Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics

Chapter 11 Political Actors

257 Chapter 11 Political Actors Performance as Democratic Protest in Anti-Apartheid Theater Emily Beausoleil What happens in theater happens. Representation has the effect of action. —David B. Coplan, “Ideology and Tradition in South African Black Popular Theater” Pluralist democracies take as given that difference is the very stuff of politics—that dominant meanings, values, and ways of life and the political relations they maintain do not account for all citizens, and alternative possibilities might yet prove legitimate, viable, even preferable. As such, democracy requires that we not only make space for diverse ways of life, or simply contain enough difference—as if this were possible—but also remain open and receptive to the changes implied by such differences .1 In short, it demands both a care for difference—an attentiveness to and agonistic care for the complexity of identity, partiality of prevailing accounts, and the persistent murmur and occasional shout of the difference that exceeds them—and receptive generosity2 toward “others” within the unsettling terrain of politics. Further, it requires forms of affiliation and coalition that work through rather than in spite of difference—where intensity of resonance is not premised on identification, where difference 258 / emily beausoleil “converges but is not conflated.”3 And yet, as critics of feminism, truth commissions, and multiculturalism have shown in various ways, these challenges are difficult to meet even within those policies and practices designed for these very purposes. It is in precisely these ways that artistic performance has been a pivotal , if still largely overlooked, site of democratic engagement. In theory, the salience of this claim is not difficult to argue. When, as so many critical theorists have observed, power is understood as embodied and maintained through the discourses, practices, and sites of the everyday as well as formal institutions, artistic performance quickly comes to the fore as a context for the contestation of power. Moreover, given the basic democratic demand to remain attentive and responsive both to difference and the various forms of its exclusion within prevailing terms for identity, action, and relation—what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”—those everyday practices that seek to unsettle, interrogate, and broaden these terms are shown to be democratic and pluralizing gestures.4 But artistic performance is not a potential site of democratic engagement merely insofar as it resembles more conventional political practices. It remains distinct among these sites, and, interestingly, it is precisely the most unruly of its characteristics—those that have led political theorists to handle performance gingerly, if at all—that allow it to serve as a site of democratic practice in powerful ways. Indeed, structured to represent meaning as complexly and persuasively as possible, artistic performance has developed communicative techniques that are not necessarily available to or used within other instances of civil society. Here, in contrast to conventional modes of communication that all too easily lapse into static terms of identity politics, meaning is expressly conveyed as multimodal, multivalent, and nonexhaustive. And here, while declarative modes of discourse conventionally used in politics tend to deny their own performativity or erase their own absences—by implicitly claiming direct, bounded, and stable referents; by grammatically asserting faithful accounts of the factual; by presumed opposition to and ostensible absence of rhetorical or aesthetic modalities—the evocative nature of artistic performance draws reflexive attention to the interpretive and partial nature of its account. And here, too, are practices found that expressly and artfully cultivate receptivity even as they challenge deeply held and often latent beliefs and values. It is this potential that this chapter will explore, using the case of South African protest theater, where a form of artistic engagement became a broad-sweeping national phenomenon widely recognized for its political influence against an oppressive state, to political actors / 259 do so. In fact, here we find an extreme case where, despite experiences of state and more insidious antidemocratic pressures, artistic performance was able to challenge effectively monolithic discourses and the antidemocratic political systems they sustain, and even flourish as alternative sites of democratic engagement in the face of such repression. Protest Theater in Apartheid South Africa: Historical Background With segregation laws, mass removals, and profound state violence and suppression of all opposition making democratic practices all but impossible , black South Africans5 and their allies increasingly turned to artistic performance. Throughout the history of apartheid in South Africa, “cultural struggle has always formed an integral part...