Forthcoming
“Social Media in/and Performance:
Rethinking Theatre & Community in the Digital Age.“
Co-authored with Dr. Catherine Quirk (Edge Hill University).
Variations, special issue on Social Media.
Abstract:
The theatre has always interacted with emerging technologies both as a way of proving the applicability of plays to their respective ages and as a way of, in Bree Hadley’s words “engag[ing] their audiences in conversations, commentary and critique to ensure that their shows have meaning, impact and a lasting place in the public imagination.” Patrick Lonergan, in his book Theatre & Social Media, talks about ancient Roman wall-writing and graffiti, anti-theatrical pamphlet wars, and the inclusion of letters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as “pre-digital” social media interaction; we can also think, for instance, of the telephone and telegraph plays of the late-nineteenth century, the office-girl plays of the early-twentieth century, and even the modern mega-musical movie adaptation. In the twenty-first century, theatres have turned to social media in an attempt to engage audiences beyond the traditional theatre space. Twitter specifically tends to be used in two ways: as a paratextual element, enhancing the overall theatre-going experience with interviews, rehearsal photos, behind-the-scene information, cast-member takeovers, and so forth; and as an element to be incorporated into the performance text itself. In both methods, social media participates in the modern theatre’s push for wider accessibility and inclusivity, and allows theatre companies to explore new areas of interactivity and audience participation.
Taking several recent productions as case studies, this essay will argue that what we call social media performance—a category that encompasses a range of objects of study, from theatrical productions that incorporate social media, to social media feeds as performances in themselves—can serve as a starting point for thinking through civics and community formation in the digital age. Social media performance has the potential to destabilize both traditional notions of performance and exclusionary practices of citizenship and belonging. Accessibility and inclusivity are the hallmarks of this kind of production, and as a model of civic engagement and community, it therefore works against standard citizenship practices, which are fundamentally founded on practices of exclusion. We ask: What might a national, or international, community look like in the age of Twitter, and how might social media performance give them voice? Who are the participants in social media performance, and what destabilizing effects—on the state, the social, the status quo—might their social media posts have?
2022
“Writing Solidarity: Women in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India.”
In the Crossfire of History: Revisiting Women’s War Resistance Discourse, eds. Lava Asaad and Fayeza Hasanat. Rutgers University Press.
Abstract:
While many critics have claimed Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India (1991) as a metaphor for Partition, the book’s original title, Ice-Candy-Man, suggests an interest both in gendered violence—character Ice-candy-man perpetrates one of the central violations of a woman—and in the complicated moral quandary that Partition necessarily generates. Imbued with ambiguity, rife with contradictions, and populated with deeply flawed characters, Sidhwa’s novel invites us to ask: How do guilt and innocence signify in the landscape of Partition? What do rehabilitation, recovery, and reparation mean when seemingly none are innocent? And, to what extent is solidarity and community possible in this context?
In this essay I contend that the structure of narration—narrated by a child ignorant of the significance of much that she witnesses—teaches us to look beyond the surface story to see a coalition of characters materialize, each adding nuance to what it means to be a citizen or a member of a community. Establishing the parameters of citizenship in the context of Partition, demonstrating how the narrative explicitly interrogates and implicitly exposes the terms of inclusion in the new state and the complexity of guilt and innocence in the face of Partition violence, and examining the liberatory potential exposed through the actions of border women—women living on the border of a new nation at Partition, especially those participating in the recovery and rehabilitation of others—this chapter outlines the limits of that potential, arguing finally that Sidhwa’s text provides a potent yet incomplete blueprint for solidarity writ large.
2022
“Against Empire: Reading Anticoloniality across Cold War Divides.”
Global South Studies, Book Forum: At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, & the Cold War (Duke UP), co-edited with Dr. Kerry Bystrom.
2022
“Introduction: Postcolonial Studies and the Cold War.”
Co-authored with Dr. Kerry Bystrom (Bard College Berlin).
Global South Studies, Book Forum: At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, & the Cold War (Duke UP), co-edited with Dr. Kerry Bystrom.
2021
“Culture and Activism: Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood.“
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
Abstract:
For South African author Mongane Wally Serote, art and activism can only operate in tandem. In the 1970s and 1980s, Serote took leadership roles in revolutionary and anti-apartheid organizations and movements, and in his writing and in these activist roles he mobilizes the one as a means to achieve the ends of the other. In his novel To Every Birth Its Blood, he uses narrative to experiment with chronology and perspective, and explore the physical spaces of township, exile, and state in ways that challenge the apartheid regime’s authority to regulate the lives of South Africans. Serote deploys the novel form against apartheid’s policies, social organization, and legacy. Through this work, he indicts the regime for human rights abuses, and imagines a new world order shaped by inclusive forms of community that carry forward the fight for equal rights.
2021
Book Review of Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century, Northwestern UP.
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
2019
“Jerusalem, 1961: Muriel Spark’s Cold War Intrigue.”
Law & Literature.
Abstract:
Muriel Spark investigates the meanings of community, nationality, duty, and betrayal across her oeuvre. In her novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Spark experiments with a different kind of citizenship and community belonging than the Cold War climate typically allows, and she does so in content as well as through the style of her prose. In the context of the Cold War, national belonging and citizenship are politically charged endowments: conflicting memberships can only belong to double agents. Because protagonist Barbara—a British, half-Jewish, Catholic convert, like her author—does not swear fealty exclusively to Britain, Judaism, Israel, or Catholicism, she is seen as betraying each in turn. Challenging notions of singular nationality or uncomplicated allegiance in light of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Spark employs melodrama to parse the meanings of betrayal and belonging. The excesses of melodrama serve as a model for citizenship in the postwar, decolonizing world.
2019
“Milan Kundera and the Radical Autonomy of Art.”
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Abstract:
As a cultural worker during the Cold War writing from behind, and about, the Iron Curtain, Czech writer Milan Kundera was subject to a double politicization of his vocation. On the one hand, within his own country, writers, artists, and intellectuals were forced to fit the socialist cultural program, or they were silenced. On the other, in the international arena cultural workers were being employed like never before in a war for cultural supremacy. Kundera resisted the politicization of culture, both within Czechoslovakia and internationally. He was critical of any regime or party that prioritized political ends over cultural ones, or that treated culture as a means rather than an end in itself. Kundera finds a literary mode of resistance to the overwhelming politicization of culture in the late Cold War years. In The Art of the Novel (1986), Kundera theorizes the novel form as radically apolitical. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he puts this into practice: where politics – totalitarianism as one of its most acute iterations – requires unitary meanings, perfect façades, and generic, kitschy artistic forms, these texts, in true novelistic fashion, deal exclusively in complexity, unsightliness, and unformulaic genre mixing.
2018
“‘Not Guilty in the Sense of the Indictment’: Statelessness, Rights, and Literary Form in Eichmann in Jerusalem.”
Textual Practice.
Abstract:
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt thinks through mid-century totalitarian movements in relation to statelessness and human rights. According to Arendt, statelessness and rightlessness correspond: it is only through inclusion and participation in a human community that one possesses any rights at all. Controversially, Arendt’s text demonstrates that, by virtue of totalitarian conditioning, Eichmann himself was deprived of fundamental human rights even before he was illegally captured in Argentina in May 1960. This essay argues that the texture of Arendt’s prose—including narrative ordering, ironic tone, and performative language—challenges the totalitarian structures that produce statelessness. At the same time that Arendt reveals an internal incoherence to statelessness—the stateless person can either be a refugee or a cosmopolitan subject—the form and content of Eichmann in Jerusalemreveals the precarious political existence of the stateless, therefore rightless, person in either guise.
2017
“‘Like photographs of ghosts’: Representing Post-Apartheid South Africa in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative.”
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.
Abstract:
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard its first testimony in April of 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first volume of the report of the commission was published. While it aims to be a document representing closure in terms of the history of apartheid, the TRC report is rife with gaps and omissions across the long history of apartheid. Approaching this history and its legacy in literary prose, Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative(2010) serves as a counter-history to the TRC’s narrative of closure. Extending formal strategies from his earlier works, including composite literary form and performative modes of writing, Vladislavić employs photography and ghosts within his text to unsettle official history and to offer a melancholic approach to the past of apartheid and its ongoing effects in post-apartheid South Africa.
2015
“Haunting and Melancholia: A Reading of the Revenant in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Casualty.’”
The Final Crossing: Death and Dying in Literature, eds. John J. Han and C. Clark Triplett. New York: Peter Lang.
Abstract:
Written during the violent political turmoil of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Seamus Heaney’s works of the 1970s often reflect upon and respond to the sectarian tensions and brutal killings of the conflict. “Casualty,” part of Heaney’s collection Field Workof 1979, reflects on the death of an acquaintance of Heaney’s killed in sectarian violence despite (and indeed because of) his refusal to acknowledge sectarian allegiances in general. In the poem, Heaney’s speaker testifies to the sudden death of this familiar man, and in the process reveals something of the psychological trauma caused by such a loss, and he attempts to refigure his place in society and his personal identity in its wake. The poem’s ending on some level must register as a pathological response—the speaker’s desperation in his call to be haunted—but it also signals something more: the double movement of the speaker’s refusal to participate in the public, funereal process of mourning for this man, and the insistence on speaking with his ghost finally opens a space for future possibility outside of the restrictive sectarian model. In the end, this pathological mourning, this melancholia of sorts, appears as the only appropriate response to such trauma. Heaney’s poem challenges his fellow survivor-subjects to rethink their own processes of mourning, indicating finally that a perpetual engagement with the ideas of death and violence may open new possibilities for Northern Ireland and its post-traumatic subjects outside of a sectarian model.
2015
“The Literary Imagination.”
Book Review of Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg, Edinburgh UP.
Women: A Cultural Review.
2013
“The Abandonment of Modernity: Bare Life and the Camp in Homo Sacer and Hotel Rwanda.”
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory.
Abstract:
In the introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben identifies as a starting point Foucault’s concept of the biopolitical, of “the process by which, at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power” (3), while at the same time he regrets the fact that Foucault “never dwelt on the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century” (4). Picking up where he sees Foucault as leaving off, Agamben discusses not only sovereign power and the sovereign ban, the state of exception and the bare life that it necessarily produces, but also what he calls “the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181), the camp. Over the course of the book, a political imperative surfaces: an injunction for the modern world—its subjects, its states, even its humanitarian organizations—to acknowledge the structure of exception which forms the framework of modernity, and to question this structure and its founding principles. This essay focuses both on Agamben’s text and on a text depicting another major biopolitical event in modern history—Hotel Rwanda, a film about the Rwandan genocide of 1994—to explore Agamben’s claim that the state of exception has become the rule in modern nation-states, and to determine what, precisely, is at stake here.
Carolyn Ownbey, PhD 