Power and privilege in neoliberal perspective: the Laboratory for global performance and politics at Georgetown university

ABSTRACT

The Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University is an interdisciplinary endeavour operating at the intersection of theatre and international relations. It develops new work; presents global performance; establishes dynamic networks of young and established artists; and cultivates diverse community and financial partnerships. Interviews with Lab staff, archival material, and the author’s experience indicate that The Lab functions both as a symbiotic performance-politics relationship that leverages locally voiced performance to enliven global political issues and as a necessary response to a major research institution’s neoliberal formations, formations that it seeks to sidestep as much as possible, despite being imbricated within them.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• politics
• interdisciplinary
• collaboration

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Kim Solga, editor of this special issue, for her thoughtful comments as this piece developed. My gratitude also goes to the multiple colleagues that reviewed this piece, for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

I have previously been a part-time paid employee of The Lab in various capacities, as described in this article.

Notes on contributor

Asif Majid is a scholar-artist-educator who researches, performs, makes work, and teaches at the intersection of performance and politics. He is pursuing a practice-based PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance at The University of Manchester, and can be found online at www.asifmajid.com.

ORCID

Asif Majid http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0765-9583

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Lab staff come from either one group interview with all Lab staff members in January 2018 or a second follow-up interview with former Managing Director Jojo Ruf in June 2018.

2. This is one of neoliberalism’s key tenets, in which traditionally defined roles are collapsed into one another or the responsibilities allocated to those roles are merged.

3. In anthropology, texts that speak to ethnographic representation of Others are Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ‘Ire in Ireland’ (2007) and Amanda Coffey’s The Ethnographic Self (1999). This challenge is a hallmark of anthropological research, manifesting no matter the subfield in question.

4. Neoliberalism is also the heartbeat of international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Both of these bodies use financial heft to compel debt-ridden countries – often from the Global South – to adopt neoliberal economic policies in exchange for loans, through predatory packages known as structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that require nations to cut social services and privatise industries. SAPs have been critiqued for: causing or exacerbating poverty (Shah 2013; Easterly 2000), stagnating or negatively impacting economic growth (Sylla 2018; Easterly 2005; Logan and Mengisteab 1993), reducing available healthcare options (McPake 2009), being associated with rises in tuberculosis levels (Bakalar 2008), interfering in national sovereignty (Kaiser 2018), and functioning as neocolonial and neoimperial enterprises (Jahn 2005; McGregor 2005).

5. Ruf left the organisation in January 2019, after working with The Lab since its founding. I reference her here because she was instrumental in its formation, ethos, and operation up to that point.

6. This is not to say that theatre itself is only ever text-based, as numerous scholars have argued. Performance ethnographer Dwight Conquergood’s critique of the Western obsession with ‘scriptocentrism’ is one example of such an argument (2002, 147).

7. Anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer describes ‘hip hop diplomacy’ as the US State Department recruiting and paying Black Muslim and non-Muslim artists to perform overseas in ‘Muslim-majority locations such as Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Occupied Territories’ in an effort to ‘manage’ both ‘the US profile abroad’ and ‘young Muslims who are perceived as potential terrorists’ (2016, 180). This implicates these artists in the ‘imperial relationship’ that the US attempts to maintain with the ‘Muslim World,’ even if those artists reject that relationship altogether (2016, 180).

8. I offer more information about the Think Tank at the end of this section.

9. Neither Goldman nor Schneider chose to share what their stipend amounts to.

10. I use the term ‘US-American’ to recognise and write against the imperial connotations of the word ‘American.’ ‘American’ belies the fact that dozens of countries -- from Canada in the north to Argentina and Chile in the south -- make up the Americas. The US’ claim of this continental term as its national identifier is consistent with the country’s founding imperial and genocidal ethic, deployed at the expense of thriving indigenous communities.

11. That documentary is now complete and is titled Queens of Syria (Fedda 2014).