Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance Ben Dorfman (bio) D. Soyini Madison , Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance, (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 322 pp. (incl. index), ISBN 9780521519229 That human rights are a matter transcending law is by now well-recognized. Human rights are a philosophical position, a history (or histories), a cultural practice, and a mode of self-understanding. The self's life and action in concrete ethnographic situations is important for D. Soyini Madison. To her, performance includes "tactics and emergence," with "tactics" understood as acts of subversion, and "emergence" understood as the assertion of collective and individual selves against those forces denying dignity.1 Madison's focus is on Ghana, and the issues her performer-activists address include water rights, the liberation of women and girls from servitude ("Trokosi"), problems of domestic violence, and the cultural and political-economic interests underlying such practices.2 [End Page 264] Madison is aware of the tension between universality and particularism in human rights. As one of her many interview subjects phrases it, the problem may be less the multiplicity of religious and gender-based practices on a global basis than their "corruption."3 The problem is the emergence of an authentic, situated voice from under the dual levels of oppressive cultural practices—corrupted or not—and institutionalized colonialist and neoliberal practices encompassing problems of economic development and neoliberal political-economics. For Madison, the battle for human rights involves the use of public space and the incorporation of politics and advocacy into the body: "organic musculature," she claims, can "embellish" and "re-perform" identity.4 Through this method, the transformations sought by rights advocates in civil, legal, and socioeconomic status become realized and engaged by publics. Ideology, international relations, and international political economy become both transcended and reproduced in social performance. While Madison states that "one of the overriding root causes troubling local human rights and social justice activism are the machinations of neoconservatism and a corporate, global political economy,"5 the patchwork of human rights is more than global politics. Human rights are the "small stories everywhere" engaged by grassroots activists: the problems with the Ghana Water Company; "six mile humiliation walks" to fetish shrines; groups of slam poets mocking Western bottled waters being sold in locales with fundamental water distribution problems; and lines of women in simulated bloodied wedding gowns protesting domestic violence and questioning the meaning of marriage. Madison's book is provocative but not revolutionary. Human rights rarely gain cultural studies or performance studies treatments, and the theoretical apparatuses of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau are not often brought into human rights studies. Space, ideology, and the body go hand in hand, maintains Madison, and while the term is not often used in her book, rights must be comprehended aesthetically, as well as intellectually or legally. Politics gain body through their performance, but they can hardly be approached as simple theoretical or philosophical constructs. By asserting such ideas, Madison asserts not only that policy demands symbolism, but that the contest over fundamental freedoms and social change demands, and only becomes real, through the expressions of physical bodies and the conscious engagement of political-oppositional acts in public spaces, made available for public consumption. Madison's approach is ethnomethodological. The work is comprised of transcripts of conversations with activists, descriptions of performances, a smattering of photographic documentation, and clear and often thought-provoking accounts of her subjective reaction to such events (and sometimes her own involvement in them). To this extent, Acts of Activism is a needed book. It begs the question of how, in relation to human rights, do claims become performed, and rights cases petitioned and argued at popular, grassroots levels? More case studies, beyond Ghana, would be valuable. One wonders, however, if the [End Page 265] empirical evidence Madison provides could not have been bolstered with a more thorough account of theoretical claims concerning the body, aesthetics, and the investment and divestment of political power (e.g., via figures such as Foucault or Judith Butler)? One also loses the immediacy of social protest and artistic acts of political resistance in having to read about them. Of course...