Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Karin Waidley Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire. By Laura Edmondson. Indiana University Press, 2018. Cloth $90.00, Paper $42.00, eBook $9.99. 308 pages. 15 illustrations. I begin this review at the book’s end. Chapter 6, “Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist,” of Laura Edmondson’s Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire provoked a disquieting blue streak of recognition. I too have felt the urge to rush headlong into a situation in East Africa where I believe I know the answer to “what can I do?” But Edmonson warns readers that there are no simple questions in regions that have “a dense regional history of colonial and post-colonial violence” (5). Her book is a sweeping “sideways glance” (20) at the voracious appetites for consuming representations of trauma through performative means. Thus, her final chapter’s call-out is an unsettling one: take heed of your role on the “trauma stage” (3). Better to practice a “radical passivity,” to dwell in the discomfort of mere presence and to resist impulses of “headlong (Western) activist manifest destiny” (279). In a time when many can relate to the debilitating fatigue of inaction, this is the book’s most applicable and timely lesson. Performing Trauma in Central Africa surveys an increasing tendency toward cliched representations of mass trauma and its effects on the people of Sub-Saharan Africa. Edmonson measures ways in which the powers of empire collate complex horrors into a banal predictability of content and approach to performance in Central Africa. Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) share externally-mapped and fraught boundaries and people whose histories are deeply entrenched and inextricably intertwined. Edmondson interrogates how the “white savior industrial complex” is fast at creative work in Uganda, how culpable governments brandishing “genocide credits” (111) in Rwanda keep the 1994 travesty well within the performance frame, and how well-intentioned NGO endeavors in the DRC, some championed by well-known playwrights Eve Ensler and Lynn Nottage, shape testimony from tactically-resistant survivors of the region’s violence into victim myopia. Trauma-laden dramaturgy is performed by insiders and outsiders, not only for emotional catharsis but for financial gain. Without sentimentality, Edmondson exposes how, when resources are limited and playing fields far from level, stakeholders get mired in an “epistemic murk” or “‘the unstable interplay of truth and illusion’ that characterizes cultures of terror” (26). The Introduction combines humanitarianism, sovereignty, and empire with an “aesthetics of murk” (26) to explore taut relationships and the means through which trauma and performance are mostly marketed and sometimes resisted. Edmondson conducted two decades of extensive fieldwork, resulting in a deep perspective on the profiteering of hardship in an area where access to theatre scholarship is scant. The author foregrounds her own outsider/insider position as suspect, one that [End Page 219] readers should be wary of when reading her analyses of the “murky” performances that follow. The author’s transparency calls attention to the burden of empire she both carries and casts off whenever possible. From this position, Edmondson tasks readers: if “we” will not choose to “stay home” (271) then be two things at once: both radical and passive. She demonstrates this necessary paradox by virtue of the (failed) activist performance models set out incisively in each of her following chapters. In chapter 1, “Competitive Memory in the Great Lakes,” Edmondson deftly explicates the interwoven pasts of the three nation-states that figure in later chapters. These are the formal landscapes of performative trauma displayed through music, dance, and drama (MDD) and on the informal “stages” of museums, memorials, and NGO-sponsored sites. More historiographic than performance analysis, this chapter introduces readers to the interconnectedness of the Lake Victoria region in a jaw-dropping portrayal of colonial pasts with a dizzying cast of characters. She demonstrates how histories are forcibly flattened into three singular narratives, one per country (genocide in Rwanda, child abductions in Uganda, and weaponized rape in DRC), with “a curious predictability” that “insistently cuts across representations of violence” (5). But like the “shadows of empire,” simplified narratives...