Introduction to Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform

Abstract

This introduction outlines an aesthetic of refusal as it emerges from instances of racialized exhaustion. Described as an aesthetics of minoritarian inaction and non-reproductivity, refusal challenges the centrality of action and repetition as the central tenets of political performance. Instead, the two valences of performing refusal/refusing to perform name an ethics of relation under racial capitalism, negating the dialectic of assimilation or resistance that shape minoritarian political performance, in favor of tactics such as opacity, imperceptibility, and obscurity.

Keywords:

• Fatigue
• refusal
• apathy
• obscurity
• opacity
• interiority
• racialization
• abstraction
• minoritarian aesthetics

Notes on contributors

Lilian Mengesha is the Fletcher Foundation Assistant Professor of Dramatic Literature at Tufts University in the department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. Her research lives at the intersection of performance and affect theory and critical indigenous studies. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Theatre Review, The Drama Review and Latin American Theatre Review. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Brown University.

Lakshmi Padmanabhan is currently a Research Fellow with the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and faculty in the department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research interests are in the fields of experimental film and photography, queer feminisms, and postcolonial studies. Her writing has appeared in Post45, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, and is forthcoming in the anthology Locations/Dislocations: Transnational and Translocal Feminist Art, 1960–1979. She has contributed catalog essays and curated experimental film with BRIC Arts and SAWCC in New York, NY, Magic Lantern Cinema in Providence, RI and the Center for Contemporary South Asia, at Brown University. She received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

Notes

1. Our conception of fatigue certainly resonates with dance and performance theorist André Lepecki’s formulation that movement, particularly within dance studies, forges compulsive subjectivity. Thus, Lepecki asks us to re-imagine the political implications of stillness and non-movement (2006). In this issue, however, we showcase the draining ways that racialization and colonial capitalism live on and move through minoritarian subjects, and how accumulative fatigue arrests political resistance altogether.

2. While our genealogy of refusal here is focused on forms of racialized refusal in the face of racial capitalist violence, we do recognize the resonances with figures such as Henry David Thoreau’s conception of civil disobedience and the recent recuperation of Melville’s Bartleby, The Scrivener in the work of Gilles Deleuze (1997) and Giorgio Agamben (1999). Nevertheless, we do not deal with the political implications of those scholars given the particularity of the problem of racialization and political recognition we are dealing with here.

3. See Adeyemi’s essay in this issue for a further engagement with Wynter’s critique.

4. While we are not pursuing a strictly delimited field of “political action” such as that of the Habermasian “public sphere,” our sense of refusal as a practice takes as its ground Hannah Arendt’s (1998) definition of the political sphere where action is always a means toward particular ends. In contrast to this political sphere, defined by a means-ends dynamic that hinges on an identitarian politics, we could locate refusal with forms of ethical inaction, what Giorgio Agamben describes as a means without end (2000).

5. See, for example, the special issue on “Living Labor” in this journal (2017).