Raising the ghosts of justice: Staging time and the memory of Empire in The Trial of Governor Eyre

Abstract

I examine the staging of time, justice and performance in The Trial of Governor Eyre, investigating what this site-specific performance reveals about the experience of time in the context of colonial violence. In doing so, I show that the work’s discourse on temporality reflects a vital sense of performativity within an Afro-diasporic context. The work’s use of temporality, besides reflecting a cultural adaptation, allows for a remoulding of forms, coupling law and theatre in confronting Eyre’s mass executions of 1865. This remoulding of forms (law as theatre, theatre as law) provides a potential for postcolonial witnessing not available when either performance protocol is used on its own. Using Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s concept of ‘misperformance’, I argue that this play-trial arises out of a Benjaminian sense of historicity, providing an experience of inchoate justice that finds fulfilment in the present. The Trial of Governor Eyre points, more broadly, to a new ‘problem-space’ in African diaspora political theory, where resistance against colonial structures of oppression is increasingly mounted on the ground of justice itself and through which the legal apparatuses of colonialism become a site of critical memory. Through the play’s deployment of ritual and its plastic moulding of time, 1865 is enlisted as a key historical conjuncture for thinking through the cultural disenchantment of race, but also of the formalist, creative resources that can be mobilised for reimagining humanness in the contemporary moment.

Tek Down Nelson! The Struggle for Repair in Barbados

“…This essay also builds on the work of Caribbean and Afro‐diaspora scholars, who locate transformation, inclusive of repair, not within material worlds but in Black performance: “renarrativisation”, “witnessing”, and in the reconciliation of self and community—“decolonial love” (Allen‐Paisant 2019; Figueroa 2015; Thomas 2019). Deborah Thomas’ (2019) concept of repair as an affective process, where descendants are permitted “wholeness” through embodiment (witnessing) versus formal processes that are imposed or contained, offers a critical framework to think about the connections between restoration and embodiment, which are engendered in the performances of the ceremony.…”