Cargo: Staging Slavery at the Cape

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Notes

1. Mark Fleishman, Drama department, University of Cape Town, 31–37 Orange St, Gardens, Cape Town, 8001, RSA. Email: [email protected] Brandstetter, ‘Choreography as a Cenotaph: The Memory of Movement’, in Remembering the Body, ed. by Gabriele Brandstetter and H. Völckers (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000). C. Nadia Seremetakis, ‘The Other City of Silence: Disaster and the Petrified Bodies of History’, in Remembering the Body.

2. Achille Mbembé, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

3. Achille Mbembé and Christian Hoeller, On the Postcolony (2002), http://www.chimurenga.co.za/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=40.

4. Achille Mbembé, ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, Public Culture, 16.3 (2004), 373–405.

5. The site is commonly referred to as Prestwich Place.

6. Tim Hart, 2003, cited in Nick Shepherd, ‘Archaeology Dreaming: Post-apartheid Urban Imaginaries and the Bones of the Prestwich Street Dead’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 7.1 (2007), 3–28 (p. 7).

7. Act 25 of 1999.

8. SAHRA 2003, Permit No. 80/03/06/001/51 issued by the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) Archaeology, Paleontology, Meteorites and Heritage Objects Permit Committee to T. J. G. Hart of the Archaeology Contracts Office.

9. Originally the committee was known as the Hands Off Prestwich Street Ad Hoc Committee, echoing the Hands Off District Six campaign in earlier times. Later it became the Prestwich Place Project Committee (PPPC).

10. Shepherd, ‘Archaeology Dreaming’, p. 8.

11. SAHRA, 2003, p. 6, cited in Heidi Grunebaum, ‘Unburying the Dead in the “Mother City”: Urban Topographies of Erasure’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America (PMLA), 122.1 (2007), 210–19 (p. 215).

12. Shepherd, ‘Archaeology Dreaming’, p. 20.

13. SAHRA Permit Committee 2, cited in Grunebaum, ‘Unburying the Dead’, p. 213.

14. Ibid., p. 214.

15. Cited in Shepherd, ‘Archaeology Dreaming’, p. 11.

16. Grunebaum, ‘Unburying the Dead’, p. 214.

17. According to Nick Shepherd, the term ‘vrijplaats’, as used in this context, comes from Christian Ernsten, ‘a graduate student in the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town who followed events closely’, as quoted in ‘Archaeology Dreaming’, p. 12. In this regard, see Christian Ernsten, Stylizing Cape Town: Problematizing the Heritage Management of Prestwich Street (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 2006).

18. Sato, 2006, cited in Shepherd, ‘Archaeology Dreaming’, p. 21.

19. The silence caused by ‘erasure’ is of course different from a consciously conceived project of silence as an ethical response. As Julian Jonker argues, there is a need to ‘differentiate between articulate silence and inarticulate silence, or even to describe silence as a dialectic of the articulate and the inarticulate’, in ‘The Silence of the Dead: Ethical and Juridical Significances of the Exhumations at Prestwich Place, Cape Town, 2003–2005’ (unpublished master's thesis, Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, 2005), p. 68. However, it is my contention that the differentiation does not do away with the contradiction and its resultant demand for response.

20. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

21. I use the term ‘performance’ here rather than ‘drama’ or ‘theatre’ because the works produced as part of this project display a wide range of live performance genres and combinations of these and do not easily reduce to traditional notions of theatre or drama. Central to all the performances, however, is an insistence on the primacy of the body and its relationship to space and a concurrent devaluation of the verbal text. This is fundamental to the idea of speaking ‘the unspeakable’ that is at the heart of the project. This challenge to speak ‘the unspeakable’ is articulated by Jonker at the end of the second chapter, entitled ‘The Ethics of Memory and Silence’, of his master's thesis (Jonker, ‘The Silence of the Dead’, p. 75).

22. The production was commissioned by and premiered at Spier (24 February to 4 March 2007), a wine estate located 45 minutes outside of Cape Town on the outskirts of the town of Stellenbosch. The estate was once a major site of slave-holding in the Cape. Today it is a major tourist site and boasts a large outdoor amphitheatre that stages opera, dance and theatre productions in the summer months. The second season was in Grahamstown (28 June to 7 July 2007) in the Eastern Cape province near the city of Port Elizabeth as part of South Africa's National Arts Festival, the largest all-comers arts festival outside of Edinburgh (see Megan Lewis, ‘Past, Present and Future: A Tense South Africa Performs’, PAJ 89, 30.2 [2008], 93–101; and Loren Kruger, ‘Performance Review: National Arts Festival’, Theatre Journal, 60.1 [2008], 117–20). The third season was at the Baxter Theatre (8 to 11 August 2007), an arts centre attached to the University of Cape Town, and the final season was at Artscape (12 to 21 October 2007), the major opera house complex in Cape Town, part of the old Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB).

23. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26 (Spring 1989), 7–24 (p. 14).

24. James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 9. It is worth emphasizing that in the sense that it is intended here, a site need not be a place, it could just as well be an object or a set of objects, an archive of documents or images, or a piece of music, or a combination of all of these.

25. Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Roth and Salas (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2001), pp. 1–13 (p. 3).

26. For more information on the company, see http://www.magnettheatre.co.za.

27. Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 20; Jeremy Ahearne, Michel De Certeau: Interpretation and its Other (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 22.

28. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

29. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 179.

30. Ibid., p. 178.

31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 24.

32. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p.186.

33. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), p. 217.

34. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 188.

35. Ibid., p. 189.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., p. 55.

38. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 136.

39. Ricoeur 2004, p. 137.

40. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 14.

41. Seremetakis, ‘The Other City of Silence’, p. 310.

42. Marc, Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. by Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), p. 61.

43. The notion of ‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ or ‘involuntary witnesses’ refers to those who create records of some aspect of society in one period that become a testimony in another period without this being the intention of the ‘witness’ (Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 170–71). Bloch argues that ‘in the course of its development, historical research has gradually been led to place more and more confidence in […] the evidence of witnesses in spite of themselves’, in The Historian's Craft, p. 51.

44. Bloch acknowledges the unwritten traces, referring to them as ‘vestiges of the past’, in ibid., p. 53, but deals with them in far less detail and complexity than he deals with the written traces.

45. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 174.

46. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125 (p. 123).

47. The idea of an ‘education of attention’ passed on from generation to generation is taken from James Gibson's Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), p. 254.

48. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 22.

49. D. Cosgrove, ‘Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes’, in Horizons in Human Geography, ed. by Derek Gregory and Rex Walford (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 118–35 (pp. 120–27).

50. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 208.

51. Ana Sanchez-Colberg, ‘Altered States and Subliminal Spaces: Charting the Road towards a Physical Theatre’, Performance Research, 1.2 (1996), 40–56 (p. 43). The body-space nexus as point of origin can also be traced to the work of Rudolf Laban. According to Sanchez-Colberg, ‘In Laban's work the central guiding premise is that of the “body in space”. Before there is movement, there is a body in space — a body that has orientation, dimensions, inclination, that by virtue of just existing occupies and produces space. Movement follows from this first principle’ (p. 44). This idea can also be found in the work of Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): ‘Before producing effects in the material world […] before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space’ (p. 41).

52. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 37.

53. Ibid., p. 38.

54. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. 41–2 and 53–4, for more detail on ‘emplotment’ as a grasping together of disparate elements into a narrative whole.

55. TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) is a joint Dutch, Asian and South African research partnership intended to preserve, restore and increase access to the VOC (Dutch-East India Company) archives. For more information, see http://www.tanap.net.

56. Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, [1994] 1997), p. xxv.

57. De Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 236.

58. Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963); John Hodgson and Ernest Richards, Improvisation (London: Methuen, 1966); Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1981); Louise Steinman, The Knowing Body: Elements of Contemporary Performance and Dance (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1986); Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow, Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan, 1990); Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers: Theatresports and the Art of Making Things Happen (London: Faber & Faber, 1999); Chris Johnston, The Improvisation Game: Discovering the Secrets of Spontaneous Performance (London: Nick Hern Books, 2006).

59. Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error (London: Vintage Books, [1994] 2006); and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003).

60. Antonio Damasio, ‘Embodied Perceptual Practices: Towards an Embrained and Embodied Model of Mind for Use in Actor Training and Rehearsal’, Theater Topics, 14.2 (2004), 445–71 (p. 454).

61. All improvisation, and all performance for that matter, begins in silence. In fact, moments of silence punctuate the subtle shifts of action throughout a performance. This silence is not empty, however; it is full of potential energy waiting to become kinetic, to burst into action at one or another level. According to Eugenio Barba,⁶ [T]he Greek word enérgheia means […]: to be ready for action, on the verge of producing work' (The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology[London: Routledge, 1995], p. 55). The above resonates with the notion of an articulate silence and its insistent demand for utterance referred to by Jonker above.

62. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 146.

63. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

64. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, [1906–1911] 1966).

65. Ermarth, Sequel to History, p. 148.

66. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 173.

67. As Ermarth shows in Sequel to History, historical time is not a given, it is produced. It is equivalent to the kind of space produced by the Quattrocento: the system of single-point perspective developed by Renaissance painters. It coordinates ‘past, present and future – and by implication all the possible viewpoints contained therein – into a single system of measurement [and thereby] organizes […] the faculty of consciousness in much the same way that realist painting rationalizes the faculty of sight’ (p. 66). The result is an objective view of the world, regardless of perspective, of the particular location of each spectator.

68. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Whitman’, in Essays Critical and Clinical translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 56–60 (p. 58).

69. Achille Mbembé, ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’, Public Culture, 16.3 (2004), 373–405 (p. 404).

70. Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 30.

71. ‘Mnemic’ is used here in the Freudian sense, to signify a hysterical thought with an unaccounted-for intense affect.

72. Quoted in Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 37.