Living Foreignness/Community: Potentiality and “Ordinary” Performances of Being/Non-Being

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to show how foreignness/community is continuously performed in “ordinary” life, both reifying and resisting normative/normalized ways of being. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's concept of potentiality, I outline a performance-based framework that sees foreignness-as-potentiality passing into the actuality of community. Foreignness is layered, acting in and being acted upon various sites of the body, including nationality, but also gender, color, sexuality and profession. Given my location as a scholar of Indian origin in the US academe, I consider intersecting academic roles of teacher, student and author to illustrate the systemic violence wrought by mainstream normalization, which seeks to forcibly erode ambiguity (and thus foreignness), and the dangers of shock-and-awe spectacle that circumvents deconstruction. I argue that interventions are performed most effectively when they keep ambiguity intact, subvert spectacle, and locate foreignness-as-potentiality within community. The implications of potentiality for the “materializing” performativities through performance are also considered.

Keywords:

• foreignness
• community
• potentiality
• performance
• performativity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank TPQ editor Dr. Heidi Rose and the two anonymous reviewers for their incredible feedback and support throughout the writing of this essay. Thanks are also due to Dr. Sandra Faulkner for her comments on an earlier draft of this work. Finally, I am grateful to all the amazing people who have been a crucial part of the personal narratives I recount here. (Pseudonyms have been used for all individuals.) Portions of this work have been presented at the National Communication Association 2008 conference and the International Communication Association 2012 conference.

Notes

1. Agamben theorizes that the sovereign is a sacred being, above the common rule of law, but framing it for others (citizens). The sovereign is both part—and yet not—of the community, and his power derives from this straddling of exclusion and inclusion, that is, his exception.

2. At the same time, Fassett and Warren warn that not all strategies are violent or constraining, and not all tactics are liberating: There is scope for these roles to be interchanged, depending on the context, nature of entities involved, and the identities sought to reified/resisted (83). It is important here to distinguish normalization from actuality (community), as well. I take normalization to be an enforced and institutionalized mainstreaming, an epistemological erasure of difference and particularities via communicative “violence” (Warner). For Yep, normalization is a “symbolically, discursively, physically, psychologically, and materially violent form of social regulation and control” (18), which others individuals and groups, segregating them from an idealized norm. Normalization thus seeks to bracket discrete categories of communal and foreign, in ways that deny both community and foreignness.

3. In fact, Fassett and Warren argue that it is precisely these tropes that invoke the classroom as not-quite the “real” world (62–63).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rahul Mitra

Rahul Mitra is at the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Purdue University