Abstract
In 2017, we formed a writing group with Lee Ann Fujii in which we shared chapters and discussed our respective book projects, including the work that would eventually become Show Time. The text below draws, inter alia, on our correspondence. It is a crazy, crazy project that may yet fail but if it does, it will fail spectacularly. And I will be happy with that.
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On January 6th, 2021, a shirtless, heavily tattooed man wearing a fur hat topped with horns and trailing animal tails, face painted red, white, and blue, stood in the halls of US Congress holding a “Q SENT ME!” sign and an American flag. In photos, he appears to roar as his fellow insurrectionists’ stream around him.
We think it’s fairly safe to say that political scientists did not see the QAnon Shaman coming.
According to Wikipedia, the QAnon Shaman, born Jake Angeli in 1988, is a white American man who graduated from high school and community college in Arizona and was dismissed from the US Navy for refusing to take the anthrax vaccine. Before participating in the January 6th insurrection, he was known as a local conspiracy theorist and Black Lives Matter counter-protester who became enamored with QAnon, 2 which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an “umbrella term for a sprawling spiderweb of right-wing internet conspiracy theories with antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ elements that falsely claim the world is run by a secret cabal of pedophiles who worship Satan and are plotting against President Trump.” 3
In a presentation on Show Time at Johns Hopkins University a week before she passed away, Fujii spoke of “men who use violence to define what it means to be white in America.” 4 In the book, she writes about men like Angeli. Men who harness and stage violence to become somebodies, to take on new roles, command attention, and attract audiences. Men who, in so doing, transform their surroundings, remake societal orders, and inscribe new categories of belonging, often along racialized, sectarianized, or ethnicized lines. Men who then use such new-found power to enact complete control over others, “where nothing is out of bounds” (pp. 83–84, italics in original). As Fujii points out in the line that follows, “What better way to show that lack of restraint than by going beyond the pale.”
The violence on display at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 shows how prescient Fujii’s book was. Why, then, would she say the project was “crazy”?
Lee Ann Fujii studied what many scholars have pejoratively (and in an often Orientalist fashion) written off as “crazed,” “monstrous,” or “savage.” It is the “extra” lethal, the “why” of “why do people dance, sing, burn, desecrate, drag, dismember as they kill rather than just killing?” In visceral, unrelenting detail, Show Time describes how such performances, seemingly unhinged, are in fact deeply human, social processes. The book does not shy away from the pleasure participants derive from participation in violence, or from its captivating effects on audiences—the sounds of screams and taunts, the smell of burning, the feel of collective, limitless power. Show Time directs our gaze to actors involved in the most brutal, ugly forms of violence, and to the casts of characters that surround them. The book shows us how broadly participatory violence is—from the Angelis of the world to those cheering him outside US Congress to those watching on social media live streams. People are often afraid to acknowledge the collective aspect of violent performances: the cast of characters supporting the main actors who directly inflict bodily harm. But, perhaps the single defining characteristic of Fujii’s work is that it is unafraid. Unafraid to disrupt. Unafraid to fail. Unafraid to result in her being banned from entering Rwanda. Unafraid to face, head on, the aesthetics of violence, where others dare—or prefer—not to look. I am more persuaded than ever as I wrestle with my own stuff right now that there is no “pure” description especially when it comes to violence. So we need to be situating all the empirics in some kind of analytic framework for understanding them because no violent act speaks for itself. When we don’t, I think we sound too dispassionate.
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Viewed through conventional lenses, Show Time is also methodologically “crazy.” In the subfield of political violence, it is radical to take such geographically, temporally, subjectively disparate cases of violence as ethnic violence in Serbia, genocide in Rwanda, and lynching in the Jim Crow South, and to study them all comparatively as instances of performance. It is radical to disrupt classifications of violent outcomes, neatly categorized to allow coding and analysis of variation, and instead to treat violent agency as a human condition, embodying power, and inscribing subjugation.
Counting and indexing violent events, perpetrators, and practices can have a sterilizing effect. The violence that Show Time depicts is meant to be seen and experienced. Its sensual dimensions are rendered invisible in standard violence indicators, but they are ubiquitous. Whether in Rwanda or at the US Capitol, violent display is used to create meaning and transform social orders. This is unsettling, as it shows us the power of violent display to pull people in, whether they intended to or not. By the way, this whole discussion reminds me of [a] student eval I once got that called me “biased.” Damn straight, I am completely fucking BIASED against Jim Crow, racism, war, killing, atrocities, etc. That’s right. I’m biased. Let us be biased. Let us force the reader to confront the *humanity* […] not just on the victim side but of course, perhaps more so on the perpetrator side.
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Forcing readers to confront the extra-lethal brutality of violent display and the social power that it engenders ironically exposes the humanity of violence. Seen through the lens of Fujii’s work, the QAnon Shaman was not just another insurrectionist, rioter, or activist. The role he played and the performances he and others gave mattered for the violence that occurred at the US Capitol. One does not sacrifice intellectual rigor by acknowledging Jack Angeli’s humanity; rather, one gains analytical depth.
Lee Ann Fujii’s interpretive, relational approach to the study of violence is not just about recognizing the role of social ties, performance, symbols, and meaning in violence. It is also about recognizing the shared humanity of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, thereby bringing into relief the researcher’s own position and role. It instructs us that how we remember violence, how we write about violence, matters. In Rwanda, state commemorations of violence became channels for reasserting group boundaries and erasing experiences of victimhood. On the Eastern Shore, accounts of the lynching were sanitized and the violence blamed on outsiders. Fujii refused to scrub the record of the extra: the ostensibly “crazy,” “monstrous,” and “savage.” Through its rigorous analysis of violent display, her work exhorts us to grapple with our own role as spectators, and with how, even as researchers, these processes might leave us transformed.