Kokontis Dissertation FINAL

Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state By Kate Menninger Kokontis A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Chair Professor Catherine Cole Professor Richard Cándida Smith Professor Laura Pérez Fall 2011 Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state © 2011 by Kate Menninger Kokontis 1 Abstract Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state By Kate Menninger Kokontis Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Chair I argue that contemporary Americans of many ethnoracial backgrounds have, in the past forty years, negotiated the painful consequences of a form of multiculturalism that rewards otherness with cultural capital and punishes it with structural and symbolic abjection, through mechanisms of what I call “performative return”: genealogical invocations of legitimating and mythologized origins, particularly ancestral homelands and fraught narratives of arrival to the United States, that become mobilized in performances to a range of ideological and political ends. Some of these performances are local to specific cities and some take place in a discursive realm; some are mobilized for purposes of truly liberatory democratic ends, and others to redraw the boundaries of exclusion. In the context of this dissertation, I turn my attention in particular to two narratives of transatlantic arrival to the U.S. – the Middle Passage, and Ellis Island immigration. As transatlantic arrivals to the U.S., the groups of subjects implicated in these narratives have tended to have had relatively permanent stays here – more so, for instance, than im/migrants from elsewhere in the Americas, who are more likely, on account of proximity, to navigate transnational back-and-forth relationships with their home country. But more significantly, these narratives are the purview of racial subjects in the U.S. who are implicated in a pernicious and reductive black-white binary conception of race. Resultantly, these narratives – particularly in the context of post-civil rights multiculturalisms – are articulated in relation to one another in a variety of ways. Ratifying origins shores up legitimacy, which is to say, it shores up the felicitousness of the performative. And performativity is a deeply temporal concept – while a performance takes place as a discrete event in a bounded moment in time, performativity is the repetition and revision over a long expanse of time: it is the longue durée, the mechanism by which social and power structures are formed and upheld. Performative return is central to the process of creating usable histories to various and sometimes deeply conflicting political and ideological ends: origins shore up legitimacy so that the narratives they invoke become articulated as reality. I establish a comparative framework of racialized histories and groups, of defining moments in the construction of an American racial state, and the ways in which their consequences register and are negotiated in the present through representations that slip into various worldmaking activities. And the project is comparative and relational not only because the racial state produces its subjects relationally within the framework of slavery, genocide, conquest and imperialism, and immigration, but also because I want to demonstrate the across- the-board nature of the ways that the past, ancestral homelands, and narratives of arrival are invoked as a means of negotiating racialized subjects’ exclusion and legitimacy. The 2 performative returns that I examine articulate the racial state, as well as ground-up negotiations of groups’ and individuals’ own racialized experiences or categorizations, in terms of the relational context of the U.S. in the world. That is, the performative returns are produced within a historical consciousness and transnational imaginary that brings spatial and temporal causes to bear on one another and takes seriously the constitutive potential of memory, the uses of narratives, and the calling into being of re-constituted “elsewheres.” i When we return to our ancient land Which we never knew And talk about all those things That have never happened We will walk holding the hands of children Who have never existed We will listen to their voices and we will live That life which we have spoken of so often And have never lived. -- Daisy Zamora The key to understanding how performances worked within a culture, recognizing that a fixed and unified culture exists only as a convenient but dangerous fiction, is to illuminate the process of surrogation as it operated between the participating cultures. The key, in other words, is to understand how circum-Atlantic societies, confronted with revolutionary circumstances for which few precedents existed, have invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others. They could not perform themselves, however, unless they also performed what and who they thought they were not. -Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead. In everyday usage, nostalgia has come to signify the longing to return to a past that probably never existed and to places that have changed irrevocably. But ‘wounds of returning’ suggest something more complicated – that the past itself may return, inflicting new wounds and reopening old ones. --Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning “Did you find something?” Father Gennaro asked me as he adjusted his thick glasses – he is nearsighted – and flung open the door to the church. “Yes,” I answered. And it is true. Precisely because I found neither Federico nor Vita. Her existence has not been entrapped in those merciless registries. She has escaped the registry of death, the aged pages, the ordered archives of time and memory. One spring day, with a clear blue sky just like today, she gave Diamante her hand and followed him out onto that far and elusive sea, which she must have seen every day from her window, and which she must have looked upon as a promise. They dove headfirst into the only gap in the net, and together these two fugitives invented another story. -- Melania G. Mazzucco, Vita To believe, as I do, that the enslaved are our contemporaries is to understand that we share their aspirations and defeats, which isn’t to say that we are owed what they were due but rather to acknowledge that they accompany our every effort to fight against domination, to abolish the color line, and to imagine a free territory, a new commons. It is to take to heart their knowledge of freedom. The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it wasn’t something that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. Freedom is the kind of thing that required you to leave your bones on the hills at Brimsbay, or to burn the cane fields, or to live in a garret for seven years, or to stage a general strike, or to create a new republic. It is won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished. The demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, and this entails much more than the end of property in slaves. It requires the reconstruction of society, which is the only way to honor our debt to the dead. This is the intimacy of our age with theirs – an unfinished struggle. To what end does one conjure the ghost of slavery, if not to incite the hopes of transforming the present? --Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother ii Table of Contents Acknolwedgements iii Introduction. Performative Returns and the Rememory of History 1 SECTION ONE Chapter One. Excavating the Blanks of Unknowingness: genealogy, temporality, knowability, and the politics of African American performative returns 26 Chapter Two. To Call My Indian Red: felicitousness, magical realism, and autochthonous/ diasporic genealogies of displacement in New Orleanian blackness 60 SECTION TWO Chapter Three. Open Signifiers of Immigration, Italian-ness, and the Port-of-Entry: on the possibilities and limitations of liberal multiculturalism 113 Chapter Four. Made In/No Such Thing As America: conjuring Manichean ghosts and haunting grief in Italian American performative returns 156 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 199 iii Acknowledgements The conception and seeing-through of a book-length project is a grueling endeavor, full of hope and despair and intersubjectivity; it is never, in spite of a single author’s name appearing at the beginning, the work of any one person by herself. Many individuals played formative roles in my intellectual development and/or were instrumental in helping me see this process through, and they deserve acknowledgement here as well as my very deep and sincere thanks. First and foremost, Brandi Wilkins Catanese not only chaired my dissertation committee (and my master’s thesis committee, and served as my primary advisor and a major interlocutor throughout these years), providing invaluable advice on this project at every stage of its development, but has also been an incredible mentor, advisor, and friend throughout a long and difficult process. She is a rare gem in the academy – a profoundly dedicated and caring teacher first and foremost, she is ethical, decent, and generous, and is a rigorous intellectual and scholar. My gratitude to her is bottomless, as is my respect; she is someone I will always seek to emulate. My committee, Richard Cándida Smith, Catherine Cole, and Laura Pérez, have been generous and rigorous in their feedback and advice and humane and patient in their exchanges with me, and I am grateful to have had such exemplary scholars and teachers to go to for guidance.

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