Law and Performance ed. by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Law and Performance ed. by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey Patrick Maley Law and Performance. Edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. pp. 250. $29.95 paperback. The passage of laws restricting the rights of trans bodies, Black bodies, refugee and immigrant bodies, women's bodies, and more seems constant. Even more frequent, though, is the exertion of violence against vulnerable bodies and populations, often in ways underwritten by law: police shootings, evictions, mass incarceration, denial of healthcare, and the like. In instances like these (and, in fairness, when legislation protects rights), the law transforms from text to performance, enacting tangible effects. Law and Performance therefore proves valuable in modeling a methodology for conceptualizing law's real-world enactments. Collectively, its six essays examine how the framework of performance studies might enrich an understanding of the embodied operations of law, challenging divisions between written law and its physical expression. Editors Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey argue that "a law is both itself and not yet itself; it is only fully realized in performance," and insist that Law and Performance's essays "challenge us to consider the place that contingency, repetition, spectacle, and audience play in the constitution of legality, justice, and legal subjectivity" (2, 1). In the book's examination of a dynamic the editors call "legal performativity," its chapters analyze a wide variety of case studies that illuminate complex conditions of law's unique performative operation (6). The broad scope of the chapters' focuses—ranging from nineteenth-century British and American prisons to contemporary Mexican film; from the Supreme Court of Canada to South Africa under apartheid; from reenactments of historical trials to contemporary violence in Ferguson, Missouri—makes it unlikely that any reader's research will be invested in all the case studies, but the volume's theoretical underpinnings construct a complex portrait of law as performative. Uniting all six essays is the presumption that law exerts performative force with recognizable consequences. While the chapters are long and occasionally meandering, the book benefits from the union of an editorial team from the fields of law and jurisprudence with an excellent slate of contributors from theatre and performance studies. The result is a provocative volume with the potential to empower theatre and performance scholars to think through how authority does things with laws. In the volume's first chapter, Julie Stone Peters boldly counters Foucault's assessment of the nineteenth-century prison, insisting that actual conditions had [End Page 187] far more in common with theatrical spectacle than a disembodied panopticon. The chapter details spectacles of forced labor at the center of the nineteenth-century prison tourism industry and demonstrates how these performances of law in action relied on offstage violence, not what Peters calls Foucault's "sanitized image" of an oppressive gaze (50). Peters closes the chapter with a nuanced discussion of the ethical complexity surrounding prison reality television. Next, Ryan Hartigan turns to Delgamuukw v. R, a monumental Canadian trial over Indigenous land rights in which Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en peoples asserted their territorial ownership by presenting "performative evidence and oral tradition" (69). In response to the oral histories, spiritual songs, and dances offered as evidence, Chief Justice MacEachern asserted, "This is a trial, not a performance!," and ultimately ruled against the Indigenous claims (68). Calling the case "a meeting point of performative and written culture," Hartigan argues that the trial betrays governmental anxiety about the extent to which law is always already performance (71). In the third chapter, Ann Pellegrini and Karen Shimakawa "investigate how the quality of reenactability both authorizes and imperils the law," with a focus on the Asian American Bar Association of New York's amateur theatrical reproductions of historically significant trials (102). Pellegrini and Shimakawa suggest that AABANY's reenactments of trials specifically notable for anti-Asian racist subjugation usher past pain into the present as a way of doing the labor of memory. The essay argues that a certain enjoyment can be reached by giving a painful past a meaningful life. In chapter 4, Catherine M. Cole examines "how the law itself performs...