Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

The first couple of readings in this class call into question the role of performance art in literary analysis. Sons of Border Crisis and the ASCO questions do this in a much more direct way, as they give us actual performances to analyze and critique. I was very interested in Sons of Border Crisis and the Gomez-Pena selections, as I had previously encountered them in last quarters Experimental Writing Workshop. I was always fascinated at their ability to capture viewer attention through vivid imagery and performance, such as the vibrant visuals of Sons of Border Crisis’ background and the eccentric uniform of the main speaker. However, I feel like these works run into the problem of valuing audience engagement over delivering a quality message. I remember a specific example within the Gomez-Pena selections that saw stage members decapitating live chickens, and I honestly fail to see how effective a message can be with that jarring of an image taking up the bulk of an audience’s time. Perhaps I need more time to analyze the underlying messages of the works, but I find the over-stimulating performative part of the work to be more detrimental to the works main point than it is beneficial. 

Glissant’s writing seems to show its performative side in a more subtle way, more inline with traditional literature. The wordplay at use within the Glissant passage is confusing at best and unreadable at worst, but as my team and I discussed Glissant seems to have done this on purpose. A line towards the end of the passage reads “Opacity is an attribute of beings-as-Being which philosophy takes account of without clarifying.” We interpreted this as Glissant saying that opacity allows us to appreciate the existence of things as they are without trying to justify or reason why they exist in the first place. From this, we came to the conclusion that Glissant was practicing opacity within the passage itself. He intentionally made his writing complicated not to make it harder for the reader to understand, but to allow the reader to appreciate the writing on its own without trying to justify its existence.