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Playing Dead in Cuba: Coco Fusco's Stagings of Dissensus1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2009

CANDICE AMICH
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Abstract

This article examines how the Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco reframes Cuban exile politics through her negation of the policing of movement within and across the island nation's borders. Fusco's rejection of the nationalist politics that have traditionally limited the discourse of the Cuban exile community enables her to explore previously disarticulated dimensions of the exile experience. Drawing on Jacques Rancière's notion of dissensus as the performance of a wrong, I discuss Fusco's stagings of the exclusions of exile in two clandestine performances, executed in Havana in 1997 and 2000, in which she examines the exile's impossible desire for repatriation. Employing an uncanny blurring of fantasy and reality in her re-enactment of a wake and staging of a burial, Fusco, in her site-specific performances, offers new possibilities for imagining Cuban identity and exilic mobility in the neoliberal era.

Type
Focus on Performance/Theatre and Philosophy
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , October 2009 , pp. 267 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2009

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References

NOTES

2 See Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar.

3 Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3Google Scholar.

4 Rancière, Jacques, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103, 2–3 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 297–310, here p. 303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject’, p. 303.

6 Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Rockhill, Gabriel (New York: Continuum, 2004) p. 13Google Scholar.

7 See Gott, Richard, Cuba: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) pp. 286–98Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 185.

9 See Coco Fusco, ‘Hustling for Dollars: Jineteras in Cuba’, in idem, The Bodies That Were Not Ours (New York: Routledge, 2001), 137–53. In this essay, Fusco likens the Cuban government's courting of sex tourists to the maquiladora model: ‘“Pussy Paradise,” as Cuba is now called over the internet, is a place where these [foreign] men can act out their fantasies without any threat of police intervention – not unlike the multinationals looking for cheap unregulated labor across the border’ (p. 142).

10 Muñoz, Jose, ‘Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt’, in Taylor, Diana and Costantino, Roselyn, eds., Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp 401–416, here p. 402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Coco Fusco, ‘The Havana Bienal’, Latino USA, NPR, June 1997, transcript, 12 November 2008, available at http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/havanna/opinion/e_fusco.htm.

12 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject’, p. 304.

13 See Guillermo Gómez-Peña, The New World Border (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996), on ‘the work of the artist’ (p. 6).

14 Coco Fusco, ‘El Evento Suspendido (The Postponed Event): A Performance for Cuba’, in idem, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, pp. 165–166, here p. 166.

15 Coco Fusco, ‘El Ultimo Deseo (The Last Wish): A Performance for Cuba’, in idem, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, pp. 163–164, here p. 163.

16 Fusco, ‘El Ultimo Deseo’, p. 163.

17 Fusco, ‘The Havana Bienal’ transcript.

18 Fusco, ‘El Ultimo Deseo’, p. 163.

19 In her Latino USA radio piece, Fusco explicitly addresses her grandmother's desire not to die in the US.

20 Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject’, p. 304.

21 Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, trans. McClintock, David (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 148Google Scholar.

22 Fusco, ‘The Havana Bienal’ transcript.

23 Freud, The Uncanny, p. 150.

24 See Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Like Jameson, Rancière identifies political art by a double movement. Here is how Jameson describes his ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’: ‘The new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last’ (p. 54).

25 See Adorno, Theodor, ‘Commitment’, in idem, Notes to Literature, Vol. II, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf, trans. Nicholsen, Sherry Weber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 76–94Google Scholar. Rancière's invocation of the uncanny echoes Adorno's notion of negation: ‘Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings’ (p. 80).

26 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 63.

27 Consider, for example, this statement from Radio Reloj's director, Omayda Alonso: ‘Our staff is never satisfied. We have to continue to improve the quality of our broadcasts and to continue being the pen that reflects the work of the Cuban Revolution, which is our raison d'etre.’ See ‘Cuba's Radio Reloj Radio Station Celebrates its 61st Birthday,’ Radio Rebelde, 30 October 2008, 24 November 2008, available at http://www.radiorebelde.com.cu/english/cuba/nacionales1-020708-eng.html.

28 Fusco, ‘El Ultimo Deseo’, p. 163.

29 Fusco, ‘The Havana Bienal’ transcript.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Quoted in Muñoz, ‘Performing Greater Cuba’, p. 403.

34 Muñoz, ‘Performing Greater Cuba’, p. 404.

35 Ibid., p. 404.

36 See Gott, Cuba: A New History, p. 18.

37 See ‘Collective Permanence 2000 (Permanecer Colectivo)’, 7th Havana Biennial, November 2000–January 2001, Alternative Exhibitions and Projects, Universes in Universe, ed. Gerhard Haupt and Pat Binder, 4 November 2008, available at http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/habana/bien7/expoalt/e-aglutinador.htm.

38 Fusco, ‘El Evento Suspendido’, p. 166.

39 Ibid., 166.

40 Ibid., 166.

41 Ibid., 166.

42 ‘Permanecer Colectivo’ catalogue.

43 Fusco, ‘The Havana Bienal’ transcript.

44 Rockhill, Gabriel, ‘Translator's Introduction: Jacques Rancière's Politics of Perception’, in Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 3Google Scholar (italics in original).