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Performing Resistance: Seven Last Words and the Carceral Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Beth Cleary
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Extract

We face a social landscape with more (or at least as much) need for radical change than we faced in the 1960s, an era that produced, flawed though it was by lack of follow-through, a mighty impulse toward change…Prison walls are being posed as a final solution. They symbolize our shortsightedness, our fear of the real problems caging us all. The pity is how blindly, enthusiastically, we applaud those who are constructing the walls dooming us.

John Edgar Wideman

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , May 1999 , pp. 75 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1999

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References

1. Wideman, John Edgar, Introduction to Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995), xxxGoogle Scholar

2. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256Google Scholar.

3. Quoted in Buck, Pern Davidson, “‘Arbeit Macht Frei:’ Racism and Bound, Concentrated Labor in U.S. Prisons,” Urban Anthropology, 23,4 (Winter 1994), 337Google Scholar.

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7. Ibid., 109–111.

8. Ibid., 104.

9. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (New York: Random House, 1995), 308Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 131.

11. Ibid., 308.

12. See Ugwu, Catherine, Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 176–189Google Scholar.

13. Kim Conner, “Rhodessa Jones and the MEDEA Project,” unpublished paper presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference, August, 1997, author's files.

14. Anne Ellis, “Theatre of Protest: Michael Keck's Voices in the Rain,” unpublished paper presented at Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference, August, 1997, author's files.

15. For an introduction to the Abu-Jamal case, see Leonard Weinglass, Esq., “Afterword” to Abu-Jamal (1995); for information on the MOVE community, see for instance Wagner-Pacifici, Robert E., Discourse and Destruction: the City of Philadelphia Versus MOVE (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

16. Foucault, 131.

17. Ibid., 302.

18. Roach, Joseph, “Theatre History and the Ideology of the Aesthetic,” Theatre Journal, 41,2 (May 1989), 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. See for instance Kirby, Michael, “The New Dance—an Introduction,” The Drama Review, 16,3 (1972), 115–116Google Scholar; also Banes, Sally, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University/New England Press, 1994), Section VGoogle Scholar.

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21. Thorne, 1–2.

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23. Debo, Dan, “The Struggle Continues: An Interview with Dhoruba al-Mujahid Bin Wahad,” in Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States, Churchill, Ward and Vanderwall, J.J., eds. (Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1992), 227–239Google Scholar.

24. Standing Deer, “Prisons, Poverty and Power,” ibid., 194–199.

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28. See for instance Wideman, John Edgar, Brothers and Keepers (New York: Penguin, 1984), 83Google Scholar.

29. Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1995), 416Google Scholar.

30. Abu-Jamal, 65.

31. The program for Seven Last Words at Theatre for the New City listed the political writers—formerly and currently imprisoned—whose writings are used in the piece. It also gave biographical information on the three writers, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Assatu Shakur, and Standing Deer. The specific authorship of each speech was not made clear in the production, which had the effect of linking their causes as prisoners.

32. Standing Deer, 197–8.

33. Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 28–29Google Scholar.

34. Foucault, 138.

35. Thome, 1.

36. Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, Jacqueline, eds. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (New York: Norton, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. See Castle, Terry, The Apparitional Lesbian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. Castle's convincing study argues that lesbians and lesbianism have amounted to a “ghost effect” throughout Western literature and popular consciousness. In borrowing her image of apparitionalism, I in no way mean to equate the temporary erasure of a gender category in Thome's piece with the much more longstanding denial of the being and sexual activity of lesbian/ism throughout history. Rather, I mean to suggest a parallel between how patriarchal narratives can effectively re-write and/or render imperceptible entire experiences of being and feeling.

38. Banes, Sally, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1998), 229–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. Flanders, Peter, liner notes to Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, Juilliard String Quartet CD recording, Sony Classical, (1990), 2Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 2.

41. For discussions of the relationship between music and representation, see for instance Kramer, Lawrence, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Leppert, Richard, The Sight of Sound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Finkelstein, Sidney, How Music Expresses Ideas (New York: International Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar.

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43. Adomo, Theodor, Prisms (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1988), 143–144Google Scholar.

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45. Brecht, 190.

46. Davis, Angela Y, If They Come in the Morning (Oakland: The Third Press, 1971), 31Google Scholar.

47. Wideman (1984), 36.

48. Benjamin, Illuminations, 262.

49. Ibid., 262.

50. Brennan, Teresa, History After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1993), 179Google Scholar.