Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha.

• Reviewed by Khalid Amine

Terror and Performance is an incredibly well-researched book that ushers in vigorous intellectual stimulation, but also appeals emotionally to its implied readers. Bharucha’s intense and provocative configuration of terror is haunted by memories of his production of Genet’s The Maids in Manila at a theatre venue that was burned to ashes three days after the last show in 2001, and by September 11 of the same year among other terrorist acts. The prefatory epigraphs (of Genet, Derrida, Gandhi, and Hobbes) are quite revealing not only in suggesting the complex cartography of the themes dealt with in the book, but also the stamina and rigor required for such an intensely gripping narrative about terror and performance. Bharucha provides a provocative and meticulous reading of terror and the problematics involved in its naming. He also offers a glimmer of hope during a dark time marked by the hegemony of the discourses of horrorism, yet through the ‘rhetoric’ of performativity. His multidimensional reading is framed within four chapters as constitutive vectors besides an introduction mapping the theoretical terrain and ‘an exit’, rather than a conclusion, which redirects our attention not only to future orientations regarding terror and performance but also stands as a reminder of the potential efficacy of the theatre language we left behind in favor of performance.

From the beginning, Bharucha warns us against the dangerous liaisons of terror and performance: ‘To regard the involuntary deaths of victims as performances in their own right raises troubling issues around the agency’. (p. 27) We are invited to reconsider the limits of performance through a critique of the overstressing of terrorist acts as performances and of the dangers in diffusing the political by overemphasizing the performative. Like Genet’s politically forcible testimony on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 with its aura of a primary witnessing, Bharucha’s undertaking was risky as it could have fallen into a reification of terror, especially given his shift from a position of primary witnessing in South Africa to one of secondary witnessing as regards Rwanda’s recorded testimonies and exchange with Amanda Breed. Terror ‘has an unsettling capacity to proliferate through words’, but it should not conflate with terrorism in the same manner as the blending of faith and fundamentalism. Terror is the book’s ‘catalyst and subject in and through its relationship to performance’. (p. 2) Meanwhile, performance is problematized along with ‘the restored behavior’ as an expansive category that needs substantial limits. The frenzied type of violence restaged at the re-invented gacaca in post-genocide Rwanda can by no means be ‘so unproblematically subsumed within the category of behavior’. (p. 113) In line with Judith Butler’s theory of subjectivity, Bharucha extends ‘performativity’ to the queer refusal to submit to norms, for it refers to attempts to trouble regulations through acts of dissidence. In the context of gacaca, repeated injury and trauma, especially that of victims, is countered through that ‘very derivation’.[1]An immune system’s recovery can be achieved through the ‘resignifying’ and ‘restaging’ of terror. Then gacaca will be a performance with effects, a political transformation by means of a subversive performance practice.

Given that justice ‘never seems to materialize for the victims of terror’ (p. 179) in both cases of Rwanda and South Africa, Bharucha reactivates Gandhi’s non-violence in the face of the ‘terror of everyday life’. Against the infinitely postponed justice suggested by Derrida, Bharucha submits that the ‘new modalities of justice to stop terror have to be initiated in the here and now’ (p. 181), for terrorism is a direct consequence of a global dialogue that is still not taking place. The exit reminds us of Genet’s attempt to understand the obscenity of love and death, as he couldn’t leave Shatila without moving from one corpse to another… The book ends with an optimistic exit, ‘ a luta continua’ against all God-blooded murders that are no more that epitomes of the insanity and rage of our age like the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris at the very moment of reviewing this book.

[1] Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative (New York & London: Routledge, 1997) p. 41.