THE OTHER HISTORY OF INTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE

Abstract

In the early I9oos, Franz Kafka wrote a story that began, Honored members of the Academy! You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape (1979:245). Entitled A Report to an Academy, it was presented as the testimony of a man from the Gold Coast of Africa who had lived for several years on display in Germany as a primate. That account was fictitious and created by a European writer who stressed the irony of having to demonstrate one's humanity; yet it is one of many literary allusions to the real history of ethnographic exhibition of human beings that has taken place in the West over the past five centuries. While the experiences of many of those who were exhibited is the stuff of legend, it is the accounts by observers and impresarios that comprise the historical and literary record of this practice in the West. My collaborator Guillermo G6mez-Pefia and I were intrigued by this legacy of performing the identity of an Other for a white audience, sensing its for us as performance artists dealing with cultural identity in the present. Had things changed, we wondered? How would we know, if not by unleashing those ghosts from a history that could be said to be ours? Imagine that I stand before you then, as did Kafka's character, to speak about an experience that falls somewhere between and fiction. What follows are my reflections on performing the role of a noble savage behind the bars of a golden cage. Our original intent was to create a satirical commentary on Western concepts of the exotic, primitive Other; yet, we have had to confront two unexpected realities in the course of developing this piece: I) a substantial portion of the believed that our fictional identities are real ones; and 2) a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats have sought to deflect attention from the substance of our experiment to the implications of our dissimulation, or in their words, our misinforming the about who we are. The literalism implicit in the interpretation of our work by individuals representing the public interest bespeaks their investment in positivist notions of truth and depoliticized, ahistorical notions of civilization. This reverse ethnography of our interactions with the will, I hope, suggest the culturally specific nature of their tendency toward the literal and moral interpretation.

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