Affiliation:
1. Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Abstract
This essay documents my three-decade-long journey of connections and resultant transformations between scholarly knowledge and artistic production in my work. In reinvestigating my history with stage and visual arts, I trace the relationship between traditionally ‘alien’ practices and academic understandings of societal and political mass violence and invite the reader to reconsider what academia stands for in order to engage with borderless histories of conflict, violence, and displacement. This essay dwells on how artistic engagement is both a personal and a profoundly political process through which the experience of violence is communicated through thoughts, emotions, hopes, and expressions of trauma. There are also significant ethical concerns present concerning the portrayal of violence, death, and suffering, which the paper discusses under the aegis of ethics of witnessing as responsibility.
Reference55 articles.
1. Agamben, Giorgio (1999). The Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books.
2. When they laugh your clown is coming’: Learning to be ridiculous in Philippe Gaulier’s pedagogy of spectatorship;Amsden;Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,2016
3. Arendt, Hannah (2013). The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press.
4. Posthumanist performativity: Toward understanding how matter comes to matter;Barad;Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,2003
5. Baum, Rachel Nahmmacher (1997). Ethics in the Face of Auschwitz: The Emotional and Pedagogical Responsibility of Holocaust Remembrance, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.