Necroperformance: Cultural Reconstructions of The War Body by Dorota Sajewska (review)

Dorota Sajewska's Necroperformance is a robust work dynamically intervening amid the imagined barriers of historiography, performance studies, and the archive. Sajewska's theory involves a process of reading remains—including textual, photographic, and filmic materials, performance records, and even physical bodies—for the impact of the past on the present while attending rigorously to tensions between animate/inanimate, experience/mediation, and action/documentation (427). This practice is used to examine "traces of memory in precarious bodies inflicted with the violence of war" (41), specifically exploring the Polish cultural memory shaped by a carefully regulated archive of World War I experiences. The whole project builds thoughtfully atop Rebecca Schneider's work on remains and reenactment, Frank Ankersmit's phenomenological approach to contemporary historiography, and Jacques Derrida's and Diana Taylor's respective forays into the concept of the archive. Similarly foundational is Leszek Kolankiewicz's "antropologia widowisk," which melds American performance studies with Polish cultural studies to examine spectacles (especially their repetitive mechanics) as demonstrations and reifications of a society's culture and collective memory (425). As the title suggests, Necroperformance also owes much to Achille Mbembe's explosive Necropolitics. Sajewska thoughtfully utilizes Mbembe's assertion that the archive is akin to a burial ground—where the remains of life exist only as papers and artifacts like tombstones and sepulchers representing the dead—as a launchpad for the various ways the deceased continue to activate the present through her study of necroperformance.

Sajewska's necroperformance process can only begin by grappling with the paradox of performance: that it is both reproducible and yet ephemeral. This contradiction establishes the political conditions for embodied engagement in the archive. The key mechanism for necroperformance is what Sajewska terms the "body-archive," through which the corpus can be understood as "a document of cultural history" (76), existing and acting both performatively and anthropologically to retain and transmit knowledge through its corporeality. This is an evolution of Jerzy Grotowski's "body-memory," which incorporates the body's "documentative nature" (77). Sajewska's project, which seeks to remedy the highly political act of excluding certain bodies from the archive, depends on this aspect.

Necroperformance is a work of theory and history, much like Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead. Necroperformance theory is used to examine material and corporeal remains via theatre and nontheatrical instances, while carefully guiding the reader through the processes by which these remains were preserved and passed on. For Sajewska, the period of history around World War I is groundbreaking and transitional, and yet often overshadowed historiographically by World War II. The book sets itself to exhaustively redefining the Polishness that resulted from the Great War in all its multiplicity. Sajewska argues quite convincingly that the spirit of modernism in Eastern Europe was ignited as a resistance to the hegemony of Western civilization's nineteenth-century mentality (59). She is also very invested in the neglected connections between Polish and German culture at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as perspectives that are queer, dissenting, and/or pacifist that have long been silenced by the cause of Polish nationalism. Gendered tensions of pregnant proletarian women during and after the war become an essential site of research, specifically with how they compared to the crises of masculinity that resulted from the brutalization of men's bodies at the front. Thorough study is also made of how social ills resulting from the war, such as the struggle over women's reproductive rights at a time when the population had been decimated, played out in the performances of the time. Finally, Sajewska provides a particularly deep dive into Stanisław Wyspiański's play The Return of Odysseus, the tale of a dehumanized soldier's homecoming, and how it was then famously restaged by Tadeusz Kantor in Nazi-occupied Krakow. Sajewska's ability to coalesce this breadth of content demonstrates the versatility of necroperformance in practice.

One of the most remarkable things about Necroperformance...