should not be understood as a distraction from the real stuff of law and politics. Performance and theatricality are central components of both.
The theatricality of the law is distinctly important in the case of the US justice system, an importance intensified by the historical events that inspired Lidless. The US political and legal system is, for better or worse, representative: politicians and lawyers act as representatives of their constituents or clients. So if Hobbes observed a blurring between the theatrical and the legal forms of representation, the lawyer’s art as a performer becomes a key means for countering forms of critical injustice. Take for example Guantánamo advocates Mark P. Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz’s introduction to a volume of interviews with Guantánamo lawyers: “[The detainees] were all held in secret and denied communication with their families and loved ones. Most, if not all, were subjected to extreme isolation, physical and mental abuse, and, in some instances, torture. Many were innocent; none was provided an opportunity to prove it. These are their stories. The stories are told by their lawyers because the prisoners themselves were silenced.”74 The prisoners, who are “silenced” by the US state, have no immediate recourse to speak their own stories to the general public, to their families, or even in a court of law. The situation necessitates the imperfect solution of having others perform in their stead, revealing representational advocacy to be a limited form of artificial personage that might realize greater conditions of justice for the detainees. That Denbeaux and Hafetz conceive of the lawyer’s art in the language of narrative storytelling is important because they seem to suggest that the narrative conventions employed by the advocates are equally important to their job as the factual record that they are presenting to both the public and the courts. In this sense, aesthetic practices (narrative, dramatic structure, character) can play powerful roles in a representative act meant to intervene in and reformat the conditions produced within the law. This power is not only the province of the lawyer, who adopts aesthetic traditions in the execution of his or her representative act, as the artist can deploy/wield it as well.
A Race So Different distinguishes itself from previous interdisciplinary approaches to law and aesthetics that commonly note that the primary difference between the two is that the law has a “real” impact on the world, while aesthetics registers as less impactful. For example, in Juana María Rodríguez’s otherwise beautiful analysis of an asylum hearing in a US court, she argues, “Both law and literature are intrinsically concerned with language, interpretation, and reception. . . . Put succinctly, literary criticism and legal treatises are both involved with constructing credible subjects, narratives, and readings. Yet law is discourse with a difference; the stories and characters are real and the interpretations have long-lasting consequences.”75 Rodríguez correctly observes that the events that inspire legal cases are drawn from real-world events. However, anyone who has ever been represented by a lawyer will tell you that by the time one’s experiences are translated into legal discourse and entered into a court record, they feel as foreign as would be a fictionalization of their story in a “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law and Order. This casts a dubious shadow on the notion that the stories and characters translated into the law are necessarily more consequential (or real) than those that are translated onto the dramatist’s stage.
Nor am I convinced that the law is especially imbued with a capacity to produce more “long-lasting [real-world] consequences” than are dramatic and literary narratives or other forms of aesthetic production. After all, most people have probably gleaned more legal knowledge from a show such as Law and Order than they have from reading actual legal texts. Culture shapes reality, sometimes confirms it, and at times supplants it. After all, people generally believe that Julius Caesar was killed in the Roman Senate, where Shakespeare placed the act, rather than in a side chamber of the Theater of Pompey, where he was actually assassinated. Mass forms of cultural production including, and especially, theater, film, popular music, and TV often function as thinly veiled ideological state apparatuses. These “culture industries” are thus what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called “instrument[s] of domination.”76 Aesthetic narratives can have “long-lasting consequences” that become real over time. As an aesthetic medium that gives embodied form to narrative, representational modes of performance (such as theater, performance art, or even film and TV) lend legal discourse an embodied verisimilitude that helps to transform a “statement of law” into a “statement of fact” within the popular consciousness of the audience. Popular aesthetic performances function as agents of the law, circulating legal narratives through the bloodstream of popular culture.
At the same time, in making a case for the power of aesthetics as legal agents, I do not want to idealize aesthetic practices over the law. In a discussion of the role of tribunals in response to the trauma of the Holocaust, Shoshana Felman seems to do as much when she writes, “Law is a discipline of limits and of consciousness. We needed limits to be able both to close the case and to enclose it in the past. Law distances the Holocaust. Art brings it closer. We needed art—the language of infinity—to mourn the losses and to face up to what in traumatic memory is not closed and cannot be closed.”77 Felman acknowledges a need for the law but figures the law as that which “encloses” a traumatic event in the past. She suggests that art’s function is to provide a closer proximity to such events, arguing that it is in the “slippage between law and art” that traumatic memory is negotiated. On this latter point, we are in agreement—it is in the slippage between law and aesthetics that real cultural work can be done to rectify past injustices. But to accept a definition of the law as “a discipline of limits and of consciousness” is to displace the slippery, “situational,” and performative nature of the law. This ignores the familiar resemblance and formal relationship between law and performance and sidesteps the fact that both, being equally reliant on the “independently determining moment” of embodied action, give way to the “language of infinity.” As such, while the law and aesthetic performances may both serve to “distance us” from the truth of a historical injustice, they also have the fecund potentiality to open up and rethink these injustices as we rehearse and stage the possibility of a more just future.
“A Rehearsal for the Example”: The Possibilities in Performance
In the preceding section, I sought to unsettle the line between aesthetics and the law as well as a critical rubric that would significantly privilege one over the other. In doing so, I had to sever some of our preconceptions about the causal nature of either law or performance. Or, to be more specific, while I acknowledge that both law and performance may inspire specific effects, these effects cannot necessarily be causally predicted. As I argue in chapter 4 in particular, the indeterminacy of the aesthetic encounter is precisely what allows for aesthetic performances to be a primary medium for disrupting the political and legal subjection of Asian Americans. The political power of performance is in its ability to enact, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, “an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations.”78 Aesthetic performances are spaces that, as much as they may be used to reify dominant racial ideology, also threaten to undo the formal “associations” between, say, dominant knowledge about racial difference and the body of the racialized subject.
Aesthetic performances are the spaces in which we can stage and experience incompleteness and openness that challenges the limits and closures of racialization and racialized subjectivity. Keen to this fact, Asian American artists have long used the stage as a space to work with the audience to challenge the racialization of Asian America. As Shimakawa argues, “the dramatic space is one where audiences are arguably willing to relax those otherwise punitively enforced restrictions on bodily identity and so may afford if not a complete repudiation of those imposed identities then at least (and at its best) a problematization of or critical engagement with them.”79 Aesthetic acts of performance, precisely because of their indeterminacy, are spaces that unleash a range of possibilities that can show how there are multiple ways of being in the world beyond the identity that the dominant culture imposes or projects onto the racialized body.
In performance, we can rehearse, stage, and materialize the stuff of a better world. Performance provides us with the means to
