A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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with a slightly round body and thinning hair, and he wears a rumpled suit that lends an air of defeat to his figure. He stands upright and holds a bouquet of rose stems in front of him, after violently decapitating the flowers a few moments before. Alice leans up against the wall, arms drawn inward and her right hand nervously toying with fingers on the left. She is powerful, tall, and imposing, with brown hair pulled into a tight ponytail at the back. She leans back with one foot pushing against the wall behind her. Whereas Alice is healthy, living a comfortable middle-class life as a florist in Minneapolis, Bashir is stateless and ill, his body bearing the symptoms of hepatic encephalopathy. His fluttering hands serve as a constant reminder of a disease contracted and left untreated in the United States’ most notorious prison. The light is dim, the sounds ambient, and the world seems suspended. Alice takes a breath and looks Bashir in the eye before she admits, “Iguanas. That’s all I remember about Gitmo. Iguanas crossing the road. I was so scared of hitting one and having to pay a fucking ten thousand dollar fine.” Bashir casually responds, “The iguanas were lucky. The Endangered Species Act was enforced.”1
This scene takes place around the midpoint of the 2011 New York premiere of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s dark investigation of Guantánamo’s legacy, Lidless. Lidless is a theatrical portrait of Bashir’s racialization and subjectivation in Guantánamo. First workshopped in 2009 at the Lab Theatre of the University of Texas at Austin, before productions in Great Britain and Philadelphia, Lidless was presented by Page 73 Productions on the downtown Manhattan Walkerspace stage just a few weeks after the tenth anniversary of September 11. The first scene takes place at Guantánamo Bay in 2004 as Alice receives an executive memo authorizing sexual interrogation techniques before she proceeds with Bashir’s interrogation. The rest of the play takes place fifteen years into the future, when Alice has placed her past in Guantánamo under erasure. She lives a seemingly normal life, running a Minnesota flower shop with her husband and daughter. This world explodes when Bashir arrives to confront his former interrogator and to demand a new liver to replace his failing organ. In encounter after painful encounter, he struggles to get Alice to remember him as he restages the scenes of their interrogation, places himself in stress positions, and ultimately coaxes Alice into playing her former role as a torturer. This reunion destroys Alice’s family and highlights the intimate bonds that tie the two together. Throughout the play, law, performativity, and performance blur, blend, and collapse into each other across Bashir’s body. Two scenes, in particular, emphasize the relationship between law and performance in the making of Bashir’s racialized subjectivity: the initial interrogation in Guantánamo and Bashir’s restaging of this interrogation in Alice’s flower shop.
The play begins with the law. Before the interrogation, Alice unfolds an executive memo, which she describes as a “spankin’ new strategy, straight from the top. Invasion of Space by a Female.’”2 When warned by a colleague, “You don’t have to do this,” she responds, “But I’m allowed to. Dick Cheney says so.”3 Throughout the play, Lidless reminds us that the law is much more than a statute or an executive order communicated in a memo. It is a process that comes to life through the interplay of juridical performativity and embodied action: the law’s realization is inextricable from the performance of law.
During the interrogation scene, Alice identifies Bashir’s racial difference as a Pakistani, Muslim man as a key factor in his detention at Guantánamo. Just before interrogating him, she exposes his genitals and remarks, “It appears those rumours about Asian men are lies your ladies tell to keep you to themselves.”4 The narrative repeatedly suggests that Bashir was innocent, like so many of the detainees at Guantánamo. He was incorrectly classified as an “enemy combatant” by a system of racial profiling that articulates the often conflated and/or misrecognized racial and religious difference of “Asian men” such as Bashir as tantamount to being a national security threat. As such a threat, Bashir is placed outside the law and rendered vulnerable to exceptional forms of interrogation, culminating in his rape by Alice.5 Thus, his status as an Asian man circuitously justifies the exceptional legal status attached to his body: subject to the law but with less legal protections than an iguana.
The role of performance in Bashir’s racialization and legal subjection is narrated with a theatrical vocabulary. At different points in the play, both Alice and Bashir refer to Alice’s job at Guantánamo as “playing a role.”6 And when Alice cannot remember Bashir, he achieves recognition from her when he too begins to play his proper role. He assumes the choreography and even costume of the state: he covers his head with interrogation hoods, forges his body into stress positions, and offers to play a part in restaging the interrogation. Perhaps most horrifying, as Bashir later declares, he comes to identify with the very terms of the violence done to him in Guantánamo: “But the only way I kept from going crazy was by making myself love what they did to me.”7 Bashir’s first performance of submission in Guantánamo is violently coerced, but the second, in the flower shop, exists in the confused space between coercion and a voluntary return to a script of subjection.
In Lidless, the state profiles, misrecognizes, and apprehends Bashir based on his racial difference as a Muslim and Pakistani man. His exceptional legal status is not entirely novel. It shares a familiar resemblance with the racialization of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans as potential national security threats who are subject to legal regulation while existing outside the universal assurances of the law.8 In many ways, Lidless figures as a point of connection between the historical racialization of Asian Americans in the previous two centuries and contemporary forms of racialization in the era of the global war on terror (GWOT). Lidless is thus well situated within a tradition of Asian American plays that use the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in US law.9
A Race So Different is a study of the making of Asian American subjectivity. I argue that this process occurs through the intersection between law and performance in and on the Asian American body. As Robert S. Chang once wrote, “To bastardize Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, one is not born Asian American, one becomes one.”10 But what are the mechanisms by which this process takes place? In order to answer this question, this book takes seriously Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s contention that “race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation” but does so in a fashion that does not maintain the divide between the two.11 A central contention of this book is that formations such as the law, politics, history, nation, and race are structured by and produced through overlapping and often contesting narrative and dramatic protocols akin to aesthetic forms of cultural production, representation, and popular entertainment. This book submits that aesthetic practices directly contribute to the shaping of these formations by serving as vessels for the mediation of legal, political, historical, national, and racial knowledge. A Race So Different analyzes racial formation through the lens of performance in order to historicize and explicate the legal and cultural mechanisms responsible for the production of racial meaning in and on the Asian American body. Bringing a performance studies perspective to bear on the study of Asian American racial formation, I suggest that it is in the places where “social structure” (the law) and “cultural representation” (performance aesthetics) become most deeply entangled on the body that they assume their greatest significance.
Interdisciplinary scholarship about law and performance has, to date, often distinguished the realm of legal ritual from the domain of aesthetic practices. Legal scholarship about performance traditionally focuses narrowly on First Amendment jurisprudence, copyright, or entertainment contract law, while theater and performance scholarship usually frames the law as either a narrative theme or part of the social/historical background against which performance occurs.12 This book joins an emerging body of performance studies literature that focuses on the intersection between state politics, law, and performance, most recently in the pathbreaking work of Tony Perucci and Catherine Cole.13 Perucci’s study of Paul Robeson’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities demonstrates the ways in which performance can be mobilized by the state as “the field upon which politics is enacted” as well as the means by which a figure such as Robeson can deploy performance in order to disrupt “the containment of the theatrical frame secured and held at bay by” the government.14