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Mastery of knowledge or meeting of subjects? The epistemic effects of two forms of political voice

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Postcolonial, critical multicultural, feminist, and critical democratic theory converge around the aim to find models of encounter in which identities and claims may be articulated and coalitions may be formed without the essentialization, reduction or conflation of social difference. And yet often encounters across difference and in conditions of inequality employ literal modes of address that exacerbate such risks. This is most apparent in realist genres such as testimony and autobiography that too easily grant illusions of direct access to another’s experience. In this article, I argue that models of the encounter that foreground the limits of knowledge-claims, mediation of representation and creative agency of speaker – exemplified in more evocative modes of address such as fictional theatre – can work to refocus the exchange across social difference from the mastery of knowledge to the experience of meeting; from grasping another’s truth to inhabiting the ever-uncertain and unpredictable ground of the encounter. Using a case of forum theatre that both utilizes the evocative potential of performance and yet introduces objectification and violation in tandem with its most literal moments, I will examine the ethical and epistemic effects of these contending models of encounter.

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Notes

  1. SRO buildings are a form of low-income housing of often one-room dwellings. They are a common first and transitional home for those coming off the streets, and often a site of substandard conditions.

  2. Martin is a fictitious name for one cast member, also used in Diamond's final report

  3. For Martin, ‘getting into someone’s face and getting physical, that was all new to me … That’s what made it intense for me, I suppose’; but as Diamond recalls, the ‘much gentler Otis’ Martin brought to the play ‘has its plusses and minuses, to be honest … It is hard for him to get aggressive, and he must if we are going to taser him’ (Diamond, 2010, pp. 30, 54).

  4. ‘it was physically challenging for me to be bullied, and to … play out an act of being hurt on stage by him … it requires a vulnerability from me and requires me to let go of wanting to fight back’ (Anderson, 2009).

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  1. School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North, 4442, New Zealand

    Emily Beausoleil

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Beausoleil, E. Mastery of knowledge or meeting of subjects? The epistemic effects of two forms of political voice. Contemp Polit Theory 15, 16–37 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2015.22

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