Performance Subjectivity Cosmopolitanism 1St Ed Edition Yana Meerzon All Chapter

Performance, Subjectivity,
Cosmopolitanism 1st ed. Edition Yana

Meerzon
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/performance-subjectivity-cosmopolitanism-1st-ed-edit
ion-yana-meerzon/
Performance,
Subjectivity,
Cosmopolitanism
Yana Meerzon
Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism
“In Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism Yana Meerzon sets the cosmopoli-

tan subject centre-stage and examines its philosophical origins, its importance in
the contemporary political context of the global rise of demagoguery and right-
wing nationalism, and its signifi cance in the contemporary theatre. This rigorous
and scholarly work extends Meerzon’s existing published research on exilic perfor-
mance to examine what she names as today’s ‘theatre of cosmopolitanism’. Defi
ning this theatrical form as originating ‘at two axes of meaning: as a social phe-
nomenon and as an aesthetic condition’, the book draws on a rich and complex
range of sources to offer an impassioned argument for the continuing value of
cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan subject in uncertain times.”
—Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick, Senior Lecturer in Drama, University of Ulster, UK
“This is an erudite and detailed study of cosmopolitan theatre, covering a range of

performances from the Global North. Meerzon reviews the meaning and function
of the fi gure of the ‘traveller’ in the twenty-first century in order to think about
subjectivity and the ethical potential of theatre at a time of global upheaval. Timely
and necessary.”
—Marilena Zaroulia, Lecturer in Performance Arts, The Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK
Yana Meerzon
Performance,
Subjectivity,
Cosmopolitanism
Yana Meerzon
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-41409-2 ISBN 978-3-030-41410-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Koukichi Takahashi / EyeEm, Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Irina, Dmitri, Alexander, and Eugenie
Acknowledgements
This project took its inspiration from the conference Local Cosmopolitanisms/
Cosmopolitismes locaux that took place in Fall 2014 at the University of
Ottawa. Later I discussed my ideas with many colleagues and friends, both
in Canada and internationally, to whom I am extremely grateful for their
insights, suggestions, critical thoughts, and interest in this topic. This list
includes Patrice Pavis, Freddie Rokem, Janelle Reinelt, Peter Boenisch,
Christopher Balme, Steve Wilmer, Joerg Esleben, Veronika Ambros, Tibor
Egervari, Ric Knowles, Inge Arteel, Guy Cools, Josette Ferral, Judith
Rudakoff, Margherita Laera, R. Darren Gobert, Magda Romanska,
Szabolcs Musca, and Silvija Jestrovic, among many others.
As I worked on this book, I participated in projects and partnerships
that are particularly echoed in these pages. They include my work with
Katharina Pewny on theatre and multilingualism (2018, 2019) and my
two-volume publication on theatre and immigration in Canada (2019),
generously supported by Roberta Barker, as well as my collaboration with
David Dean, Natalia Vesselova, and Daniel McNeil on the project
Performance, Migration and Stereotypes. A Connection Grant from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported
several initiatives related to this project, including the 2017 international
conference, the collection of articles entitled Migration and Stereotypes in
Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and this volume.
J. Douglas Clayton’s hard work on the style of this book was invaluable.
During the many hours we spent discussing this project, I came to think
of him as a true collaborator if not co-author of this manuscript. Aisling
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Murphy helped with the final touches of the manuscript, looking after
technical aspects of preparing this text for publication.
This book would not have emerged without the generous help of the
artists to whom it is dedicated. I am forever grateful to the many perform-
ers, writers, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and managers of the various
companies, with whom I corresponded, spoke, and shared my ideas
regarding theatre and cosmopolitanism. The map of my encounters is
truly international, if not global. A special thank you goes to many kind
people, although here I can name only some of them. They include Art
Babayants, Ken Cameron, Una Memisevic, Tim Carlson, Candice
Edmunds, Mani Soleymanlou, Natasha Davis, Anton de Groot, Anita
Majumdar, David Herd, Dragan Todorovic, Charlotte Bongaerts, Lars
Boot, Elke Janssens, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, James Long, Maiko Yamamoto,
An-Marie Lambrechts, Lily McLeish, Karthika Nair, Damien Jalet, Anna
Pincus, Julia Wieninger, Fleur Palezzi, and Charlotte Farcet.
I have presented materials related to this work at many conferences,
including the International Federation for Theatre Research (2014,
2018), the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (2017, 2018), and
the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance
(2018, 2019), as well as gave keynote lectures and invited talks at Ghent
University, Kent University, Northwestern University, University of
Amsterdam, University of Toronto, Masaryk University, McMaster
University, and Concordia Universities.
Some of my ideas that appear in this book were previously published in
the journals Theatre Research in Canada (2015), Modern Drama (2018),
and Ottawa Hispanic Studies (2018) and the book Performing Exile:
Foreign Bodies edited by Judith Rudakoff (2017).
My special thanks go to my family, who were simply stoic in supporting
this project. Without their patience, understanding, and belief, this book
would have never come to life.
Contents
1 Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New

Cosmopolitanism 1
Part I Encounters in Language 33
2 Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism 35
3 ‘Speaking in Tongues’: Staging Hospitality of (Non)

Translation 75
Part II Encounters in Body 115
4 Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-Fetishism in a

Cosmopolitan Solo Performance117
5 Staging Cosmoprolis: Constructing the Chorus Play155
ix
x Contents
Part III Encounters in Time, Space, and History 195
6 Dramaturgies of the Gaze: On the Intimate Realities of

Cosmopolitanism197
7 Staging Affective Citizenship: Constructing Communities

of Hope237
8 To Be a Cosmopolitan: Concluding Remarks275
Index285
CHAPTER 1
Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided

Self of a New Cosmopolitanism
Today, as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky argues, we have

entered a new phase of Modernist culture: it is now characterized by the
exigencies of hyper. ‘Hyper capitalism, hyperclass, hyper-power, hyper-
terrorism, hyper-individualism, hypermarket, hypertext’ (Lipovetsky
2004, 155) are directly connected to the economic practices of late capi-
talism. Global wars, the information overload, the acceleration of time,
and the malady of hyper-consumption all result in the processes of con-
structing, deconstructing, and reconstructing subjectivity. ‘The hyper-
modern individual’—Lipovetsky writes—‘lives a life characterized by
flexibility, adaptability, and a demand of continuous improvement, both in
the work place and throughout his/her general life’ (153). For this indi-
vidual, the global supermarket and the workplace have turned into places
of worship.
Bojana Kunst arrives at similar conclusions, declaring, ‘contemporary
society places great emphasis on creativity, imagination, and dynamism’,
so that the only tangible product of late capitalism is ‘models of subjectiv-
ity’ (2015, 19). Kunst examines the role played by the performing arts in
re-fashioning this subjectivity. In response to her own question of ‘how
and what does art actually produce in contemporary capitalism?’ (17),
Kunst suggests that the only commodity created by the performing arts is
the artist at work (19).
Using these statements as a starting point, I seek in this book to analyse
how this new subjectivity is constructed and staged in the theatres of
© The Author(s) 2020 1

Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_1
2 Y. MEERZON
hypermodernity. The focus and theoretical approaches in this book, how-

ever, differ from those of Kunst, who studies theatre and cultural perfor-
mance, which reflects its own modes of production and is tightly connected
to the material and economic conditions of labour. I am interested in
individual artists, their craft, and the philosophical discourses that underlie
this production of subjectivity. Specifically, I am drawn to those works that
produce subjectivity as a reflection of one more exigency of the hyper: the
new regimes of mobility (Schiller and Salazar 2013). They include mass
migration, refuge and asylum seeking, political and self-imposed exile,
economic migration, work-related travel, and tourism. However, instead
of juxtaposing stasis as settlement and migration as movement in their
relational perspectives, I see regimes of mobility as shaping the world of
hypermodernity in the dimensions of simultaneity, relationality, and tem-
porality and evoking the image of a new nomadism, which re-enforces
non-belonging and produces anxiety in settled populations (Landry 2017,
26). Paradox and incongruity are the basis of this new nomadism, as it
generates cosmopolitan cultural practices and consciousness and at the
same time leads to neo-nationalism and false patriotism. New nomadism
functions as a civic city, where diversities converge and interact (27). It
also spawns questions of who can be considered a responsible citizen, as
we increasingly witness more and more people declaring multiple cultural,
linguistic, and civic affiliations. Marked by its cultural heterogeneity, the
civic city serves as a model of the post-migrant society or new cosmopoli-
tanism, emerging as an alternative scenario to the practices and mytholo-
gies of the nation state. At the centre of this construction is the
hypermodern individual, someone perpetually on the move between work
and leisure, rushed to produce and achieve, often switching languages and
cultures, partners and values, driven by various commitments.
We must remember, of course, that not all travellers and travelling are
created equal. In this book I make a fundamental distinction between the
so-called jet-setters as privileged travellers, whose status in the power-
geometry of global mobility is defined by their wealth and power (Massey
2014, 62), and refugees and asylum seekers, whose movement across the
space-time continuum is forced and precarious. As a Western academic
who travels on a Canadian passport conveniently approved and acknowl-
edged by the international community, I admit that my work is marked by
my privileged position and freedom of movement. It was not always like
that: my own journey of immigration was marked by various anxieties,
hard work, and personal sacrifice. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to
1 SETTING THE STAGE: PERFORMING THE DIVIDED SELF OF A NEW… 3
recognize my privilege as a hypermodern individual. By the same token,

this book is a study of theatre performances made by and addressed to
hypermodern individuals like myself, who possess the financial, legal, and
linguistic means to access them. Like Marilena Zaroulia, who examines
‘the relation between the so-called European “refugee crisis” and the mul-
tiple meanings and performances of excess’ (2018, 181), I analyse perfor-
mative representations of migration aimed at ‘those of us who have not
had a direct experience of forced displacement’ and whose meaning there-
fore ‘exceeds us’ (181). The major question I seek to answer is: what val-
ues can the performing arts offer a hypermodern nomad? Indeed, what’s
Hecuba to him or her? For Bojana Kunst, the answer is clear: our assump-
tion that art can have some political and/or social impact is invalid (2015,
20); the only function it can fulfil is to become a repository of philosophi-
cal observations and emotional experiences. I concur with this statement
but take her position further in this book, arguing that watching a theatre
performance live and experiencing it as an embodied practice can foster
self-reflection: it can create an epiphany, a fortuitous philosophical moment
of self-recognition. The cosmopolitan spectator is obliged to contemplate
their position as a privileged subject and encouraged to step outside the
historical moment in which they live. In this post-Brechtian gesture of
alienating self from self, cosmopolitan theatre can impose a moment of
recognition. Not only can it make a person of privilege suddenly recognize
the other within themselves; it can incite them to take the first step towards
an ethical dialogue with the other outside the self. In making these sug-
gestions, however utopian they may sound, I follow, on the one hand,
Zygmunt Bauman, who advocates dialogue as the only way to overcome
the indifference, if not animosity, that late capitalism produces towards
strangers (2016, 2017), and, on the other hand, Erika Fischer-Lichte,
who has already suggested that the transformative power of performance
can involve spectators in an active loop of aesthetic and affective experi-
ences, which invokes questions of ethics and sets in motion the mecha-
nisms for one’s encounter with oneself (2008, 40–52). In her more recent
work, Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between three modes of this transfor-
mative aesthetics, such as ‘the aesthetics of impact, of autonomy and of
reception’ (2018, 18), which ‘transform the viewer into an emotional,
feeling subject and, in this respect, is comparable to the empathy aesthetics
of the eighteenth century’ (16). Transformative aesthetics is based on the
act of somatic and emotional encounter between the stage and the audi-
ence; it envisions a viewer in a state of ‘permanent activity’ (11),
4 Y. MEERZON
energetically and creatively involved in the act of receiving or co-

constructing the work of art (13). Building further on this theory, I exam-
ine the performative logic of the encounter as a relational activity
(Bourriaud 1998) and the rhizomatic stillness of multiple selves. By focus-
ing on the fundamental elements of the theatre performance, such as lan-
guage, body, and time/space, I seek to theorize the performative
mechanisms involved in conceptualizing, constructing, and performing
the new cosmopolitanism. The objective is to create a map of the artistic
strategies and philosophical preoccupations that inform the work of the
many artists whose practices and sensibilities are clearly cosmopolitan. The
underlying theme of this book is the notion of the divided self, whereas
the analyses presented are shaped by the focus on motion.
* * *
The Cosmopolitan Subjectivity of the Divided Self

The concept of self as we know it today goes back to the Renaissance and
the work of Petrarch, who ‘by reading the ancient writers had to experi-
ence his own being as a unique and autonomous self which he could
objectify, act upon, and compare to other such autonomous selves’
(Melton 1998, 68). In this process, Petrarch recognized the Western sub-
ject’s tendency to ‘general[ly] turn inward’ as ‘a reaction to the knowledge
that human beings were no longer one with the cosmos’ (68). This read-
ing of the self as a unique entity marked the philosophical thought of the
Enlightenment and the Romantic worldview of the Sturm und Drang
writers, who proposed an idealized model of the self-willed tragic charac-
ter ready for self-sacrifice. Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism radically
changed the concept of self, which is now recognized as something
invented and projected by the onlooker onto the subject. This led to the
notion of the reading self as something constructed through language and
as an act of memory that ‘provides the continuity which allows a sense of
identity’ (73). Today we often define the sense of self through the act of
encounter—an action that emphasizes the relational nature of the self as
self and the self as other—so that a cosmopolitan subject often emerges as
someone in the process of being re-fractured and redefined. As Peter
Boenisch suggests, ‘today subjectivity is not supported as an expression of
“authentic self” or “ideological misrecognition”’; it asserts ‘a subjective
position of formal self-reflexivity that always maintains a distance from

itself and thereby can never become identical with itself’ (2003, 112).
Constructed relationally through a theatre performance, in which infor-
mation and energy are exchanged between artist and viewers, cosmopoli-
tan subjectivity can be revealed (a) historically through the relation of the
self to personal memory and forgetting and to the collective history of a
nation; (b) socially in the relation of the self to society, as seen in identity
politics—the self as other and the self as part of a group; (c) philosophi-
cally and ethically, as the responsibility of the self to oneself and to the
other; and (d) as an aesthetic activity, constructed through the relation of
the self to the self through arts. Cosmopolitan theatre utilizes devices of
relational dramaturgy (Boenisch 2014; Pewny et al. 2014) to bring about
an encounter between the spectator and the work of art, thereby confront-
ing its audiences with resurfacing national, cultural, and ideological tradi-
tions and requiring our ‘radical relation to our histories, subjectivities and
identities’ (Boenisch 2003, 128).
The encounter—both as a dramaturgical device on stage and as a ges-
ture of theoretical conceptualization—serves as this study’s central meta-
phor and facilitates discussion of the complex workings of cosmopolitan
theatre. I use the notion of encounter to speak of the live theatrical work
as a social, performative, philosophical, and aesthetic event, when several
independent subjects come together to form new environments for intel-
lectual, emotional, and affectual collaborations. In its social dimensions,
the encounter can take place at a border-crossing, in a zone of economic
exchange or a (military) conflict, and as a gesture of creating a place for
dialogue or an imagined community (Anderson 1991). In its philosophi-
cal dimensions, it can be an experience itself or ‘the passage and departure
toward the other’ (Derrida 2001, 103). As a performative category, the
encounter can serve as a collision of conflictual forces which takes place
between (1) agents of action in the dramatic world, such as characters; (2)
agents of action in the dramatic world and material elements of the perfor-
mance, such as performers’ bodies, objects, media, and space; (3) the
material elements of the performance; and (4) all the elements of perfor-
mance mentioned above plus the spectator. As a category of aesthetics, the
encounter can be a state of mind or an aesthetic illusion, conditioned by
the act of experiencing a work of art (Wolf 2013, 13–14). The aesthetic
encounter requires the re-centring of the self as an (imaginary) immersion
into the newly constructed world of performance; it implies splitting sub-
jectivity into two separate consciousnesses—an observing ego and an
6 Y. MEERZON
experiencing ego (16). This ontological split of self—as the participating

self and the observing self—becomes the major mechanism for construct-
ing subjectivity in cosmopolitan theatre and thus constitutes the object of
this study. In other words, in this book I aim to shift the discussion of the
ethics of encounter from the self (us)/other (them) paradigm to the self as
other formula and produce a new understanding of subjectivity as embod-
ied self, conditioned by its material and cultural situation. Thanks to our
ability to speak, act, narrate, and ascribe actions to other persons, we can
stage our own vulnerability and our relationships with the world. The
embodied self never functions through abstract categories of being: one’s
corporeality is tightly interconnected with and reflects one’s historical sit-
uation, biography, and sense of the present. Theatre has the unique power
to stage this encounter of self as other. It favours encounter as its special
creative methodology and uses the ‘dialectics of a standstill’ as the specta-
tor’s meeting point with oneself as other (Rokem 2000, 182). To better
understand this dynamic, I suggest a theoretical model of the theatrical
encounter as an atomic cell with the divided self of the cosmopolitan artist
in its centre. This model stems from my previous research into the aesthet-
ics of theatre in exile (Meerzon 2012), in which I defined the exilic condi-
tion as a past/present or here/there binary. This binary configures the
exile’s life journey as a tripartite beginning-middle-end structure, in which
the journey unfolds from the point of departure to the point of arrival,
with no return possible. In this book, I propose to rethink this trajectory
by opening the past/present binary of exile into the simultaneity of cos-
mopolitanism: a rhizomatic process of becoming that reflects the position
of the cosmopolitan subject who is constantly on the move and forced by
the conditions of labour, politics, or physical and economic upheaval to
seek new opportunities elsewhere. This type of intercultural encounter is
reflected in cosmopolitan performances, which frequently focus on the
multicultural and multilingual urbanite torn between the accelerated time
of hyper-consumption and hyper-productivity and the stillness of nothing-
ness, when an individual feels ‘crushed by the empty period of time in his/
her life’ (Lipovetsky 2004, 60). These performances mirror the effects of
cultural globality, which constructs a cosmopolitan persona out of the
divided self (Fig. 1.1).
The nucleus of the proposed model stands for this fluent identity of the
cosmopolitan subject. The floating outer orbits of the model represent the
artistic and personal challenges faced by the cosmopolitan artist, including
the economic conditions of work, the chosen subject matter, the material,
Fig. 1.1 Alamy stock

vector by Paulo Gomez.
(Image ID: H7JNX4)
and the media. Much like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, these float-
ing orbits stand for exterior variables which also influence the making of
the divided self. These variables reflect the instability, ambiguity, and irreg-
ularity of the cultural, financial, and material circumstances that condition
the work of a cosmopolitan artist. So often theatre performance becomes
a space for individual artistic encounters where imagined communities of
global risk (Beck 2011) can be enacted and analysed. Speaking of the
divided self in such general terms, I realize, presents a certain danger of
involuntarily slipping into essentialist thinking, which associates travel
with privilege. It can also approximate cosmopolitanism to political and
social utopia, envisioning the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller only as a
privileged subject, standing apart from and above the realities of modern
migration. To avoid this slippage, in what follows I trace a brief history of
the figure of the cosmopolitan traveller or stranger and how its place and
reception have changed in Western philosophical thought.
* * *
The etymology of the Greek word cosmopolis implies an unresolved para-

dox. Cosmos refers to a universal order as established by nature; polis
8 Y. MEERZON
speaks of the order made by people. Positioned between the state and
the cosmos, cosmopolitanism signifies negotiation across differences; the
tactics of dialogue, listening, and compromise define its mediations. The
ideology of cosmopolitanism—as it is known in Western philosophical
traditions—originates with Diogenes’s postulate ‘I am a citizen of the
world’ and the stoics’ migratory practices, marked by their curiosity and
respect for new places and people. Diogenes’s saying suggests that one’s
loyalties as a citizen do not necessary lie with one place, but with the
universe (Appiah 2005, 271–278). This idea links today’s cosmopolitan
subject to the practices of mobility. These practices imagine and con-
struct a cosmopolitan subject as radicant, a being ‘caught between the
need of a connection with its environment and the forces of uprooting,
between globalization and singularity, between identity and opening to
the other’ (Bourriaud 2009, 51). Permanent exile is the destiny of the
radicant, while their lifestyle reflects the political and economic practices
of late capitalism. Being ‘[a]n object of negotiation’ and ‘a mode of
thought based on translation’ (54), this radicant ‘can no longer count on
a stable environment; he is doomed to be exiled from himself and sum-
moned to invent the nomad culture that the contemporary world
requires’ (77).
Michael Cronin identifies these practices as cultural cosmopolitanism
(2006), whereby the cosmopolitan subject acts as an involuntary transla-
tor of its meanings and experiences (11), someone who can stand outside
singular locations and traditions, interrogating oneself and the world.
Transnational artists, whose work comprises the bulk of the case studies in
this book, are cultural cosmopolitans, since they constantly work across
languages, multiple modes of artistic and economic production, and poli-
tics. They also negotiate forms of artistic production and reception; thus
they help create the conditions of performative in-betweenness (Fischer-
Lichte 2014, 12–13), in which an encounter between the agents of action
takes place and where their subjectivity—oneself as the other in the con-
text of one’s personal life experiences and as the subject of history—
is staged.
Although historically cosmopolitanism was already popular with the
early Christians, who believed that ‘people of all nations can become
“fellow-citizens with the saints”’ (Kleingeld and Brown 2014), this con-
ceptual thinking did not gain momentum until the Enlightenment. The
rise of international trade, the growth of the Western empires, and the
discovery of the new lands contributed to the idea and practice of world
mobility; these events also enabled the ‘emergence of a notion of human

rights and a philosophical focus on human reason’ (2014). From Diderot
to Hume, from Voltaire to Jefferson and Kant, the philosophers of the
time subscribed to the ‘attitude of open-mindedness and impartiality. A
cosmopolitan was someone who was not subservient to a particular reli-
gious or political authority, someone who was not biased by particular
loyalties or cultural prejudice’ (2014). For example, the French philoso-
pher Montesquieu, a true patriot of his own country and one of the first
advocates of such cosmopolitanism, was himself a renowned traveller. He
recognized cosmopolitanism as ‘the notion of human sociability’ (Kristeva
1991, 128) and advocated the wellbeing of any community in its function
as ‘an international society made possible by the development of trade’
(130). Montesquieu saw Europe as a unified nation based on respectful
interactions between neighbours, so that ethics was detrimental to his
political programme. He warned his fellow contemporaries against the
dangers of the juridical distinction between the rights of a man and the
rights of a citizen. ‘Montesquieu’s cosmopolitism was the consequence of
his fundamental concern to turn politics into a space of possible freedom.
His “Modernism” is to be understood as a rejection of unified society for
the sake of a coordinated diversity’ (133). In the philosophical work that
followed Montesquieu’s thought, including Voltaire’s Candide, the idea
emerged of the journey into a foreign land as a process of learning some-
thing new about others and something profound about oneself. In
Voltaire’s time, it was customary ‘to leave one’s homeland in order to
enter other climes, mentalities, and governments’, but it was also under-
stood that this departure was to be ‘undertaken only to return to oneself
and one’s home’ (133). In this philosophical context, the foreigner could
turn into a mythological figure or ‘the metaphor of the distance at which
we should place ourselves in order to revive the dynamics of ideological
and social transformation’ (134).
The rise of pejorative narratives about the cosmopolitan as a cross
between a trustworthy, sedimentary patriot and a suspiciously mobile for-
eigner began in the early nineteenth century and arose out of the practices
and ideologies of the nation state. Even earlier, traces of these narratives
can be found in the writings of Diderot and Rousseau, as well as in the
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the foundational doc-
ument of Western democratic consciousness: ‘Basing itself on a universal
human nature that the Enlightenment learned to conceive and to respect,
the Declaration shifts from the universal notion—“men”—to the
10 Y. MEERZON
“political associations” that must preserve their rights, and encounters the
historical reality of the “essential political association,” which turns out to
be the nation’ (Kristeva 1991, 148). In this context, a private person pos-
sesses less value than a citizen; the latter turns into a political object, whose
‘national identification is the essential expression of his sovereignty’ (149).
As a citizen, this individual has now become identified by their duties
towards the nation, whereas the foreigner turns into a stranger, someone
who ‘does not belong to the group’ (95), and so must be denied all the
privileges that come with citizenship. The negative consequences of such
discourse have been reflected in the juridical and political systems of the
nation states. The rhetoric of an anthropological or folk nationalism was
articulated in the cultural and geographical imperative of a nation, rooted
in the rituals of simple people, who eat, live, pray, and dance together
(Sennett 2011, 58–60). The identity of a national subject became directly
linked to the concepts of territory and time as something given in its linear
and uninterrupted forms, so that a true national subject would not possess
self-awareness or self-estrangement, which originates in the experiences
and narratives of displacement, foreignness, and strangeness. The political
consequences of such nationalist philosophy and the upheavals of history
made banishment and exile a commonplace in the twentieth century
(Brodsky 1995, 22). They created the figure of the unwelcome and suspi-
cious stranger, who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’ (Simmel 1950, 402).
Georg Simmel, the nineteenth-century German sociologist and phi-
losopher, positioned the stranger in the discourse of distance, uncertainty,
and disturbance, declaring the practice of free travel dangerous (1950,
402–405). As a form of mobility, foreignness presupposes freedom, the
stranger’s acceptance of both the anxiety and the excitement of the jour-
ney. To Simmel, however, mobility can turn a reliable citizen into an
uncontrollable engine of diversity. The foreigner, Simmel explained, is a
trader. An isolated encounter with a trader can be beneficial to the econ-
omy; but if the foreigner settles, they can disrupt a self-sufficient commu-
nity. Not being committed to the customs or habits of the group, the
stranger ‘embodies that synthesis of nearness and distance’ (404). This
synthesis makes the stranger’s view objective; but with objectivity comes
detachment from one’s responsibilities to the group. By recognizing
objectivity and freedom as two paradoxical but interconnected conditions
of the experience and mindset of the stranger, Simmel set the stage for
Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the flâneur (1983) and Edward Said’s
work on exile (2000).
Benjamin’s flâneur was a bohemian and a dandy, a detached observer of

his day and history, someone from an economically stable and educated
class. Benjamin traces the origins of flâneurism to the nineteenth-century
panorama literature with flâneur serving as a detective discovering the
physiology of the emerging urban lifestyle. Strolling is the flâneur’s occu-
pation; it provides them with ‘the best prospects’ of the city and vindicates
their ‘idleness’ (Benjamin 1983, 41). At the same time, the flâneur ‘only
seems to be indolent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness
of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant’ (41). This sepa-
ration between the gaze, contemplation, and experience makes the flâneur
a foreigner and a stranger. In fact, in Modernist thought and experience,
the stranger becomes a perfect example and even a fetish of the cosmo-
politan mindset. Stranger-fetishism, Sara Ahmed explains, is rooted in our
prejudice and obsession with the figure of the stranger as alien (Ahmed
2010, 2): the stranger is someone who invades the territory to which I
belong and so (allegedly) destroys the safety of my community. Not sur-
prisingly, we often trace the philosophical and artistic origins of Modernist
philosophy and the historical avant-garde in arts to ‘stateless citizens, ren-
egades, exiles, turncoats’ (Bourriaud 2009, 76). Many avant-garde artists
sought the artistic devices needed to portray the subjectivity of the flâneur
and the sense of rupture and dissonance that marks their consciousness.
Often, they opted for the artistic strategies of fragmentation, suspension
of disbelief, syncopation, distorted point of view, and grotesque to reflect
this condition of being a stranger. They also mixed autobiographical and
memory narratives with surrealist imagery to depict the alienating power
of the voyage as a separation of the gaze from the experience, of appear-
ance from desire, of self from other, and of self from oneself. In this way
they can be said to have often practised the aesthetics of exilic performative
(Meerzon 2012).
If during the twentieth-century interwar period the word ‘cosmopoli-
tanism’ had acquired a pejorative meaning, in the years after WWII, in the
period of post-colonial and independence movements, the stranger turned
into the protagonist of banishment and political exile. Edward Said defined
exile as a condition of loss and forgetting, something ‘strangely compel-
ling to speak about but terrible to experience’ (Said 2000, 1). Whether
forced or self-imposed, exile can easily turn into an ‘unhealable rift, forced
between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true
home’ (1). However, at the core of the exilic drive is the act of resistance:
an individual standing against the state. As banishment, exile often results
12 Y. MEERZON
in a state of sorrow and personal marginality, but it can be also an invita-

tion to grow up, to welcome one’s capacity for reinventing oneself. It was
Hannah Arendt who suggested that after WWII our view of the world
must drastically change (1994 [1943]). Recently, the refugee—an exile
forced to leave their country of birth and settlement to seek safety—has
become a central preoccupation of political philosophy, with Giorgio
Agamben proposing that the refugee is perhaps ‘the only category in
which one may see today […] the forms and limits of a coming political
community’ (2008, 90). A refugee, stripped of their rights as a citizen,
represents the essence of the so-called naked life, which the bureaucracy of
the nation state tends to undermine. Thus, Agamben insists, the right of
movement and asylum ‘must no longer be considered as the conceptual
category’ (94). In this argument, Agamben makes a philosophical and
political leap impossible to achieve through the logic of immobility or
settlement.
To continue this line of argument, Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a
further deliberation on freedom of mobility as a fundamental right (2006).
To him, the idea of a cosmopolitan citizen who belongs to the human
community is concretized through this citizen’s willingness to take an
interest in the lives, the practices, and the beliefs of others. According to
Appiah, ‘cosmopolitanism begins with conversation across boundaries’,
and so it ‘encourages us to embrace both local and universal loyalties and
allegiances and denies that they necessarily come into conflict with each
other’ (Seifikar 2008, 307–308). Appiah’s position echoes the views of
that long-standing advocate of human diversity, Stuart Hall, who mobi-
lized the concept of cultural and social conjuncture as a manifestation of
‘related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different
tempos’ but condensed within one historical moment and political space
(Hall 1979, 14). Ulrich Beck takes this idea further: he defines cosmopoli-
tanism as a newly imagined community of global risk, which emerges as
the result of the ‘global interconnectivity between people and states,
endorsing the end of the “global other”’ (2011, 1348). He proposes a
rethink of Kant’s view of cosmopolitanism as ‘something active, a task, a
conscious and voluntary choice, clearly the affair of an elite’, as now some-
thing mundane, banal, and coercive (1348). This new cosmopolitanism
must be understood as cosmopolitan realism (Rumford 2013, 102–107),
the process of cosmopolitization taking place ‘behind the façade of persist-
ing national spaces, jurisdictions and labels, even as national flags continue
to be raised and national attitudes, identities, and consciousness remain
dominant’ (Beck 2011, 1348). Since the global other is now amidst us,
the question becomes ‘how can strangers—constructed as members of
imagined national communities—be turned into neighbours?’ (1349); for
now ‘we’ cannot remain safely locked within the binaries of methodologi-
cal nationalism. In this sociological scenario, the ‘we’ appears vulnerable,
divided, and as much at risk as the ‘other’. Beck’s proposal leads the way
to Homi Bhabha’s suggestion that today’s world resembles the world of
proto-nationalist discourses of the late eighteenth century (2014, 262).
The new cosmopolitanism, emerging from the circumstances of exile, asy-
lum seeking, work-related travel, and cultural tourism, must be defined as
a work-in-progress and a work-in-process (262), in which the new cosmopoli-
tan subjectivity—the phenomenon of rupture and the figure of the cosmo-
politan patriot—emerges (Appiah 2006). The practice of cosmopolitanism
comprises transcultural and multilingual modes of experience; it is ‘neither
local/national nor international, but both at once’ (Simpson 2005, 145),
being equally rooted in the collective tendencies of localization and
nationalism and in globalization through the (in)voluntary re-settlement
of populations, as well as in economic migration, asylum seeking, and
nomadism.
To defend cosmopolitanism today becomes increasingly difficult, for in
order to fully enjoy the uncertainty of a journey, of sitting at a bus stop or
in an airport waiting room, one is obliged to rely on one’s physical safety,
financial security, an internationally recognized type of citizenship, and
guaranteed employment. At the same time, without utopian discourses
that at their core uphold the ideals of freedom and democracy, it will be
simply impossible to resist the rising practices and ideologies of populism,
nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. It is not surprising that in her recent
book For a Left Populism, such a fierce advocate of the political Left as
Chantal Mouffe argues that the time has come for the Left to reclaim its
political weight. In seeking to reconstruct the peoples’—the emphasis on
the plural implying the diversity of the group—or the collective we of ‘the
workers, the immigrants, and the precious middle class’ (Mouffe 2018,
24), the New Left must fight for ‘the radicalization of democracy’ (24). It
must use devices of populist performance, including affect, to mobilize
these new peoples as ‘a collective subject apt to launch a political offensive
in order to establish a new hegemonic formation within the liberal demo-
cratic framework’ (80). Cosmopolitan theatre exemplifies one of the ver-
sions of such political performance, since it enables us to confront our
own biases and question our own prejudices.
14 Y. MEERZON
Having watched the work of cosmopolitan artists and discussed what

travelling means to them, I find it rather naive to regard the life these art-
ists lead on the road only as privilege, being in control, and holding power.
The ability to move as one wishes can be liberating, just as moving from
one place to another can be helpful in seeking job opportunities and self-
growth, but it is not necessarily easier than being settled. Life on the road
involves labour and effort. It depends on one’s skills at negotiation and
willingness to take risks. It relies on management, not emotion. It main-
tains business partnerships not friendships. And it requires living on
standby, being ready to relocate, available to begin a new project, a new
enterprise, or a new commitment at any given moment in time or space.
Bojana Kunst describes this phenomenon as ‘an artist at work’ (2015), a
form of social and economic engagement that not only defines the process
of making an artistic project but also spills into its aesthetics. It also reflects
the unstable work conditions that often affect the consciousness of cosmo-
politan artists, making them politically engaged, carrying the guilt of their
survival and success within the work. As a result, they often advocate
transnational dialogue over confrontation and rely on translation both as
their work strategy and as an aesthetic principle. Their performances are
also often characterized by the slow pace of the artistic construction, and
their making is marked by estrangement, multilingualism, and interdisci-
plinarity, which serve to mobilize the aesthetic protocols of motion and
nomadism. These artists/strangers are also pensive travellers and narrators
of historical acts of destruction, often inventing various recipes for social
interaction. Frequently, cosmopolitan theatre not only reflects the world
offstage but also constructs the so-called common spaces of the post-
national and post-multicultural state (Dib et al. 2008). Because their work
originates in multicultural urban centres, it tends to address as many forms
of peoples’ movement as we know today. Some productions dramatize the
current refugee crisis and stories of individuals forced to flee their homes;
others focus on the experience of erasure and the impossibility of return.
Some study the anxiety of travel experienced by second-generation immi-
grants; others conceive of the journey as a form of memory and a history-
making. Often these works stage the ambiguity, the anxiety, the fear, the
excitement, and the uncertainty that come with being on the road. Such
experiences can be shared by many people, including those forced into
travelling, whose journey is characterized by mortal dangers with often no
real hope for survival, and by those who enjoy travelling. Yet one thing is
clear about the chosen works and this project devoted to them: nothing
else resembles such journeys. For those who have never experienced the
horrors of flight, no power of imagination or representation can ade-
quately convey this ordeal. Mass migration involves nations falling apart
and new societies being formed, often growing independently of their
hosts, in the dangerous parallel societies of refugee camps. It is marked by
human trafficking and the new social hierarchies emerging within the
underprivileged, unemployed, often racially profiled, physically and mor-
ally exhausted, and hence explosive migrant communities. Finding them-
selves in this political plight, the artists examined in this study insist that in
the history of the flight of peoples there cannot be any righteous or disen-
gaged persons. Everybody involved in the movement of populations is
implicated—physically, politically, and ethically.
* * *
Cosmopolitan Theatre: Trying on a New Definition

In defining the political, artistic, and ethical practices of cosmopolitan the-
atre, I take my inspiration from Rebecca Walkowitz’s work on critical
cosmopolitanism in literature (2006). Walkowitz identifies critical cosmo-
politanism as a type of philosophical and artistic practice that reaches
‘beyond the nation […] comparing, distinguishing, and judging among
different versions of transnational thought’ (2006, 2). This practice reflects
cosmopolitan artists’ personal conditions of movement, be it the experi-
ence of a refugee displaced by war, an asylum seeker, or an economic
migrant. It encourages these artists’ adoption of a transnational position
and multiple points of view. Thus, in their critical attitude to the world,
cosmopolitan artists often ‘emphasize the conditions of limited or sus-
pended agency, and they ask us how the conditions of belonging are
bound up in the production, classification, and reception of literary narra-
tives’ (4).
In literature, critical cosmopolitanism originated in the practices of
Modernism, as exemplified in the work of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad,
Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, and
W. G. Sebald, among others. It emerged as ‘a type of philosophical inter-
rogation—one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the
present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as
an autonomous subject’ (Walkowitz 2006, 8). Stylistically, it used the
16 Y. MEERZON
devices of suspended perception and emphasized artistic composition as

time sense (Stein 1926). Aesthetically, it rested upon two principles: ‘an
aversion of heroic tones of appropriation and progress, and a suspicion of
epistemological privilege, views from above or from the centre that assume
a constant distinction between who is seeing and what is seen’ (Walkowitz
2006, 2). Such a point of view implied ‘double consciousness, compari-
son, negation, and persistent self-reflection’ (2); it mobilized the use of
‘imitation and parody’ and ‘the processes and political contexts of know-
ing and recognizing’ (7). In its narrative procedures, the artists of critical
cosmopolitanism sought to showcase their ‘distrust of civilizing processes’
(4) and advocated the role of literature and the performing arts in dissemi-
nating knowledge. The centripetal and centrifugal forces of history and
travelling created the patterns of international transgression that charac-
terized this work, and often the topics of border-crossing and cultural
encounter constituted its subject matter.
Many ideological and artistic tendencies of critical cosmopolitanism
find new urgency in contemporary performance practices, since they
engage with the political and social consequences of migration. Today’s
theatre of cosmopolitanism—as I propose to analyse it—originates at two
axes of meaning: as a social phenomenon and as an aesthetic condition.
As a social phenomenon, cosmopolitan theatre is marked by the eco-
nomic situation and personal mobility of its makers. There is an urgent
need to talk about global migration as a cause for transnational encoun-
ters, the emergence of globalized models of economics, and their positive
and negative outcomes but also about how these phenomena trigger new
nationalism, which rejects the global other and embraces the traditional
values of the nation state (Valluvan 2019). For these reasons, a major focus
of this study is the theatrical events created by transnational theatre artists
for international audiences, who gather at international theatre festivals,
and for those urban and cosmopolitan spectators, sometime migrants
themselves, who are concerned with the changing political climate of our
time, seek and believe in political impact of a theatrical encounter, and
attend local and touring productions dedicated to these topics. This prac-
tice creates performative encounters of cosmopolitan ecology (Knowles
2017), characterized by ‘the production of sociality’ and ‘communal
forms of collaboration’ (Kunst 2015, 53). Accordingly, one of the eco-
nomic tactics of cosmopolitan theatre is to generate transcultural encoun-
ters shaped by the ‘shifts in late capitalism’ (56). In fact, in its modes of
production, cosmopolitan theatre often relies on international capital,
labour, and partnerships, for its ideological models stem from the princi-
ples of interconnectedness that also characterize the social workings of
globalization. The funding systems within which cosmopolitan theatres
operate are diverse and difficult to systematize. They include state funding
and private donations, corporate sponsorships, personal collaborations,
and grass-roots initiatives. What makes these practices similar is the com-
panies’ and individual artists’ apprehension and often dependency on such
collaborations. The goal of such collaborations is often to ensure the indi-
vidual artists and their companies’ participation in prestigious interna-
tional festivals and subsequent transnational touring. This financial model
also conditions the subject matter of cosmopolitan theatre, which fre-
quently has at its centre the figure of a traveller whose human rights have
been violated and for whom the audience’s sympathy is elicited. Questions
of displacement and border-crossing, home and belonging, divided sub-
jectivities and hybrid identities tend to dominate the individual stories told
in this type of theatre. The artists’ recognition of their personal responsi-
bility in telling the stories of intercultural encounter underpins the sense
of privilege that many of their performances share, so that they frequently
make questions of ethics and representation the cornerstone of their
works. Moreover, cosmopolitan theatre invites its spectators to recognize
the individual within the group, thereby creating a unique collaborative
space to interrogate the future of democracy.
As an artistic practice, cosmopolitan theatre is also difficult to define
and systematize. Often it addresses the fundamental gap between repre-
sentation and re-enactment, questioning the encounter principle that
motivates any type of live performance (Rebellato 2009, 78). Frequently,
its dramatic investigation is centred on an individual in crisis—someone in
the midst of a physical and existential journey, to whom the state of per-
sonal liminality has become the new norm. Positioned between cultures,
traditions, linguistic practices, and economic models, these individuals
identify with many, often conflicting, points of view. Simultaneously, they
bear allegiance to different nations, while claiming their personal linguistic
and cultural position of multiplicity as the new authenticity and truth. The
parallax of writing, speaking, or performing (Aciman 2011)—the suspen-
sion of time and memory and the possibility of encountering one’s own
self—functions in these works as an act of interpretation and repository of
individual experiences. Many cosmopolitan performances stage the phe-
nomenon of the divided self to illustrate the psychological and the cultural
outcomes of being cosmopolitan on stage. They often infuse the aesthetics
18 Y. MEERZON
of their productions with Brechtian estrangement, which enables theatre

audiences to recognize themselves as subjects of divided subjectivity. It
helps them become aware of the I as myself and I as other offstage. Many
cosmopolitan theatre makers, in other words, explore the condition of
liminality as their personal place of nostalgia, melancholia, and also privi-
lege. At the same time, they identify fear of the other as the source of the
hatred, xenophobia, racism, and hostility that characterize today’s world.
They use dramaturgical tactics of fragmentation and deconstruction,
uncanny and vertigo, multilingualism, space/time simultaneity, audience
displacement, and immersion as linking devices between the critical cos-
mopolitanism of the historical avant-garde and its contemporary forms.
Such works capitalize on Appadurai’s idea that imagination unfolds
beyond borders, cultures, or languages, so that it becomes more inclusive
than just the idea of global diversity (2017, 1–5).
Because cosmopolitan theatre is made by subjects who often find them-
selves torn between many cultures, traditions, and linguistic practices, it
relies greatly upon these artists’ autobiographical and self-reflective narra-
tives. These narratives reveal the cosmopolitan artist’s ‘focus on the self as
a creative resource’ to bridge the transcultural gaps of everyday encounter
and ‘intercultural dramaturgy’ (Rudakoff 2014, 151). Their performances
are often characterized by a dual vector, pointing simultaneously at the
artist’s personal experience and demonstrating the freedom to engage
with the works, traditions, and customs of other cultures. It is not surpris-
ing that many works discussed in this book have been presented within the
frameworks of international theatre festivals, either in Europe or North
America. Just as the conceptual underpinnings of this book stem from the
Western philosophical tradition, the selected theatre and performance
projects reflect Western theatrical traditions as well. In constructing its
fictional worlds and characters, cosmopolitan theatre focuses on the phe-
nomenological idea of the human body as a receptacle of one’s histories
and memories. In its semiotic functions, the body of the cosmopolitan
traveller turns into an object of our gaze and contemplation and thus
becomes the other. As a manifestation of Freudian uncanny, the stranger’s
body foregrounds the deep disconnect we carry within our own selves and
towards the other (Ahmed 2000, 51–52). The case studies examined in
this book emphasize our fascination, both positive and otherwise, with
strangeness as difference and the sameness of not belonging. In this con-
text, the colour of one’s skin, our gait, and the gestures we produce, the
sounds we make, that is, the materiality of the body, become the
fundamental markers of foreignness that differentiate between the right of

the man and the right of the citizen (Kristeva 1991, 96–97). Capitalizing
on this fascination with strangeness, therefore, cosmopolitan theatre fore-
grounds the materiality of the actor’s body and stages it as a tension
between the body of the performer and their character, each collapsing
into the other. Like new interculturalism, which defines the embodied
experiences of hybridity, cosmopolitan theatre ‘represents a conceptual,
processual, embodied lived condition driven by one’s own multiple affili-
ations to cultures, nations and faiths’ (Mitra 2015, 15). The artist’s posi-
tion as an insider-outsider results in an embodied view of their own
liminality as someone who experiences two or more cultures at the same
time; and thus in its performative manifestations, theatrical cosmopolitan-
ism often engages with those ‘cultural exchanges that operate primarily at
a corporeal level’ (23). Issues of language and body constitute the focal
points of the first and second parts of this volume. In many cosmopolitan
theatre practices, the actors’ voices are separated from their bodies, and
multilingual and sound-based scripts or (syn)aesthetic playtexts are gener-
ated (Machon 2009). This performance device identifies the work with
language and fosters the paradigms of polyglot theatre (Carlson 2006).
Cosmopolitan artists are very often multilingual: they rely on the phatic
power of words, turning the dramatic dialogue into music. The chorus,
whether the speech of many spoken in one voice or the speech of one
character enunciated by many voices, is one of these devices. By using the
chorus as a type of contrapuntal construction, when ‘two contradictory
themes [are] playing at the same time and creating a harmonious melody’
(Said 2010, xii), cosmopolitan theatre investigates such common strate-
gies of encounter as shock and surprise, déjà vu, mirroring, and repetition.
The creation of an emotive soundscape may constitute one of the political
devices of such a work, since many artists refuse to translate their multilin-
gual texts into any of the official language(s) of their target audiences. By
so doing, they challenge the ideological foundations of the nation state,
rooted in the dominance of one language, ethnicity, and culture, and make
multilingualism the leading paradigm of today’s social, political, and cul-
tural interactions between peoples within one nation and across borders.
The two other performative categories to be analysed are space and
time. In cosmopolitan theatre, the theatrical space becomes a philosophi-
cal construct; it can serve as an unlocalized non-place, a Theatrum Mundi
approach, a representation of movement without progression, or a version
of Beckett’s existentialism transformed into a sociological and spatial
20 Y. MEERZON
problem (Rae 2006, 20). Cosmopolitan theatre often strips the stage of
any markers of a domestic, national, or international location (Rebellato
2009, 81), so that in its referential functions it acquires the status of a
non-place and serves as a representation of stillness in motion without
progression (Rae 2006, 20). In this way, cosmopolitan theatre forces our
imagination to unfold beyond borders, cultures, or languages and demands
inclusivity rather than mere global diversity. It aspires to create theatrical
communitas on and off stage, and it uses the dramaturgy of walking as a
spatial-temporal tactic to activate its spectators’ mechanisms of self-
reflection. Since it is ‘through bodies being in contact with space [,] that
we perceive the world around us and relations to that world’ (Briginshaw
2001, 1), the action of moving on foot, individually or in a group, creates
both a temporal community of refuge and a separation between the sub-
ject and the landscape. In order to bring the idea of an empty space to life,
cosmopolitan theatre works across performative disciplines: it engages dia-
logue, dance, music, performance installations, and the immersive and
participatory practices of activism to speak to the conditions of confusion,
relationality, and non-belonging produced by living on the road. This
confusion generates a deeper focus on issues of subjectivity: by evoking
the practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan theatre fre-
quently engages with Freudian anxiety, double consciousness, repetition,
and the uncanny. Breaking the self into multiples is one example of how
this form of theatre can evoke and interrogate non-representational rela-
tions between self and identity, character and actor, fictional world and
theatre space. Capitalizing on the devices of postdramatic performance
(Lehmann 2006), cosmopolitan theatre often strips characters of their
identity, turning them into fragments and abstractions of language, craft-
ing character as a device of the postdramatic text (Barnett 2008).
At the level of reception, cosmopolitan theatre offers its audiences the
possibility of self-encounter, inviting the privileged individual to contem-
plate their role in a world of increasing social and political precarity. Silvija
Jestrovic identifies such reflection as interference—a device of relational
aesthetics that connects the performance back to its audiences in a gesture
of ‘associative thinking and excessive meaning making’ (2016, 351), a
gesture tightly connected to the very concrete images of social and envi-
ronmental disasters taking place outside the theatrical space. Jestrovic
evokes a highly personalized memory of her encounters with would-be
immigrants to Britain in the Pas-de-Calais region of France which condi-
tioned her engagement with an installation by Takehisa Kosugi: the
associations evoked speak to the psychosomatic power of reception

imposed by relational aesthetics (353). Watching a play of echoes, reminis-
cences, associations, gaps, and evocations, we ‘need to remember that
what it is is not what must be’ (Rebellato 2009, 79), a phenomenon iden-
tified by Peggy Phelan as the flow of possibilities and filling the gap
between the truth and the representation (1992). Cosmopolitan artists
capitalize on immersive experiences of watching live theatre as they aim to
mobilize the stage/audience encounter and so create new zones of con-
tact. Constructing such zones—whether in the case of a traditional perfor-
mance or in more experiential forms of participatory theatre—presupposes
practising new levels of proximity and trust between performers and spec-
tators, thus enabling affective citizenship (Parati 2017) and enacting per-
formative communities of hope (Dolan 2005).
* * *
On Methodological Considerations
As I am interested in the close interconnections between politics and
aesthetics and seek to address these questions, I continuously refer to
certain aesthetic theories of political performance developed by Erika
Fischer-Lichte (2008), Christopher Balme (1999), Marvin Carlson
(2006), Jill Dolan (2005), Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo (2007), and
Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006), among many others. These studies offer
different conceptualizations of contemporary theatre. Their shared meth-
odology involves the comparative analysis of international productions
that challenge and enrich existing theatre aesthetics in order to evoke the
history of the present. Each seeks to build either a historiography and
taxonomy of the artistic devices of the chosen phenomenon (e.g. syn-
cretic theatre) or its grounded theory (as in the case of postdramatic
theatre).
My objectives are less ambitious, since I aim only to offer a set of ana-
lytical categories to examine the working of critical cosmopolitanism in
theatre today. In terms of geographical scope, most of the case studies in
this volume examine productions developed, performed, and toured in
North America (including Canada) and Europe. My choice of perfor-
mances for each case study was also conditioned by the advantages and the
limitations of global movement, since, even as a Canadian theatre scholar
22 Y. MEERZON
able to travel freely across the world, my exposure to international theatre

work is restricted by my place of residence (Ottawa); my financial, profes-
sional, and family obligations; as well as the languages I speak. Accordingly,
although this book seeks to be inclusive, I do recognize its limitations and
so do not aspire to offer a comprehensive picture of all the possible tech-
niques of staging divided subjectivity or all possible varieties of cosmopoli-
tan theatre. I do, however, aim to describe, examine, and define its
principal political and ethical functions and outcomes.
In selecting my examples, I follow Edward Said’s advice to study indi-
vidual texts and writings that make a ‘collective body of texts’ gathered
under ‘a discursive formation’ (1979, 23)—orientalism in his case and
cosmopolitanism in mine. Said’s approach was anthropological, as he
examined a wide range of scholarly and artistic texts, personal accounts of
travelling, political treaties, and religious and philosophical studies, all of
which collectively served to draw a picture of orientalism. ‘The unity of
the large ensemble of texts I analyse,’ Said wrote, ‘is due in part to the fact
that they frequently refer to each other’ (1979, 23) and hence share meth-
odologies of representation, political and thematic concerns, and artistic
technologies of constructing the discourse of orientalism. Said used the
method of close reading of individual texts to show that historically and
geographically they reflected the artistic imaginations of individuals, who
had grown up within the imperialist practices of their own countries. He
wanted to ‘reveal the dialect between individual text or writer and the
complex collective formation to which his[her] work is a contribution’
(24). By analogy, the plays and the productions I have chosen for this
project are also deeply interconnected. Because they use images and refer-
ences of displacement to capture today’s history, the stories these works
tell are deeply informed by their makers’ personal histories of movement.
The hybrid or divided self of the cosmopolitan artist—whether a first- or
second-generation (im)migrant—often constitutes the subject matter of
the chosen works.
My analytical methodology is twofold: first, I examine how the chosen
theatrical works are structured and what patterns they employ in order to
create meaning. Then, I analyse how these narrative and performative pat-
terns stimulate responses in audiences, that is to say, how they stage the
implied receiver (Iser 1974). In doing so, I elaborate on Jill Dolan’s asser-
tion that theatre possesses the best ‘apparatus’—‘its liveness, the potential
it holds for real social exchange, its mortality, its openness to human inter-
actions that life outside this magical space prohibits’—for creating utopia
on stage and in the auditorium (2005, 63). In a sense, this volume is itself
a type of cosmopolitan production, since it describes an impossibility: a
(theatre) performance which provides a creative articulation of a social
utopia and invites its audiences to take ‘a leap of faith’ regarding the pos-
sibilities of the cosmopolitan lifestyle and interpersonal conduct. Such a
performance does not prescribe a one-way transition from the experience
of performance to the experience of a cosmopolitan subject or anticipate
that the act of watching can turn into the act of doing. What such theatre
offers, however, is a moment of provocation—either in its subject matter
or in its artistry—that turns into a moment of stillness, which allows the
spectator to experience a pause and hence an encounter with the self as
other. To better understand how this strategy works, I propose to examine
the chosen performances from the perspective of their construction,
assuming that a model spectator is already built into the work of art. For
this purpose, I adopt the theory of aesthetic response, which studies how an
artwork impacts its implied receivers (Iser 1974). An examination of the
never-occluded gap between the artist’s intention and the receiver’s inter-
pretation of it leads me to make a series of observations on how cosmo-
politan subjectivity is staged. I argue that by using performative and
narrative techniques of distraction, cosmopolitan theatre generates aes-
thetic pleasure as the audience’s participation in the performance, which
establishes new ‘connections between perception and thought’ (Iser 1974,
xiv) and enables the spectator to encounter the self. Here again, my think-
ing approximates Dolan’s, when she cites the phenomenon of utopian
performative as an affect or a ‘present-tense relationship between perform-
ers and spectators in a particular historical moment and a specific geo-
graphic location’ (Dolan 2005, 65). Our encounters with cosmopolitan
theatre practices can thus become ‘effective and pleasurable methods for
contemplating visions of a better world’ and ‘reanimate a humanism that
can incorporate love, hope, and commonality alongside a deep under-
standing of difference’ (64). Such aspirations can be utopian in them-
selves, but as many theatre theoreticians have already argued, we cannot
underestimate the power of the political impact produced by a collectively
shared emotion. This is the core of Dolan’s argument: that theatre holds
a unique power to provoke and make us experience this social emotion,
which can lead to the emergence, even if momentarily, of ‘inarticulate
spontaneous communitas’, a ‘glimpse of the no-place [which] we can
reach only through feeling, together’ (65–66).
24 Y. MEERZON
This approach is not unique. Susan Bennett had already established

important links between reception theory and performance (1997,
20–86), which further fostered impressive scholarship on theatre audi-
ences. My focus, however, is not the actual theatregoers of globalization
and cosmopolitanism (Freshwater 2009); instead I turn to philosophical,
linguistic, intermedial, and interdisciplinary theories of aesthetic encoun-
ter in order to examine the performative strategies of constructing a model
spectator (De Marinis 1987, 102). The model spectator is a hypothetical
construct; it differs from the empirical one in that it refers to the drama-
turgical and performative strategies within the work of art, which suggest
‘the manner of interpretation anticipated by the text [production in my
case—YM] and written into it’ (102). Studying these dramaturgical and
performative strategies of making theatre of cosmopolitanism can help our
better understanding of how this divided self of hypermodernity is made.
It also prompts the use of philosophical, linguistic, and interdisciplinary
theories of spectator dramaturgy.
* * *
On the Layout of the Book

This book is structured in three parts: Encounters in Language, Encounters
in Body, and Encounters in Time, Space, and History. Each of these parts
consists of two chapters that study individual experiences of constructing
hypermodern subjectivity (Chaps. 2, 4, and 6) and analyse the placement
and work of this individual within the group (Chaps. 3, 5, and 7).
Part I, Encounters in Language, examines the dramaturgy of the cos-
mopolitan encounter in language: the way its theatrical speech act
(Lehmann 2011, 38–39) is manifested in mono-, bi-, and multilingual
performances of immigration and multiculturalism. Geographically, it
focuses on English Canada and Quebec, citing milestones of bi- and mul-
tilingual Canadian theatre. Chapter 2 investigates the complexity of the
divided self as a place for multilingual, multi-contextual, and multicultural
encounters within an autobiographical solo performance, the self being
constructed from within, the way we narrate our view of who we are to
others. In Chap. 3, I analyse the same problematics applied to a multilin-
gual dramatic dialogue, looking into how one’s subjectivity can be con-
structed from without: that is, how it emerges through peoples’ multiple
interpersonal interactions and how others construct our own stories for us
and often instead of us. Language plays a primary role here: it becomes a
place to experiment with one’s sense of belonging and helps to recognize
(one)self as other. In a solo performance produced by a cosmopolitan art-
ist, we often observe a centrifugal movement, away from the defining
power of the performer’s mother tongue. When it comes to constructing
a multilingual dialogue, we often detect a centripetal drive. An untrans-
lated, multilingual dialogue has the power to put the addressee (whether
a fictional character on stage or an audience member) in the position of
partial not-knowing, a condition that can mobilize one’s encounter with
oneself.
Part II, Encounters in Body, examines the dramaturgy of the cosmo-
politan encounter in solo performances (Chap. 4) and multi-bodied works
or chorus plays (Chap. 5). Unlike Part I, it does not focus on a single
geography; rather, it studies a set of international theatre works (mostly
European and North American) which thematically, politically, and artisti-
cally speak to the benefits and failures of cosmopolitan consciousness and
practices. Cosmopolitan actors often perform both as themselves and as
the characters they enact. Thus, a theatrical encounter in body refers to the
continuous loop of cultural, logical, ethical, and aesthetic recognitions
and adjustments that take place within the body of such a performer and
between the stage and the audience. The productions studied in Part II
range from performance arts to dance and from intermedial installations
to autobiographical theatre. Being genre-diverse, the selected case studies
present the array of methodological patterns and routines that define the
aesthetics and ethics of staging body in the cosmopolitan theatre. For its
theoretical framework, Part II uses Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of
stranger-fetishism, when the ‘I’ imagines the other as alien and as a fetish
(2010, 2). Stranger-fetishism refers to our view of the body as ‘a visual
signifier of difference’ and an impassable psychological and physical bor-
der that separates the I from the other (44–45). Chapters 4 and 5 study
this performative construction of the other on stage, the ways it capitalizes
on the irresolvable dialectic between the individual body and the body
politic. It often marks the relationship between bodies and ‘suggests that
the particular body carries traces of the differences that are registered in
the bodies of others’ (44).
Part III, Encounters in Time, Space, and History, is devoted to the
encounter between the stage and the audience, as it takes place in the
spatial-temporal continuum of cosmopolitan theatre. In Chap. 6,
26 Y. MEERZON
proximity, intimacy, gaze, and immersive listening are examined as princi-

pal devices of the audience’s experiences of authenticity in the controlled
settings of one-to-one performances. These productions foreground the
spectator’s solitude and challenge the expectations of trust implied in
immersive theatre practices. They provide their spectators with a chance to
recognize the uncanny difference between the ‘I’ and myself as other.
Chapter 7 contains an additional focus on the principles of audience con-
struction as communitas. By addressing their audiences as a collective of
theatregoers, theatrical events—both those that unfold in designated the-
atre spaces as traditional or participatory performances and those that take
place elsewhere as immersive and durational projects—can make their cos-
mopolitan spectators/participants aware of their own singularity. In Part
III, the work of cosmopolitan spectators is foregrounded in their rela-
tional activity as navigators of the encounter and co-creators of the perfor-
mative event. Here the spectator’s subjectivity is revealed through the
power of performative transformation (Fischer-Lichte 2008), when the
meaning of a production and its emotional, cultural, social, and political
semiosis stem from the audience’s direct and highly personal (physical,
tactile, kinetic, and sensorial) encounters with the material elements of
performance. I build on this idea by arguing that cosmopolitan theatre can
bring an individual spectator to recognize their own divided self as other
in the context of their personal life experiences and as a subject of history.
* * *
In Lieu of Concluding Remarks

I began working on this project five years ago when it seemed somewhat
possible to think of cosmopolitanism as a type of transnational conscious-
ness and everyday practice. The late Zygmunt Bauman, for example, fear-
lessly advocated the notion of cosmopolitanism. As the world was
becoming increasingly hostile towards difference—the other, the refugee,
the nomad—Bauman spoke of the dangers of building fences. He recog-
nized the panic of migration as a crisis of current political systems: in their
attempts to protect the work of their own apparatus, institutions of power
often capitalize on peoples’ collective anxieties and fears and thus con-
struct the figural and metaphorical barriers of nationalism. ‘Strangers tend
to cause anxiety precisely because of being “strange”’, Bauman wrote
(2016, 8); but ‘the policy of mutual separation and keeping one’s dis-
tance, building walls instead of bridges […] lead nowhere but onto the
wasteland of mutual mistrust, estrangement and aggravation’ (18).
Learning how to embrace difference and act in dialogue, through conver-
sation, can serve as an antidote to raising fences; it can also lead to adopt-
ing, perhaps unconditionally, the politics of hospitality. Cosmopolitanism—a
type of social consciousness which promotes competence in co-residing
with people of different backgrounds and interest in the wellbeing of the
collective—may be seen as another antidote to the issue of fence-building
that Bauman described.
During these five years, however, many political pillars of Western
democracy have fallen. From Donald Trump’s xenophobia and anti-
immigrant discourse to Brexit, Hungarian and Italian neo-nationalism,
repeated instances of antisemitism, including the attack at the home of
Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg that took in Monsey, Rockland County, during
Hanukah of 2019, and even the pandemic of COVID19, the world has
been catapulted into another major paradigm shift that propagates not only
hostility to the other but also militarization of borders and calls for national
defence. It also brings back shadows of the past, exemplified in such move-
ments as Generation Identity, which reinforces violence, aggression, and
antagonism to each and to the other. With time, therefore, this project—
which began as an exercise in contemplation of the divided subjectivity of
the cosmopolitan self—has turned into a political endeavour, a gesture of
warning and an act of resistance, aspiring to raise awareness of the dangers
created by the practices of exclusion. However utopian and privileged the
idea of cosmopolitanism can be, without its basic imperatives—such as
right for free movement, curiosity towards the other, openness to the
encounter, embracing difference, and a transnational mindset—our march
into an unknown future, I wish to argue, can be extremely dark and prob-
lematic, since it seems that history is about to repeat itself.
Performance arts can function as ‘a laboratory of identities’ (Bourriaud
2009, 51) and as a training ground for offstage behaviour. Cosmopolitan
theatre, as I seek to demonstrate, can also serve as a reminder that in
everyday life there is still potential for transnational encounters and com-
munication, with many artists making the formation of partnerships and
practising dialogue across national divisions the driving imperative of their
collaborations. The image of Brecht’s Mother Courage, forced by the his-
torical conditions of her time to march through battle fields, negotiate her
morals, and trade security and the lives of her children for personal profit,
28 Y. MEERZON
has been hovering over the past decade. It is not surprising, therefore, that
politically engaged artists of cosmopolitan consciousness, being deeply
concerned with the fate of ordinary people in times of great historical
experiments when each person’s moral values and beliefs get tested, often
choose the aesthetics of Brechtian theatre to remind audiences of their
ethical responsibilities for themselves and for the other. The ethics of the
encounter—our obligation to recognize the other as oneself—is the shared
philosophical imperative of the theatres of cosmopolitanism, whether the
encounter is a form of artistic construction, the artists’ work in the
rehearsal hall and on stage, or the audiences’ engagement with the given
performance. This project, in other words, is dedicated to the work of
those politically engaged artists and companies, who continuously practise
cosmopolitan philosophy, ways of life and making art, both in their
rehearsal halls and on stage. As I also seek to argue, cosmopolitanism does
not liberate anyone from the responsibility of taking a moral, ethical, and
political stand. Manifested as the artist’s worldview, it encourages them to
direct a pointed critical look at the conditions of migration and rising
nationalism. It also prompts the questions of the political and philosophi-
cal impact that today’s theatre and performance arts can make on their
immediate spectators.
Bibliography
Aciman, André. 2011. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. Beyond Human Rights. Social Engineering 15: 90–95.
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality.
London: Routledge.
———. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2017. Democracy Fatigue. In The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich
Geiselberger, 1–12. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
———. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York and
London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. We Refugees. In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed.
Marc Robinson, 110–120. Boston: Faber and Faber.
Balme, Christopher B. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and

Post-Colonial Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barnett, David. 2008. When Is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic
Theatre Texts. New Theatre Quarterly 24 (1): 14–23.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2016. Strangers at Our Door. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 2017. Symptoms in Search of an Object and a Name. In The Great
Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger, 13–25. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 2011. Cosmopolitanism as Imagined Communities of Global Risk.
American Behavioral Scientist 55 (10): 1346–1361.
Benjamin, Walter. 1983. The Flaneur. In Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the
Era of High Capitalism, 35–66. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Verso.
Bennett, Susan. 1997. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception.
London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi K. 2014. Epilogue: Global Pathways. In The Politics of Interweaving
Performance Cultures, Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten
Jost, and Saskya Iris Jain, 259–277. London and New York: Routledge.
Boenisch, Peter M. 2003. CoMEDIA electrONica: Performing Intermediality in
Contemporary Theatre. Theatre Research International 28 (1): 34–45.
———. 2014. Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the Audience’s Experiences
in Contemporary Theatre. In New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on
Theory and Practice, ed. Katalin Trencsényi and Bernadette Cochrane, 225–243.
London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les Presses Du Réel.
———. 2009. The Radicant. Translated by James Gussen and Lili Porten.
New York: Lukas and Sternberg Press.
Briginshaw, Valerie A. 2001. Dance, Space and Subjectivity. Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave.
Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. The Condition We Call Exile. In On Grief and Reason:
Essays, 22–35. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Carlson, Marvin. 2006. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New York:
Routledge.
De Marinis, Marco. 1987. Dramaturgy of the Spectator. The Drama Review 31
(2): 100–114.
Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark
Dooley and Michael Hughes. London and New York: Routledge.
Dib, Kamal, Ian Donaldson, and Brittany Turcotte. 2008. Integration and Identity
in Canada: The Importance of Multicultural Common Spaces. Canadian
Ethnic Studies 40 (1): 161–187.
Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
30 Y. MEERZON
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New

Aesthetics. London: Routledge.
———. 2014. Introduction: Interweaving Performance Cultures—Rethinking
‘Intercultural Theatre’: Toward an Experience and Theory of Performance
beyond Postcolonialism. In The Politics of Interweaving Performance Cultures,
Beyond Postcolonialism, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Torsten Jost, and Saskya Iris
Jain, 1–24. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2018. Transformative Aesthetics—Reflections on the Metamorphic Power
of Art. In Transformative Aesthetics, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin
Wihstutz, 1–25. New York: Routledge.
Freshwater, Helen. 2009. Theatre & Audience. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gilbert, Helen, and Jacqueline Lo. 2007. Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-
Cultural Transactions in Australasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hall, Stuart. 1979. The Great Moving Right Show. Marxism Today 23 (1): 14–20.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose
Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Jestrovic, Silvija. 2016. Reading into Soundscapes: Between Ma and Concretization.
Recherches Sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 36 (1–2): 347–365.
Kleingeld, Pauline, and Eric Brown. 2014. Cosmopolitanism. In The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford:
Stanford University.
Knowles, Ric. 2017. Performing the Intercultural City. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Kunst, Bojana. 2015. Artist at Work: Proximity of Art and Capitalism. Winchester:
John Hunt Publishing.
Landry, Charles. 2017. The Civic City in a Nomadic World. NAI010 Publishers.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-
Munby. London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2011. Postdramatic Theatre: A Decade Later. In Dramatic and
Postdramatic Theatre Ten Years After, ed. Ivan Medenica, 31–47. Belgrade:
Anthology of Essays by Faculty of Dramatic Arts 20.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2004. Les Temps Hypermodernes. Paris: Grasset.
Machon, Josephine. 2009. (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Massey, Dorren. 2014. Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place. In
Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. John Bird et al.,
60–70. London and New York: Routledge.
Meerzon, Yana. 2012. Performing Exile – Performing Self: Drama, Theatre, Film.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Melton, Judith M. 1998. Face of Exile. In Autobiographical Journeys. Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press.
Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. Houndmills,
Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a Left Populism. New York: Verso.
Parati, Graziella. 2017. Migrant Writers and Urban Space in Italy. In Proximities
and Affect in Literature and Film. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Pewny, Katharina, Johan Callens, and Jeroen Coppens, eds. 2014. Dramaturgies
in the New Millennium: Relationality, Performativity and Potentiality,
Schriftenreihe Forum Modernes Theater. Vol. 44. Tübingen: Narr Verlag.
Phelan, Peggy. 1992. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.
Rae, Paul. 2006. Where Is the Cosmopolitan Stage? Contemporary Theatre Review
16 (1): 8–22.
Rebellato, Dan. 2009. Theatre & Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rokem, Freddie. 2000. Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past
in Contemporary Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Rudakoff, Judith. 2014. Transcultural Dramaturgy Methods. In The Routledge
Companion to Dramaturgy, ed. Magda Romanska, 151–157. New York:
Routledge.
Rumford, Chris. 2013. The Globalization of Strangeness. New York: Routledge.
Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
———. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Said, Miriam. 2010. Edward Said and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. In
Counterpoints: Edward Said’s Legacy, ed. May Telmissany and Stephanie Tara
Schwartz, XI–XVI. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Schiller, Nina Glick, and Noel B. Salazar. 2013. Regimes of Mobility Across the
Globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2): 183–200.
Seifikar, Mohammad Hossein. 2008. Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. QUEST: An African Journal of
Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie XXI: 307–314.
Sennett, Richard. 2011. The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile. London: Notting
Hill Editions.
Simmel, Georg. 1950. The Stranger. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 402–408.
Glencoe: Free Press.
Simpson, David. 2005. The Limits of Cosmopolitanism and the Case of
Translation. European Romantic Review 16 (2): 141–152.
Stein, Gertrude. 1926. Composition as Explanation. The Dial; a Semi - monthly
Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880–1929)
(October 1): 0_015. http://search.proquest.com/docview/89687990/.
32 Y. MEERZON
Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2019. The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in

Twenty-First-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Wolf, Werner. 2013. Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and
Other Media. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Zaroulia, Marilena. 2018. Performing that Which Exceeds Us: Aesthetics of
Sincerity and Obscenity During ‘the Refugee Crisis’. Research in Drama
Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 23 (2): 179–192.
PART I
Encounters in Language
CHAPTER 2
Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging

the Décalage of Vernacular Cosmopolitanism
With the increased mobility of the world’s populations, as well as rapid

developments in media and digital technologies, multilingualism and its
translingual practices (Canagarajah 2013) have become a common form
of personal expression and communication of the everyday. Today’s the-
atre often reflects these practices: language—the product of the socio-
cultural and temporal context in which it originates and to which it refers
(Carlson 2006, 3)—emerges as the focus of its artistic experiments and
politics. Cosmopolitan theatre is at the forefront of theatrical multilingual-
ism. Not only does it speak in different voices and accents on stage; it also
employs heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1991; Carlson 2006, 19) to reflect the cos-
mopolitan artist’s biography. Cosmopolitan theatre uses multilingualism
to address such common themes as border identity and exclusion in order
to dramatize both traumatic and pleasurable encounters between the trav-
eller and the world.
For a monolingual subject, an encounter with a new language is not
easy. It creates ‘the sensation of having your world turned upside down or
inverted’ (Marlatt 1984, 222). At the moment of border-crossing, this
encounter can produce ‘a sense of the relativity of both language and real-
ity, as much as it [can lead] to a curiosity about other people’s realities’
(222). Cosmopolitan artists frequently investigate these experiences; they
recognize ‘the essential duplicity of language, its capacity to mean several
things at once, its figurative and transformational powers’ (222). The ten-
sion between one’s mother tongue and the (in)ability to express oneself
© The Author(s) 2020 35

Y. Meerzon, Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_2
36 Y. MEERZON
properly in a second language constitutes one major aspect of their work.

This conflict may be experienced by a fictional character, by the writer who
has created a multilingual character, or by the audience member who
watches the play. What interests me here is how multilingualism occurs—
specifically, the role vernacular multilingualism plays in constructing the-
atrical narratives of a cosmopolitan encounter. Because they are constantly
articulating themselves in several languages and listening to others switch-
ing and mixing codes on a daily basis, multilingual speakers are obliged to
be simultaneously alert to the workings of language and distant from it.
Multilingualism also generates pockets of (not-)knowing, which compel the
interlocutors to experience moments of self-reflection and self-
estrangement. Multilingual theatre uses language to depict our divided
self as situated between experience and repetition, repetition as distortion,
and trace, something that Christopher Balme identifies as a polyethnic state
(1999, 116) and Marvin Carlson calls a polyglot theatre made by ‘culturally
hybrid artists of modern global communities’ (2006, 149). Here I argue,
after Balme, that staging vernacular multilingualism ‘attains a kind of labo-
ratory function in the Brechtian sense of being an “experimentelle
Vorschau-Bühne” for a better society’ (1999, 116). This statement begs
the question of how artists with hyphenated subjectivities negotiate their
identity through language. What devices of dramatic writing and perfor-
mance making are at their disposal? What political mechanisms of social
engagement does multilingual cosmopolitan theatre use?
To respond to these questions, I now turn to the evolution of multilin-
gual practices in Canadian theatre. This chapter studies several autobio-
graphical solo performances, in which Canadian immigrant and
cosmopolitan artists investigate constructing the divided self in language.
The productions chosen for this chapter stage the conditions of cosmo-
politanism from inside, the ways these conditions are experienced by the
travelling subjects themselves through their personal translingual practices
of communication. These examples discuss theatrically how we—the sub-
jects of the global movements—approach questions of belonging and
identity, language acquisition and expressing oneself with an accent, seek-
ing a home, and losing one’s roots, from the position of internal and
external displacement, challenging the phenomenological and cultural
place of the mother tongue. The sample productions include Vinci by
Robert Lepage (1986);1 Lorena Gale’s Je me souviens (1998–2001),2
which explores the condition of internal exile; Guillermo Verdecchia’s
Fronteras Americanas (1993),3 a performance of crossing borders through
2 DRAMATURGIES OF THE SELF: STAGING THE DÉCALAGE… 37
the construction and dismantling of stereotypes; Trois: Un spectacle de

Mani Soleymanlou (2011–2014),4 an Iranian-Quebecois theatre artist’s
exploration of his multifaceted self through language; and Wajdi
Mouawad’s one-woman show Sœurs (2014),5 the author’s ironic com-
mentary on multilingualism as a device of conflict mediation. Temporally,
these solo performances coincide with several decades in Canadian history
underscored by the policies and politics of multiculturalism. Politically,
they approximate ‘the performance of hybridity in post-colonial mono-
drama, in which a tension is created between clearly differentiated charac-
ters and the fact that they overlap through the medium of a single
performing body’ (Carlson 2006, 148). Before offering a detailed analysis
of these solo plays, I will briefly outline the cultural context in which they
originated and introduce the theoretical lenses necessary to scruti-
nize them.
* * *
Immigration and Multiculturalism in Canada

Immigration has always been central to Canada’s nation-building project,
despite being full of practices and narratives of oppression, specifically seen
in the encounters between Canadian Indigenous populations and white
settlers. The modern history of this immigration project, however, should
be viewed in the context of the country’s cultural renaissance, which began
after WWII. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Canada had been recruit-
ing European immigrants, who significantly contributed to the country’s
growth and urbanization. After WWII, the emphasis shifted to Canada’s
diversity and the cultural, linguistic, and religious multiplicity resulting
from immigration. In 1962, due to its rapidly developing economy and
pressure from international communities as well as from ethnic groups
inside the country, Canada became one of three Western nations (the oth-
ers being the USA and Australia) to open their doors to international
migration. In 1971 the federal government of Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau announced the multiculturalism policy as its commitment to pro-
tect and promote diversity, recognize the rights of Indigenous popula-
tions, and support Canada’s two official languages. This policy led to the
establishment of the Ministry of Multiculturalism in 1973 and the passing
of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988. This legislation provided
financial and institutional support to artists interested in engaging more
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
House of Commons, Mr. Balfour, who do not accept the offered
treaty which would banish war forever between the two nations
of our race. This invitation was sent by the same President
Cleveland, who is now denounced as favoring war. … It was my
office to introduce to Mr. Cleveland, then President of the
United States, as he is now, the delegation from the British
Parliament urging arbitration. In the conferences I had with
him previous to his receiving the deputation, I found him as
strong a supporter of that policy as I ever met. I do not
wonder at his outburst, knowing how deeply this man feels upon
that question; it is to him so precious, it constitutes so
great an advance over arbitrament by war that—even if we have
to fight, that any nation rejecting it may suffer—I believe he
feels that it would be our duty to do so, believing that the
nation which rejects arbitration in a boundary dispute
deserves the execration of mankind."-
A. Carnegie,
The Venezuelan Question
(North American Review, February, 1896).
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1895-1896 (December-February).

The gold reserve in the Treasury again imperilled.
Refusal of any measures of relief by the Senate.
In his annual Message to Congress, December 2d, 1895,

President Cleveland described at length the stress of
circumstances under which in the previous February, the
Secretary of the Treasury had contracted with certain bankers
and financiers to replenish and protect the reserve of gold in
the Treasury for redemption of United States notes (see above),
and added: "The performance of this contract not only restored
the reserve, but checked for a time the withdrawals of gold
and brought on a period of restored confidence and such peace
and quiet in business circles as were of the greatest possible
value to every interest that affects our people.
{561}
I have never had the slightest misgiving concerning the wisdom
or propriety of this arrangement, and am quite willing to
answer for my full share of responsibility for its promotion.
I believe it averted a disaster the imminence of which was,
fortunately, not at the time generally understood by our
people. Though the contract mentioned stayed for a time the
tide of gold withdrawal, its good results could not be
permanent. Recent withdrawals have reduced the reserve from
$107,571,230 on the 8th day of July, 1895, to $79,333,966. How
long it will remain large enough to render its increase
unnecessary is only matter of conjecture, though quite large
withdrawals for shipment in the immediate future are predicted
in well-informed quarters. About $16,000,000 has been
withdrawn during the month of November. The foregoing
statement of events and conditions develops the fact that
after increasing our interest-bearing bonded indebtedness more
than $162,000,000 to save our gold reserve we are nearly where
we started, having now in such reserve $79,383,966 as against
$65,488,377 in February, 1894, when the first bonds were
issued.
"Though the amount of gold drawn from the Treasury appears to

be very large as gathered from the facts and figures herein
presented, it actually was much larger, considerable sums
having been acquired by the Treasury within the several
periods stated without the issue of bonds. On the 28th of
January, 1895, it was reported by the Secretary of the
Treasury that more than $172,000,000 of gold had been
withdrawn for hoarding or shipment during the year preceding.
He now reports that from January 1, 1879, to July 14, 1890, a
period of more than eleven years, only a little over
$28,000,000 was withdrawn, and that between July 14, 1890, the
date of the passage of the law for an increased purchase of
silver, and the 1st day of December, 1895, or within less than
five and a half years, there was withdrawn nearly
$375,000,000, making a total of more than $403,000,000 drawn
from the Treasury in gold since January 1, 1879, the date
fixed in 1875 for the retirement of the United States notes.
"Nearly $327,000,000 of the gold thus withdrawn has been paid

out, on these United States notes, and yet everyone of the
$346,000,000 is still uncanceled and ready to do service in
future gold depletions. More than $76,000,000 in gold has
since their creation in 1890 been paid out from the Treasury
upon the notes given on the purchase of silver by the
Government, and yet the whole, amounting to $155,000,000,
except a little more than $16,000,000 which has been retired
by exchanges for silver at the request of the holders, remains
outstanding and prepared to join their older and more
experienced allies in future raids upon the Treasury's gold
reserve. In other words, the Government has paid in gold more
than nine-tenths of its United States notes and still owes
them all. It has paid in gold about one-half of its notes
given for silver purchases without extinguishing by such
payment one dollar of these notes.
"When, added to all this, we are reminded that to carry on

this astounding financial scheme the Government has incurred a
bonded indebtedness of $95,500,000 in establishing a gold
reserve, and of $162,315,400 in efforts to maintain it; that
the annual interest charge on such bonded indebtedness is more
than $11,000,000; that a continuance of our present course may
result in further bond issues, and that we have suffered or
are threatened with all this for the sake of supplying gold
for foreign shipment or facilitating its hoarding at home, a
situation is exhibited which certainly ought to arrest
attention and provoke immediate legislative relief.
"I am convinced the only thorough and practicable remedy for

our troubles is found in the retirement and cancellation of
our United States notes, commonly called greenbacks, and the
outstanding Treasury notes issued by the Government in payment
of silver purchases under the act of 1890. I believe this
could be quite readily accomplished by the exchange of these
notes for United States bonds, of small as well as large
denominations, bearing a low rate of interest. They should be
long-term bonds, thus increasing their desirability as
investments, and because their payment could be well postponed
to a period far removed from present financial burdens and
perplexities, when with increased prosperity and resources
they would be more easily met. …
"Whatever is attempted should be entered upon fully

appreciating the fact that by careless easy descent we have
reached a dangerous depth, and that our ascent will not be
accomplished without laborious toil and struggle. We shall be
wise if we realize that we are financially ill and that our
restoration to health may require heroic treatment and
unpleasant remedies.
"In the present stage of our difficulty it is not easy to

understand how the amount of our revenue receipts directly
affects it. The important question is not the quantity of
money received in revenue payments, but the kind of money we
maintain and our ability to continue in sound financial
condition. We are considering the Government's holdings of
gold as related to the soundness of our money and as affecting
our national credit and monetary strength. If our gold reserve
had never been impaired; if no bonds had ever been issued to
replenish it; if there had been no fear and timidity
concerning our ability to continue gold payments; if any part
of our revenues were now paid in gold, and if we could look to
our gold receipts as a means of maintaining a safe reserve,
the amount of our revenues would be an influential factor in
the problem. But unfortunately all the circumstances that
might lend weight to this consideration are entirely lacking.
In our present predicament no gold is received by the
Government in payment of revenue charges, nor would there be
if the revenues were increased. The receipts of the Treasury,
when not in silver certificates, consist of United States
notes and Treasury notes issued for silver purchases. These
forms of money are only useful to the Government in paying its
current ordinary expenses, and its quantity in Government
possession does not in the least contribute toward giving us
that kind of safe financial standing or condition which is
built on gold alone.
{562}
"If it is said that these notes if held by the Government can

be used to obtain gold for our reserve, the answer is easy.
The people draw gold from the Treasury on demand upon United
States notes and Treasury notes, but the proposition that the
Treasury can on demand draw gold from the people upon them
would be regarded in these days with wonder and amusement; and
even if this could be done there is nothing to prevent those thus
parting with their gold from regaining it the next day or the
next hour by the presentation of the notes they received in
exchange for it. The Secretary of the Treasury might use such
notes taken from a surplus revenue to buy gold in the market.
Of course he could not do this without paying a premium.
Private holders of gold, unlike the Government, having no
parity to maintain, would not be restrained from making the
best bargain possible when they furnished gold to the
Treasury; but the moment the Secretary of the Treasury bought
gold on any terms above par he would establish a general and
universal premium upon it, thus breaking down the parity
between gold and silver, which the Government is pledged to
maintain, and opening the way to new and serious
complications. In the meantime the premium would not remain
stationary, and the absurd spectacle might be presented of a
dealer selling gold to the Government and with United States
notes or Treasury notes in his hand immediately clamoring for
its return and a resale at a higher premium.
"It may be claimed that a large revenue and redundant receipts

might favorably affect the situation under discussion by
affording an opportunity of retaining these notes in the
Treasury when received, and thus preventing their presentation
for gold. Such retention to be useful ought to be at least
measurably permanent; and this is precisely what is
prohibited, so far as United States notes are concerned, by
the law of 1878, forbidding their further retirement. That
statute in so many words provides, that these notes when
received into the Treasury and belonging to the United States
shall be 'paid out again and kept in circulation.'"
United States, Message and Documents (Abridgment),

1895-1896, page 27.
"The difficulty which had been anticipated in keeping gold in

the treasury became acute as a result of the president's
Venezuelan message of December 17. The 'war scare' which was
caused by that document was attended by a panic on the London
Exchange, which communicated itself to the Continental
exchanges and produced at once serious consequences in New
York. Prices fell heavily, some failures were reported, and
the withdrawal of gold from the treasury assumed great
proportions. On the 20th the reserve had gone down to
$69,650,000, ten millions less than three weeks earlier, with
future large reductions obviously near at hand. The president
accordingly on that day sent to Congress a special message,
stating the situation, alluding to the effect of his recently
announced foreign policy, and declaring that the result
conveyed a 'warning that even the patriotic sentiment of our
people is not an adequate substitute for a sound financial
policy.' He asked Congress to postpone its holiday recess
until something had been done to reassure the apprehensive
among the people, but declared that in any case he should use
every means in the power of the executive to maintain the
country's credit. The suggestion was acted upon. …
"On December 26 two bills were introduced in the House of

Representatives by Chairman Dingley of the ways and means
committee. Adopting the view maintained by the Republicans,
that the chief cause of the difficulty in maintaining the gold
reserve was the deficiency in the revenue, he proposed first a
bill 'to temporarily increase the revenues.' This provided
that until August 1, 1898, the customs duties on most
varieties of wool and woolen goods and on lumber, should stand
at 60 per cent of those imposed by the McKinley Act of 1890,
and that the duties in all the other schedules of the tariff,
except sugar, should, with slight exceptions, be increased by
15 per cent over those of the existing law. This bill passed
the House on the 27th by a party vote of 205 to 81. On the
following day the second bill, 'to maintain and protect the
coin redemption fund,' was passed by 170 to 136,—47
Republicans in the minority. This bill authorized the
secretary of the treasury to procure coin for redeeming
legal-tenders by the sale of three-per-cent five-year bonds,
and to provide for temporary deficiencies by the issue of
three-year three-per-cent certificates of indebtedness in
small denominations. The administration was as little
satisfied with this bill as with that changing the tariff, and
proceeded with the bond issue. …
"The failure of the bills in the Senate was foreseen, but the
precise form in which it was manifested excited some surprise.
On February 1, [1896], the bond bill was transformed by the
adoption of a substitute providing for the free coinage of
silver, and this was passed by a vote of 42 to 35. On the 14th
the House refused, by 215 to 90, to concur in the Senate's
amendment, and the whole subject was dropped. Meanwhile the
Senate finance committee had reported a free-coinage
substitute for the House tariff bill also. But after this
further exhibition of their strength the silver senators
refused to go further, and on February 25 joined with the
Democrats in rejecting, by 33 to 22, a motion to take up the
bill for consideration. This vote was recognized as finally
disposing of the measure."
Political Science Quarterly,

June, 1896.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1895-1896 (December-

December).
Plans for coast defense.
In his annual report to the President, 1895, the Secretary of

War wrote as follows of pending plans for coast defense, and
of the progress of work upon them:
"In your annual message transmitted to Congress in December,

1886, attention was directed to the urgent necessity for
seacoast defense in these words: 'The defenseless condition of
our seacoast and lake frontier is perfectly palpable; the
examinations made must convince us all that certain of our
cities should be fortified and that work on the most important
of these fortifications should be commenced at once.' … Since
that time the condition of these defenses has been under grave
consideration by the people and by this Department. Its
inadequacy and impotency have been so evident that the
intelligence of the country long since ceased to discuss that
humiliating phase of the subject, but has addressed itself to
the more practical undertaking of urging more rapid progress
in the execution of the plan of defense devised by the
Endicott Board in 1886, with subsequent slight modifications.
That plan contemplated a system of fortifications at 27 ports
(to which Puget Sound was subsequently added), requiring 677
guns and 824 mortars of modern construction, at a cost of
$97,782,800, excluding $28,595,000 for floating batteries. By
an immediate appropriation at that time of $21,500,000 and an
annual appropriation of $9,000,000 thereafter, as then
recommended, the system of land defenses could have been
completed in 1895.
{563}
"The original plan contemplated an expenditure of $97,782,800

by the end of the present year. The actual expenditures and
appropriations for armament and emplacements have, however,
been but $10,631,000. The first appropriation for guns was
made only seven years ago and the first appropriation for
emplacements was made only five years ago. The average annual
appropriations for these two objects has been less than
$1,500,000. The work has therefore been conducted at about
one-seventh the rate proposed. If future appropriations for
the manufacture of guns, mortars, and carriages be no larger
than the average authorized for the purpose since 1888, it
will require twenty-two years more to supply the armament of
the eighteen important ports for which complete projects are
approved. If the appropriations for the engineer work are to
continue at the rate of the annual appropriations since 1890,
it will require seventy years to complete the emplacements and
platforms for this armament for the ports referred to."
Report of the Secretary of War, 1895,

page 19 (54th Congress, 1st Session,
House Document volume 1).
In his Message of the following year, the subject was touched

upon by the President, as follows:
"During the past year rapid progress has been made toward the
completion of the scheme adopted for the erection and armament
of fortifications along our seacoast, while equal progress has
been made in providing the material for submarine defense in
connection with these works. … We shall soon have complete
about one-fifth of the comprehensive system, the first step in
which was noted in my message to the Congress of December 4,
1893. When it is understood that a masonry emplacement not
only furnishes a platform for the heavy modern high-power gun,
but also in every particular serves the purpose and takes the
place of the fort of former days, the importance of the work
accomplished is better comprehended. In the hope that the work
will be prosecuted with no less vigor in the future, the
Secretary of War has submitted an estimate by which, if
allowed, there will be provided and either built or building
by the end of the next fiscal year such additional guns,
mortars, gun carriages, and emplacements, as will represent
not far from one-third of the total work to be done under the
plan adopted for our coast defenses—thus affording a prospect
that the entire work will be substantially completed within
six years. In less time than that, however, we shall have
attained a marked degree of security. The experience and
results of the past year demonstrate that with a continuation
of present careful methods the cost of the remaining work will
be much less than the original estimate. We should always keep
in mind that of all forms of military preparation coast
defense alone is essentially pacific in its nature."
Message of the President, 1896

(54th Congress, 2d Session, House Document, volume 1).
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (January).

Admission of Utah to the Union.
See (in this volume)

UTAH: A. D. 1895-1896.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (January-February).

Appointment of commission to investigate the
Venezuela boundary.
Re-opening of discussion with Great Britain on the
arbitration of the dispute.

VENEZUELA: A. D. 1896-1899.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (February).

New treaty with Great Britain for arbitration of
Bering Sea claims.
BERING SEA QUESTIONS.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (February).

Weyler made Governor of Cuba.
His Concentration Order.

CUBA: A. D. 1896-1897.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (March).

Removal of Confederate disabilities.
The following enactment of Congress, which may, with

propriety, be styled an "Act of Oblivion," was approved by the
President on the 31st of March, 1896:
"That section twelve hundred and eighteen of the Revised

Statutes of the United States, as amended by chapter forty-six
of the laws of 1884, which section is as follows: 'No person
who held a commission in the Army or Navy of the United States
at the beginning of the late rebellion, and afterwards served
in any capacity in the military, naval, or civil service of
the so-called Confederate States, or of either of the States
in insurrection during the late rebellion, shall be appointed
to any position in the Army or Navy of the United States,' be,
and the same is hereby, repealed."
United States of America, Statutes at Large,

volume 29, page 84.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (May).

Extension of civil service rules by President Cleveland.

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM: A. D. 1893-1896.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (June-November).
The Presidential election.
The silver question at issue.
Party Platforms and Nominations.
A national conference held at Washington, in March, 1895, may

be looked upon as the beginning of a widely and powerfully
organized movement to force the demand for a free and
unlimited coinage of silver, on equal terms, as legal tender
money, with gold, into the front of the issues of the
presidential canvass of 1896. The agitation then projected was
carried on with extraordinary ardor and skill and had
astonishing success. It was helped by the general depression
of business in the country, and especially by the long
continued ruling of low prices for the produce of the
farms,—for all of which effects the gold standard of values
was held to be the one relentless cause. In both political
parties the free silver propaganda was pushed with startling
effect, and there seemed to be doubt, for a time, whether the
controlling politicians in either would take an opposing
stand. Southern influences proved decisive of the result in
the Democratic party; eastern influences in that of the
Republicans. The ranks of the former were swept rapidly into
the movement for free silver, and the party chiefs of the
latter were driven to a conflict with it, not wholly by
convictions or will of their own. During the spring and early
summer of 1896, the Democratic Party in State after State
became committed on the question, by declarations for the
unlimited free coinage of silver, at the ratio of 16 to 1;
until there was tolerable certainty, some weeks before the
meeting of the national convention, that its nominee for
President must be one who represented that demand. How
positively the Republican Party would champion the gold
monetary standard was somewhat less assured, though its stand
on that side had been taken in a general way.
{564}
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
Republican Platform and Nominations.
The Republican national convention was held at St. Louis, on

the 16th, 17th and 18th of June. The "platform" reported by
the committee on resolutions was adopted without amendment on
the last named date. Its declarations were as follows:
"The Republicans of the United States, assembled by their

representatives in National Convention, appealing for the
popular and historical justification of their claims to the
matchless achievements of the thirty years of Republican rule,
earnestly and confidently address themselves to the awakened
intelligence, experience, and conscience of their countrymen
in the following declaration of facts and principles:
"For the first time since the civil war the American people
have witnessed the calamitous consequences of full and
unrestricted Democratic control of the Government. It has been
a record of unparalleled incapacity, dishonor, and disaster.
In administrative management it has ruthlessly sacrificed
indispensable revenue, entailed an unceasing deficit, eked out
ordinary current expenses with borrowed money, piled up the
public debt by $262,000,000 in time of peace, forced an
adverse balance of trade, kept a perpetual menace hanging over
the redemption fund, pawned American credit to alien
syndicates, and reversed all the measures and results of
successful Republican rule.
"In the broad effect of its policy it has precipitated panic,

blighted industry and trade with prolonged depression, closed
factories, reduced work and wages, halted enterprise, and
crippled American production while stimulating foreign
production for the American market. Every consideration of
public safety and individual interest demands that the
Government shall be rescued from the hands of those who have
shown themselves incapable to conduct it without disaster at
home and dishonor abroad, and shall be restored to the party
which for thirty years administered it with unequalled success
and prosperity, and in this connection we heartily endorse the
wisdom, patriotism, and the success of the administration of
President Harrison.
"We renew and emphasize our allegiance to the policy of

protection as the bulwark of American industrial independence
and the foundation of American development and prosperity.
This true American policy taxes foreign products and
encourages home industry; it puts the burden of revenue on
foreign goods; it secures the American market for the American
producer; it upholds the American standard of wages for the
American workingman; it puts the factory by the side of the
farm, and makes the American farmer less dependent on foreign
demand and price; it diffuses general thrift, and founds the
strength of all on the strength of each. In its reasonable
application it is just, fair, and impartial; equally opposed
to foreign control and domestic monopoly, to sectional
discrimination, and individual favoritism.
"We denounce the present Democratic tariff as sectional,

injurious to the public credit, and destructive to business
enterprise. "We demand such an equitable tariff on foreign
imports which come into competition with American products as
will not only furnish adequate revenue for the necessary
expenses of the Government, but will protect American labor
from degradation to the wage level of other lands. We are not
pledged to any particular schedules. The question of rates is
a practical question, to be governed by the conditions of the
time and of production; the ruling and uncompromising
principle is the protection and development of American labor
and industry. The country demands a right settlement, and then
it wants rest.
"We believe the repeal of the reciprocity arrangements

negotiated by the last Republican administration was a
national calamity, and we demand their renewal and extension
on such terms as will equalize our trade with other nations,
remove the restrictions which now obstruct the sale of
American products in the ports of other countries, and secure
enlarged markets for the products of our farms, forests, and
factories.
See, in volume 5,
TARIFF LEGISLATION (UNITED STATES):
A. D. 1890, and 1894.
"Protection and reciprocity are twin measures of Republican

policy and go hand in hand. Democratic rule has recklessly
struck down both, and both must be re-established. Protection
for what we produce; free admission for the necessaries of
life which we do not produce; reciprocity agreements of mutual
interests which again open markets for us in return for our
open markets to others. Protection builds up domestic industry
and trade and secures our own market for ourselves; reciprocity
builds up foreign trade and finds an outlet for our surplus.
We condemn the present administration for not keeping faith
with the sugar producers of this country. The Republican party
favors such protection as will lead to the production on
American soil of all the sugar which the American people use,
and for which they pay other countries more than $100,000,000
annually. To all our products—to those of the mine and the
fields as well as to those of the shop and the factory—to
hemp, to wool, the product of the great industry of sheep
husbandry, as well as to the finished woollens of the mill—we
promise the most ample protection.
"We favor restoring the early American policy of

discriminating duties for the upbuilding of our merchant
marine and the protection of our shipping in the foreign
carrying trade, so that American ships—the product of American
labor, employed in American shipyards, sailing under the Stars
and Stripes, and manned, officered, and owned by Americans—may
regain the carrying of our foreign commerce.
"The Republican party is unreservedly for sound money. It

caused the enactment of the law providing for the resumption
of specie payments in 1879; since then every dollar has been
as good as gold. We are unalterably opposed to every measure
calculated to debase our currency or impair the credit of our
country. We are, therefore, opposed to the free coinage of
silver except by international agreement with the leading
commercial nations of the world, which we pledge ourselves to
promote, and until such agreement can be obtained the existing
gold standard must be preserved. All our silver and paper
currency must be maintained at parity with gold, and we favor
all measures designed to maintain inviolably the obligations
of the United States and all our money, whether coin or paper,
at the present standard, the standard of the most enlightened
nations of the earth.
{565}
"The veterans of the Union Army deserve and should receive

fair treatment and generous recognition. Whenever practicable,
they should be given the preference in the matter of
employment, and they are entitled to the enactment of such
laws as are best calculated to secure the fulfillment of the
pledges made to them in the dark days of the country's peril.
We denounce the practice in the Pension Bureau, so recklessly
and unjustly carried on by the present administration, of
reducing pensions and arbitrarily dropping names from the
rolls as deserving the severest condemnation of the American
people.
"Our foreign policy should be at all times firm, vigorous, and

dignified, and all our interests in the Western Hemisphere
carefully watched and guarded. The Hawaiian Islands should be
controlled by the United States, and no foreign power should
be permitted to interfere with them; the Nicaraguan Canal
should be built, owned, and operated by the United States; and
by the purchase of the Danish Islands we should secure a
proper and much needed naval station in the West Indies.
"The massacres in Armenia have aroused the deep sympathy and

just indignation of the American people, and we believe that
the United States should exercise all the influence it can
properly exert to bring these atrocities to an end. In Turkey
American residents have been exposed to the gravest dangers
and American property destroyed. There and everywhere American
citizens and American property must be absolutely protected at
all hazards and at any cost.
"We reassert the Monroe doctrine in its full extent, and we

reaffirm the right of the United States to give the doctrine
effect by responding to the appeal of any American State for
friendly intervention in case of European encroachment. We
have not interfered with and shall not interfere with the
existing possessions of any European power in this hemisphere,
but those possessions must not on any pretext be extended. We
hopefully look forward to the eventual withdrawal of European
powers from this hemisphere and to the ultimate union of all
the English-speaking parts of the continent by the free
consent of its inhabitants.
"From the hour of achieving their own independence the people

of the United States have regarded with sympathy the struggles
of other American people to free themselves from European
domination. We watch with deep and abiding interest the heroic
battle of the Cuban patriots against cruelty and oppression,
and our best hopes go out for the full success of their
determined contest for liberty. The Government of Spain having
lost control of Cuba, and being unable to protect the property
or lives of resident American citizens, or to comply with its
treaty obligations, we believe that the Government of the
United States should actively use its influence and good
offices to restore peace and give independence to the island.
"The peace and security of the Republic and the maintenance of

its rightful influence among the nations of the earth demand a
naval power commensurate with its position and responsibility.
We therefore favor the continued enlargement of the navy and a
complete system of harbor and seacoast defenses.
"For the protection of the quality of our American citizenship

and of the wages of our workingmen against the fatal
competition of low-priced labor, we demand that the
immigration laws be thoroughly enforced and so extended as to
exclude from entrance to the United States those who can
neither read nor write.
"The civil-service law was placed on the statute book by the

Republican party, which has always sustained it, and we renew
our repeated declarations that it shall be thoroughly and
honestly enforced and extended wherever practicable.
"We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be

allowed to cast one free and unrestricted ballot, and that
such ballot shall be counted and returned as cast.
"We proclaim our unqualified condemnation of the uncivilized

and barbarous practice, well known as lynching or killing of
human beings suspected or charged with crime, without process
of law. We favor the creation of a National board of
arbitration to settle and adjust differences which may arise
between employers and employed engaged in interstate commerce.
"We believe in an immediate return to the free-homestead

policy of the Republican party, and urge the passage by
Congress of a satisfactory free-homestead measure such as has
already passed the House and is now pending in the Senate.
"We favor the admission of the remaining Territories at the

earliest practicable date, having due regard to the interests
of the people of the Territories and of the United States. All
the Federal officers appointed for the Territories should be
selected from bona fide residents thereof, and the right of
self-government should be accorded as far as practicable.
"We believe the citizens of Alaska should have representation

in the Congress of the United States, to the end that needful
legislation may be intelligently enacted.
"We sympathize with all wise and legitimate efforts to lessen

and prevent the evils of intemperance and promote morality.
"The Republican party is mindful of the rights and interests

of women. Protection of American industries includes equal
opportunities, equal pay for equal work, and protection to the
home. We favor the admission of women to wider spheres of
usefulness, and welcome their co-operation in rescuing the
country from Democratic and Populist mismanagement and
misrule.
"Such are the principles and policies of the Republican party.

By these principles we will abide and these policies we will
put into execution. We ask for them the considerate judgment
of the American people. Confident alike in the history of our
great party and in the justice of our cause, we present our
platform and our candidates in the full assurance that the
election will bring victory to the Republican party and
prosperity to the people of the United States."
Before the adoption of this platform, a motion to amend its

currency "plank," by substituting a declaration in favor of
"the use of both gold and silver as equal standard money," was
laid on the table by a vote of 818½ to 105½. A protest from
delegates representing Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Montana
and South Dakota was then read, and twenty-two withdrew from
the convention, as a sign of secession from the party.
{566}
Immediately following the adoption of the platform, the

Honorable William McKinley, ex-Governor of Ohio, and of fame
in his connection with the tariff act of 1890, was nominated
on the first ballot for President of the United States, by
661½ votes against 240½ divided among several opposing
candidates, and the nomination was then made unanimous. For
Vice President, the Honorable Garret A. Hobart, of New Jersey,
was named, and similarly by the first voting.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: 1896.

Democratic Platform and Nominations.
The Democratic national convention was held in Chicago, July

7-11. The delegates who came to it from the southern States,
and from most of the States west of Ohio, were arrayed with a
close approach to solid ranks for free silver; while those
from New England and the Middle States opposed them in a
phalanx almost equally firm. The "Gold Democrats" or "Sound
Money Democrats," as the latter were called, ably led by
ex-Governor Hill, of New York, fought hard to the end, but
without avail. The financial resolution they strove to place
in the platform was the following:
"We declare our belief that the experiment on the part of the
United States alone of free-silver coinage, and a change in
the existing standard of value independently of the action of
other great nations, would not only imperil our finances, but
would retard or entirely prevent the establishment of
international bimetallism, to which the efforts of the
government should be steadily directed. It would place this
country at once upon a silver basis, impair contracts, disturb
business, diminish the purchasing power of the wages of labor,
and inflict irreparable evils upon our nation's commerce and
industry.

Performance Subjectivity Cosmopolitanism 1St Ed Edition Yana Meerzon All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performance Subjectivity Cosmopolitanism 1St Ed Edition Yana Meerzon All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Performance, Subjectivity,

Cosmopolitanism 1st ed. Edition Yana

“In Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism Yana Meerzon sets the cosmopoli-

“This is an erudite and detailed study of cosmopolitan theatre, covering a range of

ISBN 978-3-030-41409-2 ISBN 978-3-030-41410-8 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: Koukichi Takahashi / EyeEm, Getty Images

1 Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New

Part I Encounters in Language 33

2 Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of

3 ‘Speaking in Tongues’: Staging Hospitality of (Non)

Part II Encounters in Body 115

4 Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-­Fetishism in a

5 Staging Cosmoprolis: Constructing the Chorus Play155

Part III Encounters in Time, Space, and History 195

6 Dramaturgies of the Gaze: On the Intimate Realities of

7 Staging Affective Citizenship: Constructing Communities

8 To Be a Cosmopolitan: Concluding Remarks275

Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided

Today, as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky argues, we have

© The Author(s) 2020 1

hypermodernity. The focus and theoretical approaches in this book, how-

recognize my privilege as a hypermodern individual. By the same token,

energetically and creatively involved in the act of receiving or co-­

The Cosmopolitan Subjectivity of the Divided Self

position of formal self-reflexivity that always maintains a distance from

experiencing ego (16). This ontological split of self—as the participating

Fig. 1.1 Alamy stock

The etymology of the Greek word cosmopolis implies an unresolved para-

mobility; these events also enabled the ‘emergence of a notion of human

Benjamin’s flâneur was a bohemian and a dandy, a detached observer of

in a state of sorrow and personal marginality, but it can be also an invita-

Having watched the work of cosmopolitan artists and discussed what

Cosmopolitan Theatre: Trying on a New Definition

devices of suspended perception and emphasized artistic composition as

of their productions with Brechtian estrangement, which enables theatre

fundamental markers of foreignness that differentiate between the right of

associations evoked speak to the psychosomatic power of reception

able to travel freely across the world, my exposure to international theatre

This approach is not unique. Susan Bennett had already established

On the Layout of the Book

proximity, intimacy, gaze, and immersive listening are examined as princi-

In Lieu of Concluding Remarks

Balme, Christopher B. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New

Melton, Judith M. 1998. Face of Exile. In Autobiographical Journeys. Iowa City:

Valluvan, Sivamohan. 2019. The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in

Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging

With the increased mobility of the world’s populations, as well as rapid

© The Author(s) 2020 35

properly in a second language constitutes one major aspect of their work.

the construction and dismantling of stereotypes; Trois: Un spectacle de

Immigration and Multiculturalism in Canada

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1895-1896 (December-February).

In his annual Message to Congress, December 2d, 1895,

"Though the amount of gold drawn from the Treasury appears to

"Nearly $327,000,000 of the gold thus withdrawn has been paid

"When, added to all this, we are reminded that to carry on

"I am convinced the only thorough and practicable remedy for

"Whatever is attempted should be entered upon fully

"In the present stage of our difficulty it is not easy to

"If it is said that these notes if held by the Government can

"It may be claimed that a large revenue and redundant receipts

1 Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New

Part I Encounters in Language 33

2 Dramaturgies of the Self: Staging the Décalage of

3 ‘Speaking in Tongues’: Staging Hospitality of (Non)

Part II Encounters in Body 115

4 Dramaturgies of the Body: Staging Stranger-Fetishism in a

5 Staging Cosmoprolis: Constructing the Chorus Play155

Part III Encounters in Time, Space, and History 195

6 Dramaturgies of the Gaze: On the Intimate Realities of

7 Staging Affective Citizenship: Constructing Communities

8 To Be a Cosmopolitan: Concluding Remarks275

energetically and creatively involved in the act of receiving or co-