Challenging Desire: Performing Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) Challenging Desire: Performing Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South Africa A thesis submitted in the fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of Drama at Rhodes University Sonja Smit January 2014 Abstract The central argument of this thesis asserts that in the process of challenging dominant subject positions, such as whiteness, performance creates the possibilities for new or alternative arrangements of desire. It examines how the creative process of desire is forestalled (reified) by habitual representations of whiteness as a privileged position, and proposes that performance can be a valid form of resistance to static conceptions of race and subjectivity. The discussion takes into account how the privilege of whiteness finds representation through forms of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in the post apartheid context. The analysis focuses on the work of white South African artists whose work offers a critique from within the privileged “centre” of whiteness. The research is situated within the inter-disciplinary field of performance studies entailing a reading and application of critical texts to the analysis. Alongside this qualitative methodology surfaces a subjective dialogue with the information presented on whiteness. Part Two includes an analysis of Steven Cohen’s The Cradle of Humankind (2011), Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A (2011) and Michael MacGarry’s LHR-JNB (2010). Each section examines the way in which the respective works engage in a questioning of whiteness through performance. Part Three investigates South African rap-rave duo, Die Antwoord and how their appropriation of Zef interrogates desires for an essential authenticity. Part Four focuses on my own performance practice and the proposed value of engaging with a form of practice-led research. This is particularly relevant in relation to critical race studies that require a level of self-reflexivity from the researcher. It presents an analysis of the work entitled Villain (2012) as a disturbance of theatrical desire through a process of ‘becoming’. This notion of meaning and identity as ‘becoming’ is argued as a strategy to challenge prevailing modes of perception which can possibly restore the production of desire to the viewer. The thesis concludes with the notion that performance can offer a mode of immanent ethics which is significant in creating both vulnerable and critical forms of whiteness. Acknowledgements I hereby acknowledge the Andrew Mellon Scholarship without which this research and thesis would not be possible. I would like to thank my supervisors, Anton Krueger and Alex Sutherland, for their valuable input, time and guidance in the research process. Many thanks are due to Paul Wessels for his editorial input and support. Thanks to Thalia Laric for her time in proofreading this thesis. To Andrew Buckland who was open to my interest in doing a doctorate at the Rhodes Drama Department. Thanks must also go to Juanita Finestone-Praeg, Alan Parker, Gavin Krastin, Jenn Schneeberger, Cindy Harris, Wesley Deintjie, Robert Haxton and my family. Acknowledgements to the peer reviewers for Villain: Joni Barnard and Nicola Elliott. Finally, to Wietsa: Thank You. The opinions expressed in this thesis are those of the author and not necessarily that of Rhodes University or the donor. Table of Contents Preface: Theft/Judgement/Desire 1 Introduction and Method The Necessity of Investigating Whiteness 3 Performance Studies as Methodology 6 A Note on Writing Style and Terminology 8 Part One The Problem of Whiteness and the Productivity of Desire 1.1Colonial Masks 11 1.2 Whiteness Studies and Reification 13 Intermezzo: The Problem with Whiteness as a Privilege 14 1.3 Creating White Desires 15 1.4 Desire for “Civilisation”: Jospehine Baker as Primitive, 17 Saartjie Baartman as Savage 1.5 God is White/the Devil is Black 19 1.6 Whiteness and Imperial Capital 22 Intermezzo: Memories of a Community Outside Bloemfontein 23 1.7 White Privilege as a Habit 24 1.8 The Micropolitical Production of Privilege 25 1.9 Challenging Theories of Desire 26 1.10 Desire as Fluid and Productive 28 1.11Desiring Anxiety and Revolt: the Ability to Question 31 Intermezzo: White Guilt 33 1.12 South African Whiteness: From Apartheid to Neo-liberalism: 34 Prolonging the Desire for whiteness 1.13 The New Whiteness: Neo-Liberalism 35 1. 14 Colour-Blind Desires 36 1.15 The Effect of Capital Interests on Cultural Production 38 1.16 The Challenging Desire of Performance and Performance Studies 39 1.17 Performance’s Potential 41 Intermezzo: Anxiety and the Border 43 Part Two Accentuating and Problematising Whiteness 2.1 Introduction 45 2.2 The Search for a More Desirable Origin: 47 Steven Cohen’s Cradle of Humankind (2012) 2.2.1 Cohen’s Abjection 48 2.2.2 Designing the Sterkfontein Enlightenment 59 2.2.3 Slow Ontology 61 Intermezzzo: White People Problems 65 2.3 Returning the Gaze in Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A 66 Intermezzo: Memories of England 76 2. 4 Privileged Diaspora in Michael McGarry’s LHR-JNB (2010) 78 2.5 Concluding Remarks 85 Part Three Die Antwoord: Challenging Authenticity 3.1. Introduction 87 3.2 Ambiguities of Authenticity 88 3.3 The Desire for the In-Authentic 90 3.4 Substituting the Real 92 3.5 The Relationship between Rap music and Authenticity 95 3.6 Becoming Zef 99 3.7 Poverty of Appearances 101 3.8 Umshimi Wam 103 3.9 The Threat of Poverty: A Stain on Whiteness 106 Intermezzo: Memories of a White K**** 108 3.9 Ritch Bitch 111 3.10 Kitsch Classes 114 3.11. Evil Boy 116 3.12 Die Antwoord’s Refusal: The Critique of a Multicultural Society 123 and Die Antwoord’s Response to Criticism 3.13 Conclusion: The Inadequacy of Essentialist Ideas 129 of Cultural Authenticity Part Four Villain (2012): An experiment in Disturbing Desire 4.1 Introduction 132 4.2 Conceptual Parameters of the Experiment 133 4.2.1 Ideas and Concerns 134 4.2.2 Questions for Peer Reviewers 135 4.3 Title 136 4.4 Audience Desire 137 4.5 The Rehearsal Process 140 4.6 Space 142 4.7 A Butoh Becoming: (non) Chorus work 144 4.8 Butoh as a “line of flight” 149 4.9 The “Characters” 153 4.10 Stage Properties 161 4.11 Vocal and Sound score 160 4.12 Time 164 4.13 Concluding Remarks 164 Intermezzo: Creating a Body without Organs 166 Conclusion Performance as an Immanent Form of Ethics 167 Appendix A: Nicola Elliot 172 Appendix B: Joni Barnard 177 Appendix C: Script of Villain 182 Bibliography 194 1 Preface Theft/Judgement/Desire I have, for as long as I can remember, felt dissatisfied with the organisation – with the way things are organised. I am at odds with what I am expected to desire from life: the obvious process of acquiring things to gain a sense of stability (which is always fleeting, in my case), and security (an illusion). This may be because stability or security is not an experience I am familiar with or believe in. I am white, female, seemingly middle-class, educated and at odds with this description of myself. These markers of my “identity” subject me and are not how I desire myself to be recognised. Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari note that the Body Without Organs (BwO) “howls: They’ve made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve stolen my body!”1 There is an arrangement of desires and powers that create the effect of indifference – whereby one can absolve oneself from recognising one’s own attachment to the organs. I realise my own attachment. Antonin Artaud’s idea of the Body Without Organs is not a disavowal of the organs of the body, but a reaction against the stratification of the singular experience – the judgement of God. I am disturbed by a sense of entitlement that has, at times, surfaced within me, but which I try not to act on. I believe this sense surfaces as a direct result of the organs and more specifically (in my case) the organs of my “whiteness” and my “class”. This is related to desire; to the ideas that inform my wants and impulses. Deleuze and Guattari hold that “The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified”.2 There are some things that cannot be articulated and can perhaps only be hinted at or suggested. These are ideas that do not force themselves on one; they are ambiguous, like desire. Desire is not only used here as a better word for want, or as defining aspect of sexuality, but my attempt to recognise desire as the aspect that allows wanting to happen. To recognise that desire is reified and then attempt to name it, to identify it, would be another form of relegating desire. So one actually has to go by “way of not knowing” to reveal it. Desire is arranged along lines of power and knowledge that we are all implicated in, and capitalism’s ability to profit from desire creates a situation where individual desires can be used for the purposes of commercial profit. To reify desire, to place it on the assembly line of the various institutions which construct the molar subject, is to relegate desire: to put it in its place. The assembly line structures desire, gives it a home: the unconscious. Desire can then become a slave of habits, so that it can desire its own repression, and the oppression of others.

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