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Abstract
‘Essayistic Ventures in the Wake of Diasporas’ contributes to Contemporary Theatre Review’s ‘Hear Tell: Describing, Reporting, Narrating’ issue by examining performances through the essay form. The objectives of this article are twofold: to propose a nuanced vocabulary drawing from literary and film studies for describing these performances and to re-evaluate the essay form’s relation to documentary theatre. Focusing on artists such as Jaha Koo, Ogutu Muraya, Samah Hijawi, and Sachli Gholamalizad, the analysis identifies shared attributes in their solo performances, including a first-person perspective, a hybrid form, and a concentration on personal diasporic experiences intertwined with reflections on broader subjects. Utilizing the essay form as an analytical lens, the study explores how these performances contribute to a nuanced reflection on the complexities of diasporic lives. Tracing the evolution of the essay form, ‘Essayistic Ventures in the Wake of Diasporas’ positions the essayistic lens within performing arts, drawing on the revival of scholarly interest in the literary essay and the emergence of the essay film. The essayistic structure is dissected through case studies of Koo and Gholamalizad, revealing their adept navigation through subjective reflections, historical narratives, and societal critiques. The examination highlights the active role of the audience in this essayistic endeavour, emphasizing reflexivity as integral to the thought process. In conclusion, this article underscores the essayistic potential of diasporic performances, shedding light on nuanced engagements with history, memory, and self-reflection, while emphasizing the audience’s active participation in the essayistic endeavour.
Notes
1. The title of this article is inspired by Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
2. Timothy Youker, Documentary Vanguards in Modern Theatre (New York: Routledge, 2018), 2.
3. Boetcher Joeres, Ruth-Ellen, and Elizabeth Mittman, ‘An Introductory Essay’, in The Politics of the Essay. Feminist Perspectives, eds. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993), 12–20 (18).
4. Douglas G. Atkins, Tracing the Essay. Through Experience to Truth (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2005), 148.
5. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘F-Words: An Essay on the Essay’, American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 15–45 (24).
6. Theodore W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes To Literature ed. Tiedemann Rolf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 29–47 (33–34).
7. Cheryl A. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn. The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 1.
8. On W.E.B. Du Bois see Cheryl B. Butler, ‘W.E.B. DuBois: Ideology and the Hybridity of Intentionality’ in The Art of the Black Essay. From Meditation to Transcendence (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 21–50.; on Fanon and Césaire see David Murphy, ‘The Power of Reason: Universality and Truth in the Anti-Colonial Essai’ in The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance. eds. Charles Forsdick and Andrew Stafford (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 259–271; on Glissant see Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, ‘Lyric, Essay’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Essay. eds. Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023), 215–228; on James Baldwin see Cheryl A. Wall. ‘Stanger at Home. James Baldwin on What It Means to Be an American’ in On Freedom and the Will to Adorn. The Art of the African American Essay. Cheryl A. Wall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 119–147. on Toni Morrison see Carsten Junker, Frames of Friction. Black Genealogies, White Hegemony and the Essay as Critical Intervention (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010); on Audre Lorde see Allen Durgin, ‘Wallace Stevens, Audre Lorde and the Queer Performativity of the Essay’ in The Essay at the Limits. Poetics, Politics and Form. ed. Mario Aquilina (London: Bloomsburry, 2021), 197–212., Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, ‘The Passionate Essay. Radical Feminst Essayists’ in The Politics of the Essay. Feminist Perspectives. eds. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 151–171.
9. Christy Wampole, ‘The Essayfication of Everything’, New York Times, May 26, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the-essayification-of-everything/?_r=0 (accessed July 10, 2023); Eagan, Kevin, ‘The Blogification of the Essay’, Critical Margins, July 16 2013, https://criticalmargins.com/the-blogification-of-the-essay-717d503f7505 (accessed July 10, 2023).
10. Laura Rascaroli, ‘Afterword. The Idea of the Essay Film’, in The Essay Film. Dialogue, Politics, Utopia. eds. Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades (London: Wallflower Press, 2016), 300–305 (300).
11. Julia Vassilieva and Williams Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond the Essay Film. Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology, eds. Julia Vassilieva and Deane Williams (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 11–32 (12).
12. In the twenty-first century, the films of Ursula Biemann, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, Hito Steyerl, Raoul Peck, Otolith Group, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Harun Farocki are often labelled as essay films. For recent scholarly work discussing these filmmakers (and many others) see Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film. From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Elizabeth A. Papazian, and Eades, Caroline eds., The Essay Film. Dialogue, Politics, Utopia (London: Wallflower Press, 2016); Laura Rascaroli, How The Essay Film Thinks (New York; Oxford University Press 2017); Nora M. Alter, The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Igor Krstić, and Hollweg, Brenda eds., World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice. (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2019); Julia Vassilieva, and Williams Deane eds., Beyond the Essay Film. Subjectivity, Textuality and Technology. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
13. Phillip Lopate, ‘Introduction’, in The Art of the Personal Essay. An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 1994), xxiii-liv (xxxviii).
14. Bart Verschaffel, ‘Het essay als denkvorm’, in Figuren (Leuven: Van Halewyck, 1995), 10–16 (11).
15. For more on the photo-essay see W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies’ in Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1995); Graf Catharina Der Fotografische Essay: ein Hybrid aus Bild, Text und Film (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2013); Kelly Klingensmith, In Appropriate Distance: The Ethics of the Photographic Essay (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016); for more on essay-installation see Alison Butler ‘The Essay Installation’ in Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations (Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2019), 139–159; for more on the essay-exhibition see Franke, Anselm, ‘On Fichte’s unlimiting and the limits of self-reflexive institutions’, in Love and Ethnology. The colonial dialectic of sensitivity (after Hubert Fichte), eds. Anselm Franke and Diedrich Diederichsen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019), 12–17.
16. Dutch theatre critic Fransien van der Putt described Koo’s work as ‘essayistic’. See Fransien van der Putt, ‘Dwars op het cynisme: het menselijke verhaal en het dominante kunstdiscours’ Theaterkrant January 2019, https://www.theaterkrant.nl/tm-artikel/dwars-op-het-cynisme-het-menselijke-verhaal-en-het-dominante-kunstdiscours. (accessed December 20, 2022). Some theatre venues, such as Sophiensaele in Berlin announced Muraya’s Fractured Memory as ‘performative essay about the uncomfortable confrontation with our colonial history’. See Sophiensaele. ‘Ogutu Muraya – Fractured Memory’ Program Sophiensaele. Berlin, October 9–10 2019. https://sophiensaele.com/en/archiv/stueck/fractured-memory. (accessed December 20, 2022).
17. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin Book, 1996), 21.
18. Note: The History of Korean Western Theatre, the third part of Koo’s Hamartia-trilogy, is not an included example in this text because the COVID-19-pandemic made an end to Koo’s tour through Europe just after the premiere of the performance. At the point of writing and completing this article, a video registration of the performance was not yet available.
19. Aldous Huxley, ‘Preface’, in Collected Essays (New York: Bantam, 1959), v-ix (v).
20. Ibid., p. vii.
21. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–15.
22. Arthur, ‘Essay Questions’, 58–59.
23. Corrigan, The Essay Film, 31.
24. Ursula Biemann, ‘Performing Borders. The Transnational Video’, in Stuff It. The Video Essay in the Digital Age ed. Ursula Biemann (Zürich: Voldemeer, 2003), 83–91 (85).
25. Lopate, ‘Introduction’, xxxvii.
26. Atkins, Tracing the Essay, 68.
27. Alter, The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction, 10.
28. David Montero, Thinking Images. The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 60.
29. Atkins, Tracing the Essay, 86.
30. James Baldwin, ‘Princes and Powers’, in The Price of the Ticket. Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 41–64 (45).
31. Ibid., 49–50.
32. Ibid., 52–53.
33. Ibid., 53.
34. Ibid., 53.
35. Ibid., 54.
36. Veem House for Performance, ‘Fractured Memory by Ogutu Muraya’, https://veem.house/EN/fractured-memory (accessed 10 July, 2023).
37. Montero, Thinking Images, 48.
38. Graham Good, The Observing Self. Rediscovering the Essay (New York: Routledge, 1988), 1.
39. Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 67.
40. Ibid., 73.
41. Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera. Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 191.
42. Muraya, Ogutu, ‘I am Multitudes’, Etcetera 161 (2020): 76–84 (82).
43. Ibid., 83.
44. Wall, On Freedom and the Will to Adorn, 7.
45. Margret Brügmann, ‘Between the Lines. On the Essayistic Experiments of Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medus”’, in The Politics of the Essay. Feminist Perspectives eds. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher and Elizabeth Mittman (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 73–84 (75).
46. Montero, Thinking Images, 155.
47. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–235 (222).
48. Ibid., 223.
49. Ibid., 225.
50. Ibid., 235.
51. Ibid., 226.
52. Ibid., 236.
53. Ibid., 222.
54. Ibid., 228.
55. Michelle Walker, Boulous, Slow Philosophy. Reading against the Institution (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 65.
56. Alter, The Essay Film after Fact and Fiction, 273.
57. Isaac Julien, ‘From Ten Thousand Waves to Lina Bo Bardi via Kapital’, in Essays on the Essay Film. eds. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 335–344 (336).
58. Hans Richter, ‘The Film Essay. A New Type of Documentary Film’, in Essays on the Essay Film, eds. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) 89–92 (91).
59. Corrigan, The Essay Film, 51.
60. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera, 190.
61. Biemann, ‘Performing Borders’, 83.
62. Igor Krstić, ‘Accented Essay Films: The Politics and Poetics of the Essay Film in the Age of Migration’, in World Cinema and the Essay Film: Transnational Perspectives on a Global Practice, eds. Igor Krstić and Brenda Hollweg (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2019), 55–69 (69).
63. Paul Arthur, ‘Essay Questions. From Alain Resnais to Michael Moore’, Film Comment 39, no. 1 (2003), 59.
64. Amanda Stuart Fisher, Performing the testimonial. Rethinking verbatim dramaturgies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 16.
65. Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy. Reading against the Institution (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 65.
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Jasper Delbecke
Jasper Delbecke is an art and theatre scholar whose academic work attests to a curiosity in how the (performing) arts deal with past events and the politics of representation of personal, local, national or global histories. From this interest, he has a scholarly fascination for innovative forms of documentary theatre, new modes of storytelling, the format of the lecture performance and the conceptualization of (semi-)fictive exhibitions or museums. From October 2023 until January 2024, Delbecke was appointed as guest professor at the Department of Art History, Musicology, and Theatre Studies at Ghent University. Since 2024, he has been appointed at LUCA School of Arts as a doctor-assistant where he researches the concept of the ‘essay-exhibition’.