유산의 퍼포먼스, 퍼포먼스의 유산

Performing (as) Inheritance : The Politics of Surrogation in Parks’s The America Play

This paper examines Suzan-Lori Parks’s repetition of history in The America Playas both the ritual of mounting and the performance of heritage. Drawing on Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation as the performance of cultural memory, the paper analyzes the two generations’ repeated substitution of the forefather/“foefather” to argue that Brazil’s performance of his father and the Foundling Father’s “faking” of Lincoln do not simply repeat the past, but actively fill the void or “hole” left by the Foundling Father and Lincoln, respectively, with the memories of the two father figures, and thus construct their own identities as performers. Brazil’s performance of mounting and Lucy’s narrative of “re-memberies” complete the ritualistic process of surrogation as the ghost of the Foundling Father reappears to be buried and placed among the “greats” of history. Out of this ritualistic performance emerges Brazil as the heir to the “inheritance,” the Great Hole of History dug by the Foundling Father and filled with his remains as well as historical artifacts and documents. Parks thus presents performative surrogation as a peculiarly African-American mode of inventing a new history. It is a ritual through which Brazil can honor his father and at the same time can envision an African-American tradition of performance that revises and subverts American history.