5/23 THOUGHTS WHILE RE-READING ROACH: "FEATHERED PEOPLES"


Roach says that any remembering (memorializing) also entails forgetting, and in the instance of performances which are symbolic representations of the encounter of African, Amerindian, and European peoples, "one of these parties seems fated to disappear from the selective memory of another." The reason being that the "dominant trope: that of geneological succession, imagined as a stately procession" is threatened by interruption or usurpation; that is, threatened by mixture, influence, being changed by encounter. And the most threatening (because most fundamental) of these changes is that "blood will be mixed": "The fear that blood will be mixed, a fear that intensifies the ritual expectation that blood must be shed, haunts these representations like a vengeful ghost: the specter of future generations threatening to be born." (p. 122)

Furthermore: It is in the images of violence that these fears are expressed. So, what happens if I focus on these "images of violence" in Oroonoko, Macbeth, and The Indian Emperour?

"Representations of these encounters show how Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, real or imagined, acting in one another's presence, real or imagined, repeated their special rites of surrogation." (p.122)

Also: The fear that Roach is describing, the fear of being replaced by something different, something of a different color, is not an artifact of the past. It is what is driving the current frenzy about immigration, and also--of course--what sustains institutional racism. Do I have to spell that out in a performance??

So: 1) if performance is restored behavior in service of remembering and (of necessity) forgetting; and
2) if it's necessary to maintain the myth of an unbroken succession, the idea that things will continue as they have been, and if these plays enact the desire and the threat to that succession (but how, exactly?); and
3) if the reason for this necessity is that a sense of racial and cultural identity is based on this sense of succession, because the fear is that those others, especially the "future generations threatening to be born," are going to erase "us"; then
4) is it possible to get at that fear, and make it the center of the performance, rather that "the performance of whiteness"? and
5) if so, how (in relation to these texts)?

Questioning my assumptions: Am I just being taken in by Roach's rhetoric? How, really, is it possible to make a connection between these performances during that moment in history and our lives right now? And is the issue really "white identity"? I keep assuming that the problem is that white people don't accept their role as recipients of "white privilege" and that I can create a performance which somehow addresses that problem. I THINK THIS IS A MISGUIDED WAY TO APPROACH THIS PRODUCTION.

It would be more productive to focus on the fear of being replaced:

"Whenever the sweet desire to assimilated or to be assimilated curdles into the fear of being replaced, the moment is propitious for the performance of waste." (Roach, 173)

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I keep remembering that Roach cites the "psychoanalytical truism" that anxiety is the longing for that which we fear, and that he says these plays reflect that longing. He then connects that idea to "the fear of superabundance." If he means, by superabundance, those generations waiting to be born, or if he means the vast wealth waiting for the English as a result of their growing commercial empire (replacing Spain and inheriting her empire, in a sense); then I can understand it, I guess. Or is he also talking about sexual longing, as reflected in the longing for Omoinda? Or the fascination the crowd shows for the Kings?

But how