“What the Body Can Do”: Creating Space for Critical Hope through Affective Encounters with a Different Kind of Otherness

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intecritdivestud.2.1.0010
• Pages: 10-23
• Published date: 01 June 2019
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Author: Miki Flockemann
• Subject Matter: affect,critical hope,performance,disability,embodiment

International Journal of CRITICAL DIVERSITY STUDIES 2.1 June 2019

“What the Body Can Do”:

Creating Space for Critical Hope through Affective

Encounters with a Different Kind of Otherness

Miki Flockemann

English Department, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa

Miki Flockemann is Extraordinary Professor in the Department of English at the

University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her primary research interest is

the aesthetics of transformation. Her publications include comparative studies

of diasporic writings from South Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean with an

emphasis on migrant experiences. She has also published extensively on contem-

porary South African theatre trends with a recent emphasis on the transformative

potentiality of affective performance aesthetics.

ABSTRACT

My aim here is to use the notion of critical hope as a lens for exploring how a dra-

maturgy of Affect can create spaces for challenging the on-going marginalization

resulting from the intersection of disability, race and access in the context of South

Africa’s much-lauded “inclusive” constitution. Given that the body, especially the

black and disabled body, has been seen as a site marked by physical and structural

violence, a focus on what the body can do, rather than how it is seen, has particular

relevance for exploring the work of Unmute, the rst integrated dance company in

South Africa to incorporate differently abled dancers. This discussion will take into

account the effects generated by the affective performance techniques employed,

as well as the discomfort experienced by spectators when familiar perceptions are

disrupted. It will be argued that these disruptions have a liberatory dimension in

that they can trigger cognitive shifts which are productive for conceptualizing criti-

cal hope.

KEYWORDS

affect, critical hope, performance, disability, embodiment

At the affective moment when the image first assaults us, we are temporarily outside

meaning [but] this moment of disruption also has an impact on the way we make

meaning. (Gormley, cited in Campbell, 2011, p. 17)