{"id":274,"date":"2015-10-10T13:07:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-10T13:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/?p=274"},"modified":"2020-11-15T13:14:30","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T13:14:30","slug":"terror-and-performance-by-rustom-bharucha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/terror-and-performance-by-rustom-bharucha\/","title":{"rendered":"Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul style=\"list-style-type: square;\">\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #003366;\"><strong>Reviewed by Khalid Amine<\/strong><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-275 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/41xHxQBUE2L._SX331_BO1204203200_-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/41xHxQBUE2L._SX331_BO1204203200_-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/41xHxQBUE2L._SX331_BO1204203200_.jpg 333w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/>Terror and Performance<\/em> is an incredibly well-researched book that ushers in vigorous intellectual stimulation, but also appeals emotionally to its implied readers. Bharucha\u2019s intense and provocative configuration of terror is haunted by memories of his production of Genet\u2019s <em>The Maids<\/em> 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 \u2018rhetoric\u2019 of performativity. His multidimensional reading is framed within four chapters as constitutive vectors besides an introduction mapping the theoretical terrain and \u2018an exit\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">From the beginning, Bharucha warns us against the dangerous liaisons of terror and performance: \u2018To regard the involuntary deaths of victims as performances in their own right raises troubling issues around the agency\u2019. (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\u2019s politically forcible testimony on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 with its aura of a primary witnessing, Bharucha\u2019s 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\u2019s recorded testimonies and exchange with Amanda Breed. Terror \u2018has an unsettling capacity to proliferate through words\u2019, but it should not conflate with terrorism in the same manner as the blending of faith and fundamentalism. Terror is the book\u2019s \u2018catalyst and subject in and through its relationship to performance\u2019. (p. 2) Meanwhile, performance is problematized along with \u2018the restored behavior\u2019 as an expansive category that needs substantial limits. The frenzied type of violence restaged at the re-invented <em>gacaca<\/em> in post-genocide Rwanda can by no means be \u2018so unproblematically subsumed within the category of behavior\u2019. (p. 113) In line with Judith Butler\u2019s theory of subjectivity, Bharucha extends \u2018performativity\u2019 to the queer refusal to submit to norms, for it refers to attempts to trouble regulations through acts of dissidence. In the context of <em>gacaca<\/em>, repeated injury and trauma, especially that of victims, is countered through that \u2018very derivation\u2019.<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a>An immune system&#8217;s recovery can be achieved through the \u2018resignifying\u2019 and \u2018restaging\u2019 of terror. Then <em>gacaca<\/em> will be a performance with effects, a political transformation by means of a subversive performance practice.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Given that justice \u2018never seems to materialize for the victims of terror\u2019 (p. 179) in both cases of Rwanda and South Africa, Bharucha reactivates Gandhi\u2019s non-violence in the face of the \u2018terror of everyday life\u2019. Against the infinitely postponed justice suggested by Derrida, Bharucha submits that the \u2018new modalities of justice to stop terror have to be initiated in the here and now\u2019 (p. 181), for terrorism is a direct consequence of a global dialogue that is still not taking place. The exit reminds us of Genet\u2019s attempt to understand the obscenity of love and death, as he couldn\u2019t leave Shatila without moving from one corpse to another\u2026 The book ends with an optimistic exit, \u2018 a luta continua\u2019 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\">[1]<\/a> Judith Butler, <em>Excitable Speech: a Politics of the Performative<\/em> (New York &amp; London: Routledge, 1997) p. 41.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s intense and provocative configuration of terror is haunted by memories of his production of Genet\u2019s The Maids in Manila at a theatre venue that was burned to ashes &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,28,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-featured","category-latest-news-on-performance","category-reviews"],"wps_subtitle":"\u00a0London &amp; New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. ix +236. $ 38.66 Pb\/ $ 108.80 Hb.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/furja.ma\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}