Survival as Historiographical Practice: Proposals for Substantive Theater and Performance Historiography from Contemporary Student, Youth and Social Movements

Abstract

This dissertation makes a contingent argument for reviewing existent historiographical practices in the discourse around student movements – socio-political struggles and protests that are initiated and led by students and youth. The proposal for the revision comes from an acknowledgement that academic writing and the discursive flavour around student and campus movements make use of a particular repertoire that is connected to the “global moment” of student unrest in 1968, and this leads to universalist generalizations with respect to the repertoire that contemporary student movements may or may not deploy. The thesis argues that a close reading of contemporary student movements through its performances of protest – both within the sociopolitical and cultural spheres – shows many obvious and non-obvious aspects of the contemporary student struggles, such as changes in the university system through neoliberal privatization, changes in the relationship between students and the university, changes in the relationship of the university with the state and state apparatuses such as the police. If one has to take into account these changes within historiographical practice, there is a possibility to open up to not only more viscerally and experientially situated histories of student movements (and political movements in general), but also to confront questions of ethics within history writing and historical representation of resistant political groups. Bringing in examples from contemporary insurgent youth politics and artistic practice of the Global South and its diaspora, the work views historiography as a political practice of arranging spatio-temporality with clear relationships to existent power structures, and interrogates the extent to which the insertion of the resisting body within this practice, through the discipline of theater and performance historiography, can threaten and break such arrangements. In this process of interrogation, the work in turn questions the efficacy of traditional historiographical frameworks such as “source”, “archive”, “subject”, “event”, by bringing into the conversation contemporary academic methodologies from Theater and Performance Studies, Social Movement Theory, Psychology, Trauma Studies, Disability Studies, Praxeology, Critical Legal Theory, Culture Studies and Education Studies.