It is an agency, for it is an action that produces effects in and beyond her it is tragic, for in her refusals to perform she lays bare the impasse between freedom and blackness in American culture. In her refusals to change, care, and cater to our expectations of her character, Caroline asserts the tragic agency of non-performance. Caroline Thibodeaux, a 39-year-old black maid and divorced mother of four, performs the domestic labor that sustains the conditions of the everyday, but refuses to perform either the affective labor that maintains an intimate public sphere or the gestures of change that uphold ideologies of progress and freedom in the United States. Building from William’s definition of modern tragedy (which he sees paradoxically in Brecht’s rejection of tragedy) and drawing on Benjamin’s definition of catastrophe and Marx’s theory of alienation, I locate the tragic in Caroline in the relationship between the titular character’s suffering and alienation and the present’s failure to recognize her situation as part of a larger social condition that is neither fixed nor inevitable but rather reverberating as an ongoing historical present. In the finer-grained considerations of time, affect, and the material conditions of social change that Caroline develops, we can glean something of the tragic in US culture. The epoch bookended by 19 bears examining in relation to the question: What is the structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture? There are many possible answers, depending on where you look. ![]() In Caroline, the death of JFK is the national crisis, and racial tensions and the Civil Rights movement the conflicts. Terrorism was designated the dominant threat, and Islam the enemy to freedom and democracy. When Caroline, or Change premiered at the Public Theater in November 2003, America was still reeling in the aftermath of 9/11. The sung-through musical recomposes “a sense of history and of the future” in order to complicate claims to freedom and to question the meanings, limits, and costs of change. In a similarly Marxist vein and with Brecht’s late plays as his case study, Williams identified the emergence of a new tragic structure: “the recovery of history as a dimension for tragedy.” He writes, “we should try to see what it means to drama when in recovering a sense of history and of the future a writer recovers the means of an action that is both complex and dynamic.” Playwright Tony Kushner, along with composer Jeanine Tesori, have recovered just such a “complex and dynamic” action in Caroline, or Change. Critical moment-the status quo threatens to be preserved.” Catastrophe, in this sense, is a situation in time-a too-lateness that comes again and again. Walter Benjamin revised this term as one of his “basic historical concepts.” For him, catastrophe is the continuing action of failing to recognize history in the present and thus of maintaining conditions of suffering: “Catastrophe-to have missed the opportunity. In the tragic structure defined by Gustav Freytag, catastrophe refers to the section after the scene of total suffering has taken place it is the final turning point in the tragic hero’s journey. We might call it an extended catastrophe. This is not a static contradiction located somewhere back in the past but an ongoing process and conditioning experience. “We are not looking for a new universal meaning of tragedy,” writes Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy, “we are looking for the structure of tragedy in our own culture.” The structure of tragedy in contemporary American culture is shaped, still, by the constitutional (and ontological) contradiction between promises of freedom and pursuit of happiness on the one hand, and the legacy of slavery and poverty on the other. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways the point is to change it. – Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nonperformance” We are sent in history, history comes for us. Change is the anticipation, the unanticipated that anticipates us. There is a foresight that is given in and as the unforeseen. – Tony Kushner, “Production: ‘Caroline, or Change’” It’s a tragedy, I think, in terms of Caroline’s journey. ![]() The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
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