Performing hope at hopelessness: radical rhetorics, critical states, vulnerable populations

ABSTRACT

My performances and installations question the connections between the forces that cause social injustices and environmental catastrophes. Affective multimedia performances generate spaces of rupture, propelling radical interventions. Here, I consider the role of the activist artist as a form of radical rhetoric in situating contemporary conceptual art at/about the end of the world as a platform that focuses on seemingly distinct global issues on apart contexts e.g. the Syrian refugee crisis and climate change. I reimagine some of these stories in futurities to dismantle such hegemonic structures, subverting possibilities for the subaltern. Rhetorical studies have excluded the words and worlds of the minoritized, reducing its reach to limited Western discourses and Eurocentric genealogies, while interdisciplinary fields more comfortable in the margins, e.g. performance studies, queer of color critique, made spaces for the voices and experiences of the subaltern and the global majority. Radical rhetorics transports agency to the experiences of the minoritized individuals. I discuss how my artistic works juxtapose narratives of the world's end and radical rhetoric through decolonizing the minoritized identity, performing hope at hopelessness, and how they centralize the experiences of the always, already posthuman minorities, shaping radical rhetorics through multimedia art and performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Activist performance
• minoritized protest
• decolonial methods
• dark ecology
• radical rhetoric

Notes

1 Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 277.

2 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 117.

3 Serap Erincin, “Ecological Homeostasis,” Global Performance Studies 4 (2021): 1–27.

4 I expand on this elsewhere also, see Serap Erincin. “Fictocriticism, Futurity, and Critical Imagination: Writing Stories as Activism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2021): 342–3.

5 For an example of this kind of worldmaking and radical rhetoric through art see Serap Erincin, “Imagined Communities before the End of the World: The Liberation of Marginalized Beings,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2021): 339–41.

6 See Serap Erincin, “Decolonizing Identity in Performance: Claiming My Mother Tongue in Suppression of Absence,” Frontiers (Boulder) 41, no. 1 (2020): 179–95, for an analysis of decolonial performance methods.

7 Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, Readings in Performance and Ecology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5–6.

8 Scott Rasmussen, “New Allies in Killer Whale Recovery? Orcas Adopted by Obama Girls,” San Juan Journal, June 9, 2015, https://www.sanjuanjournal.com/news/new-allies-in-killer-whale-recovery-orcas-adopted-by-obama-girls/ (accessed May 17, 2020).

9 For those of us, writing and making work about refugees and border rhetoric, especially international artists and scholars of color, the considerations of social and environmental injustice are inseparable. See for instance how Noor Ghazal Aswad complicates land dispossession in her recent article, “Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis,” Environmental Communication 18, no. 1–2 (2024): 1–8. For additional deliberations on performances of social justice by nonwestern refugees of color see Serap Erincin “Politics of Transdiasporic Identity: Regarding the Pain of ‘the Other’ and Performing Home in Diaspora” in The Routledge Handbook of Ethnicity and Race in Communication (New York: Routledge, 2024), 284–97.

10 The names Ofelia and Virginia reference Shakespeare’s Hamlet, specifically the character Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. The play also included brief reimagined sections from the writings of Woolf and Ophelia’s parts in Hamlet.

11 “The Paris Agreement.” UNFCC, https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/paris_agreement_english_.pdf (accessed June 1, 2020).

12 Serap Erincin “Telling Dark Stories, Performing Dark Ecologies: The Matter of 0.2 degrees,” Global Performance Studies 4, no. 1 (2021).

13 Elsewhere I also write about the rhetorical role of markers of identity on voice and language to decolonize performance. Post-publication this work is also in conversation with Amanda Nell Edgar’s study on the relationship between rhetoric of voice and identity in mediated works. She writes “pre-existing, culturally constructed marginalizations mark themselves onto bodies through the voice. As voices circulate through culture, they are taken up by listeners in processes that discipline, reward, and replicate, depending upon context. In this way, repetition structures the rhetoric of vocal sound, taking up the tools of media circulation and cultural structures of oppression. This process marks voices both as evidence of difference and as a naturalized extension of the body, thereby demonstrating a mechanism of marginalization that is literally invisible, and therefore difficult to discuss and dismantle.” Amanda Nell Edgar, Culturally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Voice and Identity in a Mediated Culture (United States: Ohio State University Press, 2019).

14 Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, et al. “More than just temperature—climate change and ocean acidification,” Australian Academy of Science, https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/ocean-acidification (accessed June 4, 2020).

15 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 9

16 “How Is Today’s Warming Different from the Past?” NASA Earth Observatory, June 3, 2010, https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php (accessed May 20, 2020).

17 For instance, the Spanish Flu pandemic, which peaked in 1918, reached its destructive levels as a result of the conditions of the first world war.

18 Christopher Klein, “How Pandemic Spurred Cities to Make More Green Space for People,” History.com, April 27, 2020, https://www.history.com/news/cholera-pandemic-new-york-city-london-paris-green-space (accessed June 5, 2020).

19 Timothy Morton, Being Ecological (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 15–16.

20 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

21 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

22 Serap Erincin “Performing the Other: Post-Humanism and Mediatized Senses in The Wooster Group’s Production of The Room,” Modern Drama 65, no. 2 (2022): 230.

23 Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

24 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 148.