A Race So Different. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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credible subjects, narratives, and readings. Yet law is discourse with a difference; the stories and characters are real and the interpretations have long-lasting consequences.”75 Rodríguez correctly observes that the events that inspire legal cases are drawn from real-world events. However, anyone who has ever been represented by a lawyer will tell you that by the time one’s experiences are translated into legal discourse and entered into a court record, they feel as foreign as would be a fictionalization of their story in a “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law and Order. This casts a dubious shadow on the notion that the stories and characters translated into the law are necessarily more consequential (or real) than those that are translated onto the dramatist’s stage.
Nor am I convinced that the law is especially imbued with a capacity to produce more “long-lasting [real-world] consequences” than are dramatic and literary narratives or other forms of aesthetic production. After all, most people have probably gleaned more legal knowledge from a show such as Law and Order than they have from reading actual legal texts. Culture shapes reality, sometimes confirms it, and at times supplants it. After all, people generally believe that Julius Caesar was killed in the Roman Senate, where Shakespeare placed the act, rather than in a side chamber of the Theater of Pompey, where he was actually assassinated. Mass forms of cultural production including, and especially, theater, film, popular music, and TV often function as thinly veiled ideological state apparatuses. These “culture industries” are thus what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called “instrument[s] of domination.”76 Aesthetic narratives can have “long-lasting consequences” that become real over time. As an aesthetic medium that gives embodied form to narrative, representational modes of performance (such as theater, performance art, or even film and TV) lend legal discourse an embodied verisimilitude that helps to transform a “statement of law” into a “statement of fact” within the popular consciousness of the audience. Popular aesthetic performances function as agents of the law, circulating legal narratives through the bloodstream of popular culture.
At the same time, in making a case for the power of aesthetics as legal agents, I do not want to idealize aesthetic practices over the law. In a discussion of the role of tribunals in response to the trauma of the Holocaust, Shoshana Felman seems to do as much when she writes, “Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to be able both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances the Holocaust. Art brings it closer. We needed art—the language of infinity—to mourn the losses and to face up to what in traumatic memory is not closed and cannot be closed.”77 Felman acknowledges a need for the law but figures the law as that which “encloses” a traumatic event in the past. She suggests that art’s function is to provide a closer proximity to such events, arguing that it is in the “slippage between law and art” that traumatic memory is negotiated. On this latter point, we are in agreement—it is in the slippage between law and aesthetics that real cultural work can be done to rectify past injustices. But to accept a definition of the law as “a discipline of limits and of consciousness” is to displace the slippery, “situational,” and performative nature of the law. This ignores the familiar resemblance and formal relationship between law and performance and sidesteps the fact that both, being equally reliant on the “independently determining moment” of embodied action, give way to the “language of infinity.” As such, while the law and aesthetic performances may both serve to “distance us” from the truth of a historical injustice, they also have the fecund potentiality to open up and rethink these injustices as we rehearse and stage the possibility of a more just future.
“A Rehearsal for the Example”: The Possibilities in Performance
In the preceding section, I sought to unsettle the line between aesthetics and the law as well as a critical rubric that would significantly privilege one over the other. In doing so, I had to sever some of our preconceptions about the causal nature of either law or performance. Or, to be more specific, while I acknowledge that both law and performance may inspire specific effects, these effects cannot necessarily be causally predicted. As I argue in chapter 4 in particular, the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter is precisely what allows for aesthetic performances to be a primary medium for disrupting the political and legal subjection of Asian Americans. The political power of performance is in its ability to enact, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, “an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations.”78 Aesthetic performances are spaces that, as much as they may be used to reify dominant racial ideology, also threaten to undo the formal “associations” between, say, dominant knowledge about racial difference and the body of the racialized subject.
Aesthetic performances are the spaces in which we can stage and experience incompleteness and openness that challenges the limits and closures of racialization and racialized subjectivity. Keen to this fact, Asian American artists have long used the stage as a space to work with the audience to challenge the racialization of Asian America. As Shimakawa argues, “the dramatic space is one where audiences are arguably willing to relax those otherwise punitively enforced restrictions on bodily identity and so may afford if not a complete repudiation of those imposed identities then at least (and at its best) a problematization of or critical engagement with them.”79 Aesthetic acts of performance, precisely because of their indeterminacy, are spaces that unleash a range of possibilities that can show how there are multiple ways of being in the world beyond the identity that the dominant culture imposes or projects onto the racialized body.
In performance, we can rehearse, stage, and materialize the stuff of a better world. Performance provides us with the means to interrupt the conditions of reproduction that reify the inequities of the present. In taking this position, I mean to signal to the reader that this book should be understood as openly situated within the tradition of Marxist cultural criticism. A Race So Different conceives of performance in the terms of Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch, who understood the stage as “a paradigmatic institution” in the process of imagining and enacting social change.80 Like the law, dramatic experiences require a decision, not only on the part of the performer but also on the part of the spectator: “They demand that the spectator make decisions, at the very least a decision as to whether he likes the performance as such.”81 Through decision, action is realized, and it is in action that a new politics emerges. Additionally, aesthetic performances have the unique capacity to imagine and give temporary form to otherwise impossible realities. In doing so, the stage becomes a “rehearsal” for dreaming the new and making it a reality: “As soon as the rehearsal for the example is staged the goal is clearly visible, but the stage, being experimental, that is, being a state of anticipation, tries out the ways in which to behave in order to achieve.”82 Performance at its best, by insisting on and demonstrating that something better is possible, verifies that this possibility can in fact become a reality.
If the space between law and aesthetics is one that is constantly traversed, blurred, and breaking down in the making of Asian American subjectivity, this book submits that both quotidian and aesthetic forms of performance can be deployed by Asian Americans as a “rehearsal for the example.” As Dorinne Kondo writes, in theater and performance “Asians and Asian Americans can ‘write our faces,’ mount institutional interventions, enact emergent identities, refigure utopian possibilities, and construct political subjectivities that might enable us to effect political change.”83 In many ways, this is a sentiment that is shared by many of the scholars of Asian American performance who have inspired this book, including Kondo, Shimakawa, Josephine Lee, Esther Kim Lee, Sarita Echavez See, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, and Christine Bacareza Balance.84 Many of the sites studied in A Race So Different are proof of the fact that Asian American performance can create spaces in which we model strategies for critiquing and complicating the racialization and subjection of Asian Americans, while staging otherwise impossible potentialities that push against the limits of the present.
The structure of this book is loosely chronological, tracing the production of exceptional juridical subjectivity for Asian America from the Asian-exclusion era into the GWOT. The first two chapters consider how stage performances can act as legal functionaries in their own right. In chapter 1, I return to a critical text in Asian American studies, Madame Butterfly, with a comparative study of the three original versions