Description
This research has been motivated by the work of Coco Fusco, and actress/theoretician of Cuban descent, who together with Guillermo Gomez-Pena, a Mexican who has adopted a Chicano identity, have toured the world with their performance entitled "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit...," or "The Couple in the Cage." This performance stages the violence of stereotypes by placing two "undiscovered Amerindians" in a cage in several spaces--the middle of the street, a room in a museum, a window at a coffee shop--in different cities of the world. What inspired this show was the memory of the traumatic experience of "undiscovered people" in display. From the very beginning of colonization, aborigines from all conquered lands were exhibited in public spaces--the court, gardens, museums, taverns, fairs, circuses. This tradition, initiated in the 16th century, lasted till the beginning of this century. As late as 1990, the New York Times published an article recounting the story of the son of an Eskimo whose father had been on display at the Metropolitan Museum. This type of experience, which can be found in many narratives of "discovery," is reenacted at the beginning of Fusco's article "The Other History fo Intercultural Performance," in her book "English is Broken Here," which begins with a fictitious staging of this tradition, when a man thanks the audience for inviting him to give an account "of the life (he) formerly led as an ape." This fictitious story serves Fusco to introduce the cultural tradition of converting human beings into animals and putting them in shows for the entertainment of people. This study seeks to retake this story and use it to discuss the function of the stereotype in the post- worlds. The argument is that stereotypes undescore the perpetual and unrelenting violence the system imposes upon people who are considered different and who are daily coerced to enact themselves as a being they are not; to "perform the identity of an Other for a white audience" (Fusco). Racist discrimination patterns, habits, and language is power, one which compels impersonations, performances, and habits. They keep people behind bars, endlessly enacting the primitive, the exotic, the monstrous within a society which constitutes the museum of white cultures. "The cage" serves as a metaphor to explain the constant harassment of people "of color" today and their constrain to exercise, as any other citizen, the performance of choice.
