Freedom Dreaming, Humanities and the Art of DataThoughts post Mellon School, Harvard 2021
Freedom Dreaming, Humanities and the Art of Data
Thoughts post Mellon School, Harvard 2021
In June, I participated in the first online summer school of the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance, Harvard University. The overall theme of this year’s summer school was ‘The State of the Field’, and over three weeks the school proposed ‘to examine new movements in performance studies, and ask how our field can and should be remade in light of massive global changes’[1] with a focus on the place of humanities in both the academic and public realm. Considering this theme in relation to theatre and performance, I imagine empty stages, dark dressing rooms, locked doors, sites of battle, children turned away from a border, hospital corridors, PPE gear, masks strewn on city streets….. images that quickly turn to catastrophe fuelled by fear and loss such is the state of uncertainty in which we currently reside. However, and this is what continues to drive me as an artist and a scholar, within those imaginings there are spaces for joy, for moments of discovery, for connection, for humanity to rediscover itself and shine through. Spaces can be created through the art and labour of theatre, through the voices of the marginalised, through play, representation, dreaming, analysing, questioning, writing, re writing and encounter. I believe all of this, but my belief was waning, and, my ideas of what I could possibly do as an artist and as a scholar were fading. The thoughts of three weeks online in a different time zone were starting to fill me with a dull dread, more zooms really? I was wrong. This summer school was the nourishing bowl of mixed soup I needed but did not know how to request.
Professor Martin Puchner, the school director, questioned the place of the humanities within academia and society in his introduction. He gave a brief history of the origins of the humanities, and explored ideas such as the nature and representation of knowledge, radical distance, hierarchies within academic institutions, and funding for humanities research in comparison to business or scientific research. In short, he raised the question of what it might mean to be a scholar in humanities. This question has been on my mind since beginning my journey into the humanities with an arts degree twenty years ago. A question often asked in different ways of students of the arts. Why study arts? What can you do with that degree? These questions indicate an undervaluing and perhaps a lack of understanding of what art faculties and indeed the humanities are. Are there other ways to perhaps disseminate ideas and research or make our learning more accessible to the public and to other disciplines? Can we reassert our value more effectively as students, scholars and practitioners of the arts and humanities? I envision a huge collective breath as we ready ourselves for these challenges and the future that may lie ahead.
Considering one’s work as part of a greater community within academia and society may certainly feel overwhelming, but it can also lead to a clarity of vision and a feeling of belonging. This may facilitate an openness to new or different approaches to learning and to presentation of work and research. Beginning here with this introduction paved the way for our development in thinking as humanities scholars over the three weeks of the school.
The school focused on four main subjects of inquiry: the quantitative turn, activism, post critique and public humanities. The programme consisted of two main seminars, writing workshops and evening lectures, which encompassed the four main themes. One of the participants aptly described the school as ‘theatre boot camp’ and indeed, I am unable to express the sheer wealth of material presented and discussed nor all of my learning, confusion and at times moments of revelation throughout the three weeks. However, I will focus on the pieces that stood out to me most and hope that this can convey something of the experience. I choose to participate in the Theatre, Digital Humanities, and De/Colonial Knowledge seminar delivered by Professor Elizabeth Dillon. This focused on the digital turn in performance and theatre history, particularly in relation to the coloniality of knowledge in Anglophone traditions of theatre, archival curation, literature, and scholarship. If I had to summarise what this seminar was about in a few words, I would say memory, power and representation. The seminar explored how memory, power and representation shape and form ideas of place, one’s own place and the place that may be attributed to, or enforced upon a person through versions of narrative and ‘truth’
This seminar used digital humanities, archives, texts and performance studies to ask four main questions:
What counts?
Who is counting?
How is this counting being carried out?
Why does counting matter?
This exploration was facilitated through the analysis of three main texts Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Oroonoko by Thomas Southerene, and The Octoroon by Dion Boucicault. Different versions of these texts in terms of performance, script, and archival materials were also analysed with a focus on race, slavery, memory and belonging. Some of my fellow doctoral researchers and I were quite perturbed by Boucicault’s The Octooron. The term octooroon refers to a person of one-eighth African ancestry and in this case signifies the character of the slave Zoe, an octooron. Zoe has the socially impossible position of being a woman and the daughter of a planter and a slave, who is the object of desire of practically every white man who encounters her. Boucicault’s melodrama was adapted from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid, referring to a person of one-quarter African ancestry.
I have a very strong reaction to Boucicault’s work in general as I feel he placed stereotypes onstage to make profitable and commercially viable plays, a position supported by Sarah Meer (2009)[2]. The Octooron is no exception as it is chock full of ‘yellow boys’ ‘injuns’, slaves, with sensational scenes of burning ships, murders, and a slave auction all occurring within the laws of the plantation. It proved a very popular play running throughout the US, the UK and Australia over several years. Jane Kathleen Curry cites a letter dated 5 November 1874, in which Boucicault estimated that The Octoroon had been performed 1800 times[3]. However, since its debut in New York in 1859 it has been controversial, presenting differing and contentious meanings of race and enslavement in a range of geographic locations and historical moments. The Octoroon opened at particularly significant moments: in New York just days after the execution of John Brown (1859), in London coinciding with the American Civil War and the blockade of Confederate shipping which starved British cotton factories (1861). One fascinating example of Boucicault’s cultural readings is the different endings Boucicault wrote for American and British audiences. In the version played in America, Zoe poisons herself at the end indicating the tragic fate of the slave and the impossibility of integration into white society. In 1861, a few weeks after the play’s debut in London Boucicault re wrote the ending to leave Zoe silently reunited in the arms of her white lover. The reasons for this rewrite remain ambiguous, possibly owing to publicity, audience disapproval and the differing political stance at the time of the two nations in relation to slavery. However, it demonstrates that Boucicault may have been less interested in the political integrity of this play than in its commercial success. Interestingly both versions of this play were performed in parallel transatlantically, indicating the importance of theatre in the circulation of political and social ideas and the importance of archive and memory in this process.
In 2014, black playwright Brandon Jacobs Jenkins appropriates Boucicault’s melodrama with his An Octoroon for a modern audience ‘deploying an arsenal of metatheatrical tricks, irreverent comedic jolts, and emotional gut punches’[4]
Reading Jacob-Jenkins script I had that rare experience where I felt shock, outrage and great amusement. I laughed aloud, admired the playwright’s wit and great skill, and ability to turn everything inside out and upside down. I was in my element while simultaneously feeling quite uncomfortable. I would give my white right arm to see this show live.Boucicault himself is a character, drunk and eager to get his red face paint on and play Wahnotee the Indian character whom Boucicault indeed played in productions of his own Octoroon. Both of these works play with sensationalism and representation. However, it is their circulation of story, of place, and of society that is crucial here and returns to the question of knowledge creation and how this intersects with theatre and performance as a field of cultural production, a question at the core of this summer school’s inquiry.
I move to a field that is often written off as important but boring, black and white, cut and dried, non-emotive- the field of data. I will stop here and request you please read Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, published by MIT press in 2020 (see https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/data-feminism). This short provocative book is deeply challenging and affective in ways that I feel are necessary for anyone in the business of knowledge production and dissemination. This book presents new ways of thinking about data science and data ethics informed by intersectional feminist thought. D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical classification systems. They explore ideas about effective data visualization, visualizations as rhetoric, and the concept of invisible labour and perhaps most importantly they demonstrate why the data never, ever "speak for themselves." On a side note, the piece in chapter 4 about different sizing in ‘male’ and ‘female’ pockets is equally fascinating and infuriating. I am compelled to share that the pockets of jeans designed for women are 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than those designed for men. Handbag anyone?
Throughout the seminar, we discussed the power of data, globally demonstrated throughout the COVID pandemic as restrictions and regulations were based on data and what we assume to be evidence or fact. I am not disputing the necessity of data for understanding and responding to such a phenomenon, but questioning ideas of what may be publicly accepted as ‘fact’. The idea of an implicit trust in numbers, in data presented as fact is flawed. In the seminar, we discussed the article ‘Why the Pandemic Experts Failed. We’re still thinking about pandemic data in the wrong ways’ by Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal published in March 2021[5]. Meyer and Madrigal point out that the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US were not collecting data on COVID 19 testing, deaths or hospitalizations and were using data provided by their voluntary COVID tracking project; ‘when the White House reproduced one of our charts, it confirmed our fears: The government was using our data. For months, the American government had no idea how many people were sick with COVID-19, how many were lying in hospitals, or how many had died. And the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, started as a temporary volunteer effort, had become a de facto source of pandemic data for the United States’[6]. This was quite a shocking read, that evoked many questions around the source, presentation and representation of data, or the construction of data which can be better understood through the employing a performance lens. Aptly summed up in this statement from Johanna Drucker ‘humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial and constitutive character of knowledge production…knowledge is constructed, taken not simply given as a natural representation of a pre-existing field… this the representation of knowledge is as crucial to its cultural force as any other facet of its production’[7].
We return to the notion of humanities, of study, of knowledge production, representation and memory. I agree with Professor Derek Miller’s[8] position that looking to the quantitative in theatre and performance research can open up the bigger picture. However, what is vital in this bigger picture is the complexity of experience, in particular those experiences that have been silenced or deemed less important through colonial practices both past and present. Here I proclaim the value of the humanities and of theatre and performance research in exploring this complexity of experience. The very premise of humanities lies in the interpretative nature of knowledge. Performance studies and practice attends to interpretation, embraces embodiment, process and can be used to hold power accountable, to ‘count’ in different ways. I end now as I ended the three weeks of this summer school, almost out of breath, excited, and inspired. The school ended for all participants with a session from Dr Shamel Bell of Harvard[9], who describes herself as a street dance activist scholar who facilitated our freedom dreaming[10]. I could never do that experience justice on this page; suffice to say it involved a singing bowl, connecting digitally with people across the globe, imaginative transformation and landscapes. There is hope while there is humanity!
[1] https://mellonschool.fas.harvard.edu/current-session
[2] Meer, Sarah. "Boucicault's Misdirections: Race, Transatlantic Theatre and Social Position in The Octoroon." Atlantic Studies (Abingdon, England) 6.1 (2009): 81-95. Web.
[3] Curry, Jane Kathleen. "Spectacle and Sensation in The Octoroon/An Octoroon." Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 46.1 (2019): 38-58. Web.
[4] https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/definition-theatre-an-octoroon-branden-jacobs-jenkins-dion-boucicault/Content?oid=28602413 accessed 30/07/21
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/03/americas-coronavirus-catastrophe-began-with-data/618287/ accessed June 2021
[6] Ibid
[7] Drucker, Johanna. "Graphical Approaches to the Digital Humanities." A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. 238-50. Web.
[8] Miller, Derek. "Average Broadway." Theatre Journal (Washington, D.C.) 68.4 (2016): 529-53. Web.
[9] https://www.shamellbell.com/scholar
[10] This concept comes from the work of Robin D.G Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Beacon Press 2002
