Fiebach

Theater. Wissen. Machen.

Antje Budde

• Verlag: Theater der Zeit
• Jahr: 2014
• eBook-ISBN: 9783957490131
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

Joachim Fiebach, geboren 1934 in Berlin, ist einer der vielseitigsten, produktivsten und wirkungsmächtigsten international anerkannten deutschen Theaterwissenschaftler. Sein Forschungsschwerpunkt bilden die darstellerischen Kulturen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Europa und Afrika. Seine Forschungsgebiete umfassen die westliche Avantgarde, das frühe sowjet-russische Theater, das afrikanische Theater und die Arbeit Wole Soyinkas, Arbeiten zu Brecht, Piscator, Heiner Müller und dem Theater in der DDR. Als Gastprofessor lehrte er in Tansania, Nigeria, USA, Kanada und Österreich. Das vorliegende Buch ist eine Reverenz an das "vertrackte Phänomen" Fiebach, geschrieben von Forschern in Kunst und Wissenschaft aus Afrika, Europa und Nordamerika, u. a. Carena Schlewitt, Wole Soyinka, Tiina Rosenberg, Thomas Engel, Awo Mana Asiedu, Christian Holtzhauer, Katka Schroth, Andreas Kotte, Pia Kleber, Helmar Schramm, Andrea Koschwitz, J. Edward Chamberlin, Kerstin Stutterheim u. v. a.

VERTRACKTES

Tiina Rosenberg

AGAINST TOLERANCE

Thoughts on Contemporary Scandinavian Racism

Over the last few decades traditionally “tolerant” northern Europe has witnessed the rise of populist and neo-fascist movements that have resulted in political parties such as the True Finns (Perussuomalaiset) in Finland, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) in Denmark, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) in Sweden, and the Progressive Party (Fremskrittspartiet) in Norway. These factions have effectively interpreted the ongoing economic crisis as “national identity crisis”. It is as if politicians had nothing else to say or offer to the people than a national identity, rather than engaging in a political analysis of the decline of the Nordic welfare state.

Populist and neo-fascist parties cultivate troubling fantasies about an unambiguous, unified national culture and history. These conjectures of “pure” nations without immigrants are a part of the mythical imagination that echoes Europe’s darkest past and recirculates nationalism in many European countries as a model for the future. In 2010, the German Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel gave a historic speech, whose essence may be summed up in one sentence: “Multikulti ist absolut gescheitert.” (Multiculturalism has definitely failed). Merkel, the most powerful politician in Europe, was not the only one declaring the death of multiculturalism in Europe. The French President at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the British Prime Minister, James Cameron, shared Merkel’s view.

Multiculturalism, according to them, gives rise to violence. Merkel emphasized the word Leitkultur, which can best be translated as national core culture. Sarkozy, himself a descendant of Hungarian immigrants, spoke of the threat to French culture, and Cameron spoke of muscular liberalism. All three agreed that the Achilles heel of multiculturalism is the Muslim population in Europe. This discourse creates an imaginary national virginity, which gives people a sense that they belong to a single collective “we”. Cultural critic Michael Warner calls these types of processes appellative energy, which is based on a loss of social memory ignoring inequality and marginalization.¹

The Nordic countries are used to offering themselves as prime examples of the welfare state, and they will gladly tell others how they should live. Gender scholar Jasbir K. Puar calls this phenomenon an exceptionalism that “paradoxically signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as excellence (imminence, superiority), suggesting the departure from yet mastery of linear teleologies of progress.”² Scandinavian exceptionalism means that “we” have things under control, while the rest of the world is still busy fighting inequality.

This paper is inspired by Joachim Fiebach’s cultural analysis in Inszenierte Wirklichkeit, in which he investigates global cultural performance as theatrical and symbolic acts. Inspired by Victor Turner, Fiebach sees symbols as social processes whereby groups become adjusted to internal changes and adapted to their external environment.³ Fiebach emphasizes the power of the symbolic (Macht des Symbolischen) and the mythical (Mythisches), and therefore I have chosen two performative examples to consider in thinking about the power of the symbolic and of the mythical.

Tintin in the Congo

There was a heated debate in Sweden in 2012 about structural racism when the artistic director of the children’s division of the Stockholm Culture Center (Kulturhuset), Behrang Miri, removed the illustrated cartoon book Tintin in the Congo from the reading room due to the racist and colonialist descriptions of the African, Turkish, and Russian characters in the book. If children’s literature were to be analyzed from a post-colonial and anti- racist perspective, not many books would be left on the bookshelves. Censorship may be one thing, but the conversation in social media quickly turned into heated outrage and hate speech: “Remove the Behrang Miri!” This is a classic whistle-blower scenario, in which the critique itself was lost, and vituperation was directed at the person who wanted to make a point about an important social issue – in this case racism.

Tintin cartoons have been criticized for a long time. Their author, cartoonist Georges Remi (Hergé), has been denounced in his home country Belgium for his Nazi sympathies. A trial against Tintin in the Congo took place there in 2011, but the outcome was inconclusive. It was argued that the book was written in 1931 and could not help adopting the racial stereotypes of the time. In Sweden the book’s publisher Bonnier Carlsen was similarly charged in 2007. There were other controversies about newly-produced children’s literature, and Ingrid Vang Nyman’s classic drawings in Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking in the South Seas (Pippi i Söderhavet, 1948) have also been criticized, not to mention the content of the book, in which Pippi’s father is the “negro king” of the mysterious “Kurrekurredutt” islands. The list could be continued, and would include many classics of children’s literature.⁴

The cry of racism in angry media debates is often cited as the irrational attitude of a disturbed individual. Nevertheless, postcolonial scholarship has shown that racialized stereotypes are structurally produced and that they perpetuate racism. Stereotypes recycle a particular iconography of otherness, seeking to explain diverse everyday experiences by very simple means. The debate over Tintin inevitably raises the question of how we individually and collectively maintain and spread stereotypes of people we do not know, how “we” homogenize otherness into a single entity by describing human beings in stereotypes.

Post-colonial studies examine power structures related to colonialism, imperialism, and racism. Ever since the seventeenth century Europeans have used other nations. Even the Nordic countries, while often disclaiming colonialism, have a colonial tradition. Compared to the UK, France and Portugal the history of Nordic colonialism may seem modest, but one should remember the very careful Nordic critique of Nazism in the World War II era. To this day discrimination continues against the Roma and Sami people. In this context one should also remember the Race Biological Institute (Rasbiologiska Institutet) in Uppsala, and other institutions based on race, ethnicity, or colonialism in the Nordic countries.

At its core racism has a structure that relies on fantasies to depict otherness. It is the metaphorical darkness whose paradigmatic expression has been memorialized in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Although Conrad’s existential darkness was much more than literally black Africa, its setting was precisely the same colonial landscape, where Tintin’s adventures took place. This symbolic Congo, and beyond it the whole of Africa, is considered a place of otherness, legitimizing the exploitation of Africa and keeping it the “dark” continent.

The Cake Scandal

At the same time that Tintin in the Congo was being debated, another race-related cultural event took place in Sweden, the so-called Cake Scandal, referred to as Cakegate, in imitation of Watergate. It was an installation by the artist Makode Linde, who had created a cake in a shape of an African woman wearing a black-face-mask. The occasion was a celebration of World Art Day at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The cake was part of Makode Linde’s Afromantics, a work of art, in which he examined Western stereotypes about Africa and Africans today.

The cake was offered to the Minister of Culture and other cultural representatives. The Swedish Minister of Culture, Eva Adelsohn Liljeroth, cut the first piece, not realizing what she was doing. The cake “woman” screamed whenever a piece was cut off, and behind the “black-face” was the artist himself. Photos and videos of the event show happily smiling and laughing white people dismembering the symbolic black body, and the consequence was a huge cultural debacle.⁵

In the midst of the confusion Linde stated that the artist’s responsibility is to experiment:

If we wish, there can be a wide spectrum of representations of blackness in Swedish culture, artists should be allowed to experiment with colors, figures, forms, expressions, and meanings. The power of art is in its ability to turn our ideas and concepts upside down and invest old symbols with new meanings.⁶

Art and popular culture best capture our contemporary moment, along with its problems and delights. But art is in itself an ideologically charged ritual. Color and shape can be used in so many ways, but nothing comes from nothing. Everything has a history and a context, and so the artist is standing on someone else’s shoulders. Sweden’s Minister of Culture did certainly not consciously want to injure black women, although one was featured in the form of a cake.

This inevitably raises the question of whether a person who so naively took part in cutting this particular cake, is the right person for the position of cultural minister. Did she not see the connection between white people, who nonchalantly cut pieces of the black marzipan body, and all the black bodies that have been violated in countless wars and conflicts?

In 1955, Aimé Césaire, poet, writer, and politician from the island of Martinique, wrote a critical analysis of colonialism, Discours sur le colonialisme, in which he discusses different types of racism.⁷ Césaire points out that there is a tendency to view European manifestations of evil as some kind of accidental events. It is as if European racism were a reminder of some barbarous long forgotten ancient times whose memory may suddenly re-ignite the fire. Césaire shows how the French bourgeoisie reacted to Nazism during the WWII. They did not, according to Césaire, oppose anti-Semitism as such, but the Nazi invasion was too close to them and threatened their own lives. They looked the other way when it came to the racism that Africans, Asians, and indigenous people suffered from because it was directed at people who were geographically distant from France, and therefore more difficult to identify with.

The post-colonial scholar Stefan Jonsson commented after the Cake Scandal that the artist had shown that the white woman who cut a piece of a black woman was just a white woman who cut a piece of a black woman.

And all of a sudden we see it. White people cut black people. Our Minister of Culture participates in it, and this is part of the order of things, still a natural part of the order in which white people are laughing while cutting up the fake body of a black woman.⁸

Against tolerance

Europe has always been a complex and multi-cultural part of the world, but in recent decades it has ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Impressum
• Titel
• Inhalt
• Machen. Denken. (ver)Zweifeln
• Straßengespräch. Bewegte FRAGmente
• Zu spät und schon ganz grün FRAGment I
• RADIKALES
• VERTRACKTES
• GRAVUREN
• MACHEN
• ZEITKAPSELN
• Autorinnen und Autoren