INDIGENEITY, TIME AND THE COSMOPOLITICS OF POSTCOLONIAL BELONGING IN THE ATOMIC AGE

Abstract

This essay canvasses theatrical renditions of time, mobility and belonging in Marie Clements' Burning Vision (2002) and Trevor Jamieson and Scott Rankin's Ngapartji Ngapartji (2005), each dealing with the social and environmental legacies of the Atomic Age in remote indigenous homelands in Canada and Australia, respectively. The plays situate local memories within the currents of global history by delivering intimate yet epic accounts of the effects of nuclear industrialization on land, water, species and human communities. Drawing from Tim Ingold's theorizations of dwelling and Nigel Clark's recent work on the geological scales of cosmpolitanism, I explore ways in which performances of mobility and intercultural connectedness in these theatrical works articulate with conventional notions of indigeneity as a marker of rootedness or belonging to particular geographical spaces.

Keywords:

• belonging
• cosmopolitics
• indigeneity
• mobility
• nuclear warfare
• temporality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the European Research Council for supporting the archival and field research that has contributed to this essay. I wish to thank … for jointly funding these events, and the Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin for hosting me during the project.

Notes

¹The term refers to people exposed to radioactive emissions from nuclear tests and accidents.

²In the United States, for example, federal compensation to nuclear test victims was not legislated until 1990. A 2011 amendment to include downwinders in areas such as the Mescalero Apache site in 1945 has been introduced into the US Congress but not yet passed into law. See S.791 – Radiation Exposure Compensation Act Amendments of 2011, online at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-s791/text (accessed 26 March 2013).

³These arguments are voiced on numerous Internet sites as part of a grassroots activist agenda. See Cultural Survival Quarterly (1993) for a summary of indigenous groups affected by such industries.

⁴I wish to thank Nigel Clark for allowing me to draw on this conference paper, which contains ideas expressed in a different form from the article it later generated.

⁵Discussion of Burning Vision is based primarily on the published text, supplemented by reviews, interviews, archival photographs and miscellaneous production records.

⁶This account is drawn from the summary of the CBC documentary Waterheart: The Deline Project (2009), online at http://www.cbc.ca/north/features/waterheart/ (accessed 26 March 2013).

⁷Both the play and the broader project were developed under the auspices of Big hART, a company devoted to art-based community development. The online Pitjantjatjara language-learning project is ongoing; see www.ngapartji.org (accessed 26 March 2013).

⁸My account of Ngapartji Ngapartji is based on DVD footage of a live performance on 23 January 2008 at Belvoir Street in Sydney. Sincere thanks to Big hART for supplying this recording. I attended the short version of the play in Melbourne in 2005.

⁹I use ‘between’ here because the play adopts a cross-lingual mode that often avoids rendering one language into the other but rather combines them in lyrical ways. While Pitjantjatjara is Jamieson's mother tongue, which he learnt mainly as an adult, his first language is English.

¹⁰The long campaign for compensation to address the affects of the Maralinga tests has involved several inquiries, including the Australian government's 1985 McClelland Royal Commission, which eventually led to a $13.5 million payment to the Maralinga Tjarutja people in 1994. The British government contributed to the test site clean-up, but has refused to pay compensation for the effects of radiation sickness among Aboriginals and Australian servicemen.

¹¹Grehan (2010) explores the issue of reciprocity in the play through the prism of Levinasian ethics, while Casey (2009) questions the exchanges at issue in political terms. What I am identifying here is a simpler but perhaps equally profound relation based not on a philosophy of susceptibility/responsibility to the Other but a politics of mutual intimacy.

¹²Across the decade since its 2002 premiere and subsequent tour to Ottawa and Montreal in 2003, new productions, staged readings and translations have appeared in Mexico City (2005), Eugene (Oregon, 2009), Grand Prairie (Alberta, 2009) and the small French industrial town of Pont à Mousson (2011).

¹³Productions were also structured to accommodate community cast changeovers during tours. In 2010 Jamieson took a solo version to Rotterdam. In addition, Ngapartji Ngapartji was translated for a Japanese performance at the International Theatre Institute in 2011.