theater has largely been promoted and received as dramatic testimony to the antiapartheid struggle. Created and performed under particular local conditions and sometimes for quite different occasions and audiences in South Africa, plays such as Woza Albert, Born in the RSA, Asinimali, and Bopha1 have been marketed and consumed abroad as the authentic and univocal issue ofa "blood-filled society staggering towards revolution," in the words of African-American writer Amiri Baraka (xiii). Baraka's rhetoric echoes the metropolitan reception for more than a decade of theater performances from South Africa, by which I mean pieces devised and performed by (usually black) South Africans rather than the dramatic literary works of an Athol Fugard. The latter have been absorbed into an international canon of "great works"; the value of the former, however, appears to rest on the performers' presumed affiliation with a new and integral South African identity and thus on the metropolitan critics' assumption that such a monological, uncontested identity exists. In the present context of a contradictory sociopolitical dispensation that is hardly postcolonial and in which violent conflict persists over who gets to determine what and who South Africa is, it seems especially important to scrutinize the process of this authoritative representation of South Africa on the metropolitan stage against the plurality of competing sites and shapes of this representation. Neither New York nor South Africa may be as stable as they seem. Represented by metropolitan critics as variations on a recurring theme of "protest against the horrors of apartheid," these "protest plays" take on the character ofa "national allegory," the overarching category to which Fredric Jameson loftily assigns "all Third World texts" (69). The problem with this allegorization is not merely, as Aijaz Ahmad reminds us in his critique of Jameson, that it obliterates the differences among diverse cultural practices in the Third World (5, 17). Even as it erases the specific, if not necessarily discrete , audiences and publics for these plays, the assertion that "alle191 Diaspora 1:2 1991 gory" or "protest" are essential features of identifiable Third World texts does not address the possibility that texts and performances may not be inherently Third World at all but only made so by the expectations ofcertain audiences. Likewise, the assumption that the nation portrayed in that national allegory is whole and self-evident ignores the struggle over competing representations of nationhood. The Third World or (postkolonial status of South African drama in performance is by no means self-evident. Although metropolitan audiences in London and New York and, indeed, in Johannesburg tend to treat protest plays as authentic, univocal expressions of a new South Africa, and although many producers—writers, directors , actors, impresarios—of these works have supported this interpretation , such a unitary national allegorization is disturbed on several fronts. Most immediately, there is an ongoing dispute about the national character of culture, played out between (European) literary value and (African) authentic expression in protest, against the backdrop of a long-standing debate on the status and ownership of English in South Africa.2 This dispute is in turn complicated by arguments within Afrocentric, Black Consciousness groups as to whether "theater" is "part of the African vocabulary" or merely a colonial import3 and most recently by debates among alternative theater practitioners in South Africa suggesting that the protest paradigm may have to give way to the search for a "postapartheid theater."4 In this context, in which English language and dramatic form are the site of a struggle for national identities and in which the meaning of texts emerges fully only in the occasion of their performances, the notion of national allegory expressed by Third World texts performs a particularly pernicious form of textual imperialism. On the one hand, Jameson's category assumes a natural, unquestioned supremacy of textual meaning over any locally specific performance; on the other, it effaces the (post?)colonial relations ofproduction and reception in which both text and performance are enmeshed and thus ignores the fact that the value of cultural and other commodities of the periphery and in...