Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Sky Herington Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire BY LAURA EDMONDSON Indiana UP, 2018. xii + 348 pp. ISBN 9780253032478 paper. In the context of an ever-expanding humanitarian sector, particularly active in Africa, scholarship interrogating the ethics and effects of arts-based therapeutic models in humanitarian interventions has increasingly turned to performance as both a fruitful object and an important tool of study. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson develops this approach, drawing on performance theory in a compelling analysis of a variety of cultural responses to mass violence and trauma in the Great Lakes region over the last two decades. Borrowing from Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Edmondson uses an "empire of trauma" (5) as a lens that reveals the limiting master-narratives of suffering and healing that are regularly perpetuated by Western-sponsored arts interventions. Scrutinizing neoliberal solutions to managing the aftermath of conflict, she investigates how Central African trauma is packaged to "obscure rather than to illuminate empire's complicity in a world order that sustains mass death and systemic violence" (9) and is made to soothe and satiate empire's appetites. If local artistic expression is prone to manipulation and co-option by both INGOs and African states, however, empire's trauma market is not a straightforward vampirization of African suffering by the imperial consumer. Performance is a site through which local actors might legitimate such narratives but also, simultaneously, reappropriate them for their own ends: in contexts of scarcity, trauma narratives can serve as vital resources. The historical overview of the region in the first chapter immediately reveals the advantages of Edmondson's geographical focus, which allows room for a detailed presentation of the specificities of each country's history while also establishing, through a transnational approach, the interconnectedness of conflicts across the region. Mapping the "roots and routes" (38) of mass violence and genocide, Edmondson analyzes the concept of "competitive memory" (59) and considers how a single mass trauma might overshadow others in the public imagination, creating a hierarchy of suffering. The following four chapters offer a wide range of case studies of the cultural production that has emerged from these intersecting histories of violence in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fieldwork in 2004 at a US-sponsored rehabilitation center for former child soldiers in northern Uganda, for example, informs Edmondson's reflections on the constructed linear narratives of these children's experiences, performed as spectacle for the benefit of foreign visitors. The exploration of the Western consumption of spectacle is then expanded in an examination of the performative strategies of the post-genocide Rwandan state, while in the Congolese context interventions by American humanitarian organizations are seen to shrink spaces of suffering and eclipse the trauma of those excluded from victim groups recognized on the world stage. Finally, Edmondson returns to a post-conflict northern Uganda in 2010 and reflects on the role of INGOs and American celebrities in the complex dynamics of trauma branding. Such branding projects are however sidestepped by many [End Page 193] northern Ugandans in their use of memorialization and demands on the state for "living memorials" (252) that respond to their material needs. A different approach is taken in the book's final chapter in which, drawing on her own experience running theater workshops in northern Uganda and Rwanda, Edmondson searches for new models of theater activism detached from its "humanitarian baggage" (287). Since, she argues, "neoliberal pressures are more easily negotiated than opposed" (271), staying at home is not an option. Instead she seeks to offer Western theater activists a guide to avoiding those pitfalls of empire discussed in the preceding chapters and tentatively concludes, borrowing from Emmanuel Lévinas, that a stance of "radical passivity" (276)—involving shared vulnerability, open-ended collaboration, and the acceptation of inaction—might be a useful, if sometimes elusive, point of departure from which to develop a more ethical approach to intercultural performance outside of the influence of empire. This explicit identification of an imagined reader in the closing pages echoes the emphasis on the perspectives of Western agents found...
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Nov 8, 2024
Jill Chonody + 3
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