Performing Humanity will be the proud host to History Carnival HC 122 on June 1, 2013. To nominate a blog for this issue, please visit our form at: http://historycarnival.org/form.html
We look forward to sharing this month’s trends and stories with you, and to providing new content for your reading pleasure this summer. Details to follow!
In the interest of expanding conversation about animal-human hybridity before, in, and after the Renaissance, Performing Humanity invites submissions from the public. We are particularly seeking:
*Posts that critically or theoretically consider hybridity in the literature, art, law, and social practices of any historical period.
* Reviews of relevant books, exhibits, or movies.
Submission guidelines are available on the contents bar of the website. Questions or proposals should be sent to the editor.
The Graduate Student Advisory Board of BSU proudly presents Practical Criticism Midwest on Friday, February 8, 2013!
Be a part of the Department of English’s great tradition.
Come support your colleagues as they present their research in creative writing, linguistics, literature, and composition & rhetoric. Hear our keynote speaker, Dr. Vicki Anderson, and stay for the delicious wine and sassy doggerel contest with three guest judges who will not disappoint. PCM is located at the gorgeous Virginia Ball Center. This event gives you the chance to attend a first-rate conference, and then have a fireside chat with faculty and friends.
For more info and a schedule of events, visit the PCM website http://pcm2013.blogspot.com/p/pcm-conference-scedule.html
In December of 2012, a lone gun-man walked into an elementary school at Newtown, CT and killed a group of over twenty people that included the school principle, several teachers, and a range of students under the age of 10. As news coverage informed Americans of the tragedy in their midst, pundits, politicians, and activists also began dealing with two large, weighted questions:
What role did gun control play in this event?
Is it too soon to consider the role of gun control in relation to this event?
Representatives from the NRA released several statements, with vice president Wayne LaPierre asserting that the organization stands by its beliefs: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Meanwhile, gun-attack victim Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) visited with the families of victims in order to share communal stories of pain and loss, and several gun-shows in the region were canceled out of respect for survivors in the community.
Students of the humanities will recognize that the debates surrounding both the Newtown shooting specifically and the issue of gun control more generally tap into larger, more long-term vocabularies that questions the foundations of humanity and, in connection, the levels of need for human governance.
Emerging from the bloodshed of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes composed The Leviathan as a credo on humanity and its governance. According to Hobbes, human beings struggle with a need for a social contract that will bring them out of a State of Nature and into a cooperative order. Such order is constructed and can only exist with enforcement because humans are by nature selfish and violent, they share a common tendency to war with others in order to achieve individual survival. In such a situation, life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Clearly cooperative order is more desirable; the problem is that the social contract can only function when all behave according to its law. So how do you effectively urge such violent creatures to trust one another and to avoid breaking rules when it suits their individual desires? For Hobbes, the answer is the Leviathan: a singular tyrant whose absolute power coerces the masses into performing the social contract together.
While Hobbes’ approach to human nature and political governance echoes in our own lives (one need only listen to recent debates regarding gun control, for example), he is one of myriad philosophers whose work shapes attitudes toward human nature. Writing 38 years after Hobbes, John Locke posited in his Two Treatises on Human Government that human beings were devoid of violent survival instincts because they were born tabula rosa: blank slates. Together in the State of Nature, individuals could live in “perfect equality.” 
Through socialization and education, humans learn how to generate individual and collective identities; and, for this reason, a humanistic education can teach human beings to create balanced, free societies wherein each individual’s rights count. Much like Hobbes’ views, Locke’s persist. Students of American history and politics undoubtedly hear his voice in the Constitution’s assertion of the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
When we consider contemporary political and legal discussions in our own country and worldwide, what does it mean that two such drastic approaches to humanness exist? In what ways can they be used to triangulate as we navigate our own humanity? And to what degree might these debates also signal our role as animals?
After all, humans are not unique in their squabbles, feuds, and power struggles. Animal communities across species experience the same challenges. Wild and domesticated horses turn to the leadership of an alpha-female, who is powerful enough to provide direction and protective strategies and gentle enough to care for weaker omega horses at the lower ends of the herd. Wolf packs and lion prides, meanwhile, function under the governance of alpha-males who can protect from attacks, lead aggressive strikes against intruders, organize breeding, and direct members toward good hunting. Amidst these groups, leadership is never stable. As documentaries such as Meerkat Manor remind us, even in the animal kingdom there is the odd coup d’etat and a variety of allegiances surrounding them.
Performing Humanity invites submissions from philosophers, cultural theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and scientists with interest in further discussion of these issues.
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Dr. Miranda Nesler is the editor of Performing Humanity and is an assistant professor of Early Modern & Medieval Literature at Ball State University in Indiana.
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Image: Shannon Hicks, The Newton Bee (via The Atlantic Wire, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/12/newtown-connecticut-school-shooting/59999/)
Sources:
Katy Steinmetz, “The NRA Responds to Newtown.” Time: Swampland (http://swampland.time.com/2012/12/21/the-nra-responds-to-newtown-america-needs-more-good-guys-with-guns/)
John Christoffersen, “Gabrielle Giffords’ Newtown Visit.” The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/05/gabrielle-giffords-newtown-visit_n_2415720.html)
Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (London, 1651).
John Locke, The Two Treatises on Human Government (London, 1689).
Over the winter break, Performing Humanity will be on a content hiatus. Once the spring semester commences, we will return with new posts and features. In the mean time, we encourage readers to peruse the archives, comment at will, and consider submitting their own work for consideration.
By Miranda Garno Nesler
Previous work on Performing Humanity has explored the (in)human condition of Caliban, Sycorax’s enslaved son in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c. 1611). Caliban’s condition — as monster, human, native, and displaced inheritor of the island — garners regular attention in a world increasingly interested in post-colonial theory and its implications past and present.
At a recent performance of The Tempest hosted by BSU, however, I was struck by how little attention Ariel receives as a slave and Other within the play. During post-performance Q&A, the female actor who played the role discussed how Ariel is a “fun, airy figure” who is “joyful and fun to play.” Is Ariel a light figure? Certainly the play positions this spirit as someone who, like air or water, is changeable and hard to pin down. Ariel is an elemental whose shifting nature is at odds with the physical world of the island. Indeed, Shakespeare makes this contrast clear when every threat targeting Ariel involves punishment through physical constraint: captivity within a pine or an oak that will ground and concretize in a way that runs counter to Ariel’s own mercurial makeup.
But we cannot deny that Ariel, like Caliban, is enslaved. This enslavement, much like the threats of physicality imposed by sorcerers Sycorax and Prospero, highlights Ariel’s resistance to performing according to commands (as well as Ariel’s ultimate acquiescence under duress). Unlike Caliban, Ariel seeks to reason with the master Prospero rather than violently threatening or rebelling, and Ariel rhetorically reminds Prospero that as a man and a Duke he is honor bound to keep his work and free the spirit within the promised time-frame.
If Caliban is oppressed because of his physical and linguistic differences from the Italian Prospero and Miranda, what justifies Ariel’s enslavement? What markers set Ariel apart when, ostensibly, the spirit could easily generate the illusion of a physical appearance like his captors’?
My long-term contact with this play has me convinced that, for Ariel, it is androgyny that leads to Otherness. Within the text, there are no sexed or gendered markers linked to the figure. While Prospero at times uses diminutives such as “chick” to speak to his airy slave, even this is a term that would be used for a child (who, within early modern belief and practice, by which all children were dressed and treated the same until schooling age, had yet to fully conform to a particular gender). As a spirit of air, Ariel highlights the shifting nature of gender as it was perceived during the period — as such, Ariel is a figure who awakens anxiety about what counts as male/female and masculine/feminine, and what this means for the period’s legal and social systems.
I’ve discussed elsewhere on the blog how Galenic theory and the single-sex model led to anxiety about men and women’s transformative capacities based on their behavior; and I’ve discussed how problematic the legal and social responses were that sought to dehumanize women in order to generate reliable hierarchies. Ariel’s enslavement, therefore, seems to fit within this category of action. Rather than allowing Ariel to shift at will, a Western patriarchal figure in the guise of Prospero must Other this androgynous figure to dehumanize it, then must take control of how, when, and where Ariel’s shifting occurs so that Ariel works in service of patriarchal, hetero-normative goals of dynastic marriage and reproduction.
In my reading of Ariel, this character’s ability to deploy rhetoric and call upon systems of honor and law valued within Western patriarchy suggest that a figure of blended sex and gender troubles the idea that humanness during the period only emerges out of male masculinity.
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Dr. Miranda Garno Nesler is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern Literature at Ball State University in Indiana. Her work emphasizes the disruptive capacities of silence in women’s writing and performance, as well as human-animal hybridity in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She is the editor of “Performing Humanity.”
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Images:
1) Henry Fuseli, “Ariel,” c. 1800-10. Oil on canvas, approx. 36.5 ” x 28 . The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
2) “Ariel,” in An Illustrated Shakspere Birthday Book (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1883).
Notably, both images portray Ariel as neither stably sexed nor gendered, with the physical markers of sex strategically covered.
Ball State University’s English Graduate Student Advisory Board invites fellow program members to check out its CFP for this spring’s Practical Criticism Midwest Conference. The site is continually undergoing updates as the conference nears: http://pcm2013.blogspot.com
I urge all graduate students to get involved in volunteer positions and/or to attend multiple panels. This is a fantastic opportunity to build professional experience and share your research across the department’s disciplines!
