Virginia Preston

Stage and Sovereignty: Watching 21st Century War, from a Ghost Town in Saxony

Panel Abstract: The contributors to this panel address exclusions from the public sphere in popular culture, art and media works, particularly with respect to race, gender and sexuality. The arenas in which we evolve this inquiry include policed and military sites as well as zones of sexual commerce and surveillance. People of color, the homeless and U.S. soldiers are subjects and objects of the performances addressed in these papers. What publics exist under conditions of erasure? Who is excluded from (or construed outside) the ‘publics’ of the arts and security? And what goes without saying in constituting a ‘public’ writ large? Communities of color, queer television spectators and a visual artist’s theater staged in an East German ghost town appear in these essays as sites of critical negotiation between economic systems, the carceral, military and industrial complexes and commodified desire. This panel poses questions about groups constituted by violence, sites that challenge orthodoxies of the public sphere and activate the space between public and private worlds. Prisons, troops traveling to battlefields and other concealed communities draw our attention to the violent, and silenced, conditions of possibility underwriting the public. As unmarked publics and counterpublics, these groups–an urban community in the United States that includes drug addicts, queers, and residents of color; a small village in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in an age of US global hegemony; and industrial and post-industrial black ghettoes–each exist under conditions of erasure.