Addicted to race: Performativity, agency, and Cesaire's A tempest

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Scheie, Timothy

The revelation of identity's instability through Brechtian alienation enacted in A Tempest would seem commensurate with a subversive performativity, and indeed, the performative shares many common tenets with a Brechtian theater. Both displace identity from an autonomous and fixed selfhood onto the gesture of its constitution, and both acknowledge and reveal the constraints that govern this gesture of performance. A crucial difference, however, distinguishes a Brechtian production from a subversive performativity. Brecht's plays frequently suggest an underlying truth about the events represented on the stage, and while his theater alienates the identity and actions of the characters for the spectators' critical assessment, the performers themselves often serve as agents of a truth, of a Marxist truth, about the represented people and events.ll To qualify as performative, a stage performance would need to take Brecht a step further, displacing not only the performed character but the performer as well to reveal both as the result of a performative gesture. In Butler's words, there would be no "doer behind the deed"; the doer would always be revealed as already the effect of the deed.

As an exemplary Brechtian alienation effect, Cesaire's play of masks reveals the contingency of racial attributes, but fails ultimately to reveal the constitutive instability of racial identity itself. By writing his play for a theatre negre Cesaire explicitly establishes a "doer behind the deed" in the person of the performer whose racial identity prefigures and does not participate in the obvious gesture of choice implied in the distribution of the masks in the prologue. If the Master of Ceremonies clearly calls each character into being, drawing attention to this gesture of interpellation (to use Althusser's terminology), the very visible and racially specific performers have themselves already been subjected to a tacit interpellating gesture that is not similarly revealed in the performance. Indeed, for the casting of roles across racial lines to discredit the characters' racial identity, it depends on the previous inscription of the racial boundaries it subsequently transgresses. The alienation of race enacted within the play of masks grants its exterior-the performer behind the mask-the more "real" status of the unperformed, and therefore operates through the "modality of appearance" of Butler's critique. One might argue that Cesaire's prescribed staging lodges an oblique critique of all racial identity through the metaphor of these masks, but this critique will always be too late: the masks will already have exacted the spectator's recognition and acceptance of the same racial identities targeted for subversion.

The performative challenges theater to discredit the identities of both theatrical illusion-Butler's "modality of appearance"-and the spectator's "reality," or in terms of Cesaire's play, of both the mask and the performer. This has proven difficult to do, and even the most apparently subversive or liberatory performances of identity cannot escape an insidious reinforcement of sanctioned norms.l2 However, the staging prescribed for the closing scene of A Tempest adds a final twist to the play of masks that potentially implicates the racial identities of both the performed character/mask and of the spectator's "reality" in a performative gesture.