Abstract for work to come: a nonfiction book proposal
My
recent work in Kenya to successfully mobilize a self-sustaining
theater group for Congolese refugee women presents me with the
opportunity to look critically at the performance of “safe space”
as an integral part of successful community development in
post-conflict societies. While working as an operational partner
of the UNHCR in Kenya during the summer of 2011, I founded the
Survival Girls, a group for
Congolese refugee girls who are survivors of severe gender-based
violence. An essay I wrote about the Survival Girls and what they
taught me about the importance of “safe space” to post-conflict
community-building went on to win a spot in USAID's Frontiers in
Development publication. In the book's introduction, Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton wrote: "You'll be delighted to meet the
Survival Girls."
I
certainly know I was, and I hope to identify what helped the Survival
Girls to flourish to the point of delighting Hillary Clinton in a
nonfiction book that draws on the resource of performance theory to
inform an exploration of exactly how “safe space”
is enacted. In Tracy Kidder's nonfiction best-seller Mountains
Beyond Mountains, Kidder writes himself into his story as a
character observing the antics of the inimitable Paul Farmer, a
doctor who made a significant impact on the fight against
tuberculosis in Peru, Russia, and Haiti. Kidder's knack for bringing
development issues to the attention of a general audience with tight
writing and lovable characters inspires my desire to write a
first-person nonfiction narrative about forming the Survival Girls as
a way of exploring the question of how not physical,
but emotional safety is understood and enacted in
the lives of displaced women, who remain one of the world's most
voiceless demographics.
Amendment: I ran out of word count, but realize after reading everyone else's entries that I should still have included which of our readings most informs this idea even so: The Exonerated is something that inspires me no end with its testimonials about injustice; Davis and Brecht both inform my understanding of self-awareness, which plays an as-yet-undefined role in safe space; and Roach speaks directly to this kind of cultural catharsis-through-surrogation done in liminal spaces by marginalized actors.
Amendment: I ran out of word count, but realize after reading everyone else's entries that I should still have included which of our readings most informs this idea even so: The Exonerated is something that inspires me no end with its testimonials about injustice; Davis and Brecht both inform my understanding of self-awareness, which plays an as-yet-undefined role in safe space; and Roach speaks directly to this kind of cultural catharsis-through-surrogation done in liminal spaces by marginalized actors.
2 comments:
Hi Ming--I fixed the last sentence to that it actually made sense.
You are in a truly rare position among those of us working and thinking on performance: your work has already exerted remarkable force. Who among us will ever garner the praise of the Secretary of State? Therefore your project seems to me especially crucial: having succeeded (against great odds) in Kenya, how can you 1) pinpoint the causes for that success (e.g. how did theater build this community? How do fictional worlds, merely represented in word and gesture, performatively effect themselves?) and 2) put that success into words so that it can be extrapolated and repeated by others who wish to follow or develop your model? Let me tackle the second of these first. The question of how we find a language for the workings of performance has been central to a number of our readings—hence many of our neologisms (performativity, scriptivity, feeling historical, palimpsestic time, haptic virtuality, ghosting, surrogation, textocentrism, etc). The discipline’s success depends upon marshaling folk like yourself, with strong skills in figuration, to try to make understandable the heretofore unnoticed ways that acting and seeming can produce a change in being. I feel pretty confident in leaving you to this business.
But the first question asks for a new conceptualization of safety as that which can be performed into being, and here you have a lot of possible interlocutors to help you to the task, from Austin to Phelan. I think a phenomenologist like States (or, for that matter, Handke), can tell you quite a lot about the perception of performance. A cognitive neuroscience specialist like Amy can unfold how performance grips our bodies and makes its presence felt. Someone like Berlant can give you a model for explaining how one mode of living cedes to another. My wish for your abstract is that you will give more space and play to the sources that you wish to bring together when you say that you will turn to “performance theory to inform an exploration of exactly how “safe space” is enacted.”
Post a Comment