Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha (review)

To read Rustom Bharucha’s statement that “[t]error … has an unsettling capacity to proliferate through words” in the wake of too-regular reports of violences unacknowledged and unaccounted for around the world, and in the climate of American exceptionalism and hate rhetoric espoused and repeated ad nauseum, is to read terror as an endemic condition of this young century (xiv). “[T]error can be regarded as the new banality of evil in our times,” Bharucha writes in his introduction, “functioning in a diversity of ways, … ranging from the most global and national of political interventions to the most quotidian intimacies of everyday life” (3). Terror does not become us—terror is us. But what is “terror”—what does it mean and what does it do to global life when accorded the “hegemonic discourse of terrorism” (2), a performative imperative that not only determines its narrative, but also domestic and foreign policy? As terror becomes inextricably synonymous with terrorism and as the phrase “war on terror” places on the term a discursive strain that forces any and all considerations of it to be in necessary relation to September 11, 2001 and US military force, it becomes increasingly important to dissect how terror, as a social, political, and bodily condition, is sustained through the vast proliferation of such language.

Performance is the mode of inquiry by which Bharucha explores terror’s enactment and discourse, although, as he is quick to point out, his consideration is one of terror and performance—not terror as performance. In the first chapter, he uses The Maids specifically, but Jean Genet more generally, as dramaturgical ground for scrutiny of his own response to learning about 9/11 via CNN while in Manila working on a production of Genet’s play. There is a tension of proximity in this chapter, one that functions dually in the production that Bharucha is directing and in his experience of 9/11. Bharucha leaves this tension unresolved, which is unsettling; but so too is how 9/11 provides a similar dramaturgical ground to more recent terrorist acts—or, more specifically, to how we have come to experience them in their mediated reproduction.

In chapter 2, Bharucha juxtaposes a “political construction of ‘Muslims’” with the phenomenological “predicament of ‘passing as a Muslim’” (78), where various and sometimes arbitrary signs mistakenly denote identity as something meant to be misread: a beard, your skin, the way you walk (79–80). This is, as he writes, the “terror of terrorism” (87), a terror whose object rests on an uncertain semiology and pop iconography. While Bharucha notes the violence wrought by rampant xenophobia in the immediate post-9/11 moment (one that is recurring with fervor in Euro-American political rhetoric, especially in the US presidential election), the focus in this chapter is on the 2002 genocide in Gujarat. This genocide, which resulted in the deaths of “more than 3,000 Muslims” and at least a further 100,000 who were displaced (94), was justified by the Hindu Right and allegedly devised by then state executive and now national Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bharucha counters such mandated violence with an anecdote in which, just as a riot threatens to break out on a street in Calcutta, a taxi driver picks Bharucha up, having assumed that he is Muslim. “It doesn’t matter that he is Muslim and I am Parsi,” Bharucha recalls, “even though his mistaking me for a Muslim was the accident that brought us closer together … [and] became the occasion for me to declare my ‘self’” (103).

There is a genuine though also conciliatory hopefulness here; and the threat of violence as the condition of possibility of both the sequestering and declaring of “self” creates an intentionally precarious lead-in to chapter 3 in which Bharucha examines the post-genocide Rwandan gacaca and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South Africa. Here, he explicitly links performativity to the “legal mechanisms and apparatus” that the state mandates “to legislate and enforce new modes of ‘forgiveness’ and...