Spectres of Exchange: Rights and resources in loisaida liberation-theology passion play performance

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Notes

¹In his coverage of the Iranian Revolution in 1978, Foucault reminded readers of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, ‘People always quote Marx and the opium of the people. The sentence that immediately preceded that statement and which is never quoted says that religion is the spirit of a world without spirit’. In Marx, the quote reads: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people’ (Marx and Engels 1975: 175). This is what Foucault saw in ‘a powder keg called Islam’. Unsurprisingly, he was soundly defeated in public arguments (Rodinson in Afary and Anderson 2005).

²From Foucault, ‘biopolitics’ refers to regimes of power premised on the management of life, or populations, whose productions can be deployed as an organic arsenal.

³Amartya Sen remarks, ‘The problem is not with listing important capabilities but with insisting on one predetermined canonical list of capabilities, chosen by theorists without any general social discussion or public reasoning. To have such a fixed list, emanating entirely from pure theory, is to deny the possibility of fruitful public participation on what should be included and why … public discussion and reasoning can lead to a better understanding of the role, reach and significance of particular capabilities’ (2004: 77, 81). Martha Nussbaum's list of ten ‘central human capabilities’ include Life, Bodily Health, Bodily Integrity, the Development and Expression of Senses, Imagination and Thought, Emotional Health, Practical Reason, Affiliation (both personal and political), Relationships with Other Species and the World of Nature, Play and Control over One's Environment (both material and social) (2008: 23).

⁴It was in the 1960s, of course, when Brazilian Augusto Boal first developed the Theatre of the Oppressed at the Arena Theatre. In 1967, Glauber Rocha's manifesto for the radicalization of the Brazilian Cinema Novo ('The Tricontinental Filmmaker: That Is Called The Dawn’) used language similar to Dussel's. (Randal and Stam 1982: 76).

⁵A topic notoriously narrated by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty -San Juan and New York. New York: Random House, 1965.

⁶On 6 February 2008, the New York Congressional Delegation press release states: ‘Congressman José F. Serrano (NY-16) and Congresswoman Nydia Vel´squez called on Representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) to apologize to the Puerto Rican community after the Florida Republican put out a statement saying that as “foreigners” Puerto Ricans did not qualify for tax rebates offered through the economic stimulus package’ that President George W. Bush petitioned for a declining economy.

⁷See www.notbored.org/gardens.htm. Accessed 27 February 2008.

⁸Re-reading subaltern studies, Dipesh Chakravorty explains that the provincializing project ‘refers to a history that does not yet exist … the idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it … As I have said before, it is impossible within the knowledge protocols of academic history (2000: 42–5). In the case of the Loisaida passion play performance and in the liturgies of Christianity, too, time is not integral: ‘Christ yesterday and today / The beginning and the end/Alpha and Omega / All time belongs to him/and to the ages: / To Him the glory and the power / Through every age forever / Amen’.

⁹Darién J. Davis writes, ‘in 1455, Pope Nicolas V gave the Portuguese the right to reduce to slavery the inhabitants of the southern coast of Africa who resisted the introduction of Christianity, thus in theory becoming the enemies of Christ. As a consequence, the Iberians began a modest slave trade on the Western coast of Africa … . The Portuguese set up factories, or trading posts, to deal with local middlemen and tribal chiefs. Africans contributed to the diversity of Iberian cities such as Seville and Lisbon, which were already inhabited by Jews, Arabs and Christians. Small communities of Afro-Iberians thus emerged’ (1995: xi).

¹⁰The English version that appeared at the Public Theatre was translated by Richard Nelson and directed by David Jones. The play was written for television in 1992 by Jean-Claude Carriére and subsequently adapted for the stage in 2004. Its limited use of the theatrical space did little to extend the gaze of the audience beyond the confined close-up of the televized dialogue, a technique that narrows interpretational regimes to the atomized perspective of the individual he-said/ he-said courtroom melodrama.

¹¹Much has been ventured on the representation of the ethnographic subject and the exhibition and performance of objectified persons (see Fusco 1994). As a result of the violences in the absolute conflict of colonial war, Enrique Dussel clarifies: ‘I cannot condone dominant elites in Latin America or Spain who continue speaking of the meeting between two worlds’ (1995: 55).

¹²In 1789 Alfonso was included among the twenty-three lawmakers depicted in the US House of Representatives (at the same time that slave labour was used to build the US Capitol).

¹³Then as now, rationality is said to be that species-differentiating property of the human which, in the sixteenth century at least, made it possible for the human species 1) to have a relationship to other people and their social organizations and 2) to have a relationship to the Christian God, heretical and otherwise. In Coetzee's ventroloquism, ‘The fact that animals, lacking reason, cannot understand the universe but simply have to follow its rules blindly, proves that, unlike man, they are part of it but not part of its being: that man is godlike, animals thinglike'(2003: 67).

¹⁴René Girard, a conservative Catholic in the league of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, links violence with the sacred as a necessarily sacrificial adjudication of Christianity. For Girard's position on Pope Benedict XVI (Cardinal Ratzinger's) theology, see ‘Ratzinger is Right’ (2005).

¹⁵US and other heads of state attended the funeral services, including Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Israeli President Moshe Katsav.

¹⁶Barthes writes: ‘I define the Neutral as that which outplays [déjoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral’ (2005: 6). He continues, ‘We might perhaps say that the Neutral finds its feature, its gesture, its inflection embedded in what is inimitable about it: the smile, the Leonardian smile analyzed by Freud … in which the mark of exclusion, of separation, cancels itself. To the gesture of the paradigm, of the conflict, of the arrogant meaning, represented by the constraining laugh, the gesture of the neutral would reply: smile’ (195). Thus for Barthes the practice of the neutral is to smile, ‘releas[ing] the prisoners: to scatter the signified, the catechisms’ (xiii).