Worldmaking and the ethnographic possibilities for an abolitionist anthropology

Dorinne Kondo organized a panel at the 2017 American Anthropological Association annual meeting and asked me to serve as the moderator. In the simplest of terms, this panel was meant to demonstrate the diversity of approaches and genres within the concept of multimodal anthropology. The “papers” included an extended poetic reflection, a dance that exploded from the front of the panel table and spilled down the center aisle of the conference room, and a reading of a scene from Kondo’s play in progress. During the Q&A, a woman from the audience commented that what she experienced during the hour and a half session “changed the air” not only in that room but within the preconceived imaginary of what a conference should be and do.

Two years later, Kondo convened a similar roundtable at the AAA. Citing the woman from 2017, this panel was called “Changing the Air: Genre as Worldmaking.” What I most recall from my participation on both panels was a sense of floating as if in a space-time bubble suspended within the modulated modes of movement in the academic conference. I lost my usual mooring through the identity of scholar/anthropologist reinforced through namesake lanyards and attendance at subcommittee meetings that categorize people into corresponding fields and areas of interest. As is often the case in these contexts, I was furiously writing my prepared moderator remarks in my hotel room hours before our panel based on the partial drafts and presentation abstracts to which I had access. The panelists, however, could not capture in words on paper the alchemy their verses, gestures, images, drawings, and choreography conjured in “real” time during our session. I remember glancing down at my typed pages shortly after Kondo introduced the panel as if seeing the words for the first time. They seemed empty and brittle in the rigidity of stagnation; they were not moving. I relocated with notebook and pen in hand to a chair towards the back of the room and started to write in rhythm with the performances as each panelist took the conference stage. As if channeling the collective affective energy each presenter activated, my pen flew seamlessly across the page in an attempt to write the vital and visceral present.

It was my turn to approach the podium. I wish I had retained the notebook from that day as documented proof that there was precursor to the sounds that emerged from my body as more breath and cadence than words and sentences. While I was speaking, I felt the distinction between panel and audience blur as everyone in that conference room seemed to be experimenting with the play between listening and speaking, witnessing, and participating. The nature of the conversations that continued after the Q&A into the hallway seemed to indicate that what we were left with—that filmy opaque residue—was visceral buzz and shades of feeling that eluded resolution and the finality of coherent arguments. Kondo had called us (all of us, panelists and witnesses) into the messy and exhilarating activity of worldmaking, a process she defines as “always collaborative in relation with other people, abstract forces, objects, and materials that are themselves imbued with potentiality (2018: 54).”

In Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity, Kondo—anthropologist, playwright, and performer—identifies the theater as the site from which to consider how we make, remake, and undo race through actions that simultaneously reinscribe and challenge the ways in which race is constructed in social and political life. Worldmaking also illuminates how our commitment to insular and individualized modes of creating and sole authorship can compel us to miss the latent vitality and transformative potential that emerges from thinking things in relation and an investment in collective doing. I will offer a summary of Kondo’s foci and concerns in Worldmaking and then, as is the partial charge of her book, think with Kondo in conversation with D. Soyini Madison and Erin Manning, as I consider how worldmaking might intervene in the resuscitation of an anthropology that may never be decolonized and will need to burn in order to fully transmute (Jobson, 2020). ¹

The reader accompanies Kondo as she travels in and through sites where she engages with other theater artists of color whose work is invested in worldmaking as it emerges through the practice of reparative creativity, from her participation in a playwriting workshop with the East West Players to her work as dramaturg with Anna Deavere Smith on the iconic, Twilight Los Angeles: 1992. Kondo also employs her integrated and complementary expertise as ethnographer, cultural critic, dramaturg, and playwright to provide a revelatory reading (also known as reparative critique) of David Henry Hwang’s play, Yellow Fever, as exemplar of work that holds the unwieldy contradictions of reparative creative work. The last chapter of Worldmaking is Dorinne’s full-length play, Seamless. This, I believe, is the play in progress from which the panelists read at the 2017 conference. The inclusion of the full play is Kondo showing rather than telling us how an irreverence for the expectations of genre can be a worldmaking practice. Across all chapters and vignettes, Kondo writes from various voices while also experimenting with registers of intimacy and distance that demonstrate the spatial dimensions of affect as well as the modes of seeing made available through what she terms the corporeal epistemologies of ethnography. The inclusion of Seamless erases the textual boundaries of academic publishing and its attendant concerns with categorical legibility.

Throughout the monograph, Kondo defines both worldmaking and reparative creativity, the fulcra of the text, through various iterations. Worldmaking as I understand it is creative practice that seeks to remake current social conditions starting from the limitations of given social realities or as Kondo states, “‘Worldmaking’ evokes sociopolitical transformation and the impossibility of escaping power, history, and culture” (2018: 29). Theater with its will of the imagination and rootedness in the pregiven world even as it visions beyond it, establishes the ideal conditions to explore the paradox of worldmaking. Worldmaking for the minoritarian, subaltern or Black or brown subject occurs through acts of reparative creativity. Reparative creativity is a stay against structural and affective violence offering repairs to these life-eroding traumas that are never final, complete, or fully resolved reparations. Like worldmaking, reparative creativity is always in flux and always requires the effort of a collective. The artists and scholars of color who practice reparative creativity are making a public life for and from the spaces of erasure and marginalization they occupy. Working through racial affect (a subject’s feeling intertwined with structural violence) occurs, as Kondo demonstrates, in the artistic practices of theater artists of color as they write acts of reparative creativity with the potential to contribute to the ongoing objectives of radical world making. The behind the scenes or backstage access Kondo gives us to the negotiations and conflicts that occur while making theater reveal the difficulties of reparative creativity as a necessarily collective endeavor.

For anthropologists curious about the limitations of and possibilities within social transformation, Kondo’s understanding of ethnography, like theater, to be “a way of being in the world and a way to remake worlds through engaged participation” is gratifying (Kondo, 2018: 8). Ethnography in this sense shares the foundational investments of the dialogic performative as outlined by the critical ethnographer, D. Soyini Madison. Madison assesses the dialogic performative to be “charged by a desire for a generative and embodied reciprocity, sometimes with pleasure and sometimes with pain … a mutual creation of something different and something more from the meeting of bodies in their context” (2006: 320). Ethnographers who work with and in performance and performance artists interested in ethnographic methods have been seeking the appropriate conceptual frame to capture the cross cutting theoretical orientations and practices that comprise the intersection of the “soft” social sciences and the performing arts. Performance ethnography has become the preferred umbrella term to name work that culls and documents information through the tools of ethnography while reimagining the production of knowledge through esthetic forms, ephemeral experiences, and the body. But Kondo and Madison challenge the assumed end points and limits of this work and, thus, the givens from which we approach ethnography and performance. Kondo like Madison is concerned with how the scholar/artist/researcher/performer positions themselves in relationship to other bodies, objects, and spatial realities and, most importantly, how they not only evaluate their actions in the collective but evaluate how they are evaluating their actions. This distinction between being self-reflective and self-reflexive is a distinction between being present as the “I” in a collective and paying attention to all presences that shift, expand, shrink, and transform in relationship to the interactions between multiple “I”s. The individual authoritative scholar or lone artist is not, in the space-time of the reflexive, the solo producer of knowledge or central figure in the making of new worlds. Even as Kondo notes that her participation in workshops, as dramaturg, and playwright transcends the boundaries of traditional anthropological participant observation since she is not as she states, “waiting for something to happen [but] making it happen (2018: 8),” she is clear that what ultimately happens is a manifestation of the sociality required to craft new worlds. And yet there is more at stake in reparative creativity—the activities central to the minoritarian subject’s commitment to worldmaking.

Kondo asks us to hold the tensions inherent in theater as a genre where the individual character is the heart of the narrative in terms of serving as the driving force for action as well as the affective core. The individual story, the “I”, is not merely personal given how the personal possesses the emotive force to reveal how the individual is made through, struggles against, is diminished by, and finds joy within our shared socially constructed world. Kondo demonstrates impressive dexterity throughout Worldmaking in illuminating the productive use of the “I” in theater artists of color’s attempts to write and stage performances that challenge social facts and, thus, begin the process of working through the effects of affective and structural violence (Kondo, 2018: 51). She critically engages Smith and Hwang and their work in excess of what Madison would call the “body-to-body” presence of the fully realized corporeal epistemology of (performance? Embodied? Or an unmodified?) ethnography. Situating herself in reflexive relationship to Smith and Hwang within their creative processes, Kondo is able to represent the staged and performed creative products of these artists as examples of reparative creativity that work through the partially recovered “I” of certain forms of theater. She concurrently considers how the backstage negotiations and often unresolvable conflicts among herself, the artists, and their creative teams reflect the difficult and always incomplete work of reparative creativity as a practice of confronting social facts such as the “I” as subjugated and traumatized through the non-white body. Put another way, Kondo’s backstage pass gives readers insight into how the work of reparative creativity is always reflecting and seeking to destroy the structures of systemic racial violence.

How might Kondo read her articulation of the embodied and deeply relational prerequisite for the type of socially transformative ethnography she envisions alongside cultural theorist and philosopher Erin Manning’s theory of touch? It seems both Kondo and Madison are invested in the work of movement in ethnography, reparative creativity, and the building of new worlds. I use movement here to mean bodies, affects, energies, and ideas in motion that are inevitably changed through their touch and contact. I also experience movement, and thus struggle to define it, as a visceral and emotive force felt in the individual body as the emergent transformation of the collective: movement as the erasure of the demarcation between the individual and the collective. Manning directs our attention to movement, to a relational stance that makes it impossible to pin down knowledge but asks us instead to invent (2007). Manning advocates for the commitment to the ways the body moves to get beyond the concretization of identities that stabilize the national imaginary through identifications such as man, woman, citizen, and refugee. Kondo shows us how Smith employs identities in Twilight to destabilize through different means. The individuals in Smith’s play highlight the separation, distancing, and othering promoted through racial affect; here the identities that come into being through interlocking regimes of power demystify the relationship between structural violence and identity formation and the resistance to both that, for the minoritarian subject, works through the power-evasive notion of identity politics. Manning offers that “what is new about the body is not shape or form but the relational matrices it makes possible (2007: xiii).” Kondo might offer that the work of reparative creativity functions through shape and form to establish the relational matrices that support the collective engagement in worldmaking. And it is within the space of the relational that new forms of knowledge and ways of being and living find emergent expression. The collective, the relational, and ultimately worldmaking are touch if we take to heart Manning’s definition of touch as a “reaching out that enables the creation of worlds (xv).”

Kondo’s behind the scenes writing about the serious conflicts among Smith’s racially diverse creative team as they wrestle with the challenge of rendering the complexity of social identities reminds us that the collective relational work of reparative creativity and the dialogic performative are not unburdened spaces of congenial reciprocity. Taking on this work for anthropologists and ethnographers may mean mourning the loss of ideals of empathy and nostalgic solidarity often associated with the phrase “the collective” and a sentimental association with relationships. Taking on this work will also mean opening to the new information that develops through a touch whose reach extends to the non-human and the inanimate where experiments with worldmaking both envelope and are changed by all the elements through which the futurial presence of a new world can be felt. Seamless, Kondo’s witty and luminous play culminates Worldmaking offering another reminder: this work of repair and remaking as rough and unpredictable as it is also emerges from the life-affirming expression of creative play found in the relational and through forms of touch that continually disintegrate and take amorphous shape again as sociality. Although anthropologists prior to and since Victor Turner have been interested in “deep hanging out,” ² what might it mean for this interest to develop into a curiosity towards the unrestricted sociality Fred Moten and Stefano Harney calls study (2013)?

Study asks both more and less of you than hanging out, being with, and participating as an observer. Study is Kondo’s backstage, behind the scenes, and writing that emerges from the collective space of a workshop. Study often occurs in the casual informal conversations that annoy us because we feel they are inconvenient, or not the real story, or keeping us from the keynote, the invited panel, or carefully organized interview “in the field.” Study is nearly impossible to notate because we are trained to find it unremarkable; it is the space-time that is not quite event or experience because it has yet to become legible but has the potential to teach us, if we pay attention, what we did not know we needed to live. ³

Returning to the subtitle of the 2019 AAA panel, “Genre as Worldmaking,” compels a turn to Black feminist anthropologist Savannah Shange’s abolitionist anthropology and the question of considering, as she suggests, anthropology as a genre of Black study. Might study as a way of being that takes as simultaneous givens our social landscape as anti-Black, colonialist and emergent with the possibility to be other than it is be how (not where) we practice reparative creativity in perpetual movement towards a new world? The power of performance as intervention, as performance studies scholarship tells us, is not necessarily about the intervention as definitive change maker as much as it is about an intervention that demonstrates that change is, in fact, possible. A focus on the indeterminate, emergent, and elusive nature of what is on the cusp of what is possible in anthropology could be an endlessly thrilling endeavor precisely because possibility is not concerned with the definitive answers and legible categories that currently comprise the production of knowledge … as we think we know it, but the worlds yet to be imagined, felt, and touched.