Abstract
Performance is a key aspect of representation, the means through which culture is disseminated and comprehended – and thus, how it comes to be understood within a normative conception of the world. Work such as Paul Morand’s Black Magic look to exploit this ability of representation to affect performance and vice versa, limiting the mobility of his characters while amplifying his own as he moves effortlessly through the anthology’s exoticized locales. The Other comes to be constituted through these acts of representation, expected to perform these roles which are laid out for them, but Josephine Baker is an exemplar of how these classifications can become muddled. Through her work, Baker demonstrated the irony inherent to these performances, in a way that both appealed to the desire for the exotic and made that desire ridiculous. Similarly, Kiran Desai tackles the expectations inherent to the rhetoric of revolution, which puts the primacy of revolutionary action and its sense of agency in highly masculine terms. Desai looks to satirize and problematize these notions and expectations inherent to performance, all through the lens of a West Bengali secessionist movement. dg nanouk okpik in her poetry also looks to nuance these representational forces, to move an understanding of indigenous peoples and cultures beyond a Western understanding which would see them as fossil records – lifeless and useless outside of their study by curious outsiders. These works speak of life lived by peoples on the margins, those denied agency or mobility or a voice in the present, but who nevertheless can use these works to cast doubt upon these rigid understandings of the world and how it comes to be represented.