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Abstract
What does it mean for progressive performance activists to use citizenship as an animating rhetoric? To address this question, I examine the activist tactics of two ideologically opposed groups: the civilian border-watch organizations known as Minutemen and a neo-anarchist collective called the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. While the Minutemen pursue a particular paleoconservative ideal of citizen-as-activist, the Clowns eschew citizenship rhetoric altogether. Through an analysis of the two groups, I conclude that citizenship as a concept operates in tension with radical democratic ideals of equality and liberty for all. Nevertheless, its hegemonic effectiveness in progressive endeavors makes it indispensible.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Sonja Kuftinec, Alan Sikes, and the anonymous reader for their feedback and support throughout the writing process.
Notes
Sections of this article first appeared as part of a plenary presentation at the 2008 meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research. Subsequent research was completed with the assistance of the Louisiana State University Summer Office of Sponsored Research Summer Research Stipend
1. My definition ruthlessly (but not, I think, inaccurately) boils down a robust, variegated discourse among citizenship studies scholars. I draw here primarily on the work of Charles Tilly, as well as Engin F. CitationIsin and Bryan S. Turner, who usefully highlight the contractual/relational, state–individual features of citizenship. Work by Ruth Lister points to the more horizontal (individual-to-individual) features of citizenship.
2. Simcox and Gilchrist initially jointly launched a Minuteman initiative in 2003; to this day, they are generally credited with co-founding the Minutemen. Financial disagreements caused a schism between the two in 2005, however, and the two separate organizations were born. David CitationNeiwert's article on the Minutemen presents an overview of this history. These two organizations and their offshoots operate distinct sites, each with their own charters, FAQs, and histories (Minuteman Civil Defense Corps home page; Jim Gilchrist's Minuteman Project, Inc. home page). Local chapters of the Minutemen typically run their own home pages, replicating, adapting, or linking to information from one or both groups’ web pages. More recently, as Zveika CitationKrieger chronicles, the two main groups have splintered further over leadership and financial issues. As CitationKrieger notes, a variety of neo-Minuteman organizations are currently jostling for the supremacy once enjoyed by Simcox's and Gilchrist groups. In practice, however, and despite considerable rancor between the “generations” of Minuteman organizations, Simcox and Gilchrist retain authority as primary spokespersons for Minuteman-related philosophy and practice. Moreover, the substance of Simcox's Standard Operating Procedures still form the basis for most “official” Minuteman activity, and some version of his guidelines can be found on just about any chapter or offshoot website. I thus take his articulation of goals and practices as representative of the movement as a whole.
3. A word on nomenclature: given that “America” and “American” refer to two continents’ worth of nations, I generally prefer to use “US” or “USA” when referring specifically to the United States of America. Minuteman discourse, however, uses “America/n” as a synonym for “USA.” Rather than overuse scare quotes, I use “America” or “American” in this paper specifically to reference the Minutemen's mythic conception of the USA.
4. Edward CitationAshbee and Robert J. Antonio each offer cogent introductions to and histories of paleoconservatism, and I draw on their overviews here as a balance to Buchanan's own rhetoric.
5. Many of Buchanan's popular writings reflect his paleoconservative views. The chapter “What is a Nation?” from his 2006 State of Emergency provides a solid overview of his vision of nationhood and citizenship.
6. Simcox explicitly warns against becoming a Minuteman to express anger “toward people who are fleeing economic disenfranchisement” (Simcox, SOP “The Law”).
7. The claims of Native Americans, including those whose ancestors were displaced or eradicated by the “nation of immigrants” as it expanded westward, do not receive much airtime in Minuteman discourse. Neither do Minutemen touch on the U.S.'s history of obligatory immigration (e.g., slavery).
8. Buchanan proves well aware of this term's theatrical origins (i.e., the eponymous 1908 play by Israel CitationZangwill), often quoting the main character's speech in which he recalls seeing lines of immigrants at Ellis Island: “Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American” (quoted in Buchanan 225; the original, not cited by Buchanan, is Zangwill 33).
9. Aztlán of course refers to the historic, pre-conquest nation of the indigenous Nahua peoples (thus the adjective “Aztec”). For some groups, such as MEChA (CitationMovimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Atzlán, “Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán”), Aztlán serves as an aspirational rally point, a symbol of a heritage and land stolen by European invaders and reclaimed through present-day education and activism (see MEChA's website). MEChA and other anti-assimilationist groups regularly figure as enemies in Minutemen discourse.
10. CitationAshbee points out, however, that many paleoconservative critics are themselves less squeamish about their debt to Gramsci, fashioning their cultural strategy as an insurgent “war of position,” Gramsci's term for a party or State's political/cultural, as opposed to purely military, struggle against enemies (CitationAshbee 78). For more on the war of position, see Gramsci 229–39.
11. In other contexts, the spatial-political metaphors of forward/backward transformation reverse themselves. In ecological debates, conservationists are the left-wingers, advocating a turning back of the clock to an earlier, less polluting time. Those in favor of “progress” are by contrast typically those who want fewer checks on industrial interactions with the environment so that they may move forward with newer technologies (and profit margins).
12. Mouffe sets out this argument in Chapter 4 of The Democratic Paradox.
13. For another meditation on how Boal-inspired techniques can (and cannot) facilitate a sense of community between participants, see Sonja CitationKuftinec's account of her experiences working with youth in the Balkans and in Israel/Palestine.
14. Links to video footage of these and other activities (including clips from the news story) remain available via YouTube and Indymedia (see the References section).
15. Clowns are encouraged to undergo “training” in the form of “bigshoe camps” (basically a workshop in clown improv) and join “gaggles” of other clowns, but there is no central authority to enforce these suggestions (CIRCA homepage).
16. The main, UK-based CIRCA website (http://www.clownarmy.org) contains a range of information about CIRCA's “mission” and organization (such as it is). For more detailed accounts of various CIRCA activities, see articles by CitationKolonel Klepto and Major Up Evil (CIRCA representatives) as well as journalistic accounts by Matt CitationSalusbury and Jo CitationKnowsley (reporters who each “embedded” with a UK Clown contingent).
17. Graeber refers here to actions not by CIRCA specifically (his article pre-dates CIRCA's first appearance) but to a similar group called the Revolutionary Anarchist Clown Bloc. See also Ben CitationShepard's account of protest slogan parodies during the 2003 anti-war protests.
18. Of the array of works responding to or expanding Bakhtin's ideas, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's Politics and Poetics of Transgress is a useful introduction. The Clowns themselves (the ones who dabble in cultural theory, at least) tend to invoke Bakhtin somewhat less critically and more rhapsodically than Stallybrass and White do.
19. For other descriptions of this renaissance (referred to variously as neo-anarchism or post-anarchism), see articles by Saul CitationNewman, Todd CitationMay, and Immanuel CitationWallerstein. While each emphasizes a slightly different aspect of the post-anarchist trend, Graeber's description is representative.
20. Graeber and Day give thumbnail sketches of neoliberalism. David CitationHarvey's monograph provides a detailed introduction to neoliberalism. Wendy CitationBrown's article focuses on neoliberalism's corrosive effect on liberal democratic societies.
21. Brown: “Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity…. It is this gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation” (para. 29).
22. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci defines hegemony in various ways. I use the following as my guide here: “The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony … is characterized by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent” (80f).
23. The specific phrase appears in the question and answer session following a 1999 lecture Žižek gave at Bard College (“Human Rights”). For a more thoroughgoing treatment of this blackmail concept (which he later christens denkverbot—a prohibition on thought), see Žižek's 2001 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (1–4).
24. Tony CitationEvans and Allison Ayers offer a potent analysis of how neoliberalism reroutes citizenship rhetoric into non-economic ends.
25. Terry CitationEagleton's famous quote: “Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair in every sense, a permissible rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off” (148). Stallybrass and White review this and other anti-carnival cautions (while providing a counter-argument) in their introduction.
26. “Ethical spectacle … must always root itself in the real,” insists Duncombe. “Likewise, political dreams, when they are ethical, are always recognizable as dreams. They may promise magical transformation, but they also frankly acknowledge that they are magical (168).