Knowing Performance: Performance as Knowledge Paradigm for Africa

Abstract

This article expands Chantal Mouffe's critique of the 'post-political' as a space in which the partisan model of politics has been overcome and there is no possibility of alternatives, to the realm of knowledge production. It questions the prevalent position that there are no alternatives to orthodox knowledge paradigms and suggests the possibility that performance constitutes an alternative way of knowing -both in respect of its representations but also with regard to its embodied practice.It suggests that performance as a knowledge paradigm is particularly appropriate to Africa and argues that it capitalises on our historical legacies and our particular niche advantage in the humanities.With regard to the former, note the processes of oral and bodily transmission of knowledge through dance, storytelling, poetry and song through communities and between communities -what Diana Taylor refers to as the 'so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge' (Taylor 2003: 19) -that persist across the continent despite colonially imposed preferences for the written and the ravages of so-called modernity. With regard to the latter, two prominent African academics have recently suggested in separate newspaper articles that in South Africa at least we should be devoting more time and resources to the humanities than is currently the case. In the Sunday Times (7 September 2008) Malegapuru Makgoba suggested that South Africa's strength in knowledge production lies in the humanities and that the humanities should be 'our priority national knowledge project for which we have an unparalleled history, icons, and a social laboratory of unique values that should be exploited by scholars' (Makgoba 2008). Two weeks later, writing in the Sunday Independent (21 September 2008), Achille Mbembe argued that 'South Africa as a nation needs to do more in the humanities, social sciences and the arts … [t]o break with a technocratic vision of national development that is blind to the opportunities created by the new global cultural economy' (Mbembe 2008). Part of my argument here is that performance, embedded as it is in notions of culture, might offer real opportunities for development on the continent that exceed technocratically imposed development solutions. Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 13:35 22 December 2014 SATJ 2009 VOL 23 117 What do I mean by performance? Performance as a noun constitutes a set of not so much objects, as events that includes theatre, dance, ritual, but also occasions such as political rallies, funerals and the like. In this sense, performances belong to the domain of representations: symbolic expressions of experience. What makes performances different from other forms of representation such as novels or paintings however, is precisely their lack of 'thingness' and their apparent lack of durability. Peggy Phelan for example suggests that performance is characterised by disappearance. In other words it does not remain beyond the event itself. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or ...

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